This is what neoliberalism chose to do. For those old enough to remember, the plan was clear from the start. When Thatcher reached office in 1979, her first goal was to destroy British industry
Is it worth reading more of such frothings?
This is what neoliberalism chose to do. For those old enough to remember, the plan was clear from the start. When Thatcher reached office in 1979, her first goal was to destroy British industry
Is it worth reading more of such frothings?
No.
It’s worth putting it in full, not least because its a bastardized version of what ‘Crash and Burn’em’ appears to believe – this is confirmed by a relative who is a collaborator of Murphy’s. Apparently in the 1970s houses were affordable so we must do all we can to return back there.
This is what neoliberalism chose to do. For those old enough her first goal was to destroy British industry and much of the country’s resilience.
Wrong – he goal was to end the stranglehold Hard Left trade unions had on much of the industrial base. Her predecessor, the amiable enough ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan had seen his government brought to its end by Militant Labour and their Union barons, and given they promised to do precisely the same (and arguably but for the Falklands War and the split of the Labour party might well have done so) to her then to my ind she was right to do so. It’s not easy to recall 1978, though there are those survivors, like the great John77 who can remember it well enough. Indeed the avaricious Trade Union Leaders who saw nothing wrong with an 83% top rate are well represented across the political Left even to this day. Industry, across vast swathes of the economy was overmanned, unproductive and grotesquely inefficient. That was what she sought to tackle
She started by destroying our industrial base, and her totemic victory arrived when she defeated the miners. Mining might, and for environmental reasons should, have come to an end in the UK, but not in the way that she went about it.
There was a kernel of truth in this – I wasn’t happy with the way the UDM were treated after they had successfully toppled Scargill, with Senior and indeed rank and file members having their children subjected to Hard Left violence. However, I am not entirely sure by that point (88 – 90) she was entirely in control of events – dark forces. largely aligned with the EU (which Murphy, being a lifelong traitor backs to the hilt) conspired to topple here from within her own party – as a result we saw the emergence of Blairism, which culminated eventually in Starmer/ Burn ’em and the worst government in recorded history.
She waged a deliberate war on the working class, and the communities that hosted many of the industries in which working-class people then worked, and they have never recovered.
Paradoxically this feeds into the earlier article our host posted this morning. Indeed we see it happening in Aberdeen as we speak thanks to Miliband/ Crazy Liberian destroying thousands of high paid jobs. I think the issue was you had to break that Hard Left militancy but I agree more should have been done to help some of those communities left behind. The problem, as always lies with the Hard Left , who tend to take your generosity and use it to commit dozens of acts of high treason. This is why the State needs serious cutting back!
Apparently in the 1970s houses were affordable so we must do all we can to return back there.
Bring back Watneys Red Barrel
My first ‘proper’ job was working in a little office that scanned books and newspapers. This was in the mid 1980s. We had to have a chap who was in a print union working there, such trade being a closed shop. He used to read out the pseudo Leninist letters from his union about the evils of Fatcha and where the next strike would be, to our general amusement.
Quite enjoyed that job, but the money was terrible.
There’s a place in Leeds according to a friend that does Double Diamond….
Actually I should really give you a down vote
Ah. That is interesting.
I wrote a post and put in a smiley emoji forgetting that the WordPress software couldn’t handle it. So it was posted without the illegal character, but didn’t say it had succeeded.
I tried again with a constructed smiley from colon and parenthesis.
Never noticed that before. Is it common ?
Actually I should really give you a down vote
🙂
“Mining might, and for environmental reasons should, have come to an end in the UK, but not in the way that she went about it.”
As anyone looking at the facts would know, more mines were closed and more mining jobs lost in the 11 years before Mrs T came to power than in the 11 years Mrs T was PM. Coal had been in almost continual decline since its peak for jobs in the early 1950s
Peak for jobs in coal in the UK was 1920-21. Peak output was 1913.
The goal of the miners strike wasn’t to keep coal being produced, or to preserve jobs but to topple the elected government, as they had done to Heath in 1974. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or lying.
Also elements of the NUM Leadership were being paid by the KGB (it’s alleged) – my guess is they can be both misinformed and lying!!
Apparently the Evil Thatch ( copyright Ben Elton 1985) stopped the Soviet funds:
The NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, had stepped up efforts to raise cash from the USSR; Soviet miners had responded by donating more than $1m from their wages.
The Soviets attempted to transfer the cash to an NUM bank account in Zurich, but it, like other accounts, was frozen.
The money bounced back, but Thatcher soon learnt of the manoeuvre and became worried.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/aug/29/margaret-thatcher-soviet-aid-miners
The Yorkshire & Scottish miners were naïve about Arthur Scargill and his ambitions. The Notts guys worked it out eventually. But it’s still Fatcher who is the villain.
Bring back Watneys Red Barrel
And canned Ind Coope Long Life
Don’t forget Skol lager!
Double Diamond works wonders….
Courage – It’s what your right arm’s for…..
Does it make you go blind ?
I’m ambivalent Otto, so don’t need glasses at the age of 67……
I recall the MD of Courage Breweries saying that Courage Best tasted like gnats piss. It could have been a Ratners moment but for the fact that that everyone already knew.
Courage Directors OTOH was a cracking pint (real ale). It’s still produced by the Eagle brewery in Bedford, but I haven’t tried it for years.
I used to like Directors.
Courage’s bottled light ale was quite a refreshing beer.
My father’s pub served that stuff because it was Tetley’s in house lager.
The only way it could be drunk was with a healthy shot of lime.
Mine’s a pint of Tolly Cobbold, or maybe Benskins.
Sam Smith’s for me.
What about a Party 7?
Yep, more disgusting chemical slop masquerading as beer.
Or Party 4 for the cheapskate. Of course, when you got to the party you’d scope out proper stuff to drink and leave the Party 7/4 can in the kitchen, to be used as an ash tray………
I remember the big cans. Our party favourite was Tobba. Take a 4 pint can of Abbot, invert it & pierce it. Drink a pint from the can. Then top it up with scotch. The can was inverted so it could be read lying on the floor. Which you inevitably would be.
Sounds like a good party! I remember seeing effnics sitting outside a betting shop in a shopping precinct in Willesden in the mid eighties, adding miniatures of whisky to cans of Special Brew. Heavy duty stuff….
And Davenport’s Beer at Home!
Talking of the problems with print unions. Many years ago when there was strict demarcation between what one worker could do and what they could not do because they were a different union I was on a photographic job on the South Coast for an Australian paper. We had an arrangement with a local paper to get my images processed in their darkroom but it left us with the problem of how to get the images to Australia. There wasn’t time to rush the physical images up to London where the branch office which had a wire machine was so we had to find a way to get the images directly from the South Coast to Australia.
We found an answer in the form of a journalist who had a wire machine of his own but he wasn’t officially allowed to use it as he was an NUJ member and not a member of the National Graphical Association (NGA), This journo was absolutely terrified that the NGA would get to hear that he had what is a glorified fax machine and fearful that he would lose his job and maybe get physical aggro from NGA extremists. We had to swear ourselves to absolute secrecy to not reveal that here was an NUJ member doing NGA work. We got taken around to his house and he unlocked a semi secret cupboard to reveal the wire machine and associated connections. We wired the images to Australia without any issues and compensated the journo with a wad of cash for his trouble promising again that we would not reveal either his identity or the paper he worked for or where he lived.
This experience soured me for closed shops in the print game and as soon as the closed shop went in journalism itself I ceased to pay the NUJ for the ‘privilege’ of being a struggling freelance. It should not have been the major issue that it was for a reporter to use a glorified fax machine but it was because he was a member of the ‘wrong’ trade union.
I loved Private Eye’s take on the print unions – NOTSOBA and (if memory recalls), SODOFF?
I was only an occasional reader of Private Eye so I missed those good ones.
I remember the 1970s. I remember shivering in school because there was an oil delivery strike. I remember the only functional car my Dad could afford was Citroen snail.
Some people either weren’t alive or have selective memories of the 1970’s. I remember the UK being known as “the sick man of Europe”.
Those were the days: three day week, blackouts every evening, rail strikes, coal miners strikes, ship builders strikes, Vesta beef curry, car workers strikes, seamans’ strikes, traitor Grocer Heath illegally signing us up for the EUSSR, OPEC crucifying the west with the oil crisis (we didn’t fucking learn did we?), Firemens strike, having to go cap in hand to the IMF to bailout the economy (under crash and Burn’em it’ll be deju vu all over again), the Cod War (we lost that one, and at a time when we actually had a navy), Mike and Bernie Winters (actual star of the show was Schnorbitz – he had more talent in his front left paw………) cont.P94 – Thinking of which, that was when Private Eye was funny and cutting edge.
I’d happily see the return of the Vesta paella and Chow Mein, but the beef curry is still with us and is HORRID.
Don’t forget tea candles (teak handles), crossed wires and the test card.
Fuck, it was awful.
It was shite, but the thing I remember most was that the future was fab.
Now we’re in that future and it’s only just a bit more comfy and techy.
And the future of now seems to be Islam.
Addolfff
I picked up some recent private eyes from Freecycle to see if I’d missed anything – My God. I’ve seen rusty swords with a sharper cutting edge. A couple of the correspondents (Dr B. Ching for example) seemed to be much of a muchness with the 80s but otherwise it was basically the BBC house mag.
“But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy your evening?”
People who glorify the 1970s really didn’t live through them.
You shouldn’t knock the Deux Chevaux. In the 70s, it probably the only car guaranteed to start.
The mini-moke version of that – can’t recall the name right now – goes for €15k and up these days.
At 4 or 5k I can see it as fun. But 15?
It was the Mehari, which had a plastic body. 15 grand – insane!
They say ‘houses were affordable’ here too. But if you go back to those times, most people were living in 5 story walk-up flats that they were renting. With no AC. They watch ‘Leave It To Beaver’ and use that as an ‘example of an average family’ but its like watching ‘Friends’ and thinking that was the normal living experience of New Yorkers.
Well the power of the unions and the scourge of nationalised industry perhaps. As Spud is a devotee of public ownership of the means of production, this is what he probably means. Private enterprise is anathaema to him.
I remember that Nationwide had some sort of clock which ticked over how much British Steel lost per second.
The terrible, mesmerising, power of Fatcher continues from beyond the grave.
Does he even know what “industry” means? Is he mixing it up with manufacturing?
Does anyone have any evidence to support this deliberate destruction? Swindon had the Honda plant for decades because Mrs Thatch reached out to the world and offered sweeteners to come and make cars here. Same with Toyota, Nissan and various consumer electronics companies in Wales.
The truth is, the world around Mrs Thatch changed. You got more robotics, which put a lot of people out of work. You got sweatshops in various parts of the world making clothes. And Britain shifted towards services where it had a comparative advantage. I don’t think anyone can point to bits of Fatcher legislation to explain the decline of manufacturing.
And why is that every person with a boner for manufacturing is someone that has never worked in a factory and comes from a line of non-factory workers? Is this some Tom of Finland thing about sweaty muscular men?
And Britain shifted towards services where it had a comparative advantage. I don’t think anyone can point to bits of Fatcher legislation to explain the decline of manufacturing.
What people really mean is continuing to fund unprofitable nationalised businesses like BL and inefficient one like what we now call BT.
Exactly. Lefties blame Thatcher for closing or selling off pits and factories that were already in terminal decline for their own reasons.
All she did was hasten their demise, and for good reason: she wasn’t going to diminish the baleful power of the unions in any other way. That’s what they hate.
“And why is that every person with a boner for manufacturing is someone that has never worked in a factory”.
My thoughts exactly, regarding coal mines and steam locomotives.
I believe Spud has a ‘thing’ for steam choo choos…….
“And Britain shifted towards services where it had a comparative advantage. “
The trouble is that manufactures and primary industries are the bedrock of civilisation. Things that allow people to survive, which is the primary objective of human existence. Services are ‘nice to haves’ but they aren’t critical to survival. An society based on services is one based on the hope that it can always get what it actually needs from somewhere else. A somewhat dangerous view to take IMO.
So, do you want to make shoes at Bangladeshi wages, or do you want to force someone else to do it?
Services = desk jockey wankers.
Is this Tom chap from Finland a leftwing or neoliberal economist? I did search online but the internet seems very strangely broken today.
You might not want to turn “Safe Search” off.
A downvote? Pearls before swine.
“various consumer electronics companies in Wales.”
Sony building Trinitrons in Merthyr?
This morning I learnt that Welsh school kids are apparently 2 years behind the English ones.
This morning I learnt that Welsh school kids are apparently 2 years behind the English ones.
Not for long, Labour is going to undo all Gove’s good work and more.
These fuckwits seem to believe that there is an easy answer to placing the entire population in a blissful state of cash rich ecstatic nirvana, and Thatcher or Trump (or whoever) deliberately think, ‘Fuck it, I’d rather risk character or actual assassination.’
From Spud “If we want to beat fascism, the answer is easy: scrap neoliberalism”
If only we’d had neoliberalism in the 1930s. We could have scrapped it and avoided WWII
“If we want to beat fascism, the answer is easy: scrap neoliberalism” – Kartoffel, now.
“We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.” – Eric Arthur Blair, 1941.
There’s a generation of lefties who are far too young to remember the Thatcher years, and far too stupid to read about them, who believe with religious ferocity that she de-industrialised Britain as a matter of policy.
Interestingly a lot of young people voted AfD in Saxony-Anhalt on the basis of Ostalga whereas a lot of older people didn’t because they remember what it was like according to some reports.
There must be a lot of Germans in their hundreds.
I had decided as a lad that the existence of the Labour Party made no sense since a country couldn’t both be socialist – i.e. run as a dictatorship from London – and have politically powerful trade unions. It amused me no end that it took until Sunny Jim for any major Labour figure to confess as much.
“When Thatcher reached office in 1979, her first goal was to destroy British industry”
As opposed to what Ed Miliband had in store for us in 2024?
I do hope Trump sanctions him personally. Be lovely to see a ‘British’ foreign sec get one up the keyster like that.
And all so that he can a) protect Labour’s Mohammedan vote, and b) protect that weird thing some Jews have of wanting to get themselves killed.
Not sure I can see em sanctioning a serving FS… But it would amuse…
From your lips to Don’s ears…
Murphy’s posts consistently demonstrate he is a fvcking lying cvnt. And he knows it even if his fluffers don’t
It is his goal to destroy traditional British culture and prosperity. Frankly he should be tried for sedition.
As he references coal mining, I guess he imagines Richard Murphy to be the Alexei Stakhanov of the blogosphere
Frankly he should be tried for sedition.
Given where the Establishment is now and has been for years past, it’s the likes of you and I who would face a sedition charge.
And, from a wiki a while back, I don’t think treason quite works either, because there must first be a designation of x as ‘the king’s enemy’. That is, to be guilty of treason, you have to assist the king’s enemy. And quite aside from that designation not having happened since I-do-not-know-when, the king himself is clearly on the side of our enemies.
Then there’s misfeasance in public office. I feel sure I read somewhere that the present ruling inmates abolished that, but if so I cannot find a reference to it.
Perhaps, to be on the safe side, we ought to prosecute for ‘knowingly, willingly and maliciously undermining the borders and territorial integrity of the the United Kingdom of GB and NI, contrary to common law’.
With the death penalty to follow on conviction.
That gets us everyone from the skittles hairs who impede coppers trying to deport foreign murderers to Blair and Co, Treason and Grieve, the judicial-third-sector complex, Fat Blair and the rest of the open borders gang.
Plan?
Spud is a man driven by bitterness and envy arising from the fact that he hasn’t achieved the greatness, recognition and wealth his massive ego thinks he deserves.
I think this could also describe Timmy.
Nonsense, our host is far too lazy to be driven.
That’s rather harsh! I don’t think Tim has blocked 25,000 people on X nor demanded seriously that the government enact his policies else be called ‘Stalinist’ but if you can provide evidence of such behaviour then happy to be corrected
Well for a start hasn’t got 25,000 followers on X to block. He’s always saying that govts should enact his policies. And he’s always complaining about the standard of journalism and indicating he could do so much better from his immigrant hideaway in Portugal. But then again this is just my opinion isn’t it?
The emeritus potato never tires of reminding the world that he is an oppressed immigrant to Ely from Ireland
And Timmy never reminds us of his Irish granny. But his sister does.
Well….
I don’t think he’s wrong on the quality of much modern journalism to be fair!! I don’t think there’s many current Telegraph journalists who are more on the money than Tim. Perhaps it’s ‘the way he tells them’ and the messaging which make me more sympathetic to Tim’s side but he strikes me as someone who tolerates dissent and disagreement and allows people to express a contrary opinion.
Try posting anything vaguely controversial or disagreeing with Murphy on his blog and see how far you get…
I said yesterday, there’s journalists & reporters. We don’t have any of the former & journalists have always been a bit naff.
Obviously i should have written reporters & journalists to make sense
No you don’t.
No I don’t what?
think that
It’s behind you!
Well his output is similarly OTT, but without the real productivity of Stakhanov. Tons of coal vs tons of mindless maunderings?
Mrs Thatcher did not destroy British Industry, the policies of Wilson and Frank Cousins has already done more damage than her significant policy error of letting the £ float up after North Sea Oil started to flow was ever going to do. I left Oxford in 1968 and had the option of getting a job based on my father’s reputation (where I should let people down because I am not nearly as bright) or going south. [There was one job in Harrogate for which I could apply: the short list comprised four guys with two degrees each (I could relabel my post-grad as a B.Litt. but my mind boggled at a B.Litt in Mathematical Statistics) and I don’t interview well, so no luck there].
What happened under Thatcher was that inefficient nationalised industries were told to face competition and reduce prices and hundreds of thousand or redundant workers were *told* that they were redundant. National Power sacked one-third of its unionised employees at no loss to production. The Communication Workers Union launched a strike because the Govt decided to allow Cable & Wireless (at the time state-owned) to provide a telephone service to compete with BT – the High Court granted permission because CWU convincingly argued that if BT had to compete with Mercury it would sack more union members than Mercury employed! (That is not a joke)
Industrial production went up while union membership went down