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[Helgoland]

This is the appropriate music for that, I believe.

What the fuck did I just watch

KIZ, Mutterficker! They're one of the most important German rap formations, known for jumping rope with the divide between meta-stupid and just plain stupid. They do a fair bit of social criticism, but they've also got a whole series of songs about how they're cannibals. Oh, and one of their albums is called 'Sexismus gegen rechts' - it translates roughly as 'Sexism against fascists'.

[scriver]

Let's let Owlbread and Mwncihead explain this.

[Graknorke]

Union-busting, maybe?

This. I thought that Dwarfy would care more, seeing as how she fucked up NI pretty bad.
But up here it's largely for her part in what lead to and sort of culminated in the miners' strike.

[TD1]

I put the whole thing over here down to bad counselling and unstable politics between unionists and republicans. The Iron Lady rarely admitted she was wrong, but she did over that.

As for the strike, it was a complicated matter with both sides giving reasons for their actions- still not sound reason to prance about the streets celebrating the death of a person. Gerry Adams is a symbol of terrorism in a political setting, but I would not celebrate his death in any manner.

[Graknorke]

As for the strike, it was a complicated matter with both sides giving reasons for their actions- still not sound reason to prance about the streets celebrating the death of a person. Gerry Adams is a symbol of terrorism in a political setting, but I would not celebrate his death in any manner.

There's a lot of culture around it. Think "thanks Obama" but not ironic. Various privatisations of industries leading to mass unemployment, cutting of public services, antagonism towards workers unions... And by actively making herself the face of all these things people took it personally.

[TD1]

So she didn't play the political game of licking boots. She got things done, and was no Tony Blair.

[Graknorke]

She did some things that had serious negative consequences for a lot of people. Decisiveness can't always justify a choice.

To be fair, so did Hitler

Oh phew someone else said it.

[Owlbread]

Mrs. Thatcher was consistently elected by the electorate because she was a strong leader with charisma who "got stuff done", pandering largely to right wing, privileged sectors of the population such as Middle England (mostly South-Eastern middle class people), the Scottish upper classes and the finally the Loyalists in Northern Ireland. It is known that her government even funded Loyalist paramilitaries e.g. UVF, so fruitful was her relationship with such people.

She was hated and reviled by many people (most of Wales, Scotland, Northern England etc) for the reason that not only was she the main figurehead of a movement that did its best to tear apart the state created and valued by working class British people after WW2, she was the embodiment of an establishment that no longer valued, understood or really cared about them at a difficult time for British industry when they needed the government's support most. The Thatcherites only knew how to try to force them into their way of life where everyone can be middle class and own a house and a car some day and be Essex Man. A bit like a really crap "American Dream" kind of thing (Thatcherites are like US Republicans) except you'll never really reach the top because you're still just middle class - you need blue blood. The Thatcherites are especially reviled in Scotland for their treatment of us as test subjects for unpopular policies like the hated poll tax.

To put it in a less rambly way, by busting unions and taking a hammer to British industry (effectively killing heavy industry in Scotland for instance) she destroyed the British working class. You might think killing our class system would be a good thing, but all she did was reduce it to a different kind of two tier American-style system where everyone is middle class, some are just more successful than others, but nobody from the middle class will ever reach the level of the top - that's reserved for the people so rich and sometimes well-born that Mrs. Thatcher herself would crawl for. Anybody who can't fit into the system is doomed to be part of the British underclass - a working class that doesn't work, it just shoots heroin into its veins and dies at the age of 50.

I should add finally that the remarkably high numbers of instances of sexual offense, abuse and pedophilia among her cabinet members and MPs isn't coincidental. It's symptomatic of how corrupt the British elite can be when the circumstances are right.

[GreatJustice]

A lot of people identify Thatcher with the collapse of local British industry, but realistically she just happened to be around when the unsustainable British model came crashing down, and she handled it better than most of her predecessors would have.

For one thing, British companies tended to consist of large groups of diverse companies owned by a handful of magnates, yet by the 70s (and even the 50s to some extent) only a few of these companies actually generated a profit (eg. Jaguar for BMH) and basically kept a bunch of totally unprofitable, bankrupt companies afloat instead of actually expanding these productive sectors and letting the unprofitable ones go. The owners tended to not want to ever let workers go (even in the most unprofitable companies with the most unwieldy workforces) and the unions definitely ensured that layoffs were few and far between as well, so the problems only grew worse. By the time Thatcher took over, the few profitable British companies were being driven out of the market by German and Japanese competitors since British profits went into keeping unprofitable ventures afloat. So she took over a country with a screwed up economic base, panicked workers that actually had to worry about losing their jobs for the first time in decades, and a major energy crisis (that the Labour government had done a terrible job of handling). Realistically, most of the things she's blamed for were the responsibility of those who preceded her (especially the Heath and Wilson governments), and she handled things in such a way that Britain at least still had a few industries that it was internationally competitive in.

[mainiac]

Please list these unprofitable companies which dominated the markets.

[GreatJustice]

Please list these unprofitable companies which dominated the markets.

Pressed Steel, BSA, BMH (and its successors), and Vickers all come to mind.

[misko27]

Well, the West's genetic distance to Hitler is smaller than the average one...

Did any one notice the irony of being worried (even facetiously) about genetic distance to Hitler? Come on, give it a moment's thought.

[Owlbread]

Regarding Thatcher's approach to industry, I agree most of these industries were struggling. This may be a cultural difference between Americans and certain demographics in Britain but I think the fundamental point of disagreement between us here is that by putting profit before people Thatcher adopted a kind of "cut them loose, let them sink or swim" approach that was simply too heavy handed in practice. It destroyed entire communities across the length and breadth of the country. What these people needed was a more sensitive approach that would work in cooperation with the unions and hopefully preserve the bulk pf the infrastructure for the future - nowadays a common political slogan in depressed areas is to talk of the need for "reindustrialisation" i.e. reversing  the effects of Thatcher.

[mainiac]

Please list these unprofitable companies which dominated the markets.

Pressed Steel, BSA, BMH (and its successors), and Vickers all come to mind.

You need to be far more specific when you say "Vickers".

As for the other three my best guess (since you were again not specific but the names are at least a little less common) that you are talking about three small manufacturing companies that each operated a single factory employing thousands of people.  Perhaps 10 or 15 thousand people?  Out of a 1.5 trillion dollar (present day) economy.

Perhaps you are referring to different companies, if so, please provide links.

[Sheb]

I think he meant conglomerates like British Leyland, which had 250,000 employees at his peak.


Now, to return to the "the West managed to reduce CO2 emissions without stifling growth argument". First of all, I wanted to link this nice  World Bank data visualization tool. And indeed, we see that the West did manage to reduce CO2 production somewhat over the last decade. (China since caught up with the EU average in terms of tons of CO2 per capita).

However, that ignore a few points. First of all, the reduction we've seen over the past few years are not nearly enough if we want to keep the warming to only a few degrees. We need to do much more.

Second, the West is responsible for the vast majority of the extra carbon in the atmosphere. We may be reducing emissions now, but that's because we already got rich pumping the atmosphere full of carbon. In a sense, it's only fair that we do more than our share of emissions reductions, because we got more than our share of economic growth using more than our share of fossil fuel.

And the last, but most important point: a large part of the emissions from countries like China come from producing goods that are then exported to the West. Good data is hard to find, but this report using data from 2004 estimated than a quarter of Chinese emissions then was due to China's export (They also accounted for the emissions "saved" through import) for example.

Actually, when the carbon embedded in imports is accounted for, the apparent diminution in emissions in the West simply vanish. To take an example, let's look at this report about the UK.



In green you have the estimate of carbon emissions in the UK. Notice the small reduction in emissions.

In blue, you have the estimate of carbon emissions due to consumption in the UK. Notice the big increase.

So yes, the West diminished emissions, but only because the dirty, polluting industry that produce our stuff moved away (ironically, to countries where they pollute even more due to lower level of technology and lots of coal).