I certainly think Labour didn't do enough. They halted the huge increase in inequality seen between 1979 and 1997, but they didn't reverse it. They reduced the lower rates of income tax but did nothing about the higher rates until after the GFC, which has subsequently been reduced by the Tories. They also increase NICs on everyone, but the biggest burden on low to middle incomes.

But government spending did increase as a proportion of GDP under Labour steadily up until the GFC, and debt as a proportion of GDP were exactly the same as in 1997 when the GFC started. The serious failing was deregulation of banks and financial markets and then a lack of coherent response in 2009/10.

They also could and should have done a lot more to improve productivity. The insistence that 50% of people go to University at the expense of other ideas of how to improve educational achievement and prepare people for work is one example I can think of.

Problems with the UK's balance of payments stem from 1979 and Thatcher's destruction of manufacturing. it has also got significantly worse since 2010. Labour did little though in terms of industrial policy or addressing productivity to help. There are obviously external factors which influence this such as the increased availability of cheap imports, but Germany manages to run a surplus and has a far higher share of it's economy still in manufacturing. People can point to financial markets in London being so dominant, but outside of London there are 55m people and huge scope for increasing productivity and investing in manufacturing. Thatcher dismantled much of what did exist in the North and didn't bother replacing it with productive industry. Just said said there's no such thing as society and washed her hands of them.

'Thatcher dismantled manufacturing'. The situation was far, far more nuanced than that.

British manufacturing was in a terrible state. The facilities were old fashioned, management was poor and the unions bled industry to death. British products were notoriously poor. Why would you buy an Austin Allegro when you could buy a Golf?

Blaming Thatcher for the demise of British industry is too easy and judging by your posts, you are intelligent enough to get that.

Your point is a good one, however Thatcher didn't make a noble decision to rid us of ailing industry. She sacrificed groups of people based on her neo-classical ideology. Rather than address the problems of poor quality and productivity she made a decision to move away from those sectors and leave it up to the free market to replace them, which has been a costly decision for many communities around the UK. The free market won't retrain 40 year old blokes who've spent their whole life working in a mine or building rubbish cars. What it will do is allow people to charge economic rent (this is a concept of making money out of an asset without actually creating anything, like renting out a flat, it has no productive merit) and thereby shift wealth from the users of assets to the owners of assets. This causes inequality to increase, as we saw in the Thatcher years.

Edited by CambridgeEagle (19 Apr 2017 3.52pm)

Is it the governments responsibility to retrain people who have 'spent their whole lives down mines or making rubbish cars'?

I think it is to an extent, a governments responsibility is to it citizens, and their prospects are part of that. Governments have to provide for the people they represent and their interests.

The problem is the scale of the problem at hand, especially given the increased academic level of requirement necessary for the new jobs.

Its noteworthy that even the Thatcher introduced a number of training schemes, aimed primarily at young people, such as the YTS, which did create opportunities for education and employment on apprentice schemes (I did one) but the problem was always what to do with the older workers, who were educationally unsuited to the new job markets that were springing up.

The issue I think of criticism that can be levelled at Thatcher here, is that her government did little to nothing to slow down the death of manufacturing and industry in the UK, instead opting more towards a free market approach, that left whole areas of the country in high unemployment zones.

That's not true though, not really. The Transition was more about technology opening up the viability of exploiting cheaper overseas labour. Pretty much since the industrial revolution up to the 70s, the level of 'keep up' required of workers in low and no-skilled manual labour was fairly small.

How well off would we be if it was the Left who were in power. I dunno, no one does, the Conservatives were at a critical point in history, and went one way - and it had very serious impacts and social upheaval and change, leading to where we are now.

The left, would have gone a different way, and the world would have looked very different. Its worth noting that most of the major nations of Europe when more towards a left, rather than right solution, and many of them whilst people might not personally 'earn as much' enjoy a pretty good standard of living etc...