by Andy Beckett
In some ways it was a tremendous victory. Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to be elected the leader of a Western democracy. The national swing from Labour to the Tories was the largest between the major British parties since Clement Attlee’s watershed victory in 1945. In seats won, it was the best Conservative performance in a general election for twenty years. The party had done particularly well with women voters – a 12 per cent lead over Labour compared to 1 per cent at the last election; with young voters – a 1 per cent lead among eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds compared to an 18 per cent deficit in October 1974; and, above all, with skilled workers or C2s, whose votes were divided equally in 1979, eradicating Labour’s 1974 advantage of 23 per cent in this crucial electoral category. Geographically, the Tories did best in the south of England and the Midlands, in new towns and, wrote Butler and Kavanagh, in ‘East London and its surrounding areas, particularly previously strong National Front areas’. Racists, feminists, teenagers, trade unionists, Milton Keynes residents – all had voted in large numbers for the fierce woman from Grantham.
And yet an emphatic majority of Britons had not. The Conservative share of the vote was only 43.9 per cent, the lowest to elect a British prime minister since the war, apart from Wilson’s two paper-thin mandates in 1974 – hardly the most encouraging of precedents. Nor did the turnout suggest a country that suddenly felt a change of government would solve its problems: at 76 per cent it was below average for a post-war general election. And, most awkwardly of all for those who argued in 1979, and have argued ever since, that Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street marked a moment of profound disillusionment with what had gone before, the number of Labour voters did not collapse on 3 May. It increased, going up by 75,000 compared to October 1974.
As much as movements of votes can ever be conclusively traced, the Conservatives had won instead by taking support from the Liberals (down over 2 million), the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists (down 370,000), and the National Front (down by more than half in the seats they fought). In fact, among the segment of the population you might expect to have become most alienated by Labour in the seventies, the middle class and the rich, support for Labour at the 1979 general election was up by more than a quarter. Not until Tony Blair’s election in 1997 would the party appeal as successfully again to Britain’s ABC1s. The tax cuts, social conservatism and growing interest in consumerism of the Callaghan government marked the beginning of something in British left-of-centre politics, however long it would take the defeated Labour Party to recognize it.
In other ways, too, May 1979 was less of a boundary between two political worlds than is commonly accepted. General elections, like the beginnings and ends of decades, are rarely as decisive as they seem.
Like almost all post-war British prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street with a bold vision for national revival. She gave her co-visionaries central roles in it: Geoffrey Howe as chancellor, Keith Joseph as industry secretary, John Hoskyns as head of the Downing Street Policy Unit. Early on in her government, she found the time to contact and thank even the wilder figures who had helped her to power. In late May, John Gouriet, the architect of Operation Pony Express at Grunwick, received this letter:
Dear John,
Thank you very much for your kind letter. I am grateful to you … for being such a great help during our years in Opposition. I very much hope that you will be able to give your support to our cause over the next few years. It would be greatly appreciated if you would. Every good wish, Margaret
Quickly, too, she sought to signal to the unions that times had changed. Bob Jones, NUPE’s national negotiator in the seventies, had dealt with Heath – ‘He was all right,’ he told me – and Callaghan – ‘He said to us, “Help me.”’ Now he encountered the new prime minister. ‘I met Thatcher five times, and we were never offered tea.’ There was still indignation in his usually level voice. ‘Once I complained,’ he continued, the indignation turning to disbelief, ‘and she just turned her head away.’
But this sense in 1979 of an omnipotent new government lasted no longer than it had for previous post-war administrations. Instead, between the autumn of that year and the spring of 1982, and arguably well into the mid-eighties, Britain endured a period of economic, social and political crisis that matched, and often eclipsed, anything in the seventies – indeed, anything in peacetime in the modern era. This crisis included a recession deeper and longer than Britain had known since the thirties; a rise in unemployment that reached a peak three times higher than any under Callaghan, Wilson or Heath; another surge in inflation and another oil crisis; another surge in IRA violence; another sterling crisis; race-related riots in thirty British towns and cities; a collapse in the average Briton’s disposable income so prolonged that by 1983 it still had not recovered to its level when Labour left office; an open rebellion against Margaret Thatcher’s policies involving almost half her Cabinet; repeated threats of resignation by Thatcher; and a collapse in her government’s popularity so steep that, in a Gallup poll in October 1981, she received the lowest support ever recorded for a British prime minister.
That January there was an episode, forgotten now, which seemed to epitomize the young Thatcher administration’s haplessness. The National Coal Board, with the government’s approval, announced plans to shut down an unspecified number of mines which it considered uneconomic. The NUM, under its president Joe Gormley and its president-to-be, Arthur Scargill, responded menacingly. ‘I was appalled to find that we had inadvertently entered into a battle which we could not win,’ wrote Thatcher in her memoirs. ‘There had been no forward thinking in the Department of Energy about what would happen in the case of a strike … The objective had now become to avoid an all-out national strike at the minimum cost in concessions.’ The Coal Board withdrew its closure programme, and the government, in Thatcher’s words, ‘undertook to reduce imports of coal … improve the redundancy terms for coal miners … agree to an [increased annual industry subsidy] of well over £1 billion … and draw a ring fence around the coal industry by arguing that coal was a special case’.
The 1981 miners’ dispute, with its sense of official panic and unpreparedness, with its policy U-turn by the government, with its apparent demonstration that decisive political power in Britain still lay with the unions, and with its vain efforts by leading Conservatives to dignify defeat, made the Thatcher administration look uncannily like that of Edward Heath. On 22 February, a whole edition of Weekend World was devoted to the NUM’s third victory in a row over a Tory prime minister. With the unconcealed excitement of a political journalist who had recently seen a lot of short-lived governments, the programme’s usually shrewd host Brian Walden, eyes glittering, asked the question on many commentators’ lips: ‘Is this the beginning of the end of the Thatcher experiment?’
In the early eighties, Thatcher tried to dismiss her difficulties with defiant speeches. ‘You turn if you want to,’ she famously told the Conservative conference in 1980, ‘the lady’s not for turning.’ But it was hard to argue with great confidence that the British seventies, in a political or economic sense, were over. As late as June 1985, a Punch cover cartoon could feature two pinstriped businessmen looking out of the window of a City of London skyscraper at a formation of flying pigs. ‘It’s the economic recovery!’ one businessman was saying to the other. ‘It’s the economic recovery!’
Of course, we all know better now than to write off Margaret Thatcher’s first years in government. We know that by 1985 she was already well into the run of luck and ruthless decision-making which would carry her through the Falklands War, through Michael Foot’s frail Labour leadership, through Scargill’s ill-timed summer strike and through the craze for the SDP, and which would change Britain during the eighties, year by year, law by law, Tory election victory by Tory election victory. By the end of this ascendancy the country would seem to have less in common with its seventies self, in its political assumptions, in its social structure, in its ec
onomic life, in its industrial relations, in its financial and physical landscape, in its sense of a national trajectory – who in 1989 still talked about British decline in the same way that they had in 1979? – than any comparable nation.
This erasure of the seventies continued after Thatcher’s fall in 1990. By the late nineties, let alone by the first years of the twenty-first century, after eighteen years of Conservative government, after the creation of New Labour, after the endless tranquilizing boom of the Blair era, the British seventies were a foreign country. They fascinated us, they contained lessons for us, they influenced us. But we didn’t live there.
When I started researching this book in 2003, the seventies often felt much more than three decades away. Trade unions had been wound up or amalgamated. Whole industries had been restructured or no longer existed. Leading figures kept turning up in the obituaries. Drawing parallels between the British present and the British seventies seemed a slightly esoteric interest, a game mainly for historians, like making comparisons between the present day and the fifties, say, or the twenties.
Yet between 2005 and 2008 this began to change. Largely unnoticed at first, another oil crisis began to develop. Inflation and unemployment began to rise. The Labour government began to struggle. The Conservatives began to revive. A recession began to bite. Sterling and the FTSE index began to slide. Trade unionists concerned about their living standards began, regardless of the government’s difficulties, to go on strike. Certain forgotten seventies phrases – ‘stagflation’, ‘oil shock’, ‘government pay policy’, ‘government bail-out’ – began to be taken out of their display cases. Collapsing banks were even nationalized. The will of the 1976 Labour conference, as an old left-wing delegate might have put it, had finally been recognized.
Other seventies notions made unexpected returns. In March 2008, the Sunday Times gave over two pages to explaining why the solution to the problems at Heathrow was an airport on an artificial island in the Thames Estuary. On Newsnight ten days later, Irwin Stelzer, Rupert Murdoch’s chief political adviser, previously known for his profound faith in free markets and his fierce dislike of state meddling in them, suddenly announced that the answer to the international economic downturn was ‘fiscal stimulus’ – a right-winger’s euphemism for governments coming to the rescue of capitalism. He almost sounded like a member of one of Ted Heath’s or Harold Wilson’s economic committees. Stelzer ended his contribution by quoting Richard Nixon, in his phase as a sceptic about the free market while US president in the early seventies: ‘We are all Keynesians now.’
As I write this in 2008, another right-wing American president, George Bush, faced with an economic crisis that may come to dwarf anything in the seventies, is advocating vast and panicky government schemes to regulate and nationalize. In Britain, the right-wing press, the City of London’s tycoons and sages, and the Labour and Conservative party leaderships all seem suddenly ready to talk about the problems with unshackled capitalism – the economic orthodoxy in the West, and far beyond, during the three decades that started with Thatcher’s election in 1979. It is possible that the era of Margaret and the Austrians is finally coming to an end.
At the least, a very seventies dread has seeped back into how people in Britain and other rich countries see the world. Economic crises, floods, food shortages, terrorism, the destruction of the environment: these spectres, so looming in the seventies, did not go away during the eighties and nineties; yet they faded – they were often quite easy to forget about. Now that they have returned to haunt newspaper front pages almost daily, it is possible to wonder how many of Britain’s seventies problems were ever really solved.
These days Britons no longer mourn their empire. They are more comfortably European. They are more relaxed about race, sexuality and gender. Their government is no longer fighting a war in Ulster. The British population is rising rather than falling. The feel of national life is more feverish than entropic. The look of things is gaudy and skin-deep, rather than heavy, worn-out and grey.
And yet Britain is still a polluted, often tatty country with a dependence on Middle Eastern oil. It still veers between boom and recession. It still has an unstable currency. It still has an economy with relatively low productivity. It still has a comparatively class-bound society. Its south is still richer than its north. It still invests for the long term only reluctantly. It still lacks modern infrastructure. It still panics about national security when a bomb goes off. It still harbours the National Front’s successor, the British National Party. It is still arguing about Scottish devolution. It is still arguing about the European Union. It is still not quite sure of its place in the world.
But if these remain Britain’s underlying problems, some of the solutions the seventies offered are gone. David Cameron, Old Etonian, open admirer of Tony Blair, calm rather than confrontational in his rhetoric and not a politician, you suspect, for argumentative lunches at right-wing think tanks, is not a new Margaret Thatcher – however much his response to the current economic crisis tries to echo her bracing puritanism in the seventies. There is little sign, so far, of an intellectual revolution behind his rise. There seems little of her intensity or singularity behind his charm and poise.
The modern Labour Party, meanwhile, despite its recent return to a politics which is moderately bold and left-of-centre, does not contain a messianic dissident like Tony Benn, or even a mouthy pragmatist like Denis Healey. The Liberal Democrats are presentable, disciplined, close to the Tories in many of their ideas. Nowadays, if you talk to promising new MPs, it can sometimes be quite hard to tell which party is which.
And outside Parliament, for now at least, British politics is a shrunken thing compared to the seventies. In Hull in 2006, after I had finished talking to Fred Beach about the Winter of Discontent, I walked into the city centre to get some dinner. It was a mild dry summer evening but the streets were almost empty. The city centre was nothing but lads outside bars. Beyond it, by the new marina, I found a promising-looking restaurant, but it was shut. Instead, I watched the sky dim over the Humber for a few minutes. The lights of the North Sea oil facilities that Beach had helped blockade in 1979 quivered faintly in the distance.
I walked back towards my hotel. Halfway there, I found a Chinese restaurant with a buffet, but it was all too congealed. Instead, I followed an unlit road that passed along the oldest part of the waterfront. There were derelict Georgian facades, and I could hear the slap of water out in the shadows. Then I turned a corner and saw a huge floodlit sign: ‘Napoleon’s Customer Car Park’. For a moment, I thought it meant somewhere I might want to eat, but then I saw the premises Napoleon’s occupied. ‘Casino & Restaurant’ it said above the door, beside a stretch of mirrored glass and flashing red and white lights. And framing the doorway in the darkness there was an ungainly two-storey building which I had only seen in photographs. It was Bevin House, the old TGWU headquarters. Here Beach and his comrades had run their strike. Here the T&G dispensation committee had mounted a kind of revolution. Here the power of the British Left had reached a kind of peak.
But that was over a quarter of a century ago. In 2006, the TGWU’s existence as an independent organization was drawing to a close. It would soon merge with another shrinking union and take on a new, anodyne, unthreatening-sounding name: Unite. And Bevin House had already been renamed, I noticed. In keeping with the casino’s Napoleonic theme, it was called Elba House. It was a name that conjured up exile, powerlessness, and eventual defeat.
*
A few weeks earlier that summer, I had seen Callaghan’s former intimate and son-in-law Peter Jay at his house outside Oxford. After the interview, he offered to drive me to the station. At the last minute, as we were sitting in the car in the driveway and Jay was starting the engine, another passenger got in. He was in his gangly late teens, had short spiky hair like the bass player of the Clash in the late seventies, and, like quite a lot of teenagers in 2006, was carrying a guitar case with his bags. Jay introduce
d us: the teenager was Tommy, one of his children from his second marriage (he and Callaghan’s daughter Margaret had divorced in the eighties). Tommy was getting the train to London, too, so that he could catch a flight to Ibiza. As Jay drove, he explained that he and I had been doing an interview about the seventies, ‘when politics was interesting’. We all laughed knowingly.
Jay dropped us at the station and drove off. The station was small and deserted, and the train was late. As we stood on the platform, it seemed crass to probe Tommy about his father’s famous connections with Callaghan, so I asked him instead about his plans for the summer. He said he wanted to go travelling before he started studying architecture. The sun went in and out. Then he asked me what I thought about David Cameron. I said I thought that Cameron was getting quite an easy ride from the press.
‘He’s good news for the Right,’ Jay’s son broke in. ‘I’m on the left,’ he went on. ‘But my girlfriend is from the other end of the political spectrum. Her father says Thatcher did lots of good things for this country. I’d never heard that before. In my family there was never a good word about her.’ He looked at me intently. ‘If someone said, “Thatcher saved Britain,” what would you say to them?’
I started talking about unemployment in the eighties, about the economy’s erratic growth under her administration, about how lucky she had been with the Falklands War, with Labour’s split and the formation of the SDP. ‘She had a lot more political luck than your dad’s first father-in-law,’ I said. The train came before I could say any more.
