Mitchell Anderson compares and contrasts the economic and social development of Norway and the UK, two countries which benefitted from North Sea oil wealth windfalls from the 1970's onwards:
'Thirty-five years after she swept to power as British prime minister, it is ironic that socialist Norway now has
$830 billion in the bank and enjoys fully funded social programs that most of us can only dream of. Meanwhile the U.K. is enduring another round of wrenching austerity and owes over
£1.3 trillion - about US$2.2 trillion. That massive debt grows by about $3.8 billion each week, while every seven days Norway adds another billion dollars to their bank account'
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/03/10/Thatcherism-Verdict/
Neil Clark, of the Campaign for Public Ownership writes in the Morning Star about the Con Dem's relentless drive to hive off public services in the face of both public opposition and mounting evidence of the failures of privatisation: "Thatcher may be dead, but in 2014 Thatcherism continues, in a new and even more extreme form. Despite public opinion being against them and the arguments for privatisation being more discredited than ever, the serial privatisers march on. But we should not allow ourselves to become demoralised. We have all the arguments on our side as well as the support of the vast majority of the public. It's true that 2013 was a year of disappointments, but that should only make us redouble our efforts in 2014 to bring the privatisation era to an end"
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-6452-selling-off-britain
‘Thatcherism is unfortunately alive and well, but so – thankfully – is trade unionism,’ says Carl Roper of the TUC,
writing on the Stronger Unions blog. Carl makes an important point that ‘the paradox of Margaret Thatcher's policies is that whilst proclaiming the illegitimacy and irrelevance of unions they actually reinforced the need for collective representation of working people.’ Of course unions are alive but we can be less confident that the condition of the trade unions in the UK is ‘well’ whatever criteria is used - membership density, collective bargaining coverage, political influence etc.
There is no better volume of trade union history which charts the public sector trade union real time response to the excesses of Thatcherism than the third and final volume of NALGO's history - Facing Up to Thatcherism: The History of NALGO 1979-93 by Michael Ironside and Roger Seifert. UNISON's founding General Secretary Alan Jinkinson, in a foreword to this important book, written in June 2000 but which has found many echoes this week, states that: ‘Thatcherism became the global phenomenon of the era.
Many NALGO members were angered by an ideology which undermined the post-war welfare settlement, that worshipped monetarism, the market and the individual,that asserted that there was ‘no such thing as society’, and that sought to humiliate public servants and trade unionists.
‘Demonising unions and stripping the great mass of private-sector workers of a voice and power in the workplace is still the root of the great living standards crisis that saw the share of wealth going to wages slide long before Lehman Brothers failed,’ says TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady in a Guardian article on the legacy of arch neo-conservative ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Frances goes on to point out that the ‘financial crash of 2008 was a direct result of the policies Thatcher championed. The dominance of finance in the economy and the failure of bank regulation flowed from her belief that markets should always be left to themselves’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/09/clearing-up-margaret-thatchers-mess
A considered view of Thatcher's legacy from Michael Hudson writing for the US webzine Counterpunch. From her first Government's groundbreaking privatisation of telecommunications and public utilities through to New Labour's deregulation of the City of London and the financial sector, Hudson traces the continuities since 1979 which have led to Britain's 'Great Polarization between the creditor 1% and the increasingly indebted 99%'
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/08/the-queen-mother-of-global-austerity-financialization/
- The Milk Snatcher
- The Falklands War
- A Decade of vicious Anti trade Union Legislation
. Interference in ballots
. End of the Closed Shop
. End of Secondary action
. Wages Councils wound up
-Privatisation of Water
