Rick Reuben wrote:floog wrote:my mum's stock response is: "You don't remember what it was like in the 1970s when Labour were in power".
They were up against market forces that were beyond their control....
I'm not going to get into a big debate about this (I'll lose), but I'm not sure you can analyse the shift in purely economic terms. I'm not sure my parents saw it in purely economic terms, although "economics" (personal/family, national, international) will have played its part to a greater or lesser degree.
Without having lived through those years, I'm not sure you can fully comprehend the full impact. No number of pie-charts will properly communicate the sense of systematic community and social dismantlement that ensued, or how the British sensibility responded to it. Well-established government supported industries/companies from the Milk Marketing Board to the NHS, through the railways and car manufacturing came under immediate "free-market" attack. It's one of the things that makes me so angry now - my mum's generation are the first to complain about the current state of things (albeit in a very "Daily Mail" fashion) without recognising the part they played in it (unwittingly or not) all those years ago, when they were my age.
Out of interest, how many state-owned, government controlled industries were around in the US in the 1970s? Few, I imagine, as the US has always been based on free-market principles, whereas the European approach always had a greater "social" bearing, leading to more government involvement in industry, utilities, and so on. Once Thatcher felt that manufacturing was dead in this country, there was no going back and the US model was our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Half-hearted, no-researched, hit-and-miss response, Rick. I'm relying on you to provide the research to refute/support as necessary, in a good natured fashion.
