It was decided to start the 1980s a year early
with the election of a new prime minister in 1979,
Margaret Thatcher.
Street name: Missus.
Thatcher's election was a watershed. It proved that absolutely anyone could become Prime Minister
provided they went to Oxford and married a millionaire.
As well as a uterus, Mrs. Thatcher had a vision, an economic vision with all coins up it.
She believed in laissez-faire economics, which is French for something
and then English again for the economics bit.
Mrs. Thatcher had saved the nation from chaos with her tough economic policies
and a grateful nation erupted into lively street parties.
The sense of jubilation continued during the royal wedding of the century.
It was a dream come true as the then-future and still future King of England, the Prince of Charles,
married one of the three people in his marriage,
the future Queen of Hearts
Lady Diana Frank Spencer
in a wedding just like something from a fairy tale, except without a wolf or dwarves or a beanstalk
or a happy ending.
While people waved flags like idiots at home,
trouble was brewing overseas at a faraway corner of foreign Britain known as the Isle of Falklands Island.
This island was invaded by Argentinas who'd mistaken it for an
identical island they'd left lying around in exactly the same place a few centuries ago.
Mrs. Thatcher immediately fought back by bravely ordering troops
to fight and die on her behalf. And soon that famous flag, the Onion Jack, was
flying over the Isle of Falklands Island once again.
Beating the Argentines at war sealed Mrs. Thatcher's reputation as a tough guy so much that people started
to call her the Iron Lady and she soon got another chance to prove how hard she was,
not in a major war, but a minor strike.
The miners struck their strike in 1984,
led by their leader, Arthur Scarface.
Thatcher refused to back down and soon the two sides were at war.
A class war. The rich police on their horses in their smart uniforms and the poor dirty miners
fighting with bits of coal.
It was like something out of the Russian Revolution
except it was happening here, in Britain, somewhere near you,
if you live near a mine.
The miners strike, perhaps the most bitter dispute Britain had seen in years
tore generations apart before ending in 1985, one whole year before the
terrestrial broadcast premiere of the BBC sitcom, Brush Strokes.
With the miners crushed, like miners in a bad mine, Thatcher was free to pursue her
economic dreams by privatising some of Britain's biggest assets.
Thanks to the big sell-off, anyone could get rich, providing they had loads of spare money already,
a system still in use to this day.