How Maggie mobilised Britain’s Sids

MARGARET Thatcher was determined to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ and create a share-owning democracy.

Privatisation first caught the public imagination in 1984, when British Telecom was sold off to more than two million small investors. Two years later the ‘tell Sid’ advertising campaign encouraged investors to buy ‘affordable’ shares in British Gas. Four million people applied to be ‘Sids’, with 1.5million landing shares in the newly privatised company.

The Thatcher government privatised the electricity network in 1990 and National Grid listed on the stock exchange in 1995.

Any investors still holding on to these shares are now at risk of Labour’s renationalisation plans.