Rate-Capped and Resistant: The 1985 Budget

Abstract

‘If Mrs. Thatcher is returned to Downing Street, the prospect for the next few years is for a direct and possibly bloody confrontation between the Department of the Environment and a small but vocal array of Labour city councils’. So The Times (2 June 1983) had said when the Conservative manifesto for the 1983 general election was published, and so it was to be. The main items behind this grim prediction were the Conservatives’ pledge to abolish the Greater London Council and the other metropolitan county councils, and their promise to curb ‘excessive and irresponsible rate increases by high-spending councils’. Rhodes (1992: 55) writes that both abolition and rate-capping were inserted into the manifesto by Mrs. Thatcher, who ‘wanted to “do something” about local government’ and ‘disregarded all known opposition within the government and the party’. Our council was obviously one it was intended to ‘do something about’.