Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Such an intense reaction was very common. When the Labour MP Ian Wrigglesworth compiled a dossier of letters from jobless families in his recession-scarred Yorkshire constituency of Thornaby-on-Tees, they made for blistering reading. Again and again people blamed the Prime Minister personally for their anxiety and hardship. ‘Why doesn’t Mrs Thatcher try living on the dole and see what it is like?’ wrote one woman, who added that she could ‘scream’ whenever her children mentioned Christmas. Even if she turned Britain around, said another, ‘people like myself will always remember the times and the cost of their marriages’. Indeed, to some critics the dole queues seemed definitive proof of her personal cruelty. ‘The Cruel Summer of Mrs Thatcher’, read a headline in the Observer in the summer of 1981. ‘Our lives seem petty in your cold grey hands,’ runs the Beat’s ‘Stand Down Margaret’. ‘Would you ever give a second thought? / Would you ever give a damn?’29

  Whether unemployment genuinely was Mrs Thatcher’s fault is one of the fundamental questions of the entire decade. One obvious point is that it was already very high before she walked into Number 10. Under Jim Callaghan it had reached almost 1½ million, and by the end of the 1970s some four out of ten under-25s were already out of work. This was the context not just for the Conservatives’ celebrated ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster, but also for the explosion of punk rock (‘dole queue rock’), as well as Alan Bleasdale’s original play ‘The Black Stuff’. Yet even on the centre-left there was already a fatalistic acceptance that mass unemployment was here to stay. It was Callaghan, not Thatcher, who told his party conference in 1976 that the ‘cosy world’ of full employment was gone, never to return. To the Bennites, these words were anathema, but many of Callaghan’s own ministers agreed. ‘We are seeing the increase of unemployment throughout the industrial world,’ admitted Shirley Williams a few months later, ‘and it is a problem for which we still have no real answer.’30

  After May 1979 the political actors swapped scripts. Having previously deplored ‘the tragedy of 1,500,000 people out of work’, Mrs Thatcher now insisted that unemployment was an inevitable result of national decline and technological change. Meanwhile, the same Labour ministers who had found ‘no real answer’ to rising unemployment now claimed that the solution lay in Mrs Thatcher’s hands, if only she had the sense to see it. Yet not everybody on the left pretended that everything was her fault. ‘Too many union leaders and Labour Party leaders stand up at conferences and shout “Thatcher, Thatcher” as though Margaret Thatcher invented unemployment,’ the President of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union, Terry O’Neill, told his annual conference in June 1981. Although O’Neill was on the left, he thought she had merely ‘pressed the button that accelerated unemployment figures which were already too bad under Labour governments … It is too easy to go on television and use Thatcher as some kind of scapegoat.’31

  Even so, there was an enormous difference between unemployment at almost 1½ million and unemployment at more than 3 million. Given the revolution in Iran and the resulting oil shock, some of this increase was probably inevitable. Britain was not alone in suffering double-digit inflation and a crippling recession: almost all its major competitors faced similar problems. All the same, there is no getting away from the fact that Britain’s unemployment record was far, far worse than those of its neighbours. Between 1979 and 1981, British unemployment more than doubled. In no other major Western economy did it increase by more than half. So as the economists Gavyn Davies and David Piachaud wrote in The Times, ‘all the facts point to our being, in terms of severity of unemployment, alone among the major nations. Our domestic recession bears one clear hall-mark: Made in Britain.’32

  There is, admittedly, a case that Britain had entered the 1980s in a uniquely weak position, burdened by its recent history of amateurish management, dreadful labour relations and terrible productivity, which made it unusually vulnerable to a global downturn. As The Times’s economics editor, David Blake, observed, post-war Britain had an inglorious history of underperforming against its major competitors, exemplified by its abysmal inflation record. So even if someone else had been Prime Minister, it is hard to believe that unemployment would have remained below 2 million for long.

  And yet, even on the right, most economic commentators thought Mrs Thatcher’s approach had played a central part in pushing the jobless figures to such heights. At the London School of Economics, Richard Layard and Stephen Nickell calculated that about three-quarters of the unemployment increase was down to Mrs Thatcher’s policies. And as Blake pointed out, even without the world recession the government’s policies ‘would have tightened the vice on the economy’, pushing hundreds of thousands out of work. ‘Some of the loss’, Blake thought, ‘simply consisted of the death of industries which had to go anyway. But some was the result of the loss of world competitiveness and tough domestic policies.’33

  At one level, then, it seems reasonable to blame Mrs Thatcher for the mass unemployment of the early 1980s. Probably no alternative Prime Minister could have kept it below 2 million, but probably no other Prime Minister would have allowed it to rise above 3 million without changing course. It was not all her fault, but she had been perfectly happy to hammer Callaghan’s unemployment record a few years earlier, so she could hardly complain when people did the same to her. Even so, any long-term verdict ought to be a bit more complicated. Britain’s unemployment record under Mrs Thatcher was indeed truly terrible, especially by comparison with France and West Germany. But it soon turned out that unemployment was not a uniquely British disease. In the two decades after 1990, it was France and Germany that suffered from unemployment rates of almost 12 per cent, whereas Britain enjoyed a long period with rates as low as 5 per cent.

  The truth is that, as a result of global economic and technological change, every major industrial society went through a period of very high unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. The difference was that Britain, the first nation to industrialize, was also the first to experience the shock of deindustrialization. Only after a decade or two did it become clear that there had been nothing uniquely British, and indeed nothing uniquely Thatcherite, about it. In that context, what Mrs Thatcher did was effectively to speed up the process and get it over with. That made it all the more painful at the time, of course. The upside was that in Britain the shock lasted for about a decade, whereas in France it has lasted for three. But nobody knew that in the early 1980s. In any case, it would not have been much consolation.34

  What was very unusual about Britain, though, was that the issue became so bitterly personalized. Whenever the French contemplated their painful unemployment figures, few of them seriously argued that Jacques Chirac or François Hollande had deliberately set out to inflict hardship on millions. But Mrs Thatcher was different. Her stridency, her certainty, her partisanship and her gender made her an obvious target. Every time she chose hectoring argument over emollient moderation, she cast herself as a scapegoat. ‘Sometimes’, Sir Geoffrey Howe admitted, ‘we seemed almost to relish the intellectual certainty of telling people that their fate was unavoidable and that their activity was replaceable, if not expendable.’ And by ‘we’, he almost certainly meant the Prime Minister.35

  Mrs Thatcher’s critics claimed that she never showed sympathy for those who had lost their jobs. But this is simply not true. ‘I think it’s terrible if a person who wants to work can’t find a job,’ she explained during a party political broadcast in 1977. ‘You have no self-respect, you haven’t got the respect of your family, if you somehow can’t earn yourself a living and them a living too.’ Of course it was easy to say this in opposition. It was much harder in office, when she bore personal responsibility for every new set of unemployment figures. Still, she never shied away from the topic completely. ‘I feel deeply concerned when I have people who want jobs and can’t get them,’ she told a live audience on the BBC’s Nationwide in May 1981. ‘I do feel deeply about it. Of course I do. I wouldn’t be
human if we didn’t.’36

  Yet there was something missing. Whenever she talked about inflation – or indeed about working hard, bettering oneself, making money and getting on – everyone could tell that she meant it. Whenever she talked about unemployment, it was hard to banish the impression that she was doing it because she felt she had to. Exactly what was missing is hard to say. Conviction? Sincerity? Perhaps the answer is that whenever she talked about unemployment, there was never any sense of emotional investment. As the quintessential middle-class crusader, she cared passionately about inflation, which fell so heavily on Conservative voters in Middle England. By contrast, unemployment had always been a Labour issue, falling most heavily on the industrial working classes. It is easy to imagine her and Denis grumbling about surging inflation. It is impossible, though, to picture them talking so animatedly about unemployment.

  Perhaps there was a generational factor, too. Her Conservative predecessors had been adults in the 1930s, and vividly remembered the days of the dole queues. But Margaret Roberts, born in 1925, had never been touched by the Depression. She had no recollection of the hunger marches, no memories of friends, neighbours or constituents crippled by unemployment. There is no reason to doubt that she was sorry to hear about people who had lost their jobs. But it never kept her awake at night. Her listeners knew it; and they remembered.37

  For Mrs Thatcher’s older critics, the prospect of a return to the 1930s seemed almost too much to bear. By now, however, references to the dole queues of the Depression or to George Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier had become clichés of the age.fn1 ‘We saw the Jarrow marches,’ wrote the veteran political journalist David Wood, who had then been living in, of all places, Grantham. ‘We saw the dole queues, and passed the labour exchanges where hundreds of men gathered daily to form the human scrapheap … I still see those awful dole queues of the 1930s, and remember interviewing the marchers as they made their way through Mrs Thatcher’s home town towards Westminster.’

  For years Wood had believed that people would never let this happen again. Yet now he knew he had been wrong. He talked to a man of his own vintage, a former Labour minister who had just come back from a trip to northern England. There the ex-minister had delivered a tub-thumping lecture about the evils of unemployment and the wickedness of Mrs Thatcher’s government. Some of his audience were unemployed; others must have feared for their jobs. But they just sat there, showing ‘polite interest at best and boredom with an old, old story at worst’. ‘We are 1930s men,’ Wood wrote sadly. ‘We are economically out of date.’38

  Why? One explanation is that the world of Orwell’s Wigan was now so remote as to make parallels absurd. Mrs Thatcher insisted that there was ‘absolutely no comparison between today and the 1930s, none whatsoever’. And, in fairness, she had a point. Unemployment had been far higher during the Depression, with some estimates suggesting a national peak of around 22 per cent, compared with 13 per cent in the 1980s. What was more, benefits were far more extensive fifty years later, even after the government’s cuts. The flagrantly reactionary historian John Vincent, who claimed in The Times that unemployed people enjoyed ‘gas central-heating’ and ‘wall-to-wall carpets’, was deliberately exaggerating, but there was a grain of truth in his argument that the definition of poverty had changed enormously in half a century.

  Indeed, when the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins mentioned the Depression to the former Labour minister Roy Mason in February 1981, the latter reacted with scornful incredulity. Born in 1924, Mason had been brought up in Barnsley and went down the mine at the age of 14 before becoming the local MP. He was no stranger to hardship, but he thought the parallel with the 1930s absurd. People now had so many comforts – including ‘benefits legislated by Labour governments’ – that ‘nobody could tell him that things today compared with the thirties. He’d lived through the thirties and seen the soup kitchens in Barnsley and the mayor’s boot fund. The only people who were making comparison with the thirties were left-wing intellectuals who weren’t there.’39

  The other obvious difference was that unemployment was no longer a public spectacle. As Jonathan Raban observed, the Depression had been a photographer’s dream: ‘hunger marches, dole queues, ragged men with their hands in their pockets loafing sadly at street corners … a magnificent subject, full of human colour and evocative squalor’. But fifty years later, ‘English society had gone indoors’. People no longer stood about in the streets, no longer wore rags or walked barefoot, and no longer queued for soup in the freezing cold. Most spent their days at home, watching television. ‘Unemployment’, Raban wrote, ‘had been a public event; it was now a private misery, to be borne alone, behind the curtains.’ The real image of modern unemployment was ‘a room, decently furnished in nylon upholstery, where a man and his wife sat in the middle of an afternoon watching one of last year’s movies on the rented video machine’. Raban did not mean to dismiss their anguish. But he was surely right to suggest that, as people retreated indoors, they disappeared from the consciences of their neighbours. Meanwhile, those still in work pushed the plight of the less fortunate to the backs of their minds. ‘It’s rather like death,’ the Darlington journalist Susan Gray told Mass Observation: ‘you don’t talk about it very loudly.’40

  For years one of the guiding assumptions of British politics had been that the public would never forgive a return to the dole queues of the 1930s. It seemed entirely natural, then, that as the dole queues lengthened, Mrs Thatcher’s approval rating sank to the lowest levels since polling began. Unemployment was political poison: everybody said so. And the British people cared about it, or said they did. By the end of 1980, 68 per cent told Gallup it was the most urgent issue facing the country, rising to 74 per cent by the end of 1981 and 80 per cent by the end of 1982. For the next five years people consistently ranked unemployment as their single biggest concern, with no other issue getting remotely close. So, all other things being equal, Mrs Thatcher should have stood as much chance of retaining power as Boy George did of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury.41

  Did people really care, though? Attitudes were more complicated than we remember. During the 1983 election campaign, Gallup found that only 50 per cent of the electorate thought unemployment an unquestionably ‘bad thing’, while 44 per cent thought it could be justified while the economy was going through a ‘period of adjustment’. Asked about the unemployed, 43 per cent thought ‘some’ were on the dole ‘through their own fault’, while 47 per cent agreed that ‘most’ or ‘some’ could get jobs, ‘if they tried’. As for possible solutions, only 29 per cent thought the onus lay with the government, while 68 per cent thought ‘companies’ held the answer. And even at the lowest point of the recession, despite the terrible figures and tragic stories, Mrs Thatcher could rely on the fact that nine out of ten people were still in work. Only one in ten people experienced unemployment directly, while only two out of ten experienced it in their family. Eight out of ten people, in other words, did not experience it at all.42

  Even those who did lose their jobs did not always react as Tony Benn might have hoped. A few days before the Birmingham Northfield by-election in October 1982, one reporter talked to a 42-year-old legal secretary, Ineke Nesbitt. Her husband had lost his job just ten days earlier, yet both were planning to vote Conservative. ‘There is no easy solution to the country’s problems,’ Ineke said calmly. ‘It is no good borrowing more and more money and getting deeper and deeper into debt … It hurts, but I think we have got to swallow the medicine.’ What about her husband’s job? ‘Redundancy did not scare us,’ she said. ‘Britain is a fabulous country … But it does need what Mrs Thatcher keeps on hammering again and again – and that is a change in attitude, more than anything else. It is just a shame that a lot of working class people have not got a lot of go and initiative.’

  Many people would have found such sentiments shocking. But there were plenty who agreed with her. Visiting a working men’s club in an industrial Midlands town
, Jeremy Seabrook met an older man called Harry, who had just lost his job. Mrs Thatcher, Harry said, was the ‘best thing that’s happened to this country for years’. ‘She put you out of a job,’ somebody interjected. ‘The world don’t owe me a fucking living,’ Harry said angrily. ‘I don’t need her to teach me that, like some of you silly fuckers. Eating seed-corn, that’s what we’ve been doing for years. Eating seed-corn.’43

  Even in the benefits office in Dudley, one of the most stricken areas in the country, a visiting reporter found ardent Thatcher supporters. Margaret Jones, 61, had been on the dole for more than three years, yet thought the Prime Minister was doing ‘a great job’. Like many others, she blamed the worldwide recession, not the government, and thought local firms had ‘not tried hard enough’. Another Dudley woman, 37-year-old Valerie Pugh, had been out of work for six months. She too was a great Thatcher fan, explaining that she had bought her own home and thought ‘Conservatives were for that sort of thing’. Even Isabella Smith, a 19-year-old Wolverhampton shop assistant, out of work for almost eighteen months, living with an unemployed husband and a 10-month-old baby on just £50 a week, planned to vote for the Prime Minister next time. The reporter suggested that she might be voting against her own interests, but Isabella was not persuaded. ‘Labour’s worse, aren’t they?’ she said scornfully. ‘When they were in last, what did they do? Just made it as bad.’44

  Of course this can be exaggerated: the vast majority of the claimants in the Dudley benefits office said they were going to vote Labour. Yet despite Labour’s attempts to pin the blame for unemployment on Mrs Thatcher, the wider public were never convinced. As early as the summer of 1980, Gallup found that only 23 per cent blamed the government for the rise in unemployment, while a further 23 per cent blamed ‘people not wanting to work’, 25 per cent blamed the unions and 35 per cent blamed ‘world economic pressures’. Above all, many people clearly bought the line that unemployment was an inevitable result of economic and technological change. In Sheffield, a machine-tool engineer told Beatrix Campbell about a new machine that could do his job faster than he could. ‘It was beautiful to watch it work,’ he said. ‘It was doing things that are impossible for us to do by hand.’ And in Bristol, the women working in a tobacco factory, which would soon be completely automated, told Beryl Bainbridge that they had reconciled themselves to their own obsolescence: ‘It couldn’t be helped, could it?’45