the lemur
Senior Member
As someone else pointed out before, the 'British smile' phenomenon predated Thatcher by quite a long time and can be attributed to diet and a general reluctance to seek dental care, even though it was provided free at the point of delivery for most treatment. It's worth noting that the NHS was created in 1948 and for a time thereafter there was a sizable cohort of the population who had gone without dental care for some time before its introduction and continued to do so. My anecdotal experience is that many young people born in the '60 and '70s didn't visit the dentist unless absolutely necessary and/or didn't maintain good dental hygiene/diet. It didn't help that water generally wasn't fluoridated except in a few areas.
Thatcher didn't directly cut funding to the NHS but she did implement studies leading to reforms when it became apparent that the NHS was never going to be adequately funded to do everything it was mandated to do.
The story about Thatcher eliminating the supply of free milk to schoolchildren isn't entirely what it's usually reported: it was not her idea originally and she was in fact opposed to it, but went along with the decision made by the Treasury, in her capacity of Secretary of State for Education, before being elected PM.
What might be more germane to this thread in terms of local government is how Thatcher succeeded in eliminating London's unified municipal government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London_Council
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