The new politics

Few of the problems of the 1980s were entirely new. However, many people blamed them on the new Conservative government, and in particular, Britain's first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher had been elected in 1979 because she promised a new beginning for Britain. The need for such a break with the past had been widely recognised for some years. As a result the old Conservative—Labour agreement on the guiding principles of the welfare state had already broken down. In the Conservative Party there had been a strong movement to the right, and in the Labour Party there had been a similarly strong move to the left. Both moved further away from the "centre" of British politics than they had done in living memory.

This basic change in British politics caused a major crisis for the Labour Party. Labour was no stranger to internal conflict, nor to these conflicts being damagingly conducted in public. In the 1930s the party had turned against its own first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed a national government with the Conservatives to handle the financial crisis of 1931. Four years later it had again been split between its traditional anti­war members and those who recognised the Nazi danger. In 1959 Labour had again publicly disagreed about two issues, nationalisation and nuclear weapons, which a large section of the party wished to give up, whether other nuclear armed nations did so or not. This time, however, the disagreements between the party's left and right were far more damaging. The 1979 election result was the worst defeat since 1931. Worse, however, was to follow, and as the bitter conflict continued, many people ceased to believe in the party's ability to govern itself, let alone the country.

Labour suffered a further blow when four senior right-wing members left the party to form their own "Social Democratic Party" in 1981, in alliance with the small but surviving Liberal Party. For some years the Liberal Party had been calling for a change in the electoral system. It had good reason to do so. In 1974 the Liberals had received 20 per cent of the national vote but only 2 per cent of the seats in Parliament. By March 1982 the new "Alliance" was gaining ground both from the Conservative and Labour parties.

Margaret Thatcher had come to power calling on the nation for hard work, patriotism and self-help. She was not, however, a typical Conservative. As one of her ministers said, "I am a nineteenth-century Liberal, and so is Mrs Thatcher. That's what this government is about." There was much truth in the remark, for she wanted free trade at home and abroad, individual enterprise and less government economic protection or interference. However, she was more of a Palmerston than a Gladstone. She wanted more "law and order" but was a good deal less willing to undertake the social reform for which later nineteenth-century Liberals were noted.

Not everyone in the Conservative Party was happy about the change in policy. The discontented members became known as "wets", one of whom argued that "people . . . must at least feel loyalty to the state. This loyalty will not be deep unless they gain from the state protection and other benefits", and he warned against the state's "failure to create a sense of community". Thatcher, however, ignored these views, saying that she "could not waste time having any internal arguments."

By the beginning of 1982 the Conservative government had become deeply unpopular in the country. However, by her firm leadership during the Falklands War Thatcher captured the imagination of the nation, and was confidently able to call an election in 1983.

As expected, Thatcher was returned to power with a clear majority of 144 seats in the 650-seat Parliament. It was the greatest Conservative victory for forty years. In part Thatcher's victory was a result of the "Falklands factor". Far more, however, it was the result of a split opposition vote, between Labour and the Alliance, and the continued weakness of the Labour Party, which suffered its worst result since the early 1920s. Once again the Alliance had the disappointment of gaining 26 per cent of the national vote, but only 3.5 per cent of the seats in Parliament. A clear majority had voted against the return of a Conservative government, showing dissatisfaction with Thatcher's policies. It was not difficult to see why this was so.

Thatcher had promised to stop Britain's decline, but by 1983 she had not succeeded. Industrial production since 1979 had fallen by 10 per cent, and manufacturing production by 17 per cent. By 1983, for the first time since the industrial revolution, Britain had become a net importer of manufactured goods. There was a clear economic shift towards service industries. Unemployment had risen from 1.25 million in 1979 to over 3 million.

However, Thatcher could claim she had begun to return nationalised industries to the private sector, that she had gone even further than she had promised. By 1987 telecommunications, gas, British Airways, British Aerospace and British Shipbuilders had all been put into private ownership. She could also claim that she had broken the power of the trade unions, something else she had promised to do. In fact, the trade unions had been damaged more by growing unemployment than by government legislation. She could be less confident about increased law and order. In spite of increasing the size of the police force, there was a falling rate of crime prevention and detection. In addition, the rough behaviour of the police in dealing with industrial disputes and city riots had seriously damaged their reputation.

The most serious accusation against the Thatcher government by the middle of the 1980s was that it had created a more unequal society, a society of "two nations", one wealthy, and the other poor. According to these critics, the divide cut across the nation in a number of ways. The number of very poor, who received only a very small amount of government help, increased from twelve million in 1979 to over sixteen million by 1983. In the meantime, reductions in income tax favoured the higher income earners.

The division was also geographical, between prosperous suburban areas, and neglected inner city areas of decay. Although the government sold many state-owned houses and flats to the people who lived in them, it also halved the number of new houses it built between 1981 and 1985, a period in which the number of homeless people increased.

More importantly, people saw a divide between the north and south of the country. Ninety-four per cent of the jobs lost since 1979 had been north of a line running from the Wash, on the east coast, to the Bristol channel in the west. People were aware of growing unemployment in the "depressed" areas, and fewer hopes of finding a job. Indeed, by 1986 41 per cent of those unemployed had been out of work for over a year, compared with only 25 per cent in 1979. As a result, it was not surprising that Labour continued to be the stronger party in the north, and in other depressed areas. In the more heavily populated south, the Alliance replaced Labour as the main opposition party.

The black community also felt separated from richer Britain. Most blacks lived in the poor inner city areas, not the richer suburbs, and unemployment among blacks by 1986 was twice as high as among the white population.

In spite of these problems, Thatcher's Conservative Party was still more popular than any other single party in 1987. In the national elections that year, the Conservative Party was returned to power with a majority of 102 seats. This was partly because since 1979 personalities had become politically more important. Thatcher was seen as more determined and more convincing than the Labour or Alliance leaders. It was also because the opposition to Conservative policy remained split between Labour and the Alliance, and it appeared permanently so.

There were other reasons why the Conservative Party, with only 43 per cent of the national vote, won so convincingly. Its emphasis on personal wealth and property ownership had begun to change the way many traditional Labour supporters voted. It may be that many lower income people living in the Midlands and south shifted their loyalties to the right. On the other hand, in Scotland the Conservatives lost half their seats, mainly to Labour or the Scottish National Party, an indication of the increased sense of division between richer and poorer Britain, and an indication that Scottish radicalism was as strong as ever.

Thatcher's victory caused concern for both opposition parties. Labour had done better than many had expected. However, it still had to face the fact that Thatcher's policies were creating a society which seemed decreasingly interested in Labour philosophy, and it had to decide how it could make this philosophy more attractive without giving up its principles. The Alliance also faced serious problems. It had done worse than expected, calling into question its claim to replace the two-party system with a three-party one. It now seemed that it would take two or three national elections before this question, and the connected question of proportional representation, would be decided.

The 1987 election brought some comfort, however, to two underrepresented groups. In 1983 only nineteen (3 per cent) of the 650 members of Parliament had been women, almost the lowest proportion in western Europe. In 1987 this figure more than doubled to forty-one women MPs (6.5 per cent), a figure which suggested that the political parties realised that without more women representatives they might lose votes. Blacks and Asians, too, gained four seats, the largest number they had ever had in Parliament, although like women they remained seriously underrepresented.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1155