LDB wrote:
There are many ghost towns in America from where the industry of that town became out of date and people got on their bikes to move where the work is. It's not nice to force families to displace from their roots and no sane human likes it but It's a harsh fact of industrial progress that certain industries get left behind and replaced, the difference is that in this country people stay put and expect the rest of the country to prop them up. Maybe if more people had got on their bikes and moved to the work we wouldn't have spent the last 15 years flooding the country with migrant labour. There have been efforts to provide work in these areas, I can see this by the way I have to send any correspondence with the government to fucking Liverpool or some such place but this can only get you so far, as you seem to realise.
It's not nice and it's not fair but life is rarely either of those
The trouble was that she put so many people out of work - its not as if whole swathes of Scotland and the North of England (and Wales etc) could just uproot and move en masse to the south! Plus it wasn't as if there was much other heavy industry for them to move into, you're talking about people with an entirely different skill set from that required for the jobs that were being created in many cases, a hell of a lot would need to have been spent on training etc and, whilst I can't comment for certain, I haven't heard of much of this being made available.
As for migrant labour, this was always going to happen regardless, especially before the introduction of a minimum wage - people rightly expected to be able to earn enough to look after their families whereas immigrants would, in many cases, be happy to work for very, very little in order to get into the country. More specialist fields such as medicine etc could have had less need for migrant labour but again a hell of a lot of retraining was needed, you can't expect a ship builder or a miner to suddenly become a doctor.
I genuinely don't think it was just a case of "oh well, no jobs here, let's get on our bikes and find other work". Uprooting your whole family can be difficult especially when there's a load of people unemployed, you don't have any money and a lot of the jobs are nothing like comparable. It appears that very little support was offered to the people who lost their jobs, throughout the whole period Thatcher demonstrated that she didn't simply appear callous and uncaring due to her voice/ stature etc, she genuinely just didn't give a fuck about people who wouldn't vote for her anyway and the unions (who certainly didn't help matters I agree) had pissed her off.
She did what she felt she had to do (or what she wanted to do) but she destroyed a lot of lives and a lot of areas in the process and so its no surprise that a lot of people are happy that she died scared, confused and alone, she left many others in that state and they weren't in the fucking Ritz at the time. As for Whelan and Madjeski wanting a minutes silence, well the latter might want to check who his team are playing, it would be a disaster, and I seriously doubt many Wigan (or Millwall) fans would "honour" her either. I just hope that Mike Ashley is stupid enough to suggest it at the north east derby, I've never heard both sets of fans join together for a minute and trust me, if he dared to implement a minutes silence at the derby that is exactly what would happen, our lot would happily join with the mags for once and vice versa, some things transcend football.
