No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  It is easy to exaggerate the impact that strikes had on everyday life. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many people went about their daily lives without realizing that somewhere there was an industrial dispute under way (if they had not heard about it on the news). Some groups of employees, such as the Longbridge car-workers or the Fleet Street printers, had a reputation for downing tools on the smallest provocation, but most went on strike rather less often or never at all. Of all the disputes that broke out during the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–9, the one that caused the most comment and has stuck in the collective memory was called by the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), which represented low-paid council employees. It was shocking in a way that a strike by better paid Ford car-workers was not, because it had never happened before and because the people most affected by refuse collectors and dinner ladies stopping work were, inevitably, vulnerable members of the public. There were instances of gravediggers also going on strike for a few days, with the result that corpses stayed longer than intended in the mortuaries. Those unburied bodies became a stock image of the ‘winter of discontent’, as if they had been left lying in the street. A greater number of people were affected by the uncollected refuse, which made back alleys behind shops unpleasant. One tabloid journalist old enough to remember reckoned that Britain was ‘one big, open-air skip, carpeted in chicken carcasses, rotting vegetables and assorted household detritus’.17 In reality, most people found out about the strikes on radio, television or read about them in the newspapers. They may have been irritated by them, but did not have their daily routine disrupted.

  With a few exceptions, the shop stewards running the NUPE strike were not hardened militants. An internal report compiled by NUPE officials directly afterwards noted that ‘a number of stewards had only recently been elected and were not totally immersed in the work of the union. For them, it was literally a baptism of fire, having to take decisions they would never normally have to concern themselves with.’18 They went on strike because, in the perverse conditions of runaway inflation, it was irrational not to strike. One group of workers after another had discovered that their living standards fell, year by year, if all they did was passively accept the below-inflation wage rises they were offered.

  The first strike of the new decade, which started on 2 January 1980, was called by the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC). It was one of the most conservative unions in the TUC and had not called a national strike for more than fifty years. What provoked it was that, in a year when inflation was in double figures, when council workers had been awarded a 25 per cent pay rise, and the miners were being praised for their moderation in accepting 20 per cent, the ISTC was told that its members should accept 6 per cent. The steelworkers stayed on strike for thirteen weeks, causing real hardship in steel towns such as Corby, in Northamptonshire, where 8,000 inhabitants out of an overall population of 52,000 worked for British Steel, and of those 6,000 were on strike. After three months, the union settled for 16 per cent.

  Had that been the end of the story, it would have been another example of why it made sense to go on strike. But in an early sign that this Conservative government was different from its predecessors, the chairman of British Steel was promptly sacked for giving in to the unions and, without consulting the board, Sir Keith Joseph, the industry secretary, imported a new chairman from the USA, a Scottish-born partner in the New York merchant bank Lazard Frères, named Ian MacGregor, who would live up to the reputation he had established in America as a hard man in his dealings with unions.19

  The steelworks in Consett, in an unemployment-ridden part of County Durham, had broken even in the last quarter of 1979, yet it was shut down completely in September 1980. The immediate loss of 4,700 jobs and the knock-on effect on local businesses pushed the unemployment rate in parts of the town above 50 per cent during 1981, and it became the first place in England to qualify for aid from the EEC.20 The union was too exhausted to resist. The loss-making steelworks in Shotton, North Wales, was also closed at the immediate cost of 6,000 jobs, driving male unemployment in the nearby town of Flint up to 32 per cent.21 Corby in Northamptonshire fared only marginally better, losing 7,000 jobs by 1981, pushing the unemployment rate above 21 per cent. More jobs went later. By 1987, the town’s population had fallen from 54,000 to 50,000.

  Against this background, it is not difficult to see why some Conservative radicals were drawn to the new ideology called ‘monetarism’. Milton Friedman and other members of the ‘Chicago School’ argued that governments should not have prices or incomes policies, which only interfered with the free market. A government’s first and almost its only economic duty was to make sure that the currency was sound: stabilize the pound, and leave prices and incomes to the market. In 1974, there had been no monetarists in the leadership of the Conservative Party. If the old guard had handled the circumstances of Edward Heath’s resignation with more skill, Margaret Thatcher would never have been prime minister and there would never have been monetarists operating out of Downing Street.

  The new ideology first took hold in the UK through an organization called the Institute of Economic Affairs, a long established think tank with offices near Parliament, which boasted of being ‘the UK’s original free market think tank’ and which propounded the philosophy that for people to be free it was necessary for most of society’s problems to be dealt with by companies, with minimal interference from government. After 1974, an anguished politician became a regular visitor to the institute’s office in Lord North Street. This was Sir Keith Joseph, a man whose intense, almost tortured demeanour earned him the nickname ‘the Mad Monk’. He had served in Conservative cabinets since Harold Macmillan’s time and was now renouncing his past as a high-spending secretary of state for social security in a Damascene conversion to monetarism.

  Not many Tory MPs were ready to follow Sir Keith all the way along his pilgrimage of self-renunciation and political rebirth, but aspects of what the monetarists had to say resonated around the parliamentary Conservative Party, particularly the thought that there should be no more wearying and humiliating attempts to agree an incomes policy with the trade unions. More than anything else, the Conservatives were tired of losing elections. Edward Heath had led them to defeat three times and was stubbornly insisting on trying again. Joseph was encouraged to stand for the leadership against him, but self-destructed during a speech in Edgbaston, in which he blundered into the issue of why so many children were growing up in poverty. He blamed young working-class women who did not use contraceptives. He warned: ‘The balance of our human stock is threatened. A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world … They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals.’22 From that day on, Sir Keith was known to readers of Private Eye as Sir Sheath.

  As Joseph’s leadership aspirations collapsed under a heap of ridicule, the insurgents transferred their hopes to Margaret Thatcher, though she had given no sign yet that she was a convert to monetarism. To the public, she was ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’, because it had been her task, in the only cabinet post she had ever held, as education secretary from 1970 to 1974, to announce the end of free milk for schoolchildren. She had hated doing it. The job was forced on her by the Treasury, and she was so upset by the response that she nearly quit politics. She took pride in being at the head of the second highest-spending government department, outspent only by Joseph.23 Though she did not have an easy relationship with Edward Heath, she had no personal reason to complain about him. He had promoted her to the position of shadow chancellor, the second most important in the party. And no one in their right mind would put a bet on a woman of relatively limited cabinet experience taking on the leadership of a male-dominated and reactionary political party, especially when she was up against someone of Heath’s stature and experience. It says a lot for Mrs Thatcher’s nerve and ambition that she even put her nam
e forward. On the eve of the ballot, in February 1975, the Conservative-supporting Daily Express reported that 83 per cent of Tory voters wanted Heath to stay, whereas only 8 per cent wanted Mrs Thatcher – fewer than those who would have liked to see Heath replaced by William Whitelaw.24

  However, she was vastly assisted by Heath’s behaviour. He could not see that while his policies were more or less acceptable to most Tory MPs, he was so unpopular that many were prepared to vote for anyone else just to be rid of him. It is assumed that if he had stood aside immediately, his preferred successor William Whitelaw would easily have defeated Thatcher, but since he insisted on staying, loyalty compelled Whitelaw to support him. Thatcher also had a very shrewd campaign manager in Airey Neave, a maverick MP (famous for having escaped from Colditz in 1942), who reassured doubting MPs that voting for Thatcher was a device for prising Heath out of office; it did not mean that they would be landing themselves with a woman leader with a voice which, in the opinion of the editor of the Daily Mail, David English, sounded like breaking glass.25 Her other advantage was that Sir Keith Joseph fell in faithfully behind her. ‘Keith was – and remains – my closest political friend,’ she declared, years later.26 To everyone’s surprise, she beat Heath by 130 votes to 119, thereby securing the support of every MP who did not really care who won but just wanted to be on the winning side. In the second round she faced three formidable opponents – Whitelaw, Sir Geoffrey Howe and James Prior – but won decisively.

  Heath was not gracious in defeat; nor was Thatcher magnanimous in victory. She went through the motions of offering him a shadow cabinet role, which he turned down, then she refused to allow him any role in the 1979 election campaign. Afterwards, he let it be known that he might accept the post of foreign secretary; what he received was a handwritten note telling him that she had appointed Lord Carrington instead, coupled with an offer to appoint Heath as ambassador to the USA. He turned it down,27 preferring to remain a glowering presence on the Conservative Party backbenches. They did not speak to one another from about January 1976 until 8 October 1998, when they were persuaded to sit together on stage at the Conservative annual conference.28

  The new opposition leader had fought her campaign on a ‘monetarist’ platform, but she did not come equipped with a pre-prepared ideology. She had little more than a gut instinct that she had to break away from the consensus than the two main parties had shared since the Second World War, especially the part of it that treated the trade unions as partners in the running of the economy. Consulting with trade unions over wages, retaining a large section of the productive economy in state ownership, expanding the welfare state – this was not what the Conservative Party had stood for when Mrs Thatcher was growing up. It rather shocked her to hear the self-flagellating Sir Keith Joseph declare ‘I have only recently become a Conservative’, but she could see his point. ‘I both recognized the truth of Keith’s remark and also that my own case was subtly different: I had always been an instinctive Conservative, but I had failed to develop these instincts either into a coherent framework of ideas or into a set of practical policies,’29 she wrote later.

  Her self description as ‘instinctive’ is illuminating. In the long run, she will probably prove to be the only twentieth-century prime minister to give a name to a set of political beliefs. Yet she was not a consistent political thinker on a par with Nigel Lawson or the late Iain Macleod. She never put together a definitive summary of what ‘Thatcherism’ might be, preferring to deal with each situation as it arose by trusting her instincts. It was left to Nigel Lawson to attempt an authoritative definition of Thatcherism: ‘The wrong definition is “whatever Margaret Thatcher herself at any time did or said”. The right definition involves a mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian values”, privatization, and a dash of populism.’30 It is difficult to see anything on this shopping list of political virtues with which William Gladstone would have disagreed. No less an authority than Milton Friedman once declared that Mrs Thatcher was ‘not in terms of belief a Tory. She is a nineteenth-century liberal.’31 However, Victorian liberals lived in a world of rigid social divisions, and vastly unequal and unchallenged divisions of wealth and income, whereas for thirty-four years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, British society had been levelling up, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. What is missing from Nigel Lawson’s handy definition of Thatcherism is her assumption that inequalities in wealth and income were not just inevitable, but welcome. She believed in using the levers of government to redistribute wealth, but not to take money from the rich to give to the poor. She endeavoured to devise a system that would encourage and reward those who looked after themselves, and penalize those who expected the state to look after them when they were capable of looking after themselves. Her idea of freedom included the freedom not to pay excessive tax because other people relied excessively on the welfare state. The Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling, who had a profound influence on some Thatcherites, including Michael Portillo (though he did not impress Thatcher herself), put the case: ‘It is not freedom that Conservatives want; what they want is the sort of freedom that will maintain existing inequalities or restore lost ones.’32

  Margaret Thatcher would never have said that quite so baldly, but she did believe in inequality as a spur to achievement. People who worked harder and relied on their own efforts deserved to be better off than those who relied on others. She believed, instinctively, that it was oppressive if hard-working people were heavily taxed to subsidize those who were lazy. These instincts originated in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where her father, Alfred Roberts, a shoemaker’s son, raised himself by hard work to be a prosperous and prominent member of the local community. Though he owned two grocery shops and employed five assistants, there was no hot running water or inside lavatory in the Roberts’ family flat. Alfred Roberts, an alderman, was the role model for Margaret Hilda, the younger of their two daughters, born on 13 October 1925. In her Who’s Who entry, Mrs Thatcher identified herself only as his daughter – there was no mention there, or in her memoirs, of her mother, Beatrice, or her older sister. From what we know of Beatrice Roberts, she seems to have been a passive woman, unlike her clever and compulsively active younger daughter. It was from her father that Margaret learnt ‘the basis for my economic philosophy [who] liked to connect the progress of our corner shop with the great complex romance of international trade which recruited people all over the world to ensure that a family in Grantham could have on its table rice from India, coffee from Kenya, sugar from the West Indies and spices from five continents’.33 From watching the alderman’s daily schedule of hard work, public service and self-denial, she deduced that employees in routine jobs owed a debt of gratitude to those who created their jobs by running the businesses that employed them.

  It must have jolted Alderman Roberts when Margaret returned to Grantham with her husband to be, who was neither a Methodist nor teetotal, had been married before and was ten years older than her. She had met Denis Thatcher at a meeting of a Conservative association; when she married in 1951, she said goodbye to Methodism, teetotalism and Grantham. Denis retired from the board of Burmah Oil in the year that Margaret became leader of the Conservative Party and he spent the next fifteen years walking one step behind her, an ever-present source of like-minded support.

  Ever mindful of the importance of not wasting time, Thatcher had both her children, one son and one daughter, on the same day. Her daughter, Carol, was the stronger character who, with a degree of panache, handled the extraordinary pressures of living in their mother’s shadow, but it was her son Mark – ‘an “international” businessman possessed of no visible abilities, qualifications or social conscience, pursued from Britain to Texas to South Africa by lawsuits, tax investigations and a persistently unsavoury reputation’34 – on whom she poured her maternal affection. For him, uniquely, she would put her reputation for personal integrity at risk. In Apr
il 1981, when she could ill-afford any bad publicity, Mark joined her during an official visit to Oman. A £300m contract was up for grabs to build a new university there. Mrs Thatcher exhorted the Omanis to award it to a British firm. Mark, aged twenty-seven, was working for a marketing company, promoting the construction firm Cementation International. He brought no qualifications to this task other than his family connections. The contract was awarded to Cementation and Mark Thatcher’s firm received a commission, reportedly in six figures. Two years later, when the Observer uncovered the story35 and alleged that the commission paid to Thatcher’s firm was at least £350,000, the prime minister faced such a flurry of written questions in the Commons, she feared she might be forced to make a lengthy statement to the House. A thirteen-page draft was drawn up, in which, among other things, she was going to say of Mark: ‘He is under no obligation to reveal to me details of his business or personal affairs. Like most parents, I only know what I am told.’36 In the event, the statement was never delivered, but in answers to written questions she stoutly insisted that she had never said anything about Cementation to anyone in Oman while she was there, batting for British industry,37 and therefore questions about whether or not she knew that Mark was representing the firm were ‘irrelevant’.38 But it is quite possible that the Omanis thought they were being encouraged to put business in the way of the British prime minister’s son. Four years later, Mrs Thatcher secured what is reputed to be the biggest arms deal in history: the Al-Yamamah contract with Saudi Arabia. Again, rumours surfaced that Mark Thatcher had made millions from the deal in some unspecified way. In his biography of Mrs Thatcher, John Campbell asks his readers to imagine what her upright father Alfred Roberts would have made of his grandson’s mysterious ways of making millions.

  When she was in full flight, Mrs Thatcher sounded like a bossy matron with a closed mind and a startling inability to measure the impact of her words. Her mind was often too literal to grasp a simple joke. One Tory MP who was helping her draft a light-hearted speech in praise of a colleague suggested that she could say he was clever but never let his brains go to his head, to which she exclaimed: ‘I can’t say that! If his brains aren’t in his head, where will people think they are?’39 She had no ear for sexual innuendo, thus her famous comment in praise of her deputy, William Whitelaw – ‘every prime minister needs a Willie’. Another, possibly apocryphal story, is that on a visit to the Falklands she posed for a photo opportunity on the gun of a battleship, which vibrated alarmingly and she turned to a naval officer to ask: ‘Can this thing jerk you off ?’