Mitchverr wrote:What happened to top 4 employers in the region with NO attempt to rectify the situation beyond "meh".
Mining industry - gone because short term profit, doesnt attempt to properly even sell off to private groups just gone.
Fishing industry - Common Fisheries Policy 1983, guess what happened to the vibrant fishing industry in the north east, (i will give you a hint, the fishing fleet is a tiny bit of what it once was and the "fish and chips" in what were my local pubs and chippies often came from the north sea not to far away where we once fished, but was caught by spanish or dutch or even italian ships sometimes, taken all the way back to their countries then sold to us, again, no attempt to rectify the massive damage to the local economy)
Military - a massive proportion of the armed forces has always been recruited from the North, cut the military spending, collapsed (its why a large amount of the army was in fact based in the north of England iirc out of her time, to give some boon to the economy and to help those who served be "close to home")
Steel - went the same way as the mining industry, her government loosened the binding of contracts, the recent tories destroyed it, foreign companies could just ignore what contracts said, take things and leave.
While I can understand the resentment, and I don't really have an opinion on Thatcher's internal politics. I would like a clarification for a poor non-islander that is so different that it has come full circle and is actually fairly similar.
Anyway.
As far I have understood the British coal mining was on the way out already. It was running at a deficit, and in the previous 20 years had gone from about 700.000 employees to 200.000 around 1980. So, didn't she just take the coal mining off life support? It should be telling that private companies weren't too happy to jump in afterwards and produced ever less. Britain has plenty coal remaining, but few if any new mines were opened up.
Or have I misunderstood the situation completely?
Wasn't it much the same with the fishing? The North Sea was pretty much fished bare leading up to the 80s. There would probably not have been much left regardless. This isn't a British problem, it is a world problem really. We had depleted the local fisheries and to go fishing in the deep Atlantic requires significant investment, and much less crew. Hence no matter how you cut it, the fishermen were going away, Thatcher or no Thatcher. I'm sure a larger portion of your local fish 'n chips would be 'local' fish than now, but to pin this entirely on her does seem fair. We have seen the exact same thing in Denmark, only we had no 'evil politicians' kill the industry. At most they have imposed quotas, which I think everyone has for the North Sea.
Military is on her as far as I understand. It is pretty much always the incumbent government that is responsible for significant growth or decline in the military.
I don't know as much about the steel industry, but I do know the steel mills were running at a deficit. Arguably it wasn't going to become better for some time yet (incidentally it would become better, as the recent upsurge has proven, with improved and less manpower intensive methods). I agree that on top of the coal mining cut, it was harsh.
In my opinion, what should have been done, rather than closing the mills down, was to explore the capacity for upgrades. It would have cost workplaces, but it would have retained some, and would have retained an industry in an already hit area. I have a strong feeling this one, at least, was done if not out of spite, then for political reasons rather than economic. The British Steel mills were inefficient compared to what they could have been. The solution to that isn't closing them, but upgrading them. The production numbers, unlike the coal, appears to have been fairly static.
