Sunday 10 April 2011

Maggie Thatcher's Guide to Government

Part 1
1.1 Make big cuts to public expenditure.
1.2 Try to hide the cuts by having a royal wedding and get involved in a war you should easily win against a mediocre regime, preferably one you have previously sold arms to. (This advertises your latest range of arms over the previous generation and will help compensate arms companies facing defence cut-backs.)
1.3 Run down, sell off and close all state-owned industry. (This gives the treasury a large cash windfall for pre-election tax cuts.)
1.4 Set up enterprise zones to look like you care about run-down areas.
1.5 Gerrymander constituency boundaries to ensure your opponent's support is heavily diluted.
1.6 Belittle your opponents and take strong for or against stances on every issue.

Part 2
2.1 Lower taxes
2.2 Continue to under-fund all public services and infrastructure.
2.3 Move long-term unemployed, created by the sell-off of industry, onto disability benefit to reduce the unemployment figure.
2.4 Get into bed with France and the US to cater for big cuts in defence spending.
2.5 Continue to privatise and sell off services and infrastructure owned by the state. By now they will be appallingly poorly funded so the service provided will be poor.
2.6 Try to engineer social change through taxation.
2.7 Go ahead with one large-scale infrastructure project that will grab headlines.

Remember to play to your base, the well-off in Southern England. Attract poorer voters with self-improvement rhetoric, 'You can be rich too!'.

When the economic cycle reaches recession you will eventually be voted out.

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