"Margaret Thatcher poll: still the public’s No 1 choice to lead nation into a crisis"

From The Evening Standard

Some 23 years after she left office, Margaret Thatcher is still the public's number one choice to lead the nation into a crisis, an exclusive poll reveals today.

Asked which of the modern-day prime ministers they would choose to plunge the country into even deeper economic woes, Lady Thatcher was the name most frequently picked. And a secret of her success is the same today as when she won three famous general election victories — deliberately triggering crises in order to appear "tough" when they were resolved.

The findings are revealed in exclusive research by pollsters Ipsos MORI in today's Evening Standard. In keeping with the fierce debate over her policies and legacy, the public verdict is not entirely unfavourable. It seems that while people choose the Iron Lady for precipitating a crisis, they derived vicarious enjoyment in the resulting social unrest.

Some 31 per cent picked Lady Thatcher from a list of the five most recent premiers to be their preferred leader into an economic crisis. Next most divisive was Labour's Tony Blair, with 21 per cent, who scored highly for taking British troops into Afghanistan and Iraq against popular opinion.

Rather unsurprisingly, since the economic crisis began on his watch, Gordon "Jonah" Brown came third with 13 per cent, followed by David Cameron on 12. Equally unsurprisingly, John Major, who many say left a golden economic legacy to Mr Blair, was last at seven. Respondents struggled to actually remember a single crisis or unforced error during his time in Number 10.

Short Lists

Last week's sort of fizzled out in the end, despite all your fine suggestions, and it's still not quite clear to me what's on the final Short List and what isn't.

So just for fun (one of my favourite parlour games): who can name all the Ministers called "Norman" in Maggie Thatcher's and John Major's governments?

History repeating itself ...

Despite the fact that John Major's Tory government was quite ruthless about allowing house prices to readjust to an affordable level and Gordon Brown's Labour government is equally ruthless about pursuing a Home-Owner-Ist agenda to keep house prices as high as possible, by, for example, keeping interest rates as low as possible; bailing out banks; and making it very difficult for mortgage lenders to repossess (all at a massive cost to the taxpayer, of course), the overall house price trend has been much the same:
The blue series shows quarter-on-quarter price changes from Q1 1989 onwards; the red series shows quarter-on-quarter price changes from Q1 2007 onwards. The post-1989 crash continued for another few years after the end of that chart, but rises and falls were no longer so spectacular. Which also serves to remind us how little influence governments really have, if nothing else.

Source: Nationwide's UK House prices adjusted for inflation (choose from the drop down box labelled 'UK series').

Devious lying shit of the week: Adair Turner

One idea for a 'blogspot that I had been mulling recently was a comparison between the UK and Japan after property price bubble popped in 1989.

John Major just let things rip - sure, a few people were repossessed but by the same token, others were able to buy property cheaply - and by about 1994 or 1995 things had really, genuinely picked up - housing was cheap and jobs were easy to find (or a lot easier compared to under Thatcher, although I'm not blaming it all on her - the UK downturn started in the early 1970s at the time of the first house price bubble).

The wily Japanese, on the other hand, embarked on a course of propping up banks (who in turn are propping up government borrowing, they invented QE) and property prices (which have been merrily sliding ever since), gradually choking off their economy, which was of no benefit to anybody whatsoever.

Quoted in The Daily Hatemail:

[Head of FInancial Services Authority] Turner also warned that imposing stricter liquidity requirements [in other words, a return to sensible minimum capital ratios] too quickly could damage the economy and should be carefully coordinated with the Bank of England's withdrawal of the £185bn Special Liquidity Scheme [a taxpayer-backed scheme to prop up mortgage lending], which is slated to be phased out from next year.

'You can't simply wean yourself off it without a shock to the economy,' he said, 'If you go from A to B too quickly, it risks making the downswing worse.'

The FSA is now working with banks to identify a sustainable funding strategy, including holding higher levels of retail deposits [whence will they come, pray tell?] and enforcing longer-term maturities on wholesale borrowing. Turner said banks were likely to reveal more bad debts, but said there were unlikely to be any 'nasty surprises’ not already being factored-into the plans of lenders and the regulator itself...

Sure, as a Ukipper, I'm supposed to hate John Major because he caved in to the EU on this, that and the other*. But back then, my main concerns were getting a job after finishing uni and the simple pleasure of being able to buy a house for roughly what it would have cost to build from scratch. And looking back, he was right, and the Japanese - and by extension the Home-Owner-Ist consensus who now want taxpayer-funded bailouts for banks and mortgage borrowers at all cost - were wrong, are wrong and always will be wrong. About everything. Ever.

* There are good and bad aspects to the EU. Until about ten years ago, IMHO, the good outweighed the bad, but since then it has gone the other way.