He was a terrorist in the legal sense, surely? IIRC, he admitted as much himself in an authorized biography

This is the usual anti-worker crap we can expect from the Tories. We got it from Labour too. The problem here is that the government has no real idea how people really live. The majority of people on the cabinet are millionaires and really don't need to work. Ther are running the country for a giggle - they are disconnected and disinterested in the effects of their policies.

I get the feeling that there could well be strikes unauthorised by the unions. I expect there are a few militant factions in some of the larger ones which are pondering their own action when the budget starts to bite.

Absolutely. We'll never be a manufacturing powerhouse because other less developed countries have cheaper labour - plus when we did manufacture things, we did it badly (British Leyland, Rover etc), we'll never be an exporter of raw materials because when we did, Thatcher killed that industry too. What private sector industry do the tories think will take the state's place?

Sure they'll privatise more public services...sure that worked out well for the rail network and the utilities...well, it worked out fine for the directors but not the customers. However we are still largely fossil-fuel reliant and paying high energy bills but now we have to import our fossil fuels because of Thatcher.

Strange, almost everything that is wrong with this country was started by the Tories.

Thatcher.. not been in power for the last 20 years and yet everything is still her fault. I think the Labour party might just of been able to do something in the last 13 years.

We import our fossil fuels because it is cheaper to, British coal was hopelessly inefficient and the unions were not helping any reasonable attempts to make it better. Plus the NUM leadership thought it was above the law and could dictate to the government.

+1

+2
Best thing she ever did was break the unions.

i hope that they target public pensions before or regardless of any strikes …

The only public sector pensions worth gutting are the higher up civil service & MPs ones. All the rest are in debt anyway (i.e. they no longer have the money to fund their commitments) because the last lot raided them to pay for god knows what. Since god knows when (at least the last 15 years, maybe longer)
there have actually been enough contributions by public sector workers to put their pension schemes on even footing (i.e. they would be self-financing) if the government hadn't taken any money they would otherwise have invested off them and thrown it into the main government revenue pool. So in other words, most of the public sector pension schemes have value on paper only. So there's no inherent value in them to realise. Not that there would have been any now anyway even if they had had money to invest, since the oh-so-efficent private sector finance industry threw everyone's saving down the toilet and took million pound bonuses for doing so.

Aside from all of that, I don't see how doing reducing the public sector pensions requirement actually helps matters. if you take away the public sector pensions, all the people who would otherwise rely on them will just claim state pension & benefits and we'll all have to pay for that instead. That is, unless you prefer to have aged people begging on the street. As a civilised society we should be looking after our old people one way or another. That is the ethically correct thing to do. The fact we can't afford to do so is nothing to do with the old people and I'd much rather we went after the people who actually put us in this mess rather than taking it out on defenseless old people who did nothing more than do their jobs their whole working lives and expect to get what they were promised they would get after doing so.

But Blair was carrying on Thatcherite polices from day one. There was barely any difference in policies for years. PFI's Deregulation. etc. She did not need to be in power Blair was doing her work.


Yes the coal industry had got bloated and inefficient but it could have reform further. There was also the push for gas which also undermined the need for coal plus the impact of PM!0 particles which were particularly anti coal. So there were a number of factors against coal even before global warming.