ABSTRACT
The industrial adjustment strategy adhered to by UK governments over the years has been characterised by a market-led or company-led pursuit of efficient markets and new technologies, and achieved by promoting free enterprise and withdrawing the state from the national economy (Katzenstein 1978, 1985; =ysman 1983, 1994). This strategy has sustained the openness of the British economy and forced domestic companies to compete in world markets. The typically British marketoriented or liberal policy response was taken to its extreme in the 1980s and 1990s, when the ‘Thatcherite’ Conservatives implemented their ‘big bang’ programmes, aimed at a rapid removal of remaining barriers to free enterprise. Before 1979, the character of economic policy in the UK was less profound, alternating between market-led and interventionist adjustment strategies, as promoted by ‘modest’ Conservative and Labour governments. The study of the restructuring of telecommunications in the UK is a highly interesting one, because the country has played ‘the role of policy laboratory for the world’ (Garnham 1990:7). The UK programme, characterised by radical privatisation, far-reaching liberalisation and concomitant regulatory reform, became exemplary in Europe both as an inspiration and a deterrent. Since 1981, competition has been introduced in nearly all segments of the UK telecommunications market, including equipment, enhanced services, mobile communications, voice telephony and basic networks. The public operator British Telecom was separated from the Post Office and eventually privatised in the mid-1980s, and the independent Oftel body was established, taking responsibility for monitoring and regulating the liberalised telecommunications market. Britain’s radical strategy was clearly ahead of the more gradual plans of the European Commission to open the Community’s telecommunications market, as laid down in the 1987 Green Paper.
