Thatcher’s destruction of British industry was so damaging that even the CBI has now attacked it. If Boris Johnson really wants a ‘levelling-up’ economy, only unprecedented state investment can make it happen.

25 comments

  2. The Torries don’t invest. It’s austerity till our country implodes under its own weight

    Our current trajectory is not sustainable

  4. Some folks still think Thatch was good for Britain. She did so much damage and destruction in office and her policies lingered for generations after. Even today you have Tory MPs who think she did some good. No.

  5. I can’t bring myself to mourn the death of the coal industry. A lot more should have been done to help the mining towns to get through it, but good riddance to the industry itself.

  7. Investment is spending *with a reasonable chance of an economic return*. Find opportunities with a reasonable chance of return and we can and should invest in them.

    But too often people just support any spending in the vague hope it will magically revolutionise an area.

    Industry of the type people miss from the 1950s is a lost cause. You can’t compete with Chinese labour prices. And the Chinese increasingly can’t compete with Vietnamese, Indonesian and Myanmarian prices. So stop chasing those pipe dreams, wake up and work out what we need to do for a service economy.

    Hint: education, entrepreneurship, trade, healthcare especially in mental health, redistribution of wealth, lower cost of living. All the things we’ve spent over a decade doing the opposite of.

  8. Her biggest mistake was the handling of oil. Had it been invested wisely, Scotland could’ve been like Norway is today with a gigantic self sustaining sovereign wealth fund. Pissed it away on tax breaks.

  9. Fascism always includes a vague promise of future emancipation where the downtrodden in-group willl be restored to it’s former glory. ‘Levelling up’ has simply replaced the ‘sunlit uplands’ of Brexit, and is equally plausible. Anyone who believes the Tories want to increase economic equality has their head right up their arse. It is central to Tory ideology that the poor and disadvantaged be kept in a permanent state of angry desperation.

  10. Johnson isn’t interested in ‘levelling up’ or investment, he’s only interested in helping chums, and himself, nick the last bits of lead off the roof while the chance is there. Lord Stockton (aka Harold Macmillan) was spot on about these guys back in the 80s.

  11. I see they are pushing hard in the electric vehicle front. Maybe Tesla will open a Giga factory, British Volt, Nissan expansion, Rivian…

    However, they did the same with the semiconductor industry in the 90s, and then stopped all support, and now it is a shell of what it used to be.

  12. Maybe we can finally do away with the ridiculous notion that the Tories are good with the economy.

  14. I’m interested to know what the end point of levelling up looks like. It seems very unlikely to be the return of mass employers like shipyards, steelworks and so on, with steady well paid jobs. It might improve working conditions with better contracts elsewhere, but that seems both superficial and not particularly “Conservative”.

    Is it about tarting up town centres? It could work, a bit, but the structural issues relating to rents and taxes is barely being addressed. And adding cultural destinations to make town centres more is a stretch unless wages rise to support it.

    And that’s without even considering the gerrymandered con of the Future Towns Fund.

    (Edited, employers)

  15. I fucking hate Thatcher with the passion that only those of us grew up under her can share.

    But this is fucking stupid Corbynite shite.

    State investment must fall within fair state aid rules agreed with the EU and of course all WTO countries.

    State aid is a useful tool and underused by the UK govt.

    But the absolute ignorance of Corbyn et al when talking about this and many other issues has what helped result in Brexit.

    Which has, as predicted by anyone who had basic knowledge, left the UK economy on the back foot.

    Now those exact same people are proposing that the UK damage the economy hugely in order to recover from the damage that they helped to inflict in the first place.

    The tories and Brexiteers had no better ally than Corbyn and his sycophants. And now the idiots on the far left are calling for the UK to do things which will make things even worse.

    It’s amazing to see. They still haven’t done five minutes on google.

    Since 2016.

    Author is a member of Momentum.

    Nuff said. They organised the biggest Tory victory since the 1930s.

    Edit: totally didn’t expect to be downvoted by people who can’t spend five minutes on google.

    This is Corbyn’s legacy. Well, that and normalised jew hate, of course.

    I wish that people would oppose the tories and support minorities and workers in the modern world. But Corbyn did away with that as best he could.

    Have to admit: he was quite effective. Moreso than Johnson and Rees-Mogg, actually. Corbyn dismantled the opposition very very efficiently. The tories are gonna be rampant for a generation.

    Well done, lads. Well. Fucking. Done.

  17. The deregulated financial sector gorged on international banking. Investment in the UK itself wasn’t profitable enough.
    Quick money, short termism, asset stripping were all part of free market monetarist capitalism.
    Tories don’t do care. Children and the sick and elderly don’t make profits.

    In the 60’s the Tory pillars of the community were all about the Rotary club and the league of friends of the local hospital. They were proud of their towns and bosses and business owners only earned 10-15 times that of the workers. They had a detached house, a nicer car and perhaps s foreign holiday.

    Thatcher turned all that into money grubbing. Privatised firms in competition were supposed to drive prices down etc.

    Wonderful Thatcher! 15% interest rates and 4 million unemployed. Every state asset sold off to foreign governments and crooks. People will look back and compare her devastation to that of
    WW2 as one of the bleakest periods in UK history.

    Boris Brexit corrupt Tories are starting another one.

  18. Can someone point me towards a good source of information on what she did exactly. I’m not from the UK and to young to be around for her.

  20. Where exactly does the CBI say that?

    Can anyone see any quotes or references supporting the claim in the title?

  22. If even private investment is not remotely attractive, why piss public money up the wall? The bottom line is there is a new global manufacturing base, not to mention all of the millions of trained people who work in them, oh and did I mention it’s cheap? So cheap that any attempt to replicate it in a fully developed country would simply be undercut by the existing foreign one.

    It’s gone and now China, having lifted itself up is looking to Africa to be the new source of cheap real estate and labour to replace those who no longer want to work 6 days a week on a production line as their service sector fully kicks in.

  23. The UK economy is close to collapse. Successive Conservative government have engineered a situation over the last decade where outside forces are almost fatal to the UK rather than merely harmful, and they aren’t finished yet.

    Another major global problem will wipe us out.

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