Law & Order in Freefall. Only 1% of bike thefts charged, never mind convicted.

[Deleted member 49]

@newfhouse was commenting on Thatcher herself not her government's policies or the result of them. You can loathe Thatcher but still acknowledge that she turned the economy around after the disastrous Labour Government.

We now need the reverse with a sensible Labour Party / Liberal coalition to undo that done by the disastrous Conservative Government.

Like feck she did...all she did was make it more unequal.She fecked lives, communities.The social cost were still feeling now.

 

[Deleted member 28]

Like feck she did...all she did was make it more unequal.She fecked lives, communities.The social cost were still feeling now.

Should have had a national ballot in the first place and it probably wouldn't have took place ( I assume it's the miners strike your referring to)

If you were in the Business, Health or building trade I doubt you would think the same............just think "loadsamoney".

 

[newfhouse]

Well, the economy was either good or it wasn't surely.

Depends on who benefits, surely? There’s a concept called ‘inequality’ about which you could do some background reading.

 

[newfhouse]

@newfhouse was commenting on Thatcher herself not her government's policies or the result of them.

Sorry to burst your bubble but it was the whole shebang.

 

[Deleted member 28]

Depends on who benefits, surely? There’s a concept called ‘inequality’ about which you could do some background reading.

So how would YOU determine if the country, the economy or just 'people in general' are doing well?

People on here so love their stats, links and graphs that surely there's a definitive 'yes times were pretty good that year/spell'?

You some kind of commie?

Just wondering like.

 

[Deleted member 49]

Should have had a national ballot in the first place and it probably wouldn't have took place ( I assume it's the miners strike your referring to)

If you were in the Business, Health or building trade I doubt you would think the same............just think "loadsamoney".

Selling public housing off, de nationalisation of industry and utilities.millions of people losing their jobs and livelihoods,riots....but as long as you made money ?
It was a lot more than the miners strike.

 

[BoldonLad]

@newfhouse was commenting on Thatcher herself not her government's policies or the result of them. You can loathe Thatcher but still acknowledge that she turned the economy around after the disastrous Labour Government.

We now need the reverse with a sensible Labour Party / Liberal coalition to undo that done by the disastrous Conservative Government.

Is that possible?

 

[Deleted member 28]

Selling public housing off, de nationalisation of industry and utilities.millions of people losing their jobs and livelihoods,riots....but as long as you made money ?
It was a lot more than the miners strike.

I thought you Labour lot were 'progressive' ? some industries needed selling off as they were haemorrhaging tax payers money left, right and centre.

I get it, you're a staunch union lefty, and that's fine as it makes no odds to me but you need to look at the entire picture of those times.

 

[newfhouse]

So how would YOU determine if the country, the economy or just 'people in general' are doing well?

Income inequality (ratio between richest and poorest), access to and outcomes from medical and dental care; same for education; housing and homelessness; happiness and contentment (hard to define and measure but people smarter than me have done work on this); environment and pollution; requirement for food banks and other charities just to survive; libraries, playing fields and other public amenities; personal freedoms and respect for human rights; attitude to minorities; and respect and care for the less fortunate. That will do for starters, anyway.

How about you?

You some kind of commie?

You would have to be clear what you mean by that for me to give a meaningful answer. I self identify as a green socialist if that helps but I suspect your taxonomy only extends to ‘Shep and his mates’ and ‘everyone else’.

 

[mudsticks]

Depends on who benefits, surely? There’s a concept called ‘inequality’ about which you could do some background reading.

Inequality which even if you're 'doing ok' makes the country as a whole much less of a pleasant place to live, depresses the prospects for your kids even.

Study after study has shown that it's inequality that does a society in, in so many ways.

But ofc the right wing press will keep pushing the 'every man for himself'
'I'm alright - so feck the rest of you'* agenda.
No surprise there, because that's the agenda of the people who run those medias.

Then if all that fails they'll start up some bollix blaming immigrants, or 'woke liberals' or 'Europe' 'benefit scroungers' whoever.

Anyone other than those who are the real architects of the inequality.


Still people appear to buy it, so who can blame them.??

 

[matticus]

Is there a version of Godwin's Law for Thatcher?

 

[icowden]

I thought you Labour lot were 'progressive' ? some industries needed selling off as they were haemorrhaging tax payers money left, right and centre.

I get it, you're a staunch union lefty, and that's fine as it makes no odds to me but you need to look at the entire picture of those times.

Found a study for you which covers the Thatcher / Major / Blair years:-
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/uk-growth-and-productivity-1997-to-2008/

Did Labour’s policies have any positive influence?
Some have argued that Labour simply enjoyed a “free ride” on the radicalism of Mrs Thatcher. Most analysis suggests that freeing up the labour market through breaking union militancy, removing subsidies for “lame ducks” and implementing privatisation, lower marginal tax rates and cuts in benefits all boosted productivity performance after 1979. On this line of argument the best that could be said is that at least Labour did not return to the failed pro-union, anti-competitive policies of the 1970s.

The “at least Labour didn’t mess it up” argument is not the full story. It is hard to believe that the reforms in the conservative years permanently kept productivity growth higher for the next 15 years. The anti-union policies may have raised output, for example, but it stretches credulity to think they kept the UK on a permanently better productivity growth path.

We argue that it is more likely that some policies of the Labour government drove some of the productivity improvement. In particular, the strengthening of competition policy, the support for innovation, the expansion of university education and better regulation in telecoms and elsewhere played a positive role. It is possible that immigration may have also have been a big plus. But establishing the magnitude of the causal impact of these policies is extremely difficult, and the need for proper quantitative policy evaluation remains as strong as ever.

The policy area where Labour clearly failed was in financial regulation. In addition, and more clearly with hindsight, public debt was allowed to rise higher than it should have. Although these factors did not fundamentally drive the boom and did not cause the global recession by themselves, the UK economy was more vulnerable to the recession than it should have been.

So this study posits that both the Thatcher/Major and Blair Governments were successful in terms of the economy .

Another FactCheck here from Channel 4 showing a more balanced picture:-
https://www.channel4.com/news/factc...arty-has-a-better-track-record-on-the-economy

But global recession and financial crisis aside, it is fairly clear that the recent trend is to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer at an overall cost to GDP and between Brexit and the Pandemic, the Conservatives have done a lot of damage.

 

[icowden]

Getting back to Law, a review of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) handling of the Nottingham attacks says it was right to accept the killer's manslaughter pleas.

There is lots of reference to the families seeing a manslaughter plea as a downgrading of the crime from Murder. Valdo Calucane has a Section 42 indefinite hospital order. He isn't just going to be released and needs the permission of the Secretary of State for Justice to agree with any proposed release. However the plea recognises that the killings were by someone not in their right mind, and the setting in which he will be held will be appropriate for someone with paranoid schizophrenia.

Maybe the press should stop referring to manslaughter as some sort of lightweight downgrade?