ABSTRACT
Mrs. Thatcher and her various ministers, like most of their predecessors, have displayed a mixture of the two attitudes, and it is easy to point to examples of each of the two types of business culture in the UK. The 1987 manifesto was long on self-congratulation on industrial performance but short on new policies, which were perhaps not thought to be required. Four Department of Trade and Industry policy areas can each be considered separately over the Thatcher period. The British tradition has been to subsidize either sunset industries, mostly in the public sector, such as steel, coal, railways and shipbuilding. The Government appears to have welcomed mergers and takeovers as part of the shake-up by which British industrial performance was being improved in the 1980s. Takeovers and mergers are a difficult area for advocates of the free market. Britain’s trade can be better understood from a supply-oriented examination of the highly diverse performance of its various categories.
