Boocity » Sun Mar 24, 2013 5:41 pm wrote:ycsatbjywtbiastkamb » Sun Mar 24, 2013 1:25 pm wrote:it was thatcher who sold british industry down the river, she wanted the country to be based around the financial and service sectors because she knew those 2 industries wouldnt be as bolshy or as big a threat to the establishment as the old traditional heavy industries. when the coal miners basically brought down the conservative government of 1974 it sent shock waves through establishment ranks and her answer to that was to stab her own country in the back.
whenever the IMF get their claws into some poor third world country the first thing they do is make them nationalise all their industries/infastructure and then bring in anti trade union legislation but at least those tin pot leaders are forced to do that with a financial gun to their head, thatcher did it to her own country with glee to f##k over the working classes.
she wrote off more than £15 billion in debt and paid hundreds of millions to advisors to sell off the likes of british telecom, the british gas corporation, the british national oil corporation, british airways, british airports authority, british aerospace, british shipbuilders, british steel, water supply, british transport docks board, british water board, national freight company, enterprise oil, british rail, electricity industry etc etc etc.
she sold the infastructure of one of the greatest nations on earth, built up over hundreds of years by talented engineers and hard working men to the financial markets on the cheap, and left the weakest of her own people (the elderly, disabled, cancer sufferers etc) at the mercy of the speculators.
I partially agree but your view is far to biased with your hatred of Thatcher, we were our own worse enemy in the 70's, if the unions hadn't done their best to destroy any faith in British industry and products coupled with appalling backward looking management then much of our manufacturing industry may have have survived in some form as in Germany.
the unions werent trying to destroy faith in british industry they were trying to preserve peoples standards of living.
it wasnt just the traditional `bolshy` industries like coal and the car workers who went out on strike during the 70`s everyone did (the civil service, fire brigade, nurses, teachers, even the clerks in the houses of parliament!!)
the problem was that the 70`s was the decade of rampant inflation, it ranged from 12% to 25%. the cost of everything went through the roof.
people already felt cheated when decimalisation happened, people swore blind that the cost of living took a sharp rise when that was introduced but then you had the likes of the oil crisis and rampant inflation and pay rise freezes that piled on the agony for average families.
people in the 70`s were going through genuine hardship, they werent striking over f##k all and it was the whole country striking, even people who voted conservative!! (which often gets forgotten these days).