It's really amazing that both Thatcher and Reagan came to power at around the same time, delivered such fabulous witticisms, and caused very similar societal harm.
"Fabulous witticisms" feels good to listener and is funny, because it validates what people want to hear. It is rarely actually correct or actually correctly describes world.
Not shocking the voters wanted something different.
The economy was pretty much in the dumpster for most of the 70’s in both countries.
Not unusual for the old guard to be turfed out when that happens.
Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason.
Arguably the reason was the war, not domestic policy [0]
[0] https://history.com/news/margaret-thatcher-falklands-war
I should add that as a Scot I'm definitely not a fan of hers (you just grow up there knowing "Thatcher Bad") but I'm not quite at "put a stake through her heart and garlic round her neck"[0] :)
[0] - https://twitter.com/halaljew/status/1294414600566382598
It's a lot more complex than war-helps-current-leader, at least outside the US. It depends on the war and the context.
It was a strange time.
For example the UK has also had subsequent Conservative victories for the last 12 years or so but every single argument made in 2010 about their approach has been proven true. To the detriment of every person in the UK.
So it doesn't necessarily follow in my eyes that an election win means that what you're doing is the right thing, only that you are popular and you can convince people you will do something to help them.
There certainly was an aspect of that back in the 80s. In the early years Labour was lead by Michael Foot, basically a likeable version of Corbyn but just as unelectable. But then, the Labour Party back then was properly Marxist and had actually pushed forward a programme of nationalisation and unionisation that worked out about as well as you'd expect.
The most egregious example of waste was the coal industry, hence the strikes. The tax payer was subsidizing coal to the tune of £1.3 billion a year which was real money back then, just under 1% of total national GDP, not including the increased costs to power and steel industries that were prevented from using cheaper alternatives. When the mining union leader Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.” That's what we were dealing with. That's just coal, but swathes of industry had been nationalised and was a horrible rotting carcass of waste and losses dragging the country down. Reforming that lot was incredibly painful but it had to be done.
Maggie is generally portrayed as being incredibly unpopular, and the way she was lampooned by a generation of up coming British comics was cruel though frankly hilarious, but she won resounding election victory after victory. The economy she built transformed the country into the modern nation it is today. Notably when Blair and Brown brought in a Labour government in 1997 they changed essentially nothing substantive because her reforms palpably worked. All the proposed changes reverting Britain towards a statist socialist economic agenda were quietly shelved and never talked about agin until Corbyn came along.
Since then Conservatism on both sides of the pond has suffered an appalling moral and intellectual collapse. The conservative and republican parties are mocking parodies of their former selves. Back in the 80s there were serious, major economic and social problems that desperately needed fixing and economic liberalism had the answers. Nowadays that's just not even vaguely controversial, instead the focus of the right has shifted towards damaging reactionary dog whistle issues like culture wars and blind nationalism. That tendency has always been there, but now it's all they have.
The conservatives of the 80's had a problem to solve, stagflation, inefficient socialism, big state. Neo-liberalism solved those problems, but created new ones.
The conservatives today have another problem to solve, mass immigration, rampant crime, loss of sovereignty and ability to reform to foreign bureaucracy, dependency on foreign manufacturing, etc.
Part of these problems are residues of the same economic neo-liberalism that was enacted in the 80s. Reagans and Thatcher's neo-liberalism saved society from the socialist dystopia, but over time it has thrown society in a neo-liberalist dystopian path that few people like, beside the corporate elites.
The conservatives have moved on to new, real problems. You seem stuck in the past.
A friend of mine tried that line about manufacturing on me a few years ago and I asked him what kind of factory he wanted his so. To work in when he grew up. He looked at me as though I’d just shot his dog. We don’t need factory jobs, we’ve git near full employment anyway. That’s why we need immigration to solve our demographic issues with our ageing population. We’ve got plenty of jobs much higher up the value chain, the main problems are around training and education.
As for the crime rate the perception is divorced from reality, I’ll quote from Wikipedia: “The United Kingdom's crime rate remains relatively low when compared to the rest of the world, especially among first world countries.” Our crime rate is a fraction of that in Ukraine before the war. Their murder rate was three times ours.
Maybe if you define immigrants with passports as Britons. There's a reason why the BNP, British National Party, won the two seats they ever won in counties most affected by immigration. This effect would also be exact opposite of that in Sweden, which is intriguing, because here the sub-urb ghettos are split between social democrats, which the immigrants vote for, and the nationalists, which the few non-immigrants left vote for.
The fact that you are trying to argue that areas affected are the least concerned, when the case is exactly the opposite across Europe; says a lot about your "reality". Modern leftists are a scourge.
Hardly a problem local to Britain, and hardly something Thatcher solved. It was a crisis that also passed in countries that did not elect viciously anti-state, anti-working class governments.
> crumbling infrastructure; that couldn't even clean its own streets
Bit of an exaggeration, and I'm not sure how Maggie "Minimal State" Thatcher has supposedly helped with that.
> Thatcher won two landslide re-elections for a reason
If it weren't for the Falklands she would have been a one term president.
"Neither the strong nor the weak version of the proposition that American defense spending bankrupted the Soviet economy and forced an end to the Cold War is sustained by the evidence."
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/foreign/reagr...
Currently, for example, there is Wokeism in general, with particular emphasis on transgenderism. Transgenderism only "affects" a very small percentage of the population, nobody paid it any mind a decade ago, and yet today it's a thing.
I think what we’ve discovered is that, thanks to the Internet, that’s a strategy that’s significantly easier to employ than ever before. In the past ups at least need to have mainstream media outlets onboard. Nowadays you can do that with a hashtag