Thatcher in numbers
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. Baroness Margaret Thatcher, who's died following a stroke, was Britain's first female Prime Minister and one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century. She was a pioneer of free market economics, helping to spread the ideas around the world. But the Iron Lady was a divisive figure, with passionate supporters and critics. Both hold to strong beliefs about what she did. But what does the data tell us about the many claims made about Mrs Thatcher?
And the Mounted Police are going in again. The miners' strike in 1984.
The battle between Mrs Thatcher and the miners defined her premiership. To her supporters, she defeated the over-powerful unions. To her critics, she destroyed whole swathes of British industry, like mining and manufacturing.
What big question does this episode ask about Margaret Thatcher's legacy?
Well, a look at the numbers certainly confirms Baroness Thatcher's reputation as the ultimate union basher. In the 1970s, before she came to power, there were 128 million strike days in Britain. In the 1990s, after a 10-year dose of Thatcherism, there were just 6.5 million days lost to strikes, a huge decline. It's also true that the mining industry shrank dramatically in the 80s. But was Mrs Thatcher responsible? Professor Andrew Oswald, an economist at Warwick University in the UK, looks at employment trends over decades and internationally.
At its peak, there were more than one million miners in Britain. This is before the Second World War. Now there are only a few thousand miners. That huge sweep down in the giant graph that economists used to draw mining employment was really nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher. She may have intensified the drop-off in mining employment, perhaps in the late 80s after the giant confrontations, but it's not sensible to blame Mrs Thatcher for the decline of the mining industry. This is a trend visible all over the Western world.
Nor, Andrew Oswald says, does the data support the popular view that Thatcher killed off British manufacturing.
The decline in manufacturing as a proportion of total employment in a country like Britain, that's a very long standing. And Mrs Thatcher couldn't make much impact on that downward trend. She's viewed historically as the enemy of manufacturing industry. But I think most of that criticism is incorrect. These are very powerful historical trends. As we get richer and richer in Western countries, we live more by our wits than by our skill at producing physical items.
Thatcher's also pictured as the great tax slasher, a portrait she partly painted herself.
How often do you hear people say, look how much they've taken from my pay packet. They don't work for the chance of the exchequer. They work for their families. So we've got to cut the tax on earnings and the tax on skill. Give our people incentives. And once again, Britain will be back in the race.
But what did the statistics show? Well, it's true that Thatcher cut direct taxes. When she came to power, the top rate of income tax was 83%. By the time she left government, it was 40%. And basic rate tax fell from 33% to 25%. But indirect taxes went up. For example, VAT on goods and services almost doubled. So what does this mean for public spending? Did she roll back the frontiers of the state? Well, not as much as her supporters and critics like to believe. Public spending actually went up in real terms under Thatcher. High unemployment meant she had to spend more on benefits. But as a proportion of the economy, public spending fell during her time in office. from 44% to 39%.
The National Health Service is safe with us.
During Thatcher's premiership, critics believed she had a secret plan to dismantle the National Health Service. That was her famous response. But the idea that she starved the NHS of money has stuck. Yet contrary to popular belief, Thatcher more or less maintained the same steady rate of increase in state health spending as her predecessors.
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