The decline of cinema admissions, the dominance of American films at the box office and the contraction of the domestic production sector in the early 1980s inevitably impacted upon the National Film Finance Corporation. In hindsight there is a sense that the corporation had been living on borrowed time ever since the election of the Thatcher government in 1979: the decision to wind up the NFFC – along with the other remaining instruments of state support for the film industry, the Eady levy and the quota – now seems an inevitable consequence of the ideological climate of the 1980s. For those on the Tory right the NFFC was a relic of the past that no longer served a useful purpose: its continued existence was incompatible with the ethos of private enterprise and free market economics. For others – especially though not exclusively on the political left – the dissolution of the NFFC and the abolition of the Eady levy symbolised the doctrinaire economics and cultural philistinism of Thatcherism. As Julian Petley observed in 1986: ‘They are simply the application to the film industry of the Conservatives’ avowed free market economic principles. The present government is hostile to the very notion of subsidy, and reserves a special contempt for arts subsidies.’ Alexander Walker was even more outspoken in his book National Heroes, published in the year of the NFFC's abolition: ‘The Conservatives had made no secret – but rather boasted – of their intention to see subsidised undertakings pass into private hands. How ruthless they could be emerged one General Election, two Films Ministers and a great deal of fretful waiting later.’

Yet as so often the story revealed by the archival record is rather more complex. Walker's suggestion that the NFFC's fate was determined from 1979 is not borne out by the official records: indeed, the new administration initially proved to be rather less ideologically hostile towards the existence of the NFFC than the previous Conservative government of Edward Heath in the early 1970s.