It was more than Howe. The antipathy towards Liverpool was deeply ingrained in the Tory government in the 80’s. There were several other ministers and advisers pushing her to abandon Liverpool. A few other pushing to focus their inner city strategy on Birmingham (seemed more salvageable than Liverpool) instead. The idea of an evacuation of Liverpool was toyed with. These ideas weren’t fringe. They were openly discussed in cabinet, which means although she ultimately rejected them, Thatcher did really think the abandonment of Liverpool was something to seriously consider.
Thatcher’s problem was that she profoundly didn’t understand the situation in Liverpool and other inner cities. She had an overly simplistic worldview when it came to public disorder amongst the disenfranchised and frustrated. She saw explosions of public disorder, such as the Toxteth riots, as simple criminality, rather than attempting to understand the root causes. Her predictable response was to pour petrol on the fire by tooling up the police and sending them in to crack heads, she would accept no criticism of police tactics and her response to the inner city violence was to question why people wouldn’t just respect the police.
She later adopted similar tactics in the Miner’s strike, using the South Yorkshire Police as her private militia, which led to a culture of lawlessness and unaccountability in that force. Liverpool fans don‘t need to be told where that led.
I know a few lads that were in the riot at Kiveton park in the early days of Thatchers strategy to the miners; the common story is they literally beat the shit out of South Yorkshire police, which might be a part of why things escalated later on.
Well, I don’t want to get too deep into the Miner’s strike, having been a kid in Yorkshire at the time and personally affected. Thatcher was obviously unhinged when it came to the miners, but Scargill was a fucking lunatic as well.
My main point was that Thatcher’s default mode was to take a simplistic view of problems and respond in simplistic terms. This might actually be a reason for her continued electoral success, as most voters would probably share her basic worldview of goodies and baddies. But for cities like Liverpool it only made their situation worse.
We saw the same things with football, especially after Hillsborough. Thatchers default position was Police = Good, Football fans = drunk thugs.
Sure I appreciate that, I was down in Notts which was a different experience.
She did polarise issues we now know to be far more complex and dynamic; but then she lived before the understandings we benefit from now. It was a whole other era, and probably the first showings of neoliberalism in the UK. Where poverty actually is viewed as laziness and failure rather than a lack of equal opportunity.
As a small UK manufacturer with a major customer in Germany I say thank you to all concerned and congratulations on apparently getting a deal over the line.
Probably still a few red herrings in the fine detail… …but very good news amongst the gloom…
More than a few, I think. Apparently they’ve been discussing every species of fish in the waters around the UK, of which there are over a hundred and agreeing on the quotas for each one. But it’s hopefully good news for once.
We’ve managed to get everything we wanted. The only issue. And it’s a really minor thing, tiny in fact. We now have to call ourselves the European United Kingdom and the EU flag will be overlayed on the upper left quadrant of the Union Flag.
There’s not really much point mate. Been explaining my thoughts on the subject for several years. Essentially I like straight bananas and want to send all the Indians and Chinese home. Plus I want to place my staff into effective slavery and gorge myself on mutant US chickens.
…but very good news amongst the gloom…
