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.