It is very easy to forget the near-crisis that gripped Britain in the years preceding Thatcher assuming power. But as a junior officer at RAF Benson I remember it well, and I remember other junior officers who worked on local pig farms to make ends meet.
My wife was one of hundreds of military wives who boarded a fleet of buses and went down Whitehall to the houses of parliament to protest the abysmal state of the armed forces.
The economy sagged under the weight of rampant inflation and broad unemployment. During the winter of 1978-79, just before the Tories swept to power, strikes rippled across the public sector – the infamous British “Winter of Discontent” – *in response to a labour government wage cap.
This was the deeply divided Britain that Thatcher and her Conservative Party took control of in May 1979 – beleaguered and world-weary, the patience of the people with the labour government was tanking, and the economy was about bust.
Two weeks’ worth of uncollected garbage was the most visible sign of the labor discontent that gripped strike-weary Britain that winter. With hundreds of schools closed, regular electricity blackouts, more than a thousand hospitals reduced to emergency operations only, dead bodies laying in hospital beds because of strikes, and wage demands spreading on numerous fronts, the hard-pressed Labour government, with traditionally close ties to the unions, was facing an increasingly embittered public.
The strikes were just the last spasm of the economic malaise of 1970s Britain, which featured high unemployment and double-digit inflation. Inflation averaged around 13 percent throughout the ‘70s, peaking at 25 percent.
Thatcher put an end to all the above and saved the country, God bless her! Only the socialist/communist left-wing nut cases had an axe to grind because she curtailed the unions that were killing the country and implemented a free market economy.
Bob C
Last edited by Robert Cooper; 10th Apr 2013 at 02:51.