On Friday 13 July, a strange thing happened. Eco-Actif Services, a Community Interest Company which helped find work for the hardest to employ, including ex-prisoners and ex-substance abusers, went bust. It shouldn’t have. At the time, it had £1m worth of advance orders on its books and a turnover of £700,000. So what happened? Well, for the full answer, you have to go back a very long way in time: to about 1979, in fact.
The basic economic aim of Thatcherism can be spelled out in two words: controlling inflation. The exchange rate system which had been set up with the Bretton-Woods agreement had recently collapsed. Government-set exchange rates were unworkable, so it was agreed to let them float. It meant the Thatcher government began to give priority to rooting out inflation rather than welfare and employment, deregulated its financial markets, and – most pertinently to our subject – began privatising whole industries, like gas and electricity. At the same time, it sought to reduce the bill for services it knew the public wanted to remain in public hands.
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