How Britain changed under Margaret Thatcher. In 15 charts

Margaret Thatcher
How did Britain change under Margaret Thatcher? Photograph: Graham Whitby-Boot/Allstar/Sportsphoto/Allstar

What is the the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died today?

The 1980s is increasingly being seen as deep history - 50% of the Datablog team were born in the late 1980s and were just toddling into school when she resigned in November 1990.

If the past is a foreign country (they do things differently there), there is nowhere more foreign than May 1979, when the Conservatives entered Downing Street. In fact, it's getting increasingly difficult to tell - many of the datasets we rely on now weren't compiled until the early 1990s. So what kind of Britain did the country's first woman prime minister come to rule in 1979 - and how has it changed?

These are some of the datasets which actually go back that far - mostly from the Office for National Statistics, and some from the excellent British Political Facts.

She may or may not have caused it, but Britain under Thatcher saw huge economic, demographic and cultural change. These are just some of the facts.


The UK was a smaller country then - 56.2m people lived here, compared to 62.3m people in 2010. That had been pretty stagnant since 1970, actually going down for four years before 1979 as the economy faltered. During the first years of Thatcher's reign, fewer people came to live in the UK - acceptances for settlement went down from 69,670 in 1979 to 53,200 by the time she resigned in 1990. Since then, the economy has boomed and eastern European countries have joined the EU. In fact, for much of the decade there were more people leaving the UK than coming here. Now it is the reverse. Net migration now is at a record high.

The population has changed too. There are no accurate figures for the UK's ethnic breakdown before the 1991 census, so we can't say what Britain's ethnic mix was. By the 2001 census, four years after the end of the Conservatives in power, the UK's population was 92.1% white. According to the latest ONS estimates, that figure has gone down now as Britain becomes more diverse; 83.35% of England and Wales is now defined as "white British".

We're living longer - life expectancy overall went up from 70.3 for men and 76.4 for women in 1979 by three years for both sexes by 1990. In a developed country, life expectancy should go up as medicine improves and the economy grows. But in 1985 it went down briefly, as it did again in 1993, both after huge recessions.

There are more of the super-old around now. Some 15% of babies born in 1979 would live to reach 100 - that figure is 26% now.


Ironically for a prime minister who focussed so much on family life, the 1980s saw the end of the traditional family unit for many. Divorce rates reached 13.4 per 1,000 married population in 1985, although that wasn't as high as the peak of 1994 after the recession. They have gone down now. The most recent figures show that 119,589 people got divorced in 2010, roughly half of the number of people who got married the same year.

Of course, fewer people are getting married now - only 231,490 in the latest year, down from 368,853 in 1979, which was the highest figure since the war brides of 1940.

Which also means less babies being born to a traditional family unit too - in 1979, only 12.5% of babies were born outside marriage. By 1991 that had gone up to 29.8%.



The economy

Britain got hit by two major recessions under Thatcher, which sandwiched the boom of the 1980s but even that boom never saw GDP grow by more than a couple of percent. Obviously in 2013, George Osborne would kill for growth of 2.2%.

If the deficit is the obsession of this government, in 1979 it was inflation, which had rocketed into the twenties in the 1970s.

The figures show how it went down under the Conservatives - after a struggle as it rose to 21% in the 1980s - decreases which largely continued under Labour and have only just started to reverse.

Perceived wisdom is also that manufacturing disappeared under Thatcher. If so, it was something that had already started. In 1970, manufacturing accounted for 20.57% of UK GDP. By 1979 that was down to 17.62% of GDP. By the time she left office, that decline had continued - albeit at a slightly slower pace, down to 15.18%. Now it is much lower, according to the ONS - down to 9.68% in 2010.

Public spending

Thatcher never tried the scale of austerity cuts facing the UK coalition government now. In fact if you look at spending as a percentage of GDP it actually rose in her first years of power, going down during the 1980s before rising in the early 1990s under John Major and chancellor Kenneth Clarke. Her reign actually ended with more of the workforce employed in the public sector than now - 23.1% as opposed to around 20% now.

The pay gap

She may have been our first prime minister but men still ended her decade paid a lot more than women - especially if you look at the bald figures below.

However, if you change it and look at women's full-time pay as a percentage of male full time pay it shows women working full time in 1990 paid 76% male full-time pay - up from 73%. It has improved since then - in 2011 it was 84.8%.

House prices and interest rates

One of the defining features of the 1980s was the rise of the house price economy, especially with the sales of council houses.

At the same time, interest rates rose to record levels of 17% and repossessions rose to match.

In 1991, 75,500 properties were repossesed, the peak, and 186,649 cases reached the courts.

The unions

The unions were a major force in 1970s Britain, with around one in four of the UK population a member - 13.2m people. Those numbers went down significantly by 1990 to 9.8m - and in 2008/9 to 7.4m or one in eight of the population.

At the same time days lost to industrial disputes shot down too - from around 900,000 a month when Thatcher became prime minister to 183,000 in November 1990 - albeit with millions of days lost in the miner's strike.

Poverty and inequality


With it came a huge rise in inequality. This shows the gini coefficient, which is the most common method of measuring inequality. Under gini, a score of one would be a completely unequal society; zero would be completely equal. Britain's gini score went up from 0.253 to 0.339 by the time Thatcher resigned.

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