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A month of triumph and tragedies as I spend more time filming my family and taking trips back to my origins and I win the anti-IBM/BT standards battle and develop influence for the BMMG as unemployment under Thatcher reaches 3.5million, such that the FT calls for action and the so-called Big Bang in the City of London revolution takes place against forebodings. Another Bishop attacks Thatcher’s politics of confrontation when she sets the judiciary on Arthur Scargill, sequestrating the miners’ assets and the Brighton IRA Bomb blast kills four and maims others at her Tory Conference. Abroad, South Africa also make the headlines as the white-only government sends in 7000 troops to the black townships, Polish agents kill the beloved Solidarity priest causing 40,000 attend a church service in Warsaw in defiance and Indira Gandhi is murdered by her own Sikh body guards. This, as more aid is announced for the people starving from the famine in Ethiopia in a sad and divisive world
Thus ends October; my home and family life quietly enjoyable and prosperous, and personal endeavours free of the traumas that face the world of business and commerce in this age of revolution and change. a father drugs and drowns his 6 year old daughter because he cannot bear the thought of her growing up in ‘a terrible world.’ We have helped our family by means of our success and now Freda has accepted a gift of £3,000 and is willing to consider a loan. During the month, I took a trip down memory lane to my childhood haunts in Essex And also made a nostalgic return to Brighton for the weekend and the site of the Grand Hotel bomb damage. My major triumph was of my BMMG lobbying efforts having secured the rejection by the government of the BT/IBM licence threat, and now the the DTI/LAN proposals gains momentum as the IBM/BT proposal falters. This was despite a drive to Manchester for a struggling Federation of Microsystems Centres steering committee only to find the NCC subsequently supporting the IBM/BT plan, which enraged me. I think that the turning point was my decisive meeting in London with Brian Willott, the head of the DTI IT Division and most pessimistic civil servant about the prospects of the British Computer industry that influenced their policy where I won the argument but had to await the decision.