Thatcherite London
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the general election for the Conservative Party, and the country and the capital would never be quite the same again. The Conservatives were to remain in power for seventeen years, steering the country into a period of ever-greater social polarization. While taxation policies and easy credit fuelled a consumer boom for the professional classes (the "yuppies" of the 1980s), a calamitous number of people ended up trapped in long-term unemployment. The Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985, and the Tottenham riot of 1985, were reminders of the price of such divisive policies, and of the feeling of social exclusion rife among the city's black youth. Nationally, the opposition Labour Party went into sharp decline, but in the GLC (successor to the LCC), the party won a narrow victory, led by the radical Ken Livingstone , or "Red Ken" as the tabloids dubbed him. Under Livingstone, the GLC poured money into projects among London's ethnic minorities, into the arts, and most famously into a subsidized fares policy for public transport. Such schemes endeared Livingstone to the hearts of many Londoners, but it was too much for Thatcher, who abolished the GLC in 1986, leaving London as the only European capital without a citywide elected body. Abolition exacerbated tensions between the poorer and richer boroughs of the city. For the first time since the Victorian era, homelessness returned to London in a big way, with the underside of Waterloo Bridge transformed into a "Cardboard City" sheltering up to 2000 vagrants. At the same time, the so-called " Big Bang " took place, abolishing a whole range of restrictive practices on the Stock Exchange and fuelling the building boom in the reclaimed Docklands, the most visible legacy of Thatcherism. Stocks and shares headed into the stratosphere, and shortly after, they inevitably crashed, ushering in a recession that dragged on for the best part of the next ten years.
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