Thatcher's failures and their consequences today.

Thirty years ago today I woke in a Mayfair Hotel having watched the election results roll in overnight and confirm the victory of Maggie Thatcher over a Labour Government which had done all that was possible within the confines of their own gross incompetence to destroy the British nation. My own experiences, negotiating so-called "Participation Agreements" involving the ridiculous convolutions of Anthony Wedgewood Benn as Secretary State for Energy and his ghastly henchmen at the State Oil Company, BNOC, where alongside civil servants who had been corrupted into a body of bullying thugs determined upon the destruction of the North Sea Oil Industry, which at that point was the sole spark of hope in a dessicated economy, had driven me to live and work in the USA. I resolved that morning to return to Britain once the Thatcher Government had reduced the income tax rate then peaking at 83% incurred from a ridiculously low level of income alongside an investment rate surcharge on bank deposits etc of 15% giving an absurd top tax rate of 98%. Geoffrey Howe duly delivered a cut and I was back in the UK to aid the recovery by the close of 1979! So what went wrong? Much analysis has been undertaken, but in my view, arrived at some ten years later when before Maggie's final overthrow I had once again left the UK in despair, was the failure to properly hold former Government Ministers properly to account for their actions (if necessary through the courts) and leave them to continue to poison society with their subversive ideas and secondly a reluctance to tackle the closed shops of the middle classes, particularly in the law and accountancy professions, as had been done with the Trade Unions. These lessons clearly have still not been learned!