Aye well for once I'll agree with you Tori.
I thought this subject was dead and buried with the old thread.
But what the foc;
As a small aside, Scotland hasn't voted tory since the fifties. Since then they were lucky to have any candidates above the border. Joke as much you like about the shire and blah blah blah. But the fact is she was not represented in any way up here and she allowed it to be subject to unbelievable nonsense in spite of it. Was it because no one voted for her up here that she used the whole shire as a testbed for the poll tax? Maybe she just couldn't stand sweaty socks. Who knows?!
I haven't gone back through the election results, but yes the Tory Party had a majority in Scotland in the 50's. They continued to be a strong force in Scottish politics up until Thatcher came to power. But it was a gradual decline over 4 Tory terms until they had only one Scottish MP left, which I think is still the situation today.
Of course the Tory party was dead against devolution, but the irony is that it is devolution that has saved the Tory party in Scotland. They are hardy a major political force, but PR in the Scottish parliament has delivered them a small number of MSP's, enougth to survive as a political party.
The poll tax issue is a little more complicated. Scotlands rates system had become a shambles, a complete revaluation was causing mayhem and major political problems. Legislation was simpler in Scotland, easy to get through, so The Scottish Tories invited Thatcher to launch it early in Scotland, thinking it would be popular and solve a few problems - whoops!
But really she focced so much up. She was on a mission to destroy the working class, their communities and their unions.
The thing that was so distressing about her destruction of our industry, was one, that so much of it was in good working order and economical, two, she put several 100,000 people on the dole in Scotland, shoved em on the scrapheap, she didn't give a shit, she closed industry after industry but gave no thought to what might follow, nothing.
She put over 3 million on the dole across the UK, bringing the jobless total up to between 4 and 5 million, all now on the brew. How did she pay for it? With blank cheques signed 'Scotland's oil', of which she like previous governments continued to lie to us about how much oil was under the north sea.
Roll on 18th September 2014!