Thatcher; Cause or Effect?

What I find sad is that, to a degree, people are right to blame Labour for not tackling adequately the UK economic failings back in the ’60s and ’70s.

However I would be more specific and point the finger principally at Jim Callaghan who during Wilson’s Government initially proved himself to be the most incompetent Chancellor and then pandered to the Unions to such a degree that in Cabinet he led the destruction of the efforts by Barbara Castle (no right winger by any imagination) from introducing her ‘In Place of Strife’ Bill back in 1968. He was also one of the most ineffective, if not the most, incompetent Prime Ministers in my lifetime whilst allowing the extreme Left to entrench itself when clearly some reform was needed but he had made his bed 10 years earlier and by then the bed bugs were biting.

To this day I find it incredulous that Labour put themselves in that position but they made their choice and paid the penalty in 1979 after Callaghan dithered in ’78, (in much the same way Brown did 31 years later), and exposed Labour to the horrendous images conjoured up in the so called ‘Winter of Discontent’. But then the hard Left, as with the hard Right, have always been reluctant to accept any argument or learn any lessons from their political opponents.

Between times the Conservatives, under Heath, misjudged the attitude of the public to the Miners and the three day week (which meant, strange as it may seem, that I actually earnt more then as an employee of BR). That respect for Miners was abused and eventually lost totally under Scargill who must hold a very large personal responsibility for the demise in Union power generally as well as the virtual extinction of our Coal mining Industry regardless of whether you think that was or is a good or bad thing. If Howe was sent into bat without a bat Scargill arrogantly and stupidly batted without helmet, pads and box with inevitable results.

There is a reasonable case to be put forward that it was actually the excesses of the Left and the act of being a ‘fellow traveller’ by the likes of Callaghan that really moved the political centre and that Thatcher was not cause but effect.