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Margret Thatcher isn't looked too kindly here on these boards. But from what I have heard from some people in the United Kingdom is that prior to Thatcher the country was a bureaucratic nightmare. The unions would regularly shutdown the cities over strikes. Nationalization of many key industries severely underperformed. The country was way behind in innovation. And taxes were insanely high. Essentially the country was a basketcase and the privatizations Thatcher did, while some going too far, were mostly necessary. Can someone who is knowledgeable about this time period or was even there tell me about this?
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Mar 23, 2016 21:24
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I'm not knowledgeable about the time at all, but as a Brit I can say that anything remotely related to Thatcher in the modern day is so absurdly polarised and partisan that it's probably worse than US democrats/republicans. The Conservatives are perhaps a bit less vicious defending her than Labour is on the attack, but that's only because they had the privilege of winning.
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Mar 23, 2016 23:24
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I remember where I was when I found out Margaret Thatcher was dead. It was the Cuthbert Brodrick in Leeds, just off Millenium Square. Someone came by our table and just said "the witch is dead", and then we saw it on the news. There were people dancing in the street, everyone in the pub had a massive smile on their face, one of my mates broke out cigars he'd been saving for the occasion. We stayed there all night and got pissed as gently caress, the whole evening was a massive party and not one person I spoke to had a good word to say about the dearly departed or was sad to see her go. I've rarely seen such companionship and communal joy in a boozer, it was like New Year. You'd step out for a fag and people would come up to you and say "Have you heard?" and you'd say yeah, and they'd just smile and hug you or shake your hand. I'm glad she's dead.
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Mar 23, 2016 23:25
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punk rebel ecks posted:Nationalization of many key industries severely underperformed. The country was way behind in innovation. And taxes were insanely high. Essentially the country was a basketcase and the privatizations Thatcher did, while some going too far, were mostly necessary. Privatisations by British governments are driven by two factors: 1. Neo-liberal ideology (e: there's a filter on n30-liberal, great) 2. Government ministers' desire to do their mates in the financial sector a favour (by selling them the country's assets, usually at an insanely low price) The idea that they do it to help normal people is laughable, as the poo poo results suggest.
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Mar 23, 2016 23:52
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punk rebel ecks posted:Margret Thatcher isn't looked too kindly here on these boards. But from what I have heard from some people in the United Kingdom is that prior to Thatcher the country was a bureaucratic nightmare. The unions would regularly shutdown the cities over strikes. Nationalization of many key industries severely underperformed. The country was way behind in innovation. And taxes were insanely high. It's too late for an effort post, but broadly speaking the key historical facts taken in isolation are correct. Nationalised industries were uncompetitive and lossmaking. There were significant strikes during the 70s compared to previous decades (although more days lost to strike in individual years after Thatcher's election). Investment was low and income taxes were higher in the 70s than in the 80s (although overall tax take as a % of GDP was higher under Thatcher.) The UK had to go to the IMF for a loan in the late 70s which was something of a knock to our national prestige. There are a ton of reasons for why each of these things was true and blaming it on the unions or bureaucracy is too simplistic. quote:Essentially the country was a basketcase and the privatizations Thatcher did, while some going too far, were mostly necessary. This is far more controversial for a short post and I'll leave it for someone else to talk about it properly. My one sentence summary is that just because the UK economy was messed up in the 70s doesn't mean that Thatcherism, a fixation on money supply, privatisation and de-industrialisation was the optimal strategy for dealing with it - the human cost was enormous (e.g. doubling of unemployment and long-term devastation of mining regions) and it potentially didn't need to be.
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Mar 24, 2016 01:07
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big scary monsters posted:I remember where I was when I found out Margaret Thatcher was dead. It was the Cuthbert Brodrick in Leeds, just off Millenium Square. Someone came by our table and just said "the witch is dead", and then we saw it on the news. There were people dancing in the street, everyone in the pub had a massive smile on their face, one of my mates broke out cigars he'd been saving for the occasion. We stayed there all night and got pissed as gently caress, the whole evening was a massive party and not one person I spoke to had a good word to say about the dearly departed or was sad to see her go. I've rarely seen such companionship and communal joy in a boozer, it was like New Year. You'd step out for a fag and people would come up to you and say "Have you heard?" and you'd say yeah, and they'd just smile and hug you or shake your hand. Was the same when I found out. A lot of people I know were glad she died. The only shame in it all was for people outside UK & Ireland who didn't know much about her beyond that recent movie wouldn't know why people were glad, as the coverage for why she was hated was fairly shallow. The Tories and people who saw her as an idol said it was wrong to speak ill of the dead and any criticisms should be held until after her funeral. And after her funeral there was no longer any interest in the story so the media moved onto new items.
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Mar 24, 2016 05:08
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Prince John posted:It's too late for an effort post, but broadly speaking the key historical facts taken in isolation are correct. I see. What were the reasons for why these things happened IYO? Do you feel that the United Kingdom's then left wing route was something they could have continued? How far to the left was U.K.s economy back then? Like does any modern country compare.
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Mar 24, 2016 05:27
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I'm sorry, there are no records of the UK pre-Thatcher. The Glorious Leader declared Year Zero and burned all prior documents. Edit: relatedly, RIP Mr Flunchy's avatar from his 15 seconds of post-Thatcher fame.
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Mar 24, 2016 05:30
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punk rebel ecks posted:I see. What were the reasons for why these things happened IYO? Do you feel that the United Kingdom's then left wing route was something they could have continued? How far to the left was U.K.s economy back then? Like does any modern country compare. The pre-Thatcher Labour government made some pretty bad economic decisions that were largely the result of the more limited economic understanding of the day. For example they tried to control inflation using wage-price controls, something that hits the poorest hardest and put them at total odds with their core supporters the unions. In hindsight it was a policy adopted by many countries of the day, but it's fallen almost totally out of favour since then.
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Mar 24, 2016 14:45
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punk rebel ecks posted:Margret Thatcher isn't looked too kindly here on these boards. But from what I have heard from some people in the United Kingdom is that prior to Thatcher the country was a bureaucratic nightmare. The unions would regularly shutdown the cities over strikes. Nationalization of many key industries severely underperformed. The country was way behind in innovation. And taxes were insanely high. Essentially the country was a basketcase and the privatizations Thatcher did, while some going too far, were mostly necessary. To break your post down into a few key points, you address bureaucracy, union strikes, nationalised industry sucking, innovation and taxes. On the bureaucracy front, the only thing reduced there was via privatisation - pushing the books out of government and into private hands. One of the 'problems' of stable governments is that regulation only increases as more edge cases or technologies emerge. Thatcher's deregulation was seen as easing the bureaucracy of, for instance, the banking system, but also set the scene for problems down the line (that link being one of the causes cited for the 2008 financial crisis). Unions-wise, as another poster pointed out, strike action increased under Thatcher. By the time she came to power the Winter of Discontent was over and settled, but by then the damage had been done. The classic example of a strike during her time was the 1984-85 miners' strike, which she manage to defeat by using stockpiled coal the government had built up to prevent the National Union of Miners from taking down another government (they were seen as responsible for the defeat of Ted Heath's government in the 74 elections based on their strike in 72 crushing Britain's electricity grid). Defeating the NUM was basically a death knell to the trade unions' position as a political power. Nationalised industry being poo poo was definitely a thing. I can't really say much on this subject, though, so I'll let someone else field that one. In terms of innovation, that's a hard one to say, really. The first hand-held television was released in 1970 and the first laptop in 1979. The best invention was probably the World Wide Web in 1989, but while Tim Berners-Lee is British, he developed it while working at CERN (his example image on the test page actually contained a schematic of the large hadron collider). Since discovering one little gem I've often cited how Thatcher single-handedly destroyed fibre broadband in the UK, where she was shown how to roll out fibre cables cheaper than copper wire, and decided that because a nationalised industry was doing it and not a private company, it was bad, so she killed the project. Read the article, it's pretty short. Our slow lovely internet in the late 90s up 'til now are entirely of that decision. And finally taxes. She increased corporation tax, but she also near-doubled VAT, which hurts the poor way more than the rich.
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Mar 24, 2016 15:59
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She stole milk from schoolchildren.
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Mar 24, 2016 16:51
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Tesseraction posted:To break your post down into a few key points, you address bureaucracy, union strikes, nationalised industry sucking, innovation and taxes. Fantastic post. I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in.
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Mar 24, 2016 17:04
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punk rebel ecks posted:Fantastic post. I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in. Well, first the NHS isn't a nationalised industry. But the nationalised industries weren't bad and nationalisation isn't bad. Their main drawback was that they sacrificed quality for price. You can get any level of quality you want from a nationalised service so long as the government are willing to spend the money on it, but it's the taxpayer's money and there's only so much you can spend on it before the taxpayer feels ripped off and votes for someone else. So British Rail, for example, provided an acceptable if not brilliant service at a good price. But then enter Thatcher saying "Let's sell off the rail network - private companies can take care of all the infrastructure and provide a better service, and people can pay less tax". Sounds good, right? Well, it's actually a perfect example of what happens when the free market is given control. The rail network was sold off, but as nobody could possibly afford it all it was sold as partial franchises. And of course you can't run two trains on the same track, so those franchises had to be exclusive. Hence the franchises have no incentive to improve service and they can charge what the market will bear, because they're the only game in town. The net result is a rail service that is far worse than it was when nationalised, at a far higher cost to the traveller.
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Mar 24, 2016 20:22
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punk rebel ecks posted:Fantastic post. I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in. I'd suggest reading up on the history of British Leyland since that really was the big one and most the perceptions of that pre Thatcher era of industrial unrest seems to come from that company. Basically the government told two British Car companies that for years competed directly against each other to merge (BMC and Leyland Cars) under the belief that they would be better equipped to compete globally. The immediate issue was that as the two companies were fierce competitors they A: weren't very happy about working together, B: had a ridiculous amount of overlap in their range of cars with no way to see meaningful cost savings. There's some pretty well documented history out there but pretty much the problems boiled down to refusing to modernize, cutting jobs being taboo and insufficient cash to invest in the future range of cars.
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Mar 24, 2016 21:46
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Jedit posted:Well, first the NHS isn't a nationalised industry. But the nationalised industries weren't bad and nationalisation isn't bad. Their main drawback was that they sacrificed quality for price. You can get any level of quality you want from a nationalised service so long as the government are willing to spend the money on it, but it's the taxpayer's money and there's only so much you can spend on it before the taxpayer feels ripped off and votes for someone else. So British Rail, for example, provided an acceptable if not brilliant service at a good price. This is wrong. Thatcher was strongly against privatising British Rail and had repeatedly shouted it down when members of her own cabinet kept suggesting it. This was one of the factors which led to Michael Hesseltines leadership challenge in 1990 and her virtually immediate resignation. John Major somehow won the leadership contest and became (unelected) Prime Minister in 1990. He couldn't start the privatisation process as it hadn't been in the Conservative manifesto in 1987, so it was put in for the 1992 election which he also somehow won. Major, Norman Lamont and to an extent John Redwood couldn't wait to get their grubby little paws on the railways and somehow managed to sell off the entire network within a year. For all of Thatchers faults she didn't play any part in the railways. Well, she sold off the catering side of it, but public opinion was apparently pretty strongly behind that!
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Mar 24, 2016 23:55
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duckmaster posted:This is wrong. Thatcher was strongly against privatising British Rail and had repeatedly shouted it down when members of her own cabinet kept suggesting it. This was one of the factors which led to Michael Hesseltines leadership challenge in 1990 and her virtually immediate resignation. John Major somehow won the leadership contest and became (unelected) Prime Minister in 1990. He couldn't start the privatisation process as it hadn't been in the Conservative manifesto in 1987, so it was put in for the 1992 election which he also somehow won. Major, Norman Lamont and to an extent John Redwood couldn't wait to get their grubby little paws on the railways and somehow managed to sell off the entire network within a year. I'll accept the correction, I thought she was in on it. It was definitely an extension of her policies, though.
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Mar 25, 2016 10:04
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Coohoolin posted:She stole milk from schoolchildren. This is a bit incorrect - the treasury were driving the abolition of free school milk from all schoolchildren in a climate of "cuts must be made" and Thatcher argued against this in cabinet. There was an existing trend of cutting free school milk entitlement that started under Labour abolishing it for secondary school kids. In the end, the compromise was removing it from children between seven and secondary school age (but not if they had medical need etc., or were in special needs schools). The money saved was used to fund a primary school building programme. I can't say how effective it was, but I do see that she apparently established more comprehensive schools than any other secretary of state for education, so she must have been building something with the money. Definitely 'household budget' economics though. Prince John fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 11:53
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punk rebel ecks posted:I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in. The important point to remember is that the UK wasn't facing a "publicly owned industry crisis" in the 70s. It was facing an inflation crisis. You had inflation rates over 20%, at a time when the economy was moribund. One route of tackling inflation is to remove the wage protections, in order to cut consumer spending power. You can do this by breaking the wage negotiating power of labour (by breaking the unions), and by moving industries into the private sector where their wages can be allowed to decline against the currency (this method also involves letting unemployment rise, further limiting the average national wage). This wasn't based on any judgement about whether the public sector industries were good or bad. When it comes to serving the interests of customers and employees, publicly owned energy, transport and health industries will almost always outperform the private sector, for a number of well-understood reasons (cost of financing, the power of collective bargaining, information inequality and demand inelasticity). It's true that some of the denser Tory politicians really did buy their own spin, thinking that everyone would benefit by getting rid of the "inefficient" public sector, but most of Thatcher's inner circle were perfectly aware the main "inefficiency" of those industries was the fact they employed too many people, and paid them too good a wage. They new that their method of cutting inflation would cause unemployment and recession, but they felt it was, in the words of Norman Lamont, "a price well worth paying". This is why, incidentally, Thatcher's unemployment benefit policy was relatively "generous". Job seekers allowance was similar to current real-term levels, and there was considerably less risk of having it stopped for not looking for work. Thatcher's government actually wanted people to stay on the dole, rather than get a job and and boost aggregate spending.
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Mar 25, 2016 13:41
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Before Thatcher we had a strong commitment to Jungle Canyon Rope bridges. They're now always broken and it's completely unnecessary. She even said "A mystery investigating teenager or dog who beyond the age of 26 finds himself still using a jungle canyon rope bridge can count himself a failure in life"
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Mar 25, 2016 13:55
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team overhead smash posted:Before Thatcher we had a strong commitment to Jungle Canyon Rope bridges. They're now always broken and it's completely unnecessary. She even said "A mystery investigating teenager or dog who beyond the age of 26 finds himself still using a jungle canyon rope bridge can count himself a failure in life" Can you explain what this means?
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Mar 25, 2016 14:14
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punk rebel ecks posted:Can you explain what this means? It's from a 'bit' by a popular leftist comedian Stewart Lee. It's as unfunny as it sounds. Another good thing Thatcher did was clean up football. Before the Football Spectators Act of 1989, the games were full off violent fans(all men, of course), with fights between fans, rioting and deaths not uncommon. Racism towards black players was a hallmark as well. I don't know if it still exist but the stereotype of an "English football hooligan" hasn't really existed since the 80s thanks to Thatcher. Going to football in England is now safe and anyone can do it. The pleasant and inclusive atmosphere is probably partly why the Premier League is so successful and enjoying record attendance numbers.
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Mar 25, 2016 15:27
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I was very nearly the last public sector employee she was directly responsible for becoming unemployed.
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Mar 26, 2016 16:59
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She closed the Long Ashton Research Station's Cider Section, which was a travesty. New apple varieties are constantly being developed and I need to know the optimal way to make them in to booze.
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Mar 26, 2016 18:26
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Typical of her to gut a public institution to benefit a private enterprise:
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Mar 26, 2016 18:30
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Jedit posted:I'll accept the correction, I thought she was in on it. It was definitely an extension of her policies, though. It was an extension of Thatcherism but not something Thatcher thought would work. The whole point of Thatcherism was to control the money supply in the country; by subsidising state run industries the government needed to either borrow money or print it to keep them afloat, assuming they weren't making a profit (thus putting more cash into the economy and raising inflation). Once they were sold off the state had no obligation to give them public funds, instead expecting them to rely on private investment. The railways were a special case (which Thatcher recognised) because a large part of the network runs at a loss and relies on government subsidies, but nevertheless must be maintained for rather obvious reasons relating to people being able to get to work. Thatcher knew that by opening the network to privatisation would mean that private companies would only want the profitable routes leaving the state to either subsidise, or even continue to own and run, the unprofitable routes. So rather than British Rail being a loss-making organisation with a combination of profitable and unprofitable routes a rump-BR would be running at a loss on every single route it operated. So privatising the railways would mean that the government would essentially still have to pay for them, but have virtually no control in how they're run. So the Treasury would have to continue to either borrow or print money everytime the rail companies asked for it, and couldn't tell the companies to make changes to how they're running their business as that's the shareholders job (and they would be more than happy just to take a free cash injection every now and then). And that's exactly what happened! duckmaster fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Mar 26, 2016 |
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Mar 26, 2016 21:13
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Coohoolin posted:She stole milk from schoolchildren. She didn't steal mine. I went to private school.
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Mar 27, 2016 00:02
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1500quidporsche posted:I'd suggest reading up on the history of British Leyland since that really was the big one and most the perceptions of that pre Thatcher era of industrial unrest seems to come from that company. My day job is basically writing about poo poo old British cars so I'll try and expand on this without creating a massive effortpost on the post-war British motor industry! In brief, looking at British Leyland as a representative of Why Pre-Thatcher Britain Sucked is the backwards way of looking at it: BL was nationalised because it failed. It didn't fail because it was nationalised. When it fell under government control in 1975 it incorporated the majority of the British motor industry and was the only firm that was still British-owned. It employed about 250,000 people directly in over 60 factories (many of which were the sole employer in their communities) and an estimated 750,000 more in the supply chain. As a private sector industry British Leyland had been brought to complete financial collapse and nationalisation was to safeguard those 1 million jobs and a major strategic industry. No government of the time (Conservative or Labour) would have let BL just go to the wall in 1974, and I suppose that's a big On-Topic point to make. Before Mrs Thatcher became PM the 'centre ground' of British politics was much further to the left than it is now - there were a lot of Torys in the 60s and 70s who would be considered centre-left Labour if they were in politics today while a lot of what would now be considered 'the looney left' had major posts in Labour. Some of Jeremy Corbyn's 'dangerously radical' ideas of today were appearing as solid Conservative policy in 60s. Both parties generally followed what became known as the Post-war Consenus, which was that the government would effectively guarantee the continued existence of major industries as a social, economic and strategic neccessity. This was either by outright nationalisation (such as with the railways, coal and steel) or by the general understanding that if a huge employer like British Leyland collapsed then the government would bail it out. The consensus meant that it was politically very difficult to do any rationalisation of the nationalised industries as the name of the game was acheiving full employment. When BL was first formed the new Financial Director produced an entirely reasonable plan to rationalise the new company's products (by cutting formerly competing models and, say, making only one type of 1.3-litre engine instead of continuing to make both the BMC and Leyland ones in seperate factories). This would have meant cutting 22,000 jobs. The report leaked to the press, their was an uproar, the unions called a series of strikes and the plan was dropped. So BL continued making lots of cars that competed with other BL cars at huge expense and the relationship between management and unions was immediately trashed, which set the stage for all those walk-outs over the type of biscuits in the canteen and such that people like to drag up when talking about the 1970s. But the thing is by 1968 BMC (which sold about 40 per cent of all the cars in Britain) was already haemorrhaging money for reasons entirely of its own making. Explaining why requires too much car-nerd talk but let's just say that BMC managed to introduce the three bestselling cars in British history and lose money on every single one it made. There were already huge labour relations problems, both for reasons of poor management and tensions between the workers, their own unions and the Labour governments of the period. Throw in the 1973 Energy Crisis, which tanked economies across much of the western world regardless of politics and it's not surprising that British Leyland (as a nationalised industry) didn't have a good time. Pre-Thatcher governments were also much more willing and able to dictate industrial policy, leading to some very well-intentioned but ultimately terrible decisions. For example the UK car market massively exanded throughout the 50s and manufacturers needed to expand and modernise their factories (many of which hadn't changed much since the 1920s) but government approval/financial support was conditional on building new factories in areas of high unemployment. This meant that the car makers had to build factories in places like South Wales and Clydeside, 100s of miles from their other factories and their supply chain. Brand new cars built in brand new factories by workers completely unfamiliar with how to make cars were predictably, erm, 'variable' in their build quality and reliability. punk rebel ecks posted:Fantastic post. I really would like to know more about the nationalized industries. Were they all bad but NHS? Why were they bad? Could they have been fixed? Hopefully someone could chime in. In fact BL was 'fixed' - the Thatcher government funnelled over £500 million into BL to keep it afloat and by 1986 (after seven years of Thatcher-led government running) it was making a profit and had a secure future. So it was immediately privatised! That's one of the sad things about British politics - only failing industries are nationalised and any that succeed are immediately 'set free' to make that profit for the private sector, so of course it seems obvious that nationalised industries always fail. But could BL have been 'fixed' while remaining the fifth largest car maker in the world, employing all those people in all those factories? I don't think so. The industry's problems started decades before the government took the reins and by the 1970s the social and political climate made introducing any of the required reforms and changes required to solve them virtually impossible.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:00
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Incredible write up! Is there anyway the traditional left wing Britain could come back? I have heard of Corbyn, but unlike America's Sanders he doesn't appeal to the youth that much from what I've heard.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:44
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punk rebel ecks posted:Incredible write up! Agreed - fantastic effort post. punk rebel ecks posted:Is there anyway the traditional left wing Britain could come back? Actually that's surprisingly off-key - Corbyn actually has engaged the youth vote. The Labour Party were massively taken aback that the youth demographic were a notable percent when Corbyn got voted in. In fact, Corbyn has a lot of interesting elements to his rise to leadership (and a lot of major negatives) - I'll see about rounding up a few of the UK D&D thread regulars to help me+them post about how the political scene has changed. Might have to give me a couple of hours - it's now 3AM here, so gotta wait for us to all get up. I'm a bit of a night owl, hence my late reply.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:58
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I see, thank you, more input is always welcomed. I was under the impression that Corbyn doesn't appeal to the youth, but maybe that is just a smear campaign on the media. IIRC I remember reading articles a few years ago about how the British youth were moving to the right wing and not the left wing.
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Mar 27, 2016 04:41
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punk rebel ecks posted:Is there anyway the traditional left wing Britain could come back? The D&D crew will be much better placed to discuss that, but I'd say it's possible but very unlikely. And it wouldn't be 'traditional' in the sense of 'the same as we had in the 1970s' - that way of doing things was shown to fail spectacularly and that failure was the main reason why Mrs Thatcher was able to win a landslide election and start hacking apart that Postwar Consensus, the bad bits and the good bits. There's a desperate need for a left wing voice in mainstream British politics and no shortage of people who would benefit massively from its policies, but it would mean smashing the 'Thatcherite Consenus' as firmly as Mrs T smashed the Postwar one. And that would require things to fail as spectacularly for the current thinking as things unravelled in the late 70s: The Winter of Discontent, when a combination of inflation running at 15% and government capping pay rises at 5% led to crippling strike action, including the picketing of hospitals and uncollected bags of trash piling up in the streets, was the clincher and really convinced the British public (and much of the media) that something had to change. If we have another economic crisis in the next few years and, crucially, the blame gets put on the right places, people and systems, you might see a similar broad mood change. The Postwar Consensus was 'just the way things are done' for 34 years and the Thatcherite Consensus has been in place for a similar amount of time. For the past 20 years no one would have thought it possible for someone of Jeremy Corbyn's politics to lead the Labour Party but now here we are... punk rebel ecks posted:IIRC I remember reading articles a few years ago about how the British youth were moving to the right wing and not the left wing. I remember similar articles. But that was because UKIP (right-wing populist Euro-sceptic party, if you're not aware) were in the news as the Next Big Force In British Politics. The youth vote in particular really just expresses complete dissatisfaction with the status quo and just seeks a vaguely credible alternative, be it from the right or the left. UKIP seemed to be that alternative but they then lost their momentum due to internal squabbling and a laughably bad performance in the general election (bad in terms of Pre-Election Swagger v. Actual Result, mainly thanks to our FPTP voting system). Then Corbyn came onto the scene and now there's a potential status quo-smasher as leader of the opposition no less and he has a decent and enthusiastic support base behind him (outside his own MPs, at least...) punk rebel ecks posted:Incredible write up! Thank you  I can do more of the same if you want - I can keep it fairly general and use the car industry as a case study for how things were industrially/economically pre-1979 or I could focus and go into detail about why British cars were so utterly terrible if you want to know how that specific industry did (or, more accurately, didn't) work in this period. I think that's really more for AI than this thread but you're the one asking the questions!The car industry does get thrown up a lot in general discussion about Britain in the 1960s and 70s. 'British Leyland' is a metaphor for the very worst in failed, money-sucking, strike-ridden, under-performing, inadequate, badly-managed nationalised industry (mainly because it was) and anyone who was around in that time will have very clear memories about how badly made and badly designed a lot of its products were. In fact just yesterday I heard some caller on the radio saying how Jeremy Corbyn's policies would "take us back to the 70s and it'll be the Austin Allegro all over again' - the Allegro being lodged in the popular conciousness as a particularly irredeemable turd of a car from BL. You'll read/hear right wingers talking about how the NHS (or whatever public sector organisation is being ripened for privatisation this week) uses 'management policies like something from British Leyland', even today when the company hasn't existed for 30 years. It's a boogeyman used to frighten people about the dark days before Mrs Thatcher came along.
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Mar 27, 2016 06:32
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By all means post more. The information you give is interesting.
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Mar 27, 2016 06:46
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More is good! I'll note that, from my perspective as an American, a lot of this is enlightening as hell. (One thing I think worth noting is that I have my own questions....But they seem better for the UKMT over in D&D, but that always grows to such huge size so quickly that I look at it, go  and just...run away crying.....)
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Mar 27, 2016 14:17
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Spacewolf posted:(One thing I think worth noting is that I have my own questions....But they seem better for the UKMT over in D&D, but that always grows to such huge size so quickly that I look at it, go Come over and ask away - we're usually pretty happy to answer questions. Makes a change from laughing at how terrible our political scene is and telling trolls to go away.
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Mar 27, 2016 14:52
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Spacewolf posted:More is good! I'll note that, from my perspective as an American, a lot of this is enlightening as hell. When I decided to start reading/posting in UKMT I decided I had to read all of that month's thread to catch up. Then I realised that was an exercise in folly. Because it's basically a current affairs/events thread it obviously moves along quickly, and there's very few discussions that go on for page after page. So you'll be fine. Just jump in!
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Mar 27, 2016 15:02
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BalloonFish posted:Thank you By all means post more or if you think its more AI specific me or you could make an auto history thread which I think there is probably a need for anyways. I was a history major for a year before I realized I was rubbish at it but I still find it fascinating and I hold an endless obsession with BL's history.
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Mar 27, 2016 16:07
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BalloonFish posted:And that would require things to fail as spectacularly for the current thinking as things unravelled in the late 70s: The Winter of Discontent, when a combination of inflation running at 15% and government capping pay rises at 5% led to crippling strike action, including the picketing of hospitals and uncollected bags of trash piling up in the streets, was the clincher and really convinced the British public (and much of the media) that something had to change. Well so far we have junior doctors going out on strike and the teachers are balloting for it. Joined up action is a real possibility. The problem is now the press are predominantly anti-union and enthusiasm for action could be a lot higher among every group that has been hit by this government's policies. Corbyn is also being hit with a smear campaign the likes of which we have never really seen before ("CORBYN NEARLY SNAPS" was a story in the Mail yesterday about him looking at a woman with an irritable expression on his face). He's also deeply unpopular with most of his own MPs who continually brief the hostile press against him. Overall it seems unlikely we will get a Labour government in 2020, but at least he does seem to be having some impact in dragging the overall narrative away from being 'of course we should gently caress the poor, but how hard exactly?'
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Mar 27, 2016 17:09
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OK - let's keep things broadly political and talk about what British Leyland meant to the career of this man: This is Tony Benn, who was pretty much the 'anti-Thatcher' in every way it is possible to be - not just in politics and worldview but in background, character, career and so on. He became a committed socialist, a republican, a pacificist and a Eurosceptic (at a time when Euroscepticism was a solid left wing position in British politics). This put him firmly towards the radical 'hard left' wing of the Labour Party, which saw him as their figurehead and was often referred to as the 'Bennite' wing (Jeremy Corbyn was is a Bennite back in the 80s). He was also one of the most outright interesting people in post-war British politics. I'd say that a lot of the social and economic turmoil in 70s Britain was because as the Postwar Consensus gradually collapsed the country was either going to go towards what Benn espoused or it was going to go in Mrs Thatcher's direction - and there were large sections of society that ardently believed in one camp or the other. Even though he was never Prime Minister or even Labour leader his ideas had a huge influence at some criticial times. In 1966 Labour prime minister Harold Wilson made Tony Benn Minister of Technology - this was a new government post specifically dedicated to identifying, developing and introducing new technology, methods and working practices into British industry. Wilson had made a pre-election speech where he talked about reforming socialism with science and forging a new Britain from 'the white heat of technology' and it was Benn's job to put this into effect. As Minister of Technology Benn also headed up the Industrial Reorganisation Committee, which sounds chillingly Soviet but was actually just supposed to identify opportunities for smaller firms to merge to create larger ones - large companies would be able to compete more effectively on the global stage and by merging and rationalising assets the whole British economy would be more efficient. Now we get to the cars. In 1967 the IRC asked the two remaining British-owned car makers to submit detailed accounts and details of their assets, model plans and working practices. Those two companies were the huge but deeply financially troubled British Motor Corporation (BMC) and Leyland Motors which was much smaller than BMC but was much better run and made strong profits. But both firms were losing market share to the British arms of Ford and General Motors and to large (and nationalised) European rivals such as Renault and Fiat. Combining BMC and Leyland would, the IRC hoped, form a mega-manufacturer that could match its rivals for size and would have enough capital to invest in new models and new production facilities, both of which were sorely needed. Leyland's profitability would underpin the whole thing and if all the BMC managers and executives were cleared out in favour of men from Leyland they would be able to run things properly. Problem solved! So Harold Wilson invited the chairmen of BMC and Leyland in for a little talk and 'suggested' that their two companies could be merged. The men from Leyland played an encouragingly hard game, gaining control of the entire domestic British motor industry on very favourable terms and with a lot of government credit guarantees to get things rolling. The Leyland negotiation team, and its press department, continually spoke of their plans for rationalisation, picking the best ideas and products from both sides of the merger and using the sheer size of the new firm to instil new deals with the workforce, reforming working practices and ending the endless cycle of strikes over pay disputes. This was exactly what Tony Benn, Harold Wilson and the government as a whole wanted to hear. And Leyland's account books were exactly what they wanted to see. Unfortunately they, and the financial advisers and even the stock market analysts who gave the merger their blessing with soaring initial share prices for British Leyland when it was created in 1968, had all been taken in by a very effective publicity campaign and some truth-economising by Leyland. As I already posted, the first tentative plan for rationalising the gargantuan company fell at the first sign of opposition (which could only have been expected) and there was absolutely no sign of any attempt by management to have a real discourse with its workforce. And, more crucially, the financial strength of Leyland Motors had been badly overstated. While it may have been profitable in 1967 this was during an economic boom and even then those profits were not strong enough to fund new Leyland car models, let alone to keep the money pit that was BMC going. Labour (and Tony Benn) were out of government in 1970 but were back in 1974 following the disastrous Conservative administration of Edward Heath. A miners strike and the global fuel crisis of 1973 had crippled the British economy and led to the introduction of a three-day working week and electricity rationing to preserve coal stocks. Due to poor sales and recurrent strikes BL was already running at only 60% capacity before the three-day week was introduced and once it was the end result was inevitable. BL collapsed in 1974 and was nationalised in 1975. By this time Tony Benn was Minister for Trade & Industry and so was ultimately responsible for BL now it was in state hands. During his four years in opposition his personal politics had taken a hard swing to the left, from fairly standard 1960s Labour lefty-ness to full-on radical socialism. Having a front-line seat in the divisive world of British industry and watching Britain's negotations over entry to the European Economic Community (forerunner to the EU) had convinced him that the current way of doing things was a democratic con and that ordinary people had little control over their own lives. Benn now believed that the Postwar Consensus, formed by the Labour government of 1945, was only the first step on a massive reshaping of British society and that Labour needed to campaign to keep moving the process on. With that in mind he co-wrote the 1974 Labour manifesto which pledged not only massive nationalisation of industry and infrastructure but the introduction of direct democracy into those industries. As far as BL was concerned its future in state hands was set in 1976 by the government's Ryder Report. This was supposed to survey the firm from top to bottom and plot a path back to profitability but it actually did nothing other than commit the taxpayer to funnelling £1.2 billion (in 1976 money) into BL over the next five years without changing anything else, which would, apparently, magically see a return to profit by 1981. It was literally: 1. Spend £1.2billion 2. ???? 3. PROFIT Unsurprisingly this didn't work, but one of the few things the Ryder Report did introduce was Tony Benn's beloved idea of worker representation committees in 1976. This was supposed to pioneer the idea which would then be spread to other sectors. Unfortunately there were no simultaneous changes to management practice or union rules so they just provided a dedicated forum for two massively opposed sides to have bitter arguments with each other. Worst still, the fractious atmosphere of the British labour movement in the late 70s didn't give the idea a hope in hell of working. A lot of union members and shop stewards saw the idea of cooperating with management as betrayal - the aim was for the union to *be* the management. At the time wildcat strikes were legal and you got the crazy situation of workers at BL factories striking against their own unions. In 1976 British Leyland lost production of 250,000 cars to strike action (at a time when annual production was about 1.5 million) - these were all cars that had been ordered but which were never sold. The most militant factory, the Morris plant at Cowley, experienced over 500 stoppages that year - the majority of which were walkouts of less than an hour. All these stoppages, plus low workforce morale and a completely outmoded approach to quality control led to rock-bottom build quality and reliability even in the cars that were fundamentally good designs - and there were a surprising number of those. Even when the BL factories were running properly the rest of the supply chain would be just as troubled by strike action and poor quality. If Lucas Industries, Pilkington Glass or Dunlop Rubber went on strike and BL's stockpiles ran out then it could either stop its own production (at huge cost) or ship cars to dealerships minus their headlamps, windscreens or tyres, which would be sent on later once supplies were resumed. Dealers don't have the time or workforce to actually finish building a car so these parts were often retro-fittred hilariously badly. By 1977 British Leyland had lost its position as the UK car market leader to Ford, with GM's Vauxhall rapidly approaching from third place and Japanese firms such as Datsun and Honda making serious inroads. Government money earmarked for installing new production equipment was being used just to keep the company afloat. In 1976 the British economy as a whole had faced collapse and the new Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, had to go to the IMF for a loan. Callaghan had become PM and Labour leader following Harold Wilson's resignation in 1976. Tony Benn had stood as a leadership candidate but didn't make it past the first round of voting. Callaghan was a more centrist Labour-ite than Wilson and much less radical than Benn, who was demoted from Minister for Trade & Industry to Energy Secretary. Callaghan appointed a South African called Michael Edwardes as BL chairman in 1978 - the first in a long line of 'outsider' businessmen brought in from the private sector to reform nationalised industries - with the explicit task of hacking BL down to a sustainable size and, in his own words, 'reasserting management's right to manage.' This spelt the end of Benn's workers' committees after just three years. Of course although Edwardes was appointed by a Labour prime minister he was very much in favour with the post-1979 Thatcher government, which appointed a string of similarly hard-nosed 'axe-men' to keep pruning the corporate tree after he left. By 1986 BL had ceased to operate as a large-scale car maker, becoming the smaller, more upmarket Rover Group, which was privatised in 1986 when it was sold to another former nationalised industry, British Aerospace. Following Mrs T's election in 1979 Tony Benn was not only out of government but out of favour within the Labour party - although he still enjoyed strong support from much of the wider labour movement. He argued that Labour had lost the '79 election by failing to fully implement his 1974 ideas and not offering a truely socialist solution to the country's problems. He ran for party leader again in 1980 but was again defeated. He lost his place in parliament in the 1983 election but returned as an MP following a by-election in 1984. He retired from parliament ('to spend more time on politics', in his own words') in 2001. jabby posted:Overall it seems unlikely we will get a Labour government in 2020, but at least he does seem to be having some impact in dragging the overall narrative away from being 'of course we should gently caress the poor, but how hard exactly?' Personally that's all I've ever hoped for from Corbyn. And it seems to be working, as the reception to the budget showed. There are voices against austerity and endless loving-over of the poor and they're not all being treated as bizarre out-of-touch fantasists. Questions are being asked. It's a small step and it's not like Corbyn is single-handedly responsible for it (sadly it was Iain Duncan Smith of all people who brought it up) but it's an encouraging sign. This time last year I'm not sure the same policies would have got quite the same treatment. 1500quidporsche posted:By all means post more or if you think its more AI specific me or you could make an auto history thread which I think there is probably a need for anyways. I was a history major for a year before I realized I was rubbish at it but I still find it fascinating and I hold an endless obsession with BL's history. I'd be up for doing an AI thread looking at some of Britain's more spectacular automotive gently caress-ups.
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Mar 27, 2016 18:47
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You should really write some books. That was extremely informative. It's sad that the cooperative like structure failed. Has something like that with a company so large ever succeeded in Britain or anywhere in the modern era?
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Mar 27, 2016 19:20
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punk rebel ecks posted:You should really write some books. That was extremely informative. I'm actually a motoring journalist in 'real life', currently working for a classic car magazine so writing about this poo poo is my day job. That I get to combine history and a bit of politics as well is just a bonus! quote:It's sad that the cooperative like structure failed. Has something like that with a company so large ever succeeded in Britain or anywhere in the modern era? It is sad, but it was doomed to fail when it was introduced. Britain has always had pretty adversarial labour relations and by the 1970s it had gotten really bad for all sorts of reasons. Neither management nor the unions really believed in the idea of worker representation and neither side trusted or respected the other, making the whole idea pointless. If it had been introduced in the late 1940s/early 1950s when the industry was in a much healthier state and everyone was in a much more cooperative mood it might have worked. As far as I know no British manufacturing industry has been as a true co-op. There are lots of retail co-ops though, including the John Lewis Partnership which runs a nationwide chain of department stores and supermarkets and is entirely employee-owned. Germany is very big on worker representation, and has been since it was rebuilt after WW2. As I understand it union membership is mandatory in many German industries and every German company over a certain size has to have a proportion of union representatives on its board. A lot of the German federal states have shares in big regional employers, too. Basically Germany runs something similar to the pre-1979 Postwar Consensus in the UK only it actually works.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:41
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