Margaret Thatcher

[Park Life 70]

America imported tyres worth $1.3 billion from China between January and the end of July this year. Under the terms of China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, countries have the right to impose tariffs in response to a “surge in imports” from China. But there is always scope for dispute about what constitutes enough of an export surge to justify the use of tariffs, and China has already notified the WTO of its intention to file a case against America. It has also said that it is considering the imposition of retaliatory tariffs on American exports of car parts and chicken meat.

 

Economist.

Obama has been thinking the same as me. Was going to put a 35% tax on imports of tyres, got talked out of it.

 

 

China Charges Protectionism in Call for Solar Panel Tariffs

Published: October 21, 2011

 

 

HONG KONG — The Chinese government Friday condemned a demand by the American solar panel industry for steep tariffs on solar panels shipped to the United States from China.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all

Edited May 12, 2012 by Park Life

[Christmas Tree 4003]

Don't agree with the last bit, and as I said there are examples of where incentives for foreign investment have worked very well in this country. There just isn't the will to do it because governments now leave things completely to the market. China hadn't opened its doors in 81 or 91 when Nissan opened and now its the most efficient car plant un Europe. China has had an huge effect for a decade no doubt, but the 25 years before that were a massive missed oppurtunity in this country.

 

Nissan came here mainly as they had to be based in Europe to meet manufacturing criteria. Luckily we also had a government that was prepared to grease a few palms and make it worth their while.

 

However doing a few deals to tempt inward investment is peanuts compared to subsidising huge nationalised industries that were only heading one way in the competitive stakes.

 

With regard to the mining industry you also have to factor in the discovery and boom time of North sea gas which was also making coal more redundant to industry and consumers.

 

I think Thatcher can rightly be compared to a vet putting a dying animal (nationalised manufacturing) out of it's misery.

 

Difference as Ewark points out is that instead of an injection she used a brick.

 

Not sure the unions would ever have accepted anything other than their way though.

[Park Life 70]

London is the 2nd most competitive city on earth.

[Park Life 70]

Nissan came here mainly as they had to be based in Europe to meet manufacturing criteria. Luckily we also had a government that was prepared to grease a few palms and make it worth their while.

 

However doing a few deals to tempt inward investment is peanuts compared to subsidising huge nationalised industries that were only heading one way in the competitive stakes.

 

With regard to the mining industry you also have to factor in the discovery and boom time of North sea gas which was also making coal more redundant to industry and consumers.

 

I think Thatcher can rightly be compared to a vet putting a dying animal (nationalised manufacturing) out of it's misery.

 

Difference as Ewark points out is that instead of an injection she used a brick.

 

Not sure the unions would ever have accepted anything other than their way though.

 

It was an ideological war and very little to do with what was best for Britain. As were all the sell offs and huge windfall projects handed over to private hands all of which have consequently failed and cost the taxpayer heavily.

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

It's utter bollocks that Thatcher had to shut down the mines anyway, there is a huge demand for mine-work in the UK, as evidenced by the many covert mines that exist up and down the country. Just down the road from me in the park people have burrowed into the sand pit and a small community live there quite comfortably on the profits they make from walnuts. If that was left to a multinational corporation they'd sub-contract the work out to chinese robots and quadruple the profits, to the detriment of the local community.

Edited May 12, 2012 by Kevin S. Assilleekunt

[PaddockLad 14831]

Nissan came here mainly as they had to be based in Europe to meet manufacturing criteria. Luckily we also had a government that was prepared to grease a few palms and make it worth their while.

 

However doing a few deals to tempt inward investment is peanuts compared to subsidising huge nationalised industries that were only heading one way in the competitive stakes.

 

With regard to the mining industry you also have to factor in the discovery and boom time of North sea gas which was also making coal more redundant to industry and consumers.

 

I think Thatcher can rightly be compared to a vet putting a dying animal (nationalised manufacturing) out of it's misery.

 

Difference as Ewark points out is that instead of an injection she used a brick.

 

Not sure the unions would ever have accepted anything other than their way though.

 

I haven't suggested that the mines shouldve been kept open....I'm making the point that the people who worked in them shouldnt have been left to rot. What did the Tories do for them?...next to fuck all as an act of revenge for their trade union causing a shower of shit for the previous 20 years.The same union which had been politicised by "extreamist" leaders...Arthur Scargill started the 80s miners strike with a large union and a small house and ended it with a small union and a large house.. Fair enough and hey- if you dont have to live in Barnsley or Easington who gives a fuck?...they've reaped what they sowed 30 years ago and theyve only got themselves to blame. Most folks wouldve gladly accepted a hand up rather than a hand out back then but its a different story now.

[Christmas Tree 4003]

I haven't suggested that the mines shouldve been kept open....I'm making the point that the people who worked in them shouldnt have been left to rot. What did the Tories do for them?...next to fuck all as an act of revenge for their trade union causing a shower of shit for the previous 20 years.The same union which had been politicised by "extreamist" leaders...Arthur Scargill started the 80s miners strike with a large union and a small house and ended it with a small union and a large house.. Fair enough and hey- if you dont have to live in Barnsley or Easington who gives a fuck?...they've reaped what they sowed 30 years ago and theyve only got themselves to blame. Most folks wouldve gladly accepted a hand up rather than a hand out back then but its a different story now.

 

I suppose your / my view varies on where you live. I live in Boldon (a large pit community) that did very well from the Tories because the same year of the strikes, the tories signed the deal to open the nissan plant a couple of miles away. With that came many, many support companies along with a quite large and successful business park.

 

Its fair to say that the local area was transformed from a dirty pit village to a very successful thriving community.

 

I appreciate that of course there will be towns where industry has ceased and nothings replaced them, but I also appreciate that theres not always a lot government can do. There are towns up and down the country that have thrived and died since the industrial revolution . You just have to look at the the old cotton towns of the North West.

 

I think overall its too simplistic simply to say nasty Tories, particularly when the evidence all around me growing up was quite the opposite. (Im sure we wont agree but it may help you see where my opinion comes from).

[Gemmill 35321]

Impossible to find the proper thread on a phone, but how fucking ropey is this government man?

 

Hunt is in front of Leveson today trying to pretend he isn't pals with the Murdochs.

 

Texted James Murdoch to congratulate him on the day they got the bid through Brussels.

 

Then texts Osborne to say how he is "seriously worried we are going to screw this up" following Vince Cables comments about going to war with the Murdochs.

 

The reply he gets from Osborne is "I hope you like the solution." The solution being that they'd put Hunt in charge of ushering the deal through.

 

Dodgy from top to bottom.

[Ayatollah Hermione 12866]

Impossible to find the proper thread on a phone, but how fucking ropey is this government man?

 

Hunt is in front of Leveson today trying to pretend he isn't pals with the Murdochs.

 

Texted James Murdoch to congratulate him on the day they got the bid through Brussels.

 

Then texts Osborne to say how he is "seriously worried we are going to screw this up" following Vince Cables comments about going to war with the Murdochs.

 

The reply he gets from Osborne is "I hope you like the solution." The solution being that they'd put Hunt in charge of ushering the deal through.

 

Dodgy from top to bottom.

 

"Look over there, it's the OLYMPICS!" says Government as it runs away.

[Gemmill 35321]

12.46: Hunt to Murdoch: Sorry to miss your call. Am on my mobile now. Jeremy

 

12.52: Murdoch to Hunt: Have to run into next thing. Are you free anything after 2.15? I can shuffle after this

 

12.55: Hunt to Murdoch: How about 4?

 

Murdoch to Hunt: Done.

 

12.57: Hunt to Murdoch: Great and contrats on Brussels, just Ofcom to go!

 

16.10: Hunt to Coulson: Could we chat abvout this? Am seriously worried Vince will do real damage to coaltion with his comments …

 

16.08: Hunt to Osborne: Cld we chat about Murdoch Sky bid? Am seriously worried we are going to screw this up.

 

16.08: Hunt to Osborne: Just been called by James M. His lawyers are meeting now & saying it calls ino question legitmach of whole process form beginning 'acute bias' etc

 

16.58 Osborne to Hunt: I hope you like the solution!

[LoveTheBobby 1]

All through this Hunt has appeared with his stupid sickening fucking grin every time you see him - a grin you'd wear if you'd ACHIEVED something !

 

Bordering on the semi-vacant Abramovich 'can I lick glisteny end of it Daddy, can I ?' kind of grin .

[Gemmill 35321]

Bordering on the semi-vacant Abramovich 'can I lick glisteny end of it Daddy, can I ?' kind of grin .

 

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

The fact that he feels he might be able to get away without resigning shows what a bunch of cunts* this government is. Dave himself has been involved in several scandals. He has surrounded himself with his Bullingdon buddies and media pals.

 

*couldn't think of anything more articulate than that within a minute

[BalarnyStone 0]

I think it's sad that people feel the need to demonise a senile old women who, whether they can see it or not, did a hell of a lot more for the social mobility and job prospects for the kids of working class people like my own parents than Callaghan ever could have, given the same economic conditions she inherited. I'm living proof of what a merit based education system and a flexible customer oriented economy that her policies created, can make of people who were otherwise destined by accident of birth for a job as a truck driver and a life in a council house.

 

Thanks to Thatcher, I got a full grant to uni, I now own my own house, and my employment is shock horror, in high tech manufacturing. I can still be at ease in a social club, but I would not baulk at a night of culture either. I feel no sense of being trapped in any class, but it didn't turn me into a Boyce or Hyacynth type, and while I may never own a Rolls Royce, I'm not so insecure I would feel jealous of someone who does, whether that's through graft or birth

 

I don't see myself as an I'm alright jack either, I just don't want other people's success to be reliant on me paying for it (unless it is through sensible programmes like giving grants to kids who show actual promise, not just because someone decides everybody has a 'right' to go to uni, no matter what the course or the need of the economy). Your sense of social responsibility only goes so far though when you even see members of your own family earning 'wages' in the form of government handouts, and getting free 'council' houses simply for being stupid enough to get pregnant with absolutely no means of supporting the baby, in addition to what they get free from you and yours because unlike the government, they justifiably are your problem to take care of. You tend to look at your own PAYE contributions to the fairer, caring society, a little differently then.

 

I'm not averse to the government trying to ensure everybody has a nice house and a good prospect of a job and the best start in life, but fuck me I'm not daft enough to want the economy to be ruined in the course of paying for it. When you realise how much is actually spent on just the welfare budget these days, even as a proportion of total tax, never mind absolute numbers or pounds per head of population, just to get the amazing results it does even now, you can't do anything but cringe, and wonder what the hell Ed Miliband could actually do with such a dysfunctional edifice, if we are to believe he would give it more than just lip service if he ever got in. Deckhairs and shuffling comes to mind.

 

I don't curse Thatcher and pine for the era of the mines or the ship yards, because I know that it was horrible horrible work. It only seemed good at the time because, what a lot of people seem to forget, these communities sprang up along previously green river banks like Scotswood because people migrated from even shittier existences out in the country, or the slums, or the workhouse, to the relatively well paid and good conditions in the yards or the mines. But there simply was no mass employment 20th century replacement for these sorts of industries that Thatcher could have turned to once the needs of the country had outgrown them; it's not by accident that the economies of China et al are following this exact same path from the field to the mine/yard/factory to the internet/service/added value economy. Callaghan had no better model outside of managed decline, that's for sure.

 

No doubt people bemoaned the leaders of those times aswell as they bulldozed cottages to build factories, but they ushered in all sorts of economic and social advances by breaking balls and making hard decisions. The society of those times didn't exist in aspic, it was a product of change, and it was always going to change again. Just because Thatcher had the balls to get things moving and get this country out of a terrible malaise, she gets unfairly blamed for a lot of the bad shit in life nowadays that was simply inevitable if any other western country on the planet is to go by. Neighbourlyness, fairness, politeness, community spirit, basic morality, whatever, all of these have been eroded by other fundamental changes in people that were patently not affected by whether the politics of their day was left or right.

 

And when Thatcher said, no such thing as society, like it or not, what she was trying to do was get people to get back to relying on the family and the real community as their support network and inspiration, rather than relying on some faceless DSS bureaucrat to get you a job or a house. But it was always going to be pie in the sky pointless stuff, whether it was her saying it or Callaghan. Just like it's pie in the sky nowadays to hope that a speech by Blair or Cameron could somehow stop the rise of the charver underclass or the culture of celebrity. Certain things in life are inevitable, in politics what counts is what kind of start you can give the next generation, and without doing it by crippling the current one, as it seems was Brown's model. A guaranteed place in a factory is not it.

 

The idea that things would actually have gone better for the country if Callaghan had won, is simply laughable. At worst, he could have had the country limp on for another few years before there was anarchy (the country was literally bust, not just technically as we are now). The country was producing shit, and paying a high premium for it. At best, well, you only have to look at the 70s archive material on the box recently to see what was classed as good times back then.

 

There's a reason why Britain of the 70s is the chosen decade of mockery by the likes of Top Gear and anyone else who actually remembers them. Nobody can look at what union reps at the likes of BL were claiming about 'the management' during one of their many wildcat strikes, and not have their jaw drop in amazement at the short sighted stupidity of it all. Nobody is to blame for the demise of their industry but themselves. Less so for the shipyards and coal mines, which nonetheless were riven by militantism, but jesus christ, the writing was on the wall for fucks sake. Adapt or die. That's not Conservatism, it's evolution. It's served the human race alright so far, and 70s socialism was certainly not going to offer anything better.

 

Some of the things the nissan workforce have done to become the most efficient plant in Europe, would have had those 'working class' blokes wanting to kill them. What Nissan has done is Thatcher through and through. If you're daft enough to ever believe Thatcher didn't want any industry in this country, then, well, you are actually just daft. She wanted it, she just wanted it to work, be productive, be competitive, and be flexible. She didn't want British production to be hallmarked by shit basically, which in the 70s it was. Some of the stories you read about what things British designers of the 70s had actually pioneered and wanted to make here, only to see some asshat of a union rep kybosh it, and then have it get taken up by the likes of Toshiba, well it just makes me insane.

 

I feel sympathy for the lass a few pages back whose bus driver dad had the breakdown, but it's harsh to blame Thatcher - by the 80s bus deregulation was simply a necessity or services would have become unsustainable due to an ever increasing cost base. In the 70s nationalised British Leyland built a brand new factory in Workington which was basically the first production line for a bus. The intention was to cheaply renew all the post war bus fleets around the country, which by then were all nationalised, thus providing cheap services in the UK, and make a healthy profit off of exports.

 

If this had been a success, we could have maybe avoided the first few disastrous years of privatisation by having no deregulation at all. But no, the factory never even got close to half capacity due to militancy. And you could count the export orders on one hand, such was the quality compared to products being built by the likes of Mercedes-Benz. Into the 90s they had to blackmail London Transport into giving them a whole year's worth of orders to make the factory look a little less elephant shaped and white coloured, which they then proceeded to fail to fulfil anyway.

 

Within a decade, all those short sighted self-interested assholes were working for Volvo, who unsurprisingly shut the plant and transferred production to another UK plant that was never nationalised, and thus had adapted (anyone who thinks Britain only has Nissan and Vauxhall as volume automotive manufacturers today are misinformed). Have a guess who is one of the most succesful bus builders in the country still, today? It's not fucking Leyland. Not British anyway, because funnily enough, an Indian company that BL invested in the 50s, Ashok Leyland, is now a major global bus builder. Off the back of growth kick started by the British designs that mulletted wankers in denim couldn't be bothered to build over here unless their endless demands were met.

 

Similar balls ups occurred in British Rail, people don't know how lucky they are that thanks to Thatcher we managed to come out of the disasterous 70s with foreign companies still willing to buy (rescue) our native train manufacturers, even though unlike cars/buses it was basically a captive market for them. Similar tales of idiocy can be found in the other sectors Thatcher supposedly destroyed, if you care to look beyond the soundbites. But these are the sort of facts of history that get ignored when people are going on their demonic Thatcher rants. But it was Callaghan/Wilson that presided over this sort of mess, while the bosses tore their hair out (those of them that still retained some sort of commercial perspective - by this time, doing a shit job and working for your own self-interest was getting so ingrained, it was even becoming part of the management culture)

 

There's a lot of things I like about being Geordie, but when it comes to self-indulgent delusional whinging through massively rose tinted specs, then I think we even out-do scousers when it comes to Thatcher. The idea of celebrating her death is just pathetic really. Anyone who seriously does that when she does peg out needs to have a long hard look at their own lives, and question whether they really were held back by her, or something else entirely outside of her control or even influence.

[dbsweeney 0]

It's the woirship of profit above all else thats become so prevalent in the last 30 years and for which Thatcher bears a lot of the "blame" that is the main problem in the world.

 

So fucking true, and the deregulation and control over government it causes, too.

[ewerk 26738]

It's like a well-spoken CT.

[Monkeys Fist 39088]

Can we please agree that the next post in here is to say - " Yes Gemmill".

Keep getting my hopes up.

[Kid Dynamite 6065]

No one going to say it then?

[trophyshy 6441]

[Monkeys Fist 39088]

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

that gif needs sound

[BalarnyStone 0]

See, in my head last night, that post was 3 paragraphs. Caffiene is clearly not a cure for insomnia.....

[The Fish 9135]

See, in my head last night, that post was 3 paragraphs. Caffiene is clearly not a cure for insomnia.....

nor loony conservative beliefs

 

Trickle down economics? Honestly

Edited June 1, 2012 by The Fish

[Monkeys Fist 39088]

** Thatcher recovering from operation **

Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher is recovering in hospital after having a growth removed from her bladder.

< http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20820887 >

 

Buggrit!

[luckyluke 1]

Bastard, thought she'd snuffed it.