The legacies of Mrs Thatcher have been debated recently on the newswire. As part of this debate, @Boyd gave a fine analysis of our current financial state. His comment, entitled "Worse than Vermin", gives an alternative context to our current "age of austerity"...

He begins by responding to this assertion...:

People who complain about temporary unemployment or social spending cuts forget that the false boom of Blair and Brown is akin to the economic disaster that was Wilson and Callaghan.

Nice try, but you need to widen your reading beyond the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Treasury spending increased by nearly 50,000% in 2008, with £85 billion spent on bank recapitalisation, the same amount as the cuts announced in the Spending Review. Before the recession caused by the bank crisis, the UK National Debt was lower than when Labour came to power in 1997.

Social spending is damaging if it leads to runaway deficits

It didn't. And what you call 'social spending' i call the necessary infrastructure that keeps this society from collapsing into Total Capitalism, and the banking industry has shown what happens when you leave things up to the markets.

£1.5 billion is estimated to be lost in benefit fraud every year. £2.7 billion is lost to corporate tax fraud, and billions more in avoidance because of the loopholes in laws created by your dear grocer's daughter.

Instead of trying to spin Mrs Thatcher's successes as failures, people should instead be looking closely at the covert way that New Labour undermined them.

It would have to be very covert, because even Blair himself ended up calling himself a Thatcherite. If Blair was a commie, why did he not repeal ANY of the draconian Thatcherite anti-union laws, that mean that strikes are almost unwinnable today, and end up denying workers the right to withold their labour as a form of protest? Taff Vale is with us again - like 100 years of class war never happened.

Manipulation of employment figures by creating public sector "jobs" is pointless if people are subsidised to stay in work doing next to nothing.

The only reason that benefits are higher than wages is because wages are so low, they fall below the minimum threshold that could support a family. Wages in real terms are lower now than they were in the 1970's. The average household has to rely on debt or benefits to help bridge the gap. I assume you would rather the level of £1 trillion of personal debt in this country was increasing?

Your grocer's daughter destroyed the fabric of community that used to support people, that used to support the vulnerable and the infirm, who know have to rely on council and state aid. She created this society where no one knows their neighbours, and crime is faceless and goes unpunished. And the most disgusting thing is she did it deliberately, just like the Tories are now using the 'shock' of the bank bailout to implement another Thatcherite war on the poor.

FIGHT THE CUTS!
MAKE THE RICH PAY!

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