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Margaret Thatcher Dies At 87
syngularyx writes "Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who became one of the most influential global leaders of the postwar period, died on Monday, three decades after her championing of free-market economics and individual choice transformed Britain's economy and her vigorous foreign policy played a key role in the end of the Cold War."
This is geek news because she created the conditions where IT professionals could sell their skills at a decent price. If you were in commercial IT between 1985 and 2005 and you didn't even try to become self employed, then you should ask yourself whether you missed something.
I am aware that the deregulation of the financial market went too far. However, I maintain that if Mrs. Thatcher wouldn't have exercised her influence, the UK would not have thrived as it did.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I think you have a rose tinted view of what the unions were offering (or in fact, still achieve today in public sector). Public sector unions are still fairly strong, and as someone who has worked in public sector (for 6 years) and took the time to get involved with Unison, including striking with it, I can assure you that it's not as rosy as you think.
Unions have this horrible habit of protecting their members no matter what, you may argue they have a duty to do so, but it ultimately means that no matter how in the wrong a member is they will waste an organisations time and money fighting them tooth and nail over something their member is guilty of that is completely indefensible (such as simply not turning up to work for 6 months but also refusing to get a doctor's note as evidence of some sickness - a real example witnessed first hand). Worse than this, these sorts of lazy people often then go and apply to be union stewards and so forth because they can't be bothered to do their own job and it's a good excuse to get out of it now and again. This means they get time out of their job to spend with the unions at the tax payer's expense, due to them having contact with union staff they often have a greater influence on policy and sometimes even get given jobs there meaning the unions are built up of the worst, the laziest, most inept members of society which results in a repeat of the cycle of them then going on to defend more lazy inept people. They don't care about the average Joe, they don't care about genuine injustice, it's a scam - it's all about minimising their personal responsibility in life.
On another note I think you're misguided regarding inequality. One of the times I went on strike, related to pay the government pay offer was something like 3% for the lowest paid workers and 2% for the highest paid workers (i.e. public sector executives and service directors) at a time of around 5% inflation. The lowest paid would normally be the ones that went on strike, the execs would never go on strike, so anyway the low paid workers went on strike for 2 days, giving up 2 days wages for their belief that the pay offer was too low, the government came back with a new offer which the unions accepted immediately - 3% across the board.
So there you have it, the low paid workers, the union lackeys give up their wages to go on strike so that the union negotiators can get an extra 1% pay rise for the high paid execs that gave up not a single day of wages for the effort.
It took me some years to grow up and realise in hindsight what the unions were about, how they really worked, but eventually I did. The people at the top of unions are no different from people like Rupert Murdoch - they don't care about you or I, they don't care about the workers, about increase their wages, they want one thing and one thing only - they want power to influence policy their way. Dave Prentis, the current boss of Unison, do you know what he earns? almost as much as the prime minister, he earns £127,000 and he holds so much sway in the Labour party that he can potentially determine a prime minister - it was him as much as anyone who managed to get Ed rather than his infinitely more fair and competent brother Dave as leader of the opposition right now. You really think with his salary, with the power he wields, that it's really about you, the worker?
Unions in the UK have long lost their way, they have little relevance to the mythical ideal people hold about them and one of my biggest regrets in life was ever believing the lies and funding such a corrupt organisation. They're as much an affront to classical union ideals such as those you mention as bankers are to corporate responsibility.