Thatcherism, nurtured privately throughout the sixties while the baby boomers' attention was distracted, had been crouching beneath the bridge of the seventies like a malignant troll.
It was born just before the dawn of the sixties, in 1959, the year there was a run on the pound, caused largely by rumours of devaluation, the weakening of the pound after Suez, and the devaluation of the French franc. Harold Macmillan's Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, was persuaded by his young financial secretary, Enoch Powell, to control the money supply and keep wage settlements down (see Chapter Five). Thorneycroft's measures, which included sharp bank-rate rises and cuts in public spending, did not have the impact he expected, and he urged more of the same, including deep cuts in welfare spending, abolishing children's allowances and family allowances, and higher prescription charges. It went against all Macmillan's instincts, and Thorneycroft was forced to toe the line or resign. He resigned, along with Powell and economic secretary Nigel Birch. Powell never got over his loathing for Macmillan. He later complained that Macmillan's habit was to offer 'a quid pro quo to the workers for co-operation in an inflation-free planned economy'[1] and that Macmillan and Heath inhabited 'a never-never land where it would be possible – given "moderation" on all sides – to enjoy the sweetness of inflating the currency without suffering the punishment which follows'.[2]
The 'one nation' Conservatives had won the first round, but not the last. Macmillan suffered the fate of many politicians with his precious skill for balancing irreconcilables: in the end he satisfied no one. For many in his own party, he moved to the left far too far, far too fast, but for the early sixties baby boomers, he was too old, too cautious, too cunning. They wanted a revolution, they said. And they got one, two decades later. It was not the left-wing one they dreamed of: it was Margaret Thatcher's. But hey, it was a revolution. Who's quibbling about details?
For Margaret Thatcher did the things that Peter Thorneycroft, Nigel Birch, Enoch Powell and her intellectual mentor Keith Joseph had dreamed of doing. The result was not the libertarian society that the children of the sixties might have dreamed of, but the opposite: a more centralised bureaucracy than Britain had ever known. As Will Hutton put it in 1995, 'intermediate institutions that even faintly expressed an alternative political agenda have been summarily subordinated to the will of the centre.' Norman Tebbit was remarkably frank about the reason for abolishing the Greater London Council: it was 'Labour dominated, high-spending, and at odds with the government's view of the world'[3]
Such parts of local government as remained were stripped of their powers to decide anything important, or to spend money except as decided by central government. They could not even decide how to administer such services as they were instructed to administer. Mostly these services had to be contracted out to private companies under a set of regulations so detailed and complex that ever since then, any company wanting a local government contract must fill in a form amounting often to several hundred pages. Local government contracts – and central government contracts too – have become playgrounds for big business, because small businesses cannot afford to speculate several weeks' work on form-filling.
Debased local government produced a debased political culture, because top national politicians from both political parties once cut their teeth in local government. They seldom do so any more, because local government has so little power, and they arrive in Parliament with no experience of being democratically accountable.
A debased political culture produced the totemic local government figure of the Thatcher era: Dame Shirley Porter, elected Leader of Westminster City Council in central London when money was God and Mrs Thatcher his prophet. Porter threw poor people out of council homes and into dreadful bed and breakfast accommodation, at enormous cost, because they lived in marginal wards, and she wanted to sell their flats to people more likely to vote Conservative. She knowingly housed families with young children in tower blocks stuffed with asbestos, because these blocks were in safe Labour wards, and she wanted to move the families – presumed to be mostly Labour voters – out of the marginal wards.
Porter was dependant on the sharp-toothed right-wingers of the baby boomer generation: she recruited youthful right-wing Conservatives – there were a lot of them about in the eighties – to pack the public gallery during council meetings. They got a kick out of jostling the relatives of those buried in the three cemeteries Porter sold for less than £1 – the relatives who had come to complain that the graves were no longer being looked after and were being desecrated by vandals. When a Labour councillor read letters from relatives, these unpleasant young men began to simper and snigger.
Porter was admired in the eighties because she had limitless inherited wealth (her father founded Tesco). Limitless wealth sometimes brings limitless arrogance. As her biographer Andrew Hosken puts it, people 'listened as she referred to residents as "customers" and argued the need for the council to be run on "business lines", and concluded that the magic of Tesco had rubbed off on her. But Porter had no real business experience.'
In 1995, she was to fly on holiday to the US. Her last instruction was that successful managers should be given leather Filofaxes, and underachievers should get plastic ones. Her assistant chief executive knew Porter would forget, and intended to do nothing about it. Then came a call from the airport. 'Now, I don't want you slacking while I'm away… I want you to develop an adopt-a-granny scheme… And I also want you to reward the top ten time managers with leather personal organisers.' 'Yes, Leader.' 'Oh, I've got to go now, the pilot wants to take off.' The pilot was asking Lady Porter for the return of his radio before taking Concorde to the runway.[4]
The trade unions were another potential source of dissent from 'the government's view of the world'. If capitalism was a perfect system, but a capitalist enterprise was not working perfectly – and many of them were not – there must be some external reason. The unions seemed the obvious one. 'Attacking the institutions of collective bargaining… was seen as the absolute priority of Conservative policy,' wrote Will Hutton. Unions were 'over-mighty subjects' and as dangerous to Conservative policy as strong local councils.[5]
The unions had rendered themselves vulnerable in the seventies, and never quite knew what hit them in the eighties. But it was like an armoured train. In 1979, five million people were in closed shops, where, by agreement between unions and management, everyone had to be in the union; by 1993 the closed shop had been outlawed. In 1979, 13.3 million people were in unions (perhaps slightly fewer, for some unions inflated their membership figures in order to increase their block vote at the Labour Party conference); by 1993 it was under nine million, and only a third of employed workers belonged to a union – the lowest percentage since 1946. In 1979, nearly three quarters of the workforce were covered by collective bargaining agreements; by 1993 it was less than half.
A series of Acts of Parliament reduced the unions' bargaining strength dramatically. Secondary picketing – picketing an organisation other than the one that employs you – was banned, which was serious because a strike could often be made entirely ineffective if a supplier or a customer carried on working normally. Ballots before strike action became a legal requirement, and the ballot regulations were made very complex and difficult to fulfil. It became illegal to discipline a union member, for example by expelling him from the union, for breaking a strike. Companies could not be forced to recognise unions, and could issue individual contracts that undermined collective agreements. Thus encouraged, companies rushed to derecognise unions and scrap industry-wide collective bargaining agreements.
Key to destroying the power of the unions was ending Britain's dependence on strongly unionised heavy industries, especially coal, iron and railways; and the moment when Thatcher finally defeated and humbled the unions was the great miners' strike of 1984–5. The strike was called to defend the mining industry against the huge pit closure programme planned by the government, and ended with total victory for the government.
Unemployment, which had been seen as a scourge by governments of all parties between 1945 and 1979, was considered by the Thatcherites to be at worst an acceptable consequence of the free market, at best a positive good because it depressed wages and undermined the power of the unions. Unemployment rose steadily, from 4 per cent of the labour force in 1979 to more than 11 per cent in 1986. It reached three million in 1983. The government's response was to reduce the levels of unemployment benefit and income support, and make them harder to obtain.[6] In Chancellor Geoffrey Howe's first budget, the link between pensions and earnings was broken. Those on state pensions were in future to be allowed to get relatively much poorer than those still working. The nostrums of the Attlee settlement, even the welfare state, were no longer sacrosanct.
The pensions decision meant little to the baby boomers at the time – they were aged between twenty-four and thirty-four in 1979, and not inclined to worry about the standard of living of old folk who had failed to follow Bob Dylan's advice and get out of the way of the new world. It would not have stopped them voting for Mrs Thatcher in 1979, which many of them did. But they are noticing it now, as I write, in 2010.
The National Health Service was (and is still, despite everything that has happened to it) easily the most popular institution in Britain. Every government, even a Thatcher government, promises to defend it, and cannot break that promise too openly; that would court electoral disaster. When Marianne Faithfull at last freed herself of her sixties drug addictions – expensive therapies having failed, and her money having evaporated – she did so in the NHS, and started to understand what her generation had taken for granted: 'Only on the NHS could you do something like this.'[7]
But even so, the baby boomer generation did not value it enough, and the edges of the principle of 'free at the point of use' were chipped away in the Thatcher years, with, among other things, much higher charges levied for prescriptions and dentistry, and charges being introduced for eye tests. The NHS was forced to put such services as cleaning out to tender among private companies, which produced complicated tendering procedures that favoured big companies, and lower-paid staff. General practitioners were brought as far as possible into the commercial world by being made fund-holders, holding budgets from which they bought services for their patients. Big hospitals were encouraged to opt out of regional health authority control – Nye Bevan had sweated blood to bring them in – and to become self-governing trusts. Private health care flourished as it had not done since 1947, though most people could not afford it, and it could not deal with complex illnesses. By 1990 the BMA was saying that shortage of money represented a crisis for the NHS.
The government's vast privatisation programme became a crusade in the name of freedom, and sharp-suited young men and women of the baby boomer generation made fortunes by buying public assets for less than they were worth. The eighties were golden years for the City of London, the years of legendary excess. A young person who went into the city in the early eighties and stayed there would have to be pretty thick to fail to be a millionaire several times over by the time he or she was fifty, the age at which many of them retired and started wondering vaguely what to do with their time and money.
British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Rolls Royce, the British Airports Authority, British Steel, the water companies, the electricity companies, the railways and many more are huge enterprises in which the taxpayer – every citizen – once had a stake, but does not have a stake any longer. Harold Macmillan likened the privatisation programme to 'selling off the family silver'.
While some of the baby boomers were lining their pockets in the City of London, the young in the inner cities erupted in 1981. London, Liverpool and other cities saw riots of the dispossessed young against a society that gave them no hope. A Conservative publication admitted two years later, 'Only half of Britain's school leavers are trained compared with nine tenths in Germany and four fifths in France.' Yet the government saved money by abolishing sixteen of the Industrial Training Boards, which organised training for specific industries, keeping only seven.[8] The next generation was not high on the agenda. It was the baby boomers who mattered still, when electoral calculations were made. They could make and break governments.
The age of individualism came to mean individual ownership. The Thatcher years were dominated by the certainty that owning things was the road to freedom; that the more that was privately owned and the less that was publicly owned, the freer the society. So in 1979 only about 15 per cent of the population owned stocks and shares; by 1992 it was 22 per cent. In 1979 just over half the population owned their homes; it was nearly three quarters in 1992. The baby boomers joined the property owners. Ownership seemed like a wonderful thing in the boom years, and a very bad thing on Black Monday, 19 October 1987, when £50 billion was wiped off the value of shares on the London stock exchange.
One of the few winners on Black Monday was Greg Dyke, who had just been given stock options in the company that employed him as its director of programmes, London Weekend Television. Their value was based on the average price of the shares over a short period in October 1987, and the lower the price, the better it was for him. He became very rich, very quickly.
Two years later Dyke was promoted to managing director and sent on a management programme at Harvard Business School to learn how to do his new job. 'This was 1989, the height of Thatcherism, he writes,
when everyone in Britain still believed that successful management was all about being tough with your staff, the unions, your competitors, and virtually everyone else. I had never believed that, and [a Harvard professor] reinforced my view of the world… the most successful organisations in the world were those that treated their staff properly.[9]
It was not a lesson that the Thatcher era wished to learn.
*
Thatcherism was as much a legacy of the sixties as free love. In the sixties, the baby boomers talked of freedom, meaning the sort of freedom John Stuart Mill wrote about in 1859 in On Liberty: 'If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.' As they crept towards middle age in the eighties, the baby boomers started to put the word 'economic' in front of the word 'freedom they started to identify with their bosses, to champion the right of the rich to do whatever they wished with their money, to identify taxation with threats to freedom, to imagine that ours would be a freer society if everything was privately owned.
And so the greedy eighties became the beneficiaries of the indulgent sixties. Sixties man twenty years older became eighties man: sleek, sharp-suited, and ready to harness the language of liberation to the cause of capital. He was identified by John Betjeman:
You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
I'm partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I'm viable from ten o'clock til five.[10]
It was back to the fifties with a vengeance. No one learned that the times they were a-changing back again more painfully than Marianne Faithfull. She had held fast to the sixties mantras as she understood them, but she had watched Mick Jagger start to take seriously all the things they had laughed at together, such as debutantes' parties. Jagger was embracing the establishment, and Faithfull recalls his shame and mortification when she, full of drugs, passed out at the dinner table of an earl.[11] One by one, her old sixties friends deserted her as she clung to the things that had worked for all of them in the sixties, like drugs and a grand disregard for money, and she found herself ostracised and eventually sleeping on the streets.[12] Reflecting years later on the death of Jimi Hendrix in 1970, she thought, 'We must really have fucked up.'[13] By 'we' she meant the golden boys and girls of the sixties.
In the eighties the right-wing baby boomers, those who had never been part of the ersatz revolution, came into their own. Andrew Neil, born in 1949, who had languished in the seventies in the widely despised Federation of Conservative Students (which was wound up in the eighties, having become too right-wing even for Thatcher's Conservative Party) became editor of the Sunday Times. Kelvin Mackenzie, born in 1946, took over The Sun, and Michael Portillo, born in 1953, began what looked like an unstoppable political rise as a government adviser in 1979.
The idea that all the baby boomers were, at one time or another, lefties or faux lefties was mistaken. The right were always there, and their unfashionableness in the sixties and seventies made them the more determined to put their stamp on Britain when the chance came. Unlike the baby boomer left, when their moment came, it turned out that the baby boomer right meant every word of their rhetoric, and it was in the eighties that we heard a phrase that seemed like a contradiction in terms: radical conservative.
Neil and Mackenzie helped create the mood in which Thatcherism could flourish. They redefined 'freedom' to mean freedom from taxes and regulations, and developed, as Mark Garnett puts it, 'a context in which Conservative supporters could have their cake and eat it; they could enjoy the benefits of the permissive society while blaming their political opponents for its perceived excesses.'[14] In their world, the freedom of the rich to spend their money however they wished was sacrosanct, and so was the freedom of The Sun to print soft porn and sell it over the counter; but the freedom to attack sacred pillars of the state was licentiousness, and the 1979 film Life of Brian, which made wonderful fun of Christianity, was banned in several parts of the country. 'Blasphemous as well as tasteless,' stormed the Daily Telegraph.[15] Twenty years later Peter Hitchens wrote furiously that the film 'did more damage to faith among young Britons than every pamphlet and lecture which ever issued forth from the earnest spokesmen of rationalism and humanism,'[16] which may well be true.
*
The new managerial hippie often came armed with another sixties innovation – an MBA, or Master of Business Administration. The MBA arrived quietly on these shores from the USA in 1964, and it rose to become a symbol of eighties managerialism. In 1964, no British university had a business school, and the first British MBA students studied for the degree at the London Business School (which was, and is, independent of the universities). By the end of the eighties, every university felt it had to have its own business school and run its own MBA course. They could attract commercial sponsorship as no other department could. And they alone could teach the approved ideological gospel that a society was only free if the rich were free to do whatever they liked with their money, and that only people with capital were 'wealth-creators'.
Germaine Greer, who among her many accomplishments is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Comparative Studies at Warwick University, has written of how she glowers resentfully from her office window at the building from which Warwick Business School operates – so much more expensively equipped than her department, and with access to riches of which literature students can only dream. On the other hand, John Kay resigned as director of Oxford University's Said Business School because the Oxford academic establishment would not allow him to offer his faculty salaries that were massively higher than those of other Oxford academics. Greer resents business schools having more money than other departments; Kay thinks the difference between what business schools get and what other departments get is not big enough. And it is Professor Kay, not Professor Greer, who represented the spirit of the age. The Regius Professor of Semiotics was swept aside by the Enron Professor of Profits.
It was the MBA and its associated 'business gurus' who performed the intellectual confidence trick of turning sixties freedom into an instrument of big business. The business schools persuaded many people that the only freedom worth defending was the freedom of the ultra-rich to do whatever they liked with their money, and make as much more of it as they could. Never mind your freedom or mine to go where we like, think what we like, wear what we like, do what we like, say what we like – if, as often happens, these freedoms conflict with economic freedom, they must take second place to it. The logical consequence was that you could not have freedom and a mixed economy, for anything owned by the state inhibits the freedom of investors to do what they wish with their money. You could not have freedom and strong trade unions, for an organisation that places limits on what management may do must necessarily be against freedom. It was even hard to defend the welfare state, because that requires the state to take away private money and use it in ways that those to whom it originally belonged might not have chosen.
This led to the view, which was conventional wisdom in 1920 and unthinkable between 1948 and the election of Margaret Thatcher as Tory leader in 1976, that the only sort of education, healthcare and outdoor relief that should be provided to the poor is whatever the rich choose to provide out of the goodness of their hearts.
And there was no shortage of young and early-middle-aged people to argue that very thing. The distinguished right-wing educationalist Professor James Tooley believes there is 'no justification for state intervention in education, not in terms of provision, funding or regulation'. Things were much better, he says, before 1870, when almost the only education available was what you paid for yourself. He sums up his prescription for putting it all right in one of those handy three-word soundbites of the sort that normally encapsulate something pious and reactionary: the three Fs, 'freedom, family, philanthropy'.
'Freedom' in the mouths of Thatcherite ideologues usually means the freedom of the rich to bully the poor. 'Family' in those circles is used as a way of attacking state welfare provision: when Margaret Thatcher used those famous words 'There is no such thing as society,' she added, 'There are individual men and women, and there are families.' But the key word here is 'philanthropy'. Take away the state, says Professor Tooley, and leave it to the rich and to business to decide what provision, if any, should be made for the poor. Charitable money would be raised and 'administered with discretion and discernment'.[17] As this idea caught on in the last two decades of the twentieth century, charities became very big, and very powerful. 'The voluntary sector,' as they self-importantly call themselves, has been handed huge powers and huge sums of our money.
The Attlee philosophy appeared dead in the eighties, murdered by the baby boomers. Clement Attlee had listened to Lord Beveridge, whose 1944 report advocated government action to slay 'the five giants', and to Maynard Keynes, who advocated public spending. Margaret Thatcher listened to Friedrich von Hayek, who argued that the state should not involve itself in the welfare of its citizens, and Sir Keith Joseph, who told her that money supply should be limited and public expenditure cut. For some of the baby boomers, Thatcherism seemed to be everything they had fought for: a small state, a liberalised economy, power in the hands of individuals and companies rather than the state. They were turning in their early middle age into the hard-faced men and women who did well out of the eighties.
*
For the more recognisable baby boomers, the sixties rebels turned seventies ideologues, Thatcherism was of course the enemy, but the Labour Party was even more of an enemy, for it pretended to be on the side of the working class. And the worst element of the Labour Party was those on its so-called left like Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, for they taught the working class that advance could be achieved without accepting every nostrum of whatever grouping the speaker attached himself to.
So the dull settlement that had given the baby boomers all their chances in life, created by the Attlee government and maintained by Macmillan, Wilson, Heath and Callaghan, had few defenders among the children of the sixties, being too radical for some and not radical enough for others. It was not until Thatcher had been in power for some years that many of them started to see how privileged they were, and stirred themselves to defend the welfare state; and the National Union of Public Employees produced a T-shirt for them, proudly bearing the slogan 'Born in the NHS'.
For the first few years of Thatcher government, the left among the baby boomers still thought their brand of student politics mattered. So in 1979 the Bennites manoeuvred through the Labour Party conference a system by which the leader and deputy leader would be elected, not by Labour MPs, but by an electoral college which would give 40 per cent of the votes to the trade unions and 30 per cent each to MPs and to grassroots party members. This was clearly going to direct an unwelcome spotlight on the way the trade union block vote was cast. It would make the unions the key, almost the only, power-broker, and ensure that no one could become leader without owing a huge political debt to the leaders of the biggest unions. This was bound to damage both Labour and the unions in public esteem. But the baby boomers had grown to believe that unions were impregnable, and union leaders were not wise enough to spurn this massive, but temporary, addition to their powers. It was to be a very costly mistake.
Michael Foot was by now Labour leader, and he wanted his right-wing rival for the leadership, Dennis Healey, to be elected unopposed as deputy leader, to unite his party. But Tony Benn stood against Healey, and his ambassador to the baby boomer generation, a sharp-toothed young man called Jon Lansman, had a ready answer for those who thought Benn's campaign might not be a good idea: 'You don't believe in democracy then?' Arthur Scargill, never guilty of knowingly understating a case, told the Scottish Miners Gala that anyone who criticised Benn was 'sabotaging not only the candidature of Tony Benn but the principles of socialism which are basic to our movement.'
That set the tone. No self-respecting child of the sixties could be seen to sabotage the principles, etc., etc., never mind where it might lead.
The six-month campaign centred on how the big unions were going to vote. It looked like what it was: a fight for trade union patronage. When the executive of the building trade union UCATT took its voting decision, the headline in the next day's Sunday Times read: 'How three top Communists swung 200,000 votes to Benn'. Labour's popularity plummeted, and by the time Healey's desperately narrow victory was announced, Labour had as good as lost the 1983 general election.
The Labour Party was in a state of civil war. At its 1980 conference, Terry Fields, the MP who was also a member of the Militant Tendency, said:
We need co-ordinated action by the whole of our class to get the Tories out and the democracy that is being pumped out in the capitalist press is their democracy, not ours. We will found a new democracy when we have created a socialist state in this country… To the weak-hearted, the traitors and cowards I say: 'Get out of our movement. There is no place for you. Cross the House of Commons…'
The next speaker, former Chancellor Denis Healey, to shouts of 'Out, out', said, 'We certainly will not win the next election if… instead of meeting the real needs of people, we go on ideological ego-trips or accept the clapped-out dogmas which are now being trailed by the toytown Trotskyists of the Militant group…'
While the Labour Party collapsed in ideological warfare, so did all the far left groups, tiny splinters splitting into even tinier splinters. The Communist Party was involved in a bitter civil war. One faction was the older folk grouped around the daily newspaper, the Morning Star, and the other, broadly the baby boomers, was grouped around the theoretical journal Marxism Today, edited by a very sixties figure called Martin Jacques. Tariq Ali's International Marxist Group was splitting between 'right-wingers' who supported Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill, and purists who considered Benn and Scargill to be tainted with reformism. The Workers Revolutionary Party, which, as everyone on the left knew, really was secretive and rather sinister, was about to feast on its own flesh over an accusation that its leader, Gerry Healy, then in his seventies, was guilty of 'sexual debauchery' – using young female members of his party as sexual playthings. Over at the Labour left-wing weekly magazine Tribune there was another furious, bitter and hard-fought battle as editor Chris Mullin, Bennite and baby boomer, heaved the magazine's policy away from its support for Michael Foot and swung it behind Benn, thus provoking a bitter and widely publicised war with some of his trustees. The whole of the British left appeared to be engaged in a hideous battle to strangle itself.
The baby boomers had adopted a chillingly intolerant view of the workers' movement, in which everyone was playing at being prolier than thou. If you wished to be, or purported to be, on the left, a whole range of litmus tests were devised to test your true devotion. It might be uncritical support for Tony Benn, or for Arthur Scargill. It might be getting exactly the right line on which method of electing Labour's leaders was the most democratic. Whatever it was, you either supported the line, the whole line and nothing but the line, or you were a traitor to the working class. Failure to have exactly the correct line on any one of a dozen or so issues was a fatal character defect.
Unemployment reached three million in 1981 for the first time since the thirties, but the left was so busy tearing itself to pieces that it hardly noticed.
Out of this atmosphere came Margaret Thatcher's second crushing election victory in 1983 and the great miners' strike of 1984–5. The miners' strike could not have happened at any time apart from one at which the left had become frightened of its own shadow, where the fear of being denounced for moderation or reformism, or just being a stooge of the capitalist press, was so great that decisions that were obviously foolish and self-defeating went more or less unquestioned. Decisions were made by the miners' leaders, effectively by their president Arthur Scargill, that make almost no sense until you see them as part of this determination not to be outflanked on the left: the decision not to allow the members to ballot; the decision to pass up several negotiated compromises in pursuit of a total victory that, it was clear fairly early on, was not obtainable. Arthur Scargill 'always seemed to want to appear further left than anyone else,' according to a member of the miners' executive committee.[18]
Paul Mackney, still in Birmingham and now a key figure on the city's trades council, spent the strike organising support for the miners, hampered by internecine struggle on the left. He found Communists demanding full support for the miners' leaders in public, but in private one of the Communist party's two wings, he writes, was trying to isolate Scargill from early on, and opposing mass picketing. Mackney's and Peter Hitchens's old comrades in what was now called the Socialist Workers Party, who had expelled Mackney for ideological deviancy ten years previously, got themselves into a terrible ideological tangle over putting together food parcels for miners who needed them. SWP leaders described food collections derisively as charity work that kept people away from the important work of joining the picket lines.[19]
The baby boomers seemed to split between those who created this atmosphere; those who recoiled from it, like Peter Hitchens; those, like me, who tried hard, for much too long, to appease the ideological monster at our heels; and those – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown – who took the spirit of the sixties into government in 1997.
The generation of 1968 had emerged from its universities and made the left not only unelectable but uninhabitable.
*
Thatcher was forced out in 1990 after eleven years in Downing Street, when she overreached herself with the widely unpopular poll tax. The idea that everyone should pay exactly the same for local services, whether they were multi-millionaires or on the breadline, was a Thatcherite step too far. She was replaced with the less abrasive John Major, who led the Conservative Party into the 1992 election. That election was the baby boomers' last chance to stop the Thatcherite bandwagon, to save the gentler, more caring society inaugurated by Attlee. Its failure was terminal, because by the time Labour did return to office, in 1997, it had lost the will and the courage and confidence to champion the underdog.
Labour entered the 1992 election campaign marginally ahead in the polls, and then, somehow, lost. John Major returned to Downing Street with an overall majority of twenty-one seats. And that defeat, even today, is the wound the Labour Party still touches, and finds that it still hurts. Even today, Labour people (and former Labour people like me) will fall out about why it happened and whose fault it was.
There are those who say it was Shadow Chancellor John Smith's fault for producing a shadow budget that could be unfairly characterised by the Conservatives as 'tax and spend'. (This, by the way, is the most meaningless of all political slogans, for taxing and spending are what governments – all governments – do, and if they had to stop doing it, they could not govern.)
There are those who say it was all the fault of the Sheffield Rally – a great, vulgar, triumphalist television spectacular a couple of days before the election, which spectacularly misfired and made Labour and Kinnock sound threatening.
And there are those who blame Labour's spin machine. Labour's communications in the years leading up to the election were destroyed by personal and political infighting. When it came to the election, Labour had the worst of both worlds: a reputation for an invincible spin machine, and the reality of an ineffective one.
Actually, though all of these things played a part, the real villains were the generations of the sixties and seventies. To take advantage of their last chance to salvage a fair society, the baby boomers who believed in that sort of society had to get behind the Labour leader, and he was the wrong generation for them. Neil Kinnock, born in 1942, was a war baby. A little younger, and he would have been one of their own, like Tony Blair. A little older and he would have been so far removed from them that he would have been just another elderly politician who could not be expected to understand, like Michael Foot. And he had made a series of grubby compromises, for example ditching his own long-standing belief in unilateral nuclear disarmament because it was an electoral albatross. Too few of the left among the baby boomers could bring themselves to get behind him. It was that very sixties problem of losing face if someone else was seen to be more left-wing than you were, or even just a bit less ideologically correct.
I first met Kinnock in 1982, when I was Labour's press officer for the Peckham by-election at which Harriet Harman first entered parliament. The grim, sectarian, ultra politically correct chairperson of the Peckham Labour Party Women's Committee watched Kinnock exchanging rugby reminiscences with a senior policeman sent to look after our walkabout, and muttered furiously, 'How macho!' Her name was Sue Goss, and she is now a revered figure in New Labour. But she and her like helped to ensure Kinnock's 1992 defeat.
There was then – and still is, even now, though they are getting rather long in the tooth – a collection of keepers of the pure faith who were young men and women in the sixties and seventies, and were growing increasingly intolerant and embittered as they grew older. I watched these grim folk, holding their ideological correctness to themselves like a comfort blanket, make what may have been their last appearance en masse one night in 2009, when Arthur Scargill addressed a London rally to celebrate the 1984–5 miners' strike. He told them, 'If Neil Kinnock had have called on the whole working class to support us, Thatcher would have been out in a year.' And they cheered him to the rafters, even though most of them must have known it was nonsense in a silly hat. They still could not bear someone else to be seen to be more radical than they were.
They are there to this day, confined to their ideological dugouts, spitting hate and venom at their enemies on the left, and to this day the litmus test of ideological purity is the long irrelevant belief that Arthur Scargill was a great working-class leader who could have led us to the promised land had he not been betrayed by reactionary class traitors like Neil Kinnock. There is no word too harsh and bitter for anyone who criticises their hero.
Kinnock had to face the baby boomers from the far left, who would comfort themselves with muttering 'class traitor' in the sure knowledge that, while they would change nothing, at least they could not be out-lefted; and the baby boomers from the far right, to whom Thatcher represented the promise of 1968. But worst of all, perhaps, he was surrounded by a third sort of baby boomer: the ones who wanted to turn him into a svelte, branded product that the now upwardly mobile children of the sixties and seventies would find attractive. He listened to them – to his chief of staff, Charles Clarke; to Labour's head of communications, Peter Mandelson – and they told him that all the things that made him attractive had to go: the noise, the passion, the bons mots, the houndstooth suits. He was to wrap himself in grey flannel suits and grey woollen phrases, to give up the direct, passionate language that won hearts, and deliver his thoughts in vast, shapeless bundles of words.
So he did his best. It became hard to recall what an exciting politician he had been before leadership descended on him like a frozen shroud. He started to deliver his thoughts in vast, shapeless bundles of words. They told him that, when asked a difficult question, he was to flannel until the time ran out, and he did, though he felt foolish doing it.
Despite relentless rebranding and repackaging, something of what he really was still showed, and his advisers insisted that there were still vestiges of the old Kinnock to be suppressed. Peter Mandelson wrote privately to deputy leader Roy Hattersley that Kinnock's 'values and rhetoric are still tied strongly to the "have-nots." He cares too much. He's too much of a socialist.' It didn't work, and if the communicators had understood their trade better, they would have known why. You can build on the product you have, but you can't pretend that it is a completely different product. It took the children of the muddled sixties and seventies to make that simple error.
*
In 1995, just two years before New Labour came to power, in an influential book called The State We're In, Will Hutton counted the cost of Thatcherism. Britain, he wrote, had become a country divided against itself as it had not been since before the Attlee settlement, 'with an arrogant officer class apparently indifferent to the other ranks it commands', a class which 'is favoured with education, jobs, housing and pensions.' He wrote this thirteen years before the world knew of Sir Fred Goodwin, the Royal Bank of Scotland Chief Executive who steered his bank into the rocks, and now, having reached the age of fifty, is permitted to draw a pension of £693,000 a year for the rest of his life (which under pressure he agreed to reduce to £493,000).
Sir Fred's pension is largely paid for by taxes on what Hutton called 'the new working poor, who were created when the Thatcher government removed employment regulations, and by cutting the benefits of those who live off the state in near poverty, Hutton wrote that the poor were in a trap, and all paths out of it were closing down. 'The world in which they are trapped becomes meaner, harder and more corrupting.' Those in work are much less secure than they used to be, 'fearful for their jobs in an age of permanent downsizing, cost-cutting and casualisation, and ever more worried about their ability to maintain a decent standard of living'.[20]
Hutton summed up what was in 1995 a commonly held view: 'The great ideological contest of the twentieth century has been settled. Free market capitalism has won; state planning and communism, of which social-market capitalism is alleged to be a sub-set, has lost.'[21] The conventional view was that 'a minimal welfare state, low taxation and little business regulation would allow the economy to take off into a virtuous circle of capitalist dynamism.'[22] Sixties freedom had been redefined.
Twelve years before Hutton was writing, in the week of the 1983 general election, Neil Kinnock, who later that year would be elected leader of the Labour Party, told an election rally:
If Mrs Thatcher is re-elected as Prime Minister on Thursday, I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away… If Mrs Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.[23]
Notes
[1] D. R. Thorpe, Selwyn Lloyd (Cape, 1989), p. 343.
[2] D. R. Thorpe, Alec Douglas-Home (Sinclair Stevenson, 1996), p. 257.
[3] Will Hutton, The State We're In (Cape, 1995), pp. 36–7.
[4] Andrew Hosken, Nothing Like a Dame: The Scandals of Shirley Porter (Granta, 2006).
[5] Hutton, The State We're In, p. 82.
[6] Hutton, The State We're In, pp. 92–3.
[7] Marianne Faithfull with David Dalton, Faithfull (Michael Joseph, 1994), p. 237.
[8] David Childs, Britain since 1945 (Routledge, 2001), p. 225.
[9] Greg Dyke, Inside Story (HarperCollins, 2004).
[10] John Betjeman, 'Executive', in Collected Poems (John Murray, 1958; reprinted 1992), p. 312.
[11] Faithfull, Faithfull, p. 209.
[12] Faithfull, Faithfull, p. 228.
[13] Faithfull, Faithfull, p. 230.
[14] Mark Garnett, From Anger to Apathy (Cape, 2007).
[15] Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1979.
[16] Peter Hitchens, Monday Morning Blues (Quartet, 2000), p. 155.
[17] James Tooley, Reclaiming Education (Cassell, 2000).
[18] Francis Beckett and David Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line (Constable & Robinson, 2009), p. 41.
[19] Paul Mackney, Birmingham and the Miners' Strike (Birmingham TUC, 1987).
[20] Hutton, The State We're In, pp. 2–3.
[21] Hutton, The State We're In, p. 16.
[22] Hutton, The State We're In, p. 24.
[23] Martin Westlake, Kinnock (Little, Brown, 2001), p. 208.
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源