Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (93 page)

In any
tour d’horizon
of a decade, there is a temptation to portray change as if it was inevitable and its advocates merely those best able to articulate the meaning of a revolution
dictated by impersonal forces. Yet change, be it political, economic, social or cultural, is put in motion by specific decisions, no matter how well or badly those that take them are able to
foresee the consequences. Labour’s attitude to greater choice in broadcasting, for example, was far less permissive than that of the Conservatives, with results that could only have limited
the spread of channels and production companies, regardless of the growing technical possibilities. There certainly was nothing inevitable about the right being in power in the eighties. If
Callaghan had called a general election in the autumn of 1978 instead of waiting till the spring of 1979, Labour might have won a victory that could easily have spurred the Conservatives to ditch
Thatcher, who many believed had performed indifferently as leader of the opposition. How different the Tories thereafter – led, perhaps, by Willie Whitelaw – might have been is mere
conjecture, but different they surely would have been. That Britain was no longer a country gripped by a mindset of terminal retreat but was capable of overcoming difficult odds was demonstrated in
the Falklands War. Whatever
a Labour prime minister might have done, it is certainly not clear from the discussions that we know about that a Cabinet led by a senior Tory
other than Thatcher would have possessed the martial resolve to call a halt to diplomatic obfuscations and instead retake the islands by force. Whether delivered by diplomacy or Exocet missile,
what might humiliation at the hands of the Argentines have done for the nation’s already battered morale? From a twenty-first-century perspective, where the country’s mining industry
has withered to a shadow of its former self, the defeat of the NUM in the strike of 1984–5 seems preordained. It was not. If Scargill had chosen his timing better, alienated fewer potential
allies (and other miners) and known when to make a small compromise in order to gain the substance of his demands, then the miners would have won their strike. Who then would have considered trade
union power a busted flush, and who would have been the leader subsequently to take the unions on? Who, indeed, could have predicted the next occupant of Downing Street if, at 2.54 a.m. on 12
October 1984, the IRA bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton had been placed slightly differently? The decade only unfolded in the manner that it did because a succession of potential turning points
failed to turn.

The Labour leadership and its party, the Tory ‘wets’, the Argentine junta, Arthur Scargill, would-be IRA assassins – Thatcher, it is often suggested, was lucky in her choice of
enemies. Partly, that may be true. If she had faced Denis Healey rather than Michael Foot, her fight would have been tougher. Or Labour might have imploded entirely, dashed to pieces between the
two irreconcilable forces of Healey and the left. Certainly, the other popular notion that the Conservatives only remained in power because the creation of the SDP split the anti-Tory vote needs to
be tested, resting as it does upon the false assumption that because the SDP’s leadership were Labour defectors their voters must have been so as well. In fact, opinion poll data indicates
that the SDP also attracted considerable support from those who would otherwise – if reluctantly – have voted Conservative. The detail of this psephological evidence suggests that, far
from fatally dividing the left, it was only the intercession of the SDP that stopped the Conservatives beating Labour by even greater margins in the 1983 and 1987 general elections.
¹⁸

The traits and peculiarities of Britain in the eighties become ever starker as the passage of time lengthens. The bitterness of the political divide and the extent to which the character and
policies of the prime minister seeped into almost every aspect of national life were not repeated in the twenty years that followed. Having felt compelled to expose Thatcher’s philosophical
errors and corrosive social impact, few authors, dramatists and impresarios of the creative arts dedicated themselves to getting under the skin of John Major or Gordon Brown as a means of exploring
broader truths about society. The state of the nation and the occupant of Downing Street no longer seemed so
closely aligned. Tony Blair generated his share of anger and
alarm, but mostly of a targeted and specific, rather than a general and all-encompassing, nature. Focused opposition formed against Blair’s stance, for instance, on the war in Iraq,
fox-hunting, civil liberties and the supposed triumph under his watch of ‘spin-doctoring’ and media manipulation, rather than coalescing in a relentless movement that stood against
– or indeed for – everything he represented. In the eighties, politics assumed a more all-embracing tenor. It was far from uncommon for Britons to identify their own outlook in life
primarily as either with or against the spirit of Thatcherism. By contrast, it was an unusual Briton who framed their personal identity first and foremost in terms of how it related to the supposed
viewpoint of Major, Blair or Brown. The phrase ‘Thatcher’s children’ enjoys a resonance as a description of those who grew to maturity during the eighties in a way that
‘Blair’s children’ simply does not, even though both prime ministers enjoyed more than a decade in power.

This is why any history of the eighties becomes inextricably entwined with the politics of the period and, in particular, the politician who personified it – to an extent that might be
thought more usual in a dictatorial regime than in a functioning and pluralistic democracy. During the eighties, there were three Britons whose level of recognition was truly international in
scale: Margaret Thatcher; Diana, Princess of Wales; and (primarily as a consequence of her longevity and status) the Queen. All were women, but within their homeland only one of them was generally
recognizable, without further explanation, as ‘that woman’.

Placing Thatcher alongside Disraeli, Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald as one of only four authentic outsiders to have become prime minister over the previous one hundred and fifty years, the
historian David Cannadine argued in 1989 that the full measure of her political dominance went far beyond her unprecedented three successive general election victories – ‘She has
brought her country military triumph unknown since the Second World War; she has survived a carefully plotted assassination attempt; she has been likened to Winston Churchill for her invincible
courage; and she has given her name to a political style and a political philosophy, a distinction she shares with no other twentieth-century British politician.’
¹⁹In doing so, she helped make the eighties a decade fixated on political issues and ideological debate to an extent that was simply not observable in the
quarter-century thereafter. She is the reason that the 1980s began on 4 May 1979 and ended on 28 November 1990.

APPENDIX

UK ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

ANNUAL INFLATION RATE (RPI) (%)