I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.
– Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990
In October 1986, the Thatcher government instituted reforms to the banking and financial industries, cutting down on over-regulation, minimising the role of elitist big-boy networks and creating a free-market doctrine of open competition and meritocracy. It was termed the Big Bang, and it was exactly what was needed for an ailing London, that was already losing its dominance as the global centre of finance to hungrier, less regulated financial hubs like New York.
Spurred by her belief in free markets, the wholesale deregulation of the UK’s financial markets unleashed a new era of global banking and transformed the city of London from a closed shop to an international trading house. Global businesses came to London, creating jobs, and the city provided finance to Britain and around the world. London has not been overtaken as a financial centre since then.
The reforms enacted brought an end to the dominance of the London Stock Exchange and heralded the rise of electronic trading. Many financial conglomerates were created and in purely GDP terms, this was hugely beneficial.
Jon Moulton, chairman of UK-listed turnaround firm Better Capital describes his personal experience during that era, “When I was a lad, back in the 1970s, I went to work in the USA because it was just so horrible here. With tax rates in the 90s (per cent), being rich was generally seen as socially unacceptable. Maggie’s arrival changed things quite remarkably. Whereas in 1978 many of my friends in financial services were working outside the country, by the 1980s they were all coming back.”
The right to buy
The Thatcher administration believed in property ownership and was successful in pushing owner- occupation to one of the highest levels in the industrial world. Owing to her Right-To-Buy programme between 1979 and 1988, owners increased by 3 million.
People like John Holland, who works as a security guard, bought his house in the Whittington estate in North London from the council thirty years ago…At the time, he and his sister paid GBP39,000 for their five-bedroom property, even though it was valued at around GBP70,000. Today it is worth around GBP600,000.
“If it weren’t for Mrs Thatcher’s policy, we couldn’t have afforded to buy,” he says. “There’s no way we’d be property owners now if it wasn’t for her. It was perfect, absolutely perfect.”
The real legacy of the policy is probably in the nature of the mixed communities it created. On this estate you will meet musicians, architects, and solicitors – alongside what in Thatcher’s time were known as blue-collar workers – cleaners, hospital porters and bus drivers.
This was a policy that attempted to cut across all class lines, and fulfil the very capitalist aspirations of acquiring a home and putting money in the bank. sound housekeeping principles indeed.
Educating a nation…and the world
Thatcher’s legacy to the universities was revolutionary. She felt that the universities were complacent because they were over-protected from the market and her first major step to galvanise the universities was to introduce fees for international students. Before 1981, international students were educated effectively for free. When the fees were introduced, they were denounced by the leadership of the British universities which, with one voice, predicted no international student would apply to a British university again. Today, with the UK having close to half a million international students contributing an income of GBP5 billion for the country, they could not have been more wrong, and she, more right.
Instinctively feeling that research monies were not being utilised to the maximum, Thatcher’s next step was to cut the government support for it. Of course, her policies were denounced by the leadership of the British universities who, (yawn) predicted that they would be a disaster from which the British economy in general and British universities in particular, would never recover.
Again, they could not have been more wrong, and she, more right. By introducing accountability for research – a policy that became known as the Research Assessment Exercise – Thatcher so galvanised the British universities that they now come second only to America’s in every international league table.
She was a woman of action, with a distaste for the complacency she saw in the academics, saying, “What these critics cannot stomach is that wealth creators have a tendency to acquire wealth in the process of creating it for others. They did not speak with Oxford accents. They hadn’t got what people call ‘the right connections’; they just had one thing in common. They were men of action.”
● Join us in Part 4 of ‘This Lady is not for turning’ next week to understand how The Baroness tackled the NHS and Britain’s welfare state.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
