Despite all the doom and gloom, some good news at least. According to Robert Peston, the events of the last few days and the impending buy-in by the government in to most of our major high Street banks which will happen tomorrow, is the death of Thatcherism.
"I've also been musing on the historic significance of tonight's events, and I think it can perhaps be seen as the death of Thatcherism, or at least of an important strand of the dominant ideology of the 1980s and 1990s.
It was Margaret Thatcher who in a series of bold reforms from 1979 onwards gave the City the freedom to trade in everything and anything.
She removed restrictive practices, she encouraged the free flow of capital to and from anywhere in the world, she created the notion of the City as the Great British Success.
For the liberalisation of the City to end with a quartet of our biggest and proudest banks being forced to put out the begging bowl to Government, well that is a moment in economic history - which may well, ultimately, be as significant as the nationalisations of the 1940s and the privatisations of the 1980s."
As someone who learnt to hate just about everything Margaret Thatcher stood for as a child and then as a teenager, I cannot help but see it as a good thing that this is the end of Thatcherism, I await torrents of abuse and people reminding me of the winter of discontent.
4 comments:
The problem is that 1978 was thirty years ago.
The best way to cure Britain of it's socialisation fetish is to let it run its full course so that people can experience it first hand.
Actually it was Gordon Brown who decided it was a great idea to build an economy on debt and decided to take away the responsibility for watching over banks from the Bank of England.
I've come to the conclusion that over the past week you have gone barmy. Why are you a member of the Lib Dems? Does the SWP have no Norfolk branch?
Odd - as a teenager I learnt to hate left wing politics because of the mess it left Margaret Thatcher to clean up.
There is no doubt that she saved the country.
You shouldn't fall for all the spin about this being a failure of capitalism. Its been a failure of regulation and government. The British version has its roots in the actions of Gordon Brown ( there's loads of evidence of this if you look beyond the cheer leading BBC/Guardian sources ), the American in the actions of Bill Clinton's democrats and their insistence on sub-prime mortgages being sold and Mr Greenspan.
If this lesson isn't learnt then we are doomed to repeat the lessons of the 70's and 80's.
The signs are already there with Labour telling the newly Nationalised banks what and how much they should lend.
What the left really hated about Mrs T was that she was right.
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