Hacker News Reader

Comment by ycombigator | Hacker News Reader

I think you need to read more into Thatcher and what happened under her to understand why some sections of society reacted like this.

I don't know a huge amount about Regan, but I doubt you can really compare them.

Britain in the late 70s and early 80s had huge issues which Thatcher addressed, but in hugely contentious ways, in some cases destroying entire industries and their communities.

The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.

View on HN

I've got three books about Thatcher I am reading right now.

To interpret Thatcher you need to know about the labor unrest in the UK in the 1970s. Back then there seemed to always be a strike in some chokepoint industry (Coal mining, trucking) that threw the rest of the economy into chaos, almost like a general strike. This gets talked about it in this song

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Wish_I_Could_Fly_Like)_Superm...

A lot of people saw the labor movement as a big problem, thus Thatcher was in position to make a big crackdown against it. I occasionally meet an Americans who is opposed to unions, but there never was a time when a reasonable person could say unions were bringing the US economy to its knees.

Reagan had an impact of moving the US to the right a lot like Thatcher did, but not so much.

The Democrats largely accepted Reagan's viewpoint because it was perceived to work. Clinton accepted Reaganism just as Blair accepted Thatcherism, in fact both politicians were able to outdo their predecessors because on the other side of the aisle they were able to neutralize any possible opposition and normalize the slogan "there is no alternative".

Although Barack Obama introduced almost universal healthcare but implemented the public-private partnership plan that Nixon offered in 1974... One that almost works as a policy, but does great damage to institutional legitimacy because it looks like another case of regulatory capture and ultimately contributes to the nation becoming ungovernable.

> Barack Obama introduced almost universal healthcare

Terms and conditions apply.

It's the American Way. Reduce the cost of social services, in the short term, by making them very difficult to apply for.

Once I heard Newt Gingrich talk vaguely that high deductible plans and health savings accounts (a core idea of Obamacare) would be a good "free market" solution but it strikes me as another one of those penny wise and pound foolish ideas.

If people don't buy the $200 a month Asthma inhaler which high deductible plans make them pay for themselves they might have 2 hospitalizations a year which cost $15,000 a piece... which high deductible plans will pay for. High deductible plans seem to be a way to maximize the costs of chronic disease like diabetes.

The originally introduced plan was nearly a mirror of what is currently law in Massachusetts which does cover everyone. As put in place by a Republican Governor, no less. It is only during long and bad faith negotiations that the Affordable Care Act became the extremely limited and optional alternative that we now live with.

I grew up under Thatcher in 80s Britain (also 70's but too young to see it).

Britain's problem with labour unrest was rooted in other problems. Ironically, one being a problem we are seeing again now - massive inflation.

Yes, you can definitely 'solve' the problem of industry strikes by completely destroying the industry involved.

That's one option.

Inflation always has an element of circularity in the explanations of it.

There's no doubt that workers would like to get a 10% raise in a year when there is 10% inflation. Since labor is a substantial input into the cost of services, it also seems like a plan to have at least 10% inflation next year.

The problem with many of those unions was just that they depended on industry that no rational country could have continued to run forever. Like are you seriously going to just continue to mine coal forever, in mines that have been active for 100s of years and were just losing money.

The leader of the coal miners union didn't even fight for coal minor wages, he was talking actually revolution.

Some privatizations were sensible, lets remember that Nordics, Switzerland and so on also did that and you can do it well depending on the situation. But they are complex issues that you need to consider rationally on what you want to do.

The British government rail was probably to big, doing to many things and selling part of that and splitting it up and opening it up to some competition is sensible.

In my opinion labor in the 1950/1960 just did poorly, overly focus on some of their socialist hangups rather then making smart policy. Like Britain had debt after the war for sure, but its not like it was bombed to the ground (the Blitz was minor compared what most countries experienced), you have a rebuilding Europe. Britain had a world class aircraft industry, advanced nuclear, building lots of cars, world leading and so and so. Its had a great good electronics sector as well. Being among the best in the world in almost every major technology.

And somehow that couldn't be leveraged into much economic success. You have terrible growth and massive inflation just 20 year later. Something did go wrong, and you can't blame the conservatives. Even when they were in power for period they only slightly slow down the agenda.

To be sure, good things were done in that period as well it certainty wasn't all bad but its hard to look at pre-Tracher Britain and be overly impressed.

Coal miners seem to have a sense of entitlement everywhere.

Coal was mostly crushed in the 1980s by the low capital cost of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant

and the low cost of gas of Natural gas in the US and UK, the latter because of the discovery of petroleum in the North Sea. The same economic steamroller pushed "pause" on nuclear energy.

Today we see coal miners in the US who are empowered by the "one state, two votes" structure of the Senate to keep the industry alive despite it being basically uneconomic as well as environmentally unsound, the difference is this time the coal miners are supported by the right instead of the left.

Those who hate Thatcher today aren't so much pining away for the way things used to be but instead for the loss of their dreams for how they think things could have been.

Thatcher's most memorable slogan was "There is no alternative" and it's that sense that the realm of the possible in politics shrunk dramatically is why people have a sense of loss. (I'm amused that both Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton liked that slogan too.)

It wasn't all coal mining.

We lost over 2 million manufacturing jobs at the beginning of the 80s.

The hate of Thatcher, imo, was less about "the country" and more directly about the impact on people's communities and direct personal relationships.

But looking back, Thatcher tactics were at times borderline fascist.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/03/miners...

It's hard to get a clear view on these things within your own country, my advice would be to compare Reagan, Thatcher and fascist military dictator Pinochet.

One of them killed lots of people, and still gets praised today as making their country richer, when the evidence suggests they didn't. Which wouldn't really justify the deaths even if true. Sorry, did I say one of them, all of them, I meant all of them. Seems easier to spot that when it's not your country though.

> The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.

Financial impact too; oil company privatisations and tax cuts which offset the income from the oil fields deprived the UK of a sovereign wealth fund equivalent to Norway's (although likely not as large, due to variations in the price of oil).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com