The post you are reporting:
The NHS can be applauded for the basic principals on which it was based, free healthcare at the point of delivery. No other country copied the NHS simply because, in the way it was set up, it was deeply flawed. No Government has, as yet, adequately reformed the NHS so it remains a flawed service. So I would give the NHS two out of three cheers. Other countries simply do it better.
The 60's were indeed a period in which greater tolerance started. Labour Home Secretary Jenkins said that 'a permissive society is a civilised society'. He went too far with that quote as indeed did the permissive society itself. Yes things needed to change, people needed to become more tolerant, but things have gone too far now. These days we are told not to be judgemental. That means people think they can get away with anything and have no sense of standards. We need to re-introduce a sense of shame back into society, a sense of individual responsibility and that means we, and the authorities, need to be more judgemental and disapproving of those who go too far. No, not back to how thing were back in the 50's but a happy medium.
Travel has indeed opened all our lives and people like Freddie Laker were social reformers as much as Beveridge. We must welcome this development but people jetting off to a Spanish Costa is not real foreign travel. Seeing a Costa is not like seeing Spain. Too many of those who have benefited from this social and economic revolution spend their holidays in resorts laying on the beach, eating fish and chips, binge drinking in fake 'English Pubs' and totally wasting the opportunity they have. In other words they may as well be in Blackpool with the only difference more sun.
A 'smaller' world though, as a result of cheap travel, has added a great deal to our society. We need only look at the places we can go to eat to see that. Every town has its Chinese and Indian restaurants, then (if we are lucky) we have Thai, Mexican, Argentinian, just about any cuisine in the world is available now instead of just Italian and French.... Or, perhaps I should say, Anglicised versions....
There is a negative side though. Too many immigrants do not integrate into our society and hold themselves apart, live in what are almost ghettos and dress and behave in ways that are alien to the UK.
These have been encouraged over the last 12 years by the discredited idea of multiculturalism. This has been a block to integration and is the cause of a great deal of resentment against minorities, something recognised by the head of the CRE. The rise in the BNP in some areas is a direct result and that is not good for any of us.
For decades after the war the UK economy was in decline and many thought that the best any Government could do was to manage that decline. Both Conservative and Labour Governments failed to arrest the decline which was speeded up by militant trade unionism. The Unions became a menace and were guilty of forgetting about the best interest of their members to follow a political agenda. Strikes devastated whole industries and in particular the nationalised ones. These nationalised industries were no more than a burden to the economy, inefficient, overmanned, they required huge taxpayer subsidies to produce cars that broke down all the time that no-one wanted to buy. A subsidised steel industry provided steel, using subsidised coal for a subsidised ship manufacturing industry to produced subsidised ships for the Poles who were able to undercut the hard pressed British merchant marine. It is no wonder we don't have much left of any of those industries any more, it was the economics of the madhouse and totally unsustainable.
Yes, Dave, let us also not forget those other strikes we suffered, the power cuts, the dead left unburied and rubbish not collected.
Don't forget the 29% inflation we had as well under the Callaghan Government. What about all those failed 'pay and price' policies. Then there was taxation, a basic rate of 34p and an effective higher rate, at one point of, 99%. Remember the attitude of Dennis Healey, who spoke about taxing the rich until the pips squeak. No wonder no-one wanted to invest in this country, no-wonder British industries were in seeming terminal decline.
To think now that you could be turned down for a job just because you did not want to join a Trade Union. It seems unbelievable but it happened to me once.
They were mad days and the fact that it got that bad is a poor reflection on both Conservative and Labour Governments during the 50's 60's and 70's.
One of the problems was that successive Governments had placed importance on trying to protect 'traditional' jobs and industries through subsidy. This was a block on progress and left the economy preserved in aspic not changing to meet the needs of a changing world. It simply could not last. The world does not stop still. Massive industries hid huge structural unemployment. The official figure may have been 1.5 million in the late 70's but if you looked at the underlying level the true figure was more than double that. By subsidising declining industries they placed a block on new developing industries and job opportunities. All those subsidies was hide unemployment and make future unemployment worse. (Today disability benefits are used in the same way that nationalised industries were used in the 70's, to hide unemployment).
That ended though, thanks to a great lady. Mrs Thatcher did not see an inevitable terminal decline for this country. She had a clear vision of pulling this country up by the bootstraps and of revitalising business. She could see clearly the failures of the past and had some brilliant minds behind her showing the way. Keith Joseph was one of the first, a student of Hayek and an admirer of the achievements of Friedman, he was the intellectual underpin of the early Thatcher years. A great backroom adviser but not so good as a Minister himself.
She stopped subsidising industries and got rid of a huge swathe of counter productive rules and red tape. Do you remember when you could not take more than £50 abroad? - she ended that. It was hard, no doubt about that, it was 'tough love' but it worked. Yes the hidden unemployment did 'shake out' and many lost their jobs but a great deal was done to attract inward investment and new industries to replace those jobs. It did take time but we are now all benefiting from what she did.
The over mighty Unions were brought within the law, again some tough battles had to be fought, brought about by politically motivated trade union leaders. But the Government of Mrs T won through, again to the great benefit of the UK and all of us.
I will not go into the more recent economic failures now as this post is long enough but will draw a conclusion.
Both Conservative and Labour Governments have failures and have been complicit in some very bad Government.
But there has been two terms of Government that stand apart that have had a profound and long lasting benefit to the UK. That is the 1979/83 and 1983/87 periods under Mrs T. These were rare transformational periods, that will always be controversial, but those years will always resonate because they reversed what was previously though to be an inevitable decline and Britain adopted a renewed self-confidence.
Without those years we would all be a lot poorer and perhaps no better than a third world country.