This edition describes how Margaret Thatcher and her supporters rode on her popularity after the Falklands War to roll out a series of radical policies that would transform Britain and how this ideological crusade would divide Britain and her own party to end with her booted out by own friends and allies.
After winning a massive majority in the 1983 general election Thatcher no longer had to move cautiously. Under the direction of the Treasury the Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit John Redwood MP drew up a revolutionary plan for the privatisation of Britain's state-owned industries. An initially cautious Thatcher was convinced by the loss making industries effects on the national debt. Despite business and public scepticism the 1984 privatisation of British Telecom proved to be an emboldening success and electricity, gas, airline and even council housing (through the Right to buy scheme, whereby council-house residents were given the chance to buy their homes) privatisations followed.
Margaret Thatcher hated the influence of trade unions on government; with particular vengeance as whilst Secretary of State for Education and Science in Sir Edward Heath's 1970-74 government the unions had brought down the Heath government of which she was a cabinet minister of, this made her determined to curtail their power for all successive governments. When the government announced a series of pit closures the Leader of the National Union of Mineworkers Arthur Scargill called for a strike initiating a titanic political struggle. Conflicts, exemplified by the Battle of Orgreave, erupted between strikers and police but the miners were finally defeated by Thatcher's will and returned to work.
The No Turning Back Group at the IEA pushed for the privatisation of health and education but Thatcher rejected this idea, instead trying to introduce some market-based reforms into these services. The immensely unpopular Community Charge, which replaced the Rates system with a Poll Tax, resulted in her first defeat as protest and riots forced her to back down and reverse the policy.
Thatcher's distrust of the EU led to the resignations of her Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson in 1989 and her Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe in 1990. Lawson's resignation was principly owing to him feeling that Thatcher and her economic adviser, Professor Sir Alan Walters had sidelined his remit of the economy in favour of economic policy formulation from Number 10 rather than from the Treasury. Howe's embarrassing and humiliating afront to Thatcher and her anti-European sentiments had drastic effect and consequences for the Prime Minister; for which she viewed this act as a disloyalty to her vision and premiership. The virulent attack of Howe's resignation speech from the Tory backbenches resulted in severe damage to Thatcher's standing in her own party and marked the beginning of the end with one of the true Thatcherite believers being forced to state from the backbenches that she had become too excessive; this resulted in a leadership contest being swiftly announced by her former Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine; the result being Thatcher withdrew her candidacy despite winning the first round and a further two candidates came in the race for Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party concurrently, those being John Major (her last Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Douglas Hurd (her Foreign Secretary). The Conservatives held onto power for another 7 years under Sir John Major 1990-97, but owing to internal squabbles were forced out by the electorate on 1 May 1997 heralding the introduction of Tony Blair and New Labour that would continue the Thatcherite revolution despite being of the centre-left.
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