"How could I possibly support Thatcher, that evil lady who stood for the selfish state".
I tried to explain -
My father had a small company in the far North. My memory
was that it was a constant anxiety for him to find orders, to keep “The Works”
going and to provide salaries for “The men”. It had been the same for his father
who had run it before him.
One year there was a dearth of orders and my grandfather
did not have money to pay the men at Xmas. So Granny used her small inheritance
from her father to pay them. This meant that there were no presents for my
father and his sisters.
The well-being of the men was always foremost. My father
would spend so much time looking after the men and their families that I can
remember anger in my teens as I thought he spent more time with them than with his
family. To him, the responsibility to his men and the local community came
before the responsibility to his family. Just as when I worked as a doctor, my
responsibility to my patients came before anything else.
When my father retired, he aspired to be an MP under Margaret
Thatcher but died before the election. She wrote us a lovely letter.
Mrs Thatcher was also a child of someone who ran a small
business. She would have had the same sense of responsibility drummed into her.
- A responsibility linked to business.
i.e. In order to carry through your responsibilities, the
business must be thriving.
If the business makes money there is money to pay the
workers.
If the business is struggling there is less money for the
workers.
If the business fails to succeed, it is bankrupt. There
is no money for the workers and no product for customers.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the business
owner, the worker and the customer. Each has a responsibility for the whole to
work.
When Maggie was first elected, that relationship had
broken down. A large amount of business (owned by the government) was bankrupt
due to the union-led workers demand for unaffordable salaries. Many of these
were in sectors which were no longer viable.
She once said that -
“The Labour Party failed when it ran
out of other people money to spend”.
Maggie’s politics was based on her early experience. She
believed that encouraging and freeing up small business to flourish would help
all in the community
I think that what she started so successfully, ultimately
failed because businesses got too big and because of globalisation
Once it stops being a small private business in a small community
it doesn’t work
It becomes depersonalised and faceless.
Why should someone like my Granny spend her inheritance
on the employee's Xmas when her husband is a tiny cog in some global super-company?
It is essential that there is that fierce sense of responsibility
and the bigger the company gets the less likely it is to exist.
Mrs Thatcher was known to have been disappointed that so
many people who made money by her policies did not become philanthropists as
the Victorians had done. She did not
believe that a citizen had fulfilled his or her responsibilities when they paid
their tax bills. More was required of them. She herself tithed her income to good causes
She would have been quite horrified at the present practice
of so many to avoid even paying their tax.
It was not being selfish to encourage business to succeed
Equally it was not being selfish to stop supporting
bankrupt business.
Of course she and others knew that the workers of those
companies would be badly affected. But hopefully the taxes of those that were
in work would pay enough in welfare, to be able to help them.
The most critical thing she had to do was to encourage business
wherever it was, so that there would be work to provide wages, to generate tax,
to help those without work and enable the country and society to function.
Money does not grow on trees - people somewhere must be
working to generate it.
The way things looked before she was elected, the country
was heading for bankruptcy and the breakdown of society had started, with even
bodies going unburied.
And it must be remembered that she won with landslide elections,
so what she did was done with the will of the majority of the country at that
time.
It had to be done, everyone knew it.
It just needed a strong leader to do it
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