…one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it.
—George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah
The Tories have, in modern times, been at pains to present themselves as standing above class and sectional interests. ‘One Nation’ was one of their most treasured phrases throughout much of the twentieth century. When David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, the Tories were, to begin with, full of fluffy rhetoric about understanding marginalized young people (Cameron wants us to ‘hug a hoodie’, mocked New Labour), and even about narrowing the gap between rich and poor.
But as soon as they are safely behind closed doors, away from the cameras, the cuddly PR-speak can abruptly disappear. I witnessed the mask slip myself, when in my final year as an undergraduate. An extremely prominent Tory politician from the moderate wing of the party had come to deliver an off-the-record speech to students. So that he could speak candidly, aspiring student journalists were barred from reporting on the speech and we were sworn to preserve his anonymity. It soon became clear why. As the logs crackled in the fireplace on a rainy November evening, the Tory grandee made a stunning confession.
‘What you have to realize about the Conservative Party,’ he said as though it was a trivial, throwaway comment, ‘is that it is a coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.’
Here was an analysis that could have dropped out of the pages of Socialist Worker. A doyen of the Conservative Party had more or less confessed that it was the political arm of the rich and powerful. It was there to fight the corner of the people at the top. It was waging class war.
Asked to picture a ‘class warrior’, perhaps most people would see a chubby union leader in a flat cap, becoming progressively redder in the face as he denounces ‘management’ in a thick regional accent—not well-bred men with sleek suits and clipped accents.
When I asked former Labour leader Neil Kinnock if the Conservatives were the class warriors of British politics, he shook his head gravely. ‘No, because they’ve never had to engage in a class war,’ he said. ‘Largely because we signed the peace treaty without realizing that they hadn’t.’
The demonization of the working class cannot be understood without looking back at the Thatcherite experiment of the 1980s that forged the society we live in today. At its core was an offensive against working-class communities, industries, values and institutions. No longer was being working class something to be proud of: it was something to escape from. This vision did not come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a class war waged, on and off, by the Conservatives for over two centuries.
This is certainly not the way the Conservative Party has sought to present itself in public. Whenever the interests of its ‘coalition of privileged interests’ have been menaced by even the most moderate arguments for social reform, it has decried them as attempts at ‘class war’. After six years spent resisting reforms introduced by the post-war Labour government, such as the National Health Service and the welfare state, the Tories denounced Labour in those exact terms. ‘Of all impediments the class war is the worst,’ declared the 1951 Conservative Manifesto, accusing Labour of hoping to ‘gain another lease of power by fomenting class hatred and appealing to moods of greed and envy’.
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 ‘first-rate 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. Working-class 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 Taff Vale legal judgement of 1901, which hit at the unions by making them liable for profits lost in strikes. Looking back on the episode, the future Tory Prime Minister 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 up to a 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 capitalism of nineteenth-century Liberal leader William Gladstone for inspiration.
Of course, the whole point of Disraelian Toryism was to preserve the existing social order. As the relatively moderate Tory Michael Heseltine put it a century later, it was ‘good enlightened capitalism—paternalism if you like. Noblesse oblige. I believe strongly that those with power 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—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 crackdowns 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—Scotland, Wales and most of Northern England—this had limited appeal. But where there was a solid middle class, people from working-class backgrounds were always more likely to opt for the Tories. It was a way of keeping up with the Joneses—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 World 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 speculating 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 laissez-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 I was 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, but 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 October 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 protégée, Margaret Thatcher, the MP for Finchley, stood and won. Joseph’s influence was evident in much of the intellectual 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 cliché 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 herself with men from privileged backgrounds. In her first Cabinet, 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.’2
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.
‘Morality is personal. There is no such thing as collective conscience, collective kindness, collective gentleness, collective freedom,’ she planned to argue. ‘To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order, may be easy and make us feel good, but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility.’ It was clearly too much for her speechwriters and did not make the final cut. However, they were not able to stop her infamous declaration several years later (in lifestyle magazine Woman’s Own, of all places): ‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’
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 subversive 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 rectified. 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 1976.4 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 it was 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 it certainly 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 beating 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, had given the workers in these communities strength, solidarity and a sense of power. All of this had sustained a feeling of belonging, 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 significance of Thatcherism’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 restrictive’ 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 journalist 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.
Tony Benn was a minister in the Labour Cabinet during the Winter of Discontent. ‘It was a conflict, an economic conflict between working people on the one hand and their employers on the other, and the government supported the employers, in effect,’ he recalls. ‘And it led to a great deal of disillusionment.’
There is no doubting that the Winter of Discontent fuelled popular frustration with unions. Right-wing tabloids went into overdrive, making it look like Britain was descending into chaos. Members of the public faced inconvenience because of cancelled services. The increasingly impoverished workers who had been forced to strike did not get a hearing.
Thatcher’s government relentlessly manipulated these memories. Its goal was to crush the unions forever. New laws allowed employers to sack strikers, reduced dismissal compensation, forbade workers to strike in support of others, repealed protections preventing courts seizing union funds, and made unions liable for huge financial penalties. Changing the law was not, however, enough: examples had to be made. As industrial relations expert Professor Gregor Gall puts it, the government inflicted ‘a series of defeats on unions in set-piece battles with the public sector, and encouraged private sector employers to take on the unions’. The first to face Thatcher’s iron fist were the steel-workers in 1980, who lost a thirteen-week strike battle and would pay the price with thousands of jobs. Three years later, striking workers on picket lines at the Stockport Messenger were charged by 3,000 riot police and beaten up in neighbouring fields. Their union, the National Graphical Association, had its assets seized by the government.
In the face of this onslaught, you might have expected the trade unions to rally together and fight back. But they didn’t. Unions—and the Labour Party for that matter—were hopelessly divided. Their leaders were caught disastrously off-balance by the determination and ferocity of the Thatcherite crusade. The government took note of the weakness of its enemies, and picked off those workers who dared to fight back. But all the laws and set-piece battles combined did not have the same crushing effect as another of Thatcher’s weapons: Britain’s ever-growing dole queues.
The Tories had made a big deal out of the fact that unemployment had reached a million under Labour in 1979, employing ad firm Saatchi & Saatchi to design their famous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster. But under Thatcher, some estimates put the number out of work as peaking at four million. The terror of losing your job suppresses any temptation to fight back. ‘The major catalyst for Thatcher’s alterations in labour law was unemployment,’ says former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. ‘Stupid bourgeois people, like the ones who write the newspapers, say that four million unemployed means an angry, assertive workforce. It doesn’t. It means at least four million other very frightened people. And people threatened with unemployment don’t jeopardize their jobs by undertaking various acts of labour militancy—they just don’t do it.’
When I asked Thatcher’s first chancellor of the exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, if mass unemployment had a role in restraining union power, he agreed. ‘I think it had in demonstrating the emptiness of continuing to behave as they were behaving.’ But, he was quick to add, his policies were not ‘a conscious medicine to achieve that’. Even so, one of the great achievements of Thatcherism, as far as Howe was concerned, was crushing ‘trade union tyranny’.
Others involved with the Tory governments put it rather more bluntly. When Sir Alan Budd was the Treasury’s chief economist in the early 1990s, he suspected that the government ‘never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.’
Regardless of the government’s motives, ‘the legacy of Geoffrey Howe is the de-industrialization of our economy,’ in the words of economist Graham Turner. Within three months of sweeping to power in 1979, the Tories dramatically abolished exchange controls, allowing financial companies to make huge profits from currency speculation. This allowed the City to thrive at the expense of other parts of the economy, like manufacturing. But above all, it was allowing the value of the pound to soar that did for industry, making its exports far more expensive than overseas competitors. By 1983—after just five years—nearly a third of manufacturing had vanished from Britain’s shores. Once-thriving working-class communities lay in ruin.
Now, at a time of economic crisis caused by overdependence on the City and a depleted manufacturing base, even leading Tory figures today are talking about the need for Britain to start making things again. Many of the old industrial communities remain in pieces. But remorse for Thatcherism’s scorched-earth policies is difficult to come by. I asked Thatcher’s chancellor if he regretted the use of a blunt instrument like raising interest rates. ‘It was inescapable,’ says Geoffrey Howe. ‘Most things we were grappling with were part of unconscious, suicidal management … So it was uncomfortable for industry—but no one was really arguing for an escape route. It would have been nice. But then there were other things that would have gone wrong.’ As far as Howe is concerned, manufacturing only has itself to blame. ‘Everyone regrets it, yes. It was so much caused by the behaviour of industry itself … I’ve often questioned the suicide note of much of British industry at that time.’
Senior Tory MP and one-time Conservative leadership contender David Davis is less repentant still. ‘Well, was it avoidable?’ he demands, visibly agitated. ‘What would you have done? Tell me what you would have done. Put money into manufacturing? That’s what stuffed it up in the first place! What could they have done?’ He goes as far as to argue that Thatcher’s government ‘did quite a lot for the communities, in terms of, you know, sorts of schemes to try and retrain and so on. No, no, I think they did a lot there. The truth of the matter is it just may not work, that’s the problem … the truth of most public policy is that you’ve got about a 50 per cent success rate if you’re lucky in economic areas of public policy.’ Even Howe admits that many of their initiatives in that regard, like ‘Business Start-Up Schemes and things like that … turned out to be tax avoidance societies.’
As far as Davis is concerned, manufacturing had been kept alive by ‘props’ which Thatcher had no option but to kick away. ‘And also, there is an extent to which you are acting like King Canute, trying to stop the tide, trying to stop manufacturing going to China,’ he argues. ‘Ironically, since it’s very often socialists who argue against this—it’s actually a part of material redistribution going on. The market redistributing income from the wealthy West to the poor East. And in many ways I approve of that.’ He is quick to add that this ‘doesn’t mean I want us to give away jobs’—though it is difficult to see any other conclusion to what he is arguing.
‘I think that’s a grotesque rewriting of history,’ retorts Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott. ‘The Tories came into power and made a series of catastrophic economic blunders, sending the pound shooting up on the foreign exchanges, which made our exports highly uncompetitive. They allowed inflation to get to 20 per cent, and pushed interest rates up to 17 per cent, which made borrowing expensive—which was crucial for manufacturing.’ He dismisses out of hand the idea that the 15 per cent of British industry that went to the wall in the early Thatcher years was ‘ripe for the kill’.
In other words, industry had been stripped from Britain because of government policy, not because of the onward march of history. No other Western European nation saw the obliteration of manufacturing in such a brutally short period. Just consider the contrast with the response to the financial crisis that exploded in 2008. While Thatcherism left manufacturing to bleed to death in the 1980s, the New Labour government pumped billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into banks whose greed and stupidity had left them teetering on the edge of collapse. The reason? The banks were too big to fail. ‘You could say the same about manufacturing,’ says Graham Turner. ‘The world eventually recovered, and had you supported manufacturing more, we might not have lost so many manufacturing jobs.’
All of this prompts the question: did the Tories have any interest in saving manufacturing, crocodile tears or no? As far as Thatcher and her acolytes were concerned, finance and services were the future; making things belonged to the past. In his memoirs John Cole, a former BBC political correspondent, recalls asking Thatcher how this ‘service’ or ‘post-industrial’ economy would work. ‘She cited an entrepreneur she had met the previous week, who wished to take over Battersea power station and turn it into what we both knew as a “Disneyland”, but subsequently learned to call a theme park.’ The following day, he put this anecdote to the economic attaché at the United States Embassy. ‘He looked at me in genuine astonishment, thoughtfully laid down his fork, and exclaimed: “But gee, John, you can’t all make a living opening doors for each other!” ’5 However, an economy based on everyone ‘opening doors for each other’ was exactly what Thatcher had in mind.
Thatcher’s attacks on unions and industry dealt body blows to the old, industrial working class. Well-paid, secure, skilled jobs that people were proud of, which had been a linchpin of working-class identity, were eradicated. All the things people associated with working-class Britain were disappearing. But even after Thatcher won again in 1983, Britain’s working class was not quite dead as a political and social force. The decisive battle was still to come.
‘The interesting thing people haven’t recognized quite,’ observes Geoffrey Howe, ‘is that the Thatcher government is in fact the Heath government given a second chance, with very much the same personnel.’ It is a point worth underlining. The Tories under Ted Heath had been swept from office by a national miners’ strike in 1974. Heath had asked the electorate: ‘Who governs Britain?’ The answer came back: ‘Not you, mate!’ It was a humiliating defeat, and the first time that unions had effectively overthrown a government. Thatcher had not forgotten it. Her response must rank as one of the most callous acts of revenge in British history.
Retribution wasn’t the only motive. The miners had been the vanguard of the union movement in Britain throughout the twentieth century. Britain’s only general strike had been called in support of the miners in 1926. They had the capacity to single-handedly bring the country to a standstill by cutting off its energy supply, as they had demonstrated in the 1970s. If you could see off the miners, what other group of workers could stop you? That’s why the defeat of the Miners’ Strike was the turning point in the history of modern working-class Britain.
‘Mining communities were vibrant communities, but they were built around the pit. The pit was the heart of the community, it was the pit that bound everyone together,’ recalls one National Union of Mine-workers (NUM) leader, Chris Kitchen. ‘The code of honour that existed underground was part of the fabric of the community as well. You didn’t get young lads going off the rails at the weekend. You wouldn’t upset an old guy because he would be the same one you’d rely on in the pit to protect your life at work, so why would you upset him at the weekend over a few pints?’
When Thatcher’s government unveiled its pits closure programme in 1984, many of these tightly knit communities faced oblivion. Strikes spontaneously broke out in the Yorkshire coalfields and spread across the country. NUM leader Arthur Scargill declared these strikes a national strike and called all miners out, a decision ratified by a national Conference in April that year. Of the major pits, only the Nottinghamshire miners—who wrongly, as it turned out, thought their jobs were safe—refused to strike, a cause of great bitterness among the wider mining community.
As Tony Benn recalls, the struggle ‘electrified the labour movement. I did 299 public meetings in a year, and wherever you went there was tremendous support and activity.’ But in the national media and among Thatcher’s supporters, Scargill became a hate figure. There was also fear, not least at the excitement generated by the miners’ struggle. When I discussed it with Simon Heffer, the arch-Thatcherite Daily Telegraph journalist, he was moved to make parallels with the Nazis:
I think Scargill’s mentally ill, actually. I was present at the 1984 Labour Party Conference when Scargill made this speech, which was devastating in its impact. I mean, I’d never before been in a room where he has spoken, or where anyone has spoken with such effect. And it was his orthodox Stalinist critique. I think it included the phrase—and I’m remembering this from twenty-five years ago—‘Margaret Thatcher is fighting for her class, I am here fighting for my class.’ I’ve seen Hitler on television, and it reminded me of the sort of demagoguery that Hitler engaged in. It was terrifying, because while I was able to stand removed from it, there were people in there who were all getting incredibly excited about it, and probably do get excited about it to this day.
Unlike most Nottinghamshire miners, Adrian Gilfoyle went on strike until the bitter end. Above all, he remembers the comradeship of working down the pit. ‘The strike were important because of saving jobs,’ he says. ‘I’ve got two lads—obviously I wouldn’t have wanted them to go down pit if they could get another job, but at least, when they grew up, there was that opportunity if there weren’t any other jobs, to go there, and it was a good apprenticeship. It was worth fighting for.’
At times, the struggle felt like class war in the most literal sense. ‘You used to wake up at around five o’clock in morning, and there were these police from London, and they were banging their shields at five in the morning, waking everybody up,’ Gilfoyle recalls. ‘You wouldn’t have believed it, honestly. Horrible, it was. But it made me even more determined, when you got all that, you see.’
Yet all that was nothing compared to the Battle of Orgreave. On 18 June 1984, up to 6,000 miners attempted to blockade a coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. Adrian Gilfoyle was among them. They were met by thousands of police officers, including several on horseback, from ten counties across Britain. Suddenly, the police charged.
That day, when the trouble started, they all made out it was the miners responsible ... There were all the pickets, doing nothing, and all of a sudden the police just charged with horses, and that’s when all the trouble started. And I remember, me and my brother stood there watching and couldn’t believe it, and next thing, this copper was chasing us on a horse, and we just managed to get out his way, and he hit this other lad straight across the back of head with a truncheon and split his head open … We ran and got into Asda, and the manager stopped police coming in, and he said to us: ‘Just get a basket, put in what you want, and get off and I’ll support you.’ It was horrible, though.
All the trials of the picketers arrested by the police collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of pounds were paid out in compensation.
Like many striking miners, Gilfoyle depended on the support of his wife. ‘She was in the Women’s Action Group and all sorts. She went to marches all over the place, and she went to Ollerton when that lad got killed [twenty-three-year-old Yorkshire miner David Jones who died on a picket line in suspicious circumstances], she went to his funeral. I’ve got a photograph of her stood round the grave.’ One day he told her, ‘Oh, I’m going back to work tomorrow, duck.’ ‘You go back to work and I’ll break your legs!’ she responded. It was not only miners like Adrian Gilfoyle making sacrifices: his wife came back one day ‘sobbing her heart out’ after losing her job as a primary school assistant, following a complaint by a miner who had returned to work.
Not long after the strike ended, she came home feeling unwell. ‘She said “phone the doctors for me”, and I’d cancelled my phone in the strike, so I had to go to a neighbour’s, and she collapsed and had a heart attack and died within a few minutes.’ She was only thirty-three, leaving him with two sons aged five and ten.
The Miners’ Strike collapsed on 3 March 1985, after a titanic yearlong struggle. Brass bands and union banners accompanied the miners as they marched defiantly back to work. ‘Maggie had her way, didn’t she?’ says Gilfoyle. ‘And we went back with our tails between our legs, really.’ Unlike in 1974, the government had made detailed preparations. It had stuck by the Ridley Plan, a Conservative Party document leaked in 1978 which was a blueprint for taking on the unions, and the miners in particular, including the stockpiling of coal.
Other unions and the Labour leadership refused to back the miners, because they had not held a national ballot. ‘It divided the labour movement from the Labour leadership really, because the Labour leadership was giving virtually no support to the miners,’ says Tony Benn. Whatever the reasons adduced to avoid backing the miners, the fate of the labour movement was bound up with the Strike. The defeat was a crippling blow from which it never recovered. The miners had been the strongest unionized force in the country: if they could be routed, what hope for anyone else?
Scargill was denounced for his supposedly hysterical claims that the government was determined to destroy the mining industry. Today, virtually nothing remains of it. As even Thatcher’s lieutenant, Norman Tebbit, recently admitted: ‘Many of these [mining] communities were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs and no real man’s work because all the jobs had gone. There is no doubt that this led to a breakdown in these communities with families breaking up and youths going out of control. The scale of the closures went too far.’6
The one thing that both supporters and opponents of the Strike agree on is that it taught the unions a lesson they would not forget. ‘It was the turning point of the government,’ says Robert Forsythe, a retired miner in West Lothian. ‘When they beat the miners, they could beat anyone.’ Simon Heffer concurs. ‘I think that the miners’ strike remains a wet dream for various leftists … I think the only legacy it’s had really has been to say to other great forces of organized labour, you take on the government at your peril.’ Even today, a quarter of a century later, trade union leaders still feel haunted by the Strike. Trade union leader Mark Serwotka says that its ‘legacy was years of despondency and defeatism’.
Many miners and their supporters vilified Neil Kinnock for refusing to support the Strike. Today, he sticks to his ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude towards Scargill and Thatcher, but reserves most of his vitriol for the miners’ leadership. But even he is under no illusions as to the consequences, describing it as a ‘salutary’ defeat for the labour movement. Trade unions ‘saw that if the Tory government could pulverize the coal mining industry, they could do it to anybody. And that changed the mentality of organized labour, understandably. I couldn’t blame anybody!’ He adds:
The ambition of the Thatcher government related in some degree to the defeat of Ted Heath. But it had much to do with the determination, to put it at its mildest, to put the labour movement in its place. And the most obvious [way to do] that strategically is to take on and defeat the miners. Because they understood—as anybody who thought about it would understand—the repercussive effects of defeating the miners would be very substantial in the rest of the labour movement, as it turned out to be.
To many people at the time, the Miners’ Strike looked like the last hurrah of the working class. Their most ferocious phalanxes had been crushed and sent back to their pit villages, to face a lingering decline. The popular historian David Kynaston remembers the atmosphere after the Strike. ‘It basically meant that people assumed that the old working class no longer had the power, no longer had the clout, which was a huge change in thinking,’ he recalls. ‘And there were people living in sort of middle-class suburbia like me, who felt well-disposed—but it suddenly seemed relatively unimportant in all honesty.’
On the eve of the Thatcherite crusade, half of all workers were trade unionists. By 1995, the number had fallen to a third. The old industries associated with working-class identity were being destroyed. There no longer seemed anything to celebrate about being working class. But Thatcherism promised an alternative. Leave the working class behind, it said, and come join the property-owning middle classes instead. Those who failed to do so would have no place in the new Britain.
When the newly elected Thatcher government unveiled its Housing Bill in 1979, it could barely contain its excitement. ‘This bill lays the foundations for one of the most important social revolutions of this century,’ Michael Heseltine claimed triumphantly. At the heart of the legislation was what became popularly known as ‘right-to-buy’. Council housing tenants were now able to buy their own homes at knock-down prices. If you had been a tenant for twenty years, for example, you could have half the market price taken off. One hundred per cent mortgages were offered. Home ownership was to be promoted by government like never before.
The policy was undoubtedly popular with many working-class people. A million council homes were sold in a decade. Former tenants would mark their entry into home ownership by giving their properties a lick of paint. By 1985, the Labour Party had dropped its opposition to the policy. Even so, it was not always as voluntary as it sounds. At the end of the 1980s, the Conservative government introduced legislation that aimed to strangle councils financially and force them to sell off their housing.
Owning a home did not catapult a person into the middle class. To be paying off a mortgage instead of paying rent did not change the fact that you had to work for a living. Looking back at his lifetime, Neil Kinnock remembers that ‘in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the people in the streets from which I came bought their houses from their private landlords, and it didn’t change their affiliations, or their commitment, or their sense of identity at all.’ British car workers had long been homeowners, yet had been among the most militant trade unionists in the 1970s.
But the policy was part and parcel of Thatcher’s determination to make us think of ourselves as individuals who looked after ourselves above all else. Only that would make people feel responsible for their successes and failures. Thatcherism was fostering a new culture where success was measured by what you owned. Those who did not adapt were to be despised. Aspiration was no longer about people working together to improve their communities; it was being redefined as getting more for yourself as an individual, regardless of the social costs.
The social costs were high indeed. The ‘left-behinds’, the council tenants who had the audacity not to jump on the property ladder, faced the consequences of official disapproval. Before Thatcher came to power, the average rent of a council tenant was £6.20 a week; a decade later, it was nearly four times higher. Spending on housing dropped by a stunning 60 per cent under Thatcher. But it was to be the next generation that would suffer most. The government prevented councils from building social housing to replace the stock that was being sold off.
Housing charity Shelter opposed right-to-buy at the time. ‘The critical reason was a recognition of the impact that the policy would have over the long term on the availability of social housing stock,’ says Shelter’s Mark Thomas. ‘The concern was that we’d be selling off these homes at a discount and that the proceeds that were realized wouldn’t actually be reinvested in building replacement social homes, and in fact that turned out to be the reality. We’ve only just very recently moved to a situation where we’re building more social homes per year than we’re losing under the right-to-buy.’
Rising demand for housing pushed prices up, encouraging disastrous house-price bubbles. Housing became increasingly unaffordable for huge swathes of the population. Millions of people were condemned to languish for years on council housing waiting lists. Little wonder that the number of homeless Britons soared by 38 per cent between 1984 and 1989 alone.7
The policy also drove a wedge through working-class Britain, creating a divide between homeowners and council tenants. Right-to-buy meant that the best housing stock was sold off; and it was the relatively better-off council tenants who were becoming homeowners. Those who remained council tenants tended to be poorer and in the worst homes. By 1986, nearly two-thirds of tenants were from the bottom 30 per cent in terms of income, and only 18 per cent were from the richest half. Yet, just seven years earlier, a fifth of the richest 10 per cent were council house dwellers. Council housing became increasingly reserved for those who were most deprived and vulnerable. It was in the 1980s that council estates got their bad name as dilapidated, crime-ridden, and deeply poor: exaggerations in part—and any elements of truth were the direct result of government policies.
Encouraging home ownership was not the only tool for redefining the idea of aspiration. In Thatcher’s Britain, wealth (and to be wealthy) was to be glorified. The Conservatives promoted the idea that people were rich because of their own hard work and talent, along with the implication that those who did not become so were somehow lacking. ‘I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax, that we should back the workers and not the shirkers,’ was Thatcher’s clarion call.
The rich were idolized as never before, not least the City men. The so-called Big Bang, or deregulation of financial services, not only made Britain even more dependent on the City: it also turned spivs and speculators into heroes. ‘Every man a capitalist,’ declared Thatcher: an unattainable goal, but it showed the route that people were now expected to march along.
For the first time in generations, it was a blatant government aim to shovel as much money in the direction of the rich as possible. In the first Budget, top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income were slashed to 60 per cent, and corporation tax went from 52 to 35 per cent. In 1988 the then-chancellor Nigel Lawson went even further: the top rate of tax was reduced to 40 per cent. Geoffrey Howe is unrepentant about what he calls ‘changing the tax structure to make it incentivized and not obstructive of enterprise’. Yet the reality of this part of Thatcher’s class war is that it shifted the tax burden from the rich to everybody else. ‘Whether or not it had the right impact on distribution of wealth or income, I can’t tell,’ Howe says. ‘But it certainly did liberalize, enhance the chances of making money, saving money, expanding business …’
As Howe puts it, the Conservatives had ‘to find the resources with which to reduce the burden of direct taxes’. So they put up VAT, a tax on consumer goods. The poorer you are, the more of your income goes on VAT. But it was springtime for the rich. By the end of the Tories’ reign, in 1996, the richest 10 per cent of families with three children were over £21,000 a year richer on average than when Thatcher had come to power.8 The wealthiest decile’s incomes shot up by 65 per cent for each married couple. Their taxes went from over half to just above a third of their income.9 Film director Stephen Frears remembers when Lawson cut the top rate to 40 per cent. ‘It was as if Lord Lawson knocked on my door and said, “Well, we’ll give you a cheque for fifty grand!” ’
For everyone else, taxes went from 31.1 per cent of their income in 1979 to 37.7 per cent by the end of 1996, courtesy of the ‘party of low taxes’. The real income of the poorest tenth collapsed by nearly a fifth after housing costs.10 The slice of the nation’s wealth they owned nearly halved.11 A family with three children in the bottom 10 per cent of the population was £625 a year poorer in 1996 than when Thatcher arrived in No. 10. There were five million people in poverty in 1979; by 1992, the number was closer to fourteen million. And while the top 1 per cent saw income growth of just under 4 per cent a year under the Conservatives, if you were on a median income it went up by an average of only 1.6 per cent.12
Geoffrey Howe was a little uncomfortable when I read him statistics showing that the living standards of the poor had actually declined. ‘I haven’t often considered it in that form because … No, I don’t, I don’t sort of leap around at that, it’s … at the end of the period they’ve got better off, I think?’
According to Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and leading tax specialist, ‘Thatcher shifted the burden of taxation from those who were best off in society to those who were least well off in society. Part of the increasing gap between rich and poor in the Thatcherite years was the result of her fiscal policy. I’ve got no doubt at all that that was deliberate.’ Why deliberate? ‘Because her philosophy was, those who were at the top of the pile generated the wealth that she wanted to be created; she viewed the rest as the also-rans, and it didn’t matter.’ The tax system had been reconfigured to reflect people’s supposed worth.
How could a government-backed wealth grab by the rich be justified? Thatcherites talked about trickle-down, as if the growing wealth sloshing around at the top would eventually drip down to the bottom. But this clearly was not happening. So, instead, Thatcherism attacked the victims of its failed economic policies. If they were suffering, then it must be their own fault.
At the centre of Thatcher’s philosophy was the idea that poverty did not really exist. If people were poor, it was because of their own personal failings. ‘Nowadays there really is no primary poverty left in this country,’ she once said. ‘In Western countries we are left with the problems which aren’t poverty. All right, there may be poverty because they don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings, but now you are left with the really hard fundamental character-personality defect.’13
At the 1981 Conservative Party Conference, Norman Tebbit famously said that his father ‘got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it’. Now that industrial Britain was in meltdown, this was what the swelling ranks of the unemployed were supposed to do. ‘Get on your bike’ became a national cliché, summing up Thatcherism in a nutshell: that the unemployed (among others) must take personal responsibility for the problems that the government had foisted upon them. In line with this thinking, unemployment benefits were cut and no longer rose with people’s earnings. That government policies had landed people in this situation did not even get a hearing. The irony, of course, was that when workers fought for their jobs—as the miners had—they were demonized even more.
The Conservatives remain prone to launching regular broadsides against so-called welfare dependency. But it was under Thatcher that public spending on benefits soared to historically unprecedented levels—because of the permanent loss of secure jobs in the old industrial heartlands. Thatcher has robustly defended herself against accusations that her policies were responsible. When it came to people on welfare, she proclaimed, their ‘poverty is not material but behavioural’. She even insisted that ‘welfare dependence is the classic manifestation of a still-too-socialist society.’14 Perhaps, then, Thatcher brought the country closer to socialism than has previously been recognized.
The explosion of crime was another striking example of how Thatcherite ideology worked in practice. The British Crime Survey, launched in 1981 to gauge the level of violent crime, reported just over two million incidents at its inception. By the end of Conservative rule, the rate had doubled. The areas hardest hit were poorer communities where jobs had vanished. The link between crime and the social damage wrought by mass unemployment and poverty was indisputable—except for people like Thatcher. ‘It is often said and I have had it said to me in the House that unemployment is the cause of crime. I have said: “No it is not, it most certainly is not.” ’15
Thatcher was determined to deal with the symptoms of her scorched-earth economic policies, not the causes. The Criminal Justice Bill in 1986, which provided for longer sentences and limited defence challenges to jurors, appealed to a popular fantasy that the solution to crime was simply to lock up more criminals. In the same year, the Public Order Act granted the police sweeping new powers. Thatcherism’s attitude was that crime was an individual choice, not one of the many social ills that thrive in shattered communities.
The attitude to drug users was much the same. The number of registered drug addicts soared under Tory rule: from less than 3,000 in 1980 to 43,000 by 1996. In contrast to the predominantly middle-class drug misusers of the 1960s, the addict of the 1980s was young, often out of work, single, with few or no qualifications and living in a deprived area. Drugs specialist Dr Julian Buchanan found de-industrialization to be a root cause as opportunities for unskilled young people disappeared: ‘For the first time, drug-taking became associated with working-class youth living in disaffected and isolated communities.’16
Martin Barnes, chief executive of DrugScope, has no doubt that the collapse of the old industries is in large part to blame. ‘I’m old enough to remember the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, and they ripped the guts out of a lot of communities, and families and individuals,’ he says.
With communities and families and individuals impacted by unemployment, it wasn’t just that they lost their jobs, it wasn’t just the communities being impacted by the businesses moving out. It was also that their incomes were simply inadequate. If you can buy some heroin or pinch some stuff to buy it—the first time you take it, the experience is apparently almost indescribable, you couldn’t imagine how good it feels. Is it any wonder then that’s what some people used to feel better?
But Thatcher’s response was to declare: ‘We are at war against drugs.’ By 1995, nearly a hundred thousand people were being charged with drug-related offences, around four times more than just a decade previously.
Other vulnerable working-class groups faced attack. Single parents, who largely lived in poverty, were characterized as feckless, benefit-addicted and work-shy. By 1991, there were twice as many as there had been just twenty years ago. The increase had been greater in poorer areas, particularly those hardest hit by unemployment. But there was no sympathy for often desperately poor women struggling to raise a child alone.
When Peter Lilley, then Cabinet minister in charge of Social Security, attacked single mothers in a speech at the 1992 Conservative Party Conference, he was merely articulating years of prejudice against them. To the tune of a song by Gilbert and Sullivan, he sang: ‘I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list of young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list.’ It had got to the point where government ministers were singing songs on public platforms to taunt poor people who were utterly voiceless. This was Thatcherism at its basest.
Did this bile go down well with some working-class people? Undoubtedly it did, and it became a fixture of politics to play groups of working-class people against each other. Thatcherism aimed to separate the working-class communities most ravaged by the excesses of Thatcherism from everybody else. This was old-fashioned divide-and-rule, as practised by conquerors throughout the ages. Those working-class communities that suffered most from Thatcher’s ruinous class war were now herded into an ‘underclass’ whose poverty was supposedly self-inflicted.
All this hammering of working-class culture, communities and identity would have lethal consequences. Football had long been the key leisure interest of working-class people. As scriptwriter Jimmy McGovern has put it:
The popular image of the working class is inextricably tied up with football, the sole surviving mass working-class pursuit in an era that has seen all other vestiges of working-class pride, from the traditional industries of coal mining, textiles and engineering to the historic links between organized labour and the political party that bore its name, swept away.17
Football fans had become demonized as hooligans and thugs because of the actions of a small, violent minority. The manner in which working-class people had become not just demonized, but even dehumanized, had a stomach-churning role in the worst tragedy in the history of British football: the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster.
On a sunny spring day, before kick-off at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium, huge numbers of Liverpool fans congregated outside the stadium. The central pens were already crammed with enthusiastic fans waiting for the referee to blow his whistle, but, disastrously, the police opened an exit gate to allow more through. Protocol dictated that when the central pens had reached capacity, police would direct fans to the side pens. Inexplicably they failed to do so. A crush ensued. As had become standard practice in football stadiums across the country, Liverpool supporters were caged in like animals by metal fences. As suffocating fans spilled out on the pitch in a desperate bid for survival, the police tried to drive them back because they presumed it was a pitch invasion.
Even as fans administered the kiss of life to those dying on the pitch, the police formed a cordon to prevent Liverpool fans reaching the Nottingham Forest supporters on the other side of the stadium. Fans trying to break through the cordon to carry the injured to ambulances were forcibly turned away because the police were reporting ‘crowd trouble’. Although forty-four ambulances had arrived at the stadium, police only allowed one to enter. Of the ninety-six Liverpool fans killed by the events of 15 April 1989, only fourteen even made it to hospital. The youngest victim was a ten-year-old boy.
A subsequent inquiry held the police, under the command of Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, responsible because of’a combination of inadequate safety procedures and defective crowd management’. But the police had no intention of accepting responsibility. So, instead, they attacked the victims. Police spread misinformation that the disaster was caused by the drunkenness of Liverpool fans. Duckenfield claimed that the locked gate had been forced open by Liverpool fans, and his officers were encouraged to manufacture evidence to prove their responsibility.
On the Wednesday after the tragedy, the Sun newspaper launched a savage attack on the victims on the basis of lies circulated by the police. Fans picked the pockets of the dead and dying, it claimed. Police officers, fire-fighters and ambulance crew were attacked by hooligans. Liverpool supporters urinated on the bodies of the dead. A police officer giving the kiss of life was beaten up. A dead girl had even been ‘abused’. Even today the Sun remains widely boycotted in Merseyside, despite an apology for these lies fifteen years after the issue was published. In a decade of attacking and denigrating working-class Britain, Hillsborough plumbed new depths.
How did the new, aggressive Tory class warriors win time and time again? As Geoffrey Howe boldly puts it, ‘the case against us when we were doing it was never really very frightening.’ The reasons have long been shrouded in myth. It is routinely claimed that Thatcher won record working-class support because of council house sales and populist law-and-order policies. It is true that such measures did push some working-class voters into the Tory fold, particularly in the south of the country.
According to Howe, the Tories won them over because they ‘have a respect for success and the desire to achieve it themselves. And so more naturally see our approach as being more favourable to that. And they’re less concerned with tackling poverty, in a way.’ This has always been at the heart of Tory strategy: to drive wedges between better-off and poorer working-class voters, while peddling the idea that there is ‘room at the top’ for those with the grit and determination.
And yet the reality is that Thatcher came to power in 1979 with a smaller share of the vote than any winning party since World War II, excepting the two general elections of 1974. More people voted for Labour in 1979 (when they lost) than in 1974 (when they had won). It was the defection of Liberal voters to the Conservative camp that had enabled Thatcher’s victory. Under the old One Nation leaders such as Anthony Eden, the Tories had regularly won around the 50 per cent mark: but the most Thatcher ever got was less than 44 per cent. When you factor in the number of people who actually voted—with the Labour-inclined poor being less likely to do so—Thatcher never won the support of more than a third of eligible voters.
Indeed, Thatcher sank to third place in some opinion polls during the first phase of her premiership. Then the Argentinean military junta came to her rescue. When they invaded the Falklands in 1982, barely anyone had even heard of the islands: but British victory in the war led to a wave of patriotic fervour. Even so, that was far from the most important reason she triumphantly returned to Downing Street in 1983, in spite of her ruinous policies.
As Labour shifted to the left following Thatcher’s victory, the party split, with the right forming the Social Democratic Party and making an Alliance with the Liberals. Reflecting on the catastrophe of 1983, Michael Foot believed that ‘the main reason was the breakaway of the so-called Social Democrats. Their treachery brought the country Thatcherism.’18 Thatcher had lost half a million votes since 1979, but her fragmenting opposition allowed the Tories to come through the middle in constituencies across the country, giving her a landslide.
Labour maintained its lead among unskilled working-class voters even in the ill-fated election of 1983. Among skilled and semi-skilled working-class voters, however, it did not regain its lead over the Tories until 1992—when almost all of those who were Alliance voters returned to their old political home. If Thatcher kept winning, it was primarily because the 60 per cent of skilled and semi-skilled workers who voted against her were hopelessly split.
Yet Labour’s repeated drubbing had consequences of its own. The idea that Labour gave a voice to working-class people, that it championed their interests and needs, was severely weakened during the 1980s. On issue after issue, Labour under Kinnock capitulated to Thatcher’s free-market policies. Any who resisted were sidelined.
Above all, though, it was the party’s acute demoralization in the face of Thatcherite triumphalism that paved the way to this surrender. For example, when I asked Kinnock how he managed to win what he called his ‘tussle’ with the unions to make them accept that Labour would not reverse Thatcher’s union laws, he replied: ‘It was made easier by the defeat, the size of the defeat in 1987, and the way in which I was determined to exploit that. And I exploited it mercilessly, because by 1988, I heard myself saying more and more and more, “It’s the only offer you’re going to get.” ’ Even before the advent of New Labour, Thatcherism had ensured that the working class would be bereft of political champions. ‘The real triumph was to have transformed not just one party, but two,’ as Howe was later to put it.
In only a decade or so, Thatcherism had completely changed how class was seen. The wealthy were adulated. All were now encouraged to scramble up the social ladder, and be defined by how much they owned. Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves. The traditional pillars of working-class Britain had been smashed to the ground. To be working class was no longer something to be proud of, never mind to celebrate. Old working-class values, like solidarity, were replaced by dog-eat-dog individualism. No longer could working-class people count on politicians to fight their corner. The new Briton created by Thatcherism was a property-owning, middle-class individual who looked after themselves, their family and no one else. Aspiration meant yearning for a bigger car or a bigger house. As miners’ leader Chris Kitchen put it: ‘Forget the community spirit and all that. If you can’t make a profit, then it has to be stopped. That’s always what Thatcher’s ethos was about.’
Those working-class communities who had been most shattered by Thatcherism became the most disparaged. They were seen as the left-behinds, the remnants of an old world that had been trampled on by the inevitable march of history. There was to be no sympathy for them: on the contrary, they deserved to be caricatured and reviled.
There was a time when working-class people had been patronized, rather than openly despised. Disraeli had called working-class people ‘angels in marble’. ‘Salt of the earth’ was another phrase once associated with them. Today, they are more likely than not to be called chavs. From salt of the earth to scum of the earth. This is the legacy of Thatcherism—the demonization of everything associated with the working class.