Maggie

[Sheffield Spur]

When Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, Britain was a country on its knees, a discredited, impoverished post-imperial nation in seemingly terminal decline, with ruthless union bosses imposing their will on a gutless establishment, cripplingly high inflation, a tax regime that forbade entrepreneurship and ambition, and an antiquated class system still in full sway. Dozens of key industries were being slowly throttled by state ownership, mismanagement and labour issues, one couldn’t take money freely out of the country and mindsets were narrow and insular. For the ambitious, there was no hope but to leave the UK, its parochialism, dire prospects and even worse food.

Thatcher changed all of this. Her policies were painful – shutting down unsustainable firms and improving productivity levels led to a surge in unemployment, which has remained with us ever since, though jobless rates went up internationally and any government would eventually have had to axe loss-making industries.

Ultimately, however, her supply-side reforms paved the way for our economic rebirth. She slashed the top rate of tax from 98 per cent on investment income and 83 per cent on labour income to just 40 per cent; she sold off dozens of state firms; she tackled inflation, albeit at the cost of an unavoidable recession. She shifted the burden of taxation from income to consumption, eventually defeated the unions, smashing closed shops and restrictive practices.

The cultural revolution during her time in office mirrored the economic revolution. When she arrived in office, 67 per cent of the country belonged to the C2DE economic class – the so-called working class – but when she left office that had fallen to just 51 per cent and has continued to collapse, according to Ipsos Mori. Aspiration was unleashed.

She swept away many of the old class barriers and her cabinet was open to all the talents, regardless of background and religions; home ownership increased substantially and sustainably, helped by the massive sell-off of council homes to their owners at a discount.

The City was transformed, with the Big Bang, an inflow of foreign capital and talent and the rise of upwardly mobile, hard-working and high rolling yuppie; the hugely significant Canary Wharf project was kicked-started; and the privatisations of the commanding heights of the economy ushered in an age of mass share ownership, turning the City from quaint backwater to global powerhouse.

She enjoyed her share of good fortune, as well as some bad luck. North Sea oil poured in; however, this sent the pound shooting up, a development which helped hurt manufacturers. Thatcher’s astonishingly firm handling of the Falklands crisis rescued her premiership and gave her enough time to see the recovery through. The Labour party embrace of an extreme ideology and poor leaders, and the rise the new social democratic party, which split the left-wing vote, was another great boon. But the horrors of IRA terrorism were a nightmare and the Conservative party suffered many horrendous murders. As luck had it, Thatcher was in power at the same time as her kindred spirit Ronald Reagan; the two fought communism together.

Thatcherism worked. Take one (of course imperfect) measure: ONS figures suggest the economy grew by 3.03 per cent a year in the 1950s, 3.18 per cent a year in the 1960s, 2.07 per cent in the 1970s, accelerating back to 3.09 per cent in the 1980s under Thatcher, before expanding by 2.77 per cent in the 1990s (when her legacy largely remained) and by 1.77 per cent in the 2000s.

The report of the LSE growth commission is emphatic: by the late 1970s, the UK had been left behind, with US GDP per capita 40 per cent higher than Britain’s and the top European economies 10-15 per cent ahead. By 2007, however, UK GDP per capita had overtaken France’s and Germany’s and reduced significantly the gap with the US, a position which hasn’t really changed since, despite the US and Germany’s better performance over the past couple of years.

The first Thatcher years were marred by a terrible recession, which reduced the average growth rate of the 1980s quite substantially, even accounting for the unsustainable, cheap money-fuelled growth towards the end. This also helps to explain why her cuts to the public sector as a share of GDP look relatively modest. But spending actually shot up in the early 1980s as a result of the recession, so the decline from peak to trough was much more impressive.

But while Thatcher saved Britain, she also made mistakes. All came from her turning her back on her core principles. When she was education secretary, she implemented disastrous anti-Grammar school policies. She was wrong to sign the Single European Act. She regretted this deeply subsequently. She was wrong to allow herself to be convinced to join the European exchange rate mechanism; together with a poor monetary policy by chancellor Lord Lawson, who allowed the broad money supply to rocket, this led to a boom in the late 1980s and another recession. The poll tax meant huge tax hikes on the many, and was thus rightly rejected by an angry public.

For all of those errors, she was a superb Prime Minister, the best peacetime leader of the twentieth century. She and Winston Churchill were the only two truly great PMs of the last hundred years; Churchill saved the UK in wartime and Thatcher saved Britain from economic and cultural catastrophe. May she rest in peace.

We'll take it as read that you are a subscriber to Socialist Worker, then!

 

[Hootnow]

I think it's a major reason why for many. For many others it's the feeling that their situation is more important than the good of the country as a whole.

a) If they believed that, they would change their beliefs. I don't hate SAF because deep down I want him to be our manager, I very openly and clearly want him to be our manager (well I don't hate him, there are very few people I hate). You can't know someone is right but continue to hold the complete opposite views.

b) Obviously there is no comparison in terms of actions but this is the kind of argument used for slightly benign dictators or dictators who in their first few years weren't as vicious as later. Oh of course Mussolini did this and that but he did it for the good of the country! And he got the trains running on time etc etc.

c) I love this country but I'm struggling to see this unbelievable Britain that she created which came at the cost of those people she pushed aside.

Maggie, whatever her faults and strengths, crushed a portion of her electorate. A portion of the population that elected her. In democracies, that just doesn't really happen, rightly or wrongly.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

I'm sure I'd complain a lot. I'd also go and find a job and not restrict my entire world view to a 5 mile radius because of some ridiculous mistaken belief that I was owed a living.

Sometimes its impossible.

You are lucky; you are in an area which has been burgeoning with quality/graduate work for 30+ years.

 

[Hootnow]

I will say two things though

I do think the unions needed to be brought to heel. They were becoming ridiculous in their conduct.

We need to cut the North loose. Anything above Cambridge

 

[scaramanga]

And what about the economics of comparative costs; all the benefits paid out, housing etc, social costs etc etc. People in jobs support families, pay mortgages, buy cars, pay for holidays, buy goods and services, and put back into the community.

But if you're creating those pointless jobs and paying someone to do a pointless task, then that money only ever cycles around from the government to the recipient and back to the government. Take out the long-standing inefficiencies of the public sector compared to private and a small % of value or (GDP or whatever you want to call it) will leak out of that equation (going to those who set up and administer these pointless jobs) until the GDP eventually drops to zero.

If you take the money you would have paid someone for doing nothing and give it to business (in the form of tax cuts) then they can increase efficiency/drive innovation to the point where they can compete globally (as in the 80s) the profits of which then get partly spent on employing people (as in the late 80s and most of the 90s) and partly comes back to the government as tax. This cycle (barring short term fluctuations) goes in the opposite direction to the previous example and leaves the government with more and more money to spend, business with more and more money to spend and more jobs for everyone.

Disincentives to education, hard work? Why is that? People in all areas geographically have gone into education, in the past, where they could/wanted to. Hard work? How is that an issue?

Because if everyone knows that it doesn't matter if they're brick/inefficient at their job because the government will just make one up for them why bother working?

As for moving for jobs: not really a luxury that all have (or want to do).

I suspect it's incredibly rare that there was no way whatsoever for people to move for a job. There will always be exceptions, but the majority thought it was better to stay and fight an already lost battle than to go and improve their own and their family's chances.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

But if you're creating those pointless jobs and paying someone to do a pointless task, then that money only ever cycles around from the government to the recipient and back to the government. Take out the long-standing inefficiencies of the public sector compared to private and a small % of value or (GDP or whatever you want to call it) will leak out of that equation (going to those who set up and administer these pointless jobs) until the GDP eventually drops to zero.

If you take the money you would have paid someone for doing nothing and give it to business (in the form of tax cuts) then they can increase efficiency/drive innovation to the point where they can compete globally (as in the 80s) the profits of which then get partly spent on employing people (as in the late 80s and most of the 90s) and partly comes back to the government as tax. This cycle (barring short term fluctuations) goes in the opposite direction to the previous example and leaves the government with more and more money to spend, business with more and more money to spend and more jobs for everyone.



Because if everyone knows that it doesn't matter if they're brick/inefficient at their job because the government will just make one up for them why bother working?



I suspect it's incredibly rare that there was no way whatsoever for people to move for a job. There will always be exceptions, but the majority thought it was better to stay and fight an already lost battle than to go and improve their own and their family's chances.

I find all of that an incredibly simplistic way of viewing it all.

I wouldn't call coal, steel and manufacturing jobs pointless. I would call them staple industries. They certainly still are in other countries, so why not here?

You won't agree with me, and I certainly won't with you.

Incidentally, in your world of quick and simplistic change, what would you do with the huge numbers of the people in the areas of South Yorkshire, Merseyside and the north east, who were/are there because of the evolvement of those areas? We are talking in the region of millions here, remember. Are they all supposed to suddenly up sticks and move? Or maybe just disappear?

 

[COYS]

Medicine can be very hard to swallow, it seems for some. Those who were affected by Thatcher's policies now consider themselves victims, and obviously whilst losing your job is not a nice thing to happen, those who were hit just refused to consider the bigger picture. The miners took the South's need for coal for granted and believed that they just deserved jobs for the sake of it, even though their jobs were a clear strain on the economy.

 

[kanoute16]

What about people's worth, feeling like they belonged to this country, feeling like they were important after years of doing the only thing they knew?
Yes money is important but so is self-esteem. So many people lost their identity in the Thatcher era and she actually did not give a fudge about them!

To sit here now over two decades later and make light of this is quite frankly disgusting. That some people have referred to the scousers tinkling on their own fans in here when little over 2 months ago we heard that this was just made up gonads (by South Yorkshire police ironically Sheffield!) shows the ignorance of so many.

Yes things had to change in Britain, yes Thatcher was a strong leader, yes she drove change - there is no question of this but she did so taking a small minority of already privileged people with her and leaving the most destitute to wallow in their suffering, a suffering she created with her policies.

 

[lynneb]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...atastrophe-that-still-poisons-us-8564858.html

Pretty much sums up my views

 

[scaramanga]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...atastrophe-that-still-poisons-us-8564858.html

Pretty much sums up my views

Owen Jones? As in Owen Jones the Trot? I don't need to defile my eyes with his class jealousy-driven brick smears to know what kind of dross he's spouting.

 

[scaramanga]

I find all of that an incredibly simplistic way of viewing it all.

I wouldn't call coal, steel and manufacturing jobs pointless. I would call them staple industries. They certainly still are in other countries, so why not here?

You won't agree with me, and I certainly won't with you.

Incidentally, in your world of quick and simplistic change, what would you do with the huge numbers of the people in the areas of South Yorkshire, Merseyside and the north east, who were/are there because of the evolvement of those areas? We are talking in the region of millions here, remember. Are they all supposed to suddenly up sticks and move? Or maybe just disappear?

I'd say all of those jobs you've listed are pointless if we can buy those commodities cheaper abroad. Had the unions not tried to flex their muscles so much that may not have been the case and maybe those jobs (at least some of them) would still exist.

I've never looked a the numbers, but I can pretty much guarantee that at the time there were millions of jobs available worldwide. So I wouldn't do anything with those people other than suggest that if they really did want to work there were ways and means.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

I'd say all of those jobs you've listed are pointless if we can buy those commodities cheaper abroad. Had the unions not tried to flex their muscles so much that may not have been the case and maybe those jobs (at least some of them) would still exist.

I've never looked a the numbers, but I can pretty much guarantee that at the time there were millions of jobs available worldwide. So I wouldn't do anything with those people other than suggest that if they really did want to work there were ways and means.

You clearly, have always lived south of Watford. A different world.

Perhaps an enforced spell in S****horpe or Barnsley may change your opinion.

 

[johnola]

1. Yet again, people in Surrey didn't have their job base decimated. Having choices means opportunity. Having no choice does not.
2. Job opportunities/alternatives in Surrey were/are FAR better than the areas Thatcher decimated, so retraining (if its available) is far more likely to bear fruit. Redundant miners in Barnsley did not have these choices.
3. School dropouts???? I presume by that comment you mean working class people going into traditional working class jobs, i.e. mining and steel mills. Graduate wages??? Did you ever go down a pit, or into a steel mill? I went down three pits: one was Treeton (went in paddy wagons under the M1) and one was a drift mine in Notts. I also went into British Steel Stainless by the M1. All school trips, but the real deal. The working conditions were horrible. Crawling along on hands and knees in Treeton. Helmet, respirator and light. A pit prop every yard. No more than a yard high. It was terrifying. The heat in the steel mill.... jeez, I was cooked after about 20 minutes.

These people earned every penny. Then the long term illnesses suffered by them later.

If you want a better example of your comment, look no further than the newspapermen of Wapping. Demanding ridiculous wages, only they didn't suffer long term illness caused by the job, as did steel and coal men, and had far better working conditions.

If Surrey didn't suffer from de-industrialisation that is because it did not benefit from it either. We had some manufacturing from the war era that had soaked up the loss of jobs from the mechanisation of the farms pre-war but those factories all shut in the southern recession of the early nineties.

There were not ready made jobs to those people to move into and the gap was slowly bridged by embracing free enterprise.

It was the pace of change that did for the mining communities, but I refuse to believe that significant progress has not already been made.

What makes us conservative down here is our resistance to rapid and radical change, and we are not responsible for Thatcherism but admittedly did not generally oppose it.

 

[scaramanga]

You clearly, have always lived south of Watford. A different world.

Perhaps an enforced spell in S****horpe or Barnsley may change your opinion.

Not sure I'd last all that long. None of my favourite tailors, hotels or restaurants are based north of Oxford so the travel down to those three alone would be extremely time consuming.

 

[thfcsteff]

I have thought long and hard about what I wanted to say today with regards to the death of Margaret Thatcher. Aside from an unavoidable sense of relief, my overriding emotion has been one of sadness. Not for her passing, but for all the things she effected with her policies. I lived during her 'hey-dey' and it was not a nice thing. We can discuss and debate forever whether what she put in to play might not have happened anyway, but what we must also (in that case) discuss, is the enormous impact she had on the social structure (and fabric) of our society. How people thought. How people were. How people behaved. From 'we' to 'me' very very swiftly. Her 'honesty' has been 'venerated' yet she all-too-often flipped and switched her position as the aim dictated she needed to. She would not support embargoes of South African goods during the apartheid rule on the grounds they 'hurt the common poor people' (my paraphrase), yet she steadfastly refused to ever enter into discourse with the political wing of the IRA to try and find an end to the troubles in Northern Ireland; the cost was felt by thousands upon thousands of innocent people. She supported her friend General Pinochet, one of the most disgraceful abusers of human rights imaginable in Chile, and with the Falklands, it was clear that the Argentine government would not invade were there some diplomatic talks held. Lord Carrington, her foreign advisor, further told her this in late 1981. She chose another path. Her popularity was devastated at the time, and her re-election looked severely compromised. She went to war, got the country wrapped up in jingoism and was re-elected with ease. You be the judge. I know what I think. Her savage disregard for the working class and her incessant need to privatize everything (and thus decrease the quality of many things) as well as her love of a strong police state make her someone who's work I have personally always despised.
If some consider it 'ill to speak badly' of Margaret Thatcher in these terms, then all I can say is I think it is ill of YOU to impose YOUR absurd idea of a moral code on me and those like me. I've seen a lot of it today. Forgive and forget. Show some respect. Time to move on. Perhaps for you it is, and let me add that I hope you will not be trusted with the custodianship of remembering modern history in it's proper, accurate light, or that if you are, you show the likes of Assad, Musharref and Ahmadinejad the same courtesies.

No, I think whenever figures who have had the impact Margaret Thatcher had die, their 'work' SHOULD be discussed and discussed HONESTLY. And for me, what she did to the social fabric, the social understanding, the levels of empathy and the atmosphere within Great Britain, was unforgivably destructive. I will not mourn. No. I will not.

 

[thfcsteff]

BTW, I advise watching Nick Broomfield's superb documentary 'Tracking Down Maggie' where he simply tries to ask her about Mark Thatcher's involvement in the attempted Equatorial Guinea coup only to get repeatedly fudged off by her and her staff. Arms dealing, coups...dirty stuff. He never did time. And we wonder why...:-"

 

[Danishfurniturelover]

Do you actually mean that?

Its dribble, and full of inaccuracy and untruth. Spouted by someone who has never been affected.

"New labour created a million extra civil service jobs mainly in the north because they wanted a new voter base"

Completely untrue. Civil service manpower has been run down steadily since the 1980's, and who instigated this in the first place... why Margaret Thatcher. Who else!

How do you know it never affected me, the recession in the 90's pretty much stopped house building, i had to work in a pub to pay the rent. I changed from my chosen career and did other work. I also later left london and moved down south(brighton) because the was more house building afterwards in sussex then the was around london.

Pretty weird to talk about others as if you know their sitaution when you do not even know the person your talking about. I have changed careers a few times i even posted on here a few years ago that despite the fact i had semi retired i took a minimum wage job at southampton port for extra money as we were having trouble meeting our sons school fees. I am not to proud to work and do what it takes, shame the north could not do that despite the massive effort the tories put into helping it and pumping money into the area.

Even Blair/Brown knew this which is why i got in foreign labour rather then cutting down on the benefits claimints in the north, they knew they could not do that because it was/is their core vote.

Some of the things im reading about how people are trying to blame thatcher for so many different things are just crazy. Can people not remember how bad BT were before it was privatized? the standard of service we received after was so much better.

Blaming thatcher for the demise of the north is lik blaming blair/brown for the demise of the high street it might be fun but it is not correct. I mean how many people have lost their jobs on the high street in the last few years? but we do not blame a government for the fact that people can get things cheaper off the internet. Yet we are supposed to blame thatcher for the fact that coal was cheaper from australia.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

Not sure I'd last all that long. None of my favourite tailors, hotels or restaurants are based north of Oxford so the travel down to those three alone would be extremely time consuming.

I'm not sure you would last long, full stop.

 

[Danishfurniturelover]

She turned us all into selfish money grabbing kittens!
She created the monster in the City that has sent us into an age of austerity!
She shat on the small people and treated them with derision as she closed down the manufacturing industry, an industry that so many (including my family) relied on to survive and then accused these people of laziness when they desperately looked to the state as a way to feed their families.

Don't know if anyone saw Neil Kinnock on BBC news but he summed her up quite nicely. She didn't care about the ordinary people and was so entrenched in her ideology she didn't care who she stepped on to get what she wanted.

The guy who could not even beat Major? the guy who could not win an election but took a massive non job from Brussels. No i never saw it what did he say on the BBC?

 

[DubaiSpur]

When Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, Britain was a country on its knees, a discredited, impoverished post-imperial nation in seemingly terminal decline, with ruthless union bosses imposing their will on a gutless establishment, cripplingly high inflation, a tax regime that forbade entrepreneurship and ambition, and an antiquated class system still in full sway. Dozens of key industries were being slowly throttled by state ownership, mismanagement and labour issues, one couldn’t take money freely out of the country and mindsets were narrow and insular. For the ambitious, there was no hope but to leave the UK, its parochialism, dire prospects and even worse food.

Thatcher changed all of this. Her policies were painful – shutting down unsustainable firms and improving productivity levels led to a surge in unemployment, which has remained with us ever since, though jobless rates went up internationally and any government would eventually have had to axe loss-making industries.

Ultimately, however, her supply-side reforms paved the way for our economic rebirth. She slashed the top rate of tax from 98 per cent on investment income and 83 per cent on labour income to just 40 per cent; she sold off dozens of state firms; she tackled inflation, albeit at the cost of an unavoidable recession. She shifted the burden of taxation from income to consumption, eventually defeated the unions, smashing closed shops and restrictive practices.

The cultural revolution during her time in office mirrored the economic revolution. When she arrived in office, 67 per cent of the country belonged to the C2DE economic class – the so-called working class – but when she left office that had fallen to just 51 per cent and has continued to collapse, according to Ipsos Mori. Aspiration was unleashed.

She swept away many of the old class barriers and her cabinet was open to all the talents, regardless of background and religions; home ownership increased substantially and sustainably, helped by the massive sell-off of council homes to their owners at a discount.

The City was transformed, with the Big Bang, an inflow of foreign capital and talent and the rise of upwardly mobile, hard-working and high rolling yuppie; the hugely significant Canary Wharf project was kicked-started; and the privatisations of the commanding heights of the economy ushered in an age of mass share ownership, turning the City from quaint backwater to global powerhouse.

She enjoyed her share of good fortune, as well as some bad luck. North Sea oil poured in; however, this sent the pound shooting up, a development which helped hurt manufacturers. Thatcher’s astonishingly firm handling of the Falklands crisis rescued her premiership and gave her enough time to see the recovery through. The Labour party embrace of an extreme ideology and poor leaders, and the rise the new social democratic party, which split the left-wing vote, was another great boon. But the horrors of IRA terrorism were a nightmare and the Conservative party suffered many horrendous murders. As luck had it, Thatcher was in power at the same time as her kindred spirit Ronald Reagan; the two fought communism together.

Thatcherism worked. Take one (of course imperfect) measure: ONS figures suggest the economy grew by 3.03 per cent a year in the 1950s, 3.18 per cent a year in the 1960s, 2.07 per cent in the 1970s, accelerating back to 3.09 per cent in the 1980s under Thatcher, before expanding by 2.77 per cent in the 1990s (when her legacy largely remained) and by 1.77 per cent in the 2000s.

The report of the LSE growth commission is emphatic: by the late 1970s, the UK had been left behind, with US GDP per capita 40 per cent higher than Britain’s and the top European economies 10-15 per cent ahead. By 2007, however, UK GDP per capita had overtaken France’s and Germany’s and reduced significantly the gap with the US, a position which hasn’t really changed since, despite the US and Germany’s better performance over the past couple of years.

The first Thatcher years were marred by a terrible recession, which reduced the average growth rate of the 1980s quite substantially, even accounting for the unsustainable, cheap money-fuelled growth towards the end. This also helps to explain why her cuts to the public sector as a share of GDP look relatively modest. But spending actually shot up in the early 1980s as a result of the recession, so the decline from peak to trough was much more impressive.

But while Thatcher saved Britain, she also made mistakes. All came from her turning her back on her core principles. When she was education secretary, she implemented disastrous anti-Grammar school policies. She was wrong to sign the Single European Act. She regretted this deeply subsequently. She was wrong to allow herself to be convinced to join the European exchange rate mechanism; together with a poor monetary policy by chancellor Lord Lawson, who allowed the broad money supply to rocket, this led to a boom in the late 1980s and another recession. The poll tax meant huge tax hikes on the many, and was thus rightly rejected by an angry public.

For all of those errors, she was a superb Prime Minister, the best peacetime leader of the twentieth century. She and Winston Churchill were the only two truly great PMs of the last hundred years; Churchill saved the UK in wartime and Thatcher saved Britain from economic and cultural catastrophe. May she rest in peace.

Unleashing aspiration. Hard-working yuppies. The City becoming a global powerhouse.

Yeah, I'm not going to argue your points as I see you're too right-wing to be persuaded otherwise.

It's a good post, albeit one with a few factual inaccuracies. According to the World Bank, the CIA World Factbook and the IMF's PPP analysis for the years 2005-2011, Germany remains above us in the GDP per capita table, so not quite sure where you got that whole 'shooting ahead of Germany's GDP' thing. There is little to suggest that Germany's social capitalism is adversely harming its economy, while the millions upon millions of people left redundant and the entire economy being brought to its knees by those very same saintly, hard-working City boys you so eagerly praised seems to argue against Thatcher's policy of slashing away at working-class Britain and mass deregulation.

And, in my mind, Clement Attlee remains the greatest peacetime prime minister, and the second great Prime Minister behind Churchill in the 20th century. He changed the face of a nation, entrenching the NHS, social housing and the basics of the Beveridge Report so thoroughly that by the time Churchill returned to power he could do nothing about it, lest he be tossed out of office as unceremoniously as he was in 1945 by a Britain tired of Victorian-era class divides and endless misery for all but an aristocratic few.

Together, him and Nye Bevan entered office at a time when Britain was in a far worse state than when Thatcher came to power; where Thatcher's Britain suffered from inflation and union power, Attlee's Britain suffered from massive debts, bomb craters across its major cities, an unsustainably high expenses bill borne of supporting the thousands of troops still stationed abroad, a discontented Empire rapidly approaching its complete break-up, severe rationing of everyday goods and the spectre of revolution by a disgruntled underclass that refused to be thrown back onto the scrap heap as their fathes had been after the First World War.

Yet, faced by these intractable problems, Bevan and Attlee proceeded to establish the NHS, create social housing, create a welfare policy that really served the needs of the working poor, establish the template for a modern welfare state, nationalize the industries, make the working poor healthier than they'd ever been in the history of Great Britain up to that point, oversee the withdrawal of India and Palestine from the Empire, and take a lead role in the formation of both the United Nations and NATO.

They created the best of post-war Britain, n far worse circumstances than when Thatcher came to power. Faced by comparatively lesser problems, Thatcher's idea was to destroy the working class, privatise industries left and right, and put Britain on the path to where she is today: controlled by those hard working, aspirational yuppies in the City to the point where reckless gamble after reckless gamble impacts on both our economy and our reputation on the world stage, yet we can't do anything about it because we are broken as a nation and because the banks are just about all we have left, those pillars of patriotism that they are.

Attlee was the greatest peace-time prime minister to my mind. By a long, long way.