One for TTS

From yesterday's Times.

Keir Starmer needs Thatcher’s iron to restore the collapsing state
Britain is witnessing a breakdown in authority last seen during the 1970s and 1980s. It requires the prime minister to show strength, conviction and authority

Tom McTague

Wednesday August 07 2024, 6.00pm, The Times

We are witnessing a breakdown of order with few obvious parallels in recent British history. There have been moments of resemblance, of course: the London riots of 2011 or the “skinhead terror” of the early Seventies. The clashes between Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts and the coalitions of anti-fascists in the Thirties. Yet none of these comparisons feels quite right. What we are seeing here is something more modern and frightening.

A more apposite comparison, I think, is the period of state failure that marked the tumultuous period in British life between the imposition of direct rule in Northern Ireland in 1972 and the miners’ strike in 1984. This was a time when the state appeared to lose its authority to govern, and its willingness to do so, as war in the Middle East led to recession, political strife, international retreat and finally industrial confrontation. The trade unions entered into a war to the death, first with James Callaghan and then Margaret Thatcher.

Too often Thatcher’s premiership is understood as a battle to curtail the state, rather than what it really was: the battle to reassert the state’s supremacy. In the years before her victory in 1979, the British state had repeatedly failed to impose its will, from the strikes that brought down Ted Heath in 1973-74 to the IMF bailout in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79. For all the U-turns and incoherence of Thatcher’s record as prime minister, the source of her political success was that she was willing to pay a higher price than anyone previously thought possible to reimpose the authority of the British state at home and abroad.

Margaret Thatcher demonstrated to the public that she had the willpower to reimpose government authority
This is the political reality Keir Starmer faces. In such moments, the job of the prime minister is to play leviathan; to impose order so that civility can return. The state must reassert its authority and, crucially, its primacy. Little platoons are all well and good, but not when they have tooled up.

During the recession of the early Eighties, Thatcher doubled down on her programme of austerity, even as it drove unemployment to levels previously seen as morally unacceptable. In 1982, she went to war for a set of “small islands inhabited by three sheep”, as François Mitterand described the Falklands, not because they offered any real advantage to Britain but because of the principle that they were British. And then, in 1984, she used every means at her disposal — formal and otherwise — to break the miners’ power and take the war to the IRA after they tried to assassinate her and her entire cabinet; the most serious attack on the British state since 1945.

As David Edgerton notes in his sweeping account of postwar Britain, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, “the key difference in the politics of the Eighties from what went before was the preparedness of government to fight dissenters very hard and to exert the rights of elected authority very strongly”. What marked Thatcher out as something different, Edgerton argues, was her willingness to press on “in the face of odium” and in so doing transform the self-confidence of the British elites. “In the Seventies there emerged the idea that the United Kingdom was becoming ungovernable,” Edgerton writes. “The answer was, of course, ‘rolling back the state’, rhetorically speaking, but it also involved making the state more autonomous, more powerful.”

Town and cities hit by riots this month, such as Rotherham, are those that have been failing for decades
Today, there is a similar sense of British state failure; not quite that the United Kingdom is ungovernable but that it is slipping that way, with the state unable to impose its will or that of the people it serves. This is not just a question of this week’s explosion of racist thuggery and violent counter-rioting — important though this is — but the seeming inability to perform even the basic functions of a state: providing prison places, timely court hearings, adequate sentencing and enough police to patrol the streets. Even simply ensuring there is a functioning health service, uncorrupted police force, humane asylum regime and working borders seems out of reach today.

Too many areas of Britain today simply do not work. These mobs did not form in Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge, but the cities that have been failed for decades. Just as my colleague Aris Roussinos has argued we use euphemisms to hide the reality of what we can all see in front of our eyes, we also ignore our basic failures of government. No one can say that Birmingham, Belfast, Liverpool, Rotherham, Blackburn or Sunderland — the centres of violence in recent days — are beacons of good governance and prosperity. Few can say that of Britain more generally.

This is not a crisis that Starmer is responsible for. What we are witnessing is a breakdown of order which has exposed the anarchic ethnic strife hiding in plain sight. The past week stands as another appalling indictment of British state failure. How has it come to this? How have we allowed gangs of balaclava-clad (and Nazi tattooed) men to form pseudo-paramilitary mobs in our cities?


One of the most worrying aspects has not just been the breakdown of order, but the fact that the breakdown is seemingly between groups, neither of whom any longer trust, respect nor fear the police nor the law, it seems — a scene more reminiscent of Northern Ireland than recent history of mainland Britain. An irony of Thatcher’s premiership, in fact, is that the one place where she was never able to fully reimpose the authority of the state was in Northern Ireland, whose uneasy communal truce was only reached after her departure.

As prime minister, Thatcher championed monetarism only to quietly abandon it, decried European integration while signing the Single European Act and portrayed herself as the Iron Lady while reducing defence spending from 4 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent.

What she offered, though, was a display of willpower to reimpose the authority of the British state. Any prime minister who has since offered the merest hint of losing this authority has suffered. The only time during Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister when his personal poll ratings dropped into negative territory came during the fuel protests of 2000. Blair’s own authority never recovered from the anarchic disorder which resulted from the Iraq invasion in 2003.

In contrast, David Cameron’s ratings soared in the wake of the riots of 2011 when — supported by Keir Starmer, then director of public prosecutions — he responded with a display of indignant strength, condemning “criminality, pure and simple”, which he said would be “confronted and defeated” with the full force of the law. “If you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment.”

In his message to the public, Starmer offered a similar line, condemning the “far-right thuggery” while warning anyone who had participated in the violence: “I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder.” Yet, it was slow to come and stilted and unconvincing when it did, read from a piece of paper rather than flowing from a place of anger. He needs to be quicker, fluent, less rehearsed and more emotional. He must also find a way to deal with the rise of the “Muslim Defence League” and the constant baiting from Elon Musk. Both demand displays of strength, conviction and authority. People will remember how he deals with these challenges.

and after that bullshit you,ll be saying your not a tory . give us a break .

Gaffer

I have given that article a lot of thought, and in terms that weak governments lead to lawlessness in the population, and in the way that overseas governments look on the resolve and steadfastness of the British State, that can only be achieved by the British Government being strong, and being able to assert the rule of law.

That article does beg the question, that if Margaret Thatcher had just been elected to power at the recent General Election along with the same Government as there was in May1979, how would she and that government have tackled todays issues, as they governed for the next five years ?

Margaret Thatcher's opinion on the subject of Illegal Immigration.

But, whatever her opinion was, would she be successful in forcing the government to follow it?

the same way she did with the miners at orgreave . use the police for thuggery .

Not a cat in hell's chance as the composition in the number of MP's and Lords in the Houses's of Parliament has become more multi cultural since the time of her getting into power in1979!

TTS

The two episodes that led to the bulk of the recent migration to the UK would probably have been ameliorated by Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet because they would have seen the downside early on.

In 2004 ten Eastern European countries joined the EU.
Existing member countries were given a period of grace of up to 7 years before they had to accept free movement from the newcomers. The UK accepted them from day one, Germany opted for the full 7 years.
The estimates of the number of people likely to take advantage of moving to the UK were woefully underestimated.

The Conservative governments were pressed by the university and care sectors to allow for almost unlimited visas for students , care workers and family members. Changes to the rules last year are now having a significant effect on reducing numbers.

The upshot of the above can be seen from the following,

In 2011 foreign-born workers accounted for 14 per cent of the UK workforce. Today it’s 21 per cent. Employment has grown by 3.6 million since 2011, but fully 74 per cent of this is down to immigrant workers.

blame the farmers who exploit them by underpaying them . ironicly they are now bleating because there,s no one to pick the fruit for them . serve,s them right for voting us out of the EU .

Whups

Remember the days when our own people were only too willing to do the job of picking the the fruit and vegetables for the Farmers, some even when on holiday until the benefit system put paid to the idea of doing any back bending work?

Nothing to do with benefits, oldcodger. Schoolchildren used to willingly do it regular in their summer holidays for a bit of pocket money.

If you want to blame something the real culprits are the internet, computers, playstion, Xboxes, mobile phones etc.

Why go picking peas, potatoes, strawberries etc when you can sit on your backside all day and play computer games and whatsapp your friends!

The bigger farms are now using automatic machinery. Strawberries potatoes and lettuce picking machinery are now gaining a foothold in farming. It's expected to become more widespread when AI is introduced.

Today, machinery exists to minimise human labour.

Snap!

cheshirecat

The time I am on about was when the only benefit when out of work was Unemployment Benefit and people did any job to bring a income into the house to keep the wolfe from the door.

Owdcodger.
They did potato / pea / strawberry picking etc as it was cash in hand. Thus avoiding tax payment, loss of benefit etc. Just like some tradesmen / labourers do now when they do a job for you.

yes i do & iv,e done em all . but soft fruit cant be picked by machinery due to brusing .they have to be picked by hand by "you know who" .

Look at Fieldwork robotics and Summer berry company for soft fruit picking.

The Summer Berry Company

Working in harmony with the land.
We grow our berries on more than 360 hectares, producing over 10,000 tonnes of berries per year.
The business incorporates glasshouse, outdoor and polytunnels to produce first-class fruit

In our British farms, we have currently 49 robots working on our strawberry fields and glasshouses, but this number can scale up to more than 500 robots, depending on results obtained.

The partnership between The Summer Berry Company in UK and Tortuga AgTech dates to 2020 when the first trials with robots started in our farms.

Based on the success of these initial trials, the partnership has been progressively reinforced with the increasing in the number of robots operating in our business. The robots help us with harvesting but go much beyond that, generating forecast reports and supporting the team of agronomists fighting pests using UV light technology for mildew and mite control. Other R&D services, for agronomic and operational purposes are also being developed.

Whupsy...do you honestly believe that the ordinary plod as I was can be directed to hurt another person because of politics. If that was the case I would have walked many years ago....take a chill pill...

"ordinary plod" you mean like those "ordinary plod" that was at orgreave ? .