Alwyn W. Turner - A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s

A Classless Society

These should be the best days of my life.

The Wonder Stuff, The Size of a Cow (1991)

GUS: After all, this is the caring nineties.

DAVE: Hang on, this is 1991. So who decided the nineties would be caring?

HENRY: Lots of heartless shits who work in advertising.

Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin, Drop the Dead Donkey (1991)

ANTHONY: If you and your New Labour Party sound any more like the Tories, theyll sue you for plagiarism.

Peter Flannery, Our Friends in the North (1996)

W hen I first began working on Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s it was the autumn of 2005. Tony Blair had recently won his third election victory, the economy had been growing for thirteen consecutive years, and England had just been beaten 10 by Northern Ireland in a World Cup qualifying match. Now, as I come towards the end of A Classless Society, the third and last book in this series, Britain has its first coalition government since the Second World War, the talk is of a triple-dip recession, and England have been held to a 11 draw by the mighty Macedonia. It would be hard to see all these things as steps forward.

This was never intended as a trilogy. It started as an attempt to reclaim the memory of the 1970s, the decade in which I spent most of my teenage years and which was not then as well chronicled as it has been since. The project has been extended, into Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s and then into the present volume, because the story refused to reach a satisfactory conclusion. The crises that racked this country during the 1970s remained unresolved. By the time some episodes had been wrapped up with the defeat of the trade union movement in 1984, for example others were already under way.

To some extent, of course, this is simply because the division of history by dates is a necessarily arbitrary affair. Decades and centuries are artificial, crude concepts that seldom fit the objective facts. They do, however, have an impact on the subjective experience of time, the turning of the years affecting how people see the evolution of their societies. And the current book approaches its conclusion with the biggest of all such markers: the end of the second Christian millennium. Except that even that isnt quite the right place to stop. It was not until the re-election of the Labour Party in 2001, and the second decisive defeat of the Conservatives, that things seem to have been settled in Britain.

And there is, I think, a settlement to be recorded. The social upheavals of the 1960s, when a cultural revolution began to challenge the legitimacy of the established order, were followed by the economic and industrial travails of the 1970s. Between them, they destroyed the post-war consensus, which had always been a typically British muddled compromise of a mixed economy and a shared Christian heritage, held together by the fantasy of growing prosperity. That came to an end in September 1976, with James Callaghans speech to the Labour Party conference. The cosy world we were told would go on for ever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellors pen, he said; that cosy world is gone.

The story of these three volumes is essentially the tale of the building of a new consensus. Its not as cosy. A sizeable minority of the population has been effectively excluded from mainstream society, historically terrifying levels of unemployment however the figures are disguised have become entrenched, and the concept of a job for life has long since vanished. On the other hand, sizeable minorities who were previously excluded are now welcomed. The economic fantasy remains, this time built on a massive increase in personal debt.

The new consensus may not be sustainable. All things change, and this may not last as long as the previous settlement at the time of writing, it is still unclear what impact the financial crisis that began in 2008 will have. But it is at least the end of a cycle that began with the right-wing backlash against the 1960s and culminated with the victory of liberalism, in all its economic, social and cultural forms.

Alwyn W. Turner

May 2013

From despair to where

M argaret Thatcher cast a long shadow. Her enforced departure from office in November 1990, deposed as prime minister by her own colleagues in the Parliamentary Conservative Party, was the biggest political earthquake that Westminster had experienced since the defeat of Winston Churchill in the election of 1945. The key difference, of course, was that Churchill had been removed by the will of the people in a vote that had been delayed due to hostilities; ten years and a world war had passed since the last time the British electorate had been consulted about the future of the nation. Thatchers exit, on the other hand, came after a hat-trick of election victories, and was brought about by the actions of the 152 Tory MPs who cast their vote against her in a leadership challenge.

The consequences of that contest were to colour Conservative politics well into the next century, many in the party believing that there was still unfinished business, that the Thatcherite revolution had yet to be completed. More widely, though, the new decade was to find it hard to escape the influence and impact of her political philosophy. Even in her heyday, she had never carried the whole country with her, but so powerful and all-pervasive was her presence that she had become the dominant symbol of Britain, whether one supported or opposed her.

In particular she bequeathed the culture a single phrase that echoed through the 1990s. Theres no such thing as society, quoted a character in an episode of the television drama Our Friends in the North. Remember that? Much of what was to come in the political and cultural developments of the following years was an attempt to overturn that perception, to insist that there was indeed such a thing as society.

The use of the line in Our Friends in the North was slightly anachronistic, since the episode in question was set in 1987, the year that Thatcher actually made the comment in an interview with the magazine Womans Own, but the fact that it was still being cited in a television show screened nearly ten years on was tribute to its resonance. As normal with such quotes, it gained something from being seen in its original context. There is no such thing as society, Thatcher had said, in a passage about how looking after ones own was not the same as greed, and she went on to add: There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us is prepared to turn around and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.

That explanation of her moral faith in Christian charity, however, made less impact than the denial of society, largely because it failed to describe the Britain of popular perception. Many believed that the precise opposite held true, that Thatcherism had unlocked a spirit of greed and selfishness, had played to the baser instincts of humanity. The rhetoric about civic responsibility was not seen to be matched by practice and however much it infuriated some on the right of the Conservative Party there remained a widespread belief not only that society did exist, but that it was inextricably tied up with the actions of the state, and specifically with the welfare state.