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This chapter concentrates on the reform opportunities that emerge when a government exploits its parliamentary majority. For example the privatizations and pension reforms carried out in the UK by the Thatcher government. When backed by a large parliamentary majority, the policy-makers' only constraint is the need to win a future election, which provides freedom of action in most cases. Yet, this strategy is not always valuable. The mix of successes and failures suggests that other institutional elements are crucial, such as the (lack of) internal cohesion in coalition governments or the existence of strong opposition. A strong parliamentary majority can thus be insufficient to generate sufficient coalition building.

This chapter covers the remainder of the Thatcher government’s first term of office, from 1981 until the June 1983 election. As the Conservative right tightened its grip on the government, so the National and Local Government Officers Association (NALGO) strengthened both its policies and its structures. The political economy of Thatcherism is described. The government’s main attack on public services fell onto local government, with reductions in local accountability, finances, and relative pay. The NALGO policy and practice, and the collective bargaining and local disputes, are reported as well.

This chapter discusses Prentice‘s experience of gaining acceptance within his new party, including the difficulties he faced in securing a parliamentary candidature for a safe Conservative seat in the immediate aftermath of his defection. It also considers the role he played, alongside other converts, in appealing to disaffected Labour supporters to vote Conservative in the watershed general election of 1979, and his subsequent ministerial experience at Social Security during the first Thatcher Government. His satisfaction at the defeats suffered by the Labour Left in the 1980s were tempered by the continuation of the excessively adversarial style of British politics. However, despite his retirement from the House of Commons in 1987, he continued to campaign in favour of overseas development and to argue for the fundamental principles of liberal democratic politics right up until his death in 2001.

This chapter looks at what became of the council estate as the sizable class of people renting their homes from local councils ebbed away. It explains the relative endurance of the council estate and the way that it marked the outer limit of Britain's emerging property-owning democracy. The chapter also follows the career of Alice Coleman, an urban planner who critiqued council estates along these lines and in doing so caught the attention of the Thatcher government, winning funding in the 1980s to redesign many large estates. Ultimately, the chapter highlights the privatization in the context of housing and the birth of a new urban form in Britain: the private housing estate. Private housing estate refers to any large residential building or group of residential buildings that are owned by the same private developer, planned as a totality, and to which access is available only to residents. It explores the growth of these developments in East and South London in the 1980s along with the records of private residents' associations to see the new ways in which “communities” were imagined to exist in such spaces.

This chapter provides a brief historical introduction which emphasises the importance of the temporal to the description and evaluation of regeneration initiatives. Based on the assumption that an appreciation of contemporary urban issues requires an understanding of the historical context, this chapter highlights change and continuity in urban regeneration in east Manchester and the wider UK. An overview of the distinctive history of the various neighbourhoods of east Manchester is provided and an analysis of how current regeneration initiatives both draw on and differ from earlier initiatives under the Thatcher Governments such as City Challenge and the Single Regeneration Budget.

This chapter suggests that health policy under ‘New Labour’ is not entirely what it seems, exploring a number of contradictions in health policy and the role of ‘spin’ in government at the same time. It asks how it is that, despite Labour's health policy being more radical than even the previous Conservative Thatcher government, there is relatively little debate around the direction of policy, even despite the British people's emotional attachment to the NHS. It suggests that Labour's presentation of their health policy has been extremely important in understanding these tensions because they have managed to present their reforms as modernisation rather than privatisation, they have been able to claim significant increases in health expenditure, which again act as a distraction from their increased use of non-public providers of healthcare, and finally, that ministers have claimed to have achieved far greater say in the NHS despite the absence of virtually any kind of accountability checks in Labour's reforms.

You may well have gone to university. If so, would you do it all over again? I expect so. One survey of recent graduates found 96 per cent of them would do it again. If you haven’t gone but are thinking about going to university you should almost certainly go for it. You won’t regret it. It may well turn out to be one of the most rewarding and transforming experiences of your life. But what is it that makes more and more of us go to university when the media are full of stories of graduates who are unemployed and the usual clichés that too many people go to university? And why are record numbers of young people going even after the changes in student finance, which I helped to bring in, mean that graduates are likely to be paying back more over their working lives? Just look at the newspaper headlines: . . . Thousands of new graduates out of work, figures show. Expansion of the university sector has destroyed its status. UK graduates are wasting degrees in lower-skilled jobs. Today’s university students are being sold a lie. . . . Is College Worth It? is a very fair question, and the American book with that title answers with a clear ‘No’ for many people, many courses, and many institutions. The conventional wisdom is that going to university is often an expensive waste of time. But for most students the truth is the opposite. For most young people it is a deeply rewarding, life-changing experience. And it matters particularly if you come from a poor background because then it really could transform your chances in life. I meet parents who think that too many people go to university but definitely want their own child to go—it is the other parents’ kids who aren’t supposed to go. But the other parents might not see it that way. A survey of mothers of children born in the year 2000 showed that even for the mothers with the lowest qualifications 96 per cent wanted their child to go to university.