Voici un article de MoneyWeek (Argh! des bolchéviques !) qui pense le contraire :mps a écrit :Les thuriféraires de Thatcher "oublient" toujours qu'elle a pu financer sa politique, non avec sa "gestion rigoureuse", mais avec la manne gazière de la Mer du Nord. Circonstance parfaitement impossible à reproduire, alors comment prétendre utiliser le thatchérisme comme modèle ?
Quelle curieuse rermarque ??? Ecofix est entré en production 5 ans avant que Thatcher ne soit premier ministre ... et n'a fait depuis que monter en puissance.
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Thathcher n'a pas attendu cet argent pour réformer, relancer son pays, et si le pétrole était la clé, il rapporte désormais bien plus, et donc les gouvernements auraient dû faire mieux. Absurde.
http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/co ... th-sea-oil
Quant à la production actuelle, elle a fortement chuté au point que le R-U est à nouveau importateur net depuis quelques années, ta dernière remarque ne tient donc pas.Has this affected the UK economy?
North Sea oil and gas has been something of a mixed blessing for the UK economy. On the debit side, North Sea revenues gave a huge boost to sterling, turning the pound into something of a petro-currency, which was a disaster for the competitiveness of UK manufacturing. On the plus side, the revenues allowed the Government to reduce the huge balance of payments and budget deficits that had been the cause of so many of Britain’s economic difficulties in the post-war era, when it had been forced to raise interest rates to defend sterling. Indeed, Jim Callaghan, prime minister in the late 1970s, claimed that whoever won the 1979 general election was likely to remain in power for many years, thanks to the windfall from North Sea oil and gas receipts.
Did North Sea oil make Thatcherism possible?
Some commentators think so. The money that flowed into the Treasury’s coffers was crucial to enabling the Government to bear the cost of rising unemployment. Some economists believe that, without North Sea oil, the Thatcher Government might have been forced to abandon the strict monetarist economic policies that caused interest rates to rise to punitive levels in the early 1980s, and to scale back Thatcher’s confrontation with the unions and privatisation programme, both of which contributed to soaring unemployment.On the other hand, Thatcher herself appears to attach very little significance to the role of North Sea oil in underwriting her economic reforms - in her autobiography, North Sea oil and gas merit just six passing references.
Et voilà d'autres sources qui font la même analyse :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comm ... e-red.html
Et les sources abondent sur l'étendue des dégâts. Les très libéraux et très rigoureux thatchériens (tout comme leurs successeurs du New Labour) ont entretenu l'illusion pendant des années que leur politique de dérégulation était à l'origine de leur prospérité économique, alors qu'elle était en fait financée à crédit par la rente pétrolière. Au point que désormais le Royaume-Uni est au bord d'une crise énergétique :What was the industry that powered Britain towards prosperity in the 1980s, and made us one of the most dynamic and successful nations in the Western world? I'll give you a clue: it was described by a prime minister as "God's gift" to the British economy; its revenue stream pumped ever larger amounts of cash into the Exchequer – and its subsequent collapse has helped send the public finances spiralling towards disaster.
If your first reaction was "the City", think again. The answer is North Sea oil. One of the peculiarities of British politics – and economics – is the reluctance to take into account the critical contribution of oil to the economy. We spend so much time droning on about our excessive reliance on the financial sector that we tend to ignore this elephant in the room. But the truth is that, for the past quarter of a century, Britain has been a petro-economy. In 1999, we were producing more oil than Iraq, Kuwait or Nigeria. The following year, we pumped out almost twice as much natural gas as Iran – a country with reserves that are the envy of the world.
The result is that while we are apt to attribute the sudden spurt in Britain's prosperity in the mid- to late-1980s to a deregulated and reinvigorated City, it owed far more to the massive windfall from the North Sea. Take a look at the numbers. In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, the amount Britain owed, as a nation, was £88.6 billion. In the subsequent six years, taxes from the North Sea (which had been pretty much non-existent previously) generated an incredible £52.4 billion.
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The benefits went far beyond the public finances. Were it not for the cushion provided by oil exports, the deficit in Britain's current account – its international ledger – would have been one of the worst in the Western world. Moreover, much of the massive rise in business investment in the years before the financial collapse was due entirely to spending in the North Sea.In short, without oil, recent history would have been vastly different. Growth would have been weaker, consumer spending less and the public finances decidedly more parlous. That's not to say Britain would have been an economic pygmy – just that oil is a luxury that has permitted us to live much more comfortably.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/17415 ... ot-us-mess
Coluche disait "Les technocrates tu leur donnes le Sahara, dans six mois il faut qu'ils achètent du sable ailleurs". Je crois qu'on peut dire de même des néolibéraux.Sensible European countries who plan for the future have invested heavily in gas storage. The French have reserves equivalent to 24 per cent of national consumption. The Germans, 21 per cent. Free market, 'let tomorrow look after itself' Britain, has four per cent.
The lack of gas storage facilities means that Britain, more than any other leading European country, is vulnerable to problems of supply and unexpected price hikes.
Meanwhile, according to the World Coal Institute, at least 1bn tonnes of coal could lie under British soil, enough for around 60 years' consumption. Any comment on that, Lady Thatcher?
Back in the 1940s, the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan famously said that given Britain's natural abundance of coal and fish "only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time".
By the same measure, only a blind adherence to extremist free market dogma could have got Britain, given its abundant energy resources, into the mess we are in today.
