Margaret Thatcher dies

[ahinton]

Was Glenda talking about Thatcher policies or the behaviour of the unions when she made that point?

Please read the transcript if what's plainly obvious to most is less so to you.

[MrGongGong]

She was talking about Thatcherism - perfectly clear from her speech - not about trade unions.

As with interpretations of the late Beethoven Quartets there are more than two ways of doing things and more than two ways of understanding them

[Pabmusic]

As with interpretations of the late Beethoven Quartets there are more than two ways of doing things and more than two ways of understanding them

It would appear so. Even though she said "But the basis to Thatcherism...was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice...under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, etc...".

[scottycelt]

You may not like her face but everything she said was true.

I remember the greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees from relatively well-off workers long before Thatcher came to power. Dead lying unburied, rubbish uncollected, buses and trains frequently grounded due to strikes, leaving many, including the old and infirm, stranded. And all under the previous Labour Government. That was certainly true.

Jackson's opportunistic moral preaching conveniently ignored any of that. Fortunately, Miliband perfectly represented the official, reasonable and considered voice of Labour on this occasion.

[John Wright]

Glenda Jackson, sad old lady. Did she read this forum before her rant?

[ahinton]

It would appear so. Even though she said "But the basis to Thatcherism...was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice...under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, etc...".

Indeed; I'm not sure just how much more unequivocally this should have been phrased to satisfy the requirements of some people and there seems a clear paucity of evidence that GJ intended her remarks to be understood as confirmation of as belief that Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132 and 135 counted among those vices.

[french frank]

Glenda Jackson, sad old lady. Did she read this forum before her rant?

I'm campaigning to avoid this kind of post on the forum. Thank you.

ff

To clarify: you may call Glenda Jackson a sad, old lady, if you wish. I haven't heard her speech but would no doubt feel myself that it was OTT: she and Margaret Thatcher were at opposite extremes of the political spectrum. But implying that views expressed here that you don't agree with are 'rants' simply provokes - argue against them if you disagree.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Private landlords are entitled to make profits; for that very reason they are, for the most part, unsuitable owners of social housing and not many such landlords would take it on for that very reason.

My view would be that the ability to make a profit from private ownership of rented property will be the factor that makes for better management of the housing stock. Yes, that can be abused but I'd pin my hopes on good regulation.

Your alternative is public ownership run by people who are spending money received from taxation or local government rates. That may not suffer abuse but there's little incentive to provide a good service unless, again, there's good regulation.

Is there a middle road where public land can be cheaply rented to private developers for neew housing stock?

[ahinton]

I remember the greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees from relatively well-off workers long before Thatcher came to power. Dead lying unburied, rubbish uncollected, buses and trains frequently grounded due to strikes, leaving many, including the old and infirm, stranded. And all under the previous Labour Government. That was certainly true.

No. Some of it was indeed true and there were no excuses for that, but the evidence of greed, selfishness and no care for the weaker not only flourished far more prominently during the Thatcher years but was encouraged to do so by certain government policy.

Jackson's opportunistic moral preaching conveniently ignored any of that.

Perhaps because the purpose of her speech was not to report the findings of a comparative study as part of a lecture on economics and sociology, in case you'd not noticed that...

Fortunately, Miliband perfectly represented the official, reasonable and considered voice of Labour on this occasion.

He did indeed; on that, most people seem to be in agreement.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

I remember the greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees from relatively well-off workers long before Thatcher came to power. Dead lying unburied, rubbish uncollected, buses and trains frequently grounded due to strikes, leaving many, including the old and infirm, stranded. And all under the previous Labour Government. That was certainly true.

So much so that we couldn't even bury the dead. Was that what Glenda meant by her reference to Hogarth? Corpses piled high, as was the rubbish.

[Julien Sorel]

Jackson's opportunistic moral preaching conveniently ignored any of that.

Mrs Thatcher said: "It is far better to put these children in the hands of a very good religious organisation, and the mother as well, so that they will be brought up with family values."

She told an audience in the Commonwealth Convention Centre in Louisville the spread of illegitimacy "devalues our values, our community".

She said governments had made things worse by providing social security benefits for single mothers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/197963.stm

[Julien Sorel]

Jackson's opportunistic moral preaching conveniently ignored any of that.

It’s curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda ....

Why bring Maggie Thatcher into it? In a tribute Monday, President Barack Obama said she had been “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty.” Actually, she hadn’t. Thatcher was a fierce Cold Warrior, and when it came to Chile never mustered quite the appropriate amount of compassion for the people Pinochet killed in the name of anti-Communism. She preferred talking about his much-vaunted “Chilean economic miracle.”

And kill he did. Pinochet’s soldiers rounded up thousands at the country’s national stadium and, then and there, suspects were marched into the locker rooms and corridors and bleachers and tortured and shot dead. Hundreds died in the stadium alone. One was the revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, who was beaten, his hands and ribs broken, and then machine-gunned, his body dumped like trash on a back street of the capital—along with many others. The killing went on even after Pinochet and his military had a firm hold on power; it was just carried out with greater secrecy, in military barracks, in police buildings, and in the countryside. Critics and opponents of the new regime were murdered in other countries, too. In 1976, Pinochet’s intelligence agency planned and carried out a car bombing in Washington, D.C., that murdered Allende’s exiled former Ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, as well as Ronni Moffitt, his American aide. Britain regarded Pinochet’s killing spree as unseemly, and sanctioned his regime by refusing to supply it with weapons—that is, until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/neruda-pinochet-thatcher-chile-murder-exhumed.html

[french frank]

Council houses were never run by the government. But they never exploited the less well off as so many landlords do. Perhaps the much maligned Clay Cross rent rebels were not wrong.

Not by central government, but by local government. Cutting the housing stock was therefore a way of cutting councils' 'need' for money (by way of central grants, which were also cut - hence the problem in Liverpool). None of the support for the policy and the switch to private landlords tackles the need for rents which are affordable to the poorly off as distinct from market rents which private landlords are entitled to charge.

And there was a time limit of - was it only three years? - after which tenants who had bought their cheap council houses under the right to buy legislation were allowed to sell them on and make very big profits. And people did. The fact that they were sold cheaply was effectively giving away local people's (poll tax) money, publicly owned property. The state of their gardens is irrelevant.

[ahinton]

My view would be that the ability to make a profit from private ownership of rented property will be the factor that makes for better management of the housing stock. Yes, that can be abused but I'd pin my hopes on good regulation.

Like wot the banks had? I'm afraid that pinning any hopes on that alone would likely be a recipe for disaster.

Your alternative is public ownership run by people who are spending money received from taxation or local government rates. That may not suffer abuse but there's little incentive to provide a good service unless, again, there's good regulation.

It's not my alternative. It should not and need not matter where the money's coming from for good management to be put in place and be relied upon for the future; in any case, you omitted borrowings from your funding source list for publicly owned social housing, which is a pity because borrowings are being ever more heavily relied upon today by local and national government because they can't extract sufficient taxes fully to meet their commitments and the more people who are put out of work as a direct consequence of government cuts the greater is the demand on the benefits system and the lower the tax take becomes, thereby necessitating yet higher borrowings, which is ironical to the extent that the cuts are supposed to enable reductions in such borrowings.

Is there a middle road where public land can be cheaply rented to private developers for new housing stock?

I don't know - and I also don't know if that idea's been put forward and debated, let alone tried (maybe someone else here could enlighten us on that) - but one problem is that another presumably unforeseen yet surely inevitable outcome of the sale of social housing to its tenants was the boom in property prices and the consequent rise in the price of building land; this, along with the high interest rates that at times accompanied it, not only got plenty of new owners into trouble with their mortgages but also meant that housing was becoming ever less affordable because average incomes were by no means keeping pace with average house and land prices.

An accountant that I once knew had a mantra to the effect that no one should ever regard his/her home as a financial investment on which to seek a profit; he was right, but the consequences of this particular Thatcherist policy encouraged many to believe otherwise, often to their ultimate cost. One has only to compare the cost per square metre of building land in most parts of rural France with that of equivalent areas in Britain to see evidence of the problem in the latter country.

[ahinton]

So much so that we couldn't even bury the dead. Was that what Glenda meant by her reference to Hogarth? Corpses piled high, as was the rubbish.

But that was far more down to appallingly bad management than it was specifically and solely to "greed selfishness (and) no care for the weaker".