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Originally Posted by Graham Jones
Utter rubbish. .
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Whats all this, Graham? Practice for your economic history GCSE next month? OK, not a bad effort....I'[ll give you a C grade and a little bit of advice. When it comes to the real thing, read the question carefully before you answer. Or, as in this case, read the posting carefully. My comment was about the Winter of Discontent, a series of strikes in 1978/79 involving a substancial proportion of the public sector workforce.
I think you would only have been a youngster at the time, but I remember it very vividly, and, yes, as you say in your opening remark, it was utter rubbish - A pile of it 30ft high in London's Leicester Square to be precise, infested with rats. What a splendid thing to show the tourists!
Whatever much you may wish to speculate about the relative merits of fiscal as against monetary policy (and I am prepared to debate those with you any time) the fact remains that it has been the Tory supply-side changes - albeit often seemingly socially brutal - that has given the UK a competitive edge over it's European Competitors, albeit now slowly being eroded as Blair & Brown surrender to one more set of mad-cap EU laws and regulations after another. The issue of competition with the far East is another matter.
That there were stupid mistakes made under the Tories there is no doubt - the worse one being the formal decision to enter the ERM at an exchange rate only defendable by high interest rates. The initial cost of withdrawing on Black Wednesday has been far superceded by the long term benefit of letting the market determin the external value of the pound, and to Labour's credit, giving the Bank of England independant control of monetary policy. By the last years of the Major goverment and the first years of labour, the UK was attracting almost as much inward investment as the rest of the then-EU combined. Alas, this is no longer the case.
By the way, do you know what I was doing on May 3rd, 1979? I shall tell you. I was 22 years old, having been a card-carrying member of the labour Party since I was 17, and I was back in Hyndburn working hard to get the sitting Labour MP re-elected. Like many others, he was'nt. Sometimes, it's better to fail.