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Jedit posted:Well, first the NHS isn't a nationalised industry. But the nationalised industries weren't bad and nationalisation isn't bad. Their main drawback was that they sacrificed quality for price. You can get any level of quality you want from a nationalised service so long as the government are willing to spend the money on it, but it's the taxpayer's money and there's only so much you can spend on it before the taxpayer feels ripped off and votes for someone else. So British Rail, for example, provided an acceptable if not brilliant service at a good price. This is wrong. Thatcher was strongly against privatising British Rail and had repeatedly shouted it down when members of her own cabinet kept suggesting it. This was one of the factors which led to Michael Hesseltines leadership challenge in 1990 and her virtually immediate resignation. John Major somehow won the leadership contest and became (unelected) Prime Minister in 1990. He couldn't start the privatisation process as it hadn't been in the Conservative manifesto in 1987, so it was put in for the 1992 election which he also somehow won. Major, Norman Lamont and to an extent John Redwood couldn't wait to get their grubby little paws on the railways and somehow managed to sell off the entire network within a year. For all of Thatchers faults she didn't play any part in the railways. Well, she sold off the catering side of it, but public opinion was apparently pretty strongly behind that!
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Mar 24, 2016 23:55
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Jedit posted:I'll accept the correction, I thought she was in on it. It was definitely an extension of her policies, though. It was an extension of Thatcherism but not something Thatcher thought would work. The whole point of Thatcherism was to control the money supply in the country; by subsidising state run industries the government needed to either borrow money or print it to keep them afloat, assuming they weren't making a profit (thus putting more cash into the economy and raising inflation). Once they were sold off the state had no obligation to give them public funds, instead expecting them to rely on private investment. The railways were a special case (which Thatcher recognised) because a large part of the network runs at a loss and relies on government subsidies, but nevertheless must be maintained for rather obvious reasons relating to people being able to get to work. Thatcher knew that by opening the network to privatisation would mean that private companies would only want the profitable routes leaving the state to either subsidise, or even continue to own and run, the unprofitable routes. So rather than British Rail being a loss-making organisation with a combination of profitable and unprofitable routes a rump-BR would be running at a loss on every single route it operated. So privatising the railways would mean that the government would essentially still have to pay for them, but have virtually no control in how they're run. So the Treasury would have to continue to either borrow or print money everytime the rail companies asked for it, and couldn't tell the companies to make changes to how they're running their business as that's the shareholders job (and they would be more than happy just to take a free cash injection every now and then). And that's exactly what happened! duckmaster fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Mar 26, 2016 |
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Mar 26, 2016 21:13
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HalPhilipWalker posted:From the previous page EDIT: this became a bit of an effortpost in Thatchers downfall and more specifically how John Major somehow became Prime Minister... Other posters have explained that in British politics a manifesto is perhaps taken a bit more seriously than in the US but that wasn't quite what I was getting at. The UK is split into 650 constituencies of more or less equal population size. When we go out to vote we vote for the person we want to be our Member of Parliament (MP) for our constituency. Most of the time that person is a member of a political party so once everyones been elected we can see which party has the most MPs. The leader of that party (or at least the leader who can form a coalition of 50%+1 of the MPs in the House) then becomes Prime Minister. Some people vote for the person they want to be MP, some people put their X next to the person who represents the party they want to vote for. This also means that since the Prime Minister is an MP he or she has to stand for election in a constituency, meaning they can theoretically not even be elected to Parliament, stopping them from even become Prime Minister (although if this looks likely the party would shuffle things round and put him somewhere he can't possibly lose - they've done this with senior ministers a few times in living memory). However this isn't the only way a party leader can become Prime Minister. If a party decides they don't like their leader/Prime Minister (who is obviously the same person) someone can mount a leadership challenge within the party and if they gain enough support of their fellow MPs and/or general party members (the rules differ per party; this is a purely party based thing, nothing to do with a general election) then it goes to a vote and the winner becomes party leader. And if the party leader was Prime Minister, then they vacate that office as well and the winner gets it. This is what happened with John Major. Thatcher was becoming very unpopular within her own party and a guy called Sir Anthony Meyer made a "stalking horse" bid for the party leadership. This is a bid when a person makes a leadership challenge without expecting to win, but by opening a leadership challenge the person who actually wants to challenge can do so without the controversy of making the original challenge (try and keep up  ). However, nobody did, and Meyer was resoundingly beaten.A year later in 1990 Sir Geoffery Howe, previously the Foreign Secretary (I think he was Deputy Prime Minister at this point; which paradoxically is a fringe position in the British cabinet) tendered his resignation over some complicated issues relating to the Exchange Rate Mechanism and made a blistering attack on Thatcher in the House of Commons. A pretty well known MP called Michael Hesseltine challenged her for the leadership, and when it went to a vote she gained 204 of 372 votes, which was an overall majority but not the 55% she needed to prevent the vote going to a second ballot. Thatcher then went round her allies in the party and asked if they thought she could win. Some said she could, some said she couldn't. Rather than face losing the premiership through an internal party ballot she "withdrew her candidacy" which is a very neat political way of resigning without actually having to bother resigning. Hesseltine would have run unopposed so two more MPs announced they would run - Douglas Hurd, a centre-right candidate and who had been Thatchers Home Secratary, one of the most senior positions in the cabinet - and John Major, also a moderate centre-right candidate who was Chancellor of the Exchequer which is generally seen as the best job apart from PM (but not necessarily the best grounding to become PM). Now it's important to remember that these votes were being done by Conservative MPs and they were technically secret ballots; but each candidate is "selected" by their party members in their constituency before they can run to become an MP, and they can deselect them as well, so in reality the MPs were listening to the party members in their constituency. The word on the street was that Hesseltine was unpopular with the grass roots because he'd embarassed Thatcher over The Westland Affair and resigned because of it, and it would have looked daft making someone Prime Minister if they weren't even currently in the cabinet. Plus, they thought he was a bit of a oval office. The grassroots worried that Hurd, although a popular politician and Home Secretary, was too much of a posho wanker for the people of Britain to actually elect him as Prime Minister which meant it had to be Major. In the second ballot Major won 50% of the vote to Hesseltines 35% and posho wanker Hurds 15%. This is where it gets really interesting because it now should have gone to a third ballot as again Major (according to party rules) has to get 55% of a vote to win. So Hurd should have been eliminated and it should have gone to a straight Major-Hesseltine vote; instead there were lots of shady political deals going on until someone basically told Hesseltine that nobody would be supporting him as Prime Minister so he might as well just give up. So he withdrew his candidacy, followed shortly by Hurd, and that is how a quiet grey man whose best quality was "nobody knows if he's a twat yet" became Prime Minister of a country with nuclear weapons by getting 49.7% of an internal party vote. ANYWAY - the last General Election before this had been in 1987 and rules at the time said that the PM could call one between every 4-5 years. Obviously he wasn't going to call one until 1992 because he wasn't entirely sure he could actually win it; he'd already catapulted Hesseltine and Hurd straight into the cabinet (those shady deals, remember?) in an attempt to get as much of the parties support as possible. But in the 16 months between being "elected" (lol) Prime Minister and the 1992 General Election he was pretty much powerless to do anything, because people had voted in the Conservative party when Thatcher was in charge of it and he couldn't then start doing his own thing (and since 50% of his MPs hadn't actually voted for him he'd have struggled to even get them to support it). It would be like him coming out of 10 Downing Street and saying to the press, "Look, sorry guys, I know everyone voted for Thatchers lot in 1987, but we've just had our own little vote that we didn't tell you about. Anyway I'm PM now and I'll do it my way". Although there's nothing illegal about that the opposition parties would have had a field day with it (not to mention the press). That's what I mean when I said "it wasn't in his manifesto". But then in April 1992 John Major somehow managed to win the General Election and become a proper actually elected Prime Minister and could do what he wanted. It took him about fifteen minutes to gently caress it all up. Phew, effortpost!
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Mar 29, 2016 22:31
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