From broken railways to packed prisons: Margaret Thatcher's legacy continues to cast its long shadow

Today (13 October) is the centenary of the birth of Margaret Thatcher. She was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, becoming prime minister in 1979. By rights, at this stage – 50 years after they were elected as a party leader – any former PM ought to be of interest only to political scientists or social historians.

And indeed, few will mark 13 October 2025 as anything other than another Monday in Britain. It’ll probably be raining, the kids will probably be at school, and no one will pay much attention to the events of 50 years ago, let alone a century ago.  

But in many respects, the things that we, as a nation, need to face up to also means needing to recognise the role of the UK’s first ‘New Right’ prime minister in our lives.  

Our schools (now academies in many cases), our transport system (especially the railway network), our social security system, our healthcare system, our housing market and even our criminal justice system all face structural problems and a real lack of funding and investment over the past 40 years which, arguably, can be traced back to the ideas Margaret Thatcher injected into British political discourse
and policymaking.  

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The ideas of the ‘market’, ‘market forces’ and of ‘choice’ all owe their prominence in public life to the rhetorical skills of Thatcher. Let us take schooling, for example. To introduce more parental choice into where people sent their children, the Thatcher and Major governments needed to create a metric by which schools could be compared.

Enter school league tables. No one ever wants to be bottom of any league table, and so this simple idea created a series of responses. Headteachers, keen to have as great a proportion of 16-year-olds passing five or more GCSEs at grade 5 or above did the obvious thing: they expelled the unruly kids dossing about at the back of year 10 Geography classes.

They weren’t going to get enough GCSEs to bother with, and they might disrupt the learning of those borderline kids who could get more than five GCSEs given the right learning environment.  

Yobs, layabouts, problem youth 

But kids don’t just vanish. They hang about on street corners, outside local shops and, being 16 or 17, not especially socially skilled and feeling that they had endured the rough end of a shitty stick, weren’t actually welcoming of others using the shops. Yobs, layabouts and problem youth was the rhetorical response. Crime rates, especially property crime, rose during the 1980s.

In part, the rise can be accounted for by the needs created by unemployment and the reduction in social security payments to poorer members of society. But in part it can also be explained by the arrival of heroin in many of Britain’s inner cities just as worklessness and hopelessness started to enter the lives of many younger people.  

All of this – the rise in crime, the focus on younger people and on kids who ought to have been at school hanging around – led, eventually (since there was some truth to the idea that kids hanging around with little to do were getting up to no good) to Tony Blair’s ‘war’ on antisocial behaviour. This war started as rhetoric but quickly became criminal justice policy, with numerous criminal justice acts ramping up sentence lengths and the ease with which people could be arrested, charged and found guilty.

It wasn’t just schools, children and the criminal justice system that felt the brunt of market forces. So too had large sections of Britain’s industrial heartland. After Thatcher saw off the miners following the strike in 1984/85, the ancillary and support work around mines – like railway marshalling yards, local shops, working men’s clubs and pubs – withered.  

Many of the jobs had employed a largely male workforce, paying wages on which they could support a family. Aside from the simple tragedy of so many people losing their jobs – it is estimated that 160,000 were lost by 1991 – there was an uneven geographical distribution to much of this.  

Due to an accident of geology, most of the UK’s coal mines were to be found in South Wales, central Scotland and north of a line between The Wash in East Anglia and the Bristol Channel (although there were also some coal mines in Kent).

In these areas of Britain in the years since, we have seen elevated levels of unemployment, higher rates of school truancy, poorer housing conditions and – and this may surprise some – an increased building of prisons relative to the local need, given population increases in the years since the 1990s.      

Read more:

• Brian Cox: ‘I’ve been haunting Margaret Thatcher’
• Maggie & Me author Damian Barr: ‘Today’s Tories are far beyond Thatcher’s darkest dreams’
• Richard Hawley: ‘Thatcher defined my youth. She gave us something to fight against’

The housing issue 

Housing, and especially local authority housing estates, were changed beyond recognition. I know: I grew up on one. In the 1970s and 1980s when I lived on a council estate, our neighbours were working, or if not working then recently retired. Many had blue-collar jobs, such as light engineering, transportation or building. Some were teachers, others worked in the lower ranks of the NHS and still more worked in other white-collar occupations for local insurance firms or local government administration.  

These estates were lovely places to grow up with a real sense of community. But, combined with the crushing of the trade unions after 1984, the selling off of some of the better housing stock, the downgrading of the worth of welfare benefits, and the refusal to let councils build new houses (which increased demand but not supply), these estates largely, but not exclusively, became the accommodation of last resort.   

The 1980 Housing Act (Thatcher’s gift to the aspiring, mainly south-east English working class), along with the regulation of housing standards, sowed the seeds of the housing crisis which the UK faces now – a crisis of both accessibility and affordability.  

Using two cohorts of people born in 1958 and 1970, our research found that for those born in 1958, it did not matter if your parents owned their own homes, owned a council house they’d bought, or rented their council house. As a child you were equally likely to experience homelessness as an adult – it was about 6% for the 1958 births.  

For those born in 1970, overall, it has only risen to 7%, but a much greater proportion of those were from households who lived in council housing and who did not buy their houses.  

How did homelessness affect contact with the criminal justice system? For the 1958 births, contact with the police and courts was fairly rare. For example, for people whose parents did not buy their council home, only 4% reported that they had been moved on by the police, while only about 5% of this same group were arrested.

For those whose parents lived in houses they owned, this figure was 3%, and for those whose parents bought their council houses, the figure was 4%.  

When we looked at those born in 1970, we see a very different picture. Some 24% of those whose parents didn’t buy their council houses were moved on (for those who parents owned their own homes it was 17% and for council house buyers’ children it was 20%).

In terms of arrests, 24% of those whose parents didn’t buy their council houses were arrested, with figures of 13% for those whose parents lived in houses they owned and 15% for those whose parents didn’t buy their council houses.  

This looks like two things are happening at once. First of all, of those born in 1970, far more had been moved on or arrested than was the case for those born in 1958. This can be explained by the increase in crime in the 1980s, which led to a pressure on the police to ‘do something’ which reached a crescendo in the 1990s. In 1994 Michael Howard (the then home secretary) issued a statutory notice to the police instructing them to focus on solving crimes and bringing offenders to justice, which, almost word for word, was reissued by Jack Straw when he was home secretary in 1998.

Put simply, the police were encouraged to go out and catch criminals, which meant focusing on ‘street crimes’ (such drunkenness, fights, shop theft and so on). When this pressure on the police emerged in the mid-1990s, the 1958 cohort were in their late-30s, and more likely to be at home listening to baby monitors than was the case for the 1970 cohort, who were in their mid-20s in the mid-1990s and therefore more likely to be out on a Friday and Saturday night.    

Second, far more of those who parents had not bought their council homes were moved on by the police or arrested. This can be explained by the relative impoverishment of those whose parents had not bought their council houses, and were therefore more likely to experience homelessness and to be living on the streets and hence easy to be arrested by the police, who were being required to ‘go out and catch bad people’.   

Fingers of blame. And how to resolve things 

And whose fault was all of this? The answer depends on who you asked.  

For Thatcher and those who followed her – both in terms of voting and in terms of the next generation of Conservative Party politicians – the answer was the unemployed youth hanging around street corners and ‘foreigners’ (who stole jobs). Social workers and judges weren’t blameless either, so the narrative went. The solution? Send these terribly embarrassing people to prison. This was a discourse which Blair adopted readily too. Crime in England and Wales started to come down in the early- to mid-1990s, but you’d never have known it given the increase in people being sent to prison and sent to prison for longer and longer.  

Another answer – the one I would give – would focus on the drive to cut taxes at all costs, which fuelled levels of economic inequality, and with it, crime, ill-health and a range of other nasties.  

Tax cuts serve only the interests of the already-well-off, and starve local and national governments. Why are our schools run down? Why is the NHS on its last legs? Why are the trains late or cancelled? Why are there so many people in prison that we’re having to release people early? Why is the social security system so unable to meet basic needs?  Why are so many people living in insecure housing? It is due to the ideological constructs developed by Thatcher and promoted – pretty much relentlessly ever since by governments of both colours – of ‘the market’ and of ‘small government’.  

As we leave the Party conference season, and head to focus on the government’s budget, the question is, will any politician be brave enough to argue against the private ownership of pretty much every once-state-owned asset? Will anyone have the temerity to stand up and say, “You know, for 50 years we’ve been doing it all wrong”? 

Stephen Farrall is a professor of criminology in the School of Sociology & Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.

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