Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (2 page)

Nevertheless, it would take an essayist of wearisome contrariness to argue that the period of the eighties had little that was distinctive, let alone unique, about it and should be conceded no
meaning beyond that dictated by the calendar. For a start, no decade had seen Britain served continuously by the same prime minister since William Pitt the Younger in the 1790s; and unlike Pitt
(whose terms of office stretched from 1783 to 1801 and 1804 to 1806), Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street tenure (1979 to 1990) almost perfectly framed the intervening decade as if it were her
own. Perhaps this might not have been so significant had she possessed a more technocratic and less commanding personality. That she proved to be one of the dominant figures of modern British
history is a defining characteristic of the period. While this book encompasses politics, economics, the arts and society, it has a unifying theme: the attraction or repulsion, in each of these
areas, to and from the guiding spirit of the age. That Thatcher was the personification of that spirit is perhaps the least contentious aspect of what will unfold.

There is another recurring theme. It is that what happened during the eighties in the UK was not just significant for those who lived there. The country’s influence
was worldwide to an extent that is easily forgotten in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Cold War and the major strategic role of British forces in defending the ‘Free
World’ against the Soviet Union stand out with particular clarity. Thatcher was the first Western leader to identify Mikhail Gorbachev as someone with whom, to paraphrase her, business could
be done. She was an important bridge between him and Ronald Reagan. The legacy from that most fruitful of détentes was of unambiguous benefit to mankind, which for the previous four decades
had been forced to ponder what, at times, looked like its imminent destruction in nuclear war. Necessarily, though, the ‘cold thaw’ diminished Britain’s strategic significance in
the world.

NATO and diplomatic special relationships were only a part of Britain’s significance during the eighties. The international penetration by British youth and progressive cultures was
remarkable, with British acts accounting for a third of pop music sales in the United States. On 13 July 1985, it was estimated that more than one fifth of the planet’s inhabitants watched
the most spectacular charity appeal in history, coming to them from a stadium in north-west London. In the Live Aid audience at Wembley was Diana, Princess of Wales, an international fashion icon
of the period without European, or possibly global, compare.

Political debate, though, remained at the heart of Britain’s influence. If we now take it for granted that a major Western country’s head of government could be a woman, it is
primarily because Thatcher made it so. Thirty years on from her election, it is right to argue over Thatcher’s legacy but difficult to dismiss out of hand at least the general sentiment of
her official biographer, Charles Moore, that

Such admiration was not always felt everywhere, least of all at home. For a while, other nations looked on in horror at the signs of social, economic and political division that
run through the narrative of this book. Then – for good or ill – they began to copy the policies that Thatcher’s Britain had experimented with, enacted and promoted. Britain in
the eighties was both an inspiration and a warning to the rest of the world to an extent that it has
rarely been during the succeeding twenty years. What follows is an attempt
to describe, analyse and argue over that momentous period in the nation’s history.

Waiting at the Church

The prime minister had a farm: Upper Clayhill spread out across 138 acres of the Sussex Downs. To the west was the medieval town of Lewes, where more than seven hundred years
previously the ‘Father of Parliament’, Simon de Montfort, and his fellow barons had defeated a royal army and taken the hapless King Henry III prisoner. To the south was Glyndebourne,
home since the 1930s of the celebrated summer opera festival. Set beside a water meadow, the farmhouse at Upper Clayhill was part-Elizabethan, part-Georgian. Built in old Sussex brick, it retained
many of its original oak beams and an impressive Tudor fireplace. James Callaghan had taken out a loan to buy it in 1968 shortly after a Cabinet reshuffle had switched him from the Treasury to the
Home Office. He found that farming was not only a money-making venture but also a welcome distraction, and it provided him with a weekend retreat where his family could gather for Sunday lunch.
Upon becoming prime minister in 1976, he gladly exchanged a pokey flat in Lambeth for 10 Downing Street, and even though he also gained the official country house at Chequers, parting with Upper
Clayhill was never his intention. It did not come with the job and it could not be taken away with the job. Its rustic, homely feel contrasted with the formal town-house dimensions of Downing
Street. Only the historical bric-a-brac on the walls suggested an occupant with an interest in the vigorous projection of British power in the world: the rooms were decorated with prints and
paintings of Royal Navy men-o’-war, sails puffed out and cannons ready to repel the enemy.

This artistic taste might have suggested a nostalgic Tory busy fortifying his old-fashioned dwelling against the sombre realities of 1970s Britain, a nation whose relative decline was a
recurring subject of discussion in the media, at home and abroad.
¹
But James Callaghan was the leader of the Labour Party. He had no particular pining
for lost imperial glories. What was more, as prime minister, he was as engaged as anyone in the realities of the present and more optimistic than most that years of prosperity lay ahead, especially
if his government could, through a partnership with the trade unions, ensure
industrial peace and maintain wage restraint as the means to bring down inflation. The ‘sick
man of Europe’ epithet, once used of the Ottoman Empire, may have attached itself to the United Kingdom during the decade as economic dislocation followed an energy crisis and international
economists like J. K. Galbraith spoke regretfully of the ‘British disease’, yet, unlike the other major European nations, the United Kingdom possessed an asset that seemed destined to
protect her from subsequent shocks and through which a dramatically more prosperous future could be secured.

North Sea oil promised riches the like of which previous post-war prime ministers could scarcely have dreamt. ‘Black gold’ was the abundant substance that would fund higher public
spending
and
remove the burden from the average taxpayer. In June 1977, Gavyn Davies (who would later be chairman of the BBC but was then a member of the Downing Street Policy Unit) sent
Callaghan a ‘medium-term assessment’ which forecast that through a policy of controlled reflation and rising North Sea oil revenues, Labour might be able to reduce income tax to 15 per
cent by 1982.
²
The eighties could be a decade of dynamic growth, enhanced public sector investment and Scandinavian-style social democracy.

However, if Callaghan wanted to lead this national revival he had first to win a general election. When to call polling day was what particularly preoccupied him during August 1978. With
Parliament on its summer recess, Upper Clayhill Farm provided the perfect setting for calm and measured deliberation. After completing his usual early morning tour of the acres, the fields of
barley, checking the welfare of the cattle and assessing the likelihood of rain,
³
his mind turned to forecasting the consequences if he called a snap
general election in the autumn.

There was no need to do so until late the following year since, constitutionally, it was not until November 1979 that there had to be an election. The main argument for waiting until the full
five-year term had expired was a powerful one given that the country had only recently emerged from a recession. The longer Callaghan could put off the campaign, the more time there was for a
sustained economic recovery to improve the voters’ sense of material well-being. But prime ministers were out of the habit of going the distance. In search of a workable parliamentary
majority in 1966, Harold Wilson had called – and won – an election seventeen months into his first term of office. In 1970, he went to the polls again, nine months before it was
necessary to do so. His Tory vanquisher on that occasion, Edward Heath, proceeded to gamble, unsuccessfully, on a February 1974 election, sixteen months early. Then, in October 1974, the third
general election within four years was held. Between 1966 and 1974, declaring early had worked twice and failed twice.

One handicap in calling a snap election was that it could look suspicious.
Did the prime minister know something ominous was on the horizon and was trying to secure
re-election before the storm hit? It was therefore helpful that the vote should be held not just after several months of improving conditions but in an atmosphere marked by continuing optimism.
Both criteria appeared to be met in the summer of 1978. Furthermore, Callaghan’s generally avuncular public persona – he was dubbed ‘Sunny Jim’ – was an obvious asset
in this respect. The opinion polls suggested he was both more popular than his own Labour Party and more popular than the leader of the opposition, Margaret Thatcher, whose popularity was lower
than that of her Conservative Party. Were it to be a presidential contest, the advantage was clearly with Callaghan. Nonetheless, even the reality of a parliamentary election was not necessarily
bad news for Labour. Although the psephological evidence was mixed, with private polling provided to the prime minister by Bob Worcester of MORI suggesting the Tories were clinging on to the
slenderest of advantages, other opinion polls showed Labour leads of up to 4 per cent. By October, that lead had grown to between 5 and 7 per cent.
⁴
Seven per cent represented a decent majority.

Had Callaghan enjoyed a working majority at Westminster, the argument for continuing in office well into 1979 would have been especially strong. But no such luxury was at his disposal. The
general election that had ousted Edward Heath’s Conservative government in February 1974 had produced no overall majority and when the incoming Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, finally
won a second election later that year, it was with a parliamentary majority of just three. Subsequent by-election defeats soon removed even that slender advantage. In April 1976, Wilson retired as
prime minister and, after a Labour leadership election, Callaghan took over. From the spring of 1977 to the summer of 1978, he stayed in office thanks to the ‘Lib–Lab’ pact which
Labour had negotiated with the Liberal Party.

The Liberals only had thirteen MPs – only two more than the Scottish Nationalists – but dealing with them suited Callaghan because it provided the cloak of political necessity to
cover his preference for steering policy away from the demands of Labour’s left-wingers and towards the centre ground. It also suited the Liberals, who were keen to avoid fighting an election
campaign so soon after they had hurriedly replaced their leader, Jeremy Thorpe. The flamboyant Thorpe was facing charges of conspiracy to murder a talkative stable lad turned male model whom he had
picked up and encountered unexpected difficulties in letting go. In Thorpe’s place, the Liberals chose as their new leader David Steel, who, as the son of a Church of Scotland minister,
seemed an altogether safer bet. Yet Steel was still in his late thirties and was struggling to assert himself against the condescending appellation ‘the Boy David’. Other than staving
off an expensive and awkwardly timed election campaign, the Liberals secured little from their
Westminster assignations with Labour’s chief whip. Having run its course,
the Lib–Lab pact broke up in July 1978, more in ennui than acrimony. Thus, as Callaghan weighed his options over the summer, he recognized that when Parliament reconvened in November, the
government would be unable to carry its business through the House of Commons unless it brokered deals with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and satisfied the divergent aspirations of the Ulster
Unionists and the Irish nationalists of the SDLP. Labour’s outright victory in an October 1978 general election would be the means of escaping this wearisome prospect.

Securing a dissolution of Parliament was a prime minister’s prerogative, and though Callaghan sought the opinions of his Cabinet colleagues he could divine no consensus.
⁵
There were also other important figures in public life whose views the prime minister thought worth soliciting – the union bosses. Almost alone among his
senior Cabinet colleagues, Callaghan had been a national trade union official.
^EN1
Indeed, one of his claims to the party leadership was his rapport with
both the parliamentary and trade union wings of the Labour movement. The unions had good cause to regard him as their friend. In 1969, Harold Wilson’s employment secretary, Barbara Castle,
had proposed legislation to curb unofficial strikes in a white paper,
In Place of Strife
. Opposition to it within the Cabinet had been led by Callaghan, who forced the proposals to be
dropped in favour of a face-saving, and meaningless, ‘solemn and binding undertaking’ by the TUC to discourage wildcat strikes.

On 1 September 1978, four days before he was due to speak at the TUC annual conference, Callaghan invited six of Britain’s most senior trade unionists down to dinner at his farm. It was a
beautiful summer’s evening. The food was cooked by his wife, Audrey, a woman noted for her culinary expertise as well as her experience in local government (although the press tended to focus
on her frumpy appearance, dubbing her the ‘Yorkshire Pudding’).
⁶
She was half of a happy and stable marriage, Callaghan having met her
when she was a sixteen-year-old Baptist Sunday school teacher in Maidstone and he a junior clerk at the Inland Revenue. The courses were served by their granddaughter, Tamsin Jay, whose father,
Peter Jay, had been plucked from writing about economics in
The Times
to become ambassador to the United States amid inevitable accusations of prime ministerial nepotism. In this easy,
relaxed, family-oriented life at Upper Clayhill, the union fraternity found a warm welcome. Round the dining-room table was assembled the ‘Labour aristocracy’ of Len Murray (general
secretary of the TUC), Moss Evans (the new general secretary of the Transport and General
Workers’ Union), and David Basnett of the General and Municipal Workers’
Union, who was also organizer of Trade Unionists for a Labour Victory, together with Lord Allen, Hugh Scanlon of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, and Geoffrey Drain of the local
government workers’ union, NALGO. To all but the most casual of newspaper readers or news bulletin viewers, these were some of the most well-known names in British public life. Between
courses, Callaghan discussed with them whether he should call the general election, raising arguments for why delay was worth considering. He failed to convince. Of his six guests, five felt he
should hesitate no longer and go for October. Only Scanlon argued for deferring the date. Callaghan listened and remained non-committal. Nonetheless, it was clear what the union leaders thought,
and as they delivered their parting thanks and goodbyes they had grounds for assuming the hospitable prime minister had digested their advice.
⁷