How do Margaret Thatcher’s policies stand up to the test of time? - Andy Brown

The consequences of some of the other nationalisations have been disastrous. When the public water companies were nationalised, we were told that it would result in a much improved service, lower bills, extra investment and a share holder democracy where lots of small investors owned shares and kept the companies on their toes.

The reality turned out to be very different. What has actually happened is that ownership has been acquired by a few very large shareholders many of whom are not British. Yorkshire Water is owned by a German investment fund, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, and a private equity fund.

Instead of investing heavily the focus of the privatised monopolies has been on paying shareholders excessive dividends much of which were funded by borrowing large quantities of money. The total debt of water companies stands at around £50bn. They began life utterly debt free.

The infrastructure has not been modernised. It has been run so badly into the ground that they are routinely releasing sewage into our rivers and on an alarming number of occasions even allowing it onto our streets. Ask a resident of Bishop Monkton near Ripon about that.

Customers are now being told that, if they want cleaner rivers, they are going to have to pay massively higher bills. Managers and shareholders who presided over the failure are expecting the rest of us to bail them out. In what world can this be described as a successful policy?

Similar damage to important national assets was also produced by another of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite policies. Selling off council houses to their occupants was popular at the time for good reasons. People like to own their own homes. The policy was, however, implemented with more focus on ideology than practicality. Houses were sold off on the cheap and councils were effectively banned from building replacements.

The result is there are over half a million fewer council homes available for people to rent and the public purse is spending a fortune in paying housing benefits which go to private landlords. Many of whom are providing much lower quality of accommodation at a higher price than the council’s used to achieve.

It took over four decades for the scale of the housing problem this policy helped to create to become glaringly evident and it might take another four decades to fix it but the policy needs reversing. The new government should be allowing councils to borrow and build for need instead of giving developers a free hand to slap up more executive homes on the green belt and continuing to provide a discount to those who buy a council house.

Yet both these policies failures are dwarfed by the consequences of the other huge mistake of the Thatcher years. The city of London was deregulated and boomed as the country moved away from manufacturing and relied on earning money from clever new financial products.

When Labour came to office Gordon Brown persisted with much of this approach and told us he had put an end to boom and bust. He proved good at ending the boom but not at ending the bust. Those de-regulated free markets that Thatcher and Reagan had created crashed spectacularly in 2007-8 and had to be bailed out by the state.

The consequence was a doubling of the national debt. Austerity was inflicted on teachers, nurses, and public services whilst the financiers were soon back to their old tricks of laundering money for servants of some very unpleasant regimes. Deregulating financial markets proved to be one giant disaster.

The much-vaunted policies of deregulation, giving free rein to the wisdom of markets and trusting the profit motive to provide good quality public services has failed the country.

Some of Margaret Thatcher’s other policies look a lot better with hindsight. She signed an excellent deal with the EU that allowed Britain a lot of autonomy and easy access to our main markets. Only for that deal to be casually discarded after a referendum on whether we liked nice promises.

As a scientist she was also one of the first world leaders to recognise that climate change was going to be a major problem and prevention was a more realistic option than cure. We might all have much lower energy bills and a safer world if we had taken note of her warnings and taken action in good time.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.