Did Ronnie & Maggie actually win?

In the happy 80s I remember the fear of nuclear war scaring me much more than the hordes of unemployed. It's probably because I grew up in Sheffield and watched Threads at too young an age. I was in constant fear that the evil Communists would soon be firing their death laden missiles at us in order to snuff out our freedom loving ways.

I was happy that we had strong leaders who knew that flying lasers in space would keep the scary Russian fingers off the red button.

Read his lips.

And the at the end of the 80s we won the cold war. David Hasslehof and KIT kicked down the Berlin wall and led the downtrodden masses out of the Black & White turnip fuelled life they were suffering and delivered them to the technicoloured promise land of McDonalds,  George Foreman grills and Bonnie Tyler haircuts.

Maybe I was mistaken. 30 years later, as the Daily Mail to day points out, it seems we forgot about the commies out in the east.

Apparently in ten years time communism will have surpassed capitalism as the winning formula for making money. Obviously in order to get that rich you've got to tread on a few toes, crush a few students with tanks and imprison anyone with the vaguest concern of human rights; but no one said it was going to be easy.

Did Ronnie & Maggie let us down by being more scared of these than the Russians? Could we have had a flourishing manufacturing industry here in the UK - producing top quality tat for the world - if we'd forced the Chinese to accept the free market back in the 80s? Instead of powering to world domination maybe they'd be another modern day Russia; low tax, small government, living the Big Society dream. Tweet