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punk rebel ecks posted:Margret Thatcher isn't looked too kindly here on these boards. But from what I have heard from some people in the United Kingdom is that prior to Thatcher the country was a bureaucratic nightmare. The unions would regularly shutdown the cities over strikes. Nationalization of many key industries severely underperformed. The country was way behind in innovation. And taxes were insanely high. Essentially the country was a basketcase and the privatizations Thatcher did, while some going too far, were mostly necessary. To break your post down into a few key points, you address bureaucracy, union strikes, nationalised industry sucking, innovation and taxes. On the bureaucracy front, the only thing reduced there was via privatisation - pushing the books out of government and into private hands. One of the 'problems' of stable governments is that regulation only increases as more edge cases or technologies emerge. Thatcher's deregulation was seen as easing the bureaucracy of, for instance, the banking system, but also set the scene for problems down the line (that link being one of the causes cited for the 2008 financial crisis). Unions-wise, as another poster pointed out, strike action increased under Thatcher. By the time she came to power the Winter of Discontent was over and settled, but by then the damage had been done. The classic example of a strike during her time was the 1984-85 miners' strike, which she manage to defeat by using stockpiled coal the government had built up to prevent the National Union of Miners from taking down another government (they were seen as responsible for the defeat of Ted Heath's government in the 74 elections based on their strike in 72 crushing Britain's electricity grid). Defeating the NUM was basically a death knell to the trade unions' position as a political power. Nationalised industry being poo poo was definitely a thing. I can't really say much on this subject, though, so I'll let someone else field that one. In terms of innovation, that's a hard one to say, really. The first hand-held television was released in 1970 and the first laptop in 1979. The best invention was probably the World Wide Web in 1989, but while Tim Berners-Lee is British, he developed it while working at CERN (his example image on the test page actually contained a schematic of the large hadron collider). Since discovering one little gem I've often cited how Thatcher single-handedly destroyed fibre broadband in the UK, where she was shown how to roll out fibre cables cheaper than copper wire, and decided that because a nationalised industry was doing it and not a private company, it was bad, so she killed the project. Read the article, it's pretty short. Our slow lovely internet in the late 90s up 'til now are entirely of that decision. And finally taxes. She increased corporation tax, but she also near-doubled VAT, which hurts the poor way more than the rich.
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Mar 24, 2016 15:59
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Typical of her to gut a public institution to benefit a private enterprise:
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Mar 26, 2016 18:30
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punk rebel ecks posted:Incredible write up! Agreed - fantastic effort post. punk rebel ecks posted:Is there anyway the traditional left wing Britain could come back? Actually that's surprisingly off-key - Corbyn actually has engaged the youth vote. The Labour Party were massively taken aback that the youth demographic were a notable percent when Corbyn got voted in. In fact, Corbyn has a lot of interesting elements to his rise to leadership (and a lot of major negatives) - I'll see about rounding up a few of the UK D&D thread regulars to help me+them post about how the political scene has changed. Might have to give me a couple of hours - it's now 3AM here, so gotta wait for us to all get up. I'm a bit of a night owl, hence my late reply.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:58
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Spacewolf posted:(One thing I think worth noting is that I have my own questions....But they seem better for the UKMT over in D&D, but that always grows to such huge size so quickly that I look at it, go Come over and ask away - we're usually pretty happy to answer questions. Makes a change from laughing at how terrible our political scene is and telling trolls to go away.
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Mar 27, 2016 14:52
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and just...run away crying.....)
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punk rebel ecks posted:Didn't know that Germany was that left wing when it came to worker representation. I always saw Germany as the number two most right wing modern European country after U.K. Ooh you would enjoy a history of the post-WW2 Germany scene. One of the few countries to have a militant left of note. Heck, check out the Wikipedia page on the Rote Army Fraktion / Red Army Fraction.
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Mar 28, 2016 02:13
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punk rebel ecks posted:You'd think Germany would be very anti-left due to the whole East Germany being Communist thing. The former East Germany regions are actually the strongest voting bloc for Die Linke (lit: 'The Left') in terms of political parties. The rest of the country are stronger on Merkel's Christian Democratic Union & friends coalition.
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Mar 28, 2016 03:07
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Jedit posted:The RAF were hardly left wing. As pretty accurately summed up by a Not the Nine O'clock News sketch of the time, they were what happens when a couple of sociopathic fanatics convince young people that direct action - by which we mean "killing people you don't like" - is just as valid a route to becoming a socialist as actually studying Marxist theory. Communism wasn't the reason for the RAF, it was the excuse. True enough, and I do love that sketch. It was very much a naïve anti-establishment mentality that preyed on people upset with the status quo. punk rebel ecks posted:I thought East Germany hated Communism? East Germany also required them to read about left-wing political thought, so while they saw the problems of the Soviet Union's policies, they also could see how it was different from what left-wing intellectuals had written about. Similarly Zizek was born and raised in Communist Yugoslavia and was told his writings were not sufficiently Marxist to be valid, yet here in the west he's considered an orthodox Marxist theorist (and rather unreadable, in my opinion).
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Mar 28, 2016 15:02
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punk rebel ecks posted:I was under the impression that Yugoslavia was different from the other Sovient occupied countries and is where Communism somewhat worked. To some extent, yes. Primarily because Tito was happy to work with the west, so didn't suffer the same economic deprivation of the greater Soviet bloc. HalPhilipWalker posted:From the previous page To add to what forkboy84 said, it's worth mentioning that in the United Kingdom our Upper House can block legislation indefinitely, much like the Senate in the United States, but the Parliament Acts added in a caveat that something in a party's General Election Manifesto has the right to overrule a Lords' vote. This is why, for instance, Tony Blair managed to implement a ban on fox hunting despite the Lords voting it down every time it came through to them. Of course, in practice the ban hasn't changed anything, it just means hunting saboteurs have a legal leg to stand on. It hasn't actually stopped rich people from hunting foxes because, well, they're rich. The law doesn't apply to them.
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Mar 29, 2016 11:09
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