There is an observation in American politics that some Democrats and voters are secretly relieved when the Republicans win an election. This is because the 'nasty party' is expected to make all of the hard choices that the Democrats, privately, think are necessary but feel duty, honour and conscience-bound to avoid making themselves. Things like welfare cuts, lambasting of migrants, cuts to government spending, privatizing troublesome or money-haemorrhaging industries...
There is a collective sigh of relief when the traditionally right of centre party gets in. The tough decisions will be taken and those on the centre left can benefit from them without feeling guilty. Hell, the liberals can even publicly protest, abuse and indict the Right over their policies—it'll be no skin off their nose; the Right thrive on reciting commanding and unyielding self-justifications. 'It's time to stop being a pushover' etc.
Before the last election there was talk of closet Conservatives existing in the Labour heartland—voters who now felt that the Conservatives had the answer. These were people who presumably felt that Labour weren't working, who felt that maybe welfare could do with reining in, and who, if they're honest, were bothered by immigration. David Cameron could feel the electricity of liberation running up and down these voters' spines as he told them that it was all right for them to think this. They weren't betraying their background. They weren't bigots. It was all right.
What about applying the 'secretly relieved' theory to the Thatcher government of the 1980s? Did Thatcherism liberate traditional Labour voters who felt guilty about bemoaning strikes and disruption, never-seen-the-like pay rises for unionized workers, welfare rewards... We might start to talk about Thatcher opening the door for Tony Blair and New Labour. Once Thatcherism had eliminated the sacred cows—the hitherto rough consensus between Labour and the Conservatives on providing welfare, on the unions as a political voice, on having nationalized industries, on keeping the monetary hand on the tiller—there was scope for Labour to reinvent themselves, to lose all their past difficulties with those sacred things and present a new style not as a betrayal (for that was Thatcher) but as pragmatism, as dealing with the world as it now is and has to be. We might thus talk about the blurring between the two parties' lines on the economy—on free enterprise, privatizing industry, deregulation...
We could say that the ostensibly left-leaning and anti-Thatcherite in this country did, if they were honest, benefit from the tough decisions taken. Thatcherism was morally repugnant and yet devastatingly necessary. People could noisily protest and lament while quietly feeling sweet relief as a belligerent and uncompromising government swept away, utterly defeated and humiliated, all of the elements that Labour and the Left could not, neither in ability nor in all conscience, deal with themselves. With Lady Thatcher's death and funeral the media's even-handedness amounts to: 'whether you think she was right or wrong, it had to be done.' Surely this means: 'whether you think she was right or wrong, she was right.'
The death of consensus politics—the social contract, post-war consenus, Butskellism, Keynesianism—then. Whatever the name, Thatcherism brought a sea change. Depending on your view, Margaret Thatcher either tore the wonderful thing down and ruined working people's lives and British society thereafter... or replaced a worn-out economic model that had proved its obsolescence through the unstoppable economic decline and industrial unrest of the 1970s. What consensus was, roughly, was an idea that the government, Conservative or Labour, focused on the workforce—the demand side of 'supply and demand.' People's wages were controlled through tax, the welfare state looked after them and unemployment was to be kept low at all costs. Related to this was post-war nationalization of industries, house building, the NHS… If the market dipped and a business was going under the government would step in to tide it over with investment until things picked up.
Thatcherism focused instead on supply—the goods available, the market place. The free market could do the job instead of and better than government. Nationalized industries would be privatized. The government wouldn’t intervene if a business failed; laid off workers would be swallowed up by a market gap opening elsewhere. The government controlled the supply of money, in particular limiting government borrowing and spending—monetarism (this might sound familiar). Inflation was now the thing to be kept down at all costs. Unemployment was viewed as regrettable but inevitable. How about this for baiting armchair/barstool welfare reformers: we might even need a level of unemployment for a healthy economy.
For or against the above, Margaret Thatcher clearly didn’t come up with everything personally, nor in some precedent-less vacuum.
Economics is rather nebulous, though. It’s tricky to judge how government policy affects matters (if at all) and how long it takes for any effects to be felt. It could be argued that Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of a long period of economic trouble and then enjoyed the calmer period after. Historian Arthur Marwick:
In recent tributes, the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent has been cited as what life was like before Margaret Thatcher. Here the country, the ungovernable, sick man of Europe, was on its knees (pretty hazardous, what with all those mountains of uncollected rubbish about). The unions monopolized the running of the country and paved the way for Thatcherism’s tough but necessary revolution. But the Winter of Discontent was not like the industrial action Thatcherism battled in the 1980s. Those who were striking Shakespearian were *deep breath* nurses/NHS workers, ambulance drivers, caretakers, dustmen, gravediggers, lorry drivers, train drivers, car plant workers. Thatcher’s government was contending with *and another* steel workers, printers, dockers, teachers, seamen, postal workers and, clearly, miners.
The Thatcher government's more direct response to the 'Discontent' strikers was not all that different from its supposedly 'pwned' consensus predecessors: “[the July 1979 budget] had to confront the fact that, during the election, Thatcher had bribed public-sector unions with the promise of large pay rises” [5]. Indeed, public spending rose from 44.6% of GDP in 1979 to 48.1% in 1983—trying pragmatically, in this first term of office and before the later cuts, to cope with rising unemployment and the resultant drain on welfare. What with the ‘catastrophic’ inflation and Chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s near doubling of VAT, people’s benefits didn’t go as far. This hardly helped matters for the crazy kids of Toxteth and Brixton.
Also, the power of the unions seemed to be abating alongside the Thatcher government's Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982, rather than simply because of them.
Were Labour secretly relieved by the reforms and their effect on the unions? Leader Neil Kinnock was fairly quiet over the miners’ strike, seeing a hopeless situation. Later in 1985 Kinnock made his famous party conference attack on the Trotskyite Militant tendency’s position in the Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council—a ‘party within a party.’ An expulsion of Militant supporters within Labour ensued. Retrospectively these events have been placed along Labour’s long route from factionalism and left wing dominance to the electable party eventually headed by Tony Blair. Of course, Blair and Brown were even more taken with Thatcher…
In terms of Thatcherism leaving people 'secretly relieved' the most profound or devastating effect is that on the electorate. Witness the vehement intolerance Thatcher lovers and haters have of each other. Both feel that the other's argument has to be challenged and their own defended. Thatcher played on the guilty conscience in us, whether you bought her line or not. If you hated Thatcherism you still recognized and agonized over the working class frustrations it identified and played off of. If you went with Thatcherism you recognized and agonized over the betrayal others saw in you. The very sense of betrayal is what Thatcherism sought to sooth in the electorate, to gain votes. “Morally I think it’s wrong, but I done it”—said a man who’d bought his council house under ‘Right to Buy.’ He was one of many ‘ordinary’ voices featured in Radio 4’s The People’s Thatcher.
Morals indeed. In 1977 Margaret Thatcher told the Greater London Young Conservatives that welfare, unions and the state were producing ‘moral cripples’—people who couldn’t think for themselves. She could just as easily have meant that Britain was crippled by morals, by moralizing—over what we owe the poor, the unions, our duty to welfare.
‘Mrs Thatcher underestimated the miners.’ While this is certainly true of their culture and dedication to each other, it’s not true that she underestimated their reaction. She predicted it and saw its political capital, particularly how Arthur Scargill’s inflexibility (and his likelihood to resort to now illegal flying pickets in lieu of a pre-strike ballot) would appear to ‘right-minded’ people.1981 saw the start of plans to stockpile coal for an 18-month stoppage so that little disruption would be had to the country’s power supply [8]. The 1984-85 clashes between miners and police could be allowed to play out, to demonstrate to the public the full horror of the union situation. A year of violence and hardship to those at the pickets was followed by workers returning, having suffered to prove Thatcherism’s point. “She’s just bloody laughing at us”—a returning miner from The People’s Thatcher; you should hear the anger. The watching electorate, full of decent principles, would slowly be reassured in their private thoughts that things would be better once the whole painful episode was over—like an anaesthetized reality. ==============================================================================
[1] Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003) p.237
[2] Simon Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons: A Revolution in Thee Acts (London: Allen Lane (Penguin Books Ltd), 2006) p. 29
[3] Marwick, p. 236
[4] Jenkins, p. 55
[5] Jenkins, p. 58
[6] Marwick, p. 229
[7] Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2008) p. 347
[8] Jenkins, p. 95
There is a collective sigh of relief when the traditionally right of centre party gets in. The tough decisions will be taken and those on the centre left can benefit from them without feeling guilty. Hell, the liberals can even publicly protest, abuse and indict the Right over their policies—it'll be no skin off their nose; the Right thrive on reciting commanding and unyielding self-justifications. 'It's time to stop being a pushover' etc.
Before the last election there was talk of closet Conservatives existing in the Labour heartland—voters who now felt that the Conservatives had the answer. These were people who presumably felt that Labour weren't working, who felt that maybe welfare could do with reining in, and who, if they're honest, were bothered by immigration. David Cameron could feel the electricity of liberation running up and down these voters' spines as he told them that it was all right for them to think this. They weren't betraying their background. They weren't bigots. It was all right.
What about applying the 'secretly relieved' theory to the Thatcher government of the 1980s? Did Thatcherism liberate traditional Labour voters who felt guilty about bemoaning strikes and disruption, never-seen-the-like pay rises for unionized workers, welfare rewards... We might start to talk about Thatcher opening the door for Tony Blair and New Labour. Once Thatcherism had eliminated the sacred cows—the hitherto rough consensus between Labour and the Conservatives on providing welfare, on the unions as a political voice, on having nationalized industries, on keeping the monetary hand on the tiller—there was scope for Labour to reinvent themselves, to lose all their past difficulties with those sacred things and present a new style not as a betrayal (for that was Thatcher) but as pragmatism, as dealing with the world as it now is and has to be. We might thus talk about the blurring between the two parties' lines on the economy—on free enterprise, privatizing industry, deregulation...
We could say that the ostensibly left-leaning and anti-Thatcherite in this country did, if they were honest, benefit from the tough decisions taken. Thatcherism was morally repugnant and yet devastatingly necessary. People could noisily protest and lament while quietly feeling sweet relief as a belligerent and uncompromising government swept away, utterly defeated and humiliated, all of the elements that Labour and the Left could not, neither in ability nor in all conscience, deal with themselves. With Lady Thatcher's death and funeral the media's even-handedness amounts to: 'whether you think she was right or wrong, it had to be done.' Surely this means: 'whether you think she was right or wrong, she was right.'
“This is the end of consensus politics and it's you guys who opened the door and let her in. Just remember that.”
Thatcherism focused instead on supply—the goods available, the market place. The free market could do the job instead of and better than government. Nationalized industries would be privatized. The government wouldn’t intervene if a business failed; laid off workers would be swallowed up by a market gap opening elsewhere. The government controlled the supply of money, in particular limiting government borrowing and spending—monetarism (this might sound familiar). Inflation was now the thing to be kept down at all costs. Unemployment was viewed as regrettable but inevitable. How about this for baiting armchair/barstool welfare reformers: we might even need a level of unemployment for a healthy economy.
For or against the above, Margaret Thatcher clearly didn’t come up with everything personally, nor in some precedent-less vacuum.
“The Radical Right had not been alone in thinking that, were it only possible, some limitations on the rights of unions would be beneficial to the economy as a whole. […] Criticism of the way in which the economy was actually operated had been endemic since the early sixties, with growing appreciation that financial management was lax, economic decision-making unpredictable, and power given to the big battalions inimical to genuine individual initiative. The principle of universality in the Welfare State had long been abandoned, both to try to contain costs, and to target aid where it was most needed” [1].Ted Heath’s Conservative government set out to do in 1970 much of what Thatcherism later promised. Journalist Simon Jenkins comments that “Heath’s plans for government were more ‘Thatcherite’ in 1970 than were Thatcher’s in 1979” [2]. Heath failed (he turned, whether he wanted to or not). In 1976, after an IMF bailout, Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's speech to the Labour Party conference said things like: “The cosy world we were told would go on for ever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen, cutting taxes, deficit spending, that cosy world is gone.” And “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.” The result: spending cuts, wage controls, Winter of Discontent.
Economics is rather nebulous, though. It’s tricky to judge how government policy affects matters (if at all) and how long it takes for any effects to be felt. It could be argued that Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of a long period of economic trouble and then enjoyed the calmer period after. Historian Arthur Marwick:
“Britain in the mid-seventies, when both inflation and unemployment rose menacingly, and in the early eighties, when they rose catastrophically, was directly affected by the deepening world trade recession. After 1982 trade revival, and in particular the renewed growth of the American economy, was certainly a critical factor in the growing sense of well-being of the later eighties” [3].With the government in the tail end of this up to 1982 Thatcherism had, according to Jenkins, a slow, realistic waiting period. Thatcher had moderate figures, ‘wets,’ put in charge of things like union reform as a ‘badge of our reasonableness’ [4]. It was after the famed ‘Falkands Factor’ from 1982 when Thatcherism was in the ascendant and tougher legalisation appeared. ‘Employment’ Acts became ‘Trade Union’ Acts. With this came the history-making stand-offs in domestic and international politics.
In recent tributes, the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent has been cited as what life was like before Margaret Thatcher. Here the country, the ungovernable, sick man of Europe, was on its knees (pretty hazardous, what with all those mountains of uncollected rubbish about). The unions monopolized the running of the country and paved the way for Thatcherism’s tough but necessary revolution. But the Winter of Discontent was not like the industrial action Thatcherism battled in the 1980s. Those who were striking Shakespearian were *deep breath* nurses/NHS workers, ambulance drivers, caretakers, dustmen, gravediggers, lorry drivers, train drivers, car plant workers. Thatcher’s government was contending with *and another* steel workers, printers, dockers, teachers, seamen, postal workers and, clearly, miners.
The Thatcher government's more direct response to the 'Discontent' strikers was not all that different from its supposedly 'pwned' consensus predecessors: “[the July 1979 budget] had to confront the fact that, during the election, Thatcher had bribed public-sector unions with the promise of large pay rises” [5]. Indeed, public spending rose from 44.6% of GDP in 1979 to 48.1% in 1983—trying pragmatically, in this first term of office and before the later cuts, to cope with rising unemployment and the resultant drain on welfare. What with the ‘catastrophic’ inflation and Chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s near doubling of VAT, people’s benefits didn’t go as far. This hardly helped matters for the crazy kids of Toxteth and Brixton.
Also, the power of the unions seemed to be abating alongside the Thatcher government's Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982, rather than simply because of them.
Marwick notes a ‘most unimpressive’ level of support for the TUC’s day of action against the 1982 act [6]. Clearly though the reforms criminalized many strike practices that had previously occurred. Union funds were now liable for any damage caused by illegal strikes. A third act in 1984 required secret ballots to be held before a strike was called (generously: this stopped the militant elements from taking over and forcing moderates, ordinary workers, to strike; sceptically: this expected union divisions to render most strikes non-starters and criminalized the existing miners’ strike). Illegal meant stoppable—footage of the battles between police and miners attests to this particular sea change. The reforms also addressed the closed shop, which had been a tricky issue for Labour in the 1970s. In 1975 Conservative MP Norman Tebbit had attacked Employment Secretary Michael Foot over the 'Ferrybridge Six'—six power station workers who'd been sacked for not joining the union and then denied unemployment benefit [7].“Previous attempts to bind and gag the unions had met with widespread opposition; this time, when the union leaders called for demonstrations and protest strikes, their members looked the other way.Not only did many workers feel that events of the winter of discontent - real or as reported - justified the Conservatives' backlash against the unions, they were cowed by the sharp rise in unemployment and by the sobering experience of unions which tried to challenge the government”
David Brindle, 'Tories Cripple Trade Unions' The Multinational Monitor, December/January 1986/1987
Were Labour secretly relieved by the reforms and their effect on the unions? Leader Neil Kinnock was fairly quiet over the miners’ strike, seeing a hopeless situation. Later in 1985 Kinnock made his famous party conference attack on the Trotskyite Militant tendency’s position in the Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council—a ‘party within a party.’ An expulsion of Militant supporters within Labour ensued. Retrospectively these events have been placed along Labour’s long route from factionalism and left wing dominance to the electable party eventually headed by Tony Blair. Of course, Blair and Brown were even more taken with Thatcher…
In terms of Thatcherism leaving people 'secretly relieved' the most profound or devastating effect is that on the electorate. Witness the vehement intolerance Thatcher lovers and haters have of each other. Both feel that the other's argument has to be challenged and their own defended. Thatcher played on the guilty conscience in us, whether you bought her line or not. If you hated Thatcherism you still recognized and agonized over the working class frustrations it identified and played off of. If you went with Thatcherism you recognized and agonized over the betrayal others saw in you. The very sense of betrayal is what Thatcherism sought to sooth in the electorate, to gain votes. “Morally I think it’s wrong, but I done it”—said a man who’d bought his council house under ‘Right to Buy.’ He was one of many ‘ordinary’ voices featured in Radio 4’s The People’s Thatcher.
Morals indeed. In 1977 Margaret Thatcher told the Greater London Young Conservatives that welfare, unions and the state were producing ‘moral cripples’—people who couldn’t think for themselves. She could just as easily have meant that Britain was crippled by morals, by moralizing—over what we owe the poor, the unions, our duty to welfare.
“Inside Britain there is a parallel threat from the Marxist collectivist totalitarians too. Small in number, those anti-democratic forces have gained great power through the trades union movement. Just to state that fact is to be accused of 'union-bashing'—often by people who know it to be true. Such people are to be found in the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties.”Norman Tebbit, also from 1977. He wasn't right. He wasn't wrong. He was POTENT in articulating it that way. That's what's so devastating. Where others were wringing their hands over the thankless impossibility of seeking compromise between still-valued elements, what emerged as Thatcherism took the gap, the silence of caution, and presented it as malevolence to the disenchanted voter and party member. Instead of consensual compromisers, these people, these politicians, unionists and thinkers, were going to attack you for complaining, for having an opinion. Thatcherism realigned the vocabulary and 'made it all right' to feel resentment (we see this today in the appeal of UKIP—and the BNP and EDL—over migration).
(So famous it's on wikipedia)
‘Mrs Thatcher underestimated the miners.’ While this is certainly true of their culture and dedication to each other, it’s not true that she underestimated their reaction. She predicted it and saw its political capital, particularly how Arthur Scargill’s inflexibility (and his likelihood to resort to now illegal flying pickets in lieu of a pre-strike ballot) would appear to ‘right-minded’ people.1981 saw the start of plans to stockpile coal for an 18-month stoppage so that little disruption would be had to the country’s power supply [8]. The 1984-85 clashes between miners and police could be allowed to play out, to demonstrate to the public the full horror of the union situation. A year of violence and hardship to those at the pickets was followed by workers returning, having suffered to prove Thatcherism’s point. “She’s just bloody laughing at us”—a returning miner from The People’s Thatcher; you should hear the anger. The watching electorate, full of decent principles, would slowly be reassured in their private thoughts that things would be better once the whole painful episode was over—like an anaesthetized reality. ==============================================================================
[1] Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003) p.237
[2] Simon Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons: A Revolution in Thee Acts (London: Allen Lane (Penguin Books Ltd), 2006) p. 29
[3] Marwick, p. 236
[4] Jenkins, p. 55
[5] Jenkins, p. 58
[6] Marwick, p. 229
[7] Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot: A Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2008) p. 347
[8] Jenkins, p. 95
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