Dowding - I am not a stock broker. I was a computer programmer and in 1973, the year I left home to hit the (outskirts of) the big city, I was earning £1500 per year. I lived in a small bedsit in Croydon. This was at the time of the 1973/74 miners' strike, one of the years in which Xmas shopping had to be done by candlelight to save power, and the country was on a 3 day week. Ted Heath called a general election with the manifesto
Who governs the country? He lost. Labour had the most votes but no overall majority. Heath tried to get Jeremy Thorpe (Liberal leader) to form a coalition, but Thorpe refused.
Heath resigns. Wilson is PM, ran the Telegraph headline the following day. Labour had promised to end the 3 day week. The only way they could do that was to break the deadlock with the miners. Give in to the wage demands. Some miners got
increases of £30/week – more than I was even earning at the time! At about the same time, I was given a performance review at work, and in recognition of all the (unpaid) extra hours I had put in, I was given a one-off payment of £25. It was a lesson and a half for me at the time, a naive 19 year old, in how the world works. Behind the miners stood an army of union workers, all demanding similar wage increases which they inevitably got. And the result? Just as Heath had predicted – rip-roaring inflation of around 25% per annum. The rate of inflation peaked in July 1975, the month in which inflation expressed as an annual figure equated to 30%.
Now despite the fact that British industry was antiquated and being run very inefficiently, the miners were quite resolute in their refusal to consider any productivity deals. The cost of energy soared, and the 1973 OPEC crisis had played a large part in keeping coal prices “competitive”. Throughout British industry, outdated, antiquated working practices could be seen in action. Labour always wanted to “create jobs”. So in a factory area in one of the nationalised industries which required 5 workers, the government might allow 7, and the Union would insist on 10. (Don’t get me started on Nationalisation!) With such trade union dominance, did we get better products and services? We did not. There was no competition, and no incentive to improve. Car workers were always going on strike. You had guys like Derek Robinson (Red Robbo) causing stoppages at the Leyland car plant in Oxford in demand of higher pay. Even the production line was sabotaged maliciously in their fight to get their own way. As for the cars that were produced? LOL!!!!!! You have got to be toejamting me. Just
how bad they were came to light in 1990, when I was doing some work for Honda in Chiswick – London W4. Honda/Rover had a partnership, with Honda building engines for Rover cars which would be badged as the Honda Concerto. Therefore, they had to meet Honda pre-delivery inspection requirements, not those of Rover. Well, the cars produced by Rover were so bad that Honda sent back about 85% of them some weeks, to have PDI faults corrected. They got pissed off when some of those same cars came back with faults unrectified. So then they got tough. Any cars with faults on their second arrival at the Honda engine plant in Swindon were sent to the crusher! That tells you what the Japanese thought of British productivity. If anyone was wondering what happened to the British car industry after the war, think on this for a while. There are other examples I could quote, but let’s move on.
In 1979 after 7 years as a computer programmer on ICL mainframes, it became clear that the way ahead for me was on IBM mainframes. I had no IBM experience, so what did I do? Did I dig my heels in at work and demand higher pay for doing bugger all? Did I seek to hold back the wheels of inevitable progress? I did not. With some difficulty, I got myself a job in America where I would be able to cross train using my existing programming experience to gain new IBM experience. I stayed there about three years and came home in 1982. I then had a good skill set and was able to ply my trade as a freelance consultant earning £400/week, rising to £1000/week in 1987, and continued to earn high rates until very recently when this wonderful Labour government decided to manoeuvre the tax goalposts with a new package of measures known as IR35. IR35 means I have to pay Employee National Insurance (10% - soon to become 11%) AND Employer’s National Insurance (12% off the top) on almost every penny that comes through my company. Talk about disincentive. That’s on top of 40% income tax, and a substantial payment for Corporation Tax, there has also been spiralling petrol costs under Labour (55p per litre goes as tax), a halt to road development (we’re paying more, but receiving less) and almost unimaginable decline of the railways of which you are fully aware. I arrived at the decision last year that it was no longer worth my while to continue in that line of work, and have retired from it. Those people I know who are still around have had to do one of three things: Take a permanent job, pile their income into a pension plan (risky, if you ask me) or work overseas.
Labour just doesn’t get it. They put up taxes thinking they’re going to get more tax, and tax receipts go down. Did you know, Dowding, that prior to 1979, the top rate of income tax under labour was 83%? Did you also know that, under Labour, there was a 15%
Investment Income Surcharge? What that meant was that if you had made good, and were receiving an income on money invested instead of actually working for it, you got clobbered for another 15% tax, bringing to 98% your total tax take. No wonder people were buggering off overseas, and for a few years I was one of them.
Well, Margaret Thatcher turned all that around. She saw the error of charging 83% income tax, and over a period of years our top rate of tax was reduced to 40%. People with high incomes no longer sought refuge overseas, and tax receipts went up – to Labour cries of
taxes rise under the Tories.
As for industries, yeah a lot of them got run down and there were 3,000,000 unemployed when I got home from the States in 1982. We’d had riots in the streets etc. People were so full of their rights. “Jobs for life”. I was unaffected by the unemployment – why? Not because I was a stock broker. Nope. To paraphrase Norman Tebbitt, I got on my bike. Or in my case, I got on the plane – PA103 to New York, and embarked on a self improver course in the University of Life.
How did Margaret Thatcher deal with industry? My favourite example is the Jaguar Car company. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, a brand new Jaguar XJ6 cost something around £20,000. And they were crap! The workmanship was horrible, and the reliability was laughable. After only two years, the resale value would have plummeted to about £5000. I drove a Daimler Sovereign which a friend had bought for less than £750 – and it was only eight years old. He sold it to a kid who used it for banger racing. Well, Jaguar had been one of those Labour instigated nationalised industries – part of Leyland. When it was privatised, they whittled the work force down to less than half of what it had been, and yet they were able to make MORE CARS and BETTER cars – the Jag series 3. What does that tell you? I’ll tell you what it tells me. And that is that more than half of those Jag jobs prior to privatisation
were not real jobs! Same thing applied to many other industries, in which overmanning had been used to make the employment figures look better. So under Thatcher, all these antiquated working practices, overmanning and strikes (the bane of the 1970s) became a thing of the past. No gain without pain. I’m sorry that things were so bad in the North during those years, but the real reason is because Labour had allowed the industrial stagnation to continue while the rest of the world was getting into new technology. Had those same Thatcherite policies been allowed to be applied beginning 15 years earlier, I believe the transition would not have been so severe because it could have been done over a longer period of time.
As for the miners strike of 1984/85, when they tried all their usual heavy handed tactics to get more pay, and it didn’t work, I had a good snicker – in light of how things had been round the other way 10-11 years earlier. Just to illustrate how bad British industrial relations had been under Labour, and in post war Britain generally, I did some work at the Unipart plant (part of the former Leyland) in 1985/1986. As 1986 rolled around, the company celebrated that 1985 had been the first strike free year since WW2 !!!!!
Yep, vive M. Thatcher.
What do we have now? New Labour (Old Labour dressed up). Back to strikes. Back to tax and spend. Back to punitive taxation. Back, back, back. It’s so bad that I give serious consideration to retiring abroad – probably France or Spain. So you can stuff New Labour where the sun doesn’t shine.
Well Dowding, hope you enjoyed the history lesson! To pre-empt your brother, I would add that my views do not necessarily reflect those of other Britons. LOL!
