Overall employment remained high until the Great Financial Crisis, in striking contrast to the searing rises in unemployment under Thatcher. Of course, under New Labour these lost manufacturing jobs were (in effect) replaced with service sector employment, in both the public and private sectors. The second wave of deindustrialisation in the West, apparent from the mid-1990s onwards but accelerating from the 2000s, then helps account for the loss of jobs under New Labour.Īn overvalued pound – itself the symptom of government monetary policy – is common to both experiences, with recovery in employment being particularly tied, in the 1990s, to the crash in the value of the pound following Britain’s exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Thatcher’s destruction of industrial employment was more dramatic than elsewhere, but not completely out of line with the general experience. The big picture here is well-known: deindustrialisation from the late 1960s onwards was common to the developed world, with major industries, from coal mining to car manufacture, shaking out jobs on a huge scale. ![]() The only periods of sustained increase in manufacturing employment occurred under Conservative Prime Ministers: rather weakly, rising around 200,000 in the nine years from 2010 to 2019 and then more dramatically under John Major, rising 190,000 in just four years from 1993 to 1997. ![]() But then between 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair became Prime Minister and Gordon Brown’s exit from No.10 in May 2010, manufacturing employment fell by 1.7m. It’s not something Labour like to talk about, but if deindustiralisation under Thatcher is notorious today – informing, still, how much of the North of England is perceived – its second round, under New Labour, was also far-reaching.īetween 1979, when Thatcher entered office, and 1990, when she left, employment in manufacturing fell by 1.8m. And although reported as an attack on Thatcher, Danker picked his words more carefully: “Since the 1980s, we let old industries die… We have spent the past decades living with these consequences.” ![]() Greeted with pearl-clutching in the Daily Mail, rentagob Tory backbenchers providing the copy, Danker has taken careful aim at forty years’ worth of neoliberal economic policy in Britain, specifically calling out the loss of manufacturing jobs under successive governments. But far more interesting than the party leaders’ paeans to profit or to Peppa Pig were the comments made the same day by the CBI’s new Director General, Tony Danker. While those decisions sometimes come from Editorial, it’s often the cartoonists making a decision themselves to pull a strip– or not even finish a strip– that might be too naughty for newspapers.Both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer chose to address the Confederation of British Industry conference this week. But sometimes a comic is funny or on point, and just might be a little too risqué for a broad readership, or might be a potential lightning rod for controversy. Sometimes it’s too complicated or confusing to make a good four-panel strip. Reasons? Well, sometimes something is hilarious in your head, and then you look at in on paper, and realized it doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped. ![]() One of the questions fans ask us most is if they can see some of the comics that didn’t make it– and why those comics don’t make it to print. Well, here at King Features, the cartoon graveyard is vast: for every idea that sees print, most cartoonists have at least two others that don’t make it to the big time. Paul Simon immortalized the strife of every great cartoonist in the song “You Can Call Me Al,” when he said “Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |