The making of Thatcherism

The Conservative Party in opposition, 1974–79

Philip Begley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526131324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

The making of Thatcherism examines the Conservative Party's period in opposition between 1974 and 1979, focusing on the development of key policy on issues from the economy, to immigration, to Scottish Devolution. Offering a detailed analysis of Conservative Party policy during this period, from the point at which it had last been in government to the point at which it subsequently regained power, this book helps us to understand the significance of the Conservative victory in 1979: What exactly did more than 13 million Britons vote for in May of that year? This period is typically viewed as one of dramatic change within the Conservative party; however, Begley argues that policy changes were more modest and complex than has been previously considered. Focusing on the short-term political context, Begley argues that though the roots of Thatcherism were beginning to emerge in the party, Thatcherism does not appear to have been inevitable in policy terms by 1979. Providing an overview of the intellectual, economic, and social contexts, Philip Begley examines the range of factors driving the Conservative Party's development of policy.

1

The 1970s

A ‘pivotal moment’?

In order to understand the development of Conservative policy we need to consider the context in which it took place. What did the 1970s feel like? What did they look like? What distinguished this from other decades? What were the prevailing concerns of the time? What social, political and economic trends were underway? How important was the wider context of the decade, its particular themes and its particular preoccupations?

To many this was a period of relative economic decline and high inflation, of trade union power and industrial unrest, of tension over race relations and British identity, of concern about the break-up of the United Kingdom, of random acts of terror, private armies and underground political movements. For some the very fabric of society appeared to be under threat. There was a crisis of trust in authority and growing scepticism about the role of government. Individualism appeared to be winning out over a sense of community. The picture was bleak. Taken together all of these issues could have signalled two things: the end of the post-war consensus but also uncertainty about what would replace it.¹ However, although there clearly were serious problems and a wholly positive picture of the 1970s could never be painted, a number of academics are beginning to make a serious reappraisal of the decade. In this vein, this book argues that only by understanding developments during the 1970s can we hope to fully understand the 1980s and 1990s, and that the development of Conservative Party policy can be examined in seeking to understand why the 1970s turned out the way they did.² Were the 1970s a ‘hinge’ decade? Were they a ‘pivotal moment in our recent history’?³ Conservative Party policy can help us to answer these questions. The first step in achieving this is to examine the ways in which the 1970s were understood at the time, how they were felt to relate to earlier periods, principally the 1960s, and how they were later felt to relate to the 1980s. The popular picture of the decade has often been a negative one.

‘One of the worst decades Britain has known’

At the end of the 1970s the journalist and author Christopher Booker began to corner the market in making sweeping judgements about the period as it drew to a close. Looking back he described it as ‘a decade of unending hard slog through the quicksand’ and ‘hardly a time which in years to come is likely to inspire us with an overpowering sense of nostalgia’.⁴ In making an early claim for it to be the most important decade of the twentieth century so far, he suggested that ‘the supreme keynote of this past 10 years’ had been the ‘dashing of hope’ and the ‘exhaustion’ of optimism’.⁵ But Booker was far from alone in his negativity. In December 1979 the Daily Express encouraged its readers to ‘Smile Please – It’s Almost Over’, whilst noting that ‘There is much to remember about the punk-ridden, terrorist-laden seventies. But there is much more we would prefer to forget.’⁶ The former Labour Cabinet Minister Lord George Brown, by the late 1970s a Thatcher sympathiser, saw it as a period of ‘despair and disintegration’ and ‘one of the worst decades Britain has known’.⁷ In slightly more philosophical terms, an Observer editorial described the prevailing mental condition of the 1970s as an ‘inert, numinous stupor’. It had been a period ‘which turned retrogression from a psychological ailment into the name of a fashion’, a retread of the morbid 1930s. The Economist reflected on the extent to which Britain’s economic woes had defined the ‘miserable 1970s’, labelling it the ‘Opec decade’.⁸ The Daily Mirror did attempt a slightly more nuanced assessment by reflecting on the fact that despite serious problems the everyday lives of millions of Britons had actually continued to improve, and that at least the world had not ended in a nuclear war as many had feared.⁹ Nonetheless, relief that the 1970s were over was a much more common feeling. As such, descriptions of the uncertainty, the gloom and the fear have understandably continued to punctuate popular accounts of the period.¹⁰ Francis Wheen has persuasively argued that paranoia was the default mindset of the time, amidst a ‘pungent melange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever’, and more than one observer has looked to the work of Margaret Drabble, and in particular her novel The Ice Age, as saying something profound about the anxiety of the period in which it was produced.¹¹

In this sense the 1970s were often seen as representing a reaction to or a hangover from the 1960s, which had been a very different kind of decade. Building on the affluence and youthfulness of the 1950s, the 1960s were widely thought of as a period of energy, optimism and liberation – the point at which Victorian constraints on British society were finally lifted.¹² However, what for some was enjoyable freedom was to others simply permissiveness. The seeds of disillusionment and the potential for a serious change of mood were always present and only grew as the rush of the 1960s wore off and economic reality and a sense of crisis began to set a different tone.¹³ This notion of a reaction was central to Booker’s analysis, which argued that whilst many of the 1970s’ defining political and military events had been largely unpredictable, other problems, especially those such as high inflation and aggressive trade unions which particularly affected Britain, represented the culmination of trends which had already been discernible at the end of the 1960s.¹⁴ The years from 1964 to 1976 had been a self-contained period in English life, exemplified by trendiness, immaturity, wishful thinking and childish heroism, Booker contended, and although some of the ‘follies’ of the 1960s had been enduring, by the late 1970s the reaction against them had worked its way through to become the new prevailing orthodoxy in Britain.¹⁵ This sense of a moral backlash, coming as it did after the Wolfenden Report and many ‘liberal’ changes to the law like the Sexual Offences and Abortion Acts of 1967 and the Equal Pay Act of 1970, was significant in some quarters.

One of Thatcher’s key intellectual supporters, Alfred Sherman, was certainly concerned about the consequences of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘permissiveness’ for British society.¹⁶ A former Communist, Sherman was a journalist and Conservative councillor who helped to establish the influential Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) alongside Sir Keith Joseph in 1974. As a result, he was regularly in touch with Thatcher prior to 1979, serving as something of an unofficial adviser, and is a recurring side-character in the policy chapters which follow. In a similar vein, Booker argued that by the end of the 1970s there had been a revival of conservative attitudes to the extent that they were once again a powerful intellectual force, in stark contrast to the popular morality of the 1960s.¹⁷ Interestingly, however, much of this now sits rather uncomfortably with more recent popular interpretations of the 1960s which emphasise how in many ways the decade was just as conservative as any other.¹⁸ In truth, there is never likely to be such a simple divide between decades. The 1960s may have witnessed many of the greatest upheavals, but social change in Britain was cumulative whilst other continuities always remained. The 1960s and the 1970s were both conservative and liberal.¹⁹ In this sense, however, a construction of the permissive 1960s was an important part of the construction of the crisis-ridden 1970s.

Taking all of this together, it is unsurprising that the decade has long been seen as one of great reckoning, the period when many of the trends that had been playing out in Britain for a long time finally reached their full salience. The wider the perspective that is taken, the greater the number of seemingly relevant factors that can be brought in. Across the whole of the twentieth century Britain could be seen to be defined by its changed world status, the decline of empire, its replacement with the commonwealth, and the resulting loss of prestige.²⁰ There was also the question of failed modernisation, as, over a period of at least twenty years, both the major parties had promised lasting structural reform which would equip Britain for the modern world but in the end had shrunk back from making truly radical changes. By the 1970s, globalisation and rapidly increasing competition from abroad had seriously undermined the once secure foundations of the British economy which, along with social pressures heightened by expanding consumerism and an increasing desire for social mobility, put great strain on politics and politicians. These were profound historical trends that no government would have been able to control, and it was only natural for the post-war consensus to fragment in some way. Many Conservatives certainly thought so.

But despite this, there was also much more to the 1970s. A number of studies have countered the negative portrayals and suggested that, notwithstanding the problems, the population as a whole was actually quite content during this period. In 1977 a Gallup poll found that the British people were amongst the happiest in the world, whilst a 2004 report by the New Economics Foundation suggested that 1976 may have been the peak year for well-being in Britain, the time when more people felt better off than any other. The methodology of that study has been questioned, but the attempt to reappraise the 1970s in this way represented an important step.²¹ This was also a period of general prosperity with relatively low unemployment by modern standards. The number of strikes did rise in the early 1970s, before falling back in the middle of the decade, and then rising again by 1978–79. The strikes that took place were more likely to be large and official, whilst picketing was more likely to be disruptive or violent, but the picture was not universal. Immigration was a potent political issue and it appeared as though notions of race had become uniquely bound up with those of national identity, but this was also the period of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and of a real overseas influence on British customs. There was a decline in religious observance at the same time as wider stereotypes continued to break down and society continued to loosen along the lines of age and appearance. The liberal social reforms of the 1960s reached their full s...