Britain Today 9 : The Thatcher period

It was not only the overwhelming presence of Mrs. Thatcher that dominated the 1980s. From the day she entered Downing Street, the public increasingly became aware of Thatcherism as an idea, a view of the world which spread rapidly beyond the political arena to the regions and nations of Britain. From the start, a huge proportion of the population despised everything she represented, but she sailed on nevertheless, benefitting from the opposition split between Labour, Liberal and, from 1981, Social Democratic Parties. Spurning the centrism and circumspection of her post-1950 predecessors, she set about the immediate transformation of the British political landscape. Britain’s ageing and often uncompetitive industries were to be shocked into the harsh realities of the law and of the marketplace. It was to be this market power and a willingness to put restrictions on the supply of money, that were to be the chief weapons in bringing about a sea change in the role of the Trade Unions, and especially of Trade Union leaders, in Britain’s economic life.

While Mrs. Thatcher determinedly applied her strict prescription for the national economy, vilification mounted in tandem with the speedy and relentless rise in the unemployment rate which inevitably followed. It took courage to stick to her transformative approach, which sought to bring new life to a business climate which had too often become listless, fearful and unable to compete on the world stage. In reverting to what were unfashionable classical economic ideas, where successful enterprise was rewarded and where continuous loss-making would lead inexorably to shut-down and closure, she had little support from economists and by no means full backing from within the leadership of her own party. The harshest test of Mrs. Thatcher’s stamina and endurance arose from the repeated news of large-scale redundancy that fell heavily on local communities which had been built on particular industries over long periods of time. Mrs. Thatcher’s confrontation with the way of doing things that had become established between the 1950s and the 1970s came to a head with the miners’ strike of 1984/5. The miners’ union had won twice in clashes with a Conservative government, in 1972 and 1973/4, on the latter occasion with the added bonus of replacing the mildly conservative Heath government with a familiar and more congenial Labour one led again by Harold Wilson. The scenario of 1984 was quite different. Now it was Mrs. Thatcher and the government which had stockpiled in readiness, which had planned ahead, and which would not compromise.

The recovery of the economy from 1982/3 was a signal event in Britain’s post-war history. At the same time, there were signs of movement on the world stage that suggested movement in what was widely felt to be the stalemate of the Cold War. From the outset, the new United States president, Ronald Reagan, displayed a confidence and panache that had been missing during America’s agony of disentanglement from Vietnam over the previous decade. In Britain Mrs Thatcher was called upon to fight openly for the principles of sovereignty and the rule of law following the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Given the willingness of Reagan’s US to engage in a relentless programme of arms expenditure, the circumstances developed in which this key alliance of Western leaders was able to exert influence on a financially pressed, and newly flexible, Soviet leadership. The programme of radical reform that ensued was to mushroom rapidly into a large-scale dismantling of the entire Soviet edifice over the period 1986 to 1990. This was an outcome which was astonishing in itself, and one which had not been predicted by those who had accustomed themselves to the prospect of a semi-permanent division of the world between capitalism and communism. The need for reform and renewal which was felt widely in the Soviet world became linked to an appreciation felt by many in the Iron Curtain countries for the openness and innovation evident in the daily life of the West. The key fact about the Soviet collapse was that, following the dismantling of the Soviet system in 1990/91, there were few who sought to replace the system with some form of improved communism. All of the states involved embarked fairly rapidly on reforms which opened the the way to private enterprise. Not least in her various journeys to what had become the Soviet Empire in the 1980s, in which she herself represented this different message and spirit to the Russian public, Mrs. Thatcher had played a significant and historic role.

While it is granted that dramatic changes took place on the world scene in this period, in what way had the nature of everyday life in Britain and the US been changed? To answer, it would not be unfair to point out that in the period 1979-1990, while Mrs Thatcher provided the spark for economic revitalisation, and while the spirit of enterprise and risk was rediscovered, her efforts did little at all to reverse or even halt the advance of the cultural revolution that had been so successful since the mid- to late-1950s.

The liberal-left leaning transformation in the way of life continued as before, with the hatred felt widely towards Mrs. Thatcher serving, if anything, to embed the new guidelines for the national culture, especially amongst the many young people who viewed the increasingly imperious prime minister as being “out of touch” with the times. This had major social consequences. By the beginning of the 1990’s, a situation had developed, helped enormously by the all-pervasive modernising trends in education and child-rearing, in which much of the youth of the country had either forgotten (or never ingested) what had by now become the former dominant culture. The change had involved not just the gradual erosion of the Christian underpinning of social life. It also affected the prevailing and shared sense of everyday irony and humour, the beliefs regarding individual obligation and responsibility both to family and community, and the willing participation in the longstanding hierarchies of social life. All of these had contributed massively to the former sense of belonging.

The victory in the Cold War, unexpected at the end as it was, had been the product of a long-term strategy, in which belief in the Soviet system as a workable and sustainable system for the organisation of society had been largely discredited in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Russia itself. Its quick collapse was a testament to the shakiness of its foundations, a fact which had been missed by many in the Western commentariat over several decades. But, as it turned out, the effort, risk and long-term planning on the part of the West which had made possible the defeat of an entire social system, one which had spread over half of Europe, and which had presented a living threat to all aspects of Western life, meant little in the short months in which the old order was dissolved. There was, now, no dramatic storming of the Winter Palace as in 1917, only the opening of a hole in the city-wide wall which allowed people to flow freely through and across. In the West, apart from the rather academic musings from one historian who pronounced on “the end of history”, this shattering of the Cold War produced both surprise and a vague anticipation of an ideology-free era where a sense of there being only “one world” would replace the confrontation of opposing systems of life. In Britain itself, it rapidly became clear that the new cultural world-view had proved itself capable of coping easily both with the overthrow of Communism as a world system and also with Mrs. Thatcher’s radical attempt to transform Britain’s long-suffering post-war economy and cure its social malaise. Not only did it cope: it continued to thrive. How could this be?

For many, the new culture appeared to have little to do with the major world events. Rather, it appeared to represent simply an extension of personal freedoms, with fairness for all, coupled with a drawing of the curtains across the stuffiness of old England. And it was true that, for the majority of people, the new social order, the new guidelines for how to think and act, how to detect good from bad, were not directed specifically against capitalism, or against socialism. The new world-view was, however, most definitely at odds with Mrs. Thatcher, and all that she represented. Her departure from office late in 1990 coincided with the closing down of the Soviet Union and seemed to mark the turning of a page in Britain’s national life. Of greater significance historically (given the nature of the struggles over identity and the nation-state which were to come) was the fact that her resignation was directly linked to her objection to and rising irritation with the growing power and ambitions for control of the (then) European Community.

The new cultural order welcomed the overturning of the totalitarian Soviet regimes in Europe, and it also welcomed the simultaneous (and connected) movement in South Africa towards majority black rule. Now settled and “embedded” in Western society, it became evident that this new world-view and code of conduct were intended as replacements in toto for the way of life and attitudes and assumptions inherited from parents and grandparents. The new social outlook can best be described as the latest, and, arguably, most ambitious expression of liberal Utopianism, one which, sadly but characteristically, would find no place for doubt, questioning, or the kind of common-sense reflection still common amongst the mass of people. The belief in human rights, non-discrimination, and the equality of all races and peoples (“one race, the human race”) were cardinal elements in this new order, but so too was the guilt (on the part specifically of white British and American people), a guilt which would only increase with the constant and easy association of the colonial era with criminal brutality, theft and exploitation.

Individual emotion played a big part in the new, a world in which self-expression, creativity, passionate feelings, and “finding your true self” predominated. These feelings on the part of the individual extended, through the education handed down, to an appreciation of the horrors of the world of our ancestors, where inequality, racism and sexism, mass poverty and straightforward greed abounded. Worse still was the message that many of the ideas underpinning these historic realities persisted today, either expressed openly or cloaked behind politeness and “good manners”. The active response to all of this seemed a curious one (though, on reflection, it was in line with the theme of Utopianism). As part of the contemporaneous rise in academia of the “social sciences”, there grew an all-pervasive tendency to place great faith in the essentially scientific basis of the new order of ideas. The unpleasant and inhumane elements of social life which lay in our past but which had continued in some form in the present, were open to rectification through the advance of science, which would come to be our guiding light in the secular society now being forged. This belief placed in a world of objective science (something not notably shared by the many millenarian movements of previous eras) added a dangerous element to the newly-supreme utopian world-view. A social climate was created where, for example, the tendency for individuals to stray from the path of right thinking, or to fall into the world of crime, would perforce become a subject for scientific examination and rectification. The consequent discovery of scientific “truths” would then translate into doctrines about the “right” way to raise and treat children and about the effects of growing up in deprived circumstances. “Evidence-based research” would be adduced to “prove”, for example, that unequal societies were more unhappy, conflict-ridden and liable to civil discord.

This aspect of the new culture owed much to Marx’s belief that his work involved uncovering the scientific truth of human conflict and social change. The echoes of Marx’s categorical pronouncements and resolute certainty are to be found sprinkled liberally across the different aspects of the new culture. Whether it be the nature of family life, the question of discriminatory behaviour, of educational practice, or a hundred other social issues, the new way or view was always to be presented as an advance based on expert analysis, and therefore, in its essentials, unchallengeable. Debate then became relegated to the details alone, and we find the situation frequently arising where all the people on a panel discussing a current social or political topic hold fundamentally the same world-view. What is most telling about these kind of discussions is the way that no-one amongst those holding the majority or dominant outlook seems to notice the absence of any fundamentally contrary view. It is not surprising then, when young people, encouraged by their education into seeing these situations as normal, become horrified when a genuinely different opinion is expressed, and we find the lurch to the practice of shouting-down, to “no-platforming” and to the creation of “safe spaces”.

Lurking in the undergrowth of the new culture is Marx’s concept of false consciousness. If people insist on holding views or taking actions which have been shown, according to the appropriate scientific opinion, to be incorrect, then there must be something wrong with them. If they think the wrong way then, at best, they must have been misled. Better education generally and re-education (for those of advancing years) are required. In extreme situations , the verdict will be that the individuals or groups concerned are simply not “keeping up”, are easily hoodwinked, or are basically ignorant or wilful. A case in point was the way in which the British working-class (formerly praised as “the salt of the earth” when they overwhelmingly cast their votes for the Labour Party) were traduced when many amongst them started embracing what the new culture defined as unacceptable attitudes. The false consciousness explanation was, of course, to find its full flourishing a generation after Mrs. Thatcher, in the period before and after the landmark European referendum of 2016. The long-term danger of this drift into the strange world of liberal-left totalitarianism was then to be exposed for all to see.

The yawning gap left when the Christian framework for national life was dismantled needed to be filled. The fact that in the course of everyday life, the new culture was so reliant on superficiality, on instant reactions and on celebrity contributed to its underlying problem. It was, essentially, brittle. Being fundamentally less sure of its position meant that it soon became more intolerant and authoritarian than Christianity had been in recent times in Britain. The rejection of the Christian concepts of the impossibility of human perfection, of sin, of judgment, and of the belief that something existed beyond the secular activity of human beings brought about a predicament of massive proportions. Without the need to lead a “god-fearing” life (given there was now nothing to “fear”), the only feasible way forward lay in re-establishing coherence and integrity through a new orthodoxy, a new set of “correct” ideas. Genuine freedom of thought and a real diversity of opinion, as replacements for the old social forms and manners, would be nothing but a pipe-dream.

The reasons why Mrs Thatcher’s radical policies had failed to undermine or slow the onward march of this new culture are perhaps linked with the way both her policies and style tended to concentrate attention much more on the individual than on the links which bind people together in families, neighbourhoods and through spontaneous shared interests. Her attempt to focus attention on the importance of individuals and families taking responsibility for their actions was, it is true, unfairly caricatured by the twisting of her comment that “there is no such thing as society”. But it was nevertheless evident that that the long-standing cultural virtues of restraint, quietness, modesty and above all the readiness to listen, to understand and to debate, continued to wither away through the 1980s. And while Mrs. Thatcher was right to point repeatedly to the need for the individual and the family to take responsibility for their lives, and not to look to others to blame, many of the central questions concerning the community and nation as a whole, matters which in turn affected the morale and outlook of the individual and family, were neglected.

By 1990/91 it was becoming clear that a new era was beginning on the international stage. The great divide between the capitalist world and all those societies “behind the Iron Curtain” was, apparently, over. Given the mixture of surprise and shock felt by many, it took time to digest and to get used to life post-Cold War. The task for the new social order in countries such as Britain and the US was to adapt to geopolitical change in ways that would preserve and foster the key features of their ongoing cultural revolution. The end of the Cold War seemed to represent a victory for liberalism and this assessment served only to feed the Utopianism that already underpinned the now-dominant world view. The way was open for a new era in which all the divisions of the postwar period could be set aside in favour of an altogether more co-operative world where emphasis could be placed on long-standing problems of world poverty and deprivation. In Britain and the US, the reality was that the way was clear for a continuance of the cultural revolution. With radical division over economic systems (apparently) in the past, focus could now be placed on identifying and battling discrimination, on promoting individual dignity, self-expression and human and “group” rights. Modernisation in religion had meant the promotion of love and good and the phasing out of evil and judgement. With the cultural transformation, rights and feelings became the watchwords at the expense of duties and obligations.

The end of East-West confrontation would make possible the world of the creative self-organising personality who lived according to the ideal of the equality of all people and of the freedom of the individual to move “without borders”. Both the old adherence to the nation-state and to patriotic feeling could be safely wheeled off the stage, to join the now largely discarded Christian religion. All had played out their role. Even the intractable ideological conflict in South Africa, where a Calvinist-dominated Afrikaner nationalism had stubbornly resisted the liberalising trends in Western policy for 40 years, seemed now to be resolving itself with the the initiating of a new ‘rainbow” social order in which the liberal individual would be given free rein.

In the world of British politics, the radical reforms taking place within the Labour Party in the second part of the 80s, coupled with the emergence of new younger political figures, seemed in the early 1990s to herald a period in which, for the first time, the political order could itself be at one with the new culture and the new code of behaviour and belief. But with John Major taking the helm of a Conservative Party which was still well installed in government, would this new era in British political life come to pass?