Making Thatcher's Britain

Making Thatcher’s Britain Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial igures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure, and her legacy remains iercely contested. Yet assessments of the Thatcher era are often divorced from any larger historical perspective. This book draws together leading historians to locate Thatcher and Thatcherism within the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain. It explores the social and economic crises of the 1970s; Britain’s relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States; and the different experiences of Thatcherism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The book assesses the impact of the Thatcher era on class and gender, and situates Thatcherism within the Cold War, the end of empire and the rise of an Anglo-American ‘New Right’. Drawing on the latest available sources, it opens a wide-ranging debate about the Thatcher era and its place in modern British history. B E N J A C K S O N is a University Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University and a Fellow of University College. He is the author of Equality and the British Left (2007). R O B E R T S A U N D E R S is a Lecturer in History and Politics at Oxford University. He is the author of Democracy and the Vote in British Politics (2011). 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 1 4/25/2012 12:11:55 PM 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 2 4/25/2012 12:11:55 PM Making Thatcher’s Britain Edited by Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 3 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM CA MBR IDGE U NI V ERSIT Y PR ESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107683372 © Cambridge University Press 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data ISBN 978-1-107-01238-7 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-68337-2 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 4 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM In memory of E. H. H. Green (1958−2006) 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 5 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 6 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Contents List of contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Varieties of Thatcherism page ix x xii 1 B E N J AC K S ON A N D ROB E R T S AU N DE R S 1 Part I: Making Thatcherism 23 ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Thatcherism and the seventies 25 ROB E R T S AU N DE R S 2 The think-tank archipelago: Thatcherism and neo-liberalism 43 B E N J AC K S ON 3 Thatcher, monetarism and the politics of inlation 62 J I M TOM L I NSON 4 Thatcherism, morality and religion 78 M AT T H E W G R I M L E Y 5 ‘A nation or no nation?’ Enoch Powell and Thatcherism 95 C A M I L L A SCHOF I E L D 6 Part II: Thatcher’s Britain 111 Thatcher and the women’s vote 113 L AU R A B E E R S 7 Margaret Thatcher and the decline of class politics 132 J O N L AW R E N C E A N D F L O R E N C E S U T C L I F F E - B R A I T H WA I T E vii 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 7 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM viii Contents 8 Deiant dominoes: working miners and the 1984–5 strike 148 D AV I D H O W E L L 9 Thatcherism, unionism and nationalism: a comparative study of Scotland and Wales 165 R I C H A R D F I N L AY 10 ‘Just another country’? The Irish question in the Thatcher years 180 M A RC MU L HOL L A N D 11 Part III: Thatcherism and the wider world 197 Thatcherism and the Cold War 199 R ICH A R D V I N E N 12 Europe and America 218 A N DR EW GA M BL E 13 Decolonisation and imperial aftershocks: the Thatcher years 234 S T E P H E N HOW E Appendices 253 P R E PA R E D B Y P E T E R S L O M A N Appendix 1: Timeline Appendix 2: Statistical tables Notes Further reading Index 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 8 255 264 278 335 346 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Contributors L AU R A is Assistant Professor of History at American BEERS University. R ICH A R D is Professor of Scottish History at Strathclyde F I N L AY University. A N DR EW GA M BL E is Professor of Politics at Cambridge University. is University Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton College. M AT T H E W G R I M L E Y STEPHEN HOW E is Senior Research Fellow in History at Bristol University. D AV I D H O W E L L is Professor of Politics at the University of York. is University Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University and a Fellow of University College. B E N J AC K S ON is Reader in Modern British History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. J O N L AW R E N C E is University Lecturer in Modern History at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. M A RC MU L HOL L A N D ROB E R T S AU N DE R S is a Lecturer in History and Politics at Oxford University. C A M I L L A SCHOF I E L D is Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of East Anglia. PET ER SL OM A N is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at Oxford University. S U T C L I F F E - B R A I T H WA I T E is a PhD student in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University. F L OR ENCE T O M L I N S O N is Bonar Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee. JIM R ICH A R D V I N E N is Professor of History at King’s College London. ix 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 9 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Acknowledgements The chapters in this collection were presented in draft form at a workshop in St John’s College, Oxford, in September 2010; and our thanks go irst to all those who participated in the lively debates at this event. We are especially grateful to those who acted as respondents: Hester Barron, Anne Deighton, Brian Harrison, Iain McLean and Glen O’Hara. We would also like to thank Chris Collins, Gregg McClymont, Ross McKibbin and William Whyte, who either spoke at the workshop or commented on the papers presented. Their ideas and their time were greatly appreciated. We are particularly indebted to Brian Harrison for generously allowing us to draw on the timeline in his book, Finding a Role? The United Kingdom, 1970–1990 (Oxford University Press, 2010), for Appendix 1. We are grateful, for inancial support, to the Oxford University History Faculty, St John’s College, Oxford, and the John Fell OUP Research Fund; and to Aileen Mooney and Martin Conway for their guidance in securing this funding. The John Fell grant enabled us, among other things, to employ Peter Sloman as a research assistant. Peter proved an outstanding asset throughout this project: it has been a great pleasure to work with him and we are indebted to him for the enormous amount he has contributed to this book. The research for this volume could not have been undertaken without the assistance of innumerable librarians and archivists, and we are truly thankful for their help. We are also grateful for permission to quote from the following papers and archives: the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website and the Margaret Thatcher papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, courtesy of Lady Thatcher; the papers of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in the Albert Sloman Library, Essex University; the Alfred Sherman papers at Royal Holloway; the Donald Coggan papers at Lambeth Palace; the papers of Enoch Powell at the Churchill Archives Centre, with the kind permission of the Trustees of the Literary Estate of the late J. Enoch Powell; the Conservative Party x 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 10 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Acknowledgements xi Archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Labour Party Archive at the People’s History Museum, Manchester; the papers of Lord Hailsham at the Churchill Archives Centre; the papers of the Institute of Economic Affairs and Milton Friedman, both held at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. We are especially grateful to Andrew Riley at the Churchill Archives Centre and to Chris Collins at the Thatcher Foundation for the assistance they gave to so many of our contributors. We are also indebted to Cambridge University Press, and in particular to Michael Watson and Chloe Howell, for their enthusiasm for this project and for all their work in seeing the book through to publication. For support and encouragement along the way, Ben Jackson thanks Zoia Stemplowska and Edward, Jacqueline and Daniel Jackson; Robert Saunders thanks Andrew and Penny Saunders. Our inal debt of gratitude is both personal and intellectual. At different stages in our lives, we were privileged to work with the very distinguished Thatcher scholar, the late E. H. H. Green. Ewen was a much valued tutor, colleague and friend, whose scholarship made an enormous impact on the study of British Conservatism. We hope that he would have approved of this volume, and it is dedicated to his memory. 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 11 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Abbreviations CCO COSA CPS CRD EEC EOC ERG ERM HC Deb. HL Deb. IEA IMF INLA IRA LCC LEA MFGB MPS MTFS MTFW NCB NEC NUM NVALA PEB PMQ PPS PSBR SDLP Thatcher CD-ROM Conservative Central Ofice Colliery Oficials and Staff Area Centre for Policy Studies Conservative Research Department European Economic Community Equal Opportunities Commission Economic Reconstruction Group Exchange Rate Mechanism House of Commons Debates House of Lords Debates Institute of Economic Affairs International Monetary Fund Irish National Liberation Army Irish Republican Army Leader’s Consultative Committee Local Education Authority Miners’ Federation of Great Britain Mont Pèlerin Society Medium-Term Financial Strategy Margaret Thatcher Foundation website: www. margaretthatcher.org National Coal Board National Executive Committee National Union of Mineworkers National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association Party Election Broadcast Prime Minister’s Questions Parliamentary Private Secretary Public Sector Borrowing Requirement Social Democratic and Labour Party Margaret Thatcher: Complete Public Statements, 1945–1990 (Oxford University Press, 1999) xii 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 12 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Abbreviations TUC UDA UDM UUP xiii Trade Unions Congress Ulster Defence Association Union of Democratic Mineworkers Ulster Unionist Party Citations from the Thatcher Foundation website are given in the following format: MTFW [unique document ID]. Documents can be found either by typing this number into the search box on the website, or by appending it to the URL www.margaretthatcher.org/document/. For example, MTFW 107590 can be found at www.margaretthatcher. org/document/107590. 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 13 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM 9781107012387pre_pi-xiv.indd 14 4/25/2012 12:11:56 PM Introduction: Varieties of Thatcherism* Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial igures in modern British history. No Prime Minister since Gladstone aroused such powerful emotions, or stirred such equal measures of hatred and veneration. For her admirers, she was ‘the greatest living Englishwoman’,1 a new Churchill who had reversed decline, defeated socialism and restored Britain’s place in the world. For her critics, she was a smallminded bigot, who destroyed British industry, widened inequality and unleashed a new era of greed and rampant individualism. Yet if commentary on the Thatcher years is often very polarised, the period itself offers a nest of contradictions. Thatcher was the irst Prime Minister since the Great Reform Act to win three general elections in a row; but the irst since Neville Chamberlain to be evicted by her own party. She was the only Prime Minister of the twentieth century to give her name to an ideology, but there is no agreement on what it was or who believed in it. In electoral terms, she was the most successful party leader of the modern era, but she won a smaller share of the vote than any Conservative government since 1922, and fewer votes in absolute terms than her successor, John Major. The Thatcher years have inspired a substantial literature, drawn from every point on the political spectrum. There are at least twentyive biographies of Margaret Thatcher, numerous documentaries and dramatisations, and an unusual array of diaries and memoirs. Journalists, economists and political scientists have all engaged closely with the period, as have sociologists, scholars of gender politics and historians of popular culture. Regional studies have begun to emerge, and there is a signiicant literature on the political legacies of Thatcherism.2 The result has been a rich, diverse and often very impressive body of scholarship that is already more extensive than for any other government of modern times. Is there any need, then, for a further volume? * We are grateful to Tim Bale and Matthew Grimley for helpful comments on an earlier version of this introduction. 1 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 1 4/25/2012 12:13:01 PM 2 Introduction This is not a new biography of Margaret Thatcher; nor is it a comprehensive survey of the Thatcher years. Instead, it offers a fresh perspective on the period from the viewpoint of the historian. As the 1980s recede in time, and as papers and archives become more readily available, ‘Thatcherism’ is emerging as a major ield of historical research. Scholars such as E. H. H. Green, Brian Harrison and Richard Vinen have challenged the tendency to view the Thatcher era in ‘splendid isolation’, and have reconnected the period to the social, political and cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.3 This volume seeks to broaden and extend that engagement, by drawing together scholars from many different areas of historical enquiry. The approach is both historicist and comparative, locating the Thatcher era within a range of different contexts. The essays that follow explore the place of Thatcherism within the political, cultural and economic crises of the 1970s; they consider its relationship with Europe, the Commonwealth and the Atlantic world; and they assess the different experiences of the Thatcher governments for class, gender and regional identities. They restate the importance of the Cold War context and restore a ‘four nations’ approach to the history of the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. This introduction offers a framework for the chapters that follow, beginning with a brief overview of the Thatcher era, before proceeding to an analysis of the key themes that dominate existing scholarship on this period. The grocer’s daughter Margaret Roberts was born in Grantham in 1925, the second child of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her father was a grocer and Methodist lay preacher who rose to become mayor of Grantham, and he encouraged his daughters to take an interest in politics. Alfred took Margaret to meetings of the council, and she sat in the public gallery of the magistrates’ court where her father served on the bench. There was a strong emphasis on discipline and self-improvement: as Margaret recalled years later, ‘I always got the books I wanted. But no pleasures.’4 In 1943 Margaret won a scholarship to Oxford, where she studied Chemistry at Somerville. University life offered a welcome relaxation from the strict regimen of Grantham: she attended her irst dance, smoked her irst cigarette and tasted alcohol for the irst time.5 Though excluded by her gender from the Oxford Union, she joined the University Conservative Association and became only the third woman to hold the presidency. 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 2 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 3 Leaving Oxford in 1947, Margaret worked for a short period in industry as a research chemist. In 1950 she contested the safe Labour seat of Dartford for the Conservative Party, cutting the Labour majority by 6,000 votes; and, as the youngest Conservative candidate in the country, her campaign drew considerable attention from the media. It was in Dartford that she met two of the most important men in her life: Ted Heath, who would promote her to the Shadow Cabinet in 1967; and Denis Thatcher, whom she married in 1951. After a brief period away from active politics, in which she passed her Bar exams and gave birth to twins, she was elected in 1959 as Conservative MP for Finchley. She would hold the seat for almost thirty-three years. Thatcher entered Parliament during the Conservative ascendancy of 1951–64, and quickly made an impression. In 1961 she was given her irst ministerial post in the Department of Pensions and National Insurance, and six years later she was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet with responsibility for fuel and power. When the Conservatives returned to ofice in 1970, she became Secretary of State for Education. There she acquired the nickname ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’, after withdrawing free school milk from children in primary education. The Sun labelled her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’, and her decision attracted a torrent of public abuse.6 As the only woman in Heath’s Cabinet, Thatcher acquired a signiicant public proile, but few would have tipped her for the leadership. As a woman whose origins lay in the provincial lower-middle class, she did not it the mould of previous party leaders; and until 1975 the height of her ambitions appears to have been the Exchequer. Yet the culture of Conservative politics was undergoing a change, which opened up new possibilities for a woman of Thatcher’s background. Defeat in 1964 had triggered a reaction within the Conservative Party against the patrician style of Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Between 1965 and 1997, the party elected four leaders in succession from relatively humble backgrounds, each of whom could claim an authentic connection with the lives of ‘ordinary’ voters. This cultural shift was sharpened by changes in the party’s internal procedures. Thatcher would never have achieved the premiership before 1964, when the leadership was in the gift of a ‘magic circle’ of party grandees; but the move to election by MPs gave greater scope to candidates who deined themselves against the party establishment. Thatcher played little role in these developments, but she rode them expertly. Since leaving Grantham in 1943, Thatcher had played down her provincial background, acquiring the poise and accent of 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 3 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM 4 Introduction the Tory grande dame. She had rarely returned to Grantham after moving to Oxford, and references to her father were fairly scant before the 1970s. The tone of these remarks was sometimes ambivalent; and while she credited her father with stimulating her interest in politics, there was little sense as yet that its substance was derived from this source. The image of Thatcher as ‘the grocer’s daughter’ was partly a media construction, fashioned by interviewers and political journalists eager to establish a creation myth for this new and interesting igure. Yet it was keenly embraced by Thatcher herself, for it allowed her to refashion her public proile in the image of the society she hoped to lead. By reactivating her provincial roots, Thatcher could soothe anxieties that the wife of a millionaire, living in a privileged metropolitan culture, would have dificulty appealing to a mass electorate.7 Heath had always known that he was likely to face a leadership election in 1975. His position had been weakened by successive electoral failures in 1974, and the Tory right was in rebellion over the alleged U-turns of 1972–3. The most likely challenger was Keith Joseph, but he destroyed his chances with an ill-judged speech at Edgbaston, which appeared to advocate eugenic policies.8 Thatcher, who entered the leadership contest in his stead, was viewed primarily as a stalking horse, but her position was stronger than at irst appeared. Given the fate of the Heath government, the fact that she had never held an economic portfolio, or played any obvious role in the decisive events of that ministry, could be turned to her advantage; and a strong result for Thatcher offered the only prospect of a second ballot in which other potential candidates could stand. After a skilful campaign, masterminded by Airey Neave, she caused a sensation by defeating Heath in the irst ballot. Unexpectedly established as the front runner, she secured outright victory on the second ballot, becoming leader of the Conservative Party on 11 February 1975. The party Thatcher inherited was in some disarray. By 1975, the Conservatives had lost four of the last ive general elections, and the party was losing support in all parts of the United Kingdom. Its share of the vote had declined from almost 50 per cent in 1955 to 35.8 per cent in October 1974, and it was in third place behind the Liberals among irst-time voters. The Conservatives’ most recent period in government, the Heath administration of 1970–74, had collapsed into a chaos of recriminations after a protracted confrontation with the miners. The party, it seemed, could neither work effectively with the unions nor impose its authority upon them, raising questions about its capacity to govern at all in a modern corporatist state. 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 4 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 5 At a time when the Conservatives needed to broaden their appeal, and to prove that they could build a constructive relationship with organised labour, it was not at all clear that Thatcher was a sensible choice of leader. To her many critics, Thatcher was a suburban housewife with no experience of high ofice, who seemed neither willing nor able to expand the party’s constituency. Her personal powerbase remained precarious, and she was outnumbered by Heathites even within the Shadow Cabinet. Her predecessor was openly hostile, and she operated throughout her period in opposition under the shadow of a Heathite restoration. Had an election been called in 1978, the Conservatives might well have lost and Thatcher’s leadership would almost certainly have come to an end. But the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, delayed the election until 1979, ensuring that the country went to the polls under the shadow of industrial unrest. The public sector strikes of 1978–9 – the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ – destroyed Labour’s claims to a superior governing competence, and handed the electoral advantage to the Conservatives. With 44 per cent of the popular vote, the Conservative Party won a majority of forty-three seats, with a lead over Labour of seventy MPs. The irst term (1979–83): back from the brink The irst term was dominated by economic policy. On public sector pay and reform of trade union law the government moved cautiously. Ministers accepted a raft of inlationary pay awards, while labour reforms focused on trade unions’ internal procedures, rather than on the right to strike. In macro-economic policy, however, there was a radical change of direction. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, cut the top rate of income tax from 83p to 60p in the pound, and the basic rate from 33p to 30p. To compensate, VAT was increased from 8 per cent to 15 per cent. To squeeze out inlation, interest rates rose to 17 per cent by the end of 1980. The government removed all controls over the exchange of foreign currency and ambitious targets were published for control of the money supply, embodied in the Medium-Term Financial Strategy of 1980.9 The effects were seismic. Between 1979 and 1981 the manufacturing sector contracted by 25 per cent, buffeted by a combination of high interest rates, tight monetary policy and a soaring exchange rate. GDP shrank by 2 per cent in 1980 and by a further 1.2 per cent in 1981, in a recession that was both deeper and longer than ministers had anticipated. Unemployment escalated from 1.3 million in 1979 to over 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 5 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM 6 Introduction 3 million in 1983, where it remained until 1987. Inlation – which had stood at 8.3 per cent in 1978 – hit 22 per cent over the Conservatives’ irst year in ofice, and did not fall below the 1978 level until 1983. The pressure to change course was overwhelming. In a letter to The Times in March 1981, 364 university economists insisted that government policy had ‘no basis in economic theory’. The monetarist experiment, they warned, would ‘deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability’.10 As if to prove the point, riots broke out in Brixton, Southall and Moss Side. In June 1981, the government’s approval ratings hit a record low of −43. For much of 1981 and 1982 the Conservatives occupied third place in the polls, trailing both Labour and the newly formed Liberal−SDP Alliance. Slowly, however, the economy began to improve. Inlation fell from a yearly rate of 18 per cent in 1980 to 11.9 per cent in 1981. By 1982 it was 8.6 per cent, plunging to 4.6 per cent in 1983. Interest rates declined from 17 per cent to 9 per cent, while a fall in the value of the pound eased the pressure on exports. After two years of contraction, GDP grew by 2.2 per cent in 1982 and 3.7 per cent in 1983. How much credit the Thatcher government could take for all this remains contested, but its political signiicance cannot be doubted.11 By standing irm against all opposition, Thatcher and Howe had exorcised the memory of the Heath U-turn; and, as the outlook brightened, they could claim vindication for their tough economic medicine. Economic uplift coincided with a major foreign policy crisis. On 2 April 1982, Argentine forces landed in the Falkland Islands, a British colony since 1833. Sovereignty had been contested by Argentina for many years, and in 1978 the Callaghan government had sent naval reinforcements to the region to discourage an attack. The invasion was a humiliation that could well have destroyed the government. The Labour leader, Michael Foot, accused ministers of betraying the islanders, and challenged them to ‘prove by deeds’ that ‘foul and brutal aggression does not succeed’.12 The crisis was viewed as the supreme test of Thatcher’s capacity to lead, and the recapture of the islands became one of the deining moments of the Thatcher premiership. Whether it proved decisive at the following election, as widely claimed, is doubtful;13 but failure would probably have cost Thatcher the premiership and would have made it harder to deploy patriotic defence as an electoral weapon. Instead, it was the opposition that suffered the political fallout. Despite Foot’s determined stand, the Labour Party was visibly divided over the war, establishing defence as a clear electoral advantage for the Conservatives. 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 6 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 7 By July 1982, Thatcher’s personal approval ratings had reached 52 per cent – up by 27 points from the previous December. For most of the next two years the Conservatives rarely dipped below 40 per cent in the polls, as Labour dissolved into fratricidal conlict and the Alliance lost some of its early momentum. When Parliament was dissolved in June 1983, the Conservatives won a landslide. Though their share of the vote fell slightly from 1979 (from 44 per cent to 42.4 per cent), they won an overall majority of 144 seats. Labour only narrowly held onto second place in the share of the vote, beating the Alliance by 27.6 per cent to 25.4 per cent, but the new party was denied its breakthrough by the electoral system. While Labour achieved a roughly proportional result – winning 32 per cent of the seats on 27.6 per cent of the votes – the Alliance secured more than a quarter of votes cast, but a paltry 3.5 per cent of seats. The big winners were the Conservatives, who returned 61 per cent of MPs on 42.4 per cent of the vote. The second term (1983–7): high Thatcherism With their majority secure, the Conservatives continued the programme of radical reform. Privatisation, in particular, emerged as a central component of Thatcherite policy. The sale of council houses, initiated in the irst term, was accelerated and expanded, while giants like British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways and Rolls-Royce were all transferred into private ownership. Revenues from privatisation, which had never exceeded £494 million a year in the irst term, rose to more than £10 billion over the course of the Parliament, while the low of North Sea oil revenue became a lood. In the ive years from 1983 to 1987, government oil revenues totalled £41.6 billion − more than double the igure for the previous four years. Given that oil revenue had been a mere £25 million as recently as 1975, this was a substantial windfall. As well as paying off public debt, this allowed the new Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, to make further reductions in direct taxation. The main rate of corporation tax was cut from 50 per cent to 35 per cent, while the small business rate fell from 30 per cent to 25 per cent.14 There were further cuts in the basic rate of income tax, which fell from 30 pence to 27 pence in the pound. There were also curbs on union power and local government – both seen as bastions of the left. Union membership was banned at the government intelligence communications centre, GCHQ, while the 1984 Trade Union Act required secret ballots for union oficers and removed legal immunity from unions that held strikes without balloting. Caps were imposed on local taxation, and the metropolitan councils and the 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 7 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM 8 Introduction Greater London Council were abolished. The Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Single European Act (1986) opened up new directions in European and Irish policy, while a deregulation of inancial services in 1986, known as the ‘Big Bang’, transformed the City of London. The main crisis of the Parliament was the miners’ strike of 1984–5. The year-long strike, called in response to a national programme of pit closures, was one of the iconic events of the Thatcher era. It was only the second national coal strike since the 1920s, and the most recent shutdown had destroyed the Heath government in 1974. When a strike had seemed possible in 1981, the government had made concessions; but it used the time gained to build up coal reserves, improve strike planning and prepare for a future conlict. As David Howell shows in Chapter 8 of this volume, the miners’ defeat was not simply a case of Thatcherite resolution succeeding where Heathite prevarication had failed. The dispute in 1973–4 had been about pay, at a time when pay agreements were determined nationally, and this made it easier to achieve solidarity across the industry. That was harder to achieve when the issue was pit closures, for it required pits whose futures were apparently secure to strike in sympathy. The National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill, took the controversial step of striking without a national ballot, alienating public support and ultimately landing the union in court. Four nuclear power stations had opened since 1976, providing an alternative source of energy, while stockpiles of fuel and the increased supply of North Sea oil diminished the government’s reliance on coal. The political consequences of the strike were ambiguous. On the one hand, victory cemented Thatcher’s authority and exorcised the demons of 1973–4. Norman Tebbit later said that it broke ‘not just a strike, but a spell’, re-establishing the authority of government over organised labour.15 Yet the government’s approval ratings sank dramatically after the miners returned to work, falling from 42 per cent at the beginning of the strike to just 23 per cent by August 1985.16 Once beaten, the miners seemed more to be pitied than feared; and Thatcher’s rhetoric appeared, to some voters, unduly triumphalist. The violent scenes in and around the strike may have persuaded many voters that the battle needed to be won, but they also entrenched a perception that Thatcherism was socially divisive. In so doing, they undermined any lingering pretensions the government may have had to the mantle of ‘One Nation’. The third term (1987–90): decline and fall Nonetheless, when Parliament was dissolved in June 1987, the Conservatives won a second landslide victory. With 376 seats and 42.3 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 8 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 9 per cent of the vote, they had a parliamentary majority of 102, enabling them to undertake further radical reforms. The basic rate of income tax, reduced shortly before the election from 29p to 27p, was cut further to just 25p, while the top rate was slashed from 60p to 40p. New privatisation measures were introduced, and further reforms were signalled in local government. However, the economic climate was about to take a turn for the worse, with dramatic effects for the government’s popularity. The irst warning came with a stock market crash in October 1987, in which the FTSE lost a quarter of its value. Though the so-called ‘Lawson boom’ triggered 5 per cent growth in 1988, inlation reemerged in 1989, with a spike in the retail price index of 7.8 per cent. As interest rates climbed, reaching a high of 15 per cent, growth slowed to 2.3 per cent in 1989 and 0.8 per cent in 1990, before tipping back into recession in 1991. By 1989, the government’s ratings were down to −36, their lowest since 1981, plunging to −42 in 1990. Though Thatcher remained more popular than her party, her own ratings reached −32 in June 1990. As the climate worsened, old alliances began to fray. Howe was demoted in July 1989, removed from the Foreign Ofice to the less prestigious post of Leader of the House of Commons. Lawson resigned three months later, exasperated by the inluence of Alan Walters as the Prime Minister’s chief economic advisor. Thatcher was accused of an increasingly autocratic style and, in December 1989, she was challenged for the party leadership by Sir Anthony Meyer. Socially liberal and proEuropean, Meyer was easily defeated; but the failure of 60 Conservative MPs to back Thatcher was a straw in the wind. His action broke – as it was intended to do – the taboo against challenging a serving Prime Minister, paving the way for the events of 1990.17 Two issues proved especially toxic for the government: the relationship between Britain and Europe, and local taxation. The Community Charge – or ‘Poll Tax’, as it was widely known – was introduced in England and Wales in April 1990, having been trialled in Scotland a year earlier. It was a lat-rate tax levied on all adults, and was intended to make local councils more accountable inancially to their electorates. The tax was widely perceived as inequitable and, disastrously, initial bills proved higher for most households than the system it replaced. Opposition to the tax was widespread, and serious public disorder at an anti-Poll Tax demonstration in London in March 1990 encouraged a perception that the government was losing its grip. The Prime Minister also took an increasingly hostile stance towards the European Community. Thatcher had warned in 1988 against ‘a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels’; 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 9 4/25/2012 12:13:02 PM 10 Introduction and on 30 October 1990 she dismissed a whole series of proposals for Community reform, declaring robustly that ‘we have surrendered enough’.18 Two days later, Howe resigned from the government, accusing Thatcher of promoting a ‘nightmare image’ of ‘a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people’. In an electrifying resignation speech, Howe openly invited a leadership challenge: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conlict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’19 His appeal was answered by Michael Heseltine, a Thatcher critic since his resignation from the Cabinet in January 1986. Though Thatcher won 204 votes in the irst round of voting, 152 MPs voted for Heseltine, while 23 abstained or spoiled their papers. Thatcher’s authority had been damaged beyond repair; and, under pressure from the Cabinet, she announced her resignation on 22 November 1990. Thatcher’s resignation prompted extraordinary reactions from both supporters and opponents. At Glasgow Airport the news was announced over the tannoy, drawing cheers from travellers and impromptu parties around the baggage conveyers.20 The journalist Julie Burchill, by contrast, told The Guardian that it was ‘a terrible day for this country, I feel as if somebody’s banged me over the head with a mallet.’21 At Peterhouse, in Cambridge, the historians Niall Ferguson and John Adamson drank away their misery in Ferguson’s study, listening to ‘The Death of Siegfried’ from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. ‘As far as I was concerned’, Ferguson recalled, ‘that was the night that Britain gave up any hope of seriously reforming its post-war institutions.’22 Such divergent reactions have also been relected in commentary on the Thatcher era. Three themes in this commentary are of particular importance to the arguments developed in this book: an extraordinary emphasis on Thatcher as an individual; a preoccupation with the ideological claims asserted for her ministries; and a conviction that her governments had unusual historical signiicance. We will survey each of these in turn. The Thatcher effect One of Thatcher’s most striking characteristics was her capacity to inlame the imagination. No other Prime Minister has made such an impact on popular culture, or achieved such notoriety in the pop charts.23 For her critics, like the writer Hanif Kureishi, she embodied all ‘that was most loathsome in the English character’. A. N. Wilson, by contrast, thought her ‘truly magniicent on a human level’; her ‘qualities of personal greatness outshone what you might think of as her 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 10 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 11 “policies”’.24 Critics routinely called her a ‘fascist’, and the satirical programme Spitting Image developed a running joke in which Thatcher took instructions from an elderly Adolf Hitler. This emphasis on Thatcher as an individual owed much to her gender. Early proiles stressed her ‘femininity’ and ‘sex appeal’, and their incongruity with established models of authority.25 Thatcher’s femininity automatically set her apart from any of her predecessors. She had never worn uniform, or served her country in battle; she had never held high ofice, prior to the leadership; and she was poorly connected in Conservative clubland. By virtue of her sex, Thatcher was neither an oficer nor a gentleman, and the models of authority invoked by male leaders were largely closed to her. It is easy to overlook the extent to which Thatcher had to create her own model of female leadership, while operating in an overwhelmingly male environment. Her ventures in this regard naturally captivated public attention, marking her out – regardless of policy – as a new and unique political phenomenon. Thatcher was often described as a ‘presidential’ leader, though this understates the differences between a presidential and parliamentary system. Unlike her close contemporary, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher enjoyed an almost unlimited command over the legislature; but she had little power over the selection of MPs or civil servants. Ministerial appointments had to be drawn from a limited pool, with the result that she was often in a minority within her own Cabinet. The civil service could be supplemented with small numbers of political advisors, but Thatcher enjoyed none of the sweeping powers of patronage conferred upon the White House. This made it harder in Britain than in America to bring about a change of political culture. The corridors of Whitehall did not, like those on Capitol Hill, hum with energetic, young political staffers committed to a programme of reform.26 These constraints inevitably shaped Thatcher’s governing style. Cabinet government was undesirable, because she could not rely on the consistent support of her ministerial colleagues. In the face of this disadvantage – and from a desire to distinguish her tenure from that of Heath – she cultivated her own highly personal model of leadership, combining courage and determination with an astute reading of the political space available to her. At the same time she relied, to a greater extent than any Prime Minister since Gladstone, on a network of supporters outside her institutional base in Parliament. From the moment she challenged Heath in 1975, Thatcher attracted a personal court, whose members proudly self-identiied as ‘Thatcherites’. The term was signiicant, for unlike the labels with which it is conventionally associated – ‘neo-liberal’, ‘Conservative’ or ‘free marketeer’ – it implied a 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 11 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM 12 Introduction personal, rather than doctrinal, allegiance. The term was irst used in the 1975 leadership election, as an antonym to the ‘Heathmen’ loyal to the former Prime Minister. In this respect, it had an oppositional lavour from the outset; and that usage was to re-emerge after 1990, as a mark of allegiance to the deposed leader. ‘Thatcher’s people’ were not so much a ‘kitchen Cabinet’ – a private, policy-making unit of the kind maintained by Harold Wilson – as a network of cheerleaders, with a strong, public allegiance to Thatcher as an individual. Geoffrey Howe likened the Prime Minister to ‘Joan of Arc, invoking the authority of her “voices”’; but though their political inluence was far from negligible, these were prophets, not policy-makers.27 Their claim to articulate Thatcher’s private opinions, sometimes in opposition to the actions of her government, gave them the lavour of a rebel movement, only loosely connected with the oficial Conservative Party. The result was to establish ‘Thatcherism’ as a public discourse independent of oficial Conservative policy. As such, it drew into the party’s orbit a number of igures that did not self-identify as Conservatives, and it allowed Thatcher to act almost as a commentator upon her own ministry. In this respect, Thatcher served as the focal point for a set of overlapping institutions and allegiances. Her fall in November 1990 broke the link pin, sending the various groups scattering across the political landscape. Her eviction was, of course, a symptom of that breakdown as much as its cause; but the rupture allowed for new political alignments in the 1990s. Just as importantly, it ensured that Conservative politics in that decade would not be marked by the loyalty and party discipline with which it has customarily been associated. As ‘Thatcherites’ irst and Conservatives second, her followers established a new set of rules after her departure, with damaging consequences for her successor. Thatcherism and hegemony A second line of approach has focused neither on ‘Thatcher’ nor the ‘Thatcher era’, but on ‘Thatcherism’ as an ideological project. It has long been a cliché that Thatcher was the irst Prime Minister to give her name to an ideology, yet talk of ‘Thatcherism’ obscures as much as it reveals.28 Originally a pejorative term, the word was coined by the Labour Party and theorised by the Marxist left, before being adopted as a badge of honour by Thatcher and her associates.29 It has been used as a receptacle for a dizzying array of ideas and never achieved a stable meaning, even among Thatcher’s closest allies. Historians cannot simply abandon the word, for it was central to political discourse in the 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 12 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 13 1980s, but nor should they impose upon it a single, arbitrary deinition. ‘Thatcherism’ should be viewed as a discourse to be interrogated, not as an explanatory tool for the actions of the Thatcher governments. The irst substantial discussion of ‘Thatcherism’ was found in the pages of Marxism Today, and emphasised both the scale of Thatcherism’s ambitions and its place in a global movement of ideas. ‘Thatcherism’, for these writers, was reducible neither to the opinions and political style of Thatcher herself, nor to the actions of the governments she led. Instead, it stood as a local embodiment of a global revolution, making Thatcher the architect – to an extent unprecedented in British history – of an explicitly ideological reconiguration of domestic politics. Though the journal had an obvious ideological leaning, the intellectual calibre of its contributors was extraordinarily high. Both right and left drew freely on its insights, establishing Stuart Hall and Andrew Gamble in particular as the most authoritative early commentators on the Thatcher phenomenon.30 It was no accident that the theoretical analysis of Thatcherism had its origins on the Marxist left. Inluenced by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, Marxism Today inclined naturally to a reading of ideology as conditioned by material interests, paying close attention to the historical forces that underpinned high political innovations. It located Thatcherism at the convergence of three long-running trends: economic decline, or a breakdown of ‘Fordism’; the decay of the post-war social democratic consensus; and the beginning of a new phase in the Cold War.31 Linking global economic turbulence to a crisis of authority within the bourgeois state, Marxism Today theorised Thatcherism both as an ‘accumulation strategy’ – based on free markets and liberal economics – and as a new ‘hegemonic project’, directed at the exercise of political and moral leadership. It saw Thatcherism as an attempt to recast the electoral politics, ideological premises and policy regime of British government in such a way as to subvert the social democratic assumptions of the post-war era and to restore the Conservatives as the leading party of the British state. Neo-liberal ideas – of the sort espoused by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman – were said to have played a critical role in the formulation of this project. For this reason, Marxism Today privileged the afinities between Thatcherite Conservatism and the American ‘New Right’, while asserting a disjunction within British Conservatism before and after 1975.32 Jim Bulpitt, by contrast, located Thatcherism within a British tradition of Conservative statecraft. From the era of Salisbury onwards, Bulpitt argued, Conservatives had sought to insulate ‘high politics’ from the collision of class interests within the market. This was achieved, in 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 13 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM 14 Introduction part, by externalising responsibility for the economy to other agencies, so ‘depoliticising’ the issues most likely to undermine the ‘governing competence’ of Conservative governments. By the mid 1970s, however, the party had become trapped in a ‘statecraft game’ that Conservatives no longer believed they could win, since the basis of governing competence had become the successful management of corporatist bargaining. It was this, Bulpitt argued, that attracted Conservatives to neo-liberalism. The intellectual resources of the New Right were harvested by Thatcher and her allies because they offered a new technique for ‘depoliticising’ economic policy and therefore an alternative to the failures of Heathite statecraft. On this reading, ideology was instrumental − a new weapon to be mobilised behind the Conservative Party’s longstanding instinct for power.33 For these and many other writers, the Thatcher administrations aspired to more than the eficient conduct of government. Instead, they sought to re-engineer the structural, ideological and cultural foundations of British politics, allowing them ‘not merely to relect the wishes of the electorate, but to shape that electorate’.34 That view has also found an echo on the right, among those who supported and admired the Thatcher governments. Such writers have tended to deine Thatcherism against some prior cultural authority, from the ‘post-war consensus’ and the ‘permissive society’ to ideological infections like ‘declinism’ or ‘socialism’. Acknowledging the hegemonic aspirations of Thatcherism, they frame its ambitions in less pejorative terms. For Thatcher sympathisers, ‘hegemony’ could be understood as an attempt to restore the authority of Parliament, reasserting the institutions of the democratic state against unelected corporate interests. Shirley Robin Letwin has seen in Thatcherism a still more ambitious project to restore what she termed the ‘vigorous virtues’ to British society, undoing the moral corrosion of collectivist social democracy.35 Thatcherite politicians often framed their case in moral terms, vowing to ‘destroy socialism’, end the culture of decline and restore the traditional values of Judeo-Christian civilisation.36 As Thatcher herself told the Sunday Times in 1981, ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’37 Legacies of Thatcherism If Thatcherism is to be measured by the scale of its ambitions, can it be said to have achieved them? Some historians and political scientists have been sceptical of the transformative claims made for the Thatcher effect. This is not simply because statements and positions once thought 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 14 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 15 radical have become orthodox; nor is it solely because, after the end of the Cold War, free market liberalism was in the ascendancy across the world. It is also linked to a broader perspective on the period, which puts some of the more extravagant claims for the Thatcher effect in a more sobering context. As Richard Vinen has noted, the period between 1975 and 1990 witnessed extraordinary changes across the globe, from the Iranian Revolution and the massacre at Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire. In such company, privatisation and the sale of council houses take on a less epoch-making hue.38 Like any government, the Thatcher administrations were often pragmatic, improvising their agenda in response to the pressures of ofice. The consequence was a sometimes confused and contradictory policy legacy.39 For all the radicalism of Thatcher’s rhetoric, the welfare state remained largely intact. Measured as a proportion of GDP, taxation actually rose over the Thatcher era, from 38.8 per cent in 1979 to 39.3 per cent in 1990; and in the inancial year 1981–2, it rose as high as 43.7 per cent. Public expenditure increased throughout the irst term, reaching 48.5 per cent of GDP in 1982–3. As late as 1984–5 – perhaps the peak of ‘high Thatcherism’ – it was as high as 48.1 per cent, before falling to 40 per cent in 1990–91. Proposals for radical welfare reform were largely ignored; and Thatcher continued to insist that ‘the NHS is safe in our hands’.40 Despite her moral conservatism, and willingness to use the premiership as a pulpit, Thatcher made little effort to legislate on matters of personal morality; and the government’s response to the AIDS crisis focused on safer sex rather than abstention. In many respects, as Richard Vinen argues in Chapter 11 of this book, the most dramatic movement during the Thatcher era took place on the left. On foreign policy, defence and relations between Britain and Europe, it was Labour that abandoned the consensus, while Conservative positions remained broadly orthodox. Nonetheless, the scale of the Thatcher legacy should not be understated. Between 1979 and 1990, the state withdrew almost entirely from the direct control of industry, while shrinking signiicantly the state provision of housing. If the overall tax burden remained static, there was a marked shift from direct to indirect taxation, with the percentage of revenue raised from income tax down from 43.5 per cent in 1978 to just 33.1 per cent in 1990. The top rate of income tax fell from 83p to just 40p, while the basic rate fell by 8p in the pound. This was accompanied by a sharp rise in economic inequality: the incomes of the poorest ifth of the British population rose by between 6 and 13 per cent from 1979 to 1993, while the incomes of the richest ifth rose by more 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 15 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM 16 Introduction than 60 per cent.41 Public borrowing also fell: though the government ran deicits in all but two years of Thatcher’s premiership, the national debt declined as a proportion of GDP from 49 per cent in 1979 to 39 per cent in 1990. Perhaps the most dramatic change was the diminished power of organised labour, due to a combination of falling inlation, rising unemployment, the break-up of state monopolies and new trade union legislation. The number of days lost in strikes fell from 29 million in 1979 to just 761,000 in 1991, while union density in the workforce fell from 57 per cent to 42 per cent. Just as signiicant was a change in assumptions, in both industry and politics. Trade unions were never again viewed as partners in government; nor was governing competence measured by the capacity to work constructively with organised labour. By the time the Labour Party returned to ofice in 1997, it had accepted large parts of the Thatcher legacy. As for ‘socialism’, the word all but disappeared from British politics. It would be churlish, then, to deny the impact of the Thatcher governments; yet three qualiications should be borne in mind. First, there is little evidence of the broader cultural change so often associated with the Thatcher era. Survey evidence does not support the emergence of more individualist popular attitudes, and the Conservative share of the vote actually declined in each election from 1979 to 1992. On this evidence, the British electorate was not signiicantly ‘Thatcherised’; nor was it persuaded of the Thatcher governments’ ideological claims in relation to full employment and the welfare state.42 The political success of Thatcherism owed a considerable debt to the electoral system, and to a constitution that permitted radical policy change on the basis of 42–44 per cent of the popular vote. Second, it is important to distinguish the impact of the Thatcher governments from those social, economic and generational changes that coincided with its period in ofice. The increasing opportunities for working mothers, the rise in teenage pregnancy, the decline of traditional manufacturing industry and the rise of the service sector – all these developments were in progress before Thatcher took ofice, and operated autonomously upon British society. Any government spanning a period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s would have experienced seismic changes. For all the power of ‘Thatcherism’ as an idea, it should not be made an explanatory tool for every social development. Third, many of the changes associated with ‘Thatcher’s Britain’ were not to the Prime Minister’s liking. By 1990 divorce, abortion and teenage pregnancy were both more common and more socially acceptable. Church attendance continued to decline, while crime increased by an 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 16 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 17 average of 5–7 per cent each year.43 Despite Thatcher’s own emphasis on thrift, personal borrowing escalated dramatically. In the decade after 1978, non-housing loans by UK banks rose from £4 billion to £28 billion, while housing loans increased more than tenfold to £63 billion.44 The Conservatives had promised a manufacturing revival in 1979, but the number of workers employed in manufacturing industry fell by 42 per cent over the 1980s. Thatcherism had also promised to restore the Anglo-Scottish Union, after both major parties had lirted with devolution. Support for Scottish independence, however, rose from 14 per cent in 1979 to 33 per cent in 1987. If ‘Thatcherism’ aimed at the restoration of the traditional family, the reinvigoration of industry and the strengthening of the Anglo-Scottish Union, its success had been limited indeed. Thatcherism in historical perspective As the Thatcher era becomes the province of historians, new questions are being asked and new evidence assessed. The history of Thatcherism is still an emerging ield, but two lines of inquiry have already become prominent: the place of Thatcherism within the Conservative tradition; and its emergence as a viable political project in the context of the 1970s. Locating Thatcherism within the Conservative tradition is an especially vexed task, for it depends not only on one’s view of the Thatcher decade but also on how one reads Conservative history. Nonetheless, several historians have sought to challenge the widespread perception of Thatcherism as an alien intrusion into a hitherto pragmatic creed.45 The main tenets of Thatcherism, it is argued, are deeply embedded in Conservative history: from Burke’s defence of the individual and Peel’s free trade reforms to the delationary politics of the inter-war period and the Conservative grassroots campaigns against inlation in the 1950s and 1960s.46 From this perspective, it is the emollient Conservatism of the Macmillan era that appears exceptional. Among historians sympathetic to Thatcherism, this interpretation could lead to an indictment of the ‘guilty men’ in charge of the party after 1945. As Andrew Roberts put it: ‘Instead of treating it as the freak result it was, an entire generation of Tory politicians was emasculated by the 1945 election result, especially over the issues of nationalisation, the growth of the State and trade union reform.’47 Others have doubted whether pre-1945 Conservatism can be mapped so easily on to Thatcherism. For Andrew Adonis, Conservative political strategy for most of the twentieth century involved accommodating 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 17 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM 18 Introduction the agenda of its opponents. After its traumatic, Edwardian confrontation with ‘New Liberalism’, inter-war Conservatism was cautious in its economics and conciliatory in its governing strategy, offering a rhetorically inclusive, progressive Conservatism as the best antidote to socialism. On this reading, Thatcherism marked a new development in the party’s history: an attempt to win elections on the basis of an uninhibited liberal market prospectus and, ultimately, to remake the sociological foundations on which previous electoral strategy had been premised.48 The relationship between Thatcherism and the Conservative tradition is not simply of academic interest. It was keenly contested during the Thatcher era itself, for the claim that Thatcherism marked a radical disjunction in British Conservatism was not ideologically neutral. Rather, it was promoted by two distinct groups, each with a political purpose to serve. The irst were those critics of Thatcher who had been frozen out of the party hierarchy, of whom the most articulate spokesman was Ian Gilmour. By extruding Thatcher from the Conservative tradition, and aligning themselves with an older, purportedly more authentic Conservatism, ‘One Nation’ Tories were able to legitimise their dissent and to hold out the promise of a future restoration.49 Thatcher’s cheerleaders, by contrast, presented the ‘wets’ as the alien intrusion, an accommodationist old pals battalion said to have dominated the party since 1945. Thatcherism could then be portrayed as ‘the reversion to an older tradition’ of Conservatism, in which ‘the false lessons taught by the war have begun to be unlearned’. This allowed Thatcherites to distance themselves from the errors of the Heath government and the electoral failures of the period since 1959.50 Historians have become increasingly sensitive to the political charge carried by these debates, viewing terms like ‘One Nation’ not as ixed camps on the party battleield, but as contested terrain, to be fought over by political pugilists.51 A second line of enquiry focuses on how the Thatcherite approach became politically possible in the 1970s, a question addressed not only by historians, but by political scientists inluenced by historicist methodologies.52 Such an analysis locates the emergence of Thatcherism in the economic and political crises of the 1970s. In this respect it shares common ground with the writers of Marxism Today, though it focuses less on material change than on the capacity of the Conservatives to ‘construct’ or ‘narrate’ these crises through the shrewd use of ideological frames. This has encouraged a greater sensitivity to the ideological charge carried by narratives such as ‘decline’, and their role in structuring contemporary interpretations of crisis.53 Such analyses 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 18 4/25/2012 12:13:03 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 19 have necessarily emphasised the contingency of Thatcherism, crediting its ascendancy as much to political agency as to structural economic change. Making Thatcher’s Britain This book seeks to build on and extend the nascent historical interest in the Thatcher era, exploiting the thousands of documents published by the Thatcher Foundation and the rolling release of oficial papers under the ‘thirty year rule’. The book also aims to broaden the focus of historical investigation, reaching beyond the traditional emphasis on statecraft and political economy. To this end, the volume explores issues of class, race and gender; sets Thatcherism within an international context; and pays attention to each of the ‘four nations’ that comprise the United Kingdom. Part I examines the ideas and inluences that shaped Thatcherism as it emerged in the 1970s. Robert Saunders opens this line of enquiry by investigating how Margaret Thatcher responded to the economic and political crises of the 1970s, showing how she reinterpreted them rhetorically in ways that widened the political space available to her. Ben Jackson then assesses the inluence of the neo-liberal thinktanks that acquired ever greater ideological heft from the 1960s onwards, revealing how they mobilised both inancial and intellectual resources to re-shape the outlook of British media and political elites. Jim Tomlinson gives an account of the politics of inlation in the 1970s, revealing the strategic, rather than strictly economic, thinking that governed Thatcherite policy prescriptions. Matthew Grimley explores the moral and religious dimensions of Thatcherism, locating it within a wider reaction against permissiveness in the 1970s. On this reading, Thatcherism was a response not only to economic crisis, but also to a perceived moral crisis. Camilla Schoield concludes this section by looking at the inluence of Enoch Powell on Margaret Thatcher and her allies and inds a more complicated relationship than is commonly assumed. Powellism and Thatcherism, she notes, were separated by important ideological differences, particularly in relation to the status of the nation. Taken together, the chapters in Part I show how both the form and content of Thatcherism were shaped by its historical context, acted upon by a range of forces and issues that came to prominence in the 1970s. Yet Thatcherism was not simply a product of these contexts. Through rhetoric, strategy and policy formation, it responded to its environment in ways that expanded the terrain of the possible. 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 19 4/25/2012 12:13:04 PM 20 Introduction Part II turns to the impact of the Thatcher years on British society and political culture. Laura Beers analyses the differing reception of Thatcherism by men and women, focusing on Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to female voters. Jon Lawrence and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite show how Thatcherism recast the dominant social discourses of British public politics, substituting a language of ‘ordinary working families’ for the more familiar notions of class that had hitherto governed the post-war British political imagination. David Howell casts new light on the archetypal class conlict of the Thatcher years – the miners’ strike – by demonstrating that commentators who focus on Thatcherite resolution have neglected the complex forces at work within mining trade unionism in this period. The National Union of Mineworkers was riven by signiicant internal disagreements and could not mount as powerful a collective response on closures as it had done in the 1970s on pay. Richard Finlay investigates why Thatcherism gained less traction in Scotland and Wales, arguing that Thatcher embraced a particular form of unitarianism that set her at odds with other unionist traditions. He shows why, in spite of their shared rejection of Thatcherite Conservatism, the politics of Scotland and Wales diverged from one another with respect to the strength of nationalist sentiment and popular commitment to some form of home rule. Marc Mulholland chronicles the complex evolution of the Irish question during Thatcher’s time in ofice, and the dilemmas it posed for a government led by a Prime Minister so staunchly committed to a certain vision of British unionism. Overall, the chapters in Part II emphasise the diversity of the Thatcher effect across different classes, regions and social identities. As these chapters make clear, to ask ‘What is Thatcherism?’ or ‘What is the Thatcher legacy?’ evokes a further set of questions: where? when? and for whom?54 Part III places Thatcherism in an international context. Richard Vinen locates Thatcherism within the foreign and domestic policy debates surrounding the Cold War. He concludes that, in crucial respects, the Thatcher governments should be seen as upholders of the establishment consensus rather than radical challengers thereof. Andrew Gamble reconstructs Thatcherite perceptions of Europe and America during the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the neo-Thatcherite orthodoxy of the 1990s: that a clear choice had to be made between closer integration with Europe and stronger relations with the United States. Stephen Howe takes up the question of empire, which sits alongside Europe and the United States as one of the three referents that have historically shaped Britain’s role in the world. Howe surveys the legacy of empire 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 20 4/25/2012 12:13:04 PM Varieties of Thatcherism 21 in the Thatcher years, not only for foreign and domestic policy but also for the shaping of memory and national identity. The chapters in Part III therefore signiicantly widen the ield of discussion of Thatcherism, recasting the Thatcher era as a consequential episode in the twentiethcentury transformation of Britain’s place in the world. We do not pretend, in this volume, to undertake a comprehensive survey of the Thatcher era. Many important themes are underrepresented; others are absent altogether. More could certainly be said about privatisation, policing and the welfare state; while environmentalism, the AIDS crisis and popular culture all deserve volumes of their own. By offering the case studies included in this volume, we aim simply to illustrate the varieties of Thatcherism and to offer a range of historical perspectives. We hope that this will encourage further scholarship in the historical study of Thatcherism, as archives and papers become more readily available, and we look forward to learning from the results. 9781107012387int_p1-22.indd 21 4/25/2012 12:13:04 PM