254. Maggie reaching the top

Thatcher’s victories, including a general election landslide and breaking the miners’ strike, emboldened her to launch another phase in the reduction of the role of the state in the British economy.

Nationalised industries were privatised, with encouragement given to individuals to buy the shares, which they did with enthusiasm. This came on top of the continuing success of council house sales under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. Extending home and share ownership to far more people, from far more modest backgrounds than ever before, Thatcher claimed, was opening an era of popular capitalism.

The reality, however, was more nuanced. Many buyers of shares in privatised companies sold them again, taking a quick profit, because the share price on flotation had been low and it climbed dramatically afterwards. Many owners of former social housing also sold their properties, leading to a large minority ending back again as rentals, but with private landlords not bound by the policy of affordable rents that councils had applied.

Similarly, another great initiative of the Thatcher government, the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange, seemed to go brilliantly. London regained its status as a major financial centre. It would only be twenty or so years later that some of the downside emerged, when the encouragement to banks to engage in speculation became a contributing factor to the 2008 crash.

The IRA was running a terrorist campaign in Britain too, one that nearly claimed Thatcher's own life, when a bomb was planted in Brighton’s Grand Hotel, where she and many leading Tories were staying for the party conference. Thatcher reacted with commendable courage and resolution at the time, and later even went so far to negotiate an Anglo-Irish agreement, again giving the Republic a consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. It didn't go far enough, as the Good Friday agreement would a decade later, but it was an important step,

And then there was the Westland affair, when a British helicopter manufacturer ran into difficulties, and a dispute broke out in cabinet over which two options, American or European, to back for a rescue. Ultimately, that led to the Minister of Defence, Michael Heseltine, openly defying Thatcher. That was an ominous event, a first crack in the previously apparently indestructible fortress of support for Thatcher among her colleagues.

It was a foretaste of unpleasantness ahead but for the moment that was still quite a way in the future.

Illustration: Margaret Thatcher in defiant mood, speaking out against terrorism at the 1984 Conservative Party conference, after the bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Photo from The Guardian.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License