I am not disagreeing that times were tough. The demands were divorced of reality, but then inflation was divorced from sensibility, so what do you expect? You have a government that has made a series of ****-ups that have in part led to a situation in which the some of the populace is being 'unreasonable'. So the workers are expected to just put up with it because of tough economic conditions, while the politicians they pay for and elected continue to f*** it up time after time for them? Has anything really changed on that front? I have a distrust and a lack of respect for most politicians, so I am obviously biased, but it seems that things are still pretty much the same in that regard.
It seems fair to say the unions needed to be reined in a bit (or a lot!), and so some compliment Thatcher on that, but unfortunately the ultimate p!ss-taker was not the unions it was and is the government, and as BBmac correctly pointed out so long ago, a huge problem is in not understanding exponentiality and debt and despite the fact those are what should have been reined in, both seem to have grown, with no signs of being reined in.
I believe that no government can, now, control the debt spiral in which we find ourselves. It's exacty like the Visa card that gets out of control by the unwary.
No government knows what to do and, simply, passes the buck to the next. We are no longer the nation that exports what everyone else wants, to the extent that debt is kept under control and so all that we have, to any important degree, is a financial industy that uses the very thing that is killing the country, debt, as a means of self-enrichment.
How wrong I was, along with millions of others, Thatcher included, to go down the privatisation route, willy-nilly, as if it was the complete ansewr to our problems.
That is what happens when one side, the unions, in this case, gets out of control and is replaced by a sector that is greedy and corrupt. Legislation seems, unfortunately, a necessary evil- The service companies, ie. water, gas, electricity should never be in private hands.
In Spain, we have many, serious problems, ones that I doubt, now, whether we can get out of in great part, BTW. due to debt and corruption in the financial and political sectors.
What seems to be benign, though, apart from one-day manifestations are the public sector industries because there is accord between the interested parties, I suppose, Even public transport strikes are dampened by minimum services.
What is it about the UK population that damages itself in this way?
