It was a Thatcher-era thing, and despite being evil and wrong about nearly everything, she at least thought what she was doing would help normal people. In the case of privatisation, it was accompanied by a big push to get normal people to buy shares in the newly formed companies. As a result, the water companies are mostly owned by pension funds and there’s a large chunk that’s normal people owning a tiny bit each. That’s then meant that any attempt to claw back illegally paid dividends (the companies have a legal duty to invest in keeping the water working and haven’t been doing so) would tank loads of people’s pensions, as would dissolving the companies or putting stronger restrictions on paying out dividends.
The whole system’s all knotted together in a way that makes all the obvious solutions cause other big problems, and the government can’t afford to cause big problems when the polls have Reform so far ahead on account of them just claiming the obvious solutions will work flawlessly and not giving a shit about whether that’s true. Everything’s so on fire that it can’t be extinguished within a single electoral term, let alone rebuilt, so it’s become the priority to avoid upsetting anyone before the next election, lest the flamethrowers get voted in again only with napalm as fuel this time instead of petrol because the Tories have been eclipsed.
The obvious solution is to clean up the mess.
Yeah it takes effort to clean things up, but the current way is only helping the far-right and kicking the can down the road will only mean them to become even more powerful by the time they take the wheel.
Yeah, pretty sure the cunt that shut down all the industries in the North because workers went on strike didn’t give a flying fuck about helping people.
But her favourite story book said that if she destroyed all the industry then the invisible hand of the free market would liberate all the workers from drudgery and they’d all become doctors and live lives of luxury and never have to do any work.
Thatcher was a die-hard believer in Ayn Rand’s economics, and a core part of that is that people are poor because you give them the opportunity to be, and then through several unexplained leaps of logic, that if you take away the option to be a bit poor, instead of making everyone even poorer like obviously happens in real life, somehow they’ll instantly gain qualifications in unrelated fields and become rich. It’s insane, and yet somehow a wildly popular worldview among the ‘intellectual’ right, despite being dismissed as moronic by anyone with two braincells to rub together and every serious academic.
It’s roughly equivalent to claiming we should enslave short people and call them house elves and then as a result we’ll all get wands and certificates from Hogwarts that let us do magic (except the house elves, who wouldn’t need wands), but then instead of being placed into a secure hospital to protect the public, you get put in charge of one of the most influential countries in the world, and by an unrelated coincidence, the North Sea Oil Boom happens and makes that country more wealthy, so then decades later, magic being accepted as fact despite being purely from a fantasy novel full of plotholes.
leisesprecher@feddit.org 1 day ago
Oh no, she did not think it would help normal people.
Just think about what kind of system you’re describing: local people owning shares of their utilities. That’s ownership by the populace. So, you know, public ownership. Like the system already in place.
The story you’re describing is just an attempt to sell redistribution to people who are not willing to think. Even in the best case, this would be a giant rent-seeking scheme for banks and pension funds. And we’re definitely not living through the best case here.
Stop trying to whitewash politicians. Especially not the ones who showed time and time again that they don’t give a shit about the literal survival of anyone poorer than them.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Steal the cake from the public.
Slice it up and sell the slices to the fatcats at discounted prices.
Throw a few crumbs towards members of the public and claim that “now everybody can own it”.
It’s been the neoliberal strategy for privatizing public assets since the very start.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.
There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.
Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.
leisesprecher@feddit.org 1 day ago
You’re whitewashing, because you’re implying that she had good intentions. She did not. She was not misled by propaganda, she knew what she was doing and what the implications would be.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.
It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.