THE Scottish founder of the Labour Party is probably turning in his grave at his namesake’s praise of former Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
There can be no doubt that James Keir Hardie would have found Thatcher’s policies repugnant and Keir Starmer’s comments appalling. Starmer said he respected Thatcher for having “a mission and a plan”.
Here’s how three parts of that mission and plan worked out for Scotland – and they don’t even cover how this country was singled out as a guinea pig for the hated Poll Tax, nor the Section 28 legislation which did so much to ostracise the LGBT community.
PRIVATISATION
Thatcher turned state monopolies into private monopolies and this was especially significant regarding social housing. The roots of the current housing and homeless issues in the UK can be traced directly back to Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme, a cynical and destructive ploy to increase Tory votes.
She believed that if people were homeowners, they were more likely to vote Tory and so began selling off the UK’s social housing stock.
The scale of the problems this caused can be seen from the effect on Scotland’s housing alone. In 1981, 51% of Scottish people were living in council homes but Right to Buy resulted in the sale of more than half a million council homes in the 30 years from 1980. Fewer social homes have led to longer council waiting lists and a reduction in the quality of housing available as the most desirable homes generally sold first.
Thatcher also sold off telecoms, gas, electricity, rail and the state-owned oil company British Petroleum (BP). The effect has been disastrous, particularly with regards to energy as the high bills we pay now can be traced back to the privatisation of the energy companies.
NORTH SEA OIL
The catastrophic way the Thatcher government used North Sea oil profits changed Britain forever and we are still paying the price.
Ignoring SNP calls for the oil money to be invested in a fund for the country’s benefit, it was used to pay for social security for the masses of unemployed people thrown out of jobs in the Tories’ systematic dismantling of the UK’s manufacturing industry.
In contrast, Norway has an oil fund that is now worth 16 billion kroner and has helped cushion the country against the financial crash of 2008 and the Covid pandemic, as well modernise infrastructure and industry and fund the transition away from fossil fuels and into renewables.
Thatcher’s treasury instead used every last pound of the “black gold” for current expenditure, leaving nothing for capital projects or the future.
“Thatcher used North Sea oil receipts to pay for unemployment benefits rather than develop an industrial strategy,” said Professor Richard Finlay of Strathclyde University. “She focussed on services and the south of England economy and left the industrial north to collapse through deindustrialisation.”
MONETARISM
Thatcher's focus on services and the south of England economy along with her unwillingness to support public investment in industry, was also catastrophic for the Scottish economy which was geared towards steel, coal, shipbuilding, engineering and the manufacturing of a wide range of goods from cars to textiles.
Industries disappeared overnight and unemployment soared. A fifth of the Scottish workforce lost their jobs in the two years between 1981-83. The casualties included Linwood car plant, with almost 5000 jobs lost, and Leyland and Plessey in Bathgate, where more than 4000 jobs were lost. Shipbuilders Scott Lithgow was privatised in 1984 and defunct less than a decade later.
Thatcher destroyed the two great nationalised heavy industries, British Steel and coalmining, with her vicious stand against the National Union of Miners resulting in the closure of 13 Scottish pits. Ravenscraig steelworks, famed for its productivity, and which at one point employed around 13,000 people, was gradually run down until it closed in 1992.
The result of Thatcher’s monetarism is the over-reliance of the UK economy today on a poorly regulated financial sector and the harmful concentration of wealth in the south of England.
