It was, above all, a big decade, an era in which size became ever more important, when the people, events and debates of public life seemed to be written on a grand – if not always a glorious – scale.
It was a decade shaped by Murdoch and Maxwell, Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Heysel and Hillsborough, Live Aid and Lockerbie. Industrial conflict might have become less disruptive to the economy and to everyday life, but the strikes that did happen were epic in nature, with both the miners’ strike and the Wapping dispute lasting for a year apiece. Riots grew in both frequency and scale, as did demonstrations, some of which – on Greenham Common, at RAF Molesworth and outside the South African Embassy in London’s Trafalgar Square – became semi-permanent institutions. Union membership declined, but unions themselves began to amalgamate into larger entities, mimicking the mergers and takeovers that proliferated in the City of London. Even the Falklands War, minor in comparison with 1940, was considerably more serious than the Cod War against Iceland had been in the 1970s, and the period ended with Saddam Hussein threatening ‘the mother of all battles’ if America, Britain and their allies continued in their attempt to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. For internationally too, it was a time of big, bold politics, a time for Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to seek a resolution of the Cold War; it saw the rise of political Islam, the fall of the Soviet empire and, what was for some, the biggest story of all: the realization that human activity and industry might change the very climate of the planet, with uncertain but perhaps catastrophic consequences for the species.
Meanwhile, Dallas and Dynasty inspired the inflation of women’s fashions and hairstyles, tours by pop superstars became bigger and more lucrative and were individually branded to enhance their commercial potential, while London – having resisted for so long the vainglorious machismo of tall buildings – finally sacrificed its skyline to a series of massive office blocks, from the NatWest Tower to Canary Wharf. Models mutated into supermodels, supermarkets into superstores, cinemas into multiplexes. Building societies became banks and humble record shops developed delusions of grandeur, turning themselves into megastores. High streets were eclipsed by out-of-town shopping centres, and the number of television channels, newspapers and magazines simply grew and grew. If something wasn’t already big, then advertising – one of the great growth industries of the time – could make it seem so, or else the overblown price tag would suffice, as with the rise of nouvelle cuisine or the trend away from drinking pints in pubs towards bottled beers in bars.
And in Britain this swollen, steroid-pumped decade was dominated by the figure of Margaret Thatcher, the unlikeliest of Conservative Party leaders, who set a twentieth-century record as the longest-serving prime minister. ‘I was eighteen when she got in,’ wrote comedian Mark Steel, recalling Thatcher’s political demise in 1990, ‘and now I was thirty. All that time. All that time she’d strutted across my and millions of other lives, the symbol of every rotten selfish vindictive side of the human condition she could rake up and cultivate, like an evil scientist nurturing a test tube of greed and releasing it across the whole planet.’
Clearly Steel’s views were not universally shared, for Thatcher won three successive general elections, but the sense of his whole youth passing him by under her rule was very common indeed. Because her long period in office coincided with the coming to political maturity of the most numerous generation in British history, a demographic bulge which had peaked in 1964, the only year that the birth-rate exceeded a million. So while nine million people were born in Britain during her term, somewhere around twelve-and-a-half million others found that, on the first occasion that they were entitled to vote in a general election, she emerged as the victor. For that generation, even more than for the rest of the country, she was the one figure who shaped political perceptions, whether for good or ill, in support or in opposition, well into the next century.
When i-D magazine came to produce a summary of the decade in 1989, at a time when Thatcher was still in power, it concluded that she was ‘almost a fact of nature’, and so she sometimes appeared as, like a roaring lion, she walked about seeking whom she might devour. She was more than a prime minister, for her appeal – and the antipathy she aroused – were not merely concerned with politics; she came armed also with a philosophy and a morality about the individual and the nation that resonated in a way denied to her immediate predecessors. So powerful a brand was Thatcherism that her slogan ‘There is no alternative’, which had come across as hubris in the early 1980s, began to look like no more than the truth by the end of the decade, and for a while was understood to suggest that there was no alternative to Thatcher herself. The resultant sense of hopelessness and helplessness engendered in some was perhaps reflected in a report published in the British Medical Journal that the suicide rate doubled in the month that followed each of her general election victories.
Certainly no twentieth century leader, outside wartime, exercised anything like the dominance over the country’s psyche that Thatcher achieved during those eleven and a half years. And certainly the country was a very different place by the end of her premiership. But it would be a mistake to conflate those two facts, for it was by no means certain that the changes that Britain went through were in the direction she wished. Rather it was as though she had unlocked a Pandora’s box and released forces into society over which she had little or no control. She called for a return to thrift and good housekeeping, and presided over a massive increase in credit card and mortgage indebtedness; she sought to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit, and saw the City of London overrun by what detractors viewed as a generation of spivs and speculators; she wished to reverse the effects of 1960s permissiveness and found herself in a country where drug-taking had become almost the norm amongst young people, where condoms were promoted by government ministers and where home video recorders and satellite television made pornography ever more available.
Britain, the first industrial nation in the world, was now being told that it could enter a new age of prosperity if it would only abandon the tired old tradition of manufacturing and instead, cast against type, take up a role as a service-based economy. And in the wake of such thinking came a whole host of new professions, addressing needs that had never previously been identified: aromatherapists, kissograms and telecom salesmen (these last weighed down with answerphones, fax machines and brick-sized mobile phones). It was a decade that promised a new wave of wealth-producing, job-creating industrialists, but which also provided opportunities for lager louts, wheelclampers and computer hackers.
Even where commerce did triumph, it often unlocked elements in society that were antithetical to other strands of Thatcherism. Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin group, was eulogized in the media as the exemplar of the new entrepreneurs, yet his ownership of London’s leading gay nightclub Heaven (it had opened in 1979 and been purchased by Virgin in 1982) was, he observed, ‘always good for a “sleaze attack” from the tabloids.’ The expression ‘the pink pound’ was yet to be coined, but it was in the 1980s that Branson and other businessmen first saw investment opportunities in meeting the requirements of the gay market, and the result, according to the pioneering gay journalist, Peter Burton, was an impact that was as important as more overtly political campaigning: ‘it has been the commercial wing which has brought homosexuality a long way out of the closet,’ he wrote in 1985. The conflicting interests of economic and moral liberalism within the Thatcherite coalition would remain throughout the decade.
It is doubtful too whether Thatcher truly won over the nation to her vision of the sunlit uplands of unfettered capitalism, where market forces would set the price of everything, without necessarily worrying about its value. For as she sought to free the country from its recent history of industrial strife and underperformance, it became apparent that, for the British people, ideals of enterprise were all very well, but winning at all costs, with no thought for the loser and no care for the way one played the game, still seemed somehow wrong.
Culturally the country was unconvinced. There was a television boom in the lovable, semi-villainous rogues so beloved of British culture, and although there was a brief attempt to give them a Thatcherite edge (Arthur Daley in Minder, we were given to understand, ‘admires Sir Keith Joseph’), characters such as Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, Oz in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Robbie Box in Big Deal – even Vincent Pinner of Just Good Friends – still remained defiantly beyond the pale of respectable society: they could all be found on the spectrum that contained, at one end, the undeserving poor championed by Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion and, at the other, the myth of Robin Hood. Similarly, although in the mid-1980s, British pop was dominated by the shiny, unthreatening likes of Duran Duran and Wham!, it had by the end of the decade reverted to type and produced the Happy Mondays, a Manchester group who gave every appearance of being a Dickensian gang of rogues and reprobates.
And so the British continued to cheer the plucky underdog, even if he were destined never to make it to the top, and even if he were as implausible a hero as Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, the short-sighted plasterer who became a star after finishing so far behind everyone else in the 1988 Winter Olympics ski-jumping competition that the rules were immediately changed to prevent the likes of him from ever competing again. Likewise the family-friendly Frank Bruno became Britain’s most popular boxer since Henry Cooper. Having seen his career derailed when he lost two fights with American journeymen, Bruno re-established his credentials when he avenged Our ’Enery’s final defeat by beating Joe Bugner, the man who had taken Cooper’s titles back in 1971. The fact that Bugner was now thirty-seven years old and yet the bout could attract a live crowd of 30,000, with sixteen million watching on television, said a great deal about the low level of sporting prowess for which the public was prepared to settle.
Or perhaps that Bruno-Bugner fight, staged by Essex-born businessman Barry Hearn, the man who steered snooker champion Steve Davis to commercial success, was an encapsulation of the values of the era: two also-rans of heavyweight boxing generated absurd amounts of money in a bout that did little for the reputation of either, or of the sport itself. (Both men, incidentally, went on to win world championships, Bugner doing so at the age of forty-eight, so inflated had the number of available titles become.)
But while the triumph of money was hard to avoid, that was ultimately not Thatcher’s stated goal. ‘Economics are the method,’ she insisted. ‘The object is to change the soul.’ It was a theme that she had outlined to her speech-writers back in 1975, as she prepared to make her first appearance as party leader at the Conservative conference. ‘The economy had gone wrong because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically,’ she remembered telling them. ‘The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation.’
There were many strands that had supposedly contributed to this situation, but perhaps two were pre-eminent. First, there was said to be a tendency on the part of many to run the country down, sliding from traditional self-deprecation into outright disparagement. The loss of faith was summed up by humorist Paul Jennings in 1982 as he proposed the introduction of a new word into the language, ‘Britic’, the definition of which would be: ‘A person of British birth who thinks that everything Britain does is wrong and talks about “the British” as though he were of some other nationality.’ To counter this, a new sense of patriotism was to be encouraged, a reborn pride in the nation’s history and a hope for its future. This was largely an ideological war, to be waged in the classrooms and in the columns of the tabloid press, but in the event it was a more literal battle that came closest to achieving the objective; as Thatcher put it in 1982 when announcing to the House of Commons that, with the surrender of Argentine forces, the Falklands War was now over: ‘Today has put the Great back into Britain.’ The somewhat trite phrasing may have been more appropriate for a late-night radio phone-in show than for a prime minister, but it undoubtedly captured the mood of much of the nation.
Second, and more immediately pressing, there was the issue of the trade unions that had been at the core of British politics for a decade and more. Twice in recent years the governments of first Harold Wilson and then Edward Heath had tried to find a way of constraining the industrial power of the union movement through legislation, and twice those governments had been defeated at a subsequent general election. The fall of the Heath administration, in particular, had left scars on the soul of the Conservative Party that would take a long time to heal. Confronted by the threat of a miners’ strike at a time when the economy was already suffering the effects of huge increases in the price of oil, Heath had announced the introduction of a three-day working week at the start of 1974, and had then called an early election, seeking a mandate that would strengthen his hand in dealing with the unions. And the people responded by removing him from office, punishing him for his evident inability to provide stable government.
The question of the relationship between parliament and the unions, however, was not so easily resolved, and while some measure of industrial peace was achieved in the next few years, the underlying tensions erupted in the first months of 1979. An attempt by James Callaghan’s government to impose a maximum pay rise of 5 per cent across the whole nation was contemptuously rejected by the unions, and a series of strikes in private industry was followed by similar disputes in the public sector. The result was swiftly dubbed the winter of discontent, with the effects reaching into every area of public services: schools were closed, public places (including, most famously, Leicester Square in London) were converted into makeshift refuse-dumps, and hospitals found themselves unable to provide anything but the most urgent treatment. The disruption was relatively short-lived, certainly compared to the disputes of the coming decade, but the imagery was to live on in the collective memory. And when, in May 1979, a third successive government was defeated in a general election as a consequence of clashes with the unions, there were many who felt that the time had come for firm, decisive action, that Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union rhetoric should be given a chance to find concrete expression.
The society she inherited was so torn by division and conflict, so racked by crises, that when she stood at the threshold of 10 Downing Street in May 1979 and quoted what purported to be a prayer by St Francis – ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’ – there were plenty prepared to mock, but few who would deny the desirability of such an aspiration. The problem was that it was hard to see how the policies of her government were going to live up to such a lofty, perhaps unattainable, ideal. The encouragement over the ensuing decade of what cabinet minister Kenneth Baker was to call ‘acquisitive individualism’ did not, in the minds of many, bring harmony to the nation.
Instead the 1980s were characterized by increasing divisions, between rich and poor, between north and south, between those in work and those without, divisions that were manifest in civil disorder, rising crime and rioting. There was a note of snarled hostility, of suppressed violence, that insisted on making itself heard; sometimes drowned out by the loud celebration of wealth, it was never quite silenced, and echoes could be heard in the unlikeliest of places. The conduct of disputes coarsened during the decade, so that when Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was preaching in a Liverpool church in 1982, he was interrupted by hardline Protestants demonstrating against the forthcoming visit of Pope John Paul II to Britain. He was jeered and hissed, and there were cries of ‘Judas’ and ‘traitor’, to such an extent that he was unable to continue his sermon, with newspapers reporting that ‘the crowd of banner-waving men and women hurled four-letter words and vile abuse at the Archbishop’. After a failed attempt to read from the Bible, he was forced to walk out of the service, amidst a storm of catcalls, and while there was also supportive applause from other members of the congregation, it was an extraordinary display both of Christian disunity and of sheer bad manners. Nor was such behaviour confined to a single group: the Liberal MP David Alton spoke at a Bristol church later in the decade, in the midst of his campaign to amend the abortion laws, and found the church surrounded by stone-throwing protesters.
The popular leftwing slogan ‘Ditch the Bitch’, aimed at Thatcher, was similarly unedifying, though it was eclipsed by the work of Saatchi & Saatchi, the only advertising firm to become a household name, thanks to its association with the Conservative Party. Their best known work for the party was little more than knocking copy, which made some sense in 1979 when the Tories were in opposition, but was less impressive as the decade progressed. The 1983 campaign featured an election broadcast showing scenes from the winter of discontent four years earlier with a voice-over saying ‘Do you remember?’ A press advert from the same campaign compared extracts from the manifestos of the Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain, under the slogan ‘Like your manifesto, comrade’. The negativity continued into the 1987 election and beyond, giving the impression that the government had few achievements of its own to celebrate, or perhaps that it simply preferred attack to debate.
There was a level of aggression and verbal violence that would previously have remained in private, kept away from the public sphere. The behaviour of delegates at Labour conferences in the early years of the decade, abusing and shouting down speakers with whom they disagreed, was matched by representatives at the Conservative conference in 1981, who booed a speech opposing racism and then heckled the home secretary, William Whitelaw, when he reprimanded them for their discourteous behaviour. The lack of respect implicit in all this was, some argued, part of the decline of deference, a development that Thatcher herself encouraged and that could be seen as a sign of a healthy democracy, though its negativity was often more apparent than were its benefits. Bobby Robson, who served as the manager of the England football team between 1982 and 1990, was perhaps the best-loved man ever to have held the post, but, a casualty of the circulation wars then raging between rival tabloid newspapers, he received coverage that was abusive, insulting and personal. He took the team to the quarter-finals and then the semi-finals of successive world cups, and faced press reports calling him everything from PLONKER (a characteristically direct headline in the Sun) to ‘a liar, a cheat and a traitor’, this being Today’s considered verdict on the man on the very eve of his most successful tournament at Italia 90.
Amongst football fans too, longstanding rivalries became ever more vicious, with the supporters of Manchester United responding to a Liverpool banner that read ‘Munich ’58’ (in reference to the aircrash that killed eight of the United team) by displaying their own taunting banner, ‘Shankly ’81’, the year that the greatest Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly, died of a heart attack; accompanying chants and songs were inescapable on the terraces, as was the heightened level of hooliganism. ‘In my experience there was more violence in the ’70s – that is to say, there was fighting more or less every week – but in the first half of the ’80s,’ recalled the writer and Arsenal fan Nick Hornby, ‘it was less predictable and much nastier. Police confiscated knives and machetes and other weapons I did not recognize, things with spikes coming out of them.’ Journalist Robert Elms, a Queen’s Park Rangers supporter, noted the same tendency: ‘this is a vicious era, when the mass ends of the seventies have been distilled down to a more ruthless, more organized hardcore of tightly knit, Stanley-knife-carrying cadres.’
The coarsening of British culture could also be seen in the biggest live draws on the comedy circuit of the 1980s: Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson and Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. All performed acts that were considered completely unsuitable for broadcast and, from another direction, all came under fire from the new wave of alternative comedians for the racist and sexist content of some of their material. Language itself became a battleground, here as elsewhere, so that Brown’s song ‘He’s a Cunt’ – which was broadly representative of his work – offended some by its vulgarity, others by its use of what was deemed a sexist term. The struggle for a politically acceptable language raged through the decade, reflecting a deeper ideological divide, so that, for example, a Conservative Party spokesman would be answered by a Labour Party spokesperson. Similarly the Sunday Telegraph reported that Labour MP Clare Short refused to refer to her first speech in the House of Commons as a ‘maiden’ speech, ‘in the pursuit of linguistic integrity and sexual equality’. (Contemporary linguistic preferences are used in the following pages.)
It was a time of dogma and doctrine, of heated conflict, of the adoption of extreme positions. Derek Hatton, the deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, reflected that it was an era in which ‘views polarized, and there was no middle ground left on which to stand.’ And yet the story of the 1980s is largely one of parties and movements seeking to find that elusive common ground. Everyone was agreed that the political and social consensus that had dominated Britain since the war had come to its end, but there was no certainty what would take its place in a new settlement. Despite her series of overwhelming parliamentary majorities, Thatcher only ever attracted the support of a third of the electorate at the ballot boxes, scarcely a ringing endorsement of her vision for the future.
In 1985 a young Labour MP named Tony Blair declared that ‘there is virtually a consensus against this government’, which was overstating the case a little, but did at least point to the fact that Thatcherite arguments had not yet managed to score a decisive victory. Nor were they ever to do so. In 1989 the journalist Eric Jacobs and the psephologist Robert Worcester of MORI conducted an in-depth poll aimed at discovering the mood of the nation. Chief amongst their findings was that, when presented with a series of opposing views on what constituted an ideal society (along the lines of ‘private interests and free enterprise’ versus ‘public interests and a more controlled economy’), it appeared as though Thatcherite principles had failed to transform the country. Their conclusion that more than half the population were essentially socialist in their value system was perhaps a little too simplified in its reductionism, but was an instructive counterbalance to the distortions of the British electoral system.
The consensus that did emerge from the frequently traumatic upheavals of the 1980s was partially shaped by Thatcher, but in several key respects it was in defiance rather than in support of her beliefs. Because Thatcher, of course, was not the only one seeking resolutions to the crisis of self-confidence that had descended upon the nation in the 1970s. Other major politicians had their own solutions to proffer and contributions to make, whether they were veterans such as Edward Heath, Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn, or new stars like David Owen, Michael Heseltine and Ken Livingstone. So too did a wide range of campaigners, commentators, police chiefs and even comedians. All were to help mould the new Britain, and the story of the 1980s belongs to them as much as it does to Thatcher. So dominant a figure was she, however, that she often eclipsed what else was going on in the country. And much that happened during the decade was attributed to her influence, whether it were appropriate or not, so that, for example, Kenneth Branagh could be described by Time magazine as ‘an icon of Thatcherite initiative’ simply for doing what many another actor had done, long before Thatcherism was conceived: setting up a theatre company.
There was a subtle but unmistakable change in the nature of the nation’s culture, as the advent of an overtly doctrinaire prime minister, matched by an equally doctrinaire Labour opposition, produced an increasingly politicized cultural expression. One of the big television successes of the 1970s had been The Good Life, first broadcast in 1975, a sitcom that responded to the environmental concerns of the time by depicting Tom and Barbara Good, a suburban couple who choose to abandon the rat-race in favour of self-sufficient simplicity. There was a degree of gentle social commentary to be found here, but the series only won over a real mass-audience when it allowed the Goods’ next-door neighbours, the conventional Jerry and Margo Leadbetter, to share equal billing; the show rapidly became a straightforward middle-class comedy, more stylish and of a much higher quality than the likes of, say, Bless This House or Terry and June, but not entirely unrelated. With the ending of the series, however, the actors who had played Jerry and Margo – Paul Eddington and Penelope Keith – went on to star in their own shows, and the changed times were immediately apparent.
Eddington found a new role as James Hacker in Yes, Minister, the definitive political comedy of the 1980s. Hacker was the newly appointed minister of administrative affairs in a government whose composition was carefully unspecified but which was clearly Conservative, and found himself engaged in a running battle with his permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), as the civil service did its utmost to frustrate every initiative that was launched, every policy that was mooted, most especially when it involved changes to the civil service itself. The series was largely based on the experience of the previous Labour government, but its central truth – that the civil service saw itself as the ultimate custodian of consensus politics, determined to draw the teeth of all would-be radicals, from whichever quarter they might come – remained relevant into the 1980s.
This was a very different world to the one portrayed in the long-running radio comedy The Men From the Ministry (1962–77), which had seen Richard Murdoch and Wilfrid Hyde-White (later replaced by Deryck Guyler) as hapless incompetents at the general assistance department of the civil service, whose antics included nothing more controversial than ordering 20,000 left-foot boots for the army. Rejecting the cosiness of that portrayal of Whitehall, Yes, Minister made few bones about its underlying message, summed up by one of the co-writers, Antony Jay, as ‘undermining the concept of socialism and that the state should run everything’. At its most extreme, in the 1984 Christmas special ‘Party Games’, Sir Humphrey conspires with the cabinet secretary and the chief whip to stage a coup, installing Hacker as prime minister in a manner which made clear where real power lay in the establishment (as well as setting up two further series in the guise of Yes, Prime Minister). But the satire was not restricted to senior civil servants. Hacker spends much of his time onscreen revealing the cynicism of professional politicians: ‘First rule of politics: never believe anything until it’s officially denied.’ Perhaps not noticing this element of the show, Thatcher cited it as one of her favourite programmes, and even appeared onstage with Eddington and Hawthorne in a sketch when the series received an award from Mary Whitehouse’s Viewers and Listeners Association in 1984; playing herself, she displayed little acting ability and no comic timing.
Meanwhile Penelope Keith was also enjoying her new status as a television star in To the Manor Born, in which, as Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, she was even more snobbish, bossy and self-centred than she had been as Margo. Recently widowed and obliged to sell off Grantleigh Manor, an estate that has been in her late husband’s family for four hundred years (‘We’ve been here through wars, plagues, floods, famines and Labour governments!’), she finds to her horror that it has been bought by a nouveau riche millionaire Richard DeVere, played by Peter Bowles, a businessman of Czech ancestry who has made his fortune with a company named Cavendish Foods. ‘He’s trade,’ shudders Audrey; ‘at bottom he’s a grocer.’ Over the course of the next three years, as she lived on in the old coach-house in the grounds, constantly trying to interfere in his management of the estate, the two played out a long feud that turned inevitably to courtship.
The idea for the series had been developed by writer Peter Spence many years earlier, and had even got as far as an unbroadcast radio pilot, but didn’t reach television until the autumn of 1979, some four months after Thatcher’s election victory. Its timing was impeccable, seeming to capture the antagonism between the twin wings of the modern Conservative Party (the estate-owners and the estate agents, as Denis Healey once described them): Audrey represented the old feudal tradition, now in decline, while DeVere stood as the embodiment of the rise of the entrepreneur. The fact that he was regularly referred to as a grocer, echoing the occupation of Thatcher’s own father, was perhaps fortuitous, but resonant nonetheless. Though many episodes were little more than mild meanderings through rural affairs, the series was, Spence said, conceived as a portrayal of a time when ‘the economic and social structure of England was in the process of being turned on its head’. It proved hugely popular, with the final episode attracting a record audience of twenty-four million viewers to witness the couple getting married and Audrey returning in triumph to the manor house.
If that seemed to suggest that a truce had been sealed between the warring factions, however, it was not one that found a counterpart in real life, where Thatcher’s vision of modern conservatism continued to be opposed by traditionalists. Characteristic of the battles that were fought throughout the decade was the struggle over the government’s attitude towards the film industry. The first half of the decade saw a revival of British movies with the international success of films such as Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982) and The Killing Fields (1984), followed by a spate of comedies about attitudes towards sex in the 1950s and ’60s: Personal Services, Prick Up Your Ears, Wish You Were Here (all 1987). But there was little enthusiasm for such enterprise within the Thatcherite ranks. Norman Tebbit arrived at the department of trade in 1979 as a junior minister and found himself responsible for policy on the industry, a fact that baffled him entirely. ‘Why do we need a films policy?’ he asked the permanent secretary. ‘Let’s get out of films as soon as possible.’ In true Yes, Minister style, however, he was deflected from his course and the tax-breaks for film-making remained. It was, however, only a reprieve for the industry; in the mid-1980s Tebbit returned to the department in the top position, took up where he had left off and was later able to gloat in his memoirs that he had finally achieved his goal: ‘as secretary of state for trade and industry, I won that battle!’ The result was that by 1990 The Times was reporting that ‘production of movies has fallen to its lowest point since the 1920s’. The hostility was amply reciprocated; when asked what the government should do to help the film industry, Hanif Kureishi, who had written My Beautiful Laundrette and was one of the brightest new talents in the field, was disdainful: ‘I don’t think the government should do anything. They’re ignorant, suburban people who wouldn’t know a work of art if it bit them.’
Throughout the decade the political conflicts of the time spilled over into the cultural arena far more explicitly than they had done before, often expressed in straightforward party terms. In the 1970s popular culture had helped prepare the ground for the advent of Thatcherism by expressing discontent with where the country was heading; in the 1980s it was far more overt in its opposition, particularly in the context of that massive generation reaching adulthood. Pop music, comedy, fiction: all felt moved to remark upon political developments, normally from a hostile position. Their voices were seldom acknowledged by the Thatcher governments, but even so their impact was felt and – perhaps more than the official opposition – it was often these cultural dissidents who kept alive the idea that there was indeed an alternative to Thatcherism. Certainly they provided a running commentary on the era that was hard to ignore.
Like its predecessor, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, this book is an attempt to depict the high politics and low culture of the time. It is structured in three sections, broadly corresponding to the three Thatcher governments. Each section starts with an overview of the period, followed by a series of chapters addressing contemporary issues. These latter are not entirely chronological but are intended to explore thematically the evolution of one of the great transitional decades in British history. If the 1970s had asked social questions about the nature of Britain, then the 1980s sought to provide political answers.