The obvious question if Mrs T was so awful: How come the Conservatives won the elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987 with Mrs T as leader? How come that Conservatives won the 1992 election with John Major, her preferred successor, as leader?

I reckon these people could use a little media spin.

Bob, three letters: SDP.

Cherub,
Are you saying that the SDP won those elections for Thatcher and Major?

The figures don’t seem to back that up, though clearly there was an affect on the majority in 1987.

Judging by the video, the “media spin” seems to have got things about right.

The SDP took more votes from Labour than the Tories, changing the electoral arithmetic in their favour. Just as UKIP are going to do to the Tories next time. With the annihilation of the LDs that seems almost certain all Miliband has to do is avoid gaffes and he’s in.

Cherub,
It’s true that the SDP took more votes from Labour, but the figures suggest a win for Thatcher anyway, just with a much smaller margin.

Are all these people from UK Unhaircut?

They’re like the UK branch of the Westboro Baptist Church.

@1

Thatcher never won as much as 50% of the vote, and many people felt that Thatcher’s policies would enrich them personally, rather than help the country as a whole.

In 1979, she won 43.9% of votes with a 76% turnout.
In 1983, she won 42.4% of votes with a 72.7% turnout.
In 1987, she won 42.2% of votes with a 75.2% tunout .

And in 1992, Major won 41.9% of votes with a 77.7% turnout.

At no point in Thatcher’s rule did she have a majority of the British people supporting her.

Why do people attack Thatcher, because she changed the political landscape of the UK, and in turn the Western World. You only have to have lived in the UK in the 1970s what this meant.
The Unions told the Government what to do, with the Social Contract, which allowed people to lose their jobs if they did not join the Union. Strikes were called on the whim of shop stewards, and a show of hand, which were never counted. Scargill assumed that he could bring the Government down, but they were ready for him, and the lights never went out all through the strike.

@ Richard
No government since the war has reached 50% of the vote – including the 1945 Attlee government. As the number of smaller parties (including nationalists) has increased over the years, so the chances of any party achieving a majority of the popular vote is correspondingly diminished. Mrs Thatcher won her elections under the system we have now, and I think there is no point to quoting vote share – we do not have a PR system. The chance of modest change was rejected by the result of AV referendum, so we are stuck with FPTP for the forseeable future.

12 – not just that, only two parties won more than 50% of the vote in the entire 20th century. One was a National Government, with a Labour Prime Minister in coalition with the Tories; and the other was Lord Salisbury in 1900. Majority support is a ridiculous benchmark to set.

“Mrs Thatcher won her elections under the system we have now, and I think there is no point to quoting vote share – we do not have a PR system.”

The point is simply that she never enjoyed the electoral support of the majority of voters, or got anywhere near it.

And a moment’s historical reflection will show that arguments along the lines of “If X was so awful how come he won elections” don’t hold much water.

Bob’s question still stands. Thatcher was more successful electorally than Tony Blair, and by quite a margin.

The answer to Bob’s question is simply that awful people can win elections. Do you really need examples pointed out to you?

Simply Bob she stood for greedy. Most humans believe in self interest. The right is correct on that point.
Churchill’s funeral was a thank you to a generation of warriors and self sacrifice. Thatcher’s funeral is a thank you to the greedy, the selfish tw*ts who made a quick buck selling their shares to EDF, , the self absorbed ,yuppie bankers, the Sun pornographic journalist who delights in a 16 year old breasts, the loadsmoney morons who have sold any chance of their offspring’s generation to live in affordable housing, and cowardly breed who love taunting the socially disadvantaged. It is the opportunity for the Kojaks, Tim J , cjcj, John77, SFMS, Dtp and the rest who never donned a uniform but who have enjoyed the delights and benefits of the arm chair warrior to wave a flag for nanny on her journey to Valhalla.
Post war spongers and pension scroungers of the baby boom generation.
Depressing.

Chris,
As you only ever post statements of “fact”, it would be interesting to see you provide examples of anything.

@ 10 Richard

Labour didn’t win the support of the majority of the British people either.

1979 Tories 43.9% (Labour 36.9%)
1983 Tories 42.4% (Labour 27.6%)
1987 Tories 42.2% (Labour 30.8%)
1992 Tories 41.9% (Labour 34.4%)
1997 Labour 43.2% (Tories 30.7%)
2001 Labour 40.7% (Tories 31.7%)
2005 labour 35.2% (Tories 32.4%)
2010 Tories 36.1% (Labour 29.0%)

Indeed, with the Tory vote holding up around the 42% level over 4 elections, and the Labour vote never getting close until Tony Blair, it’s pretty hard to argue that Thatcher and the Tories didn’t have a mandate, unless you also argue that Labour didn’t after their election victories. It’s even harder to argue when you consider in 2005 Labour barely achieved over a third of the vote.

Jack C

Well, surely your own example of Tony Blair – who also won three elections – is sufficient, and it has the added advantage that it won’t start people wittering on about Godwin’s Law.

” the loadsmoney morons who have sold any chance of their offspring’s generation to live in affordable housing”

Diddy, can you explain this statement?

Chris,
Out of interest:

a) Was John Major also “awful”?
b) Who did you vote for from 79 onwards, where applicable?

Jack C

Before I submit to interrogation, maybe you can just clarify whether you’re really denying that awful people can win elections – and, if so, how my opinion of John Major and my personal voting history are relevant to the subject? Thanks.

No, I’m not denying that “awful” people can win elections, but that’s subjective.

Jack C

No more subjective than Bob’s question, I’d have thought.

As we agree about that, I don’t understand the relevance of the other information, but in the interests of full disclosure:
(a) Not particularly; benefits from comparison with predecessor and successors
(b) 1979 not applicable; 1983-2010 Alliance/Lib Dem

@jack C #21:

” the loadsmoney morons who have sold any chance of their offspring’s generation to live in affordable housing”

Diddy, can you explain this statement?

I suspect it’s a reference to the Right to Buy; which creamed off the best of Council housing and ensured that local authorities had no incentive to build new housing to replace it.

Remember, local authorities were not allowed to use right to buy receipts to build new property; so any authority building housing following the introduction of the right to buy was at risk of having that investment entirely snatched away. Even if they had been allowed to use those receipts, they’d have lost out to the extent of the discount which was pretty substantial as a proportion of the value of the house in the early days.

@ 14 and others
Mrs Thatcher won her victories under the system we have. The only time the public were offered change they rejected it. Vote share is irrelevant because the system of election makes it irrelevant – look at the vote shares listed in 19 above, and compare with the seats obtained as a result of those vote shares. The present government has 59% of the vote (Con 36%, Lib Dem 23%) so I take it all agree they enjoy the support of the majority of voters.

Chris,
Bob’s point, I think, is that no one truly awful or unpopular could win so many elections, and that a calmer approach is required when appraising her.

Your view is that, between 79 & 2005, we elected 6 “awful” and 1 “not particularly awful” PM.

Perhaps you’d like a new electorate to be appointed?

Technically speaking, apart from those from their constituencies, no one voted for the prime minister. It need not also be noted that there are many other reasons to vote for a political party in your constituency other than ‘I like their leader’. Particularly if your candidate happens to be one of the party gadflys.

Robin @ 26:

The impetus behind Right-to-Buy was extending home ownership, thus allowing the benefits to be enjoyed by an increasing percentage of the electorate. A good thing surely?

You can argue about whether councils should have been allowed to build with the receipts, but it’s relatively unimportant. The discounts may or may not have been too generous, but they were based on length of tenure, and anyway represented a transfer of wealth to lower income groups.

Too few have grasped the unfolding nightmare of high housing prices, and the rise of renting. Demonising buy-to-let misses the point and provides no solution.

The stark fact is that the owner-occupier % has been declining since 2003 due to excessive house prices, a trend fuelled and repeatedly boasted about by Gordon Brown.

The effect of this is very simple:

1) In order to buy now, you need to have some money already. Or have generous and wealthy parents.
2) Mortgage costs will be high and need to be covered by rents (which are now often ridiculous).

But that’s not the worst of it. Let’s roll it forward a few years:

3) The buy-to-let mortgage on House A is now paid (by the renters). The landlord now owns the house, and will continue to receive rent from it.
4) The owner-occupier % is down from (approx) 71% to 65% in 9 years. If nothing changes, ownership of private homes will eventually transfer to a small % of the population.

In short,

a) Housing costs will continue to be paid by everyone.
b) However, ownership will be restricted to a small %.

Maybe right-to-buy was not so bad after all?

Jack C

“Bob’s point, I think, is that no one truly awful or unpopular could win so many elections, and that a calmer approach is required when appraising her.”

Sorry, but I think the point is just as fallacious if, in the discussion we’ve just had, you replace “awful” with “truly awful”.

Popularity is something else entirely, but that’s not what Bob said.

@Jack C 30:

The impetus behind Right-to-Buy was extending home ownership, thus allowing the benefits to be enjoyed by an increasing percentage of the electorate. A good thing surely?

It depends; promoting home-ownership runs directly counter to promoting a mobile labour force.

In fact, however, the impetus was Cutler’s view that councils shouldn’t be in the housing business.

Again:

You can argue about whether councils should have been allowed to build with the receipts, but it’s relatively unimportant.

Hardly. House-price inflation arises from lack of supply; and preventing councils from building choked off the most significant supply of housing, while at the same time reducing the supply of housing that was affordable. We have lost 100k homebuilds a year since 1980 as a direct result of the policy.

Many of the right-to-buyers sold out, after the discount repayment period ended, to property companies who rented the properties out (I believe it is 2/3rds of them that were so sold); so any “social mix” benefits of right to buy were lost.

Those that didn’t sell out, or sold only to buy elsewhere, didn’t gain much by way of disposable wealth.

The situation you describe in your final paragraphs was created, or at elast contributed to, by the right to buy policies pursued by successive Governments, Tory and Labour. Do we really want more of the same?

“Vote share is irrelevant because the system of election makes it irrelevant …”

Of course it’s not irrelevant, if the point being made is what share of the vote went to the Tories under Thatcher!

In July 1990, Nicholas Ridley told Dominic Lawson [editor of the Spectator] that monetary union was “all
a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”. He was immediately forced to resign from the Cabinet.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2011/09/from-the-archives-ridley-was-right/

Nicholas Ridley was Thatcherite long before Mrs T became PM. Dominic Lawson is the son of Nigel Lawson, who was Mrs T’s chancellor from June 1983 until he resigned in October 1989 after a row with Mrs T about her listening to Alan Walters, her economic guru, about why it wasn’t a good idea for Britain to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM).

When Nicholas Ridley as DTI minister made those comments about Germany, the Europhiles in the cabinet wanted him out. John Major, who was Lawson’s successor as chancellor, joined the Pound to the ERM in October 1990 – with disastrous consequences two years later when the Pound was forced out of the ERM in September 1992.

Lawson, as chancellor, had formally abandoned “monetarism” in the autumn of 1985 – the official name was: Medium Term Financial Strategy. To anchor the Pound after junking monetarism, he sought to link it to the Deutsche Mark at “a competitive exchange rate” using the BoE’s Bank Rate, which was set by the chancellor in those times, not by the BoE.

To keep the exchange “competitive” in Lawson’s judgement required keeping interest rates low, so low that economy got set on an unsustainably high growth rate, house prices went into a bubble and inflation revived. In other words, Lawson had sewed the seeds for a policy disaster just before John Major put the Pound into the ERM as Lawson had long intended.

The misgivings of Alan Walters and Nicholas Ridley about the ERM had been well founded but Mrs T deferred to a cabinet consensus and agreed to putting the Pound into the ERM in October 1990.

This is one example of why just dumping on Mrs T regardless is unwise.

Another example is that the railways were not in the programme for privatisations while she was PM. That was because Nicholas Ridley had served stints as ministers of the environment and of transport and had advised against privatising the railways. He had concluded that the railways would always have to be run at a loss for social reasons and argued that was better managed, with accountability to Parliament, in the public sector. John Major as PM went ahead and privatised the railways in the year that Ridley died.

The morale is that it is always worth listening to the argument of someone you disagree with. They could just be right.

“The impetus behind Right-to-Buy was extending home ownership, thus allowing the benefits to be enjoyed by an increasing percentage of the electorate. A good thing surely”
So there are no council houses for the next generation. Surely to buy a council house well under market value is
immoral and wrong. If they have money they should go into the market like the rest of us. But greed and self interest comes first. Jack C you should be over the moon your philosophy is the only one in town.

Mrs Thatchers real crime was that she defeated the then hardline political wing of the Left, in other words Arthur Scargill and his undemocratic allies. It is the hardline political left that is now celebrating her death.

I started work, at fifteen, with the NCB in ’61, and left in ’64 as there wasn’t a future in coal.

Harold Wilson came to power in ’64 and closed more pits than Thatcher ever did – Wilson and Heath both had problems with the miners, thought the altogether more reasonable, and democratic, Joe Gormley was in charge then. Accommodations were reached, but nothing was ever settled.

The Scargill era and the rosie view of united mining communities pitted against a ruthless government as depicted in Brassed Off is a myth. There is one scene in Brassed Off where there’s a fight (amongst miners) about the conduct of the strike. The divisions that existed within mining communities was raw and is captured by that scene. There were many people within mining communities who simply did not believe there was a future in coal and wanted to move on, there were also too many others (miners and left wing activists alike) that were concerned about the violent conduct of the strike and the fact that there’d been no strike ballot.

Thatcher won elections, not because she was liked (she wasn’t)or that the economy was performing significantly better, but because she’d put an end to the perpetual disruption to working peoples lives that had endured, as a consequence of strikes, in the decade and half before she came to power. It was the memory of three day weeks, rubbish in the streets, the picketting of cemetries, and violent strikes, that won her elections.

I think the motivation for the discount in the sale of council houses to resident tenants – or at least for part of the discount – was to reflect the maintenance costs which the local authority would no longer have to carry.

If a tennant chose not to buy, there was no additional house on the market for a new tenant to rent until the sitting tenant chose to move out or died.

There are doubts about whether council housing enhanced the geographic mobility of tenants.

Owner-occupiers could and did sell their houses and buy other houses in places they wanted to move to. OTOH council tenants had no house to sell and needed to negotiate some sort of exchange arrangement for another council house in the place they wanted to move to.

Various multilateral exchange schemes between council were devised. I don’t believe any of these worked well if only for one reason – there were places with chronic shortages of council houses, relative to demand, and other places with chronic surpluses. The fundamental problem was a continuing mismatch between the availability of houses and jobs. The places with chronic surpluses of council houses tended to be places with higher unemployment rates.

Thatcher won three elections because:-

– In 1979, like most Tories, she told lies – such as she wouldn’t raise VAT (but increased it from 8% to 15% as soon as she gained power), and that she would reduce unemployment from its level of 1.4 million (within four years it was 3.2 million).

– She bribed working class voters by letting them buy their council-owned houses at a huge discount.

– Most of the UK press was, and still is, right-wing, being owned by a handful of very rich men.

– In 1983, she cashed in on the prevailing jingoism after the Falklands War.

– After the Labour Party elected a left-wing leader in 1980, some on the right broke away and formed the SDP. They later merged with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats, but it meant that opposition to the Tories was badly split.

– She privatised gas, electricity and telecommunications and once again bribed voters, this time with cheap shares.

– She had the benefit of North Sea oil revenues (about £78 billion) and the proceeds from privatisation (about £65 billion).

– There was the novelty factor of the first female PM in the UK.

The re-election of the Conservatives in 1983, 1987 and 1992, had absolutely nothing to do with Labour’s notorious 1983 manifesto which would have committed a Labour government to negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the European Common Market, unilateral nuclear disarmament and taking the commanding heights of the economy into public ownership.

Really? But those were commitments which Tony Blair junked on his way to getting New Labour elected to government in 1997. And why did New Labour leave almost all Mrs T’s industrial relations legislation untouched?

What was the public to make of Kinnock’s speech about the Militant Tendency in Labour at the 1985 Party Conference? The polls were predicting Labour to win the 1992 election until the Sheffield Rally a week before. In London at the time, the public mood changed after that.

What are we to make of this by Sam Brittan in the FT?

“The relative decline of the British economy in the century up to the late 1970s has been reversed. Since then, the UK has caught up with and even overtaken its principal trading partners. The previous two sentences are neither a typing mistake nor a daydream. They are the sober conclusions of the country’s leading quantitative historian, Prof Nicholas Crafts”
http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text399_p.html

Before anyone labels the FT as irredeemably “right wing”, recall that its lead economic commentartors, Martin Wolf and Sam Brittan, have been persistent critics of George Osborne’s austerity programme.

Bob B,

You asked a question at the beginning of this thread and I gave you the answer.

You might also care to take on board the debunking of all the Thatcherite myths about the 1970s:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/04/thatcher%E2%80%99s-greatest-legacy-rewriting-seventies

Ivan White

Britain’s economy during the 1970s and comparisons with the performance of other W European economies have been extensively covered in academic texts so we’ve no need to rely on partisan propaganda:

Alec Cairncross: The British Economy Since 1945 (Wiley-Blackwell 1995)
NFT Crafts and Nicholas Woodward (eds): The British Economy Since 1945 (OUP 1991)
Nicholas Woodward and Richard Coopey: Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Economy (UCL press 1996)
Nicholas Woodward: The Management of the British Economy 1945-2001 (Manchester UP 2005)
Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo (eds): Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945 (Cambridge UP 1996)
Nicholas Crafts and Gianni Toniolo: European Economic Growth, 1950-2005: An overview
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1671/1/WRAP_Crafts_CEPR-DP6863%5B1%5D.pdf
Andre Sapir: Globalization and the Reform of the European Social Models

The question remains: why did Tony Blair find it necessary to reverse the commitments in Labour’s 1983 manifesto to withdrawing from the European Common Market, unilateral nuclear disarmament and nationalisation of the commanding heights of the British economy in order to get New Labour elected to government in 1997? This was hardly just a little cosmetic surgery.

Richard @ 10 & Tyler @ 19:

Strange how the left worries about percentages only when it is the loser…

Funny dat.

The Tory councillors down here tell me that their canvassers for the forthcoming county council election are having doors slammed in their faces by previously loyal Tory voters. They are losing to UKIP.

Bring on the General Election!

“They are losing to UKIP.”

What, then, is happening with the Monster Raving Loony Party? Are its supporters also defecting to UKIP?

Bob, sometimes I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not.

I think it’s worth a read anyway:

Sticking it to Thatcher’s corpse
The political necrophiliacs dancing at ‘death parties’ disrespect the British people as much as Thatcher.

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13531/

@37. Bob B: “I think the motivation for the discount in the sale of council houses to resident tenants – or at least for part of the discount – was to reflect the maintenance costs which the local authority would no longer have to carry.”

It may have been an argument but it was not a coherent one.

Take two council house renters who intended to stay living in similar homes: five year tenancy and 25 year tenancy. The one who had been there for 25 years received a greater discount but logic says that annual maintenance costs for the homes was the same. If the motivation was to persuade tenants to buy to avoid future maintenance costs, it would have been logical (but politically unacceptable) to give bigger discounts to those with shorter tenancies.

@46. damon: Damon asks us to look at:
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13531/

Looking for an explanation about how the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) transformed itself via Living Marxism/LM magazine into the Spiked Online conglomerate baffles me. I’d really like to know what they are about. I’m a sincere old liberal. Spiked’s contrariness, limited by popularity, is beneficial; some things need to be expressed.

Spiked people scare me; I can’t see analysis or logic in their philosophical change; there was just a light bulb moment?

Jenny Turner’s essay at the LRB is the starting point of any discussion:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n13/jenny-turner/who-are-they
Warning: that is one hour of your life to read and think.

The motivation for selling council houses was to bribe, sorry persuade working class voters to vote Tory. Successful to a point, until when there were no more to sell.

“Spiked people scare me; I can’t see analysis or logic in their philosophical change; there was just a light bulb moment?”
Spot on Charlieman.
I know so many leftie trots and commies in the eighties who clanked their tins for the miners, now repeating the mantra. “I am ashamed of those days and Maggie was right all along”
I have feeling the same will be the case for student’s demos of today. Hence I have a distaste for lefty politics. My old man was a Midlands Labour councillor in the 50/60’s. He was attacked by two Cannock miner commies. Nasty bast**ds. I bet they run Thatcherite security form now.
Also I saw the right with their “vote labour for a black neighbour”, very unpleasant.
Thatcher and her adherents brought US histrionics to the political scene which I find
even more distasteful. That is why I really don’t like right wing politicos of today mainly because of their certainty, hate, emotional baggage and lack of empathy.
They mirror the spiked commies and the trots.
Although every rightist on the site from Kojak, john77, TONE to Tim J will always take the party line, whereas the lefties most of the time disagree. They and their leaders couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery because there lack of unity.
I quite like that. Reminds me of a better time

Several questions arise out of the character of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, out of the taxpayer’s bearing of its cost, out of the cancellation of Prime Minister’s Questions in order to accommodate it, and out of the silencing of Big Ben.

First, where, when, how, why, and by whom was it decided that neoliberal capitalism and its neoconservative foreign policy were now the official ideology of this State, and beyond question even on the floor of the House of Commons, the business of which has been suspended in order to glorify that ideology? Extremely prominent seats were allocated to Dick Cheney and Binyamin Netanyahu, as he calls himself. They were closer to the bier than the Queen was, or even than Lady Thatcher’s children were. Departing mourners were air-kissed at the back of the Cathedral by Tony and Cherie Blair. Obeisance was made not only by Parliament, but also by the monarchy, by the churches, by the print and broadcast media, by the Corporation of the City of London, and most especially by the Police and by the Armed Forces.

Secondly, where, when, how, why, and by whom was it decided that political office and military rank were now interchangeable, even identical? No other reasonable inference can be drawn from the burial with full military honours of a politician who was never a member of any of the Armed Forces.

Thirdly, where, when, how, why, and by whom was it decided to draw a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash, beyond which, in relation to London, all territory has literally been alienated, and declared occupied rather than integral? In view of the first two questions, we in the Occupied Territories are well and truly bracing ourselves.

Fourthly, what would the 800 and more military personnel have been doing if this funeral had not been taking place, how could those duties have been cancelled or postponed at such short notice if at all, and how many of those personnel are expected still to be in their jobs this time next year?

Fifthly, on what would the £10 million that this funeral has cost the taxpayer otherwise have been spent, how can that spending be foregone, and what plans are in place to deal with the consequences of that foregoing?

And sixthly, when is legislation going to be brought before the House of Commons to recover those costs by levying a charge of £770 on each of the 13,000 beneficiaries of the reduction in the top rate of tax on incomes above £100,000 by Blubbing George Osborne, who is himself one of those beneficiaries?

@50. p.diddy: “I know so many leftie trots and commies in the eighties who clanked their tins for the miners, now repeating the mantra. “I am ashamed of those days and Maggie was right all along””

Consider, pd, that I am a contrary liberal. In broad left student politics I worked with Eurocommunists to defeat Bennites and Trots. I don’t know whether it was worth it. Did it mean anything?

I lived in Nottingham throughout the 1980s and during the miners’ strike. There was no side to take because the argument was always so foolish.

Why do people fetishize leaders so?

Maggie was just a charismatic figurehead. Once she’d served her purpose her erstwhile henchmen themselves turned on her and notoriously stabbed her in the back.

Poor deluded soul, she wasn’t achieving what she thought she was achieving half the time.

Us ordinary folk are forever being sent from pillar to post. One decade it’s the unions taking the piss with closed shops and suchlike, next thing we’re being told unemployment is a price worth paying and the welfare state is being dismantled.

Why did people vote for Maggie? Why did they vote for Blair? People just try and vote for someone who looks like they’ll tackle whatever mess the last lot got into. Someone who’ll make them feel safe. So put up a plausible enough spin and you’ll get in!

i think we need to stick with the fact that thatcher could do that because of the voting system. no party would have been able to ram through policies that unpopular without a first past the post voting system. if we had had proportional representation in 2005 blair could have been removed from office the greens, respect and charles kennedys version of the libdems would all have done spectacularly well. i think thats the argument for proportional representation we need protecting from extremists like thathcher and blair preventing them having a majority offers some protection however inadequate.

Charlieman @48. I try not to bother with the stuff you are hanging up on and only go on what they write.
That seems to be exactly what most people refuse to do and only want to talk about the ”wider political project” if there is one.
I think that quite possibly there isn’t and these ex-RCPers are just carrying on with what they know best and trying to make any living they can out of it, or just doing it for the hobby of it. They like to talk and comment about stuff. Just like all the writers on this website do and all the rest of the blogosphere does.

Being hung up on what kind of organisation they are and ”how do they get their money” etc, just means that you don’t have to deal with articles like the one I linked to …. which is basicly poking fun at all the anti-Thatcher people going out on the street celebrating – and downloading the Witch is Dead song.

Why not deal with the content instead?
But I know by now, that can’t be done on LC as it’s too close to the bone.

The casting of Thatcher as the Wicked Witch also serves to cast the people of Britain as moronic Munchkins, idiots stupefied by Thatcher’s enchanting policies. This attitude has long been a left-wing staple, right from the early 1980s when left-wing theorist Stuart Hall saw Thatcher harnessing the ‘the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities of a people’. What else could explain the fact that many of the ignorant masses chose not to support Labour at successive elections?

bloody hippies

@55. damon: “I try not to bother with the stuff you are hanging up on and only go on what they [Spiked] write.”

That seems to be exactly what most people refuse to do and only want to talk about the ”wider political project” if there is one.”

I find the LM network/Spiked’s contrariness to be helpful and try to treat every essay on the basis of reality. The argument that the essay comes from Spiked, and is therefore irrelevant, is not a helpful one.

I’ve asked a couple of non-RCP members why they wrote for Spiked. Their argument was that Spiked provided a wider platform for debate than elsewhere. They knew where Spiked originated but it meant the essay was published.

“I think that quite possibly there isn’t and these ex-RCPers are just carrying on with what they know best and trying to make any living they can out of it, or just doing it for the hobby of it.”

It ain’t a hobby; perhaps Spiked is a business promotion which loses money (akin to Ian Dale’s blogging) for the contributors; but LM network/Spiked has created a number of organisations to extend itself.

“Why not deal with the content instead?

But I know by now, that can’t be done on LC as it’s too close to the bone.”

I don’t know whether it is ironic or bizarre that LC can’t become more liberal given our current governance.