Andy Beckett
The Guardian, Saturday 27 October 2012
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Thatcherism, the miners' strike, Hillsborough, Murdoch … what will be the final reckoning on 1980s Britain? Photomontage: Andrew Stocks
In 2006, the year before the financial crisis started, BBC2 broadcast a luxurious adaptation of The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst's heady novel about rich Britain in the mid-80s. In the Observer, Tim Adams, who had been a young adult in the heyday of Thatcherism, wrote a perceptive essay about the feelings the programme and book provoked. For some of the people who had read the novel on his recommendation, "certainly those a few years younger than me," he wrote, the "moral shifts Hollinghurst was concerned with no longer had the power to shock. They had grown up with nothing else but 80s values." Adams concluded: "The point about the 80s is that they have never finished."
In 2010, the Labour prime minister who did so much to ensure this, Tony Blair, argued in his autobiography, A Journey, that there were good reasons for Thatcherism's continued hold on Britain. "Much of what she wanted to do in the 1980s was inevitable, a consequence not of ideology but of social and economic change." In many ways, he wrote, "Mrs Thatcher was absolutely on the side of history."
It feels less like that now. Some of the most obvious cracks in the supremacy of the 80s have appeared where Thatcherism was supposedly strongest: on the economy. Home ownership, central to her popular capitalism, peaked in the United Kingdom in 2003. In England, it has been declining for two years longer: the National Housing Federation predicted last year that by 2021 owner-occupancy will be back to mid-80s levels.
In the privatised utilities, 80s dreams of consumer empowerment, choice and value have also soured. Ten days ago, David Cameron's hasty, misfiring announcement about energy prices tacitly acknowledged this: his supposedly free-market government was planning to legislate to make energy companies offer their customers their cheapest tariffs.
The economy as a whole was supposedly revitalised for the long term by Thatcherism. It has not quite worked out like that. Thursday's announcement of a single quarter of growth after one of the most protracted ever modern recessions was greeted with almost desperate relief – "the economy is healing" – by the chancellor George Osborne. Probably closer to the current mood of many voters and economists was a speech last month by the Labour leader Ed Miliband. He said that, in the 80s, "A set of [economic] assumptions emerged … A rising tide would lift all boats … Wealth would trickle down to all. And the rules governing our economy were unchangeable … All of these assumptions have been discredited by the events of the last five years."
A lack of faith in the Thatcherite free market now extends far beyond the left. Last October was the 25th anniversary of the "big bang" that deregulated the City of London. In the Daily Telegraph, an even-handed article by City historian David Kynaston prompted a long chain of reader comments whose recriminatory tone would have been unthinkable on previous anniversaries, but now seems quite normal. "So many of us were taken in by Maggie Thatcher at the time," wrote marknewdarkage. "I was a huge fan … But as time has gone by, I can see she has ruined so much of what was good about this country … It is going to take years and years before this mess is cleared up, if it ever will be."
A similar sense of a country belatedly waking up to what happened in the 80s has hung over the News International phone-hacking scandal, which may enter a new phase next month with the publication of the Leveson inquiry report. Rupert Murdoch's influence over Britain did not start in the Thatcher era – he bought the News of the World in 1968, the Sun in 1969 – but it was in the 80s that it hardened into one of the central facts of political life, through his breaking of the printing unions, his purchase of the Times and Sunday Times in 1981, and the relentless rightwing crusading of those papers and the Sun. Three decades later, in July 2011, to watch a slightly pasty, croaking, self-styled "humble" Murdoch appear before a televised committee of suddenly irreverent MPs was to see something dragged out into the light: a power relationship that would never be quite the same again. It was the first time he had ever faced direct scrutiny by British MPs.
This autumn, an equally unexpected reckoning has begun about 80s policing. On Wednesday, Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire, abruptly resigned, two days after being accused by Labour MP Maria Eagle of boasting that he had smeared Liverpool supporters following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Bettison denied the allegation, but his Hillsborough conduct is being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). On Monday, the Commons heard that the names of a startling 1,444 former and serving police officers have been passed to the IPCC, which is also examining whether there was a criminal cover-up of the police actions at Hillsborough. According to the IPCC, it is the biggest-ever independent investigation into British police behaviour.
In the 80s, many powerful people in Britain regarded football fans as nothing but hooligans, to be policed as robustly as possible. Liverpudlians sometimes attracted a similar contempt: their once grand, increasingly gaunt city was associated with riots, insubordinate leftwing councillors and unstoppable economic decline. The police fared rather differently as an interest group. At the first formal cabinet meeting after the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the first item was police pay: after years of slow growth, it was to increase immediately by 45%.
A connection between the enhanced political status of the police in the 80s, the more militarised style of British policing that began then and the sometimes confrontational style of the Thatcher government has long been an article of faith for many on the British left. Last month, they gained an unlikely recruit in Jack Straw, the former Labour home secretary, not usually a liberal on law and order. He told the Today programme: "The Thatcher government, because they needed the police to be a partisan force, particularly for the [1984-5] miners' strike and other industrial troubles, created a culture of impunity in the police service … They thought they could rule the roost, and that is what we absolutely saw in South Yorkshire."
The South Yorkshire force policed Hillsborough and its aftermath. Five years earlier, in 1984, they also policed the attempted blockade of the nearby Orgreave coking plant by striking miners. Following "the Battle of Orgreave", one of the most violent and infamous clashes of the Thatcher period, dozens of miners were prosecuted, then acquitted: police evidence against them, it was revealed, had been fabricated. This week, a BBC1 programme, Inside Out, made further allegations about the faking of police statements at Orgreave, and the Labour party and the National Union of Mineworkers called for an inquiry.
Until recently, Orgreave, like much of the 80s, seemed increasingly like ancient history – all the more remote because the issues contested then seemed to have been settled, for good or ill. Each time the anniversary cycle came around, or new generations appeared of commissioning editors or writers or artists who had spent formative years in the 80s, the key events would be remembered, but rarely properly re-evaluated, let alone acknowledged as part of our present.
Those that attempted the latter during the placid years of the Blair boom faced difficulties. In 2001, artist Jeremy Deller famously restaged Orgreave, in well-researched detail, close to where it happened, using veterans from both sides. But for all the provocativeness of the idea and the moments of raw feeling it reportedly generated – "you bastards, bastards, fascists", Tom Lubbock of the Independent heard people shout from the watching crowd during "the first mounted police charge" – the event seemed to place Orgreave in a museum as much as bring it back to life. Two-thirds of the participants were actually from historic re-enactment societies, and ironising 80s pop hits played through a PA system at "half time". A fortnight earlier, Thatcher admirer Blair had been re-elected with another enormous majority. In 2001, raging against how the 80s continued to shape Britain felt like complaining about the weather.
The fact that the 70s remained – and remain – widely reviled has also helped make 80s values seem impregnable. Recriminations about the British 70s, about their messy politics, their spluttering economy, their sleaziness, started well before the 70s had even ended. It was not hard subsequently to present the 80s as an improvement, or at worst, a painful but necessary corrective – "inevitable" in Blair's words. In many ways, the 80s are the right's sacred decade; and in the British media, and in how Britain talked about itself, in the three decades from the election of Thatcher to the election of Cameron, the right's ideas generally prevailed.
Yet even the notion that the 80s represented an advance on the 70s' sometimes grisly sexual mores can be challenged. One of the many horrible aspects of the Jimmy Savile scandal is how his alleged assaults, seen initially by much of the media as emblematic 70s behaviour, seem to have continued well into the 80s and beyond.
More quietly, generational shifts are eroding the 80s' electoral influence. Thatcher and the changes that occurred under her were rarely overwhelmingly popular. The British Social Attitudes survey showed leftward as well as rightward trends during the 80s; her share of the vote at general elections was middling by postwar standards; and her iron majorities were in large part the products of splits and weaknesses among her opponents. Nowadays, the beneficiaries of her booms, such pivotal interest groups in the Britain of the 90s and 00s, are beginning to be rivalled politically by those too young to have taken part. To some of this economically stressed generation, the postwar world she replaced – of state paternalism and strong unions, of municipal housing and more workplace protections – looks quite appealing, which is one of the reasons the 70s are beginning to be rehabilitated. Meanwhile, pessimists of all ages look at Britain now and wonder if we are back where we were in 1979: economically vulnerable, unsure of our place in the world. Was all that 80s turbulence and toughening-up really worth it?
Even British thinkers on the right are beginning to wonder. From Tory philosopher Phillip Blond's attacks on "individualism", to Tory MP Jesse Norman's criticism of monopolistic "crony capitalism", to Ferdinand Mount – once head of Thatcher's Downing Street policy unit – worrying about the concentration of wealth among "the new few", there is strengthening disquiet at some of the forces the 80s set in motion. There is also an emerging, little-noticed common ground with Labour's bolder social critics, such as the MP Jon Cruddas and Miliband himself. In 2011, the latter's party conference condemnation of free-market "predators" – some of the more sharkish characters in The Line of Beauty come to mind – was initially received on the right with bafflement and derision. Miliband's populist, timely argument gets more respect from some Conservatives now.
How much of a reckoning about the 80s will there ultimately be? What the police did then may never be fully exposed: Britain probes and punishes police excesses with extreme reluctance. The same may go for the bankers. The privatised utilities feel more vulnerable: even the rightwing papers routinely deride them. Murdoch's political dominance has surely gone. He is 82, and British politicians are unlikely ever to attend his parties like they used to.
Thatcher herself has recently turned 87. At the TUC conference last month, T-shirts with a tombstone print and the words, "A Generation of Trade Unionists Will Dance On Thatcher's Grave", were briefly and controversially on sale. Last December, when there was the latest round of speculation about whether she would receive a state funeral, even Thatcher-admiring commentator Peter Oborne argued in the Daily Telegraph that she was too divisive a figure.
But I am not sure we should celebrate unreservedly if the 80s are written off as where it all went wrong. The 90s and 00s – the decades of complacency? – will be next. In an anxious country, the recent past is always to blame
