By Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot CLP member
The fourth episode in Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain series, concentrated on the 1980s, a period dominated by Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
The programme begins with the late 70s and what was described as the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Marr fails to explain why this strike wave happened in the first place. Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, had wanted to restrict pay rises to a limit of 5%, at a time when inflation was much above that, meaning living standards would fall. There had already been years of pay restraint and both the TUC and Labour Party conferences rejected any more; pressing on with a pay freeze inevitably resulted in strikes in both the public and the private sectors.
Thatcher had replaced Ted Heath as Tory leader after the election defeat of 1974 and in the early 70s had already earned the reputation as ‘Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ because she had ending the issuing of free school milk to children. On the back of the squeeze on living standards, high unemployment and the consequent disillusionment with Labour, the Tories won the 1979 general election.
The Tories had a poster campaign during that campaign, showing a line of unemployed and saying, “A Million Reasons why Labour isn’t Working”. This had some effect, but it proved in the end to be a cruel joke, because under Thatcher’s premiership unemployment rose to over 3 million in the first three years. Inflation also increased rapidly, to 22% in 1981. Thatcher was the most unpopular Prime Minister in living memory and looked to be heading for a certain defeat. So why did the Tories win another landslide in 1983?
Labour right-wing sabotage election in 1983
There were two factors: a right-wing split from Labour to form the Social Democratic Party, and the Falklands War. As it is today, Labour’s right wing were celebrated and feted by the anti-Labour press and the BBC and they had acres and acres of free publicity in all the newspapers. Although it was nothing like as bad as the avalanche of bile and lies directed at Jeremy Corbyn, there was a huge campaign of vilification against Michael Foot, the Labour leader who had come from the left tradition of the Party. As a result of their huge support in the establishment, the SDP were at one point even ahead of both Labour and the Tories in opinion polls. By the time of the general election, the SDP took millions of votes, most of them from Labour, and enough to prevent Labour winning.
Then there was the war in the South Atlantic. The Argentine military junta, to divert attention from the growing opposition to their brutal rule at home, invaded the little-known British-controlled Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas. In response, Thatcher ordered a military task force assembled, that travelled 6,000 miles and successfully retook the Islands by force, but not without a huge number of casualties on both sides. One of the most infamous incidents was the sinking by submarine of the Argentine warship the Belgrano, when it was actually sailing away from the Falklands, with the loss of hundreds of lives. Over a thousand died in that conflict, including over 250 British deaths.
Miners’ strike lasted a full year
The Falklands War was celebrated as a British ‘triumph’ and was the second factor in shoring up support for Thatcher in the 1983 election. Thatcher was now being described as the ‘Iron Lady’, which she took as a compliment, as she faced down the EU and the so-called ‘wets’ in her own party over economic policy.
Throughout the 80s, there was rioting in many of Britain’s inner cities as a consequence of the policies pursued by the Tories, with higher unemployment, particularly among youth, and lower living standards. Domestic attention was now turned to those who Thatcher would describe as the last bastion of opposition to the ‘free market’, the trade unions and in particular the National Union of Mineworkers.
Andrew Marr suggested in his programme that the position of the NUM was already weakened because of the fact that coal by then was only providing a quarter of Britain’s energy needs. In addition, stockpiles of coal had been built up to prevent power cuts, as there had been during the miners’ strikes in the early 1970s. Marr reveals his own right-wing bias in his description of the NUM president, Arthur Scargill, as a ‘delusional insurrectionist’. Unfortunately, rather than a serious analysis of the year-long strike, this programme gave us anything but. The dispute began at one colliery in Yorkshire and it quickly spread to other pits in the Yorkshire area. Scargill’s supposed ‘crime’ was to pledge the union’s support for their struggle to prevent pit closures; hardly ‘insurrectionist’. Scargill was proven right when he described the closure proposals of McGregor, the boss of the National Coal Board, as “decimating” the mining industry.
Weakened trade union movement
The great miners’ strike of 1984/85 was in my view the most important industrial event since the 1926 General Strike and its defeat had similar consequences. This is not the place for an in-depth analysis, but had the leaders of the TUC used their industrial muscle and political authority to support the miners, the NUM would have won. Had the Labour leader Neil Kinnock not disgracefully stood on the side-lines with folded arms, it would also have significantly helped the miners. The passive role or the outright opposition of the TUC and Labour leaders (bar some honourable exceptions) were the principle reasons for this defeat. If only the majority of trade union leaders had shown half of the determination shown by Thatcher, things could have been different. But it was not to be, and the defeat of that strike paved the way for a weakened trade union movement. The Tories were now rampant, and many of the gains of the labour movement from the post-war era were now under attack.
A new battery of anti- union laws was put into effect; many state-owned industries were sold off at knocked down prices. Marr noted that the largest sale was British Gas, which netted the treasury only £5-4 billion, a fraction of its real worth. The sale of over one and a quarter million council homes which netted a further £18bn to the treasury and that factor alone not only gave the Tories a boost in the polls, but it contributed to the huge shortage of social housing that still affects us today. Former Tory Prime Minister, Harold McMillan, by then Lord Stockton in the House of Lords, even said (correctly) that Thatcher’s policies were the equivalent of “selling off the family silver”. The political justification for privatisation was that it would produce a shareholding democracy, but although share ownership widened to begin with, as time went on, the ownership of the newly-privatised companies was reduced, as usual, to a handful of the rich and super-rich.
IRA bombing campaign
At one point during the miners’ strike, the IRA planted a bomb in the hotel in Brighton where the Tory leadership were staying for their 1984 Annual Conference. The bomb was intended for Thatcher and was planted on the floor below her room. It killed five people and injured many more, including two Cabinet ministers and by the increase in support for the Tories, without moving Northern Ireland one inch nearer to a resolution of the conflict there, it showed the utter futility of the Provisional IRA bombing campaign.
Marr claims that if the IRA had been successful in killing the Prime Minister, it would have meant the end of the ‘Thatcher Revolution’, but in my view, this is false. Thatcher’s policies were about driving up profitability, in the interests of big business, at the expense of working people. The more ‘effective’ that bomb had been, the more it would have strengthened reaction, not weakened it.
After the bombing, Thatcher declared that the conference would go on and that ‘terrorism would not prevail’, so the press was able to put her on a pedestal as a ‘champion of democracy’.
Marr makes the point that Thatcher did have some ‘luck’ on her side. She came to power as North Sea oil and gas output were increasing to very high levels, netting around £8bn annually, and equivalent to around a tenth of all tax revenues. On the strength of this income, Thatcher was able to cut taxes for the rich and by the mid-80s a consumer boom was underway. She ended exchange controls and all restrictions on credit and on the City of London.
Marr states that the ‘Square Mile’ became the most profitable and most expensive place on the planet. In the late 80s, house prices rose by 30%. According to Marr, every revolution has a loser, in this case the poorest tenth of the population who experienced a 17% fall in its income. We had the emergence of homelessness and begging, things not seen in Britain in decades. Thatcher was infamous for stating that there was “no such thing as society”, a philosophy supported by many Tories today, but completely at odds with all common sense and norms.
The Militant and mass resistance the Poll Tax
After the 1987 election victory, Thatcher appeared to be invincible, although it should be noted that in both of her re-election victories, in 1983 and 1987, her vote was less than her previous vote. Her flagship policy for 1987, the so-called Community Charge, was based on a local charge per head, taking no account of the size of a property, and was therefore dubbed the ‘Poll Tax’, like its equivalent from the Middle Ages. It was introduced in Scotland first and it soon was to become her Titanic.
Opposition to the Poll started in Scotland and soon spread to the whole of England and Wales; it became a genuine mass resistance movement, with demonstrations and outright refusals to pay the tax right across the whole country. Marr reports on a riot that erupted on the fringes of the biggest mass demonstration of all, in Central London. What he failed to mention throughout his narrative was that the Anti-Poll Tax movement was largely led by the Militant Tendency, around a slogan of “can’t pay, won’t pay’. The opposition became so great that local authorities were not getting any money coming in. The courts were getting clogged up with non-payment cases. In Scotland, protests were organised to prevent bailiffs from recovering any goods from the houses of non-payers. Eventually, there were actually some people who refused to pay the tax, pay the subsequent fines and were sent to prison. IN one case, an elderly man was sentenced to prison and someone paid his tax anonymously. It did not put the Tories in a very comfortable place politically. It should also be noted that in the midst of this huge mass movement against the Tories, the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, as he did with the miners, stood with folded hands and pathetically urged people to ‘pay up’ and wait for a Labour government.
With the Tories position in opinion polls plunging to an all-time low and local government in utter chaos; with Tory divisions over Europe resurfacing again, Tory MPs began to think the unthinkable – that Thatcher needed to go. After mutterings of opposition came out into the open, Thatcher called her Cabinet members in one by one and asked if she could count on their support. Most of them said yes, but still thought she would lose a vote of confidence, which effectively she did. Later, she described this as “treachery with a smiling face”. She left Downing Street with tears in her eyes, but for millions her departure was something to celebrate. She might have enjoyed “eleven wonderful years”, but they were years of misery for millions and she was literally hated by them for the rest of her life. With Thatcher gone, the Tories soon retreated on the Poll Tax; it was scrapped and quickly replaced by the Council Tax which we have today.
New Labour…Thatcher’s most enduring legacy
Andrew Marr referred to the Thatcher years as “nothing less than a revolution”, but most working class people saw it in completely opposite terms, as a counter-revolution, stripping away many of the post-war gains in wages and in the social wage. Thatcher bragged about being responsible for the rise of New Labour and Blair and indeed this was probably one of her most enduring legacies. This was due to the fact that Tony Blair was the most right-wing Labour Leader in its history. The philosophy of the ‘free market’ pervaded the whole of mainstream politics in the Thatcher years and it still permeates and underpins the outlook of Labour’s right wing to this day. If she were alive today, she would not be a happy bunny, to see the Labour Party armed with a programme similar to that of 1945. That programme and manifesto is under threat today but should the new Labour leadership attempt to overturn these policies, they will meet huge resistance from rank and file members. The social base for Thatcherism was always fragile, but it is far weaker today than even it was in then. The BBC series has been an interesting watch, but we need to view it with some scepticism, and we need to bear in mind that compared to where we are now, the 1980s are another country altogether.
Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain can be seen on BBC i-player, here.
June 4, 2020
