Margaret Thatcher's Policies Benefited Britain

The way my opponent gave many sperate critiques of Thatcher at the end together can be bunched into some full sections and paragraphs in my rebuttals, so that is what I have done. HealthcareIt should be noted that when Labour finally took back power in 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair said he would reverse course with the internal market reforms the Thatcher Government had passed in her last year in office in 1990. The National Health Service and Community Care Act was supposed to make the state the enabler of health policies and not the supplier. This job was to be done by new NHS trusts who would compete with each other while local governments purchase the services needed. Yet Blair did a U-turn in his second term after the 2001 general election where he decided to modernize the healthcare system. Thatcher's reforms were kept in place because they were the start of a much needed reform of the NHS (which is difficult to do as my first source mentioned):"The point of all our proposals is to produce a better NHS providing the type and standard of service a patient has a right to expect throughout the country. Hospitals will have more freedom to manage their own affairs and so will be able to respond better and quicker to individual patients and their GPs. District health authorities for their part will in future be able to concentrate on identifying the health needs of the populations they serve and then making sure that they receive a comprehensive range of high quality services. " [1]One must understand what was wrong with the system:"The trigger was a crisis at Birmingham Children's hospital where heart operations had been postponed for lack of funding putting young lives at risk. The NHS had lurched from crisis to crisis during the 1980s and the Government had once more been forced to seek an extra £100 million from the Treasury to bale it out. Patience was wearing thin, and the Tory party was growing restive. " [2]"Every development since has been a refinement of this market structure. Has it improved the NHS? The service is better today than it has ever been, with shorter waiting lists, better access and higher standards of care than at any point in the last 60 years. " [2]"Right to Buy"The blame for the 2008 economic crisis cannot be blamed on Thatcher, but on prime ministers and their governments following her. Keep in mind Thatcher was a fan of high interest rates, balanced budgets, private spending over public spending. When Labour won by a landslide in the 1997 general election, the Blair government increased welfare spending beyond the revenue provided and interest rates were cut dramatically allow for easy credit policies that were very outrageous. This increased borrowing and the bubble burst in 2008. However, it is wrong to blame this on Thatcher, who had largely different policies:"A mixture of budget restraint, economic recovery, North Sea oil revenue and enhanced receipts from privatization and council house sales brought borrowing down, and by 1987-8 the British government was a net repayer of debt. This achievement might have been expected to be repeated during the unprecedentedly prolonged period of economic growth of the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was not, primarily because the Thacherite belief in smaller state was reversed through a return of borrowing. " [3]Poll TaxI will say that because this policy was never actually carried through to its full effect, primarily because of massive protests by the infamous Militant Tendency, which had influence had in the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation and because her successor John Major and his Conservative government abandoned the policy, we cannot fully assess and analyze the effects of the poll tax. We know people were made over it, but just because a policy is unpopular does not mean it is the wrong policy (most of Thatcher's policies led her swimming against a socialist tide). The problem on why the poll tax was introduced was because of local governments, specifically Labour ones, that didn't want to cut their budgets and instead raised taxes. Like I said though, this policy lasted from 1990 to 1993 so we don't have much long-term effects to debate her. This argument must be discarded. Unions and Manufacturing IndustryIt is important to understand, like I have already said before, that unions were taking the British government hostage by getting whatever they wanted when a strike occured because all major industries were owned by the state. This was a disaster in that unions were threatening a democratically elected government. Thus the threat to the government needed to be taken out and that is what Thatcher aimed to do. These the unions that led the previous Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath (who Thatcher served as Education Minister) to call five separate state of emergencies from his victory in 1970 to his defeat in 1974. Heath simply did not have the guts to fight them and the country was held hostage. Thatcher did have the guts. "Nor were the unions important merely because strikes caused disruptions and lost revenue. They were partners in government to the extent that they were accorded a critical role in economic policy, agreeing with government ministers' nationwide pay norms to prevent greeat numbers of employees - even in the private sector - from earning above a perscribed amount. " [3]One has to consider this outrageous that these unions had such lobbying power in a government to get whatever they wanted, even if it was against the wishes of the voters. Thatcher also created more than enough jobs to offest losses in manufacturing jobs:"A net of 1.6 million jobs were created under Thatcher. The manufacturing industry lost 1.9 million, while the services sector grew by 3.6 million. " [4]Remember that were was such a huge decline in the quality of state manufcaturing that the government was making huge losses. Thatcher sought to get rid of the dead weight and what was left became a small and effecient system. Also, services dramatically increased while manufacters decline. This is the natural economic cycle of agricultural economy, industrial economy, and then service economy. People say this is wrong, but why? The pattern has always been like this:"This is a pattern that has been seen throughout the world, and there is nothng wrong with it - or if there is, most of the First World is now in worse economic conditi0on thant the Third World, which is an apagogical argument. Services are real economic goods, and civilization depends of them. If you possess a comparative advantage in service provision, you are clearly better off providing services. " [5]"A Doomed to Fail System"? What is doomed to fail about defeating unions that threaten democracy, turning your country into a modern economic powers (while socialism falls apart), making Britain a strong nation after the Falklands War, and preventing the nation from going into permanent decline. People ended up better off under her. "Recall Sir Nicholas Henderson, the British ambassador to Paris, who sent a telegram to the foreign office in 1979 remarking 'today we are not only no longer a word power, but we are not in the first rank even as a European one. ' He included his missive table: It showed that Britain's per capita income was 46 percent below West Germany's and 41 percent below France's. As of today, British per capita income is 6 percent higher than united Germany's and 8 percent higher than France's. Britain is Europe's fastest growing economy now and fifth largest. " [5]All this can be credited to a grocer's daughter from Grantham. Sources1. ""Working for Patients"" (Hansard, 7 November 1989). N. p. , 7 Nov. 1989. Web. 24 July 2014. <. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com...;. 2. Laurance, Jeremy. "Margaret Thatcher's Impact on the NHS. " The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 8 Apr. 2013. Web. 24 July 2014. 3. Stewart, Graham. Bang! : A History of Britain in the 1980s. London: Atlantic, 2013. Print. 4. Jones, Jonathan. "Margaret Thatcher in Six Graphs. " Spectator Blogs. The Spectator, 10 Apr. 2013. Web. 24 July 2014.5. Berlinski, Claire. "There Is No Alternative": Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. New York: Basic, 2008. Print