Janet Tweedy wrote:
In article , Tom
writes
As the Unions were representing the average working man, what you
really mean is "she did a great job of getting the working man in his
place"

This is OT for the newsgroup but I would like to say that you have
obviously never worked in or for a closed shop nor can you evidently
remember the 1960's when union pressure meant men HAD to strike or
risk getting kicked out of their job or worse, even though they were
happy to go to work.

As you say, this is completely off topic for this newsgroup so I will bow
out after this statement.

The whole point of a closed shop was this: Every man was in the union, so
every man had a vote. For or against. If the majority voted not to strike,
then no-one should strike[1]. If the majority voted to strike, then it was
right that every man should strike. Anyone who chose to work when the
majority had fairly voted to strike was a scab. One man = one vote, and
everyone gets a vote, pure direct democracy.

The man given the job of breaking the collective strength of the working
man was the ultimate scab, Norman Tebbit, former leader of the BALPA pilots'
union. The man who, in his own words, wanted to "..drag us back perhaps into
the 19th century, which in many ways was a very much better one for this
country ". Better perhaps if you were a rich man with a public school
education, but not if you were a working man.


Thatcher's legacy is still with us. It is in the overcrowded prisons, full
of kids who never had a job and so never had anything to lose. It is in the
crumbling hospitals and the (privately owned) railway companies that are now
subsidised at a rate that British Rail never was. Perhaps more to the point
it is also in the buoyant German steel industry, who's government chose in
1983 to subsidise rather than asset strip its nation, and is now the biggest
steel producer in the EU and the 6th biggest in the world, and in the £437.4
billion UK national debt [2]



I have no doubt that I will never convince you that collective bargaining
(the unions) was a good thing for the average working man and Britain in
general, and you will never convince me that Thatcher (and her skeletal
sidekick Tebbit) wasn't evil personified, so as I said, I am prepared to let
this disagreement lie.



Tom









[1] I am well aware of Arthur Scargill's call for illegal strikes. His
megalomania helped Thatcher and Tebbit destroy the mining industry.



[2] This is a minimum figure, as of 2003, the last year that figures have
been released. Thanks to the current governments use of PFI - Private
Finance Initiatives, a large quantity of debt is hidden away in company
balance books and does not appear in the government figures. No exact
analysis exists for the value of this hidden debt, but it is said to be
significant.