Cyberyeti, on 2013-April-09, 11:37, said:
Looking at the url of that group's website, it's clear they're logical well balanced individuals ...
Hatred runs deep particularly in the north of England and Scotland against Margaret Thatcher. My epitaph for her would be "She overdid something that needed to be done".
Hmmmm......I can see why the miners and others may feel that way, since it is very hard for people to be at all objective about their own situation, but from the outside looking in, it is difficult to make a persuasive case that she overdid the breaking of the unions.
The unions, and in particular, the coalminers, were dominated and led by a fanatical cadre of leaders, determined to flout the law and advocating violent resistance as well as labour action calculated to wreak economic havoc on an already economically damaged nation. They were working in mines that had long since become uneconomic, and consistently rejected any attempt to introduce modern working practices.
In essence, they saw themselves as above the law, and were de facto in a rebellion in that they wanted the government overthrown and their jobs made secure no matter how ruinous that was for the country nor what laws were passed by a democratically elected government.
They had been enabled in this partly through the extreme left wing Labour Party (Blair was arguably closer in economic philosophy to Thatcher than he was to the Labour Party at the time of the miners' revolt) and partly through the insipid behaviour of previous Conservative Prime Ministers.....notable Edward Heath, who was notorious for backing down from the unions.
The result of the union busting was that many areas of the UK enjoyed an economic boom, and the country became far more competitive than it had been for several decades.
It is true that the coal-mining industry and the communities dependent on it never revived, but that was inevitable. The choice was never between the health of the coal-industry and the health of the rest of the nation. Both were sick, and both were going to get much sicker. What Thatcher did to the mining was to accelerate the inevitable while saving the rest.
It was akin to amputating a limb infected with gangrene, in the days before antibiotics. Yes, the limb would have remained somewhat viable a little longer, were it not amputated, but eventually both it and the body to which it was a part would be dead.
I am not generally conservative in my politics and I certainly didn't agree, from afar, with all that she did but as someone who was raised for 13 years in a class-ridden, hide-bound UK, I applaud the stance she took on the unions.
One characteristic that more politicians should strive to emulate is that she ALWAYS said what she meant and meant what she said: she had intellectual integrity. She was a realist in the sense that very few modern conservatives seem to be. She saw things as they were, not as she'd like them to be. She would have had no time for the US climate deniers, for example.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari