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Serious rioting in Brixton following the arrest of a local black man marked the start of violent unrest across England. In London's Southall, Toxteth in Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester, and to a lesser extent other centres such as Derby, crowds rioted, looted, and fought the police. Many of the riots reflected specific local problems, especially poor relations between predominantly black communities and the police.
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The Humber Bridge was built between 1972 and 1980. At the time, it was the longest single-span bridge in the world at nearly 2,200m.
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Republican prisoners at the Maze prison near Belfast had begun their hunger strike over the right to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals. A first strike, begun in late 1980, was called off with no deaths. But failure to secure concessions resulted in a second, led by Bobby Sands. It began in March 1981. The British government refused to concede. Ten men, including Sands, starved themselves to death, while 61 people w
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Unemployment breached the psychologically significant barrier of three million as manufacturing was hard hit by a deep economic recession.
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Three days after the invasion, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent a naval task force to liberate the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. The subsequent conflict cost the lives of 655 Argentine and 255 British servicemen, many of them sailors who died during attacks on Royal Navy warships. The conflict ended on 14 June when the commander of the Argentine garrison at Port Stanley surrendered to British troops.
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The Conservatives were re-elected with 379 seats and an enormous majority of 144 seats. Labour's share crashed to 209 seats. The Social Democratic-Liberal 'Alliance' won 23 seats. The Conservatives benefited from division among their opponents and doubts about Labour's competence on the economy and defence. Thatcher's government used its majority to embark on a radical programme of privatisation and deregulation, trade union reform and tax cuts.
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A local strike on 5 March over a threatened pit closure in Yorkshire had, within a week, broadened into a national miners' strike. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pitted her personal authority against that of the militant socialist president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill. There were violent clashes between striking miners and policemen. The strike failed and was called off after a year, allowing the pit closures to go ahead. The strike left a legacy of deep bitterness.
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The bombing by Irish Republican Army terrorists of the Grand Hotel Brighton during the Conservative Party conference killed five and left more than 30 injured. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher narrowly escaped the blast. It was the closest the IRA had come to killing a British prime minister.
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The privatisation of British Gas was a major step in the Conservative government's policy of privatisation. It paved the way for the privatisation of British Aerospace, Cable and Wireless, Britoil, the National Bus Company, British Airways, Rolls Royce, British Steel, British Telecom, the electricity-generating industry and the water companies. These sales cut government expenditure, by bringing in large sums of money and by reducing the need for state subsidies.
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Margaret Thatcher was re-elected for an historic third term, with an overall majority of 101 - less than in 1983, but still significant. The Conservatives had 376 seats (42.3 % of the vote), Labour 229 (30.8%) and Alliance 22 (22.5%). It paved the way for Thatcher to become the longest serving prime minister for more than 150 years. Signs of a Labour recovery appeared in Scotland, where they won 50 of the 72 seats.
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In 1989, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea of the World Wide Web, a new way of using existing internet technology to share information. He wrote the first web browser the following year, and went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994.
