There were a number of studies done to show that the media in Britain during the Seventies and Eighties was predominantly right leaning. You might take a look at the studies conducted by the
Glasgow University Media Group.
As I said a lot depends on perspective & plenty of studies have shown the opposite argument to.
From a personal perspective Id have put the lean marginally to the right but then after the mess of 74-79 & considering, in my opinion the media tends to swing and lean towards the government, and considering obvious self interests, its what Id expect, but studies can be produced showing leans in both directions so whatever the reality, my perspective, your perspective, one study or another its not a huge margin, nor of much significance.
No, you're right. It didn't all date from the Thatcher years and there were many, many problems prior to that including a degree of corruption within the trades union movement and mismanagement from within large corporations and nationalised industries.
Whatever a mans personal political perspective I think it can be agreed it was sad that at such a time of need there were those who were basically just corrupt (left, right & center) who let everyone down.
There are a lot of things from that era (lets go 74-84 to include both sides) that are not good adverts for left or right.
She cannot be blamed for not bailing everyone out as she was not the state and couldn't have done so even if she'd been inclined to do so. What she can be blamed for is the destruction of our primary industries.
Again that was really a 70's thing. A lot may have died on her watch but they were terminal before that & thats not to put all the blame on the 74-79 era either, the world was changing post-war & Britain didnt react to it fast enough, or in the right way, & would of struggled under a tory or labor regime, 74-79 just sped the process up.
Privatisation did not pay off any debts. Where did you get that idea?
A LOT of debt was paid off & we can quibble over which penny, from which place paid for what but the money came in & money went out on debts.
Privatisation sold off to large investors highly valuable national assets for peanuts.
I know, but then debts needed to be paid so money had to come from somewhere and taxes were already high so someone might have argued against some of the tax cuts in the thatcher era, or even about the distribution of the share of the burden, but no one, left or right, could argue for tax rises sufficient to fill the holes so money had to come from somewhere.
Its oft asked question "where else could the money have come from?" its the tory line of defense, & the #1 answer is usually by raising tax on the rich but do you remember how high that already was?
Theres a threshold in tax where, if exceeded, its been observed that revenue actually shrinks for numerous reasons & Britain had experianced that, at the peak of tax money was actually draining out of the country in tax avoidance, bussinesses were relocating, jobs were being cut, & other methods were being deployed to move the money because of the tax burden & revenue was starting to shrink.
Any more tax hikes & the economy would have collapsed completely, British companies would have folded, or relocated & most of the super-rich would have taken their money & ran.
There was no wiggle room, no more money to borrow, debts to pay and a stagnant economy, someone had to get some money from somewhere.
Those industries were then deregulated in a way that made them massively profitable. Had she wanted those industries to become highly profitable for the public good she could have deregulated when they were under public ownership and the nation would have reaped huge benefits. We'd also still have a car industry
Im sorry but thats a dream right there, the British auto industry was a dead duck, thatcher or no thatcher.
I mean thats sort of one of the things I was talking about earlier when I said the world was changing & we were slow to react.
Even before thatcher the whole manufacturing sector was a joke, with bad management, high tax & high wages meaning it had become just impossible to produce competitively priced goods.
Many of our best industries were run by fools, I mean we all know the story of the mini, priced lower than production costs & many were brutalized by strikes and driven to extinction & lets be honest while some unions have campaigned for genuine workers rights over the years there have also been others motivated by shear selfish greed.
I know people who were on ridiculous wages in the 1970's & 1980's. I know one guy who was grossing over £900 a week at one stage for manual labor, thats about £3500 ($5600) a week in todays money. I know thats probably an extreme but you just cant pay everyone silly money & run competative bussinesses at the same time.
Post-war Britain was arrogant, thought it was still king of the world, thought it was still the richest & still the leader in technology & so would control the world & its economy, admittedly now they felt theyd have to share it with their American cousins but they didnt see the rising tide of change, the tiger economies, Japan, China & India rising, the increasing industrialization of the third world or the fact that others might start making our products just as well as we could, nor the fact that in a shrinking world of air travel and gigantic cargo ships that these products could be moved around the world in their millions.
People really didnt see it coming, they were fat & lazy & complacent.
How would our manufacturing industry survived without becoming lean & competative?
a steel industry and a coal industry and would have been rolling in the profits
Coal is definately a 50-50 one, yes thatcher not only stuck the knife in, but smiled while doing it but the industry (& unions) had done themselves no favors.
That was undoubtedly the biggest mistake. If people back then had seen todays phone market theyd have been a greater outrage at its undervalued sell off.
Pro or anti-privitization that was a hideous **** up, even worse than gordon browns gold sell off and that was bad enough.
The oil industry consider 74-79 as the worst pissing away of oil revenue (mind you they think every governments screwed up on Britains oil reserves.
Examples from British TV? I've not seen or heard them.
At least once a day during the recent conference season, lots of back & forth with tories pointing at the 70's & labor looking shocked & saying but were not like that anymore (which technically is true labor now & then are two very different animals).
Yes, there were differences, but I'd suggest they were differences of time. Owing to the depredations of the Thatcher years on the NHS, for example, the public appreciation of the importance of investment in it rose sharply. The Blair government's investment was a factor of evident public demand that they wished to see it improved, not wholly dismantled. This continues to this day and the rhetoric of the Tory party is that they now want to be the champion of the NHS. You didn't hear that from Thatcher's ideologues in the early-80s.
Certainly theres always swings, some one spends, tax rises to pay for it, people swing the other way for a tax cut, to fund that spendings cut and so on, but as I think you observe the greater swing is to the middle & I think thats another "problem" the west are reacting slowly too.
The trouble is, as I see it, you cant please everyone & in fact the bigger the state becomes, the more issues it embraces, the less people you can appeal to (forget left & right, think of it mathematically with an ever increasing array of combinations of positives & negatives) so they sink to the middle to try and catch as many votes as possible & you see it with both labor & tory trying to play the one nation populist card.
I think if a few issues, that really shouldnt be the bussiness of government, were kicked into the long grass, people could concentrate on more weighty issues & feel more represented on them.
Sorry about trimming a lot of your post. I did read it all & appreciate your personal experiances (incidentally almost included my own miners strike story - I lived in a pit village for a while) but I was having trouble with some sort of character limit.
