Latest news with #Thatcherism
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Labour has wiped out Thatcher's legacy
The Thatcherite dream finally died this month. Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in office had a long afterlife, perhaps longer than that of any prime minister other than Clement Attlee. She reimagined both her own party and indeed that of her Labour opponents. There would have been no Blairite interregnum in the socialist party's relentless 'egalitarianism before all else' philosophy without her. Even more significantly, Mrs Thatcher transformed British society – at least for a while. But 35 years after leaving Downing Street for the last time, Thatcherism has finally expired. The Iron Lady's legacy has not managed to survive the vicissitudes of Keir Starmer's Government. With the renationalisation of South Western Railway as the next step towards the full state ownership of Britain's railways, that moment has come to an end. Rail privatisation, only enacted in 1993 when John Major was prime minister and implemented amid the last gasps of 18 years of Tory rule, was a late flowering of the valiant attempt to roll back the frontiers of the state. Its implementation was bodged and the infrastructure soon fell back into public ownership in 2002. The privatisation programme started slowly in Mrs Thatcher's first term with various sell-offs, most notably the flotation of 51pc of British Aerospace in 1981. It really took off and grabbed the public imagination with the float of British Telecom in 1984. Millions of people on ordinary incomes caught the bug for investing in shares and these sales were hugely oversubscribed. Privatisation was not just an attempt to inject dynamism into the British economy, although it undoubtedly achieved this. Thatcherism has been denounced by the Left as an attempt to transform the very ethos of the UK, to dismantle the collectivist assumptions that had taken hold since the Second World War. They pillory Mrs Thatcher for declaring that there is no such thing as society (she never said it) and that we owe our fellow citizens nothing in terms of social solidarity (she did not believe that either). The Left are wrong in this caricature, but they are right to say that Thatcherism was an attempt to fundamentally change our country's character. And privatisation – alongside council house sales – was a cornerstone of this mission. At the 1985 Tory party conference Mrs Thatcher declared that she hoped a day would come 'where owning shares is as common as having a car'. She saw that by spreading the benefits of ownership, both of people's homes but also of the country's assets, Britain could become an entrepreneurial society; a country where bosses and workers saw themselves as in conflict could become one where all strived for affluence. In short, Mrs Thatcher hoped Britain would have an American future, where the accumulation of wealth was seen as a virtue, not a sin. She believed that once people have a proprietorial stake in the country – be that via owning their council house or possessing a few hundred shares in BP or British Steel – old class antagonisms would over time wither away. The Left saw these privatisations as a bribe; just as council house sales were discounted, shares were deliberately underpriced so the public could make a quick buck. And they are right in this analysis, but it was not an electoral bung but rather a strategy to change public attitudes. Perhaps the apotheosis of this was the 1986 'Tell Sid' advertising campaign for the sale of British Gas. Its message was unapologetic: these flotations are for everyone. And it worked, those owning shares directly rose from around three million people in 1979, or around 7pc of adults, to over 12 million, or nearly a quarter of adults, when Mrs Thatcher left office. This was further augmented by the big demutualisations of the late 1990s – Abbey National in 1989, Northern Rock in 1997 and Standard Life in 2006. This trend has reversed. The proportion of UK-listed shares directly owned by UK-resident individuals was 10.8pc at the end of 2022, down from 12pc just two years earlier. Today 57.7pc of UK shares by value are owned by overseas investors, a record high. If you go back to the 1960s, those figures are reversed with 54pc of shares owned by British individuals. This had fallen to 28pc by 1981. Mrs Thatcher did not reverse the overall trend in a declining percentage of the stock market being directly owned by individuals, but did vastly increase the number of people owning those shares. The long-term decline is not an entirely negative one. The days when the well-off would buy, say, £10,000 of Marks & Spencer shares and then hold them for 40 years are gone. And that is not a bad thing; pooled investment funds are clearly a far wiser and less risky route for investment for most people than simply buying individual blue chip stocks and holding them for the long term. Additionally, it is inevitable as so many of the privatised and demutualised companies have been taken over, bought by private equity or are no longer with us for other reasons. But more broadly, the agenda of popular capitalism has been reversed. The decline has been long and gradual, but has been vastly accelerated by Starmer's Government. One of its early actions in office was to hugely cut the discount that council tenants receive on buying their home. In London the maximum discount was reduced in November from £136,400 to £16,000. Mrs Thatcher's 1980s dream of making Britain more laissez-faire and more American in attitude is now sadly dead. Labour has deliberately extinguished it. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Labour has wiped out Thatcher's legacy
The Thatcherite dream finally died this month. Margaret Thatcher's 11 years in office had a long afterlife, perhaps longer than that of any prime minister other than Clement Attlee. She reimagined both her own party and indeed that of her Labour opponents. There would have been no Blairite interregnum in the socialist party's relentless 'egalitarianism before all else' philosophy without her. Even more significantly, Mrs Thatcher transformed British society – at least for a while. But 35 years after leaving Downing Street for the last time, Thatcherism has finally expired. The Iron Lady's legacy has not managed to survive the vicissitudes of Keir Starmer's Government. With the renationalisation of South Western Railway as the next step towards the full state ownership of Britain's railways, that moment has come to an end. Rail privatisation, only enacted in 1993 when John Major was prime minister and implemented amid the last gasps of 18 years of Tory rule, was a late flowering of the valiant attempt to roll back the frontiers of the state. Its implementation was bodged and the infrastructure soon fell back into public ownership in 2002. The privatisation programme started slowly in Mrs Thatcher's first term with various sell-offs, most notably the flotation of 51pc of British Aerospace in 1981. It really took off and grabbed the public imagination with the float of British Telecom in 1984. Millions of people on ordinary incomes caught the bug for investing in shares and these sales were hugely oversubscribed. Privatisation was not just an attempt to inject dynamism into the British economy, although it undoubtedly achieved this. Thatcherism has been denounced by the Left as an attempt to transform the very ethos of the UK, to dismantle the collectivist assumptions that had taken hold since the Second World War. They pillory Mrs Thatcher for declaring that there is no such thing as society (she never said it) and that we owe our fellow citizens nothing in terms of social solidarity (she did not believe that either). The Left are wrong in this caricature, but they are right to say that Thatcherism was an attempt to fundamentally change our country's character. And privatisation – alongside council house sales – was a cornerstone of this mission. At the 1985 Tory party conference Mrs Thatcher declared that she hoped a day would come 'where owning shares is as common as having a car'. She saw that by spreading the benefits of ownership, both of people's homes but also of the country's assets, Britain could become an entrepreneurial society; a country where bosses and workers saw themselves as in conflict could become one where all strived for affluence. In short, Mrs Thatcher hoped Britain would have an American future, where the accumulation of wealth was seen as a virtue, not a sin. She believed that once people have a proprietorial stake in the country – be that via owning their council house or possessing a few hundred shares in BP or British Steel – old class antagonisms would over time wither away. The Left saw these privatisations as a bribe; just as council house sales were discounted, shares were deliberately underpriced so the public could make a quick buck. And they are right in this analysis, but it was not an electoral bung but rather a strategy to change public attitudes. Perhaps the apotheosis of this campaign was the 1986 'Tell Sid' advertising campaign for the sale of British Gas. Its message was unapologetic: these flotations are for everyone. And it worked, those owning shares directly rose from around three million people in 1979, or around 7pc of adults, to over 12 million, or nearly a quarter of adults, when Mrs Thatcher left office. This was further augmented by the big demutualisations of the late 1990s – Abbey National in 1989, Northern Rock in 1997 and Standard Life in 2006. This trend has reversed. The proportion of UK-listed shares directly owned by UK-resident individuals was 10.8pc at the end of 2022, down from 12pc just two years earlier. Today 57.7pc of UK shares by value are owned by overseas investors, a record high. If you go back to the 1960s, those figures are reversed with 54pc of shares owned by British individuals. This had fallen to 28pc by 1981. Mrs Thatcher did not reverse the overall trend in a declining percentage of the stock market being directly owned by individuals, but did vastly increase the number of people owning those shares. The long-term decline is not an entirely negative one. The days when the well-off would buy, say, £10,000 of Marks & Spencer shares and then hold them for 40 years are gone. And that is not a bad thing; pooled investment funds are clearly a far wiser and less risky route for investment for most people than simply buying individual blue chip stocks and holding them for the long term. Additionally, it is inevitable as so many of the privatised and demutualised companies have been taken over, bought by private equity or are no longer with us for other reasons. But more broadly, the agenda of popular capitalism has been reversed. The decline has been long and gradual, but has been vastly accelerated by Starmer's Government. One of its early actions in office was to hugely cut the discount that council tenants receive on buying their home. In London the maximum discount was reduced in November from £136,400 to £16,000. Mrs Thatcher's 1980s dream of making Britain more laissez-faire and more American in attitude is now sadly dead. Labour has deliberately extinguished it.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Demonising Thatcher may backfire for Keir
Faced with a new challenge in Reform UK's surging support in the polls, Sir Keir Starmer has turned to an old strategy: attempt to invoke the spirit of the 1980s, and call on tribal Labour loyalties in the fight against Thatcherism. In his speech today, the Prime Minister framed Britain's politics as a two-horse race between Left and Right. Where he differed from his predecessors was in defining this as a choice between Labour and Reform, dismissing the Conservatives as 'sliding into the abyss'. Nigel Farage will surely be delighted; it is a coup for Reform to be described by the Prime Minister as the de facto opposition given its status as outsider. It is this status, also, that seems to have dictated Sir Keir's line of attack. While the Tories can be held to their record, part of Reform's appeal is its lack of one. Mr Farage and his colleagues, having never governed, are untainted by the policy failures of the past 28 years. As such, Sir Keir has attempted to pin upon Reform the mantle of a Tory revival: the old enemy with a new face. All the old warnings were wheeled out. Mr Farage would 'spend billions upon billions upon billions' in 'an exact repeat of what Liz Truss did'. Reform's leader had no understanding of what it was like to grow up 'in a cost of living crisis', and would use 'your family finances … as a gambling chip on his mad experiment'. And while Sir Keir had 'protected those jobs' threatened by US tariffs, Mr Farage would not have. Supporting Reform, in other words, was supporting the pit closures, or their modern equivalents. No doubt the poll tax would have been trotted out had fiscal profligacy not been the theme of the day. The language may well appeal to Labour's base, and it would be unsurprising if jabs over the NHS and other invocations of Left-wing shibboleths follow. The general public may be less perturbed. While Reform has a great deal of work to do before its policies are a serious prospectus for government, observing as much is unlikely to be a killer blow from a man whose time as party leader has been defined by a series of screeching U-turns. A dose of genuine Thatcherism would probably do Britain good, and it is to be hoped that the Tories as well as Reform will embrace this spirit. Despite Sir Keir's jibes, he has done little to shift the country off an unsustainable fiscal course, and raised incentive-sapping taxes that destroy economic activity. By the next election, portraying his opponents as 'Thatcherites' may prove an own goal. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Invoking Thatcher may backfire for Keir
Faced with a new challenge in Reform UK's surging support in the polls, Sir Keir Starmer has turned to an old strategy: attempt to invoke the spirit of the 1980s, and call on tribal Labour loyalties in the fight against Thatcherism. In his speech yesterday, the Prime Minister framed Britain's politics as a two-horse race between Left and Right. Where he differed from his predecessors was in defining this as a choice between Labour and Reform, dismissing the Conservatives as 'sliding into the abyss'. Nigel Farage will surely be delighted; it is a coup for Reform to be described by the Prime Minister as the de facto opposition given its status as outsider. It is this status, also, that seems to have dictated Sir Keir's line of attack. While the Tories can be held to their record, part of Reform's appeal is its lack of one. Mr Farage and his colleagues, having never governed, are untainted by the policy failures of the past 28 years. As such, Sir Keir has attempted to pin upon Reform the mantle of a Tory revival: the old enemy with a new face. All the old warnings were wheeled out. Mr Farage would 'spend billions upon billions upon billions' in ' an exact repeat of what Liz Truss did '. Reform's leader had no understanding of what it was like to grow up 'in a cost of living crisis', and would use 'your family finances … as a gambling chip on his mad experiment'. And while Sir Keir had 'protected those jobs' threatened by US tariffs, Mr Farage would not have. Supporting Reform, in other words, was supporting the pit closures, or their modern equivalents. No doubt the poll tax would have been trotted out had fiscal profligacy not been the theme of the day. The language may well appeal to Labour's base, and it would be unsurprising if jabs over the NHS and other invocations of Left-wing shibboleths follow. The general public may be less perturbed. While Reform has a great deal of work to do before its policies are a serious prospectus for government, observing as much is unlikely to be a killer blow from a man whose time as party leader has been defined by a series of screeching U-turns. A dose of genuine Thatcherism would probably do Britain good, and it is to be hoped that the Tories as well as Reform will embrace this spirit. Despite Sir Keir's jibes, he has done little to shift the country off an unsustainable fiscal course, and raised incentive-sapping taxes that destroy economic activity. By the next election, portraying his opponents as 'Thatcherites' may prove an own goal.
The National
27-05-2025
- Politics
- The National
Reform by-election candidate denies Anas Sarwar ad is racist
However, Ross Lambie said the claim that the Scottish Labour leader will 'prioritise' the Pakistani community was 'a quote from us' rather than Sarwar. The controversial advert has been condemned by other political parties, with First Minister John Swinney describing it as 'racist' and calling for Meta to take it down. The video claims the Scottish Labour leader will 'prioritise' the Pakistani community in Scotland, as it plays clips of the politician urging more people from South Asian backgrounds to get involved in politics. READ MORE: Comment: Thatcherism's toxic legacy lives on in Reform UK Voters go to the polls next week in the Scottish Parliament by-election, which was called following the death of SNP MSP Christina McKelvie. Swinney has said the contest is likely to be 'very tight' between the SNP, Scottish Labour and Reform UK. Nigel Farage's party does not currently have any MSPs. Lambie, who is a councillor in South Lanarkshire, was pressed on his party's online ad when he appeared on the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme on Tuesday. He said disaffected voters are turning to his party, adding: 'If you look at Parliament, there's a lot of young faces that don't seem to know what they're doing. 'So people look at Nigel (Farage), they like Nigel's bullish attitude on how to make this country great again.' He was questioned on his claim of there being an 'open door' migration policy in the UK, saying immigration figures are 'out of control'. Asked about the video's claim that Sarwar will 'prioritise' the Pakistani community, he said 'that's a quote from us'. It was put to Lambie that Sarwar does not use these words in the video clip, with the Reform candidate saying: 'We're not misleading people at all, all we've done is share two clips of Anas Sarwar's own speech.' Lambie said prioritising the Pakistani community 'was what the whole speech was about' and Sarwar was merely 'deflecting'. The Reform councillor denied the video amounts to racism, saying it shows 'another example of the two-tier society that the Left are trying to build in this country… READ MORE: Reform UK are a real and present danger in Scotland 'People should be in positions of power based on merit and their contribution to society. We shouldn't be trying to foist various minority groups into, you know, into position.' The LibDem candidate in the election, Aisha Mir, earlier told the programme that the video is 'scummy tactics'. The SNP's candidate is Katy Loudon, who was campaigning alongside Swinney on Monday. Asked about the Scottish Government's funding for local councils, she said: 'I'm never going to sit and not argue for more funding for local authorities.' Loudon also responded to an attack from Labour – whose candidate is Davy Russell – that she had voted against funding for Hamilton's town centre, saying: 'What we're talking about here is one line in a Labour amendment at South Lanarkshire's budget. 'I'm very proud, not only of the record of our SNP group at South Lanarkshire council, but what we have chosen to back.'
