We are paying a heavy price for the damage Thatcher did

The Herald Scotland

23-07-2025

The current crisis has been a long time in the making and many of the recent news items confirm that grim impression.
Just look at the state of our former public utilities still in private hands with money pouring out to pay handsome dividends to investors and hefty bonuses to top management.
Over and above, the right to buy council houses has depleted the building stock of the country to such an extent that homelessness is very much on the increase.
And the treatment of miners at Orgreave at the hands of the police with their riot gear and their cavalry of mounted policemen was brutal in the extreme as we have been reminded today by footage ("There is a strain of delinquency at the heart of our [[pub]]lic bodies", The Herald, July 22).
The Tory government of the day made sure that plentiful overtime pay was available to the police forces to crack down on demonstrations by striking miners, determined to exact retribution for the humiliation experienced by Heath's government at the hands of the miners.
Margaret Thatcher's aim was to break the power of that particular group of workers to make sure the unions would be crippled and contained. We are now suffering the long-term consequences of Thatcher's pigeons transformed into vultures coming home to roost.
A week used to be a long time in politics but the folk memory of the depredation wreaked on the political consensus which had previously served the country well until the advent of the puritanical monetarists has been branded deep into the psyche of the nation – so much so that the loss of trust in politicians can be traced to the time when attacks upon unions, privatisation and the introduction of competition into public services were the canaries in the coalmine.
We are paying a harsh price for falling for the blandishments of Sid and his promises of easy money. Is there any way back from the ruin so inflicted upon the bulk of the UK's population?
Denis Bruce, Bishopbriggs.
• Among the usual diet of vituperation and personal animus, Kevin McKenna ("There is a strain of delinquency at the heart of our public bodies", The Herald, July 22) throws in some remarks on miners' redundancy packages which require some comment.
No miner got 'a few hundred grand'; they got on average less than £30,000, and when the pits closed few alternative jobs were available for them or their children. The last four pits in east Ayrshire closed within a few years of each other at the same time as many local factories, and the consequences for the local [[Ayr]]shire economy was dire.
Labour had refused to support the miners, and the party's Ayrshire MPs were handed their jotters as well.
GR Weir, Ochiltree.
Read more letters
Nationalisation move that worked
Surely there can be no clearer example of the marginalisation of Scotland in the UK than the current media furore over the massive failure of private English water companies? Hardly once, over countless UK news interviews, was Scottish Water even mentioned. Unquestionably, the major central issue to raise with English politicians should be the very successful existence of nationalised water in Scotland. Despite covering one-third of the area of the whole of Britain, we have nothing like the problems encountered south of the Border. And Scots pay less than the English in water bills.
Nationalised Scottish Water was secured through a referendum run by Labour-run Strathclyde Regional Council in March 1994. On a 71% turnout, an absolutely massive 97% – 1.28 million voters – supported retained public ownership of Scottish Water. Could we even imagine the so-called Labour Party doing this today? The London-run UK Labour Party explicitly opposes water nationalisation in England, preferring to continue Margaret Thatcher's privatisation policy, with attractive returns for private shareholders.
Councillor Tom Johnston (SNP), Cumbernauld.
Nuclear does not make sense
Ian Mitchell (Letters, July 22) spouts the usual pro-nuclear propaganda of abundant, cheap, clean energy.
He rubbishes "water and windmill" generation as being left behind at the Industrial Revolution but has obviously never heard of Norway, which generates 85% of its power by hydro-electric, or the Netherlands, which currently generates 30% by wind power with an expectation for this to rise to 70% by 2030. He talks of the toxicity of waste disposal from battery farms but seems unaware of the problems of disposal of the lethal waste from nuclear generation which has to be stored for thousands of years.
The economics of nuclear power simply do not add up: huge set-up costs, a relatively short working life, massive waste disposal costs and most of all, decommissioning costs.
We only have to look as far as Dounreay, which after a working life of less than 50 years was closed in 1994 and where the decommissioning will not be complete until the 2070s, some 80 years after it last generated anything apart from expense.
David Hay, Minard.
Going green means going poor
Stan Grodynski (Letters, July 22) joins Stephen Flynn in being highly selective in defence of SNP policies. The claim that the UK Parliament has invested "tens of billions of pounds in English CCS projects" masks the fact that John Swinney continues to withhold planning requested by SSE to build a 900MW power station at Peterhead. This project would be a major customer of the Acorn project, yet no explanation for the delay is forthcoming from Bute House.
Had Mr Grodynski read my letter of July 14 he would have recognised that zonal pricing is a myth to mask the problem that wind output is 50% too expensive for Scottish consumers yet the SNP refuses to campaign for a unit cut to wind prices or eliminating the 25% green levy to further reduce electricity prices.
Stephen Flynn says that political parties which refuse to support renewable energy plans will leave Aberdeen looking like Detroit without reference to the fact that 200 job cuts a week in the oil and gas sector over the next five years, arising from the lack of [[SNP]] support for the industry, will turn Scotland from the Tay to the Moray Firth into a desert from which the area will never recover.
The basic problem facing the Scottish economy is that renewable electricity at 25.6p/unit is too expensive compared with gas (6.3p/unit).
Until wind energy can match that of gas then the impact on the cost of living for Scottish households will not be solved. Going green under current policies means going poor, especially when inefficient wind turbines require battery back-up, pump storage back-up and 25GW of hydrogen-fuelled gas turbine plant. Can Mr Flynn provide an estimate of the costs of these triple back-up systems which the SNP never adds to the costs of wind output?
Ian Moir, Castle Douglas.
How to stop the boats
There has been yet more rhetoric from this disastrous Labour Government about stemming the numbers of illegal, mainly young men, arriving on boats from France.
It says it is going to smash the gangs by targeting the criminal networks and individuals who supply the inflatables and the infrastructure. This is in addition to a recent joint announcement with the French President committing to a "one in, one out" agreement, whatever that's supposed to mean.
Everyone is aware that none of these initiatives will make any meaningful difference to the numbers arriving.
One thing and one thing only will stop this tragic exploitation of desperate people willing to pay to come here illegally and that is if they know that if they successfully land here they will be immediately put on a boat and returned from whence they embarked.
Until this simple truism is accepted and acted upon, nothing will change.
James Martin, Bearsden.
What should the Government do to crack down on illegal immigration? (Image: PA)
Knickers to all that
The Scottish Greens Internal Elections Officer has verified that the count was conducted using iterative rounds of STV, specifically the Weighted Inclusive Gregory method, and was done as a bottom-up process ("Greens insist votes for MSP lists 'counted correctly'", [[The Herald]], July 22).
In Romola, George Eliot put it more demurely than I might have with her "thou hast got thy legs into twisted hose".
David Miller, Milngavie.
Changing room questions
Of all the issues aired about the presence of a biologically male doctor in a nurses' changing room in a Kirkcaldy hospital, one seems to have been overlooked. Why was Dr Upton not using a changing room for doctors? Were other doctors using the nurses' changing room? If so, we haven't heard about them. If not, why was he the exception?
Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh.