No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  The great state-run monopolies that had brought gas, electricity and water to the home in 1980 had either gone, or were on the way out, replaced by private companies on the lookout for new businesses into which they could diversify. The ordinary consumer may not have noticed the difference this made to the supply of the basic utilities, but they certainly felt the effect of the privatization of British Telecom. No one needed to wait for a telephone to be installed – telephones could be bought in shops (there was even a range of colours and designs to suit individual taste), and there was no longer the same exasperating delay in getting connected to the network. In 1979, 33 per cent of pensioners living alone had a telephone; the 1990 figure was 75 per cent. Only the very poor or the mildly eccentric did not have a telephone in the home.

  Home computers, CD players and colour televisions were now too common to be status symbols. Vinyl records would soon disappear from the shops, except as collectors’ items, as CDs took over. The next big boom forecast by the Economist Intelligence Unit in November 1990 was in the sale of ‘white goods’ – devices for the kitchen, including automatic dishwashers and microwaves. You could impress visitors to your home by showing them your state-of-the-art microwave, but if you really wanted the neighbours to know that you had money to spend you invested in a satellite dish. Other status symbols included car telephones, or fax machines in the home, while at work there were people who delighted in strutting about holding huge, brick-like mobile telephones.4

  There were other technologies at the development stage that had not yet made their entry into everyday life. In November 1990, the same month that saw Margaret Thatcher brought down, it was reported that Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone company was developing a mobile phone that would work anywhere, weigh no more than about four ounces, be small enough to f t in a pocket, cost less than £100 and be capable of running for a month on a rechargeable battery.5 A more significant but less publicized development took place at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Switzerland, where a British scientist, Timothy Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal in 1989 to create a means by which scientists across the world could exchange information by computer. At that time, the fashion in physics was to give new inventions names drawn from classical mythology, but Berners-Lee insisted, rather prosaically, that he would call his invention the World Wide Web. The first successful communication between a server and an HTTP client took place at CERN on 25 December 1990.

  However, the most significant transformation had nothing to do with new inventions. It was the change in the political and social landscape. Anyone growing up in 1980 was entering a dangerously divided world, the long-term future of which seemed uncertain. The words ‘capitalist’ and ‘capitalism’ cropped up in conversation, even among people who were only remotely interested in politics, because it was apparent to anyone that the capitalist system was not the only possible way of ordering human affairs. In 1980, the journalist and future Labour MP Chris Mullin began work on a novel entitled A Very British Coup, which imagined a left-wing Labour prime minister coming to power on the back of a series of corruption scandals, and having his plans to take Britain down the parliamentary road to socialism halted by a politely organized Whitehall coup that forced him to resign. Mullin claimed at the time of the book’s publication in 1982: ‘Britain is ripe for destabilisation. It would not be necessary for the United States government to resort to military coups, invasions, assassinations or any of the other strong arm stuff tried out on its Third World clients. There is a wide range of other options.’6 Instead of laughing at him for peddling fantasies, Mullin’s real-life protagonists paid him the compliment of denouncing his novel as subversive propaganda, because there still appeared to be an outside possibility that Mullin’s friend, Tony Benn, might be the next prime minister. One critic pronounced: ‘Presumably this cautionary tale is meant to further the cause of the Left in British politics by exposing the dastardly nature of its opponents. In fact, the insight it provides may ensure that the reader votes Conservative, or Social Democrat, for the rest of the century.’7

  In 1988, the novel was stylishly adapted for television by Alan Plater; the only complaint heard was that it could be construed as a libellous depiction of the Labour Party, whose leaders were so obviously not radical socialists, like Mullin’s characters. The whole story was ‘littered with implausibilities’, Hugo Young declared magisterially in the Guardian. He conceded that ‘in 1981, when it was written . . . a tremor of belief rumbled round’, but added: ‘Seven years on, it doesn’t look quite like that any more’.8 It was one of many signs that the contest was over; Britain’s political future was settled. People no longer talked about capitalism or its alternatives, because they expected the capitalist system to last forever.

  Class also seemed to disappear as a subject of political or sociological discussion. The days were gone when any politician seriously seeking election would promise to defend the interests of one social class to the exclusion of others. The only polite way to talk about class at all was to promise to ignore or abolish it. During the leadership contest that followed Margaret Thatcher’s downfall, John Major made a much acclaimed and widely quoted promise that he would bring about ‘changes to produce across the whole of this country a genuinely classless society’.9 The trade unions, which for so long had functioned as the most effective promoter of working-class economic interests and social aspirations, were in chronic decline, their power broken not just by the succession of employment laws passed by the Thatcher government and the set-piece confrontations with the miners and print unions, but also by the changing pattern of work and property ownership. People in what had been working-class occupations now owned cars and televisions and had mortgages on their properties. The typical union member was increasingly likely to be an office worker, employed by the state, rather than a factory worker with a capitalist boss. Membership of TUC-affiliated unions fell by nearly a third, from just under 12.2m in 1980 to 8.4m in 1990.10 Strikes had become rare; mass pickets unheard of – a thing of the past.

  The largest working-class crowds to trouble the police, away from football matches, were the followers of a new craze, acid-house music, which attracted hundreds or even thousands of people to what became known as ‘rave’ parties. The organizers quickly ran out of venues where they could hold these events legally, so took to hiring out-of-the-way sites such as warehouses and keeping the venue secret until the last minute, in the hope that the party would be well under way before the police located it. The first rave parties were held on the outskirts of London, near the newly opened M25, but soon spread. In July 1989, there was chaos on the M4 aft er a landowner near Swindon suddenly withdrew permission for his land to be used, presumably aft er being spoken to by the police. One would-be participant recorded:

  We had paid £16 each in London record stores for tickets with no address, just a telephone number. From 8.30 p.m., a recorded voice directed us to Membury service station on the M4: ‘You will receive further instructions there’. The police were faster. As we arrived they closed the service station. Most people never reached the hangar nearby. At the airfield, we found police Land Rovers standing guard, lights off, beside locked hamburger vans. Other party-goers, stretching miles back, halted in mid-motorway. Horns blasted in frustration. At 3 a.m. the Peugeot received instruction and we swarmed to Chievely services, eighteen miles away. ‘Keep calling this number,’ the voice said. The convoy circled the forecourts but, minutes later, the police caught up. By 4 a.m. most people were demoralised.11

  Six months later, the authorities were alerted to a plan to hold a New Year’s Eve rave party in a warehouse in Rugby, which was expected to draw a crowd of 10,000. Warwickshire police brought in officers from all over the county and set up a roadblock on Junction 1 of the M6, but 200 revellers were there ahead of them. In the resulting scuffles, a police van and two cars were overturned, and five people were arrested.12 In April and May 1990, thousands flocked to warehouse parti
es in Blackburn every Saturday night. When the police located the venues, the organizers moved to Cheshire, West Yorkshire and Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. In June, 231 people were arrested at an illegal party in Wakefield. In July, it was reported that a regular party held on waste-ground in Birkenhead was attracting between 2,000 and 3,000 people most Saturdays.13 In times past, concerts organized in defiance of the authorities were usually associated loosely with left-wing politics. Rave parties were a form of rebellion without any obvious ideological clothing, though at least some of the organizers followed the libertarianism associated with the Federation of Conservative Students. The first-known organizer was a public schoolboy named Tony Colston-Hayter; one of his helpers was Paul Staines, another public schoolboy who achieved prominence, years later, as the right-wing blogger, Guido Fawkes.14 Those parties were a harbinger of a period when it seemed that the only prevailing ideology was a belief that people have a right to consume what they want to consume.

  A character in Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep says:

  Everybody gets it wrong about the 1980s, don’t they? They think it was all about money, and maybe it was, for some people, but for the people I used to hang about with, the students and people like that, there was a different set of values, just as severe, just as intolerant, really. We were so obsessed with politics all the time.15

  It would not be at all contradictory to say that the decade was ‘about’ money and ‘about’ left-wing politics, since much of it was taken up with a titanic struggle between those two forces; but, really, Coe’s character is describing the first half of the decades. There is little evidence of many students being ‘obsessed with politics’ aft er the miners’ defeat. Though the mass pickets outside Wapping and the fight against the poll tax would demonstrate that the British had not lost the taste for protest, the protests had become conservative. People were taking to the streets to prevent change and put some sort of brake on the triumphal advance of money, rather than in the hope of creating a brave new world.

  One symptom of changed times was that it became progressively harder to distinguish the main political parties one from another. Anybody who followed the news even cursorily in 1980 knew what distinguished Labour from the Conservatives. By 1990, it took a specialist to tell you where Conservative and Labour policies diverged. Voting became less a matter of deciding where you stood on the great issues of the time, and more of a consumer choice between personalities. Consequently, the character or behaviour of politicians started to seem more important than the causes they championed. It is noteworthy that during the 1980s there was only one headline-grabbing political sex scandal, when Cecil Parkinson had the misfortune to have his extra-marital activity exposed in the week of a Conservative annual conference. Otherwise, the sexual and financial peccadilloes of MPs was barely reported – not because they were all behaving themselves, but because such things did not seem important against the background of huge events like the miners’ strike or the Falklands War. But a time was coming when sex and money were the surest ways to get a politician into the news. Aft er the great upheavals of the 1980s, there were no more big political causes to be fought. ‘Nowadays, there is a clear tendency to proclaim the death of all ideologies in the name of the victory of capitalism,’ the novelist Carlos Fuentes lamented, writing in the Guardian in the last week of 1990.16

  However, to proclaim that history has ended, that all ideologies have been routed by the final victory of liberal capitalism is itself ideological. It was to be the prevailing ideology of the 1990s. British history did not end during the 1980s, but it did slow down, because the events of that turbulent decade had settled the way that Britons would be ruled and the way they thought about the world for at least the next quarter of a century.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. According to Frank Field, Labour MP for Birkenhead, a visitor to a Merseyside Jobcentre would see ‘jobs advertised at £1.20 an hour, £1 an hour, £57.25 a week’, while the best paid ones would offer ‘princely sums of £70 and £91 a week’. Hansard, 17 July 1985, col. 330.

  2. People, 14 July 1985.

  3. Bob Geldof, with Paul Vallely, Is That It?, Macmillan, 1986, p. 301.

  4. Brenda Polan, Guardian, 3 October 1985.

  5. Bob Geldof, Is That It?, p. 300.

  6. David Pallister, ‘The arms deal they called the dove: how Britain grasped the biggest prize’, Guardian, 15 December 2006.

  7. Financial Times, 17 November 1986.

  8. By far the best primary source for any words attributed to Margaret Thatcher is the comprehensive archive held at Churchill College, Cambridge, almost all of which is available on the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. The telegram from Milton Friedman, dated 5 May 1979, and her reply, dated 11 May, was included in a collection released on 30 January 2010.

  9. During an interview with Douglas Keay, ‘AIDS, education and the year 2000!’, Woman’s Own, October 1987.

  10. Handwritten draft by Margaret Thatcher for a speech to be delivered. This was also among the batch of documents released on 30 January 2010.

  11. John Hills et al., An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK – Report of the National Equality Panel, Government Equalities Office, London, 2010, p. 41, p. 27.

  12. The Times, 14 October 1981.

  13. Francis Fukuyama’s essay ‘The End of History?’ first appeared in the magazine The National Interest in 1989.

  14. She used this expression in a valedictory interview with ITN, broadcast 28 June 1991.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Kenneth Williams, The Kenneth Williams Diaries, edited by Russell Davies, HarperCollins, London, 1993, p. 581.

  2. Lee Hall ‘Adaptation’, from the programme notes to Billy Elliott; The Musical, Victoria Palace Theatre, London, 2005.

  3. Tony Benn, Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977–80, Arrow, London, 1990, p. 494.

  4. Sir Nicholas Henderson, ‘Britain’s Decline; its causes and consequences’, Economist, 2 June 1979.

  5. Obituary, Sir Nicholas Henderson, Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2009.

  6. Nicholas Henderson, Mandarin, The Diaries of an Ambassador 1969–1982, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1994, p. 269.

  7. Jim O’Donoghue, Carol McDonnell and Martin Placek, Consumer Price Inflation 1947–2004, Office for National Statistics, London, 2006, p. 41.

  8. The Times, 16 April 1980.

  9. The Times, 9 July 1980.

  10. Hansard, 9 March 1970, col. 892.

  11. Flight International, 1 March 1980.

  12. Factsheet M5, ‘Member’s pay, pensions and allowances’, House of Commons Information Office, London, May 2009.

  13. Factsheet M6, ‘Ministerial Salaries’, House of Commons Information Office, London, May 2009.

  14. Obituary, Lady Barnett, The Times, 21 October 1980.

  15. Kenneth Williams, p. 619.

  16. The Times, 21 October 1980.

  17. Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 24 November 2006, quoted in Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy – The British Experience since 1975, Jonathan Cape, London, 2007, p. 92.

  18. Together We Can Win, the Story of Two NUPE Branches Involved in the Council and Hospital Workers Pay Dispute, Winter 1978/9, National Union of Public Employees, Northern Division, 1979, p. 26.

  19. MacGregor was the most expensive public servant the British government had ever hired. His basic pay was £48,000 a year, and in addition, Lazard Frères was to receive a fee of £675,000 if MacGregor proved to be good at the job, with the possibility of an extra £1,150,000 if he could make British Steel profitable, a large chunk of which would go direct to MacGregor, as a partner in the bank. When Sir Keith Joseph revealed the figures in the Commons his words were drowned in derisive laughter, combined, no doubt, with a touch of envy, given that he was being paid more than the prime minister, even without the bonus.

  20. The Times, 2 November 1981.

  21. The Times, 5 June 1980.

  22. Sir Keith Joseph, sp
eech at the Grand Hotel, Birmingham, 19 October 1974. The full text of the speech is available on the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, at www.margaretthatcher.org.

  23. I heard her make this boast during a speech at a Conservative rally in Slough, shortly before the general election of February 1974.

  24. Daily Express, 3 February 1975.

  25. Gordon Greig, the political editor of the Daily Mail, was even instructed by English to ring Thatcher at home on a Sunday, on the eve of the declaration of her candidature, to ask her how anyone with a voice like breaking glass could ever lead the Conservative Party. Years later, he would regale younger journalists (such as me) with a vivid description of the noise that came down the telephone in reply.