Tuesday 3 January 2012

Ms Streep

I loved The Iron Lady, but can't help but think that it is a curious representation of Maggie Thatcher.
 While we might feel compassion for her in old age, in the end she was a very nasty piece of work who failed to understand from her lower-middle-class threshold what the Friedmanite economics was doing to the genuine working class of whom (it seems to me) she had no genuine understanding. 
She was a "grocer's daughter" but had no understanding what it was to be a "miner's son" when the pits were closed down and the North was ravaged to save the south of England.
Bp David Jenkins of Durham, was lampooned by the southern paparazzi for being a modernist, but he was actually advocating for his pastoral crowd.....the impoverished poor of Tyneside.
Thatcher was petrified.
The Lord Bishop of Durham could see through her shallow economics, so they mocked his theology. Not extreme by theological standards ...well maybe...but he was not preaching Christless Christology, or Godless theology. He was, it seems to me advocating for the poor.
Well, Maggie didn't like that.
Jenkins  became identified with opposition to the policies of the Thatcher and Major governments and subsequently was a critic of new Labour. He argued that what these governments shared was a dogmatic faith on the market which had many pseudo-religious elements too it. This led him to write at length about what he saw as the intellectual deficiencies of economic theory and market theorising and its pseudo theological character. His Market whys and human wherefores : thinking again about markets, politics and people London : Cassell, c2000 was an extended layman’s critique of economic theory and its application to policy. Jenkins described himself as an ‘anxious idiot’ using the latter term in its original meaning of an ordinary person with no professional expertise. His book nevertheless diagnosed many of the problems with economic theory and its application to a deregulated economy that would later become seen to be seen as prescient in the light of the global economic crisis of 2007 onwards. He also challenged the idea that markets created freedom (source Wikipedia)


Can't help but think he was a 'good thing'!!!!

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