Postwar

249

In Eastern Europe it was Hungary, where the ‘underground’ economy (see Chapter 18) furnished many people with a higher standard of living than elsewhere in the Bloc, which first reached comparably low birth-rates in these same years.

250

The highest level of resentful anger was to be found in the public service unions, covering underpaid government employees from dustmen to nurses. The major industrial unions were far more sanguine about Callaghan’s cuts: so long as Labour kept its promise to protect the traditional skilled industrial workers and leave their privileges intact, their leaders were pleased to tolerate the government’s apostasy. They were rather taken aback to discover that no such deals could be cut with Mrs. Thatcher.

251

In 1996 (its last year of existence) Britain’s nationalized railway network ‘boasted’ the lowest public subsidy for a railway in Europe. In that year the French were planning for their railways an investment rate of ?21 per head of population; the Italians ?33; the British just ?9.

252

And private poverty, too. By breaking the link between pensions and wages, Thatcher sharply reduced the retirement income of most of her fellow citizens. By 1997 UK public pensions were just 15 percent of average earnings: the lowest ratio in the EU.

253

In the decade following her retirement, Margaret Thatcher’s heirs at the Conservative helm declined from the tiresomely humdrum (John Major), through the bumptiously inadequate (William Hague), to the terminally inept (Iain Duncan Smith). After the long reign of the Sun Queen there ensued a deluge of mediocrity.

254

As she explained to the Scottish Tory Party Conference, on May 14th 1982: ‘It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands, when you have spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment.’

255

With perhaps this difference: whereas Margaret Thatcher believed in privatization as something akin to a moral good, Tony Blair just likes rich people.

256

A 1979 poll revealed that the electoral profile of Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste uncannily reflected that of the country at large, something no other party could claim.

257

A former banker and one-time adviser to Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Delors would go on to preside over the European Commission from 1985-1995.

258

Even at the height of popular discontent with government policy, in the economic slump of the mid-1980s, 57 percent of electors declared themselves pleased with Mitterrand’s foreign policy.

259

In 1982 IRI (Instituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale) controlled, among much else, all of Italy’s cast-iron manufacturing, two-thirds of its special steel output, one quarter of its ice-cream production and 18 percent of its peeled tomatoes.

260

The original goal of the Treuhand was to convert as many as possible of the nine thousand East German companies (employing seven million men and women) into real businesses and liquidate the rest. But under political pressure it preferred to rehabilitate or consolidate many of the unprofitable concerns, ironically thereby creating a new, semi-public sector subsidized from public funds. See Chapter 21.

261