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Originally Posted by dellwear
Personally I'd rather have people working (even if we are "over manned") then claiming benefit and sitting at home committing crime and causing mischief. I'm sure the 1.6 million others that were out of work because of MT cost cutting exercise would agree with me, I know my family would rather be working than sponging.
As for the rest of the article, yes I'd agree with you that new Labour is a bit of a hybrid, but there nothing wrong with that, your not telling me that the previous conservative governments have never taken policies from other parties and implemented them.
On the other issues, I cant honestly believe that the country would be in the state its in today if the conservatives were still in power, their lack of investment is still crippling the railways and the NHS, in fact the NHS may have even crumbled if the Tory's were still in power. You cant keep on asking for something to work without paying for it.
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The issue of mass unemployment is, as Tebbit said, a painful one. I think if anything, it is probably still too soon to properly evaluate the effects of Maragret Thather's premiership on the UK. At the scale of individual families who were devastated by mass pit closures, the disappearance of our shipbuilding industry and the like, she was and always will be a hate figure. But 50 years from now, there will be few people alive with any real experience of those days, and all that will be left will be to assess, on a wider scale, the effect of her reforms on the country as a whole. I think you would be hard pressed, even now, to find an economist who will argue that the structural reforms of the 1980s have been bad for Britain in the long term.
Over-manning is a strange issue. You might say it is preferable for someone to have a job in an over-manned industry, but preferable for whom? It is not to the benefit of the country as a whole, if he is not contributing anything to the wealth of the country. And if a job in an over-manned state-run monolith
is acceptable, then why is it considered political suicide for any Government to make people perform work to 'earn' their benefit (a scheme proposed by the Tories in the early 90s, IIRC, was decried as 'workfare' by Labour)?
Mass redundances were politically risky and personally painful for a lot of people, but today's unemployment figures prove that it was the right thing to do. The majority of people found new jobs, performing tasks that needed performing. That is better for the UK economy as a whole and also for the self-esteem of the individuals concerned.
As to New Labour, and the causes of New Labour - I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the fact that they stole the Tories clothes. I'm just observing that, in evaluating whether Margaret Thather was A Good Thing or A Bad Thing, it has to be highly significant that eventually her 'arch-enemies' had no choice but to become like her in order to get the British people to elect them.
For the other issues:
Railways: The result of more than 50 years of neglect by both Labour and Conservatives, as Labour has now acknowledged. Privatisation was possibly the biggest single ****-up but Labour's dithering, dabbling and u-turning over the last seven years has been disgraceful and arguably fatal on more than one occasion.
NHS: I am very suspicious of parties that, seven years after taking office, are still happy to blame the previous administration for the state of services that they are elected to run for us. The state of the NHS today is the responsibility of the Labour Government, which has learned the hard way what the Tories knew all all along: that massively increasing spending on unreformed public sector services is just throwing good money after bad. Labour can only challenge the Trade Unions so far, because at the end of the day the Trade Unions still pay Labour's bills. They just don't have the stomach to do what Thatcher did, which was to sacrifice her personal popularity, and short term political gain, for the long-term benefit of the country.