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Riots: were they Mrs Thatcher’s fault or not?
First Reaction: IDS blames Mrs T’s ‘unfinished business’ - others just blame Mrs T
Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has linked the "social crisis" which spawned this month's riots to the Thatcher government in the Spectator. Under Margaret Thatcher, he said, the Conservative government "freed up the markets", but "missed the next bit". This resulted in "a sort of mid-20th Century society, many locked away in welfarism, and a 21st Century economy."
But Smith fell short of blaming Thatcher. Instead, he said what was still needed was social and welfare reform. Thatcher knew this, but "never got there", and neither have her successors of either party.
Whatever Smith might stay, others have been quicker to point the finger at Thatcher. In the San Francisco Chronicle Pankaj Mishra said that if Tony Blair and David Cameron have both been called the "sons of Thatcher", the rioters can be called her grandchildren.
It was Thatcher, he says, who proclaimed "there is no such thing as society" and set about privatising public assets, weakening unions and decimating many public services that tended to Britain's disadvantaged. The result of her radical socio-economic engineering is "some of the world's highest levels of inequality". Her policies fragmented the old working class and created a new underclass of "the unemployed and unemployable".
What's more, those policies created a "grab what you can, winner takes all" attitude, said Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. This "amoral creed" has reigned unquestioned since Margaret Thatcher. Combine it with a small state, a smaller police force and diminished social programmes, and there's "more potential for anarchy".
Oh please, says Brendan O'Neill on spiked.com. Saying the rioters are just like people rushing for Ikea sale items, and simply a violent expression of the capitalist ethos, just "demonises material aspiration".
The nihilistic destructiveness of the rioters is not a result of communities broken down by market forces, but ones that have been "artificially propped up by welfare". It's not Thatcher's culture of individualism and competition that has caused the riots, but rather "the welfare state's decommissioning of those things" - the erosion of working people's social networks and self-respect. ·
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If I may say so, I think you are slightly missing the point, Craig. Today's politicians are, to a very large extent, a legacy of Thatcher's years - as are Murdoch's empire and the UK's highly politicised police force. Thatcher isn't wholly to blame for the riots, but she laid the foundations - on which others enthusiastically built.
It wasn't politicians who exposed the NOTW. It was journalists.
And it's hardly piffling when serial criminality is ignored by the police because their in bed with the criminals, and by the politicians because they want them on their side and are scared of them.
The riots weren't caused by two senior Met officers resigning because they were either incompetent or corrupt.
It surely is not the business to be running enterprise and Mrs Thatcher was right about that. The "right" way is to privatize with subsidies to get what is needed. The simple fact is that if too many people get the wrong side of survival they will get the wrong side of the law fom time to time. There are three ways of dealing with the problem. The first is to stimulate the economy in a positive manner. Subsidy of the new emerging industries is one constructive area as it will yeild exports and taxes come in later. Second is to improve the infrastructure. Too much time is wasted in transport in the UK. In health, care for the elderly, education and all public services there are thousands of jobs to be done. Even simply cutting labour costs could create more jobs. The third alternative way of dealing with the root problem is trash a segment of society and hire more police, fill prisons with more drug offenders and thugs as in the USA and call in the cast off New York policeman to bring in gunlaw and expand the fear culture with some bible thumping and moralizing. We know Mr. Cameron wants his own boots on the ground war and he may get that as well. This seems to be a much more suited to Mr. Cameron's style and probably what we will get.
Has anyone thought it was not politicians of 30 years ago, but rather current politicians ?
They cheat on expenses and then whip up a storm over piffling voicemail intercepts, forcing two senior Met Police chiefs out of office thus leaving the security of the city exposed.
Quite literally fiddling whilst London burns.