Where's Col Rouge when you need him?

Confession: I am no Thatcher groupie. But I could not let this flawed perspective pass without comment. For a start, it hopelessly confuses means with ends:

"It was right that the Falklands should be liberated..."

But according to the author, the means to achieve this were so tainted with Maggie's hubris, that the fact that the proper result was reached is also somehow... wrong? The same result could have been achieved by, perhaps, a fireside chat with Gen. Galtieri?

"Once again there were some good reasons for [taking on the miners]. But once again the methods Thatcher used were wrong"

Could you perhaps imagine for us, Mr Cooke, a scenario where a different approach - appeasement, back-down, compromise, whatever - could have engineered the same positive result for the UK economy?

It would be pure speculation, would it not, full of "ifs" and "buts" and "maybes..."

As for the "downhill path" Mr Cooke describes...

"The legacy of her mismanagement lives on... her refusal to ease [the] passing [of declining manufacturing industries] resulted in tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs without hope of reemployment."

Interesting phrase, "ease their passing". How - even with the benefit of 100% hindsight - could this have been achieved?

"Her simplistic way of thinking could not embrace the concept of Britain as an active participant in the European Union."

And how incredibly right she was. The future of the EU is an enormous topic on its own. But I challenge Mr Cooke to articulate one benefit of which non-membership has deprived the country.

As someone who left the country to get away from her hectoring condescension, and her self-righteous schoolmarming control-freakery, I never thought I should find myself defending the old bat.

But this article has nothing to do with Ms Gillard's political future, and everything to do with gratuitous Maggie-bashing.

A poor article that manages to combine illogicality with spiteful nastiness. Like the author and Pericles I am a migrant from England. I came here before Thatcher and remember England as a tragic country that was dominated by the trades union movement. The author says that there was reason to do something about that issue but does not put it strongly enough. Heath was elected democratically. He was brought down by a trades union, i.e. the miners. Can the author tell me anything more serious that that a union can defeat a government?
Thatcher came to power at a time of decay caused overwhelmingly by the unions. She took them on and won. Pericles is right, the authors suggestion that that could have been done some other way than tough use of a democratically elected governments powers is just puerile.

Gillard is no Thatcher. She is a run of the mill lawyer who comes up through the well worn tracks for promotion within the ALP. Thatcher went to the local selective school because she was smart. She then qualified as a chemist, then a lawyer who came to lead a party of upper class snobs who had been to the 'right school'. A truly remarkable effort.

The key question must be - was the country better off after Thatcher than before? The answer must surely be yes - for all her faults as listed by Pericles!

Graham, I’m with Pericles and eyejaw on this article. We used the “Iron Lady” and many other world leaders as case studies for training corporate management. The topic was “Leadership and Decision Making” and was run by the Australian Graduate School of Management at Sydney Uni.

JFK and the Iron Lady were the highest ranked, not just as politicians but as true leaders who never squibbed hard decisions. I’ve no doubt that dear Maggie could be an absolute pain in the butt, particularly when she was channeling “Hyacinth Bucket”, however, in terms of leadership qualities she was outstanding.

As for our Julia? In applying the same objective criteria as applied by the AGSM, Julia would not even get a mention as a rookie, utterly different leagues

Dear Graham Cooke you have trivialised an important figure with petty and shallow criticisms. OK you don't approve of everything, or perhaps anything, Thatcher achieved but achieve she did and it wasn't all accident. She turned Britain round, painfully perhaps, but successfully, and shifted it into the modern world.

Julia Gillard has no place in your argument she is a different and her own person and may yet achieve her 'moving forward' mantra with bells on.

Don't be petty Graham, it does't become you.

Pemmy

The writer professes a love of soccer. All I can say is that the article ranks on the same level as the England soccer team - utter rubbish.

From 1945 until the advent of Thatcher the UK was undergoing a gradual decline with both Conservative and Labour governments continually subsidising uneconomic industries. For example in the early 1970s a British coal miner whose productivity was 1% that of an Australian miner (they were digging by hand seams less than 10cm thick) was subsidised in his job by six times his annual salary of 5000 pounds.

I left the UK in the early 1970s thinking it was all over and until the advent of Thatcher it was. My best friend from school was CEO of London and 'Red' Ken Livingston's closest adviser. A total Labour supporter he says that there is no doubt Thatcher saved the UK and by keeping it out of the Eurozone has kept its future under its own control. You may have disagreed with her principles but you can never deny her ability to stick to them. By the way it was not just the unions; when the City underwriters came to her to be bailed out of the BP underwriting as it went under water she sent them packing.

Unlike Julia, Maggie was a champion of small business and entrepreneurs and no friend to the big end of town (which also include the unions.)

Was Maggie Thatcher was a person of true integrity who did not realise who were pulling the strings of real power?I doubt it. This I know. The following traitors;George Bush,Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton,Tony Blair,John Howard,Gordon Brown,Zibigniew Brzezinski, and Bibi Netanyahu, have sold our humanity for a few pieces of power lust.

They have painted themselves into such a narrow corner of orchestrated insecurity, that now,there is no room for negotiation.War is the respite of cowards and avaricious insanity.Old insecure men initiate them,while young men die for no good reason.

Arjay,

Are you OK?

eyejaw

Oh dear, Arjay. I despair of you.

>>The following traitors;George Bush,Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton,Tony Blair,John Howard,Gordon Brown,Zibigniew Brzezinski, and Bibi Netanyahu, have sold our humanity for a few pieces of power lust.<<

Your paranoia seems to increase by the day.

At one stage I believed that you might be simply a mischief-maker, writing all sorts of rubbish, just to get a reaction. And having a good giggle when anyone took you at face value.

But using a thread about Thatcher and Gillard to list your selection of "international criminals" would indicate that you are, in your own mind, serious.

You really should get some help. And I mean that both genuinely and kindly. It is not healthy to carry around the level of fear that you clearly do.

Arjay, you'll be happy to know that my latest post deals with turning Australia around, bringing it up to speed in the world's military hierarchy.

You'll change your mind about war being for cowards should you happen to read it!

Regarding Julia, she is no Thatcher thank heavens, although in my new Australia, Maggie would've shone!

http://www.dangerouscreation.com

Margaret Thatcher said

"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."

When some paid journo-hack takes up criticing an elected politician and 3 times re-elect Prime Minister of UK, not on what they achieved but criticising the supposed manner in which they achieved it -

One is left to ask the mute question - well what would you have done in her place?

It is a mute question because the armchair politician and paid-hack of the tabloids knows they will never be tested.

To matter of the Falklands... the chain of command means Margaret Thatcher would not have planned to go through or around goose green... a military analyst did.

Another point..

the Falklands was invaded by a hostile force and repelled with absolute determination,

there is only one way to fight a war, absolutely or not at all.

But I think we can sum this up in one easy statement

Man to Man,

Margaret Thatcher, for all her feminine virtues, was more a Man than Graham Cooke could ever aspire be

Julia Gizzards does not have the character or strength to match Margaret Thatcher, nor the debating prowess or dedication to values

Julia Gizzards is just after the power of the position at all costs....

Margaret Thatcher wanted the power to fix some of the problems created by the "Gizzard-thinkers" of previous generations

Thatcher was on her her way to being booted out after her first term, it was the Falklands War, unfortunately an unavoidable conflict for Britain at that time, that gave her the opportunity to become the Iron Lady. By the time she was into her third term, the public was sick of her and her party quickly removed her. So really, she had one term in government where she rode on her popularity, before the end came for her career. I think she did some good things for the UK, understod climate change and wanted to do something about it, and also stood firm in the face of international opposition to the Falklands War, but I don't know too many people who think, on balance, that she was that good for the country.

Phil Matimein "I don't know too many people who think, on balance, that she was that good for the country."

Merely the majority who elected her/her government (and they after all are the only ones who matter), because they thought she was alot better than any of the available alternatives and certainly alot better than the forces she opposed.

and no one ever gets to elect tabloid hacks....

But as Abe Lincoln said... you cannot please all of the people all of the time......

Perhaps you should get out more, Phil Matimein.

>>I don't know too many people who think, on balance, that she was that good for the country<<

Your West Australian perspective is possibly not the most appropriate lens through which to make a judgment. Go visit the Old Dart some time, and ask the people who experienced, first hand, the ancien regime of Union standover tactics.

It may be fashionable to use Thatcherism as a catch-all description of all that is bad about capitalism. But you only have to look at the damage that Gordon Brown has caused with his thirteen-year "socialist" spending spree, to understand that the verdict of history might ultimately pronounce otherwise.

Pericles,

I was born in the Old Dart and lived in the Old Dart from 1981 to 1993...I think you'll find that was the THatcher era and its post-script. Were you there, or are you commenting from an Australian perspective?

I know what I'm talking about...she presided over disaster after disaster...and only ever had about 45% of the vote. She certainly didn't represent the majority or anything close to it. She was deeply unpopular...and still is. Except perhaps with the wealthy who benefited. She excerbated the north south divide during her time in office. She was ideologocally driven in the main and this sent her down some very dark pathways.

1981-1993 were, as I recall Phil Matimein, the period of significant growth of the UK economy.

>>I was born in the Old Dart and lived in the Old Dart from 1981 to 1993...I think you'll find that was the THatcher era and its post-script. Were you there, or are you commenting from an Australian perspective?<<

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I left the UK at the beginning of the Thatcher era - at the deepest point of the early eighties recession, as it turned out, and missed out on the boom years that followed.

>>She was deeply unpopular...and still is. Except perhaps with the wealthy who benefited.<<

During the twelve years you spent in the UK, suffering Thatcher-induced "disaster after disaster", the economy grew 34%, GDP rising from £651bn to £871bn. Do you expect me to believe that all £220bn went into the pockets of the "wealthy"?

That was certainly not the experience of the rest of my stay-at-home family - none of whom, by the way, can even remotely be described as wealthy.

I can also tell you - helped along by the Conservative Party's 1987 Campaign Guide, 786 pages of juicy goodness - that:

"The UK is [in 1987] the world's second largest creditor nation (after Japan). Net UK assets overseas have risen from about £5 billion in 1976 to over £100 billion at the end of 1986"

While David Kern, in his pamphlet "UK Economic Decline: ‘Myth’ or Reality?", tells us that:

"...recovery, starting in the early 1980s both in the UK and the rest of the OECD, was sustained for an exceptionally long period until 1990. In the UK, growth accelerated to over 4 per cent in the late 1980s. In the midst of this boom... the British economy grew more rapidly than the rest of Europe and matched the expansion of the US".

If you were there during this time, Phil Matimein, how come you didn't notice all this happening around you?

What I noticed Pericles was that whole towns had unemployment levels of 30% or more, and that final push for separate assemblies in Scotland and Wales were startd because of the lack of investment in such regions. I saw unemployment figures massaged by cons like the Youth Training Schemes, I wondered where my next job was coming from and finally decided that life would be much better over here in Aus. In short, I saw a lot of what was going around and didn't like much of it at all. Some parts of the UK took many many years to recover from Thatchers economic policiy, some never fully recovered and were left to rot since

Fair enough Phil Matimein.

>>What I noticed Pericles was that whole towns had unemployment levels of 30% or more... etc etc.<<

If that was your experience, then that was your experience.

From a less subjective standpoint, though, that particular period delivered dynamic growth and personal enrichment to the majority of UK citizenry, and La Thatcher had a significant hand in making it so.

As the history books will show.

Phil Matimien "What I noticed Pericles was that whole towns had unemployment levels of 30% or more... etc etc."

yes, like the coal towns and the steel towns

those bastions of vested unionism, who had leeched tax susbidy off the rest of the population for decades. The institutional baskets cases of the UK economy.

The reason these towns had 30% unemployment is because Thatcher grasped the nettle and said "no more".

Of course, when that happens the incompetent employees of nationalised industry suffer a shock to their cozy parasitism

Just as when one takes a purgitive to expel a tape worm, the tape worm does not like it,

to quote Thatcher "Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself."

so too, when the employees of subsidised nationalised industries were exposed to those gales they do not like it their parasitic existence being rained on.

But reality, they were for decades, unemployed in jobs paid by taxation, rather than commercial reality and that taxation was born by real employers and real employees, trying to compete in real markets from all across the nation.

and on the big plus side, I do recall her removal of the rail transport monopoly (another basket case) saved me 70% on the price of travel to and from work.

The thing is Stern...you can have economic reform, but to just leave places to rot is hardly good governance. It showed a callous lack of compassion or understanding, and a contempt for parts of the country. The NUM and other militant unions such as the printers and dock workers, brought a lot of trouble on themselves, but under Thatcher, the industries were left to complete against subsidied competitors - coal industry was left to compete against heavily subsidised coal from Sweden and Canada...it was hardly a level playing field - it was just an ideology that is still unproven, just still in vogue. Sometimes it seems ideologues give the impression that society and people exist soley to support the economy, when in fact, it is the economy that is a tool to support society in general.

Pericles...I think I will agree to disgree - we could go round in circles...as you say, there is always a subjective element in memory and experience.

“It showed a callous lack of compassion or understanding, and a contempt for parts of the country.”

Previously, the levels of subsidy which those parts of the country demanded were only made available by a “callous lack of compassion and understanding” to the plight of other tax payers, forced to subsidise incompetent and inefficient nationalised industries.

“the industries were left to complete “

As they should

against subsidied competitors”

The cycle of perpetual and ever increasing subsidy is a bottomless pit into which the UK economy was being drawn deeper and deeper, by the sort of lunatic economics which Margaret Thatcher opposed.

And to further respond to your comment I rely on the Iron Lady herself

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first....”

Perpetuating economic stagnation through the subsidisation of nationalised industry is economic treason. The only outcome was to take UK to the brink of collapse, as was seen in the mid 1970’s under the incompetence of Wilson and Callaghan, who were the lapdogs of the NUM and other militant unions such as the printers and dock workers.

Every tax is an impost and every subsidy a waste of competitive opportunity.

Subsidies are what governments do for expediency but it is like building up the banks of the River.

- When the banks eventually break, the flood plain and devastations is far broader than if proper dredging had been undertaken in the first place.

Margaret Thatcher simply did what should have been done 20 years previous.