No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  Then, in January 1981, Howe came to her with devastating news. It was a monetarist axiom that governments must restrict how much they borrow, as measured by the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR). This was the first statistic that the IMF examined when a government applied for a loan and it was the main measure of the amount of money in circulation. In 1976, the Labour government had set about reducing the figure, but by 1978–9, with unemployment rising and tax receipts falling, it had slipped back up to £9.25 billion. Howe’s target was to bring it down to £8.25 billion in 1979–80, but all he had done was put it up, despite the money now coming from North Sea oil. The news that Howe brought to an incredulous prime minister was that it was now on course to reach £14.5 billion in the coming year.

  This was the most testing moment Thatcher ever faced in her capacity as an economic manager. If there are three incidents that defined her as prime minister, they are the miners’ strike, the Falklands War and the economic crisis of 1981. The country was deep in recession, with unemployment rampant, much of it as a direct result of government policy. In the circumstances, any Keynesian economist would have advised Thatcher to let the PSBR keep rising; indeed 364 economists did, in a signed letter to The Times in March 1981. But Mrs Thatcher had a new economic adviser, Alan Walters, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, who urged her to cut the deficit by £4 billion by raising taxes, which ran counter to nearly fifty years of accepted practice and would do nothing for the Conservatives’ claims to be the tax-cutting party. But she and Howe agreed. In March, a shocked House of Commons heard Howe announce a grim package of indirect taxation and cuts in personal tax allowances, including an increase of 17p on the price of a packet of twenty cigarettes. ‘They may get rid of me for this,’ Mrs Thatcher told Walters, adding: ‘At least I shall have gone knowing I did the right thing.’61 The only good news was that having put this Budget through, Howe felt able to cut interest rates, but this led to a run on the pound. Having done so well in 1976–80, sterling lost a third of its value during 1981 and was worth just $1.81 by October, 25 cents less than it had been when the Conservatives took office. Howe then had to put interest rates up to prevent it falling further.

  In July 1981, as Toxteth in Liverpool was being torn apart by riots, Mrs Thatcher faced the most serious cabinet revolt of her premiership, led by Michael Heseltine, the environment secretary, with at least five other cabinet ministers joining in, but she did not buckle. She let the summer pass and then sacked three cabinet ministers, including Christopher Soames, the lord privy seal, son-in-law of Winston Churchill, who was so outraged that he shouted at her for twenty minutes, declaring that he had never been spoken to by a woman in so abusive a manner. Jim Prior was shunted off to Northern Ireland, and into an enlarged cabinet she brought a praetorian guard of Thatcherites: Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson. She had increased her hold over the cabinet, but had not made herself loved by the country, where she was – to quote a headline in The Times – ‘The Most Unpopular Prime Minister Since Polls Began’.62

  By the beginning of 1982, there were signs that the worst was over and that the unpalatable medicine dispensed by the Conservatives was beginning to work. Inflation had peaked at 21.9 per cent in May 1980 and now fell to 16.9 when the VAT increase dropped out of the annual comparison. In April 1982, it was 12 per cent and by the end of 1982 it was 5 per cent. Rampant price increases, which had so disrupted everyone’s lives for so long, had at last been exorcized, making Howe’s tax-raising Budget look more like a far-sighted act of courage than the destructive folly that it had first seemed to be. The future chancellor Kenneth Clarke, who was no Thatcherite, believed that it was ‘the finest Budget of the 1980s’63 – though there were others, even in the Conservative Party, who vehemently disagreed. After more than twenty-seven years had passed, Clarke mentioned the subject in passing in a speech in the Commons, only to be interrupted by another Tory veteran, Sir Peter Tapsell, who told him that what Thatcher and Howe did back then was ‘intellectually and economically illiterate – the West Midlands has never recovered. The 1981 Budget is the reason why now, with the collapse of our financial industry, we do not have a proper industrial base.’64

  What mattered at the time was what the Budget did for Thatcher’s reputation and self-belief. According to Nigel Lawson, ‘she saw as her Government’s finest hour, her equivalent of the Battle of Britain, to which her mind was always harking back, as having been the 1981 Budget’.65 Tina was alive and well and would serve as a political mantra for the remainder of the decade. She had proved that she was ‘not for turning’.

  CHAPTER 2

  SISTERS ARE DOIN’ IT FOR THEMSELVES

  There was a murder in 1980 that had more impact on public opinion than even the assassination of John Lennon. The victim was Jacqueline Hill, a third-year student at Leeds University, whose discarded handbag was discovered near the hall of residence on the evening of 17 November 1980. The student who discovered it did nothing at first, but when he took a second look, he noticed bloodstains and rang the police. Two officers arrived, but did not see any cause for alarm. People were nervous everywhere in the north of England because there was an infamous killer known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ at large. One of the officers made a semi-jocular remark about him, but the police went on their way without instigating a search for the missing woman. There were too many demands on their time. Burglar alarms were every shopkeeper’s new must-have accessory, but they were notoriously unreliable; on the evening that the missing handbag was found, ninety alarms went off in the Headingley area, of which eighty-seven were faulty. As the police scurried from false alarm to false alarm, Jacqueline Hill lay dying from hideous injuries. She may have been alive at the moment when an officer made that off-colour remark about the Yorkshire Ripper,1 but she was dead when her mutilated body was found the next morning – the thirteenth woman killed by a criminal so vicious and elusive that, like the original ‘Jack the Ripper’, he became a catalyst for social change.

  There had been a lively, growing women’s movement in the 1970s, but its impact was felt principally in the universities and on the libertarian left, where it asserted the right of women to be independent of men, to have the right to control their own bodies, dress as they please and challenge sexist language; in other words, more than anything else, feminism asserted its right to exist. By 1980, attitudes that might have counted as vanguard feminism ten years earlier were seeping into the mainstream. Women’s independence and sexuality were celebrated in drama and in music, such as in the comic song ‘It’s Raining Men’, recorded in 1982 by the Weather Girls, or the 1985 Eurythmics song, sung by Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin, ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves’, or by the riskily named theatre group, Cunning Stunts. Victoria Wood’s gentle television comedies might also have been thought risky in a previous decade. In one, she cast herself as a nervous working-class girl setting out to lose her virginity, only to find that when the opportunity had been created, the man she had solicited did not want sex without love.

  There was tension in the women’s movement between those who wanted to stay inside the protective isolation of exclusive women’s groups and those who wanted to turn outwards. Sheila Rowbotham, a well-known feminist writer, warned in the late 1970s that ‘feminist politics can become preoccupied with living a liberated life rather than becoming a movement for the liberation of women. Our lack of structure can make it difficult for women outside particular social networks to join. It can lead to cliquishness.’2 A few years later, another writer noted, with reference to meetings of women’s groups, ‘The last one I consciously avoided concentrated on peaceful and painless methods of male extermination.’3

  As feminists turned outwards, their presence was felt in the Labour Party. The annual Labour Women’s Conference, which had the reputation of being a preserve of people who were good at making tea, was suddenly invaded by women in dungarees, demanding radical change, whose most visible long-term
achievement was the election of more than a hundred women Labour MPs in 1997. The introduction by Labour of a national minimum wage was also a sign of feminist influence. It had been opposed by some of the stronger, male-dominated trade unions on the grounds that it would erode pay differentials. It was the unions with large numbers of women members, such as the public employees’ union, NUPE, and the shopworkers’ union, USDAW, who successfully put the case that the employees least likely to be protected by collective wage agreements were low-paid women workers.

  Law enforcement was not traditionally the home turf of the left, and given that the revived women’s movement was a product of 1960s permissiveness, it might seem an unlikely turn of events that feminists would be on the streets demanding that police put more effort into a criminal investigation such as the Jacqueline Hill case, or demanding that films and printed material should be subject to tighter censorship, or that certain offenders should be sent to prison rather than fined. In 1979, a government-appointed Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship had produced an anti-censorship report, just in time to be ignored by the incoming Conservative administration. Chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams, former husband of the Labour cabinet minister Shirley Williams, it recommended that there be no censorship of the written word and light censorship only of pictorial images that might be seen by people who did not wish to see them. ‘We unhesitatingly reject the suggestion that the available statistical information for England and Wales lends any support at all to the argument that pornography acts as a stimulus to the commission of sexual violence,’4 it concluded. It was like a last call for 1960s liberalism, which looked indulgently on pornography as a harmless outlet for men’s sexual frustrations, as if a man who finds relief in masturbation or prostitution is thereby less likely to commit a sexual assault. One notable submission to the committee disagreed, arguing that pornography encouraged men to think that they had proprietorial rights over women’s bodies and so encouraged sexual violence. It came not from some right-wing campaigner for censorship in the Mary Whitehouse mould, but from the feminist collective who produced the magazine Spare Rib.

  Of all the writers in world literature, the one most revered by the left around the beginning of the 1980s was Bertolt Brecht who, while generally sound on what were classed as women’s issues, had written the lyrics of a popular song, ‘Mack the Knife’, the opening number of The Threepenny Opera, mythologizing a fictional serial killer similar to ‘Jack the Ripper’. The accompanying novel by Brecht explained:

  The people in the great stone tenements of Whitechapel were excellent judges of the difference between the accomplishments of a fancy General and those of their own heroes. To them it was plain that the ‘Knife’ carried out his crimes at a far greater personal risk than the official picture-book heroes did theirs.5

  That was fiction, but in the Yorkshire and Manchester regions, in 1980, women were becoming seriously frightened by a real-life murderer, who killed randomly and whom the police seemed to be incapable of finding. He behaved differently from most serial killers who escape detection for a long time, concealing the bodies of their victims so that the police do not know that there is a killer at large. This was the case with Dennis Nilsen, the notorious 1980s multiple murderer, arrested at his home in Muswell Hill, London, on 9 February 1983, after plumbers investigating a blocked toilet discovered human remains in the drainage system; most of Nilsen’s fifteen victims, young homosexuals all, had not been reported missing, and the investigation went ‘backwards towards detection, rather than forwards towards arrest’, as the police began with ‘a suspected murderer, and as yet no idea who had been murdered’.6 The horror was over before the public knew about it. By contrast, the ‘Ripper’ left his handiwork in the open, and from the moment that the second body turned up the police knew they were hunting for a man who killed at random and would continue killing. The Sun reported in January 1976 that the Yorkshire police were hunting a serial killer. The publicity expanded with each new murder and there was – as Brecht could be said to have forecast – a strand of public opinion that admired this anonymous loner who was eluding the largest manhunt in British criminal history. He was a constant topic of pub talk, particularly in the north of England. Police at football matches were occasionally taunted by chants of ‘Ripper – 13, police – nil’. Men, after all, had no reason to be afraid, but women across Yorkshire and Merseyside found themselves almost under curfew, because no woman out on her own after dark could be sure that she would live to see the morning. So when feminists raised a clamour against male callousness and the incompetence of the police, they reached a wider and more receptive audience than all the debates about gender-specific language and patriarchal structures ever had.

  It was alleged that because senior police officers were male, they didn’t take the case as seriously as they should. This does not really stand up to the known facts. The head of Leeds Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban, knew at once that he was pursuing a very dangerous man; when he died in 1978, aged fifty-two, friends and colleagues suspected that the stress of the Ripper hunt had hastened his death.7 He deployed 137 officers, and within a year of the second murder the police had invested 64,000 hours, filled 6,400 index cards, made 3,700 house-to-house inquiries, checked up on 3,500 vehicles and taken 830 statements.8 By the end of 1980, there were 289 police officers working full time on the case, 188 in West Yorkshire alone. The problem was not lack of effort, but disorganization. Computers existed, but the police would not use them. The government offered the West Yorkshire police access to the computer at the Atomic Research Establishment, in Harwell, for a fee of £25,000, plus an annual rent of £156,000, but the police decided that it would not be worth the money,9 so every report of every investigation or interrogation was recorded on paper. The inquiry drowned in paper. Police officers would head off to interrogate Peter Sutcliff e, a Bradford lorry driver, unaware that he was being questioned over and over again by diff erent officers, and that no one had noticed the evidence piling up against this one name.

  Another problem was that the UK has no national police force, and the killer was no respecter of police boundaries. When he killed in the Manchester area, the inquiries were handled by the Manchester police, who held by the far the strongest clue to his identity. A woman murdered in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in the Manchester area, in October 1977, had a freshly minted £5 note in her handbag. Her body had lain undiscovered for days, and it was evident that the killer had come back to the scene, looking for the incriminating note. It had been issued only days before the murder to one of 34 firms, employing a total of about 6,000 people, including T. & W.H. Clark (Holdings) Ltd, of Hilliam Road, Bradford, where Sutcliffe worked. Chief Superintendent Hoban had deduced back in 1975 that the killer drove a lorry. Yet the Manchester police could not question anyone in Bradford without cooperation from West Yorkshire, who were not that interested in a clue held by a rival force. Nevertheless, two detectives, one from each force, visited Sutcliffe. They thought he was odd, but his wife provided him with an alibi, and there the matter rested.

  The man leading the hunt in West Yorkshire, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, had a lead in which he invested much greater faith. In March 1978, he and the Daily Mirror received letters from someone claiming to be the Ripper, which they did not take seriously until a year later, when a second letter came from the same source, accompanied by a tape made by a man with a Wearside accent. Oldfield’s instinct told him, beyond the possibility of doubt, that it came from the killer. The tape was played at a press conference in June 1979. By the end of the day, millions of people had heard it. For years, they had been reading about this elusive killer; now, people imagined they were hearing his voice. For the next eighteen months, hundreds of officers from Northumbria were deployed, interviewing men with Wearside accents to see if they could account for their movements on the days the murders had been committed. In West Yorkshire, any man with a Yorkshire accent was
assumed to be innocent.

  After Jacqueline Hill’s murder in November 1980, and a broadcast by her stricken parents, the ineptness of the investigation became a public scandal. Anger was directed not only at the police, but at anyone who seemed to think that there was entertainment value in sadistic murders. In Leeds, several hundred women stormed cinemas showing horror films called The Beast and Dressed to Kill. They pummelled men in the audience and threw red paint at the screen. In south London, 200 women invaded the cinema where Emanuelle: Queen Bitch was on show. In Margate, women picketed the cinema where Dressed to Kill was to have been shown, until the manager agreed to remove it from the programme. The following month, eight London cinemas were invaded in a synchronized operation by Women Against Violence Against Women. This invasion led to fights with male onlookers. Eight women were arrested, whereupon the feminists picketed Bow Street police station in solidarity. Another nine were arrested after throwing eggs and paint at a cinema screen in Kilburn, north London. In Cambridge, feminists invaded a sex shop, a cinema and a news-stand selling pornography. A sex shop in Leeds was also damaged. On 12 December, it was the turn of the Sun offices, off London’s Fleet Street, to be invaded by women protesting about the ‘Page 3’ girls. Ten days later, there was an eruption when it was reported that MGM was planning a film on the ‘Ripper’. Lawyers for Jacqueline Hill’s parents lodged a protest in Los Angeles and the very next day MGM cancelled the project. Feminists also protested against the advice given from the police that women should stay indoors after dark. A group of women lecturers from Bradford University suggested that: ‘If there are to be curfews, it would be more rational to require men to stay off the streets as women seem more able to go about their business and their pleasure without attacking people.’10