Thatcher was not solely responsible
MANY have suggested that Margaret Thatcher spawned the banking shambles. But her prime intent was that we must all take responsibility for our own actions. So although she unwisely allowed Nigel Lawson’s inflationary boom, it is inconceivable that she would not have stopped the rot well before the moral hazard of banks offloading their responsibilities to the taxpayer by becoming “too big to fail”. That was corporatism, not the free- enterprise capitalism she espoused.
More culpable, surely, were Jimmy Carter, who actively encouraged subprime lending in the 1970s; Bill Clinton, who greatly increased it and repealed the Glass-Steagall “firewall” act in the 1990s; Gordon Brown and Ed Balls for their tripartite regulatory confusion in 1997; the incompetence and venality of top banking executives and directors; the non-use of their existing powers by regulators in the US, UK, Netherlands and elsewhere; inadequate auditors in (I regret to say) my own accountancy profession; and almost all politicians in the early 2000s, who were incapable of judging conse- quences – and delighted with the billions of tax revenues generated from apparently real profits. John Birkett St Andrews THE Thatcher tsunami which hit Scotland in 1981, from the Invergordon smelter to the Lanarkshire coal mines, virtually demolishing the foundations of Ravenscraig steelworks in its wake, caused untold poverty and unrest. Some 250,000 people were thrown on the scrap heap, with many never again to earn a wage packet.
Scotland has never completely recovered from the Iron Lady’s demoralisation of a nation and few will shed a tear in her passing. Donald J Morrison Buckie THE legacy of Thatcher’s neoliberal policies seem to have been air-brushed from history. Greed was encouraged and profit worshipped to the exclusion of all thinking about the impact on society and future generations. We are paying the cost of these policies now, yet television interviews on the Thatcher legacy focus almost exclusively on the few who prospered. Kris McFayden East Kilbride