@Mezz 539070 wrote:
Maggies message was, self determination, personal freedom ( with personal responsibility ), equality, working to achieve, living within your means…… all seems like common sense good stuff to me
Problem with most people is they want the freedom, but dont want the responsibility, they want rewards & to have everything in the adverts, but they dont want to work to pay for it……. and in this lazy ‘I deserve’ mentality believe the borrow & spend BSers that will promise everything for nothing yet never deliver.
Feel like Im on a lone crusade here and dont really understand why, I thought most party people felt the same, that they ( like me ) want minimal government interference in their lives, and the ability to choose for themselves instead of being communal drones.
Mate I agree with you to a certain extent but you seem to deify Thatcher’s policies. She did set up the economy very well for the boom of the 90s and early 2000s but at the cost of completely dividing the british public and moving the economy entirely away from industry to a service-based economy. Having a service-based economy is good for the most part but British manufacturing has suffered a tremendous result because of it and other countries what have stronger manufacturing (such as Germany, whose strong manufacturing base is partly the reason they are enjoying better economic times than the UK and France.) Postwar Germany’s large boom and economic prosperity is due largely in part to the “Soziale Marktwirtschaft” or social market economy style developed there, which benefits both business owners and labourers.
During Thatcher’s time an undue amount of power was held in the hands of labourers. She tipped the scales in favour of capital and this worked to her advantage as the country’s wealth increased but at the cost of bitter social divides and practically all-out class warfare which you expect to see more often in the U.S. Social mobility in the UK is pretty low compared to other Northern European countries and bear in mind many of these countries such as Denmark have very high minimum wages. In the Nordic countries + Germany you see quite a high standard of living and a good level of social mobility, but also good safety nets for the unemployed.
Also I created a tax calculator program about a year or so ago to find out how much tax money goes to different departments. I pulled all data from the government and made some equations to determine how much you’d be paying. Checking it now if you earn 52k a year you are paying 22k in tax and whopping £1.06 a day goes for unemployment benefits and £0.08 per day goes for housing benefits. So this myth of “rampant benefits culture sucking our tax money” is false. By contrast at that income bracket you’re paying £3.89 per day on the army and £8 a day for running the government.
