by Owen Jones
But a cursory look at its history uncloaks a party that has always defended 'privileged interests', particularly against the threat posed by working-class Britons. Throughout the nineteenth century the Tories were fervent opponents of allowing any but the richest to vote. When the 1831 Reform Bill was presented to Parliament, proposing to extend suffrage to as many as one out of every five adult males, the Tory reaction was hystericaL One Tory MP sensationally alleged that the Bill
represented 'a revolution that will overturn all the natural influence of rank and property.' Lord Salisbury, the future Tory prime minister,sulked about the expanding suffrage with dark predictions that 'firstrate men will not canvass mobs, and mobs will not elect first-class men.' It was in the twentieth century that the Tories and their coalition of
privileged interests would face their greatest political threat. W orkingclass people had organized themselves into trade unions by the million.
These unions went on to found the Labour Party with the specific mission of representing working-class interests in Parliament for the first time. Well before Thatcher, the Tories launched rearguard actions against this menace. The governments of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour stood enthusiastically by the infamous TaffVale legal judgement of 190I, which hit at the unions by making them liable for profits lost in strikes. Looking back on the episode, the future Tory PrimeMinister Stanley Baldwin later confessed: 'The Conservatives can't talk of class war. They started it.'
When trade unions launched a general strike in 1926, the Tory government warned of red revolution and mobilized the armed forces.
After the strike was broken, senior conservative and irreconcilable class warrior Arthur Balfour boasted: 'The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done. '
As part of this lesson, mass picketing and any strikes launched in support of other workers were banned, and union links with Labour were weakened. The working class was put back in its box. In view of all this one may well wonder how, in an age of mass democracy, the Tories could ever have hoped to win an election. But the Conservatives are the most successful political party in the Western world. They governed Britain for two thirds of the twentieth century.
The former head of Margaret Thatcher's policy unit, Ferdinand Mount, gives short shrift to the senior Tory's 'privileged coalition' theory, dismissing it to me as 'the kind of show-off cynicism which old politicians like to indulge in. I should have thought it would be quite hard
to score consistently twelve to fourteen million votes at general elections if you did not have some genuine sympathy with the less privileged majority.' It is a compelling point. If everyone has the vote,
then why would working-class people vote for a political gravy train for the rich?
That old class warrior Lord Salisbury was himself surprised to discover that uptoa third of manual workers voted Tory in the early twentieth century. It all goes back to the second part of our anonymous
politician's thesis; that Conservatives win by 'giving just enough to just enough other people'. The Tories have always sought to weaken the collective power of working-class people as a group in society. But they also knew how to win elections by courting working-class voters as
individuals, by methods which were frequently ingenious. One common ploy was moderate social reform with conservative ends. It was a method used to great effect by Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative prime minister in the late nineteenth century, who continues to be fondly regarded by the ever-diminishing band of 'One Nation' Tories as their founding father. His government introduced limited progressive measures such as reducing the maximum working day to ten hours and banning children from working full-time. His calculation was that it would 'gain and retain for the Conservatives the lasting affection of the working classes'. Indeed, some trade union leaders hated the Liberals more in this period, and Thatcher herself looked to the laissez-faire leader William Gladstone capitalism of nineteenth-century Liberal for inspiration. Of course, the whole point of Disraelian the existing social order. As the relatively
Heseltine put it a century later, it was 'good Toryism was to preserve moderate Tory Michael enlightened capitalism paternalism with power if you like. Noblesse oblige. I believe strongly that those and privilege have responsibilities.'
After all, no Tory would ever think of the party as out to hammer the working class. All politicians, no matter how reactionary, feel a need to rationalize their policies for a greater good. Many undoubtedly had-and have-s-noble, paternalistic ideas of public service. It is a deeply held and sincere Conservative belief that what is good for business is good for the country. But there is no escaping the fact that the Tory leadership has always been dominated by the wealthiest elements of society, determined to thwart reforms offered first by the Liberals and then by the Labour Party. Sticks alone could not contain the working class in a democratic system: carrots had to be offered too.
The Tories have long used populism as a trump card to win working- class support. From the late nineteenth century they tapped into a growing backlash against Irish and Jewish immigration, culminating in the introduction of the restrictive Aliens Bill in 1904. Promised crack- downs on immigration have been a mainstay of Tory electioneering ever since. Flying the flag in a range of ways has invariably aided the Conservative cause: for example, appealing to nationalist sentiments by opposing self-rule for Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. And, of course, popular fear of crime has long been fertile political territory for a party with a tough law-and-order message.
They have lost their salience today, but religious allegiances once played a major role. Before 1914, if you were staunchly Church of England (once derided as the 'Tory Party at prayer') you were pretty likely to vote Conservative. Today's Liverpool may be the most solidly Labour city in Parliament, but religious sectarianism and Tory anti- Catholicism once made it a hub of working-class Toryism.
Social aspiration has been another fruitful vote-catcher, as well as a means of undermining working-class identity. There was room at the top, ran the promise: you could improve your lot by edging up the social ladder. In areas devoid of a strong middle class-s-Scotland, Wales and most of Northern England-this had limited appeal, But where there was a solid middle class, people from working-class back- grounds were always more likely to opt for the Tories. It was a way of keeping up with the joneses-s-and even, so they thought, of joining them. 'What you find is that Labour is strong in the mining seats, even in the interwar years, or in the East End of London-because there's no middle class, basically,' says political historian Ross McKibbin. 'It doesn't take much of a middle-class presence to affect the way that working-class people are prepared to vote.'
Above all, the Tories have been able to win working-class support through ruthless pragmatism. After W orld War II, the Tories and their supporters were forced on to the back foot. Recent memories of the Great Depression seemed to have permanently discredited free-market capitalism, and the Tories had no option but to accept the welfare state, higher taxation and a strong union movement. Tony Crosland, a senior post-war Labour politician, noted that the Conservatives had no choice but to fight elections 'largely on policies which twenty years ago were associated with the Left, and repudiated by the Right'. 1 But with the Conservatives in power throughout the 1950s and the unions and Labour taking a moderate direction, some Tories could not resist spec- ulating that they had the upper hand. 'The class war is over and we have won it,' declared Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1959.
This ceasefire did not last long. The new consensus unravelled in the 1970s as company profits went into free fall and trade unions flexed their muscles once more. Suddenly it looked as if the class war was back on. This time, a new generation of Tories intended to win it-for good.
Few men can claim to have had as much influence over modern Britain as Keith Joseph. The son of a construction magnate, Joseph was the most prominent figure of the Tory right in
the early 1970s. When the Conservatives were defeated in two successive general elections in 1974, Joseph became one of the leaders of a new breed of Tory who rejected the post-war consensus of welfare capitalism that had been upheld by earlier Conservative governments. Instead, they wanted to curb union power, sell off state-owned industries and return to nineteenth-century principles of Iaissez-faire capitalism. For Joseph the road to Damascus moment came when Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath was booted from office, after having taken on the miners and lost. 'It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism,' he later claimed. 'I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that Iwas not really one at all.'
Keith Joseph and his laissez-faire cabal were supporters of American free-market guru Milton Friedman. When, in 1974, the Labour Party returned to Downing Street with a promise 'to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families', Friedman's ideas were still largely confined to the textbooks. The exception was Chile, where in 1973 General Augusto Pinochet, with US backing, had removed the elected socialist President Salvador Allende in one of the most brutal coups in Latin America's tortured history. Pinochet shared one of the main aims of his ideological soulmates in Britain: to erase the working class as a concept. His goal, he declared, was to 'make Chile not a nation of proletarians, hut a nation of entrepreneurs'.
But Keith Joseph blew his chance to lead a similar project through the ballot box in Britain. In a speech in 0ctober 1974, he expressed some of the attitudes towards 'the lower orders' that were once common among middle-class eugenicists. He argued that 'a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5 ... Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.' But the killer line was this: 'The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened.' Joseph's message was clear. The poor were breeding too fast, and the danger was they were going to swamp everybody else.
Though Joseph was only repeating prejudices long held among many wealthier Britons, his mistake was to repeat them in public. His hopes of becoming Conservative leader were over. But all was not lost. In his place his protegee, Margaret Thatcher, the MP for Finchley, stood and won. Joseph's influence was evident in much of the intellec- tual underpinning of what became known as Thatcherism, leading critics to call him the Iron Lady's 'Mad Monk'. Following her election victory in 1979, the Conservatives would launch the country's most audacious experiment in social engineering since the Puritans ruled England over three hundred years earlier. 'We have to move this country in a new direction, to change the way we look at things, to create a wholly new attitude of mind,' Thatcher urged her party.
To understand Thatcherism's attitude to working-class Britain, it is important to start by looking at Thatcher herself. Some of her warmest admirers have often been at pains to portray her-wrongly--as a person of humble origins. As the staunchly Thatcherite Tory MP David Davis told me: 'Margaret was always a bit more middle class than she made out.' It is almost a cliche to describe her as a grocer's daughter, but it was this that coloured her entire political outlook. Growing up in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham, her father had instilled in her a deep commitment to what could be called lower- middle-class values: individual self-enrichment and enterprise, and an instinctive hostility to collective action. Her biographer, Hugo Young, noted that she had little if any contact with working-class people, let alone the trade union movement.
Her attitudes were undoubtedly cemented when in 1951 she married a wealthy businessman, Denis Thatcher, who believed that trade unions should be banned altogether. She surrounded privileged backgrounds. In her first Cabinet, herself with men from 88 per cent of ministers were former public school students, 71 per cent were company directors and 14 per cent were large landowners. No wonder, then, that one of her Cabinet ministers told a journalist just before the 1979 election: 'She is still basically a Finchley lady ... She regards the working class as idle, deceitful, inferior and bloody-minded."
If Thatcher had one aim, it was to stop us thinking in terms of class. 'Class is a Communist concept,' she would later write. 'It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another.'3 She wanted to erase the idea that people could better their lives by collective action, rather than by individual self-improvement: that is, 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps'. Just months after her election victory in 1979, she had intended to spell this out to the country in stark terms.
The Tories might be a party rooted in Britain's class divisions, but they are at pains to deflect any reminders of this fact. Indeed, for right- wing ideologues in the Thatcher mould, any talk about class is subver- sive for a host of reasons. It implies that one group possesses wealth and power in society, while others do not. If you accept that much, it is only a step to concluding that this is something that needs to be recti- fied. It suggests that a group of people live by working for others, which raises questions of exploitation. It encourages you to define your own economic interests against those of others. But, above all, it conjures up the notion of a potentially organized bloc with political and economic power, and one that could wage war against wealth and privilege. That made the existence of the working class as a concept the mortal enemy of Thatcher's everyone-for-themselves model of capitalism.
Thatcher had not the slightest ambition to get rid of social classes, she just didn't want us to perceive that we belonged to one. 'It's not the existence of classes that threatens the unity of the nation, but the existence of class feeling,' as an official Conservative Party document put it in 1976.~And yet, at the same time, Thatcherism fought the most aggressive class war in British history: by battering the trade unions into the ground, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to the working class and the poor, and stripping businesses of state regulations. Thatcher wanted to end the class war-but on the terms of the upper crust of British society. 'Old-fashioned Tories say there isn't any class war,' declared Tory newspaper editor Peregrine Worsthorne. 'New Tories make no bones about it: we are class warriors and we expect to be victorious.'
At the centre of this crusade was a concerted attempt to dismantle the values, institutions and traditional industries of the working class. The aim was to rub out the working class as a political and economic force in society, replacing it with a collection of individuals, or entrepreneurs, competing with each other for their own interests. In a new, supposedly upwardly mobile Britain, everyone would aspire to climb the ladder and all those who did not would be responsible for their own failure. Class was to be eliminated as an idea, but itwas to be bolstered in practice.
There has been no greater assault on working-class Britain than Thatcher' s two-pronged attack on industry and trade unions. It was not just that the systematic trashing of the country's manufacturing industries devastated communities--though itcertainly did, leaving them ravaged by unemployment, poverty and all the crippling social problems that accompany them, for which they would later be blamed. Working-class identity itself was under fire.
The old industries were the bearing hearts of the communities they sustained. Most local people had worked in similar jobs and had done so for generations. And of course the unions, whatever their faults and limitations, darity and belonging, had given the workers in these communities strength, solia sense of power. All of this had sustained a feeling of of pride in a shared working -class experience.
For those who, like myself, grew up in a country without strong unions, it is easy to understate the significanceofThatcherism's war on the organized working class. Such was Thatcher's legacy that when Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair could boast that even after his proposed reforms, trade union laws would remain 'the most restric- tive' in the Western world. When working-class people were demonized before the advent of Thatcherism, it was almost always because of fear of
the unions. 'I recall in the 60s, 70s and 80s, strikers-- and most of the strikers then were working class=-were treated pretty badly in the media, always in a very hostile way,' recalls Mirror jour- nalist Kevin Maguire. Aggressive picketers and 'unions holding the country to ransom' were mainstays of newspaper copy. At the heart of the Tory strategy was their clever manipulation of a series of strikes by largely low-paid public sector workers in 1978 and 1979--or, as it became known, the Winter of Discontent.
Even today, over thirty years later, the Winter of Discontent remains a kind of right-wing folk story used to bash unions whenever there is even a murmur of industrial unrest. Scenes of uncollected rubbish rotting in the streets and the dead going unburied are recounted in almost apocalyptic tones.
Yet the strikes were almost completely avoidable. James Callaghan'S Labour government had imposed years of effective pay cuts on public sector workers in order to keep down inflation. But this approach was based on the myth that union pay claims caused price rises, rather than the other way round. Inflation was rampant across the Western world at the time, regardless of how strong unions were. 'What really kicked things off in the late 1960s was the start of economic liberalization and the removal of credit controls, leading to excessive credit growth,' says former City economist Graham Turner. Another factor was the printing of huge sums of money by the US government to pay for the Vietnam War, which unleashed a tidal wave of inflation across the West. Low-paid workers like refuse collectors went on strike in the winter of 1978-9 because their living standards were in free fall, and they were being made to pay for an inflationary crisis that they had had no part in creating.