Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (62 page)

Developing the theme that it was voluntary organizations and good-neighbourliness that made life better, Thatcher went on to profess that her favourite charity was the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children because, despite the strides that had been made in material welfare, too many young people had been shown nothing but cruelty at home. ‘For those children it
is difficult to say: “You are responsible for your behaviour!” because they just have not had a chance.’
³
This was not far removed
from a similar point made in 2006 by David Cameron, which his Labour opponents mockingly paraphrased as ‘hug a hoodie’. But, back in 1987, the surrounding threads of Thatcher’s
tapestry were successfully unpicked by the efforts of her critics to identify the denial of social obligations as her political mission. The damage to her reputation had been done by the time, six
years later, she attempted to clarify what she had meant: ‘Society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it . . . the error to which I was objecting was the
confusion of society with the state as the helper of first resort.’
⁴
What she could not satisfactorily answer was why the accusation that she
wished to destroy society had gained such traction. Doing so would have necessitated going to the core of what fuelled popular apprehensions about social change in the 1980s. These concerns stemmed
from what might vaguely be termed the weakening of a social contract – the tangible results of which were a widening gulf between rich and poor, rising crime rates, along with football
hooliganism and antisocial behaviour, a perceived decline in community spirit, and the undermining of ‘family values’ and responsibilities.

There was consensus on neither the causes nor the consequences of these social changes. In the foreground stood unemployment as a major source of poverty and the undermining of human
relationships. Given the anxiety joblessness created, alongside feelings of social exclusion and purposelessness, it defied common sense to imagine there was no correlation with growing signs of
social fragmentation. By the middle of the decade, seven out of every ten convicts going to prison were registered unemployed.
⁵
Communities that had
been built around one or two dominant employers – such as a coal mine or a single large factory – were disproportionately affected when that employer shut down, plunging the whole
community into a state of helplessness. In particular, male unemployment inevitably undermined the traditional
patriarchal model of the man finding purpose as the
family’s principal wage-earner. The surprise would surely have been if such shocks had not strained human relationships and led to an increase in antisocial behaviour. However, establishing a
direct correlation was not easy. As Thatcher was quick to point out, unemployment (peaking at 11 per cent of the workforce in 1986) was half that of the 1930s (22 per cent in 1932),
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yet the thirties coincided with historically low levels of family breakdown and, by later standards, remarkably little crime.
⁶
According to this critique, it was cultural change rather than economic hardship that had intervened to breed modern social ills. The blame could thus be laid on the culture
of the ‘permissive sixties’ – and, by implication, at the door of the liberal left. Into this debate, the American social scientist Charles Murray imported a term that became
shorthand for a sector of society that, having become dependent upon welfare benefits, had supposedly given up on the prospect of reintegrating into the workplace and seeking self-improvement
– the ‘underclass’. It was a new term for what previous generations had described as the ‘feckless’ and the Victorians had depicted as the ‘undeserving
poor’. The fear was that the underclass was becoming so entrenched that it would prove impervious to the opportunities presented to the rest of society by returning economic growth.

The Thatcher years were particularly anxious ones for those whose outlook valued the presumed stability offered by conventional family structures. For them, alternative ways of living posed a
challenge and the evidence of social atomization represented their consequence. Some – but not all – of the statistics appeared to bear out the charge that the decisive shift had
actually taken place before Thatcherism took hold. The level of marital break-up, for instance, suggested that the eighties confirmed, rather than accelerated or reversed, the trend of the previous
two decades. The divorce rate had soared during the sixties and seventies: in England and Wales there were 37,657 petitions for divorce between 1961–5 and 162,481 in 1976–80 – an
increase of 331 per cent, which far outstripped the population increase of scarcely 5 per cent per decade. After rising modestly in the first half of the eighties, the numbers getting divorced then
gently slid to 152,360 between 1986 and 1990, a fall of over 6 per cent from ten years earlier.
⁷
This decline was only slightly exacerbated by
proportionately fewer marriages being contracted.
⁸
The essential point, however, was that, although the period of steady ascent in the divorce rate
had come to an end, it remained close to its all-time peak. No such plateaus were reached in the growing levels either of illegitimate births or of abortions. Here, it was the eighties that
witnessed the great change in behaviour, with births outside marriage accounting for 12 per cent
of all births in 1981 but over 26 per cent by 1989 (the rate continued to
soar thereafter and had reached 46 per cent by 2009).
⁹
Neither the easier availability of contraception nor the destigmatizing of illegitimacy
reduced the number of terminations carried out. The rate of legal abortions in England and Wales during the late seventies ran at a little over 110,000 per year, but reached 160,000 per year in the
late eighties.
¹⁰
The exception was in Northern Ireland, where abortion remained illegal.

In the meantime, the nature of the family had undergone a transformation. By 1984, there were nearly a million one-parent families in the UK. The incidence of divorce was one reason, the numbers
of births outside a stable relationship another. Single mothers who had never shared a household with a partner became a significant group in society (rising by 168 per cent from 160,000 in 1981 to
430,000 in 1991).
¹¹
The social assumptions upon which Beveridge’s version of the welfare state had been founded – of an average
household in which the husband was the breadwinner for a wife and child – now appeared to belong to a bygone age: an age that had been dismembered by the shrinking number of breadwinning
partners, whether because of widespread joblessness or because, out of personal choice, they were no longer partners. For some single mothers, friends or relatives provided the support necessary to
allow them to hold down at least a part-time job, but for many others dependency upon supplementary benefits became a way of life – and, to the Treasury, a cause for alarm. Thatcher’s
intention that absentee fathers should not escape paying their share to the mothers of their children was not realized until the Child Support Act 1991 was introduced, which only reached the
statute book after she had fallen from office. The only working mother to become prime minister, her understanding of why many mothers might prefer to stay at home to bring up their children was
nonetheless sufficiently strong for her to reject proposals that would have introduced a tax allowance for childcare. There was disappointment for those who wanted the sticks and carrots of taxes
and benefits to be used in a way designed to recreate the environment of the 1950s. Tax breaks to support marriage ran up against Nigel Lawson’s desire to simplify the tax system, and it was
not until 1988 that some of the income tax penalties operating against marriage began to be reduced. Husbands and wives were finally taxed independently in 1990.

Despite these years of major social change, there was in eighties Britain nothing remotely comparable to the campaign for ‘family values’ that so energized the conservative movement
in Reagan’s America. The Cabinet was populated by politicians who had either endorsed (with whatever level of enthusiasm) many of the measures that created the ‘permissive
society’ in the sixties or had long since come to accept them as irreversible. In 1967, Thatcher had voted in favour of legalizing both homosexuality and abortion
and
she was not minded to reverse either move while in Downing Street, though she did allow Section 28’s inoperable attempt to stop local councils from actively promoting gay
relationships.
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Nor had she any intention of reversing the legislation that had made divorce easier (though married to a divorcee she had voted
against the liberalization in 1968, concerned by what she took to be its implications for deserted wives and families).
¹²
Nevertheless, divorce
was made easier in 1984 by the passage of the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act, which reduced the minimum length of time between marriage and filing for divorce from three years to one year.
Thereafter, Thatcher was keen to keep the divorce law as it stood, which was why she did not look favourably upon the Law Commission’s November 1990 recommendations for the introduction of
‘no-fault’ divorce.
¹³
The greatest threat to the scope of the abortion law came not from government ministers but from a private
member’s bill introduced in 1988 by the Liberal Democrat MP David Alton, which attracted sufficient cross-party support to gain a second reading before being talked out of time. Even that
only envisaged preventing the relatively small proportion of terminations that took place after eighteen weeks, which it hoped to make the new upper limit in place of the existing twenty-eight
weeks. As for contraception, Whitehall was certainly not going to do anything to reduce the effectiveness of the fight against Aids and teenage pregnancy. The courts were similarly robust. In 1985,
Victoria Gillick, a mother of ten, lost her protracted legal battle to stop doctors prescribing contraceptives to under-16-year-olds unless they had parental consent – though the British
Social Attitudes survey did suggest a majority of the population backed her stance.
¹⁴

Law and Disorder

There could be few clearer signs of a fractured society than soaring rates of crime, and in this respect the eighties brought an alarming breakdown of order. In England and
Wales, the number of indictable criminal offences notified to the police rose by 52 per cent in the decade between 1979 and 1989, from over 2.5 million to over 3.8 million. The single biggest
category, theft and handling stolen goods, rose by 42 per cent, while violence against the person increased by 86 per cent and sexual offences rose by 36 per cent. In Scotland, total offences rose
by one third. Only in Northern Ireland was the increase, at one tenth, noticeably more modest.
¹⁵
Even more alarming was the implication of the
British Crime Survey that the number of reported offences hugely underestimated the real level of crime.

As with changes in the structure of the family, there was no consensus on
which factors were driving criminal activity. If theft was a response to job losses, were sexual
offences equally attributable to socio-economic factors? To Thatcher, of course, the link was neither proven nor, if it did exist, justifiable. Blame was more properly directed not at the state but
at a state of mind channelled by social and political radicals towards scepticism and disrespect towards institutions, authority and discipline. ‘We are reaping what was sown in the
sixties,’ Thatcher told a meeting of party delegates in March 1982. ‘The fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline
and self-restraint were denigrated.’
¹⁶
She was still on this theme five years later, assuring the party conference that ‘civilized
society doesn’t just happen. It has to be sustained by standards widely accepted and upheld’ – which was why ‘when left-wing councils and left-wing teachers criticize the
police they give moral sanction to the criminally inclined’.
¹⁷
‘We Conservatives know,’ she told her last party conference as
leader, ‘even if many sociologists don’t, that crime is not a sickness to be cured – it’s a temptation to be resisted, a threat to be deterred, an evil to be
punished.’
¹⁸

One identifiable stimulant of this counter-culture originated from beyond the limits of national sovereignty. In January 1979, an Islamic revolution deposed the shah in Tehran, causing a
temporary spike in opium production while power changed hands and opponents of the new regime whose bank accounts had been frozen sought out alternative means of accessing money. Then, in December
that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, only to be met by resistance funded partly from the proceeds of the country’s swiftly expanding opium crop. The result was the swamping of the
West with cheap and easily available heroin. During 1979, the price of one gram of heroin fell from £200 to £50, and it continued to slide thereafter. Heroin users multiplied and by
1984 were estimated to number fifty thousand Britons.
¹⁹
With nothing better to occupy their time, addicts sought oblivion in the ‘shooting
galleries’ of housing estates in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and other pockets of deprivation. To fund their addiction, they turned to street crime and burglary, since disproportionately
heroin addicts were, or had become, unemployed – and in danger of becoming unemployable. In this respect, the fights against crime, drugs and the sense of purposeless were clearly
intertwined.

The opinion polls suggested that regardless of where the public looked for the causes of crime, they overwhelmingly preferred the Conservatives’ solutions to those offered by Labour or the
SDP–Liberal Alliance. The impression that Labour was not greatly exercised by the evident crime wave was reinforced by the party’s 1983 election manifesto, which proposed various
measures to hold the police to greater account and to improve conditions for prisoners, while downgrading the tackling of criminality to a couple of
sketchily imprecise
generalities which read suspiciously like afterthoughts.
²⁰
Particularly for those on the left of the party, restraining the forces of law and
order sometimes appeared to be the priority. ‘The police are one of the most worrying aspects of society and have become a very political organization indeed,’ claimed one of the
left’s standard-bearers and leader of the Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone.
²¹
Certainly, the police had personal cause to be thankful
that there was a Conservative government in office which was busy greatly expanding their numbers and dramatically increasing their pay. In other measures designed at getting tough with criminals,
a new prison-building programme was instituted and the Criminal Justice Act 1988 sought to lengthen some prison terms by giving the Attorney General the power to appeal against supposedly
over-lenient sentences. At the same time, the legislation tried to deal more sensitively with those who were victims of crime, offering compensation as well as better protection for children in
court proceedings and privacy in child-abuse cases.