Brunte 🏴🇬🇧@Brunte84
Since you mentioned Lady Thatcher, @andyburnham, here's a reminder of what she achieved 👇🏼
• Top rate of income tax: 83% → 40%
• Basic rate: 33% → 25%
• Inflation: 21.9% peak (1980) → 2.4% (1986)
• Days lost to strikes: 29.5 million (1979) → 1.9 million (1990)
• Real take-home pay for the average earner: up by a third
• Right to Buy: over a million council tenants became homeowners
• Home ownership: 55% → 67%
• Individual shareholders: 3 million → 11 million — one in four adults
• Foreign holidays: roughly doubled
• Homes with a telephone: two-thirds → nearly nine in ten
• Pensioners' average incomes: up around 30% in real terms
• Infant mortality: down almost 40%
• Real GDP: up by almost a third
• GDP per head outgrew France, Germany and Italy in the 1980s
• Manufacturing productivity: slowest growth in the G7 in the 1970s → fastest in the 1980s
• Self-employed: 1.9 million → 3.5 million
• Nissan to Sunderland, Toyota to Derby, Honda to Swindon
• Britain became a net oil exporter
• London restored as the world's financial capital in 1986
• Budget surpluses three years running — Britain repaid debt, 1987–90
• National debt: 47% of GDP → 28%
• State spending: ~45% of GDP → ~39%
• The civil service: 732,000 → 565,000
• Corporation tax: 52% → 35%; the small firms' rate: 42% → 25%
• Personal tax allowances: up more than 25% in real terms
• Higher rates of income tax: nine → one
• Death duties: fourteen rates → one
• Exchange controls scrapped after 40 years
• 40+ nationalised businesses privatised — 600,000 employees moved to the private sector
• The 33 big state industries: took ~£500m from taxpayers in 1980 → paid £8.4bn to the Exchequer by 1987
• British Steel: world-record loss-maker (1980/81) → £733m profit (1989/90)
• BT, 1984: the largest share offer the world had ever seen
• "Tell Sid" broke the record again in 1986
• British Airways: nationalised loss-maker → profitable, private, "the world's favourite airline"
• The Channel Tunnel: launched — entirely privately financed
• The Falklands liberated in 74 days
• Backed Gorbachev early, stood with Reagan, and won the Cold War
• Three consecutive election victories and the longest-serving PM of the twentieth century ✌🏼🇬🇧
