The body is gone, but you can still smell her...

Thatcher was a 'conviction' politician, but her conviction was based on the error that everyone else was just like her, but lacked her willpower. She began as a middle-class grocer's daughter in the east Midlands and  worked her way up the social ladder by hard work, perseverance and luck, she became a research chemist who worked on whippy ice cream (a 99 = iced Thatcherism) and then a barrister as she forayed into politics.
'There is no such thing as society,' she later quipped, to the outrage of the communitarian left.

This was a woman of iron will who was well networked. She had middle class upbringing. She married a wealthy businessman. She conveniently forgot these elements as she worked through her philosophy of personal industry and force-fed it to the British public in the 1980s. To Thatcher, it was only a lack of willpower that prevented mining towns from recasting themselves as hubs of entrepreneurship. This is the logic of a well-connected and highly mobile woman.

The Conservatives were voted in in '79 much the same way they were (albeit with the Liberals) in 2010 - on a promise to sort out the economy. And sort it out they did, as the hagiographers keep telling us. Catastrophic unbalancing of the economy would be another way of putting it. Scrapping industry because we can't compete with the Germans is nothing to be lauded. What filled the gap was the beginning of the pain: 1986's Big Bang, which revivified the City of London, helped keep the GDP figures handsome:

Unfortunately, it also provided a crack pipe for Westminster to smoke itself into the belief that there would be 'no return to boom and bust'. A 'shot in the arm', as the Americans would say, which kills the legs is no cure at all.

Thatcher's death gives us a glimpse of what is interesting in people's attitudes towards society. That she 'had to take on the unions', 'sort out the national debt', 'get inflation down' possesses the status of myth for the winners of Thatcher's policies. For the losers - those whom Thatcher believed lacked the willpower to be a part of her Britain - there was increasing meaninglessness, increasing poverty and increasing shame: in the North, Midlands and the West; in Scotland; in Wales; in Northern Ireland.

Thatcherism, for all its divisiveness, gave way to something much worse: Blairism. Blairism shared Thatcherism's credo of greed (they were intensely comfortable with people getting filthy rich), ramped up surveillance, tried to re-engineer the ethnic make-up of the country in a spectacular piece of gerrymandering the demos, but went to war dishonestly with Iraq, and then laughed off what was basically a war crime. Thatcher was an arrogant prig. Blair an insufferable eel.

Thatcher is dead, but her legacy is alive.

BBC: Should Britain let go of London

Link.

Britain - a call centre for London. London - a piece of 'real estate' for the global rich. It isn't healthy and it isn't good. It feasts on the nation. Like a vampire, it sucks the blood; like a zombie, it eats the brains. We at Burning Pyre believe that the provincialisation of the nation outside of the capital is the price to be paid for the destruction of industry, but better that than the collapse of the UK, thought the Tories in the 80s. It has a certain logic to it, but of course it's proved decisive to the growth of nationalism in Scotland and Wales.

The question is, how long before the regions bring a motion to Parliament to rename London Transylvania?

ONS report on regional economics here (March 2013).

Political Olympics: twitter antics

Bad tweet saw Greek OC drop athelete...

Despite her apology, pressure continued to mount for Papahristou to be removed from the Greek Olympic team

...

‘It’s the same as violating fair play,’ [head of Greece’s Olympic mission] told a Greek television station.

How, when it had nothing whatsoever to do with the sport with which she is involved, or any sport for that matter?

 ...another bad tweet sees Swiss athlete sent home

In a statement, Gian Gilli, the head of the Swiss Olympic delegation, said that Morganella, 23, had “said something insulting and discriminatory” about the South Korean soccer team. 
 ...
In a separate statement, Morganella said that he had “made a huge mistake” by sending the Twitter message after the game and that he was “truly sorry for the people in South Korea, for footballers, but also for the Swiss delegation and the Swiss football in general.”  


MP in the shit with the PM for complaining about the opening ceremony


The worst:

Hunt for Tom Daley Twitter troll: seaside police raid nets suspect, 17

A 17 year old boy tweets that an athelete has let down his father. I feel for the athlete (his dad died last year), but should this really be an arrestable offence? The worst thing is, people actually felt the need to report the comments to the police.

LIBORgate: less than full disclosure?

Diamond accused of not being fully open with MPs walks with a now-confirmed £2m severance package.

Link.

He'll walk; Tucker'll walk - they always do. When complete global financial collapse is the alternative to fraud, the law will turn into a pragmatist. This is clear from the fact that countless subprime loans were linked to LIBOR, which is to say that the rate of interest at which incredibly risky borrowers borrowed (the so-called NINJA loans - no income, no job, (no) assets. WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING?) was linked directly to the rate at which banks received short loans from other banks in order to lend. It was a patriotic act to fudge LIBOR and continue the illusion that it was safe for banks to lend short to each other (rather than knowingly pass around an HIV-infected needle at a bag and spoon party). patriotic to capital and Smithsian self-interest, that is.

LIBORgate: Diamond Bob polishes himself off

faces grilling of MPs. Senior Bank of England official knew about the scandal.

Let's see how far they take the same line as Murdoch and get away with it: "I didn't know about LIBOR manipulation by people in my division." Didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg. Some consistency please, people! The law is the law!

Link.

LIBORgate

Let's start with a fundamental truth: rigging votes is less important than rigging money. When a vote is rigged, you end up with a candidate very slightly different from the one that won the most votes. When money is rigged - by banks manipulating the rate at which they will lend to each other - you set yourself up for a massive redistribution of wealth. It is the selfsame systemic risk problem that caused the Credit Crunch. The money Barclays itself would have made on manipulating the rate is like the tiny circumference of a thrown stone as it breaks through the surface of a calm pond; it is dwarfed by the ripples which emanate from the source of the impact. Five years' worth of manipulated LIBOR is the latest storm in managed capitalism, the main problem of which is not corruption or venality - for they exist in all walks of life and to a degree never smaller in history - but scale. The ability of single events to spiral out of control and destroy not just banks but countries is the ineluctable causal principle of our networked society.

Kids' TV star does the deed, is deed.

Story here.

UK 08: Property prices falling faster than the rising of the repo man's cock

Property prices article here.

'Prices are likely to fall by 30-40% over a four-year period nationally.'

'Hi - I'm the repo man, I've come about the house' - Here.