Andrew Oswald
speaker
46 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2011
last heard Apr 2013
Andrew Oswald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
At its peak, there were more than one million miners in Britain.
This is before the Second World War.
Now there are only a few thousand miners.
That huge sweep down in the giant graph that economists used to draw mining employment was really nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher.
She may have intensified the drop-off in mining employment, perhaps in the late 80s after the giant confrontations, but it's not sensible to blame Mrs Thatcher for the decline of the mining industry.
This is a trend visible all over the Western world.
The decline in manufacturing as a proportion of total employment in a country like Britain, that's a very long standing.
And Mrs Thatcher couldn't make much impact on that downward trend.
She's viewed historically as the enemy of manufacturing industry.
But I think most of that criticism is incorrect.
These are very powerful historical trends.
As we get richer and richer in Western countries, we live more by our wits than by our skill at producing physical items.
Mrs Thatcher inherited a growing unemployment problem.
The 50 years from 1950 to the year 2000, unemployment in Great Britain is like a gently rising escalator with a lot of wiggles along the way, so there's a strong upward trend.
What did happen in the year of 1979 was there was a very large rise in the price of oil, and that undoubtedly pushed up unemployment a lot over the ensuing, let's say, two or three years.
That trend was visible all over the Western world.
Her government was...
very strong on controlling inflation, and that probably added an upward twist to the unemployment.
But most of the rise in joblessness, I think, can be traced back to what happened in the Middle East, not to Mrs T herself.
GDP in its time was a very useful measure.
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