Don’t blame Thatcher for manufacturing decline

PERHAPS we should be grateful to Tom Howley (Yorkshire Post, June 1) for demonstrating just how deep and bitter a campaign of denigration and misrepresentation is being waged against Margaret Thatcher.

He accuses her of “callously ditching the country’s industries”. Britain’s manufacturing has been in decline since long before she became Prime Minister and continued and even accelerated under subsequent Labour governments.

There were many causes for this. British manufacturers had difficulty competing against cheaper goods produced in countries with lower wages, lower taxes, less regulation and less disruptive labour relation.

He also has a fantasy of her “grinning whilst selling essential utilities at give-away prices to foreign investors”.

During privatisation, shares were offered to British investors and subscribed by hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom resold their shares at prices that they considered fair.

He also seems to blame her for a banking crisis, which happened more than 15 years after she left office. It was some 10 years after Gordon Brown had scrapped Bank of England supervision, which had protected British banking for 150 years, and replaced it with a “tripartite” system that nobody understood.

If I remember rightly, it was Gordon Brown who had decided that Fred Goodwin deserved a knighthood for services to banking.

We are entitled to be somewhat sparing in our praise of Gordon Brown for his efforts to resolve a problem, which he had helped to create.