No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  Generally speaking, on economic issues the government succeeded in carrying public opinion with it. Its trade union legislation, the tax reforms, the selling-off of nationalized industries and the attacks on local government spending all provoked ferocious opposition, but the opposition never really had public opinion behind it until Mrs Thatcher overreached herself in 1989 by introducing the poll tax.

  In the circumstances, it might be expected that right-wing opinion would also carry the day on other issues, such as sexual morality or race relations. Perhaps surprisingly, this did not happen. People who were basking in the experience of having ‘loadsamoney’ may have been selfish, but they were not trying to force everyone else to be like them. Race and sexuality were the greatest social issues of the 1980s, and on both counts society was more liberal at the end of the decade than at the start. In the final years of Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment an increasing number of white Britons saw him as a prisoner of conscience, despite the prime minister’s unchanging belief that he was the head of a terrorist organization. It is claimed that gays suffered a setback at the government’s hands with the introduction of Clause 28, which banned local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality. Gay men suffered something much worse than a setback in the 1980s, not from bigots, but from the AIDS epidemic, while Clause 28 had almost no effect on them. The only harm it really did was to the Conservative Party, which had to spend years trying to shake off its reputation as a party for bigots.

  Though there was a great deal more political activism in the 1980s than in the two decades that followed – more marching, protesting and standing on picket lines – it should not be forgotten that most people did not become involved if they could avoid it, but got on contentedly with their lives. Despite the economic and political upheavals, there were plenty of visible signs that life was getting better, including the arrival of new time-saving or leisure-improving technology. The first video cassette recorders went on sale in 1978, giving rise to the possibility that people could free themselves from the television schedules and watch the programmes of their choice at the time of their choosing. The cheapest VCR advertised in the Birmingham Evening Mail in January 1980 cost £172.80, whereas a washing machine or a fridge freezer could be bought for £140, and a black-and-white television for £70. It was during 1980 that the first affordable home computer, the Sinclair ZX80, went on sale; it had no sound or colour, and was very slow, but it cost less than £100. People in the larger towns had recently been introduced to the new machines in the walls of banks, where they could use plastic cards to withdraw cash, but never more than £50 at a time. Shoppers who visited the Keymarkets store in Spalding, Lincolnshire, would have noticed something unusual. In 1979, this shop was the first in the UK to introduce scanners that read the barcodes on certain products, starting with Melrose tea bags. In 1980, barcodes spread for the first time beyond the grocery trade, when they were introduced by WH Smith.

  For male university students, the most interesting innovation of 1980 was the noisy, bulky Space Invaders machines that turned up in every student bar. For teenage schoolchildren, the biggest intellectual challenge of 1980 was trying to solve Rubik’s Cube. This new craze was a three-dimensional puzzle, devised in the 1970s by a Hungarian sculptor and licensed by Ideal Toys in 1980, comprising six faces covered with nine stickers in six different colours, which could be turned independently, mixing the colours to one of 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations. The challenge was to turn them back again so that each face was a solid colour once more. By September 1981, 50m cubes had been sold, fifty books had been written about it and there was a magazine devoted specifically to the cube, edited by David Singmaster, a mathematics lecturer from London’s South Bank Polytechnic. Children were better at it than grown ups; some could solve it in seconds while an adult could sweat unavailingly for hours. A twelve-year-old boy named Patrick Bossert, from Ham, Surrey, devised a system for solving the cube in thirty-five seconds, which he wrote down on two sides of A4 and sold to other children at his school for 30p a copy; Penguin bought the rights, and You Can do the Cube sold 500,000 copies in four weeks, and 1.4m in all, making it the fastest selling title since Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Its young author had to take action in the high court to prevent pirated copies going on sale.12 Hobbies such as this were more fun and less divisive than politics.

  Even in 1981, when the inner cities were torn apart by race riots, there was a yearning in society to put aside ideology and civil conflict, and muddle along together. In that year, for the first and only time in the twentieth century, a new political party made an impact on national politics. This was the meteoric Social Democratic Party (SDP), formed in reaction to the left-right divide separating Labour and Conservatives, and which looked briefly as if it might be the next governing party, but which had gone out of existence by 1989. The same longing for something uncontroversial and unifying explains the astonishing popularity of the royal wedding of 1981, and the cult of Princess Diana. It also goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenon of Live Aid, which offered the young a way to be involved in one of the great issues of the time, without being divisive or dull.

  In 1980, the developed world was cut in two by the military border that ran through Germany, between the communist and capitalist blocs. They had learnt to coexist, but no one knew how long peaceful coexistence could last. The capitalist system was more dynamic and more successful economically than its rival, but once communism took hold of a country, it seemed that nothing could turn it back. No established communist system had ever been dismantled or overthrown from within. People expected this contest between rival systems to continue indefinitely. Instead, they saw it coming to a quick, decisive and non-violent end. As communism rolled out of Eastern Europe in 1989, an American philosopher forecast that the end of history was approaching13 and that every other political system in the world would evolve into the western model of liberal capitalism.

  These developments were mirrored in domestic politics. Since 1945, the UK had edged towards becoming more ‘socialist’, with free medicine, free schools, state pensions and more than 40 per cent of the country’s industrial capacity owned by the state. Within the Labour Party, there was a vigorous movement led by Tony Benn to give the country another sharp push in the same direction. Mrs Thatcher, however, was determined to ‘roll back the frontiers of socialism’,14 which she succeeded in doing. Though her economic legacy is highly controversial, no government has attempted to undo it. The Thatcherite mix of privatized utilities, low taxes for the highly paid and restrictive trade union legislation survived even thirteen years of Labour government. The end of ideology changed the language. Words like ‘Marxism’ and ‘capitalism’ went out of everyday use, while ‘political correctness’ and ‘spin doctor’ entered the language, as people stopped thinking about where politics might go and turned their thoughts to personal behaviour and the political process.

  More change and more conflict were crammed into the 1980s, particularly the first half of the decade, than any other decade in the second half of the twentieth century. Out of political chaos, Britain arrived at a settlement that lasted, for better or worse. The way we live now follows directly from the tumultuous events of the 1980s.

  CHAPTER 1

  A LADY NOT FOR TURNING

  In the middle of the afternoon of Friday, 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher stood outside 10 Downing Street and recited a quotation attributed to St Francis of Assisi:

  Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.

  Where there is error, may we bring truth.

  Where there is doubt, may we bring faith.

  And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

  The Conservatives had won 339 seats in the House of Commons, with Labour reduced to 269. For the first time in British history, a woman was to hold office as prime minister. It was this, more than the change in the government’s political colour, which was the day’s main talking point; people did not realize that th
ey were at a milestone in British political history, as significant as the Labour victory in 1945. That inveterate diarist Kenneth Williams, too busy during the day of the election to check that Thatcher had won, was pleased and impressed by what he saw on the evening news. He noted: ‘Maggie has seen the Queen and is now the first woman PM in Europe and it’s the first time since Macmillan that we’ve had a leader with style and dignity.’1 The playwright Lee Hall witnessed a contrasting reaction in Newcastle upon Tyne: ‘My abiding memory of my first year in secondary school in 1979 was the teachers’ long faces the day after Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister. There was a real sense of despondency which I did not understand.’2

  But even the despondent teachers in north-east England could take comfort in the thought that a lot of prime ministers had come and gone during their lives. Mrs Thatcher was the fifth in sixteen years – the sixth, if Harold Wilson was counted twice. Politics had been like a swing door since the Labour victory of 1964, with one party governing for four to six years then the other taking over. There was no reason to think this government would last beyond 1984, or make much impact on society. Its manifesto was no more right wing than the one on which the Conservatives had won the 1970 election, which was abandoned when it collided with reality, as was that ‘irreversible shift in wealth and power towards working people’ that Labour had promised in 1974. As Mrs Thatcher stood waving on the Downing Street steps, the men in the picture – her husband Denis and two uniformed police officers – towered over her; and with her rigid hairdo, short jacket, pleated skirt, her high heels that threatened to topple her forwards, her drooping handbag, high-pitched voice and earnest, humourless, hectoring manner, the woman did not look as if she was built to last. Tony Benn, then an ex-cabinet minister, was brimming with optimism. After surrendering his Whitehall pass and seals of office, he recorded: ‘This is probably the beginning of the most creative period of my life. I am one of the few ex-ministers who enjoy opposition and I intend to take full advantage of it.’3 Within a couple of years, Thatcher and her government were so unpopular that it would have taken a very bold punter to bet on their survival.

  The Bennite Left and the Conservative Party agreed on one thing: there was a serious crisis that required drastic action. Margaret Thatcher’s and Tony Benn’s generation was brought up in a world in which the United Kingdom was one of the superpowers, with an empire on which the sun never set. In their lifetime, that empire had been reduced to scattered fragments and the British economy had slipped remorselessly down the international league table. Between 1954 and 1977, Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) had grown by 310 per cent, France’s by 297 per cent and the UK’s by just 75 per cent. In 1954, the British workers were substantially better paid than their equivalents in France or Germany. By 1977, average wages in Germany were nearly double those in the UK. ‘We are not only no longer a world power, but we are not in the first rank even as a European one. You have only to move about western Europe nowadays to realize how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours,’ is the lament of Sir Nicholas Henderson, the British ambassador to France, in a ‘valedictory’ written for the eyes of his superiors at the Foreign Office as he approached retirement.4

  Sir Nicholas, who was known also as ‘Nicko’, was a seasoned diplomat whose ‘professionalism, cultivated tastes, rumpled charm and attractive if studied eccentricity won him trust and affection wherever he was posted’.5 He was there when Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee joined Harry Truman and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference to discuss the shape of post-war Europe. His valedictory was not meant to be published but was leaked a month after the Conservatives came to power. Mrs Thatcher praised it as a ‘very, very interesting dispatch’; the new foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, told Nicko privately that it was ‘identical’ to the Conservative election manifesto,6 and instead of being made to retire, as expected, Nicko was promoted to the most prestigious job in the diplomatic service, as ambassador in Washington, so we can take his words as an accurate reflection of the Conservative state of mind in 1979.

  A variety of reasons have been given for Britain’s relative decline after the Second World War, including a very high military budget. Sir Nicholas singled out three reasons that should be addressed, and it can be assumed that the new government agreed with his choices. They were a weak foreign policy, poor industrial management and, particularly, the power of the British trade unions. When French or German workers went on strike it got them nowhere, he claimed, whereas ‘nearly always in Britain in recent years a strike has led to a very favourable settlement for the employees’.

  A few months before Nicko wrote his valedictory, Britain had been through the now infamous ‘winter of discontent’, which began in autumn 1978 and lasted until the following February, when there was a rash of strikes that did severe damage to the reputation of the Labour government. This period acquired an almost mythical status throughout the 1980s, as Conservatives referred to it again and again as a dreadful warning of what might happen if the Labour Party, funded by the trade unions, was to return to power. The strikes, however, were a symptom of a more invasive malaise that had been affecting everyone’s lives continually for years – the continual shrinkage of the value of money. The pound sterling had not been doing well even before the oil-producing nations hiked up the price of oil in 1973; since then, it had been in intensive care. In summer 1975, the annual rate of inflation reached a peak of almost 27 per cent. It had dropped by the end of the 1970s, but was still alarmingly high. This made it difficult for people to keep a basic idea of what a unit of currency was actually worth. Most food and drink had quadrupled in price in the ten-year period from 1970 to 1980, as this table of a few basic prices shows:

  For most people, these rising prices were offset by equally fast rising incomes, which year by year changed people’s idea of how much money you needed to be earning to call yourself rich. In 1970, someone on a salary of £3,400 a year was at the prosperous end of the middle class and could afford a house, foreign holidays and private-school education for the children. As 1980 dawned, the lowest paid employees of ICI were on £66 a week (£3,432 a year), and that was before that year’s pay round.8 The minimum pay for a nurse was set in July 1980 at £80.71 a week, a 13 per cent increase9 compared with £15.0/6d. (£15.02) ten years before.10 A graduate with an engineering degree could realistically aim for a starting salary just under £100 a week.11 An MP’s salary rose from £3,250 in 1970 to £11,750 in June 1980. MPs’ expenses were not a political issue, so the annual office allowance could rise in the same period from £500 to £8,00012 without anyone remarking on it. Edward Heath’s salary, when he became prime minister in 1970, was £17,250. In July 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s went up to £46,400.13

  These escalating figures were bewildering enough for people who could protect their living standards either by switching jobs, or by joining a union, but for those on fixed incomes they were terrifying. People living off a lifetime’s savings watched helplessly as the nest egg shrank, month by month. As an example, Lady Isobel Barnett was one of the very first celebrities created by the television age. She was a quick-witted, engaging doctor who was a regular panellist on a TV quiz show called What’s My Line?, which was so popular that when she published her autobiography, in 1956, one reviewer commented that a visitor to Britain from another planet would soon be asking ‘What is “What’s My Line?” and who is Lady Barnett?’, and calculated that any Briton between the ages of seven and seventy would know the answer.14 In 1980, Dr Barnett, by then an arthritic widow, was arrested for shoplifting. Although the evidence was conclusive, she insisted on pleading not guilty and exercising her right to trial by jury, thereby maximizing the publicity that her trivial offence and small fine attracted. After seeing the case plastered all over the Sunday newspapers, Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary: ‘It’s all so footling and unnecessary. She’s an elderly lady who wants psychological help not humiliation. No good will come
of it and I don’t envy the shopkeeper who reported her to the police.’15 On Monday morning, 20 October, Lady Barnett committed suicide. The shopkeeper, Roger Fowkes, reacted as Kenneth Williams had foretold: ‘It is a terrible, terrible tragedy. I feel deeply sad and deeply shocked,’ he said.16 Since she left no suicide note, we cannot know what combination of stress, illness and depression drove her to her death, but there is a clue to her situation in the stated value of what she stole. It was a carton of cream and a tin of tuna fish, priced 87p. That was 17s./5d. in the pre-decimal money in which Lady Barnett probably still made mental calculations, an outrageous price for goods that she could have bought not so long before for less than five shillings.

  Throughout the 1970s, Labour and Conservative had tried to tackle this problem by using the levers of the state to hold down prices, where possible, and to persuade people not to demand wage increases that kept pace with inflation, arguing that each wage increase added fuel to inflation, which then required another wage increase. The Labour government’s prices and incomes policy went through three phases. The first two had some effect, as the unions generally agreed to cooperate. For phase three, in 1978, the government wanted an agreement that there should be no wage rises above 5 per cent. The TUC refused to endorse the policy, and the strikes began.