There is a question here which says: Will the Conservatives now be backing a law to restore the death penalty in the light of what happened in Brighton? We had one at the beginning of this Parliament. I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live.
I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty. But I say that as a personal view. There has never been a party political view on the death penalty. It has always been held that we vote individually.
These measures, coupled with the receipts from North Sea oil lead to a strengthening of Pound Sterling and hit export manufacturing incredibly hard.
Despite public outcry and plunging popularity, Thatcher stood firm in her policies, leading to one of her most famous quotes :. Ultimately her policies and the link between money supply and inflation were proven correct and inflation lowered to 8. But that was not before over 2 million manufacturing jobs had been lost in the recession and swathes of industry had been decimated, never to recover - though Tony Blair's Labour administration actually contributed more to manufacturing decline , as seen in the GDP graphic below.
What is less welcome to many people is that Britain was in critical need of this change. Andrew Sullivan sums it up well in his piece, Thatcher, Liberator :. She divided the country deeply — and still does. She made some serious mistakes — the poll tax, opposition to German unification, insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist — but few doubt she altered her country permanently, re-establishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that Britain had intellectually bequeathed to the world and yet somehow lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.
For a more 'thorough' review you can read a detailed analysis from the Centre for Business Research on the History of British Industrial Performance from , or The impact of Government policies on UK manufacturing since She did. This Guardian article and the linked Google Spreadsheet has a number for excellent interactive charts where you can plot various economic indicators over the course of the Thatcher Government and beyond.
More important than simply being in office during the time of such rates were the consequences and the measures taken to control them. This Parliamentary Briefing Paper shows one of the biggest - repossessions. Ordinary home owners, many of whom had bought their homes as a direct result of the Right to Buy scheme, found themselves losing their homes due to spiraling mortgage payments.
However, it must be said that the bulk of repossessions happened directly after Thatcher left office , though no doubt many rightly attribute their defaults to the period of high interest rates that preceded her departure. Though the control of inflation was ultimately achieved, this further damage to ordinary people, millions of whom had already lost their jobs thanks to the impact on manufacturing, lead to a deep rooted personal hatred of Thatcher and Thatcherism.
She did, but the Bill passed anyway. As ever, things are more complicated. Thatcher, the new Secretary of State for Education at the time, was ordered to make cuts in four areas:. Concerned over the effect of the cuts to milk, she said :. She proposed a compromise, that would later be accepted , to remove milk provision for those aged 7 to 11 but retain it for primary school pupils for nutritional purposes.
In , the then Labour Education Secretary Edward Short removed free milk from secondary schools , 3 years before Thatcher continued the phased removal for primary school pupils over 7. It is therefore prudent to ask at what point responsibility for the current situation switches to successive Governments who have failed to correct this imbalance. The Poll Tax is the stand-out, unequivocal disaster of the Thatcher Government.
Though, that's a somewhat contested claim. Many believed that changing the way the tax was calculated, from the estimated market value of a property to the number of people living in it, was a backwards step. It disproportionately hit large families living in relatively small accommodation and was universally hated for being unfair on ordinary working people.
The Community Charge caused intense distrust and deep wounds in the political psyche of millions of voters, many of whom never forgave Thatcher for her actions as we see from the anger released following her death. The changes generated seething public anger , mass protests , public disobedience, mass refusal to pay , legal challenges and some of the worst rioting ever seen in England.
Yorkshire Police even made preparations to refuse to arrest anyone as thanks to the problems of implementing the tax , the force believed it lacked the resources to deal with such wide-scale civil disobedience. In other news, The Long Call episode 2 air date, how many episodes and full schedule.
Skip to content. Paul Fogarty. Have something to tell us about this article? There is talk on social networks of impromptu street parties to celebrate, ghoulish as that might seem. And no doubt, Thatcher's funeral will be accompanied by protests from the U. Thatcher has never been forgiven for what she did to the Left during the s. She didn't so much break up the industrial labor unions as eviscerate them, gladly shutting down scores of coal mines and steel foundries across the country, and refusing to compromise with striking miners during the year-long industrial action of Her Conservative Party privatized vast swaths of the state's apparatus, including the gas, water, telecom, and electricity industries, and reduced public funding for education, welfare, and social housing.
She was nicknamed " Milk Snatcher " after scrapping free school milk supplies while education secretary in the s, and the name stuck throughout her premiership.
It easily fit her reputation among liberals as a callous, cold-hearted villain. To communities riven by unemployment, she must have seemed like one, too. But it would be altogether wrong to suggest that the only people mourning Thatcher today are Tory plutocrats. Thatcher's decade of supply-side economics made a lot of people rich, and not just the 1 percent.
The economy boomed under Thatcherism, sparking a rise in house prices and productivity that served to create a real, wealthy middle class. Without Thatcherism's program of deregulation and tax reform, the City of London would never have become a titan of the financial world.
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