UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
from The Great Debate:
Thatcher: Master of the ‘unexpecteds’
The passing of Margaret Thatcher comes at a time when the great theme that shaped her years as Britain’s prime minister – the frontier between government and the private sector – is again the focus of serious public debate. Her historic achievement was to widen the frontiers of the “market” and, as she said, to have “rolled back the frontiers of the state.”
There is, however, a pendulum in this relationship between government and private sector. The role of government in the economy has expanded greatly since the 2008 financial collapse, along with government debt. So we will likely again see a struggle to rebalance the respective realms of state and market. And it will again be a battle.
The former prime minister’s memorial service Wednesday provides timely reason to ask: What was the Thatcher Revolution about? I tackled that question 15 years ago – for my book The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy – and I decided the best way to answer was by asking Thatcher herself. So I turned up at the Thatcher Foundation, a town house in London’s Belgravia, which was the operating base for then-Baroness Thatcher.
“For me, it was so simple,” Thatcher told me that day. “The state ought not to tell people what to do. My experience reinforced my beliefs. It was becoming obvious to people that the socialist way meant accepting decline.” At that point she shook her head. “Can you imagine – people accepting decline.”
The reform that breaks the camel’s back?
Trade union leaders have been warning for some time now that it would be pensions reform — not pay freezes or job cuts — that could prove the trigger for widespread public sector strikes this year.
Now activists, eager to punish the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, have all the ammunition they need in the Hutton pension review.
Should stiletto heels be banned in the workplace?
A call by the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists asking employers to work with unions to conduct risk assessments and if necessary allow workers to replace high heels with comfortable shoes in the workplace created a controversy this week.******Unions passed a motion at the Trades Union Congress conference demanding that women have the right to comfortable footwear in the workplace.******Defenders of the stiletto claimed that unions were attempting to ban the shoes in the workplace, but the podiatrists defended their position, stating that high heels can cause such foot problems as blisters, corns, calluses, damaged joints, knee and back pain.******Some women argue that stiletto heels give them a power advantage in male-dominated workplaces because the shoes make them appear taller and enhance their sex appeal.******Others consider the shoes demeaning and symbolic of the sexist subjugation of women and their health to satisfy male whims and fantasies.******What do you think? Should stilettos be banned in the workplace?
UK unions fear future with the “enemy”
After more than a decade of railing against a Labour government that they feel has betrayed their shared socialist roots, British trade unions are now starting to fear what a future with a Conservative government will be like.
“They’re going to come after us like rabid dogs,” said Brian Caton, general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association said — dubbing the Conservatives “the enemy”.
BA attempts to talk its way out of trouble
British Airways has become a real chatterbox of late.
Chief Executive Willie Walsh is attempting to stage a recovery from a year of record losses and a business-class focus that has proven rather ill-suited to a recession. He has been scaring staff and shareholders rigid with his ‘fight for survival’ rhetoric, but how does he plan to wage this battle?
By talking.
He talks to pilots, he talks to engineers, he talks to ground staff and cabin crew. He talks to trade unions, he talks to shareholders – and apparently he talks to his allies over at Spanish rival Iberia. Today’s annual general meeting was dominated by news of these talks – they are making progress, apparently — all of them are making progress.
Can you train a teacher in six months?
As the recession closes one door for bankers, another quickly opens.
The government’s latest educational wheeze is to allow teachers to qualify in just six months, half the current one-year time period.
Schools Minister Jim Knight wants to attract “more outstanding people” to the profession and hopes the scheme could help those such as bankers, who were excellent mathematicians and had been made unemployed, switch careers.
Privatising Royal Mail
The government is trying to defuse anger over its plans to part-privatise Royal Mail. Postal workers are protesting in Westminster after it was announced that 30 percent of the company is to be sold off. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gordon Brown faces a large backbench rebellion as 145 MPs – more than a fifth of all members of the House of Commons – sign a motion rejecting the move.
Ministers argue that Royal Mail simply cannot survive in its current state and must be part-privatised to fund modernisation and fight a growing pensions deficit which, the Royal Mail pension scheme trustees have warned, could be “significantly larger” than the 5.9 billion pounds estimated last year.
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The Wall
