“Selling the family silver”, he went on, had gone “to foot the bill of past failure rather than investing in future success They have squandered nearly pounds 90bn from privatisations. With proper investment, Britain should have been prepared to meet the challenges of the next century – instead, the money has been spent supporting divisive, short-sighted policies.”There was more to privatisation than a series of sales. With it developed a whole new sub-culture, of City banks which set up specialist privatisation arms, of public relations executives who dreamt up new ways of marketing what until then had often been a run-down branch of government, of eager punters queuing round the block to get their share forms.The first Thatcher administration saw the sales of British Aerospace, NFC, Cable and Wireless, Associated British Ports, Britoil, British Rail Hotels and Amersham International.After her second, resounding victory in 1983, the process moved up a gear. Out went Enterprise Oil, Jaguar, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways and Rolls-Royce.By now, she recounts in her autobiography, The Downing Street Years, “privatisation had leapt from fairly low down to somewhere near the top of our political and economic agenda”.
That zeal was confirmed by her third, and last, term, which saw the programme reach new heights of ambition in the sales of water and electricity.In all, in what Mrs Thatcher boasted was “the greatest shift of ownership and power away from the state to individuals and their families in any country outside the communist bloc”, more than 600,000 people ceased to be public servants.. A Christian pressure group is planning to provide a special election telephone hotline service for voters to check up on the moral beliefs of would-be MPs. The Movement for Christian Democracy, a 10,000-strong inter-denominational and non-aligned group, plans to survey the views of every candidate standing in the forthcoming general election.
Politicians’ answers to its 25-point questionnaire will be used to create an information database, available to electors via a line manned by volunteers.The campaign has been organised by the author Christopher Graffius, who helped start the MCD with the Liberal Democrat MP David Alton in 1990.Last week, however, in a surprise move, Mr Graffius, the MCD’s general secretary, announced that he was leaving to set up a new political pressure group funded by Mohammed Al-Fayed, the millionaire owner of Harrods.Called The People’s Trust, it will lobby politicians on morality issues, but the campaign masterminded by Mr Graffius at his old job will go ahead without him.In his place, the MCD has appointed Jonathan Bartley, who is putting the finishing touches to the questionnaire.Dr Alan Storkey, the MCD’s chairman, said: “There is no question that the campaign will not go ahead. I trust Chris and feel sure that he believes what he is now doing is for the best.”His new group would appear to be somewhat different from our organisation but I wish it well. To some degree we would both appear to be travelling in the same direction but the MCD is an explicity Christian organisation.”Mr Graffius’s book, Election ‘97: A Christian View of the Major Issues, to be published on Wednesday, sets out the policies and values of the MCD.
He denies that there is a Christian agenda behind the hotline campaign.”There are clear principles which everyone, not only Christians, can follow,” he said. “This will be an exercise in voter empowerment.”The MCD take the traditional view that what an elected representative says in his own right and believes is what is important at election time. It is not healthy for democracy to have faceless representatives who simply toe a party line.”The MCD wants to test the views of prospective MPs on a wide range of sensitive ethical and moral questions, from arms sales to Third World countries through to euthanasia and violence on TV. Its questionnaire will be sent out next month and candidates will be asked how, if elected, they would vote on specific issues.. A Major new exhibition about modern London has rejected the bobbies- and-beefeaters image beloved by tourist boards and foreign visitors, and portrays the city instead through the eyes of squatters, demonstrators and tower-block dwellers. The warts-and-all view of the capital since the Second World War presented by the Museum of London’s new London Now gallery, which opens on Tuesday, is, according to Cathy Ross, head of the museum’s Later London History department, “an attempt to reflect London as it is, not a tourist’s view of it”.
So, although events such as the Coronation and the marriage of the Waleses do get a look in, the gallery devotes far more space to such issues as traffic jams, pollution, riots, homelessness and the decline of manufacturing since the war.One of the most striking exhibits is a large and detailed model of two Hackney streets under threat from developers. “The Ghetto”, made by photographer Tom Hunter, who lives there, and model-maker James MacKinnon, gets its title from what the artists claim was an attempt by Hackney council to “smear” their thriving community of squatters and artists as a slum inhabited by drop-outs and losers.Residents gave Mr Hunter permission to take pictures of the insides of their homes; the resulting transparencies have been placed in the corresponding rooms on the model and back-lit, so that the view through the windows is of the real interiors.
“The idea is to show that it’s not a ghetto, that everyone is very productive and that we have created a good environment in which to live,” said Mr Hunter.Dr Ross said she believed the exhibit would become as popular as the museum’s Great Fire of London model.Other subjects include the Wapping print dispute of 1985, the transformation of Docklands, and the 1990 Trafalgar Square anti-poll tax riot, the subject of a 12ft by 9ft painting by John Bartlett. An eclectic mix of exhibits includes a 1965 Mark 1 Ford Cortina, a fragment of concrete from the collapsed Ronan Point tower block, costumes from 1960s Biba and 1990s raves and litter.. Wealthy Hong Kong Chinese are buying hundreds of millions of pounds- worth of prime residential property in London in the run-up to the handover of the colony in June, inflating the already rising trend in prices. The influx of Hong Kong money has accelerated to such an extent in the past year that some estate agents are reporting a 100 per cent increase in sales to colony buyers.
Vogue Residential, based in Belgravia and catering for the top end of the market in Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Belgravia, handles hundreds of properties year, typically valued at pounds 400,000-pounds 450,000 Two years ago, 20 per cent of buyers were from Hong Kong. Now it is 40 per cent.Vogue’s owner, Helen Toulouze, said: “We’re experiencing a lot of Hong Kong trade, particularly in the last six months. Probably about 40 or 50 per cent of the rise in prices is due to the influx of this trade.”The last time that property prices rose in a similar manner was in 1988, just before individual tax relief on mortgages was abolished This led to soaring demand and prices, followed by a slump. Now there is growing evidence of another boom developing; last year prices in London rose by 14.9 per cent, and solicitors, estate agents and mortgage lenders have all reported a surge of business after Christmas, with the Hong Kong Chinese adding an extra pressure to prices in the capital.Jonathan Seal, developments director and a partner with Hamptons International property company, said: “We have been doing a huge amount of business in the Far East in the past four years.
