The Thatcher Years, 1979-1990

Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister was marked by two things: a determination to bring down inflation by a rigid application of "monetarist" policy (restricting the supply of money), and a small but costly war fought against Argentina for control of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

The determination to bring down inflation whatever the short-term cost meant the death of much of Britain's traditional industry. The refusal to subsidise industry or to compromise with trade unions was the end of a long postwar consensus. It was clear from the beginning that the social cost in terms of unemployment would be high, but "fixing the fundamentals" of the economy (that is, bringing down inflation) was given priority. This was despite the Conservatives having run an election campaign in 1979 that was critical of high unemployment, with the slogan "Labour isn't working". In 1977 there were 1.3 million unemployed in Britain; by 1981 2.7 million.

In 1981 there was rioting in several major cities: in Brixton (London), Chapeltown (Leeds), Handsworth (Birmingham), Toxteth (Liverpool), and Moss Side (Manchester). In each case there was an element of racial conflict in the rioting, as well as a sense of grievance relating to unemployment and urban decay.

Victory in the Falklands meant that the social and industrial cost of monetarist economics could be overlooked by the electorate. There was also, in the early Eighties, no real political alternative: the Labour Party had fallen under the sway of a Trotskyist-infiltrated left wing, and made itself unelectable. Four senior members of the more moderate wing of the party - including Roy Jenkins - broke away to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In terms of policy the SDP presented an attractive alternative to the two main parties, but it lacked the party machinery and established mass base to win power. The SDP formed an electoral pact with the Liberal Party, and in 1988 the two parties merged under the name Liberal Democrats.

It was in her second term that Margaret Thatcher began to change the British economy in ways that were soon copied in other countries, by a commitment to the privatisation of state-owned companies. Together with the sale of council houses, this created a new "popular capitalism" of home ownership and share ownership. At the same time, the deregulation of financial markets meant that speculation was producing massive new wealth, and London was becoming the most active financial market in the world. A Labour government had begun the exploitation of oil fields in the North Sea in 1975, but it was Thatcher who reaped the benefit of growing revenues and a measure of energy self-sufficiency, subsidising her economic reforms.

It was during her third term that Thatcher began to lose popularity in the country, as her policies to make the rich richer came to seem equally calculated to make the poor poorer (income tax cuts, sales tax increases, the "poll tax"). At the same time, she was becoming increasingly unacceptable to other leading figures within the Conservative Party through her populist anti-Europeanism, wrecking their attempts to gain Britain a "leading role" in the European Union.