rulers revolt
18
Rulers’ Revolt
This election is about the future of Britain – a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands.
Conservative Party manifesto, 1979
Remember the conventional wisdom of the day. The British people were ‘ungovernable’. We were in the grip of an incurable ‘British disease’. Britain was heading for ‘irreversible decline’. Well, the people were not ungovernable, the disease was not incurable, the decline has been reversed.
The Next Moves Forward, Conservative manifesto, 1987
Politics changed in the 1970s, but in ways that are not well described by the concept of an end to consensus. Much more was changing than the politics between parties. Intra-party politics were especially important. Whether the main divisions in politics lay within the Conservative or Labour Parties was an issue. For some it lay between the right and left of the Labour Party; for others between the emerging of the Conservative Party and the rest of parliamentary politics.1
The two key political drivers of new ideas in the 1970s, Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher, represented positions which were critical of the positions of their own parties. For both, 1975, their fiftieth year, was particularly important. Tony Benn, without question the leader of the left, led the anti-EEC campaign of that year, losing decisively, and as a result was demoted from the Industry to the Energy portfolio in the Labour government. Margaret Thatcher stood against and defeated Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative Party and took the party sharply to the right. She campaigned for a yes vote in the referendum. Both came into their moment of greatest power in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, Tony Benn as leader of a Labour left which was able to change the policies of the Labour Party very substantially. If there had ever been a post-war consensus they would both certainly have broken it.
Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Under her determined leadership, the trade unions were brought to heel, and the British decline, claimed her supporters, finally began to be reversed. Industries nationalized in the 1940s and earlier and later were now privatized and liberalized. So were industries born from within the state machine. There was an economic transition from manufacturing to services in which, it was claimed, British firms did very well, creating a uniquely competitive European economy which became a model for many. Margaret Thatcher, in office for eleven consecutive years, was forced out in 1990, to be replaced by John Major, who won the 1992 election with the consequence that the Conservatives would be in power for a remarkable eighteen years. The country was transformed, economically and ideologically, to a degree not seen since the 1940s.
For both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn, their push for new policies was in part about recapturing a past. Margaret Thatcher’s policies were in some respects about a return to the 1950s, a period she identified with. This was a period with high defence spending, a clear bipartisan commitment to national nuclear weapons, to close relations with the US, to the capitalist economy and to limited welfare expenditure. All this was threatened in the 1970s by the rise of the unions and the left in the Labour Party. Thus, the 1979 Tory manifesto did not attack a post-war consensus, but what had happened in the recent past, pointing to the fact that Labour governments had dominated by being in office for eleven out of the previous fifteen years. Certainly in some respects the 1974 Labour programme broke with the previous one, but the really big break came after 1979. By 1983 the left had pushed the Labour Party into a position which involved withdrawal from the EEC, rejection of nuclear weapons and elimination of US nuclear bases, and a strong dose of nationalist economic planning. By this standard the Conservative Party certainly stood for the post-war consensus in substance though not in style.2
And yet, one could also see the Labour programme of 1983 as a plea for a return to the past. Though it was never expressed in this way Labour advocated the national, protected economy, with an interventionist state, outside the EEC, which had been the post-war norm. In many respects the left was looking to finally bring about the promise of those years, which they saw as unrealized because of the political power of British capitalism and the political and ideological weakness of previous Labour governments. The difficulty was that business, the Conservative Party and the Labour right had long moved from this past, to decisively support the EEC and to reject economic nationalism.
Perhaps the best way to think about this is to cast out any thought of a general consensus being broken and rather to see both major parties revising their positions radically, both looking to recreate semi-mythical pasts and to create a new future. Furthermore, the policies of the parties interacted with each other – the Tories reacted to the extension of social democracy in the 1970s, just as Labour reacted to the market liberalism of the Conservatives after 1979. In both cases they reacted in ways which drove their positions, always different, further apart.
Perhaps the key difference in the politics of the 1980s from what went before was the preparedness of government to fight dissenters very hard and to exert the rights of elected authority very strongly. That is not the same as breaking a consensus – it is rather a willingness to press on with one’s own policies in the face of odium. Thus it was not a matter of moving from agreement to disagreement, but rather a change, a very important one, in how to deal with disagreement. From the war both parties accommodated disagreement – Mrs Thatcher did so much less. She was admired and loathed for being what she said she was – a conviction politician. She broke through an unsteady equilibrium of forces. Push came to shove, and the forces on her side could shove an awful lot harder.
There was indeed a crucial transformation in the power and self-confidence of the British elite. Sometime in the 1970s a chunk of the British upper class said enough is enough. For parts of the middle class, too, the future – with stronger unions and a more comprehensive welfare state – was not attractive. In the 1970s there emerged the idea that the United Kingdom was becoming ungovernable; that the state had been captured by unproductive groups; that there was an inexorable tendency to use the state to exploit producers in favour of a parasitic public. The answer to everything, it had seemed, was the government must do something, which it couldn’t. Government not only dominated economic activity, it actively prevented private sector operation, by making it illegal in certain fields and uncompetitive in others. Democracy was thus destroying the sinews of production and of national power. The answer was, of course, ‘rolling back the state’, rhetorically speaking, but it also involved making the state more autonomous, more powerful. There were models. In Chile from 1973 and in Argentina from 1976, military governments opened markets, privatized state industries and crushed organized labour. There were also think tanks and pressure groups in the United Kingdom arguing for a robust economic liberalism and talk of anti-socialist private armies of the right among a fringe of business and military people.
LA PASIONARIA OF PRIVILEGE
In 1975, in a dramatic shift, the leadership of the Conservative Party changed in style, substance and its deep nature. It was the result of a coup, the first against a Conservative Party leader. It was to be called, very misleadingly, ‘the Peasants’ Revolt’. She was voted in by ‘toffs, country gents and Treasury specialists’, ‘men of old money, old regiments and old school ties’.3 Edward Heath, leader since 1965, when he was the first leader of the Conservative Party to be elected by members of parliament, was thrown out of office. Conservative MPs replaced Heath by someone not much younger, of similar social origin, who had studied also in Oxford. But Heath was a man who had visited republican Spain during the civil war; where he had met Jack Jones, then fighting in the International Brigades, later to be leader of the TGWU. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher had no positive feeling for the anti-fascist compact of the 1930s or the war and its aftermath. Just before becoming leader she was called the ‘La Pasionaria of privilege’ by the Labour chancellor, Denis Healey. She was a nationalist with a very different sense of the nation and one who clearly communicated that nationalism in an overt way.
Heath was able at least in part to play the role of party grandee, but Thatcher was ‘that awful woman’ even to some who were extremely loyal and helpful to her. In a telling anecdote, the Labour MP Dennis Skinner, a stalwart of the parliamentary left, recalls being taunted for being a grammar school boy (which, unusually for a former miner, he is) by a crowd of braying Conservative public school MPs seated around her in the tea room of the House of Commons in the late 1980s. He embarrassed them all by telling them that ‘Maggie’, who sat silently among them, also went to a grammar school.4 Margaret Thatcher was in part a creature of the old party who spoke directly to the membership of the Conservative Party and to a wider public in ways Edward Heath plainly did not.
Margaret Thatcher’s ascent and success were not inevitable. She won the election in 1979 with a lower vote percentage than Edward Heath gained in 1970. The Conservative vote share decreased from 44 per cent in 1979 to approximately 42 per cent in 1983, 1987 and 1992. She was a minority taste and remained so. The electoral victories were not pre-ordained. They depended, particularly in 1983, on a strong performance by the new SDP–Liberal Alliance, which split the opposition and nearly replaced Labour as the second party. Furthermore, the Falklands War could have finished differently, she could have lost against the miners, she could have been thrown out as a result of Westland and she could have been left isolated by the abolition of nuclear weapons by the USA and the USSR. Yet she dominated politics like no other politician since Churchill, drove through changes against strong opposition and indeed destroyed British socialism. She was admired around the world and had an extraordinary personal following within her own party. She represented and led a reinvigorated ruling class. As she herself put it, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away. That confidence comes from the re-discovery of ourselves, and grows with the recovery of our self-respect.’5 She had power, if little popularity.
Yet Margaret Thatcher was the first British prime minister to be dumped by her party while in office. Challenged by Michael Heseltine, whom she beat but not strongly enough, she resigned at the end of 1990. Not since the defenestration of Neville Chamberlain in May 1940 had something similar happened. But Chamberlain at least remained leader of his party and a senior minister. Edward Heath was got rid of in opposition. In earlier times Asquith and then Lloyd George were kicked out of office, but largely by coalition partners, not their own parties. What is plain is this. When she threatened a key policy of the Conservative elite, and the business elite – engagement in the EEC – she was forced out. While Margaret Thatcher was clearly useful for a project of transformation, she was far from indispensable. There was indeed a party and class project for which she was, temporarily, a brilliant political figurehead. For she was thrown out not by the actions of ‘the wets’, but by the resignations of two deeply Thatcherite senior ministers, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe. Finally, it is not at all clear, despite the strong sense that Margaret Thatcher achieved what she set out to do, that this was the case. For it could be argued that what she appeared to want was a strong, self-confidently British and socially conservative nation, with a powerful regenerated manufacturing industry led by British entrepreneurs, which would reverse the decline as it had been defined by declinists.6 By these measures she undoubtedly failed.
IDEAS
Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party was strongly influenced by many different sorts of ideas often in contradiction with each other. Some were socially and politically conservative and authoritarian, others were libertarian. It was not just about conserving the old, but also about creating something new. It was thus not easily comprehended by those who saw Conservatives as mere reactionaries, and the promoters of change only on the left. One strand was a growing body of economic reflection which was profoundly critical of economic nationalism, of the notion that the state could or should guide economic development. The new right, as they were called by the left, believed in free trade and in letting the private sector decide on investments, on what machinery to buy, what research to do, where to locate and so on. The nation, as had been the case for the Liberals of old, should not be a factor.7 This was the big issue on which there was a clear divide, and it is not summed up by the difference between something called Keynesianism and something called monetarism. It was a matter of political-economic principles, not particular kinds of macro-economics. It was not the control of demand or the money supply which was really at issue, but the place of free trade, and of the capitalist, in a global market. It was more profound than hostility to nationalized industries – it was a matter of who or what was in charge. And it was also about any number of different kinds of government measures for the support of industry, from education to taxation, on which neither ‘Keynesianism’ nor ‘monetarism’ had anything distinctive to say. It was crucially about the distribution of power in society, an expression of the feeling that an active state had supported the unproductive rather too much.
It was a movement centred on business-financed private think tanks, rather than British universities. Indeed, it ran in opposition to the academy and what it took to be conventional elite thought (and of course socialist ideas). Its central academic influences came from abroad. Friedrich Hayek, who had been at the LSE between 1931 and 1950, went to Chicago. Milton Friedman was a US academic.8 In terms of economic theory there was a very significant difference between the Austrians, like Hayek, who were hostile to macro-economic ideas and scientism, and the neo-classicals like Friedman, who were macro-economists schooled in proudly scientistic economics. The British think tanks which took up these ideas sought influence not in the universities but in the press, in politics and policy, with success, though they also set up their own small private university. Their success came in the 1970s, but their ideas were not as marginal in the 1950s and 1960s as they were later made to seem.9
Among the politicians and thinkers associated with these ideas and institutions there were those who attacked both British economic nationalism and techno-nationalism. For example, Enoch Powell imagined, in 1968, getting rid of all industrial and agricultural subsidies. Nicholas Ridley wrote a 1973 pamphlet attacking the civil service for its support of high-tech industries. Duncan Burn was a fulminating critic of the extraordinarily wasteful British nuclear programme. David Henderson claimed the Concorde and the AGR programmes, while still underway, were some of the worst imaginable investment decisions. Naive techno-nationalism resulted in giving too much power to engineers and not enough to market forces and was in their view to be rigorously avoided. These critics focused on civil programmes, though the bigger problem was in the military sector.10
Mrs Thatcher was the first British prime minister to have completed a science degree. Yet this did not make her a technocrat.11 Indeed, British academic science had an important tradition of liberal-individualist thinking in it. Its ablest ideologue was the Hungarian émigré Michael Polanyi, professor of physical chemistry and then of social philosophy at Manchester, and who closely associated with classically liberal philosophers and economists such as Hayek and John Jewkes. They were profoundly hostile not only to Marxism but also to centrist scientism, and their writings of the late 1940s onwards were well supported by the CIA.12 John Jewkes was to become a notable critic of claims for bureaucratized invention.13 Rather strikingly, there were British scientists who prospered even outside the university. Peter Mitchell, a biochemist with personal wealth, left the academy completely to research in his country house in the 1960s; he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1978. Another country-house scientist of the 1960s and 1970s was the inventor James Lovelock, later famous for his Gaia Hypothesis.14 Nevertheless, in the academy at least few scientists had any sympathy for the politics of the first scientist in No. 10.15
The relationship between the Thatcher revolutionaries and the universities was fraught. Universities had been marginal to the development of the new liberal economics, or indeed thinking from the right more generally, and were (laughably) regarded as strongholds of the left. Mrs Thatcher was refused an honorary degree by her own university, in a calculated and controversial insult. The Royal Society elected her, as it did most prime ministers, but with more reason, given she was a chemist, but even this was a commented-on election. She also had a tense relationship with the established churches and promoted an evangelical to the see of Canterbury. However, she did not favour the sort of cynical born-again Christianity that the US right promoted at this time, though this was prominent in Northern Ireland in the case of the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley, who had an honorary doctorate from a US fundamentalist university.
In arguing for a free market economy, from which political freedom would flow, the economic liberals were very poor indeed in describing the actually existing economy and its history. They blamed its faults on ‘socialists of all parties’ and foreign ideas. An early and blatant example was John Jewkes’ Ordeal by Planning, of 1948 and 1968, which lambasted the post-war Labour government for planning while ignoring the wartime planning in which he had been a major player. Indeed, there was no convincing economic-historical account of the British economy to support the economic revolution which was being proposed. Perhaps this was not surprising in that the most elementary examination of the historical record would show that phases of slow growth corresponded to full exposure to the market, and that the greatest growth had taken place in the years after the Second World War in a protected economy with significant state intervention and control. Tory histories of the twentieth century did little more than lambast past Tory governments for appeasing Labour and letting in too many black people.16 They might at most hint that it might have been a good idea to stay out of the Second World War, hiding behind imagined imperial ramparts.17 There was essentially no useable, positive Tory history of the twentieth century, a reason perhaps for the popularity of the nineteenth century, with its ‘Victorian values’.
Yet histories which purported to explain poor British economic performance were important to arguments for an economic revolution. Revitalized declinist histories were central to the ideological baggage of Thatcherism. Martin Wiener’s reiteration of a 1960s thesis on the elite educational system sucking the entrepreneurial spirit out of the British bourgeoisie was a huge success in 1981.18 Even more spectacular was that of Correlli Barnett’s Audit of War, another version of the same thesis, which also blamed the post-Second World War British decline on high welfare spending and a do-gooding British elite schooled in Christian moralism and determined to create a New Jerusalem rather than a thrusting industrial nation. The academics generally liked these works – the higher reading public, of left and right, were generally ecstatic, especially about Barnett.19 They did not detect, perhaps because they shared, his nationalistic-militaristic-technocratic world view. Thatcherism was never ideologically consistent. It took time for the claims of these histories to be shredded, and they remained influential even so.
The Thatcher government was very self-consciously going to do something about the British decline. When Margaret Thatcher talked about reversing decline and releasing enterprise she, like others thinking about decline, was thinking primarily of manufacturing industry.20 Yet ministers in the first Thatcher government were ‘notable for the lack of contact with the industrial values that they extolled’.21 While this is true of manufacturing industry, there were many businessmen in the government, including David Young from the world of property, Nicholas Ridley, a civil engineering contractor, from a business and aristocratic family, Sir Keith Joseph, a hereditary baronet whose father had created the building firm Bovis, Patrick Jenkin, a director of Distillers, and Michael Heseltine from publishing. There were also important advisers from business in No. 10 Downing Street.22 Yet it was also the most donnish set of ministers since the 1960s, though of a distinctive sort, including many Fellows of All Souls in its leadership – for example, in the later years, Keith Joseph, John Redwood, Robert Jackson, Lord Hailsham and William Waldegrave, and at least three PhD historians, Rhodes Boyson, John Redwood and John Patten.
POLICIES
The Thatcher government came in at a very inauspicious moment – a new Great Depression, comparable to that of the 1930s, had hit the world. Yet this crisis of capitalism, global as it once again was, far from discrediting capitalism, as had happened in the 1930s, actually strengthened it ideologically, especially in the United Kingdom and the USA, where Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 on a very economically liberal agenda. One important reason for this shift was that there were no cases of apparently radically better economic performance by non-capitalist countries. Indeed, what was very obvious in the 1970s and 1980s was the poor recent performance of the Soviet bloc and its satellites. In any case, the crisis was interpreted by most not as a crisis of capitalism, but as a crisis generated by interventionist states (however implausible this was). Yet it was clear that something was wrong – rapid growth had stopped in the mid-1970s, inflation surged nearly everywhere, together with unemployment. On top of this, the established order was threatened by stronger trade unions and the rise of the left. However, economic doctrine, and economic policy, were a changeable mess between 1979 and the late 1980s.23
What was particularly astonishing was the response to the crisis, one which conventional economists thought was making it worse. Instead of Keynesian reflation there was Keynesian deflation. This was partly a question of economic doctrine and partly of objective. The long-proclaimed central aim of the Thatcher government was bringing down inflation. Inflation undermined freedom, a key word, in their view. They saw inflation as undermining savings, undermining the middle class against the workers, and, though this was not stated, it favoured the debtor, rather than the creditor. They also had a theory of inflation – that it was due not to high demand, or trade unions pushing up wages, but rather to the supply of money in the economy. Reducing inflation meant, in their terms, control of the money supply, which meant high interest rates and cuts in public spending and higher taxes. This they did. In fact their measures at first pushed inflation upwards such that it went up from 8 per cent to 18 per cent. However, as the economy crashed, so did the rate of rise of prices. Real interest rates were raised for a prolonged period to levels last seen in the 1920s and were in stark contrast to most of the 1970s, when real interest rates had been negative, as they had been from the Second World War into the early 1950s. These high rates were a gift to owners of property – real owners that is, not mortgagees.
High interest rates, and a high pound, exacerbated the problems of tradeable manufacturing industries in particular. Manufacturing output fell much faster than that of the economy as a whole – there was a fall in two years of nearly 15 per cent, taking manufacturing output back to that of the late 1960s. ICI lost 30 per cent of its workers between 1979 and 1983 and by 1984 was employing equal numbers in the UK and overseas.24 The United Kingdom became a net importer of manufactures. Mass unemployment followed but was often seen within government-supporting circles as a necessary shake-out of labour from ‘over-manned’ industries.
The attitude to the national economy was critical too. Economic nationalism was out. There was in time an all-out rejection of Labour’s refreshed economic nationalism. One telling early indicator was the abolition of exchange controls in 1979. This had once affected even holiday spending money, but was now really a matter of overseas investment. British investors were now free to invest abroad as they wished, and they did. From its beginning, then, the Conservative government was encouraging the bringing-down of economic barriers around the nation – which would lead step by step to the fall of the nation as an economic unit.
Another crucial element was a change in attitude to trade unions. They were no longer to be seen as social partners but as an economic danger. Trade union legislation was passed, but of a very different sort from Heath’s ill-fated Industrial Relations Act. Successive legislation ate away at the various immunities that allowed trade unions to act. In effect there was a return to the practices of past Tory governments. Trade unions were derecognized in very significant ways, and this was all the more important because unemployment was increasing very radically in the early 1980s. Among many changes, unions were made liable for damages for strikes unless they took place in very particular conditions and were voted for in postal ballots. An extreme case, but a potent symbol, was the 1984 banning of trade unions at GCHQ, the central electronic espionage facility which had only recently had its existence acknowledged. This led to the sacking of fourteen workers who refused to renounce union membership. The implication that trade unions might be traitorous was as offensive as it was deliberate. This was the only anti-trade union measure repealed by the 1997 New Labour government.
The power of organized workers was broken by high unemployment and the collapse of unionized industries. The changes were palpable – the heads of the TUC diminished in stature, the names of union leaders were increasingly unknown, the industrial correspondents disappeared from television and newspapers. From the late 1980s the working class disappeared from the public sphere. The poor, the unsuccessful, were stigmatized in the media in ways which would have been unthinkable earlier.25 The tripartite apparatus that involved trade unions in public life was abolished or ignored. The NEDC was sidelined, though not abandoned till 1992. The discourse around the economy was now one of flotations and enterprise and the state of the stock market, rather than the balance of payments and production.
LEGACY ASSETS
There was a hardly known story of something which made the Thatcher revolution possible but which was submerged in accounts stressing crisis and decline in the 1970s. The Thatcher government claimed it had inherited a fundamental economic crisis caused by government intervention in the economy. Yet the developmental state had created the very economic conditions which made Thatcher’s approach possible. The transformations under Thatcher were only made possible by previous state investment, by the success of the state, not by its failure.
Her government had inherited, uniquely in modern British history, a nation self-sufficient in food, an exporter of wheat and meat. It had also inherited a nation which was about to become, for the first time since 1939, a net exporter of energy. The implications were extraordinary, too: the United Kingdom no longer needed to be a net exporter of manufactures to balance its earlier needs for energy and food. This epochal transformation has barely registered in political discourse or the history books.26
When the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, there was a mass of modern public capital that had not been there in 1950, or 1960, or even 1970. There were modern electricity supply, railway, telephone, gas, postal and other systems newly in place. As we have seen, there was an inheritance of a motorway system, new steel works and more, including new coal mines. Council houses, in their millions, now existed.
The valuable assets could be sold. Two million council houses were sold to tenants. North Sea Oil was the first significant state-owned industry to be privatized, though this is not very well known.27 First went part of Britoil, formerly BNOC, in 1982 for over £600 million. In 1983 a £500 million tranche of BP was sold, the biggest privatization of the year. In 1984 nearly £400 million was raised from Enterprise Oil, spun out of British Gas. In 1987 another large chunk of Britoil went, and in 1987 £5.5 billion of BP.28 The first huge sale was that of British Telecom, which been part of the Post Office, which came at the end of 1984. Just over 50 per cent was sold, for £4 billion. This was followed the massive £7 billion privatization of British Gas in 1986. The other utilities would not be privatized until the 1990s.29
It should not be thought that the Thatcher government modernized nationalized industries by selling them off – they were modernized further under state ownership prior to privatization. There was continued, indeed increased, activism by the state in these industries. However, it was not like that of old, which consisted in investment in new equipment. Now the focus was on reducing the workforce and on closing facilities. The most radical case was the coal mines, not privatized till a tiny rump was left in the 1990s. But British Airways (1987), British Steel (1988), British Telecom (1984), British Gas (1986) and others were all privatized as lean, profitable enterprises, which had all first shed labour under public ownership. Among the others were the warship yards (1985), British Leyland (1988) and Rolls-Royce (1987). Even in the case of nuclear energy, there was a transformation in performance of the old reactors, but under public ownership. The best that can be said for the positive impact of privatization on performance is that it resulted from the need to be ready for privatization. But of course, the argument for privatization was precisely that the state was incapable of modernizing, or even shrinking, industries. Thatcherism was not so much the release of entrepreneurial power, but rather the creation of a brutally activist state, directly and powerfully transforming society, ideas, as well as the economy. For all the complaints about social democratic state intervention, there had never been state intervention this strong until Thatcher. Indeed, there was a strong bureaucratization and an extension of central controls, of planning and of the state. The rulers’ revolt did not push aside the state, it strengthened it and made use of it.
Furthermore, it could be argued that the devastations to the productive economy caused by government policy were only sustainable because the government inherited a newly comprehensive and, by historical British standards, generous welfare state. There was an extensive safety net onto which many millions could, and did, fall. The official number of unemployed rose to over 3 million and stayed at that level for years. Many who would otherwise have worked went onto disability benefits. The number of people on invalidity and sickness benefit doubled between 1980 and 1993, to 2 million people.30
THE GREAT MINERS’ STRIKE 1984–5
Under the plan for coal of the 1970s the British coal mining industry would be modernized and its output expanded slightly. The rapid decline of the late 1950s and 1960s was over. Yet that maintenance of the industry implied new, much more productive mines, notably the complex being developed at Selby in Yorkshire. The new Conservative government, elected in 1979, wanted to cut subsidies to coal, and thus its use, but U-turned in 1981, giving the miners what they wanted.31 By 1981 the Conservative government wanted to close what were called ‘uneconomic’ pits. The miners rebelled, threatening strikes, and a general programme of closures was called off. But mines continued to close, and more were expected to close, especially in Wales and Scotland. In 1984 the miners correctly believed there was a plan to close over seventy pits (a claim denied by the Coal Board and government). They went on strike following the announced closure of Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire. Despite the long strike, there was no significant loss of electricity production, because of coal stocks, coal imports and the switching of many power stations to oil.32 This was a very different outcome from the work-to-rule and strikes of the 1970s, which had brought the three-day week and power cuts.
Why did the strike happen at all? Plenty of mines had closed in the 1960s, more than the Conservative government of the 1980s planned to close. As a result, the number of miners in 1984 was a fraction of what it had been in 1954 or 1964. The difference between the 1960s and the 1980s was that this was a closure in the face of mass and rising unemployment. There were no jobs for miners to go to, or their children to go to, as there had been earlier. To leave the pit for the car factory was one thing, for the dole another. ‘Coal not Dole’ was the slogan of the striking miners.
The strike was a wrenching event. It was a defence of communities, rural rather isolated communities, conservative, and law-abiding, white, patriotic communities. Most miners were not fighting for their own jobs, but for jobs for other miners. They demanded British power stations burn British coal. They became, nevertheless, the ‘enemy within’, associated in the eyes of the conservative media with violence, picketing and intimidation. That the miners did not have a national ballot was used against them, despite the fact that they voted with their feet. A near-national strike was achieved, by talking, by picketing, by area ballots, and it was without doubt legitimate in the eyes of the strikers: its extraordinary length is eloquent testimony to that. The miners were in fact difficult to organize nationally; there was no national action between 1926 and 1972. The national strikes of the early 1970s were exceptional and were over pay, which affected everyone. Indeed, the National Union of Mineworkers was, despite the name, really a continuation of its predecessor, the Miners’ Federation, that is a federation of various local mining unions. In 1977 the union had agreed an area incentive scheme (destroying national solidarity), despite a national ballot against it. This weakness at national level was a reflection of a strength at local level, most obvious in the close links between living and working in mining.
The state, and the Conservative Party, set out to destroy the union. The gloves were off, the assumptions of corporatism finished. Union members were encouraged and financed to bring actions against the union, leading to the quite unprecedented sequestration of its funds. The union was infiltrated, and an extraordinary campaign was launched to unseat the leaderships, one in which the Daily Mirror and the secret services were involved. The police were set onto the miners, with on average 4,000 officers (4 per cent of the male police force) policing the strike each day, with many more on some occasions.33 The miners were crushed by distinctly continental practices – a shielded and visored police force tore up British liberties during the strike.34 Yet this ghastly vista found no strong opposition on the right, though there was some coded distaste in the 1984 Christmas broadcast from Buckingham Palace.35 Yet the strike held, and there was a real possibility of victory. The miners were not doomed, they were defeated. The fight was closer than is often imagined – had the dockers struck, as they nearly did, and the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), as they nearly did, the outcome could very easily have been different. It would undoubtedly have been messy – for it would have been a victory against the might of the state, and against the unsympathetic Labour Party parliamentary leadership, not least its leader, Neil Kinnock.
The miners agreed to return to work unconditionally in March 1985, as the drift back became an issue of survival for the union. The great miners’ strike of 1984–5, like the lockout of 1926, was not an offensive, but a last redoubt, the tail end of a period of some trade union influence. It was understood by all that a defeat for the miners was the defeat of the organized working class as a whole, for the left too. A certain wistfulness came only after the miners were defeated. The director Stephen Daldry saw miners marching to save the pits again in 1992 down fashionable Kensington Church Street ‘full of antique shops and coffee shops – and there were people cheering out of their windows and bringing out tea. Suddenly the miners are the underdogs and it’s OK.’36 But the sympathy not only came too late, it meant nothing: the mines closed faster than before, and production now fell quickly.
The ‘Britain that found herself’ in the South Atlantic did not find itself to be a nation that included the pit villages of Yorkshire, Scotland or Wales. The defeat of the miners was much more important than a defeat of organized labour. It marked, more fundamentally, the end of British economic nationalism, just as the Falklands War was the last national military operation. Although coal production remained roughly level till 1990, the defeat of the miners opened up the possibility of not using British coal at all, but importing it on a large scale. This is what would happen in the 1990s (see chapter 19).
Figure 18.1: Defence, NHS, education, social security and public investment as percentage of GDP, 1948–2000
Source: IFS, UK Historic Government Spending by Area, Guardian datablog, 18/10/10.
ROLLING BACK WELFARE?
There are those who still believe that the Thatcher governments (1979–90) rolled back the state and cut taxes. In fact Thatcherism involved an increase in the proportion of national income passing through the state and an increase in the tax burden. Only income taxes went down, with great publicity – the more hidden taxes increased. Value Added Tax, a form of purchase tax, was increased and was by comparison with income taxes, regressive, though not quite as regressive as the additional taxes which were levied on alcohol and tobacco. National Insurance, itself regressive, was increased from 5.5 per cent in 1975 (the beginning of National Insurance as a percentage of income up to a limit) to 9 per cent for most of the Thatcher period and increased slightly later too. Furthermore, while many aspects of state funding were cut, notably investment, the Thatcher government, and indeed subsequent ones, ended up spending more in absolute and even in relative terms on welfare taken overall. While they could and did make the system less generous to particular recipients, the overall level of spending went up and up; though spending on non-pensions fell.
After increasing with earnings in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the incomes of those on the state pension and benefits were quite deliberately left behind. The welfare system provided benefits stuck in real terms, representing a decreasing proportion of average earnings.37 The ratio of unemployment benefit to average earnings, and the basic state pension to average earnings, fell to levels very much lower than in comparable countries. This was not a rejection of a long-standing generous welfare state, but rather a return to the low levels of generosity of the 1940s and 1950s.38 This fundamental change was not very visible and resulted from the delinking of pensions and benefits from earnings, so that they rose only in line with prices.
Apart from pensions, three areas of increasing expenditure were especially prominent. The first was disability allowances, the result in part of wanting to take people off the unemployed total. The second was housing benefits – a subsidy for landlords – arising from the increasing lack of cheap housing. Total house building was stagnant through the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, at half the peak of the mid-1960s. The third was health. This was in significant measure the result of an increase in the elderly population.
Although local government had been shorn of many powers by the nationalization of the 1940s (in health, electricity, gas), it still retained important functions and a good deal of autonomy. Under the Thatcher governments extraordinary controls were placed on the ability of local authorities to raise taxes (rate-capping), and government grants became a central means of control of local government. Most importantly, they were forced to sell off most of their housing stock, much recently built, and prevented in effect from building much new stock. The government abolished the greatest local authority in the country, the Greater London Council, descendant of the London County Council. Councils were forced to buy services they would once have provided for themselves, part of a much larger trend whereby the state paid for but did not directly supply services of many different kinds. What really changed was not the funding, but the nature of the services and how they were provided, reversing the great nationalizations of the social services of the 1940s.
As well as controlling the level of spending centrally, the government moved to replace the one British property tax, the rates, with, of all things, a poll-tax. Named the ‘community charge’, it was introduced first in Scotland and then England and Wales, as a fixed charge for local authority services. It was designed just like the old flat-rate National Insurance contribution to act as an automatic restrictor of the level of benefits. The idea, a theoretical one but which aimed to force the poor themselves to reduce expenditure, was that the poor, the hardest hit by the new tax, would vote for lower taxes and thus lower council services. Property was spared, and the poor penalized. It was poor politics, but it gave a good insight into the priorities of the government. It lasted only a few years, having been a factor in the ejecting of Mrs Thatcher from the premiership in 1990.
The Thatcher governments clamped down on educational spending (the province of local authorities) and also introduced centralizing reforms. In a distinctly continental move teaching content was directed through a National Curriculum, in the context of British history a remarkable turnaround. It was introduced in stages, starting in 1989. At the same time a rather more hidden revolution was to take place – although the school-leaving age remained at sixteen, many more students began to stay on, especially from the late 1980s. The expansion in secondary education increased demand for higher education, which had been reined back in the early 1980s.
Thus began in the late 1980s especially an unexpected expansion in publicly funded higher education. In a British university city of 1950, there might be fifty professors; fifty years later there might be 1,000. In 1950 the university might have been a small feature of a bustling industrial city centre; in the post-industrial city the university might be one of the major employers, and the middle-class students a motor of the town’s economy. Universities, once close to production and associated with a certain austerity, were now congregations of up-market consumers.
The expansion took place in a new ideological context, and a new more controlling funding regime. In the early 1990s the binary divide between local authority polytechnics and the independently chartered universities was dissolved. This removed the former polytechnics from the local authorities, but subjected the older universities to oversight which had been more familiar in the polytechnics. Universities would in a short time become (again) conformist institutions, their vice chancellors not representatives of learning, but managers of vast enterprises and property portfolios. The massified university, irony of ironies, was put in place by the inheritors of those who believed more is worse.
PROPERTY’S PROGRESS
Although the economy continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s, it did not do so as in the 1950s and 1960s by the expansion of manufacturing and by the growth of large manufacturing firms. Manufacturing output was at best stagnant, and employment was falling very rapidly. Firms shrank in size, yet returns on investment increased. The stock market boomed. The rich simply got richer by being rich. A key minimal indicator was that real interest rates (interest rates discounting inflation) were exceptionally high – at levels last seen in the 1920s. This was a very marked contrast to the negative real rates of the 1970s, and low rates of the 1950s and 1960s, and negative rates of the 1940s. This in itself yielded a powerful trickle-up of income and wealth and power. Property, capital and wealth were once again central.39
Figure 18.2: Inflation and interest rates, 1900–2000
Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1485/interest-rates/historical-real-interest-rate/.
The 1980s saw a massive reversal of the long trend culminating in the 1970s towards increasing equality in income and wealth. Inequality was driven by higher unemployment, by lower rates of benefit, by the pushing-down of wages and by increases in the returns to capital in many forms. The greatest and easiest rewards came from ownership of property, not work, much less building a business. The massive rise in house prices, temporarily halted in 1987, and the early 1990s, meant that many in the middle class accumulated capital in larger annual increments than their salaries. They made money simply by sitting in the right sort of homes. House price inflation was the one kind of inflation that seemed to be liked; just as the mortgage was the exception to the remaining social prejudice against debt. The tax relief on mortgage interest grew to a gigantic subsidy for the middle classes and, for those owning homes outright, boosted their value. Here was the new politics of property in action, a profoundly unproductive politics.
With vast elite salaries and rising investment incomes came new tastes and new outlooks, or rather the renewal of old haute-bourgeoise taste. Opera and elegant restaurants expanded. A new anti-egalitarian snobbism was permissible, a certain reactionary chic possible. Private schools thrived. Money and merit tightened their grip on each other. Houses divided into flats became houses once more; servants and nannies returned.
This renewal of the elite bears some exploration because one self-presentation and indeed analysis of Thatcherism and its effects suggested otherwise. Was Thatcherism a revolt against rulers or a rulers’ revolt? Much was made of the claim that both Thatcher herself, seen as incorrigibly middle-class and unrefined, and Thatcherism challenged the ruling class, that business now trumped aristocracy, and merit the old school tie. There is something in this in as much as the state-oriented high bourgeoisie – in the limited sense of ‘the establishment’ – the top echelons of the BBC, the universities and the civil service, the gentlemen of The Times, the heads of great professions – saw their status and power fall. Furthermore, it was suggested that there was a downgrading of the leaders of manufacturing and an elevation of financiers. Yet this should not be overdone. The House of Lords did not fight for the old order – it was overwhelmingly, until 1999, a Conservative-voting body that followed the party line. The BBC, never radical, was hardly even neutral in, say, the miners’ strike and was put firmly under the control of government sympathizers in 1986 and 1987. The Confederation of British Industry remained close to and very supportive of the main thrust of policy.40
There is some evidence of hostility from the monarchy and more importantly to the monarchy from the guardians of the new order. In 1986 journalists briefed by Palace officials wrote that the queen was concerned about the policies of the government, not merely about its resistance to the Commonwealth view on sanctions against South Africa, but also about damage that was being done to social cohesion at home, not least in the coalfields.41 Certainly there was a fresh critique of monarchy in the air. From the left Tom Nairn launched a scintillating attack on the notion that the monarchy was irrelevant. It was in his view at the absolute core of a diseased and decaying nationalism and elite. The new right came to agree, and the Murdoch press in particular destroyed much of the mystique of monarchy. There was much tut-tutting about an intrusive press gawping at the private affairs of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, until the rare moment of honesty which revealed the ‘War of the Waleses’ involved both sides putting essentially true stories into their favoured newspapers. By the mid-1990s royalty was indeed in a very different place in the public eye. A BBC Panorama interview in 1995, in which the Princess of Wales dished the dirt, would have been unthinkable in 1985. Diana’s death in August 1997 unleashed an emotional response from the public unheard of in recent history, which put the monarchy in more danger than it had ever been since the nineteenth century. Yet it was a revolt of celebrity against crown, not of a republican spirit.
Generally the elite presented a united front: old and new both prospered together as both were changed.
Rulers’ Revolt
This election is about the future of Britain – a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands.
Conservative Party manifesto, 1979
Remember the conventional wisdom of the day. The British people were ‘ungovernable’. We were in the grip of an incurable ‘British disease’. Britain was heading for ‘irreversible decline’. Well, the people were not ungovernable, the disease was not incurable, the decline has been reversed.
The Next Moves Forward, Conservative manifesto, 1987
Politics changed in the 1970s, but in ways that are not well described by the concept of an end to consensus. Much more was changing than the politics between parties. Intra-party politics were especially important. Whether the main divisions in politics lay within the Conservative or Labour Parties was an issue. For some it lay between the right and left of the Labour Party; for others between the emerging of the Conservative Party and the rest of parliamentary politics.1
The two key political drivers of new ideas in the 1970s, Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher, represented positions which were critical of the positions of their own parties. For both, 1975, their fiftieth year, was particularly important. Tony Benn, without question the leader of the left, led the anti-EEC campaign of that year, losing decisively, and as a result was demoted from the Industry to the Energy portfolio in the Labour government. Margaret Thatcher stood against and defeated Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative Party and took the party sharply to the right. She campaigned for a yes vote in the referendum. Both came into their moment of greatest power in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, Tony Benn as leader of a Labour left which was able to change the policies of the Labour Party very substantially. If there had ever been a post-war consensus they would both certainly have broken it.
Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979. Under her determined leadership, the trade unions were brought to heel, and the British decline, claimed her supporters, finally began to be reversed. Industries nationalized in the 1940s and earlier and later were now privatized and liberalized. So were industries born from within the state machine. There was an economic transition from manufacturing to services in which, it was claimed, British firms did very well, creating a uniquely competitive European economy which became a model for many. Margaret Thatcher, in office for eleven consecutive years, was forced out in 1990, to be replaced by John Major, who won the 1992 election with the consequence that the Conservatives would be in power for a remarkable eighteen years. The country was transformed, economically and ideologically, to a degree not seen since the 1940s.
For both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn, their push for new policies was in part about recapturing a past. Margaret Thatcher’s policies were in some respects about a return to the 1950s, a period she identified with. This was a period with high defence spending, a clear bipartisan commitment to national nuclear weapons, to close relations with the US, to the capitalist economy and to limited welfare expenditure. All this was threatened in the 1970s by the rise of the unions and the left in the Labour Party. Thus, the 1979 Tory manifesto did not attack a post-war consensus, but what had happened in the recent past, pointing to the fact that Labour governments had dominated by being in office for eleven out of the previous fifteen years. Certainly in some respects the 1974 Labour programme broke with the previous one, but the really big break came after 1979. By 1983 the left had pushed the Labour Party into a position which involved withdrawal from the EEC, rejection of nuclear weapons and elimination of US nuclear bases, and a strong dose of nationalist economic planning. By this standard the Conservative Party certainly stood for the post-war consensus in substance though not in style.2
And yet, one could also see the Labour programme of 1983 as a plea for a return to the past. Though it was never expressed in this way Labour advocated the national, protected economy, with an interventionist state, outside the EEC, which had been the post-war norm. In many respects the left was looking to finally bring about the promise of those years, which they saw as unrealized because of the political power of British capitalism and the political and ideological weakness of previous Labour governments. The difficulty was that business, the Conservative Party and the Labour right had long moved from this past, to decisively support the EEC and to reject economic nationalism.
Perhaps the best way to think about this is to cast out any thought of a general consensus being broken and rather to see both major parties revising their positions radically, both looking to recreate semi-mythical pasts and to create a new future. Furthermore, the policies of the parties interacted with each other – the Tories reacted to the extension of social democracy in the 1970s, just as Labour reacted to the market liberalism of the Conservatives after 1979. In both cases they reacted in ways which drove their positions, always different, further apart.
Perhaps the key difference in the politics of the 1980s from what went before was the preparedness of government to fight dissenters very hard and to exert the rights of elected authority very strongly. That is not the same as breaking a consensus – it is rather a willingness to press on with one’s own policies in the face of odium. Thus it was not a matter of moving from agreement to disagreement, but rather a change, a very important one, in how to deal with disagreement. From the war both parties accommodated disagreement – Mrs Thatcher did so much less. She was admired and loathed for being what she said she was – a conviction politician. She broke through an unsteady equilibrium of forces. Push came to shove, and the forces on her side could shove an awful lot harder.
There was indeed a crucial transformation in the power and self-confidence of the British elite. Sometime in the 1970s a chunk of the British upper class said enough is enough. For parts of the middle class, too, the future – with stronger unions and a more comprehensive welfare state – was not attractive. In the 1970s there emerged the idea that the United Kingdom was becoming ungovernable; that the state had been captured by unproductive groups; that there was an inexorable tendency to use the state to exploit producers in favour of a parasitic public. The answer to everything, it had seemed, was the government must do something, which it couldn’t. Government not only dominated economic activity, it actively prevented private sector operation, by making it illegal in certain fields and uncompetitive in others. Democracy was thus destroying the sinews of production and of national power. The answer was, of course, ‘rolling back the state’, rhetorically speaking, but it also involved making the state more autonomous, more powerful. There were models. In Chile from 1973 and in Argentina from 1976, military governments opened markets, privatized state industries and crushed organized labour. There were also think tanks and pressure groups in the United Kingdom arguing for a robust economic liberalism and talk of anti-socialist private armies of the right among a fringe of business and military people.
LA PASIONARIA OF PRIVILEGE
In 1975, in a dramatic shift, the leadership of the Conservative Party changed in style, substance and its deep nature. It was the result of a coup, the first against a Conservative Party leader. It was to be called, very misleadingly, ‘the Peasants’ Revolt’. She was voted in by ‘toffs, country gents and Treasury specialists’, ‘men of old money, old regiments and old school ties’.3 Edward Heath, leader since 1965, when he was the first leader of the Conservative Party to be elected by members of parliament, was thrown out of office. Conservative MPs replaced Heath by someone not much younger, of similar social origin, who had studied also in Oxford. But Heath was a man who had visited republican Spain during the civil war; where he had met Jack Jones, then fighting in the International Brigades, later to be leader of the TGWU. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher had no positive feeling for the anti-fascist compact of the 1930s or the war and its aftermath. Just before becoming leader she was called the ‘La Pasionaria of privilege’ by the Labour chancellor, Denis Healey. She was a nationalist with a very different sense of the nation and one who clearly communicated that nationalism in an overt way.
Heath was able at least in part to play the role of party grandee, but Thatcher was ‘that awful woman’ even to some who were extremely loyal and helpful to her. In a telling anecdote, the Labour MP Dennis Skinner, a stalwart of the parliamentary left, recalls being taunted for being a grammar school boy (which, unusually for a former miner, he is) by a crowd of braying Conservative public school MPs seated around her in the tea room of the House of Commons in the late 1980s. He embarrassed them all by telling them that ‘Maggie’, who sat silently among them, also went to a grammar school.4 Margaret Thatcher was in part a creature of the old party who spoke directly to the membership of the Conservative Party and to a wider public in ways Edward Heath plainly did not.
Margaret Thatcher’s ascent and success were not inevitable. She won the election in 1979 with a lower vote percentage than Edward Heath gained in 1970. The Conservative vote share decreased from 44 per cent in 1979 to approximately 42 per cent in 1983, 1987 and 1992. She was a minority taste and remained so. The electoral victories were not pre-ordained. They depended, particularly in 1983, on a strong performance by the new SDP–Liberal Alliance, which split the opposition and nearly replaced Labour as the second party. Furthermore, the Falklands War could have finished differently, she could have lost against the miners, she could have been thrown out as a result of Westland and she could have been left isolated by the abolition of nuclear weapons by the USA and the USSR. Yet she dominated politics like no other politician since Churchill, drove through changes against strong opposition and indeed destroyed British socialism. She was admired around the world and had an extraordinary personal following within her own party. She represented and led a reinvigorated ruling class. As she herself put it, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away. That confidence comes from the re-discovery of ourselves, and grows with the recovery of our self-respect.’5 She had power, if little popularity.
Yet Margaret Thatcher was the first British prime minister to be dumped by her party while in office. Challenged by Michael Heseltine, whom she beat but not strongly enough, she resigned at the end of 1990. Not since the defenestration of Neville Chamberlain in May 1940 had something similar happened. But Chamberlain at least remained leader of his party and a senior minister. Edward Heath was got rid of in opposition. In earlier times Asquith and then Lloyd George were kicked out of office, but largely by coalition partners, not their own parties. What is plain is this. When she threatened a key policy of the Conservative elite, and the business elite – engagement in the EEC – she was forced out. While Margaret Thatcher was clearly useful for a project of transformation, she was far from indispensable. There was indeed a party and class project for which she was, temporarily, a brilliant political figurehead. For she was thrown out not by the actions of ‘the wets’, but by the resignations of two deeply Thatcherite senior ministers, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe. Finally, it is not at all clear, despite the strong sense that Margaret Thatcher achieved what she set out to do, that this was the case. For it could be argued that what she appeared to want was a strong, self-confidently British and socially conservative nation, with a powerful regenerated manufacturing industry led by British entrepreneurs, which would reverse the decline as it had been defined by declinists.6 By these measures she undoubtedly failed.
IDEAS
Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party was strongly influenced by many different sorts of ideas often in contradiction with each other. Some were socially and politically conservative and authoritarian, others were libertarian. It was not just about conserving the old, but also about creating something new. It was thus not easily comprehended by those who saw Conservatives as mere reactionaries, and the promoters of change only on the left. One strand was a growing body of economic reflection which was profoundly critical of economic nationalism, of the notion that the state could or should guide economic development. The new right, as they were called by the left, believed in free trade and in letting the private sector decide on investments, on what machinery to buy, what research to do, where to locate and so on. The nation, as had been the case for the Liberals of old, should not be a factor.7 This was the big issue on which there was a clear divide, and it is not summed up by the difference between something called Keynesianism and something called monetarism. It was a matter of political-economic principles, not particular kinds of macro-economics. It was not the control of demand or the money supply which was really at issue, but the place of free trade, and of the capitalist, in a global market. It was more profound than hostility to nationalized industries – it was a matter of who or what was in charge. And it was also about any number of different kinds of government measures for the support of industry, from education to taxation, on which neither ‘Keynesianism’ nor ‘monetarism’ had anything distinctive to say. It was crucially about the distribution of power in society, an expression of the feeling that an active state had supported the unproductive rather too much.
It was a movement centred on business-financed private think tanks, rather than British universities. Indeed, it ran in opposition to the academy and what it took to be conventional elite thought (and of course socialist ideas). Its central academic influences came from abroad. Friedrich Hayek, who had been at the LSE between 1931 and 1950, went to Chicago. Milton Friedman was a US academic.8 In terms of economic theory there was a very significant difference between the Austrians, like Hayek, who were hostile to macro-economic ideas and scientism, and the neo-classicals like Friedman, who were macro-economists schooled in proudly scientistic economics. The British think tanks which took up these ideas sought influence not in the universities but in the press, in politics and policy, with success, though they also set up their own small private university. Their success came in the 1970s, but their ideas were not as marginal in the 1950s and 1960s as they were later made to seem.9
Among the politicians and thinkers associated with these ideas and institutions there were those who attacked both British economic nationalism and techno-nationalism. For example, Enoch Powell imagined, in 1968, getting rid of all industrial and agricultural subsidies. Nicholas Ridley wrote a 1973 pamphlet attacking the civil service for its support of high-tech industries. Duncan Burn was a fulminating critic of the extraordinarily wasteful British nuclear programme. David Henderson claimed the Concorde and the AGR programmes, while still underway, were some of the worst imaginable investment decisions. Naive techno-nationalism resulted in giving too much power to engineers and not enough to market forces and was in their view to be rigorously avoided. These critics focused on civil programmes, though the bigger problem was in the military sector.10
Mrs Thatcher was the first British prime minister to have completed a science degree. Yet this did not make her a technocrat.11 Indeed, British academic science had an important tradition of liberal-individualist thinking in it. Its ablest ideologue was the Hungarian émigré Michael Polanyi, professor of physical chemistry and then of social philosophy at Manchester, and who closely associated with classically liberal philosophers and economists such as Hayek and John Jewkes. They were profoundly hostile not only to Marxism but also to centrist scientism, and their writings of the late 1940s onwards were well supported by the CIA.12 John Jewkes was to become a notable critic of claims for bureaucratized invention.13 Rather strikingly, there were British scientists who prospered even outside the university. Peter Mitchell, a biochemist with personal wealth, left the academy completely to research in his country house in the 1960s; he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1978. Another country-house scientist of the 1960s and 1970s was the inventor James Lovelock, later famous for his Gaia Hypothesis.14 Nevertheless, in the academy at least few scientists had any sympathy for the politics of the first scientist in No. 10.15
The relationship between the Thatcher revolutionaries and the universities was fraught. Universities had been marginal to the development of the new liberal economics, or indeed thinking from the right more generally, and were (laughably) regarded as strongholds of the left. Mrs Thatcher was refused an honorary degree by her own university, in a calculated and controversial insult. The Royal Society elected her, as it did most prime ministers, but with more reason, given she was a chemist, but even this was a commented-on election. She also had a tense relationship with the established churches and promoted an evangelical to the see of Canterbury. However, she did not favour the sort of cynical born-again Christianity that the US right promoted at this time, though this was prominent in Northern Ireland in the case of the Reverend Dr Ian Paisley, who had an honorary doctorate from a US fundamentalist university.
In arguing for a free market economy, from which political freedom would flow, the economic liberals were very poor indeed in describing the actually existing economy and its history. They blamed its faults on ‘socialists of all parties’ and foreign ideas. An early and blatant example was John Jewkes’ Ordeal by Planning, of 1948 and 1968, which lambasted the post-war Labour government for planning while ignoring the wartime planning in which he had been a major player. Indeed, there was no convincing economic-historical account of the British economy to support the economic revolution which was being proposed. Perhaps this was not surprising in that the most elementary examination of the historical record would show that phases of slow growth corresponded to full exposure to the market, and that the greatest growth had taken place in the years after the Second World War in a protected economy with significant state intervention and control. Tory histories of the twentieth century did little more than lambast past Tory governments for appeasing Labour and letting in too many black people.16 They might at most hint that it might have been a good idea to stay out of the Second World War, hiding behind imagined imperial ramparts.17 There was essentially no useable, positive Tory history of the twentieth century, a reason perhaps for the popularity of the nineteenth century, with its ‘Victorian values’.
Yet histories which purported to explain poor British economic performance were important to arguments for an economic revolution. Revitalized declinist histories were central to the ideological baggage of Thatcherism. Martin Wiener’s reiteration of a 1960s thesis on the elite educational system sucking the entrepreneurial spirit out of the British bourgeoisie was a huge success in 1981.18 Even more spectacular was that of Correlli Barnett’s Audit of War, another version of the same thesis, which also blamed the post-Second World War British decline on high welfare spending and a do-gooding British elite schooled in Christian moralism and determined to create a New Jerusalem rather than a thrusting industrial nation. The academics generally liked these works – the higher reading public, of left and right, were generally ecstatic, especially about Barnett.19 They did not detect, perhaps because they shared, his nationalistic-militaristic-technocratic world view. Thatcherism was never ideologically consistent. It took time for the claims of these histories to be shredded, and they remained influential even so.
The Thatcher government was very self-consciously going to do something about the British decline. When Margaret Thatcher talked about reversing decline and releasing enterprise she, like others thinking about decline, was thinking primarily of manufacturing industry.20 Yet ministers in the first Thatcher government were ‘notable for the lack of contact with the industrial values that they extolled’.21 While this is true of manufacturing industry, there were many businessmen in the government, including David Young from the world of property, Nicholas Ridley, a civil engineering contractor, from a business and aristocratic family, Sir Keith Joseph, a hereditary baronet whose father had created the building firm Bovis, Patrick Jenkin, a director of Distillers, and Michael Heseltine from publishing. There were also important advisers from business in No. 10 Downing Street.22 Yet it was also the most donnish set of ministers since the 1960s, though of a distinctive sort, including many Fellows of All Souls in its leadership – for example, in the later years, Keith Joseph, John Redwood, Robert Jackson, Lord Hailsham and William Waldegrave, and at least three PhD historians, Rhodes Boyson, John Redwood and John Patten.
POLICIES
The Thatcher government came in at a very inauspicious moment – a new Great Depression, comparable to that of the 1930s, had hit the world. Yet this crisis of capitalism, global as it once again was, far from discrediting capitalism, as had happened in the 1930s, actually strengthened it ideologically, especially in the United Kingdom and the USA, where Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 on a very economically liberal agenda. One important reason for this shift was that there were no cases of apparently radically better economic performance by non-capitalist countries. Indeed, what was very obvious in the 1970s and 1980s was the poor recent performance of the Soviet bloc and its satellites. In any case, the crisis was interpreted by most not as a crisis of capitalism, but as a crisis generated by interventionist states (however implausible this was). Yet it was clear that something was wrong – rapid growth had stopped in the mid-1970s, inflation surged nearly everywhere, together with unemployment. On top of this, the established order was threatened by stronger trade unions and the rise of the left. However, economic doctrine, and economic policy, were a changeable mess between 1979 and the late 1980s.23
What was particularly astonishing was the response to the crisis, one which conventional economists thought was making it worse. Instead of Keynesian reflation there was Keynesian deflation. This was partly a question of economic doctrine and partly of objective. The long-proclaimed central aim of the Thatcher government was bringing down inflation. Inflation undermined freedom, a key word, in their view. They saw inflation as undermining savings, undermining the middle class against the workers, and, though this was not stated, it favoured the debtor, rather than the creditor. They also had a theory of inflation – that it was due not to high demand, or trade unions pushing up wages, but rather to the supply of money in the economy. Reducing inflation meant, in their terms, control of the money supply, which meant high interest rates and cuts in public spending and higher taxes. This they did. In fact their measures at first pushed inflation upwards such that it went up from 8 per cent to 18 per cent. However, as the economy crashed, so did the rate of rise of prices. Real interest rates were raised for a prolonged period to levels last seen in the 1920s and were in stark contrast to most of the 1970s, when real interest rates had been negative, as they had been from the Second World War into the early 1950s. These high rates were a gift to owners of property – real owners that is, not mortgagees.
High interest rates, and a high pound, exacerbated the problems of tradeable manufacturing industries in particular. Manufacturing output fell much faster than that of the economy as a whole – there was a fall in two years of nearly 15 per cent, taking manufacturing output back to that of the late 1960s. ICI lost 30 per cent of its workers between 1979 and 1983 and by 1984 was employing equal numbers in the UK and overseas.24 The United Kingdom became a net importer of manufactures. Mass unemployment followed but was often seen within government-supporting circles as a necessary shake-out of labour from ‘over-manned’ industries.
The attitude to the national economy was critical too. Economic nationalism was out. There was in time an all-out rejection of Labour’s refreshed economic nationalism. One telling early indicator was the abolition of exchange controls in 1979. This had once affected even holiday spending money, but was now really a matter of overseas investment. British investors were now free to invest abroad as they wished, and they did. From its beginning, then, the Conservative government was encouraging the bringing-down of economic barriers around the nation – which would lead step by step to the fall of the nation as an economic unit.
Another crucial element was a change in attitude to trade unions. They were no longer to be seen as social partners but as an economic danger. Trade union legislation was passed, but of a very different sort from Heath’s ill-fated Industrial Relations Act. Successive legislation ate away at the various immunities that allowed trade unions to act. In effect there was a return to the practices of past Tory governments. Trade unions were derecognized in very significant ways, and this was all the more important because unemployment was increasing very radically in the early 1980s. Among many changes, unions were made liable for damages for strikes unless they took place in very particular conditions and were voted for in postal ballots. An extreme case, but a potent symbol, was the 1984 banning of trade unions at GCHQ, the central electronic espionage facility which had only recently had its existence acknowledged. This led to the sacking of fourteen workers who refused to renounce union membership. The implication that trade unions might be traitorous was as offensive as it was deliberate. This was the only anti-trade union measure repealed by the 1997 New Labour government.
The power of organized workers was broken by high unemployment and the collapse of unionized industries. The changes were palpable – the heads of the TUC diminished in stature, the names of union leaders were increasingly unknown, the industrial correspondents disappeared from television and newspapers. From the late 1980s the working class disappeared from the public sphere. The poor, the unsuccessful, were stigmatized in the media in ways which would have been unthinkable earlier.25 The tripartite apparatus that involved trade unions in public life was abolished or ignored. The NEDC was sidelined, though not abandoned till 1992. The discourse around the economy was now one of flotations and enterprise and the state of the stock market, rather than the balance of payments and production.
LEGACY ASSETS
There was a hardly known story of something which made the Thatcher revolution possible but which was submerged in accounts stressing crisis and decline in the 1970s. The Thatcher government claimed it had inherited a fundamental economic crisis caused by government intervention in the economy. Yet the developmental state had created the very economic conditions which made Thatcher’s approach possible. The transformations under Thatcher were only made possible by previous state investment, by the success of the state, not by its failure.
Her government had inherited, uniquely in modern British history, a nation self-sufficient in food, an exporter of wheat and meat. It had also inherited a nation which was about to become, for the first time since 1939, a net exporter of energy. The implications were extraordinary, too: the United Kingdom no longer needed to be a net exporter of manufactures to balance its earlier needs for energy and food. This epochal transformation has barely registered in political discourse or the history books.26
When the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, there was a mass of modern public capital that had not been there in 1950, or 1960, or even 1970. There were modern electricity supply, railway, telephone, gas, postal and other systems newly in place. As we have seen, there was an inheritance of a motorway system, new steel works and more, including new coal mines. Council houses, in their millions, now existed.
The valuable assets could be sold. Two million council houses were sold to tenants. North Sea Oil was the first significant state-owned industry to be privatized, though this is not very well known.27 First went part of Britoil, formerly BNOC, in 1982 for over £600 million. In 1983 a £500 million tranche of BP was sold, the biggest privatization of the year. In 1984 nearly £400 million was raised from Enterprise Oil, spun out of British Gas. In 1987 another large chunk of Britoil went, and in 1987 £5.5 billion of BP.28 The first huge sale was that of British Telecom, which been part of the Post Office, which came at the end of 1984. Just over 50 per cent was sold, for £4 billion. This was followed the massive £7 billion privatization of British Gas in 1986. The other utilities would not be privatized until the 1990s.29
It should not be thought that the Thatcher government modernized nationalized industries by selling them off – they were modernized further under state ownership prior to privatization. There was continued, indeed increased, activism by the state in these industries. However, it was not like that of old, which consisted in investment in new equipment. Now the focus was on reducing the workforce and on closing facilities. The most radical case was the coal mines, not privatized till a tiny rump was left in the 1990s. But British Airways (1987), British Steel (1988), British Telecom (1984), British Gas (1986) and others were all privatized as lean, profitable enterprises, which had all first shed labour under public ownership. Among the others were the warship yards (1985), British Leyland (1988) and Rolls-Royce (1987). Even in the case of nuclear energy, there was a transformation in performance of the old reactors, but under public ownership. The best that can be said for the positive impact of privatization on performance is that it resulted from the need to be ready for privatization. But of course, the argument for privatization was precisely that the state was incapable of modernizing, or even shrinking, industries. Thatcherism was not so much the release of entrepreneurial power, but rather the creation of a brutally activist state, directly and powerfully transforming society, ideas, as well as the economy. For all the complaints about social democratic state intervention, there had never been state intervention this strong until Thatcher. Indeed, there was a strong bureaucratization and an extension of central controls, of planning and of the state. The rulers’ revolt did not push aside the state, it strengthened it and made use of it.
Furthermore, it could be argued that the devastations to the productive economy caused by government policy were only sustainable because the government inherited a newly comprehensive and, by historical British standards, generous welfare state. There was an extensive safety net onto which many millions could, and did, fall. The official number of unemployed rose to over 3 million and stayed at that level for years. Many who would otherwise have worked went onto disability benefits. The number of people on invalidity and sickness benefit doubled between 1980 and 1993, to 2 million people.30
THE GREAT MINERS’ STRIKE 1984–5
Under the plan for coal of the 1970s the British coal mining industry would be modernized and its output expanded slightly. The rapid decline of the late 1950s and 1960s was over. Yet that maintenance of the industry implied new, much more productive mines, notably the complex being developed at Selby in Yorkshire. The new Conservative government, elected in 1979, wanted to cut subsidies to coal, and thus its use, but U-turned in 1981, giving the miners what they wanted.31 By 1981 the Conservative government wanted to close what were called ‘uneconomic’ pits. The miners rebelled, threatening strikes, and a general programme of closures was called off. But mines continued to close, and more were expected to close, especially in Wales and Scotland. In 1984 the miners correctly believed there was a plan to close over seventy pits (a claim denied by the Coal Board and government). They went on strike following the announced closure of Cortonwood colliery in Yorkshire. Despite the long strike, there was no significant loss of electricity production, because of coal stocks, coal imports and the switching of many power stations to oil.32 This was a very different outcome from the work-to-rule and strikes of the 1970s, which had brought the three-day week and power cuts.
Why did the strike happen at all? Plenty of mines had closed in the 1960s, more than the Conservative government of the 1980s planned to close. As a result, the number of miners in 1984 was a fraction of what it had been in 1954 or 1964. The difference between the 1960s and the 1980s was that this was a closure in the face of mass and rising unemployment. There were no jobs for miners to go to, or their children to go to, as there had been earlier. To leave the pit for the car factory was one thing, for the dole another. ‘Coal not Dole’ was the slogan of the striking miners.
The strike was a wrenching event. It was a defence of communities, rural rather isolated communities, conservative, and law-abiding, white, patriotic communities. Most miners were not fighting for their own jobs, but for jobs for other miners. They demanded British power stations burn British coal. They became, nevertheless, the ‘enemy within’, associated in the eyes of the conservative media with violence, picketing and intimidation. That the miners did not have a national ballot was used against them, despite the fact that they voted with their feet. A near-national strike was achieved, by talking, by picketing, by area ballots, and it was without doubt legitimate in the eyes of the strikers: its extraordinary length is eloquent testimony to that. The miners were in fact difficult to organize nationally; there was no national action between 1926 and 1972. The national strikes of the early 1970s were exceptional and were over pay, which affected everyone. Indeed, the National Union of Mineworkers was, despite the name, really a continuation of its predecessor, the Miners’ Federation, that is a federation of various local mining unions. In 1977 the union had agreed an area incentive scheme (destroying national solidarity), despite a national ballot against it. This weakness at national level was a reflection of a strength at local level, most obvious in the close links between living and working in mining.
The state, and the Conservative Party, set out to destroy the union. The gloves were off, the assumptions of corporatism finished. Union members were encouraged and financed to bring actions against the union, leading to the quite unprecedented sequestration of its funds. The union was infiltrated, and an extraordinary campaign was launched to unseat the leaderships, one in which the Daily Mirror and the secret services were involved. The police were set onto the miners, with on average 4,000 officers (4 per cent of the male police force) policing the strike each day, with many more on some occasions.33 The miners were crushed by distinctly continental practices – a shielded and visored police force tore up British liberties during the strike.34 Yet this ghastly vista found no strong opposition on the right, though there was some coded distaste in the 1984 Christmas broadcast from Buckingham Palace.35 Yet the strike held, and there was a real possibility of victory. The miners were not doomed, they were defeated. The fight was closer than is often imagined – had the dockers struck, as they nearly did, and the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), as they nearly did, the outcome could very easily have been different. It would undoubtedly have been messy – for it would have been a victory against the might of the state, and against the unsympathetic Labour Party parliamentary leadership, not least its leader, Neil Kinnock.
The miners agreed to return to work unconditionally in March 1985, as the drift back became an issue of survival for the union. The great miners’ strike of 1984–5, like the lockout of 1926, was not an offensive, but a last redoubt, the tail end of a period of some trade union influence. It was understood by all that a defeat for the miners was the defeat of the organized working class as a whole, for the left too. A certain wistfulness came only after the miners were defeated. The director Stephen Daldry saw miners marching to save the pits again in 1992 down fashionable Kensington Church Street ‘full of antique shops and coffee shops – and there were people cheering out of their windows and bringing out tea. Suddenly the miners are the underdogs and it’s OK.’36 But the sympathy not only came too late, it meant nothing: the mines closed faster than before, and production now fell quickly.
The ‘Britain that found herself’ in the South Atlantic did not find itself to be a nation that included the pit villages of Yorkshire, Scotland or Wales. The defeat of the miners was much more important than a defeat of organized labour. It marked, more fundamentally, the end of British economic nationalism, just as the Falklands War was the last national military operation. Although coal production remained roughly level till 1990, the defeat of the miners opened up the possibility of not using British coal at all, but importing it on a large scale. This is what would happen in the 1990s (see chapter 19).
Figure 18.1: Defence, NHS, education, social security and public investment as percentage of GDP, 1948–2000
Source: IFS, UK Historic Government Spending by Area, Guardian datablog, 18/10/10.
ROLLING BACK WELFARE?
There are those who still believe that the Thatcher governments (1979–90) rolled back the state and cut taxes. In fact Thatcherism involved an increase in the proportion of national income passing through the state and an increase in the tax burden. Only income taxes went down, with great publicity – the more hidden taxes increased. Value Added Tax, a form of purchase tax, was increased and was by comparison with income taxes, regressive, though not quite as regressive as the additional taxes which were levied on alcohol and tobacco. National Insurance, itself regressive, was increased from 5.5 per cent in 1975 (the beginning of National Insurance as a percentage of income up to a limit) to 9 per cent for most of the Thatcher period and increased slightly later too. Furthermore, while many aspects of state funding were cut, notably investment, the Thatcher government, and indeed subsequent ones, ended up spending more in absolute and even in relative terms on welfare taken overall. While they could and did make the system less generous to particular recipients, the overall level of spending went up and up; though spending on non-pensions fell.
After increasing with earnings in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the incomes of those on the state pension and benefits were quite deliberately left behind. The welfare system provided benefits stuck in real terms, representing a decreasing proportion of average earnings.37 The ratio of unemployment benefit to average earnings, and the basic state pension to average earnings, fell to levels very much lower than in comparable countries. This was not a rejection of a long-standing generous welfare state, but rather a return to the low levels of generosity of the 1940s and 1950s.38 This fundamental change was not very visible and resulted from the delinking of pensions and benefits from earnings, so that they rose only in line with prices.
Apart from pensions, three areas of increasing expenditure were especially prominent. The first was disability allowances, the result in part of wanting to take people off the unemployed total. The second was housing benefits – a subsidy for landlords – arising from the increasing lack of cheap housing. Total house building was stagnant through the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, at half the peak of the mid-1960s. The third was health. This was in significant measure the result of an increase in the elderly population.
Although local government had been shorn of many powers by the nationalization of the 1940s (in health, electricity, gas), it still retained important functions and a good deal of autonomy. Under the Thatcher governments extraordinary controls were placed on the ability of local authorities to raise taxes (rate-capping), and government grants became a central means of control of local government. Most importantly, they were forced to sell off most of their housing stock, much recently built, and prevented in effect from building much new stock. The government abolished the greatest local authority in the country, the Greater London Council, descendant of the London County Council. Councils were forced to buy services they would once have provided for themselves, part of a much larger trend whereby the state paid for but did not directly supply services of many different kinds. What really changed was not the funding, but the nature of the services and how they were provided, reversing the great nationalizations of the social services of the 1940s.
As well as controlling the level of spending centrally, the government moved to replace the one British property tax, the rates, with, of all things, a poll-tax. Named the ‘community charge’, it was introduced first in Scotland and then England and Wales, as a fixed charge for local authority services. It was designed just like the old flat-rate National Insurance contribution to act as an automatic restrictor of the level of benefits. The idea, a theoretical one but which aimed to force the poor themselves to reduce expenditure, was that the poor, the hardest hit by the new tax, would vote for lower taxes and thus lower council services. Property was spared, and the poor penalized. It was poor politics, but it gave a good insight into the priorities of the government. It lasted only a few years, having been a factor in the ejecting of Mrs Thatcher from the premiership in 1990.
The Thatcher governments clamped down on educational spending (the province of local authorities) and also introduced centralizing reforms. In a distinctly continental move teaching content was directed through a National Curriculum, in the context of British history a remarkable turnaround. It was introduced in stages, starting in 1989. At the same time a rather more hidden revolution was to take place – although the school-leaving age remained at sixteen, many more students began to stay on, especially from the late 1980s. The expansion in secondary education increased demand for higher education, which had been reined back in the early 1980s.
Thus began in the late 1980s especially an unexpected expansion in publicly funded higher education. In a British university city of 1950, there might be fifty professors; fifty years later there might be 1,000. In 1950 the university might have been a small feature of a bustling industrial city centre; in the post-industrial city the university might be one of the major employers, and the middle-class students a motor of the town’s economy. Universities, once close to production and associated with a certain austerity, were now congregations of up-market consumers.
The expansion took place in a new ideological context, and a new more controlling funding regime. In the early 1990s the binary divide between local authority polytechnics and the independently chartered universities was dissolved. This removed the former polytechnics from the local authorities, but subjected the older universities to oversight which had been more familiar in the polytechnics. Universities would in a short time become (again) conformist institutions, their vice chancellors not representatives of learning, but managers of vast enterprises and property portfolios. The massified university, irony of ironies, was put in place by the inheritors of those who believed more is worse.
PROPERTY’S PROGRESS
Although the economy continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s, it did not do so as in the 1950s and 1960s by the expansion of manufacturing and by the growth of large manufacturing firms. Manufacturing output was at best stagnant, and employment was falling very rapidly. Firms shrank in size, yet returns on investment increased. The stock market boomed. The rich simply got richer by being rich. A key minimal indicator was that real interest rates (interest rates discounting inflation) were exceptionally high – at levels last seen in the 1920s. This was a very marked contrast to the negative real rates of the 1970s, and low rates of the 1950s and 1960s, and negative rates of the 1940s. This in itself yielded a powerful trickle-up of income and wealth and power. Property, capital and wealth were once again central.39
Figure 18.2: Inflation and interest rates, 1900–2000
Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1485/interest-rates/historical-real-interest-rate/.
The 1980s saw a massive reversal of the long trend culminating in the 1970s towards increasing equality in income and wealth. Inequality was driven by higher unemployment, by lower rates of benefit, by the pushing-down of wages and by increases in the returns to capital in many forms. The greatest and easiest rewards came from ownership of property, not work, much less building a business. The massive rise in house prices, temporarily halted in 1987, and the early 1990s, meant that many in the middle class accumulated capital in larger annual increments than their salaries. They made money simply by sitting in the right sort of homes. House price inflation was the one kind of inflation that seemed to be liked; just as the mortgage was the exception to the remaining social prejudice against debt. The tax relief on mortgage interest grew to a gigantic subsidy for the middle classes and, for those owning homes outright, boosted their value. Here was the new politics of property in action, a profoundly unproductive politics.
With vast elite salaries and rising investment incomes came new tastes and new outlooks, or rather the renewal of old haute-bourgeoise taste. Opera and elegant restaurants expanded. A new anti-egalitarian snobbism was permissible, a certain reactionary chic possible. Private schools thrived. Money and merit tightened their grip on each other. Houses divided into flats became houses once more; servants and nannies returned.
This renewal of the elite bears some exploration because one self-presentation and indeed analysis of Thatcherism and its effects suggested otherwise. Was Thatcherism a revolt against rulers or a rulers’ revolt? Much was made of the claim that both Thatcher herself, seen as incorrigibly middle-class and unrefined, and Thatcherism challenged the ruling class, that business now trumped aristocracy, and merit the old school tie. There is something in this in as much as the state-oriented high bourgeoisie – in the limited sense of ‘the establishment’ – the top echelons of the BBC, the universities and the civil service, the gentlemen of The Times, the heads of great professions – saw their status and power fall. Furthermore, it was suggested that there was a downgrading of the leaders of manufacturing and an elevation of financiers. Yet this should not be overdone. The House of Lords did not fight for the old order – it was overwhelmingly, until 1999, a Conservative-voting body that followed the party line. The BBC, never radical, was hardly even neutral in, say, the miners’ strike and was put firmly under the control of government sympathizers in 1986 and 1987. The Confederation of British Industry remained close to and very supportive of the main thrust of policy.40
There is some evidence of hostility from the monarchy and more importantly to the monarchy from the guardians of the new order. In 1986 journalists briefed by Palace officials wrote that the queen was concerned about the policies of the government, not merely about its resistance to the Commonwealth view on sanctions against South Africa, but also about damage that was being done to social cohesion at home, not least in the coalfields.41 Certainly there was a fresh critique of monarchy in the air. From the left Tom Nairn launched a scintillating attack on the notion that the monarchy was irrelevant. It was in his view at the absolute core of a diseased and decaying nationalism and elite. The new right came to agree, and the Murdoch press in particular destroyed much of the mystique of monarchy. There was much tut-tutting about an intrusive press gawping at the private affairs of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, until the rare moment of honesty which revealed the ‘War of the Waleses’ involved both sides putting essentially true stories into their favoured newspapers. By the mid-1990s royalty was indeed in a very different place in the public eye. A BBC Panorama interview in 1995, in which the Princess of Wales dished the dirt, would have been unthinkable in 1985. Diana’s death in August 1997 unleashed an emotional response from the public unheard of in recent history, which put the monarchy in more danger than it had ever been since the nineteenth century. Yet it was a revolt of celebrity against crown, not of a republican spirit.
Generally the elite presented a united front: old and new both prospered together as both were changed.
Comments
Post a Comment