Challenge: Reagan seen in the USA as Thatcher is in the UK

Thatcher was controversial (and despised by a significant portion of the British population) because the union movement was much more powerful and popular in Britain and her privatization policies flew in the face of widespread public approval regarding the labor movement and government entitlements in general.

In the USA, for a variety of reasons, the whole class-warfare philosophy that informed unionism in Europe and the UK was never that widespread among rank-and file Ameicans and the population at large. One has only to compare the broadly favorable popular reaction to Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers right after he assumed office with the reaction of many Britons (including some in the Conservative Party) to Thatcher's attempt to break the unions at the mines. Also, in the USA the whole idea of government-protected entitlements was always a legitimate topic to attack.

People seem to be making the assumption that it was Thatcher vs. the Unions which is what it may have appeared to be, but those that really suffered were ordinary working people and the communities they served who were caught in the cross-fire. Villages became ghost towns over night, huge areas of the country left without hope or a future, the devastation caused has still not been fixed 30 years on. I could go on but I won't and despite my words I am fairly impartial despite living amongst the communities destroyed ... I sat as an observer and fortunately never had to suffer ...
 
Though Iran-Contra would seem like the most likely thing to do the trick, it isn't really centered on any major political issues 5h3 2qy much of what Thatcher is loved/hated for. I mean, disliking drug cartels and Iran was a pretty "across the aisle" kind of issue in the US. I think what you need is to get a really nasty plane crash or two in the immediate aftermath of breaking the Air-Traffic Controller's strike. It would serve to strengthen the labor movement significantly rather than what happened IOTL, and there would be enough people who would blame it on the striking air-traffic controllers, thus balancing out the love-hate.
 
Though Iran-Contra would seem like the most likely thing to do the trick, it isn't really centered on any major political issues 5h3 2qy much of what Thatcher is loved/hated for. I mean, disliking drug cartels and Iran was a pretty "across the aisle" kind of issue in the US. I think what you need is to get a really nasty plane crash or two in the immediate aftermath of breaking the Air-Traffic Controller's strike. It would serve to strengthen the labor movement significantly rather than what happened IOTL, and there would be enough people who would blame it on the striking air-traffic controllers, thus balancing out the love-hate.
For those who think it was a simple strike and that a similar event in the U.S. could have led to Reagan being "hated" by some as Thatcher is in some areas of the UK maybe you should consider this ...

In the UK the mining industry employed 170,000 people prior to Thatcher's premiership. There are now just 2,000 people employed. Whilst not all of the job losses happened in the mid-eighties the majority did and the decline has never stopped.

If you put this in context Reagan would have to be responsible for destroying the employment hopes of just over 1 million U.S. citizens in one foul swoop in one industry centred in just a few states for there to be a similar backlash.

Here is an article written by Ken Capstick for the Guardian ...

Unlike Margaret Thatcher, miners believed in society

Miners were the 'enemy within'. Their communities were targeted for destruction. If there is rejoicing at her death, bear this in mind.

In 1984 Britain had 186 working coalmines and approximately 170,000 coalminers. Today we have four coalmines and around 2,000 miners. They lived in close-knit communities built around and based on employment at the local colliery. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. They looked after their old and young as well as those who were ill or infirm.
They built and provided their own welfare facilities and, well before today's welfare state was built, miners created their own welfare systems to alleviate hardship. They rallied around each other when times were hard. They recognised the need for cohesion when at any time disaster could strike a family unit or indeed a whole community.

The latest pit to close, Maltby in Yorkshire, still has a death and general purpose fund to help fellow miners and their families in times of hardship. In short, miners believed in society.

These values were the exact opposite of those Margaret Thatcher espoused. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. From the valleys of Wales to the far reaches of Scotland, miners were, by and large, socialists by nature but this was tempered by strong Christian beliefs. Thatcher's threat to butcher the mining industry, destroy the fabric of mining communities and in particular the trade union to which miners had a bond of loyalty, was met with the fiercest resistance any government has met in peacetime.

For those miners and their families to be referred to as the "enemy within" by Thatcher was something they would never forgive and, if there is rejoicing at her death in those communities she set out to destroy, it can only be understood against this background.

Miners had always known that eventually any of the colleries would close and were always prepared to accept that as a fact of life and find employment somewhere else within the industry, but Thatcher's attack was wholesale. It was seen for what it was, nothing to do with economics, but purely an attempt to destroy the National Union of Mineworkers by wiping out the entire industry.

Thatcher exposed the sharp edges of class division in Britain and the strike of 1984/5 was as much a clash of values as it was about pit closures. Arthur Scargill and the miners represented the only opposition to the prime minister and her destructive and divisive values and, after the strike, the way was open for the most aggressive neoliberal policies. Thatcher and Reagan went on to facilitate a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, leading to the world economic crash we now witness.

Thatcher was a divisive woman who created discord, not harmony.

Now also remember this was just one of the things she did to the people of the UK (mainly in the Midlands and North) and maybe you can understand why some celebrated her death ...

I must also add that I am not one of those who celebrated, just trying to point out just how far reaching her internal policies were.
 

amphibulous

Banned
People seem to be making the assumption that it was Thatcher vs. the Unions which is what it may have appeared to be, but those that really suffered were ordinary working people and the communities they served who were caught in the cross-fire. Villages became ghost towns over night, huge areas of the country left without hope or a future, the devastation caused has still not been fixed 30 years on. I could go on but I won't and despite my words I am fairly impartial despite living amongst the communities destroyed ... I sat as an observer and fortunately never had to suffer ...

This is true, but only a partial truth. Because those communities were full of selfish people who had inflicted immense economic harm on the UK in the preceding years and whose only aim was to see that they were all right at any cost to the rest of the country. Thatcher was far from an ideal leader, but the economic war she won was not one she had started.

It's easy to whine "Miners believed in society" - but the society they believed in was one where money flowed from the rest of the society to them and everyone else had to work harder and have less to pay for coal to mined from pits that where not economically justified. And when society said "No" to this, the miners believed they had the right to blockade commerce in the UK. Which to me doesn't sound like a belief in society at all but rather the opposite.
 
Concerning the numbers of reduced mine-workers: both, in Germany as well as in the UK, the actual massive reduction of mining-jobs occured in the 1950s and 60s - under overall better employment situations.

It is just in the 1980s and 90s that the Germans kept wasting money on coal-mining and reduced the number of pits at a slower pace. One reason for the difference was that even Kohl's CDU is a Social Democratic Party when compared to Tories or Republicans. The other reason is federalism. Heavy industries, esp. coal and steel, has been at the core of two in eleven Bundesländer, NRW and Saarland. In a federation, things need to be negotiated. I wonder how Thatcher would have liked to deal with Labour Governors in Yorkshire and the Midlands?

Thatcher's failure as a Prime Minister was that while I agree that she did what she had to do, she had little concept of how the British economy should be encouraged to replace the losses sustained by breaking down these obsolete and incompetitive industries. The exception is the expansion of the banking sector, which created wonderful numbers overall, but could never translate this into economical improvement across the UK.

The consequences are felt especially today after the banking business went into the severe crisis of 2008ff. Britain today lacks (not completely, but in comparison) the backbone of specialized, high-quality small industries the Central European Nations still have. It also lacks the geographical, political and social circumstances (add to that the superpower-status) the US hold and which still enable the latter to rebound from economical crises.

My general attitude is very much Anglophile, so I am quite curious how the UK will stand at the end of the 2010s.
 
For those who think it was a simple strike and that a similar event in the U.S. could have led to Reagan being "hated" by some as Thatcher is in some areas of the UK maybe you should consider this ...

In the UK the mining industry employed 170,000 people prior to Thatcher's premiership. There are now just 2,000 people employed. Whilst not all of the job losses happened in the mid-eighties the majority did and the decline has never stopped.

If you put this in context Reagan would have to be responsible for destroying the employment hopes of just over 1 million U.S. citizens in one foul swoop in one industry centred in just a few states for there to be a similar backlash.

Here is an article written by Ken Capstick for the Guardian ...



Now also remember this was just one of the things she did to the people of the UK (mainly in the Midlands and North) and maybe you can understand why some celebrated her death ...

I must also add that I am not one of those who celebrated, just trying to point out just how far reaching her internal policies were.

Well, that's why I said "plane crashes" If you get a midair collision of two fully packed 747's in the immediate aftermath of the AT-controllers being fired and it could be reasonably blamed on the sudden loss of manpower, you would have a significant number of people blaming Ronald Reagan for hundreds of deaths. At the same time it would be easy to see an equal number of people blaming the striking controllers. As a result you have half the populace hating his guts and the other half loving him.
 
End separation of powers in the US federal government and reaganomics becomes far more divisive. To some extent, people in the UK were voting against or for an economic outlook, whereas in the US the choice was between 2 people. The US president neither controls Congress nor implements the budget, so the OP is not a like for like comparison.
 
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