Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [95]
Even though the ‘wets’ would continue to be sceptics for another six months, our policy had already begun to succeed. The early signs of recovery in the summer of 1981 were confirmed by statistics in the following quarter, which marked the start of a long period of sustained economic growth. Political recovery followed in the wake of these early signs of improvement, with better poll figures in the spring of 1982. We were about to find ourselves in the Falklands War, but we had already won the second Battle of Britain.
* Higher interest rates caused people to increase the amount they held in interest-bearing financial assets and to reduce cash and non-interest-bearing assets in their current accounts.
* The civil service strike began in March 1981 and lasted for five months. Union members struck selectively at crucial government installations, including computer staff involved in tax collection, costing the Government over £350 million in interest charges on money borrowed to cover delayed and lost tax revenue. Industrial action was also taken at GCHQ, the installation at the heart of Britain’s signals intelligence, which led to our decision in January 1984 to ban trade unions there.
CHAPTER VI
The West and the Rest
The early reassertion of western — and British — influence in international affairs in 1981–1982
We were not to know it at the time, but 1981 was the last year of the West’s retreat before the axis of convenience between the Soviet Union and the Third World. The year began with Iran’s release of US hostages in a manner calculated to humiliate President Carter and ended with the crushing, albeit temporarily, of Solidarity in Poland. The post-Vietnam drift of international politics, with the Soviet Union pushing further into the Third World with the help of Cuban surrogates, and the United States reacting with a nervous defensiveness, had settled into an apparently fixed pattern. Several consequences flowed from that. The Soviet Union was increasingly arrogant; the Third World was increasingly aggressive in its demands for international redistribution of wealth; the West was increasingly apt to quarrel with itself, and to cut special deals with bodies like OPEC; and our friends in Third World countries, seeing the fate of the Shah, were increasingly inclined to hedge their bets. Such countervailing trends as had been set in motion — in particular, the 1979 decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing in Europe — had not yet been given concrete effect or persuaded people that the tide had turned. In fact it had just begun to do so.
EARLY TALKS WITH PRESIDENT REAGAN
The election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States in November 1980 was as much of a watershed in American affairs as my own election victory in May 1979 was in those of the United Kingdom, and, of course, a greater one in world politics. As the years went by, the British example steadily influenced other countries in different continents, particularly in economic policy. But Ronald Reagan’s election was of immediate and fundamental importance, because it demonstrated that the United States, the greatest force for liberty that the world has known, was about to reassert a self-confident leadership in world affairs. I never had any doubt of the importance of this change and from the first I regarded it as my duty to do everything I could to reinforce and further President Reagan’s bold strategy to win the Cold War which the West had been slowly but surely losing.
I heard the news of the American election result in the early hours of Wednesday 5 November and quickly sent my warmest congratulations, inviting the President-elect