Dislocated to Success by Iain Bowen Read Free Book Online Page B

Norman Tebbit was absolutely categorical about how some firms were too valuable to go to the wall and that it would pay us back over time; in most cases he has been proven correct.
     
    The free-marketeer wing were, essentially, in full retreat. Margaret and Norman Tebbit were instinctively in favour of them, but they also understood that we were essentially in a wartime situation; they also understood that the way out of this was not a short one. They did what was best for the country, not what was best for their favoured ideology, which in my opinion is the essence of being a good Conservative. Others were not so quick to adapt, and that includes a number of One Nation supporters as well - there were those wedded to their beliefs, and to be honest some who enjoyed the skirmishing rather too much.  Of course, the actions of the government did lead to quite a lot of heckling from some parts of the old Labour benches and Dennis Skinner [36] , who became a particular bête noire of the PM. Skinner is a vile but necessary part of our democracy; if he didn't exist someone would have to invent him. I must admit that, after 25 years of his moral purity, there was delicious Schadenfreude when his Elephant and Castle love-nest was discovered during our newspapers’ latest moral crusade.
     
    Of course, one of the side-effects of the Dislocation was that we were a colonial power once again - although some would argue that as long as we had Hong Kong we had never stopped being a colonial power. However, apart from the Fragrant Harbour, most of our remaining territories before the Dislocation consisted of a selection of bases for the Forces, a number of Caribbean tax havens and holiday destinations, and some awful outposts like the Falklands or Pitcairn. God, the number of times we tried to give New Zealand or Australia Pitcairn and they wisely declined it. The first question was, of course, what we owned; the second one was more how we owned it; and the third was its usefulness to us. The first two were answered within the first week, although the second was a little more tricky; I’m not entirely sure that the third was ever really answered. For the most part, we owned islands, or ports, or concessions for trade scattered around the world, but then there was the 800 pound gorilla in the room; we had substantial rights to parts of North America and there were over half a million people there - of which around 20% were held there against their will as chattel slaves, which was very awkward to say the least to any modern political party. 
     
    The mere existence of chattel slavery galvanised the left in politics; they had found their moral crusade, and quite rightly so. Fortunately for future politics, they decided to combine their justifiable campaign against slavery with plenty of modern political rhetoric about colonialism, imperialism and racism which made their crusade unpalatable to many people. They also advocated withdrawal and independence, which caused them a big problem with the West Indian population of the United Kingdom - who, whilst generally favouring the left in those days, recognised that just leaving the liberated West Indies to fend for themselves was not an option.
     
    There was a very early list which indicated roughly the use of each of our colonies to the UK; both the RN and the RAF had quite a bit of input into that, and there were some fairly extensive discussions on the status of others. Originally, the plan appeared to be to retract as much as possible, but that was subject to considerable intervention - long lists of what the UK needed to survive as a modern industrial state were being churned out, along with assessments that these could not be provided by our European neighbours - either without what was euphemistically called “direct intervention” or not at all. It wasn’t more than a week before a decision had been taken, after a considerable row in Cabinet, to colonise parts of the former South