Have-a-go zeroes, Brexit dreamers and a tribune emerges: the UK General Election of 2017

‘He would probably have to move to Downing Street. He says: “I am very happy where I live. Others may wish me to move. I did not become leader of the Labour party to get a new house. There are going to be pressures. Security issues, no doubt. But I like where I live. My neighbours like me being there as well, most of the time.’[1]

 

So, election 2017... A weird, surprising experience; an entirely unnecessary party-political ploy by the Prime Minister, but one the left have made use of. If Corbyn wins it or (infinitely more likely) if there's a hung parliament, it will be the biggest political upset of... surely any!? The thing is, each day the prospect seems a bit likelier. Could events in Chris Mullin and Alan Plater's superb 1988 Channel 4 drama A Very British Coup actually come to pass...?

This has been, viewed objectively, the most incompetent Tory campaign you could imagine. In 2001 Hague-led, they were underdogs. Now, in 2017, they were massive, media-boosted favourites and yet... now face an entirely new political landscape. Labour will now surely at least gain 33-34% of the vote. All accounts point to a highly significant swing to the left among younger voters. The Labour manifesto and campaign has dragged the political "Overton Window" to the left. This refers to Joseph Overton’s theory of which policies are publicly considered acceptable within a given political context.[2] It can be argued that May’s duplicitous left-ish rhetoric also engages with the reality that neoliberal right-wing policies are now less acceptable than in their 1990s-00s heyday, and Corbyn’s manifesto will surely cement a general leftwards trend in which policies will be seen as not just desirable but possible.  

Whatever you think about Jezza, you simply cannot imagine Owen Smith or Liz Kendall pulling this off. The most important test for progressive politicians is how they affect the political centre of gravity. The affable but uncharismatic Ed Miliband's caution just did not work. This more cerebral leader hedged his bets on everything, didn't seem genuine. He lacked passion. Corbyn is now showing these qualities and it seems they may even advance beyond "shoring up the core vote"... Whatever happens, it is good to see that this is now not a walk in the park for the most arrogant, laughable politician in my lifetime, my namesake: T. May. In this, she may beat stiff competition from Michael "something of the night" Howard, Billy "14 pints" Hague and even the pathetic "Quiet Man" of British politics, IDS!

The mind-numbing political language of cliché and sound bite has, yet again, dominated. But, it has been good to see “Strong and Stable” widely mocked. “Magic money tree” needs to be as widely reviled – but then, public understanding of the complexities of economics is so low that such arguments may not easily find purchase. A telling moment in the debate was when Paul Nuttall decried Labour’s manifesto as set on taking the country “back to the 70s”. There was some scoffing and laughter, if not quite as much as when Rudd boasted of “our record”. Surely, a large number who lived through the 1970s would say it was a better time than now, in terms of a shared common culture, but also the diversity of subcultures and the power that working people had. It also saw the most significant developments in British feminism and environmentalism.

Worst of all has been May’s “no deal is better than a bad deal”, winning idiotic right-wing cheers for a paradox: no deal actually being the likely most punitive and economically devastating situation conceivable. In the Paxman interview, May was vastly more at ease talking about Brexit than domestic policies; this has been the Tory mantra this time, replacing the "maxed out credit card". It is believed. Many voters are willfully deluding themselves that an independent future will be rosy. They can kid themselves, as we won’t leave until 2019 at the earliest… They can still, somehow, cling to their own idealised visions of what “Brexit” will entail: a return to the 1950s, a return to metric measurements, more deregulation, more nationally focused regulation, fewer bendy bananas…

Therefore, it is the right-wingers in this country who are the dangerous dreamers and the next few years will make this amply clear – this wouldn’t be a bad election for Labour to narrowly lose, as dealing with Brexit is the ultimate poisoned chalice. These voters are ultimately deciding to focus more on their imagined “Brexit” panacea than thinking deeply about frankly absurd policies such as the expansion of grammar schools at the expense of the majority of children. Sadly, for a great many voters, the power of simple appeals to patriotism will outrank critical thought about the Tories' remarkably sectional domestic agenda: class war on behalf of the already sharp-elbowed and prosperous.

A more gratifying aspect of the election has been UKIP’s overdue eclipse. Unless they are able in the future to claim some sort of ‘betrayal’ of the Brexit ‘promise’, they are finished for good. Paul “Eddie Hitler” Nuttall is the most singularly unimpressive political leader the party has had, this year. My funniest moment of the campaign was when Andrew Neil questioned the pro-capital punishment scouser, following his reported comments claiming he’d like to pull the lever on those convicted of the death penalty: “do you want to be an MP… or an executioner?” I'm not usually a fan of Neil, but here he encapsulated Nuttall's have-a-go zero nature in one stroke.

Hopefully, the Corbyn campaign has engaged young people in politics - a vastly important development regardless of exactly what happens tonight. From this week's Gateshead rally to anecdotes within my Further Education workplace, there is tangible engagement – seemingly entirely on the Labour side. This could bode well for future elections if people react to the probable Tory victory in the right way – avoiding becoming disheartened and getting even more active.

The campaign has been ‘won’ by Labour, with even the more pessimistic polls from a left-wing perspective seeing a swing of around 6.5% since the start of the campaign with its 24-point Tory margins. They have presented an agenda that clearly entices voters after seven years of austerity. It is an interesting fusion of Corbyn’s ideas and the PLP’s; while a compromise, it is more radical than would have been probable with another leader, e.g. Cooper or Burnham. As John Harris argues, ‘an entire way of doing politics – deadened, arrogant and often absurd – is dying in front of our eyes. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has revealed that the received wisdom of the past 15 years was wrong, and that talking in plain-spoken, moral, essentially socialist terms about the condition of the country need not entail political disaster.’[3] Corbyn's humility is key; he is just one of the people himself, who genuinely likes listening to and learning from people. He is more interested in tending his allotment than in wielding power for its own sake. His tribune-like giving voice to the crowd will be a much more winning way of doing politics than the old devious bullshit, if only Labour will learn from it.

While the Guardian seems to have recanted its Corbyn scepticism, the New Statesman’s leader article last Friday tortuously triangulates – ironically, given its reference to Ed Miliband’s ‘tortuous triangulations’. It acknowledges Labour’s increased support – due to ‘a spirited campaign’ – but ultimately asserts the conventional New Labour rhetoric: ‘a leader who cannot command the support of his parliamentary party is no leader at all’.[4] This fails to see that much of Corbyn’s appeal is in his break with conventional Labourist attachment to parliament and elections as the be-all and end-all. QUOTE MILIBAND. The NS asserts its politics as ‘liberal, sceptical and unpredictable’, in no way engaging with arguments about the Overton Window.[5] They instead ‘believe’ we should take Theresa May at her word regarding these declaratives in her manifesto: “We do not believe in free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.’[6] Somehow, they do not castigate such statements as being as divorced from real objective policies and conditions as Blair’s ‘belief’ in the rightness of his actions over the Iraq War. Peter Wilby forwards wiser words, seeing it as plausible and beneficial for Corbyn to come close to Blair’s 35.2% in 2005: ‘We may then hear less from Blair, Mandelson and their ilk about how Labour can’t win on a left-wing manifesto.’[7]

Yet, editor Jason Cowley focuses on a likely ‘shattering’ defeat, based on apparent conversations with Labour MPs in marginal seats, and ends up advocating a sort of Blue Labour approach, quoting Orwell: “Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again” – and arguing than ‘an era is passing and the right is once more in the ascendant in these unsettling new times’.[8] It reads more like an intervention in a putative post-election leadership debate than a deep analysis of where the UK is at ideologically.

Of course, a Tory win of 50+ seats will necessitate a reckoning for Labour: for future advances to be made, both left and right will have to give some ground. The leftist’s perennial vice, embroilment in myopic sectarian squabbling, must be avoided. It is Labour’s challenge to harness the  novel positives of the Corbyn campaign and not retreat into 'politics as usual', 'austerity-lite' or the comfort zone of New Labour nostalgia. Even if May ends up winning, this win will be pyrrhic.

However, complacency would be folly. As Tufecki claims, there are ‘historically low levels of union membership and workplace militancy, along with the continued electoral fragmentation of Labour’s ‘natural’ base in the working class […] a Labour allied working-class movement […] appears largely absent today’.[9] Much of this can be laid at the door of Labour under Blair and successors, who did not challenge the Thatcherite settlement. The unenviable challenge is to advance within parliament and also outside it – this latter process has been begun, but has an immense way to go. A wider socialist culture won’t easily transpire without a radical government able to legislate – e.g. removing Tory laws restricting the practices of trade unionism. However, the election of such an intentioned government just won’t happen without greater pressure from the public. Dissatisfied working people – as well as the young – are going to have to get organised.

Key policies for medium-to-long term strategy that need relentless focus, to shift public discourse to move towards a more interventionist, socialist place: housing, wages and holidays, local democracy and the NHS.

The Labour campaign has effectively used the perception of its underdog status – as fostered by the media and polls – to build support, and increase scrutiny of the Tories. Aided, as Joe Brooker has argued, by the greater air-time an election campaign gives to opposition parties.[10] It has tapped into a notable anti-establishment mood – tellingly shown by the laughter in the TV debate when Amber Rudd made a ‘look at our government’s record’. Just how widespread the angry, naysaying public mood is remains a key moot point. Even if it turns out to be limited, we will likely see evidence of a larger left-wing ‘protest vote’ than in living memory – the switching to the Liberal Democrats over the Iraq War in 2005 may be the only comparable moment. If Labour manages to gain over 11 million actual votes cast, as is possible, this would be a good result: their highest total since 1997!

 

This does not feel like an election where the Tories are going to match or better the popular votes of 42-44% won by Thatcher and Blair in the 1979-87 and 1997 elections. Those campaigns largely saw those victorious party leaders controlling the agenda and featured only very minor 'wobbles'. Contrastingly, this has been the campaign of “weak and wobbly” May. The question is how damning the voters will be towards her presidential-style campaign…

Probably not so much, knowing this country’s entrenched political culture… The British public have a predilection for self-punishment. They go for an abstract idea of ‘safety first’ and endanger their own and our futures. They complain about things getting worse in their local areas, yet many of them vote in the party least committed to local democracy. On this, Tom Crewe’s excellent, depressing piece from December is worth quoting at length:

‘The establishment of a neoliberal consensus in Britain has been, in its essence and by necessity, an anti-municipal project. Austerity is Thatcherism’s logical end-point, effecting simultaneously the destruction of local government as a potentially rivalrous state-within-a-state, and the marketisation of nearly every aspect of public policy. Since 2010 the Conservative leadership, following the example of Thatcher and Blair, has diminished local democracy in order to entrench the gimcrack democracy of the free market, with the all-conquering mantra of ‘choice’ relied on to produce its own virtuous aggregations of opinion and activity: it is indicative that the Conservatives have not only brought back Right to Buy but also sought to expand the Free Schools programme so that councils would no longer have any role in the education system. Local government will soon be brought into line with its national counterpart: both limited in their essential functions, outsourcing the greater part of their responsibilities to the private sector. Private companies are now partly or fully responsible for the parole service, schools, roads, prisons, GP surgeries and walk-in centres, hospital services, the Royal Mail, tax credits, care homes, welfare assessments, refugee and detention centres, deportations, the provision of court interpreters, government pay rolls, broadband roll-out, IT programmes and government security. Most of these outsourced services are handled by four firms: Atos, Serco, Capita and G4S, who between them receive around £4 billion a year from taxpayers. (When the Tories won the general election in 2015, Serco’s share price rose by 5.95 per cent, Capita’s by 6.72 per cent and G4S’s by 7.35 per cent.) Mooted for future privatisation are the student loan book, the land registry, child protection services and the law courts. This isn’t to mention our privatised rail, gas, electricity, water and nuclear energy networks.’[11]

The Tories promise five more years of this deadening, unnecessary austerity – and are now even unable to credibly argue it has been in any great economic cause: deficit and debt have grown more than previously when spending was higher.

Also, the electoral system now thoroughly favours the Tories, even more than in the past – they get votes where it counts. If Labour won’t back PR after this, it will be off its electoral rocker.

The polls offer something for all; for the pessimists, yes, but also the optimists: some are showing 1-4% leads for the Tories. If this transpired, a hung parliament would be definite. While May’s party would likely be the largest, it would be a fatal blow to the Prime Minister and a dent to the Tory agenda. YouGov’s seat-by-seat model currently shows the Tories ahead of Labour by 42-38% and with a narrow 33-seat lead: 302 to 269. It claims to contain a heavy focus on exact seat demographics, Remain-Leave and is said to be based on the current polling and factors in higher youth turnout. It also has the Lib Dems on 12 seats and Vince Cable winning by 18% in Twickenham (53-35).

On the cautious side, I am sensing YouGov’s model may be missing something. While I sense that Electoral Calculus is much less seat-specific and will be widely out in some areas, its caution is generally a bit more persuasive, given the ‘shy Tory’ factor clearly at play in elections like 1992 and 2015. On EC, you plot a 7-point Tory lead and the majority is nearly fifty. Some polls are showing 10-11 point margins. While many of these polling companies bizarrely cap youth turnout at 2015 levels, they may factor in some probable Tory – and status quo – “swing-back” (as the jargon has it).

The Tories have clearly had more money to spend on the campaign, and while the media has become increasingly critical of May’s campaign, the previous idolatry of the “Strong and Stable” One engendered too big a lead in perceptions than this campaign could fully overcome. In addition, the Tories have been deploying dark advertisements using social-media, untracked by the law or election authorities. These have been micro-targeted to specific demographics and specific marginal seats, in addition to a big spend on propaganda within local newspapers.  The Bureau of Investigative journalism have revealed that nine out of ten such Tory ads personally attack Corbyn.[12]

The Tories’ attention to electoral geography gives them a massive advantage. Even if there’s a Conservative to Labour swing in the national popular vote (perfectly possible), there could well be a counter-swing in the marginal seats. There unquestionably will be such a pro-Tory swing in narrowly held Tory seats that are not in London or bastions of Remain voters, as basically Labour have not focused on campaigning in Tory-held constituencies. 

Some key seats to watch:

1. Twickenham – will social democratic slaphead Vincent Cable win, against a Remain-leaning Tory?

VERDICT: not quite. Photo-finish, with the Tories just edging it.

2. Vauxhall – as focused on in John Lanchester’s LRB piece. Will Farage associate and pro-fox hunting and grammar schools Tory in all but name Kate Hoey hold off the anti-Brexit Liberals?
VERDICT: No. Liberals lose out, as Hoey wins by association with Corbyn-led Labour.

3. Hartlepool – Mandelson’s old coastal seat epitomises the disillusionment with metropolitan pro-immigration New Labour politics. This seat, in an isolated, deprived and insular part of the north-east, has seen massive UKIP votes in recent General and European elections. Just how much of that vote goes to the Tory will decide who wins in 2017…

VERDICT: Labour to hold with 5-10% lead over Tories. Quite a lot of the UKIP vote will actually go to Labour – I think you’ll see this in quite a few more seats than expected. A 3:1 Tory:Labour ratio?

4. South Thanet – Tory Craig MacKinlay has a 2,812 majority in this Kent seat, over second-placed UKIP, and was around 7,000 ahead of third-placed Labour. All so straightforward, until CM was charged with election spending offences from the 2015 election…

VERDICT: a Brexit heartland, so surely an increased Tory majority, of around 9,000 ahead of Labour, who will easily beat UKIP. I don’t think the voters will care that much about his being charged, though it may reduce the majority more than I am positing.

5. Hastings and Rye – Coastal Sussex seat, with Hastings a left-leaning town, but Rye and rural wards in-between solidly Tory. In Netherwood, within this seat, there was once a Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) guesthouse, in the post-WW2 era. This seat is now held by ‘magic money tree’ fabricator Amber Rudd, with a 4,796 majority. YouGov have Labour ahead 48-42%.

VERDICT:  I see a result almost exactly the other way around as probable. A slightly reduced majority compared with 2015, due to there being less of a UKIP vote than other such seats.

6. Halifax – now it’s this sort of seat that is absolutely crucial to whether the Tories fail to win a majority, scrape home similarly to 2015 or rack up the sort of 50+ majority that the odds surely point to. The northern and midlands marginal seats, held by Labour with small majorities under Miliband, will be key. This seat was won by Labour’s Holly Lynch by a mere 428 votes. The New Statesman had an article last Friday suggesting it’ll fall to the Tories. However, there isn’t a massive UKIP vote for the Tories to stockpile – they only got 13% last time, like in Hastings and Rye. What the NS failed to highlight is the inexorable decline of Labour’s majority in each and every election since 1997. This is exactly the sort of traditional Labour seat – see Wakefield too, in the same region – that feels massively let down by New Labour. Viewed logically, it would be curious for the seat to go Tory considering ‘there is dissatisfaction here, particularly with public services’.[13] Yet, there is little logic in politics and thus it’s little surprise that Theresa May unveiled her manifesto here – it’ll be interesting to see if even that cack-handed document will stop a Tory gain here… If it does, we would be in hung parliament territory.

VERDICT: knife-edge Tory win by 200 votes. I think the post-1997 pattern won’t quite be turned around. But it will be close.

My overall election prediction:

CON 43.5% (351 seats)
LAB 36.5% (225 seats)
LD 7% (4 seats)
GP 1.5% (1 seat)
UKIP 4% (0 seats)
SNP/PC 4.5% (51 seats)

Tory majority: 52.

A result that Labour would certainly have taken a few weeks ago! But also one that the Tories would have taken in the early days of June, and that, sadly, will give Theresa May a boost – even if it will now clearly only be a short-term one. We have seen her mettle – or lack thereof – and know she’ll be devoured by Brexit.

To quote Antonio Gramsci, this election is, more than any, about “optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect.” It has to be about maintaining and nurturing that hope for the long haul, without any illusions regarding harsh realities.

---

[1] MacAskill, Ewen (2017) ‘Facing the political fight of his life: on the road with Corbyn’s campaign’, The Guardian, 3^rd June, p.7

[2] Lehman, Joseph G. (2010) ‘An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibility’, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 8^th April [online] http://www.mackinac.org/12481 [accessed: 08/06/17]

[3] Harris, John (2017) ‘Corbyn has shown there’s a new way of doing politics. Straight talking is back’, The Guardian, 3^rd June, p.33

[4] Leader (2017) ‘Labour and the common good’, New Statesman, 2-8 June, pp.4-5

[5] Leader (2017) p.5

[6] Leader (2017) ibid.

[7] Wilby, Peter (2017) ‘Corbyn’s bung to the middle class, the true causes of terror, and a musical’s off-key message’, New Statesman, 2-8 June, p.7

[8] Cowley, Jason (2017) ‘The reckoning’, New Statesman, 2-8 June, p.28

[9] Tufecki, Baris (2017) ‘’Politics of containment’: The (Ralph) Milibandian critique of the Labour Party’, Socialist History 51, pp.65-6

[10] Brooker, Joseph (2017) ‘Election Campaign 2017’, Reeling At All, 6 June [online] https://reelingatall.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/election-campaign-2017/ [accessed: 08/06/17]

[11] Crewe, Tom (2016) ‘The strange death of municipal England’, London Review of Books, (38)24, 15^th December, pp.6-10

[12] Anon (2007) ‘Tories ‘using fake news to attack Corbyn’’, The Guardian, 3^rd June, p.7

[13] Lewis, Helen (2017) ‘Unhappy valley’, New Statesman, 2-8 June, p.32

Major: grey manna from heaven or deep, grey emptiness?

'For a time, Major took his charter very seriously. The absurdity of a citizens' charter, written in secret by a government department and launched by a prime minister, escaped him. As his predecessor had virtually abolished citizens, we are probably not yet very real to him either.'
Sarah Benton (1991), 'Viewpoint: Citizen Major', Marxism Today, July, p.9.

'And he briefly resurrects old enmities, pointing out "an early example of... the Times's ability to be wrong on every major issue".'
no author (2007) 'Major's Game: book review of More than a Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years', The Economist, 16th June, p.101.

'John Major's bizarre resignation - an act more of bravado than of bravery - will solve very little and carries considerable risks [...] It all smacks of Richard II, not Henry V.'
Simon Jenkins (1995), 'This midsummer madness', The Times, 24th June, p.18.

'We have had a government that tried to operate an economy as well as a society according to blunt, free-market principles. It's clearly failed. What we don't have in Mr Major is an alternative ideology. We've got a change of style, and a lot of rhetoric about a classless society and opportunity for all - but we do not have a way forward.'
Gordon Brown (1991) 'After Thatcher: Business as Usual', Marxism Today, January, p.26.

'Mothers who wouldn't know what to do with a Heseltine or a Portillo wish their daughters could find a nice man like John Major to bring home to tea.'
Alice Thomson (1994) 'Can women's votes save John Major?' The Times, 2nd February, p.15.

'As Thatcher's preferred successor, John Major represents continuity. But he also represents the routinisation of charisma, and the dissipation of the energy, the radicalism, and the conviction that suffused the Thatcher decade.'
Andrew Gamble (1991) 'After Thatcher: Following the Leader', Marxism Today, January, p.15.

'In a speech marked by the xenophobic smack of  its attack on foreign 'scroungers', Mr Lilley openly and impertinently cheeked Mr Major for referring to himself and other right-wingers as 'bastards' - saying that he had it on his mother's authority that he was not 'fatherless' - and capping all by echoing a Thatcherite rant against the powers of a European superstate.'
Anthony Bevins (1993), 'Bastards are the masters, for now', The Guardian, 10th October, p.8.

'John Major became an object of contempt for his dogged refusal to preside over the break-up of the Conservative Party.'
Bagehot (2003) 'Archbishop Major', The Economist, 16th August, p.27.

Steadily, there has been a perceptible shift in perceptions of John Major.

Obviously, his resolutely centrist performance in Westminster on 22nd October will provide a contrast to the neo-liberal dogmatism of Cameron-Osborne Toryism and the shallow poujadism of Nigel Farage. In this week's New Statesman, ex-cricketer and columnist Ed Smith writes of Major's 'late popularity' and 'measured and affable public appearances'. He regards him as 'a victim of the way the market for news and public opinion operates', whose reputation has grown since leaving office - in stark contrast to Tony Blair's. Smith will have seen Major's intervention on energy prices, proposing a windfall tax in a manner that is rather more in touch with public opinion than with notions of a sacrosanct private sector 'market':



The erstwhile 'Grey Man' has produced evidence of a 'hinterland', publishing books on cricket and music hall. Not areas that will prove everyone's cup of Earl Grey, but surely specific interests to be commended, next to the career politics and the workaday immersion in pop culture of the current generation.

Cultural historian Alwyn W. Turner has written recently - in his new 1990s history - of Major's brief period of ascendancy as a 'classless' Tory, making great strides initially as someone from an unusually humble background who seemingly had more of a 'common touch' than the absurdly messianic latter-day Thatcher.

Turner writes of his understated compassion for the dying, cancer-afflicted left-wing Labour MP Eric Heffer. In January 1991, Major crossed the floor of the House of Commons, knelt beside Heffer and had a private conversation. Turner also mentions a curious flirtatious side that few knew existed prior to revelations of his affair with Edwina Currie. "Would you like a nibble of my mace?" he is said to have cheekily asked Margaret Beckett. All reflective of very different personality to the abrasive, inhumanly driven Thatcher. Major took a notably more realistic, constructive approach to the Northern Ireland question than his predecessor - leading to the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993.

It is beyond question that of living Prime Ministers, Major would be the most affable company on a personal level, as ex-Labour MP Chris Mullin's diaries attest. He clearly sees things on a human scale, and Mullin reveals that he was prescient regarding the threat to democratic and cultural values posed by Rupert Murdoch. He was too weak to act on this, however. Though his successor Blair was much more fawning in his subservience to the culturally debasing mogul.

Major, then, might just be the ex-PM you could just about engage with in an earnest and affable conversation over a pint...

Ultimately, however, his period as Prime Minister was disastrous.

The Criminal Justice Act was passed in 1994.

The railways were privatized from 1994.

In the same year, he presided over what Turner describes as a shambolic and demeaning failure to pass the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill to legislate for disability rights - earning the ire of Stephen Hawking among many others: 'I don't think any disabled person should vote for the present government unless they do something to atone for the shabby way they killed the Civil Rights Bill'. The responsible minister Nicholas Scott had killed the Bill with amendments and had used an eighty minute speech to talk it out, while refusing to admit that that was what he was doing.

Major maintained the despicable Section 28 and expanded anti-Union laws set in train under Thatcher.

Whatever his personal qualms - as detailed by Turner - he sanctioned Heseltine's steadfastly inhumane closing of the pits in late 1992.

His years in office were, as The Observer argued in the week of his vainglorious and bathetic resignation as party leader in 1995, 'characterised by crisis management'. That ludicrous episode demonstrated self-inflicted crisis, with the "PUT UP OR SHUT UP" call being followed by a challenge out of left - or rather right - field from vulcan headbanger John Redwood.

This 1994 sketch from The Day Today of a film 'reserved for times of national emergency' captured this sense of perpetual crisis, as well as the Major years' deluded, deadening preoccupation with heritage. The show's brilliance was to have this wonderfully ludicrous projection of Tory normalcy broadcast after its fabricated scoop of John Major punching the Queen. In its cynical fantasy the video summarises the government's attempt to paper over the cracks left by virulent Thatcherism. It represents the sad bathos of its times, as a hapless, non-threatening PM presided over measures that threatened the quality of a large number of people's lives - all the while pretending: EVERYTHING'S ALL RIGHT.



Major presided over a stagnant Britain. While there was vivid, energized cultural opposition from 1990-94, this was quickly overtaken by a resurgent cultural conservatism. Areas as diverse as television situation comedy, cinema, popular music and stand-up comedy saw a perceptible shift away from politicised, socially engaged content towards pastiche and willful, disconnected individualism.

The movement from Mike Leigh's Naked to Secrets and Lies indicates a shift. As does the movement from the likes of Derek Jarman being supported to the ascendancy of Guy Ritchie. Lad culture, while surely lamented by Major personally, was a significant legacy of his era - and the media culture grew ever more aggressive and cynical.

At the time, as the years passed, it felt as if his tired, incompetent and nasty government would never end. In 1996, yours truly was moved to write and record a song attacking the newly established National Lottery, coming across like Adrian Mole channeling John Lydon. In this intemperate, hastily assembled slice of punk agit-prop, my thirteen-year-old self lashed out at those running the culture, discerning "no ray of light in their Major-grey cheeks!" The song was a rather ghastly racket, but few could doubt the sincerity of the irritation at the man whose very name had became a sort of adjective synonym of 'dismal'.

Of course, now I know a bit more. Major did have the misfortune to preside over a party haunted, indeed besotted by the ghastly subject of its 1990 matricide. They have never looked back on looking back, remaining to this day the 'bastards' - in Major's words - that she created, forever seeking revenge against her assassins and completion of her ideological 'project'. The man Major might have had an instinct for the moderate, 'decent' English vote. His fellow party members haven't, at least since the passing of the Macmillans, Macleods and Whitelaws. In October 1995, Hugh Dykes, moderate Tory MP for Harrow East, noted that the representatives at his party's Blackpool Conference were 'more and more right-wing, narrow-minded, selfish and xenophobic'. Hardly an understatement when the event included the bombastic, bellicose "Don't mess with Britain" speech from bastard-in-chief Portillo. This era saw the ascendancy of such lovely humans as Peter Lilley, IDS, Michael Howard, John Redwood and Ann Widdecombe. A supposedly decent man in charge merely provided ideal incubation conditions for some of the lowest impulses:

While the 'Grey Man' possessed an unusually compassionate outlook - devoid of sharp elbows and social scorn - he simply did not run the country according to these 'decent', 'One Nation' Tory principles. He did little if anything to quell the juggernaut of neo-liberalism unleashed by his abhorrent predecessor. The best that can be said of him is that he didn't preside over a foreign policy disaster like the Iraq War or the sort of retrograde 'reforms' of health, education and welfare that Cameron's government are now pursuing.

Not One of Us: The Political and Cultural Legacy of Margaret Thatcher

‘She has always struck me as, on a personal level, a completely fucking shit human being, not at all one of those people of whom it is possible to say ‘I’m sure she’s a nice person, but…’, and an emphatic riposte to the popular notion that ‘there’s a little bit of good in everyone’.’ – Alex Niven, The Fantastic Hope (14/04/2008)

‘Thatcher is remembered as The Iron Lady only because she possessed completely negative traits such as persistent stubbornness and a determined refusal to listen to others. […] Iron? No. Barbaric? Yes.’ – Morrissey interview reposted (08/04/2013)

‘Any man who finds himself on a bus at the age of 26 can account himself a failure’ – Margaret Thatcher (1986)

‘There is too much Thatcherite ideology ingrained in our political culture to celebrate, even for one night.’ – Ben Sellers, The World Upside Down (08/04/2013)

‘From now on the electorate was to be led, not followed. What ‘I believe’ became what all were to believe, and remained so for twelve years.’ – Simon Jenkins, Accountable to None (Penguin, 1996, vii)

‘Perhaps if a Labour government had reduced the prosperous middle-classes of the Home Counties to mass unemployment and poverty, and stockbrokers desperate to save their livelihoods had been chased by police on horseback through the City of London, they would understand the bitterness’ – Owen Jones, The Independent (16/09/2012)

‘London became a city Hogarth would have recognized.’ - Glenda Jackson, parliament (10/04/2013)

‘Thatcher’s own attitudes are less important here than the political context she exploited. The broad base of support for the New Right in politics included an element of white English nationalism, which successively gave allegiance to the extra-parliamentary threat of the National Front in the 1970s, and to the relatively authoritarian and jingoistic government headed by Thatcher.’ – Joseph Brooker, Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed (Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.144-5)

‘Her whole philosophy was that you measured the price of everything and the value of nothing – and we have to replace that… there is good and bad in everyone and for 10 years it has been the bad that has been… promoted and the good that has been denounced as lunatic, out-of-touch, cloud cuckoo land and extremist’ – Tony Benn, parliament (1990)

‘I’d vote Socialist. There was a documentary on Margaret Thatcher on ITV last night, and it’s enough to put anybody off.’ – Elton John, NME interview with Charles Shaar Murray (08/03/1975)

In January 2012, I was sat around a table with academic types in a Newcastle pub. One of them had been to see The Iron Lady. We had a measured discussion on the dangers of an ‘apolitical’ film about a decisive figure in our recent political history. The gent who’d seen the film, an affable PhD student at Warwick University, persuasively criticized the sentimental ‘humanizing’ of a woman who was driven by the protestant work ethic and was notable for her steely stoicism. In that social context, I didn’t think I needed to point out the lack of human empathy with the victims of her policies – or the doctrinaire certainty and zeal that genuinely made her more of a Maoist than a mainstream member of British society.

But then the complicated picture does need to be illuminated, as few people younger than I will possess any first-hand memories of Thatcher and often simply know nothing: 

Whether we are of a left, right, liberal or green persuasion, surely none of us are served by forgetting or misrepresenting her personality or politics. In August 2012, Thomas Byrne contributed to a debate regarding left-wing people preparing to celebrate Thatcher’s demise. Byrne is a rare breed – not just a thoughtful Tory, but a north-eastern one – and, unlike Nigel Lamont on Monday’s Newsnight, he clearly grasps at least some of the reasons behind the significant antipathy towards her. 

He counsels fellow Tories thus: ‘When you stop feigning outrage and ignoring the real emotional and social reactions of people who feel they were failed by Thatcher, I’ll stop feigning surprise that so many people still ignore us.’ (1) Indeed; the party’s continued adherence to Thatcherism holds them back from being a palatable option for a large number of voters. The party’s continued adherence to Thatcherism holds them back from any prospect of being a palatable option for a large number of voters, as Colin Kidd pointed out in an insightful recent LRB article.

Much of the mainstream media hagiography misses the fact that in her three election victories 56-58% of the voting electorate cast their ballots for non-Tory candidates. It was the divided opposition that enabled her to win.

Before I go further, it is worth highlighting a few things in her favour: she did – rhetorically at least – stand up to Reagan on the USA’s imperialist invasion of Grenada, taking a pro-self-determination position. However, she did not show quite such principled concern about US abuses in other non-Commonwealth countries. She must take some credit for moving towards diplomacy with the USSR and some nuclear arms reduction. Thatcher was shrewd enough to utilize her knowledge as an Oxford-educated Chemist to make a significant speech to the UN in November 1989 regarding the dangers to the environment relating to climate change. However, in later years, she recanted this constructive stance, falling into line with the right-wing orthodoxy of George W. Bush and Fox News.

When it comes to us being failed by Thatcher, her deregulation of the City of London in 1986 looms large; this led to an exceptionally irresponsible Boom culminating in the following year’s Bust. This more broadly freed up unscrupulous spivs to acquire riches through absurd means like betting on which companies would fail next. Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money (1987) is the key contemporary depiction, as Brooker notes in his excellent book on 1980s literature. Fry and Laurie also displayed a righteous anger at what she was doing to the culture; they knew that ‘choice’ did not equal quality in broadcasting and that believing unquestioningly in ‘market forces’ is a negation of humanity itself:

All of which makes this pronouncement in her 1987 Smash Hits interview all the more disingenuous: ‘You know, some of the rules are coming back and life is much better when you have rules to live by.’ She preached orderliness, yet life for many in the UK became substantially more unsettled and uncertain during her tenure.

Yes, a large number of us in the North shiver at the thought of what was done. This was apparent during Sam West’s April 2012 Northern Stage production of Alan Plater’s Close the Coalhouse Door - a lively ‘epic history’ of north-east working class culture including songs by Alex Glasgow and inspired by Sid Chaplin’s County Durham coalfield writings. (2) On the stage prior to the performance there stood a large billboard film poster of Meryl Streep as Thatcher. Scary, harsh eyes staring you out – belying the supposed Hollywood woolliness of the film. The play’s conclusion was heartrending: it was originally staged in 1968 with the prospects for socialism still – broadly – on course.

This version of the play included a brief coda with a wistful song regarding the historical progress the working class had clearly achieved by 1968 via the likes of Thomas Hepburn: “It’s only a story / a fanciful tale”. The Thatcher-turn in history has rendered this all merely a story to tell the bairns today, albeit with tantalizing if threatened remnants of the Attlee world just about visible. It isn't clear-cut, but by 1968 safety and working hours and conditions had been vastly improved out of all recognition compared to previous eras. As Ken Loach stated in his recent documentary film, the Spirit of '45 had won significant advances for society. Plater’s original ending was upbeat and dryly jovial in his best style; the 2012 staging was shattering in its evocation of a backwards movement. ‘Community’ is too broad a word to evoke the collective memory and experience that Plater’s text conveyed when enacted on stage. This was the essence of socialism in practice, intrinsically social.

The sort of pride in work and companionship shown in the play is anathema to Thatcher. Long hours are a badge of honour to a City banker or grocer’s daughter wanting to change the country – not, apparently, a backward Victorian horror. She incarnated the ludicrous idea that we work better when working longer, and that there is some intrinsic nobility in ‘working hard’: toiling so absurdly hard destroyed her personally and influenced her later hubris. Some form of self-sacrifice for the ‘good of the country’? The strong-willed individual: battling for ‘The Individual’? It all takes on a creepy, barking mad, Ayn Rand complexion.

Where ‘hard-work’ was extolled, being on benefits was denounced, with Tebbit attack-polecat subtlety. There is a strident body of opinion in this land that ‘benefit dependency’ is a problem. Whether you concur with the swivel-eyed, blanket-condemnations of the Daily Mail or possess a humane perspective on diverse people’s circumstances, you must acknowledge this ironic truth: that Mrs Thatcher actually presided over the colossal expansion of welfare provision that resulted from her policies. In the political calculus, she preferred former industrial and manufacturing workers pacified and on the dole rather than in unionized employment and part of the ‘enemy within’.

I'm over 26 and I sometimes use a bus. What a failure I am!

It is, of course, inconceivable, that heavy-industry could have remained as it was indefinitely; yet, as Byrne acknowledges, there were other alternative options: liberal, social democratic and ‘wet’ Tory as well as Old Labour – more ameliorative policies and humane methods could have been used.

In her Smash Hits interview, Thatcher tries to be relatively amicable, though comes across as patronising: ‘most young people rebel and then gradually they become more realistic’. She speaks of her youthful liking for the 1940s Hollywood cinema of Carmen Miranda and Jean Arthur but even here she is drawn back to a characteristic emphasis on toil: ‘But I suppose things turn out to be less glamorous the closer you get to them: they were jolly hard working, jolly hard working.’ She speaks of the escapism in enjoying South of the Border and The Plainsman and also that young people shouldn’t be persuaded ‘into a direction into which they don’t want to go’.

The Guardian, 07/02/1986

However, the hectoring impulse is never far away, overwhelming these accommodating words which had no doubt been given her by cynically youth-conscious PR advisers. The moralistic matriarch comes into view: ‘On the other hand if they want to do terribly glamorous things which aren’t going to give them a living, you’ve got to say ‘now, look dear, don’t you think it would be worthwhile taking some training which will give you a much better chance of earning a basic living?’ She was a cultural philistine; in the interview, her most enthusiastic cultural endorsement is of a Nanette Newman-featuring Fairy Liquid advertisement on the telly.

Thatcher’s ideal New Year’s Eve party at Chequers would have included Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Archer, Paul Daniels, General Pinochet and Jimmy Savile – with Brotherhood of Man playing on the sound system, as the Smash Hits interview indicates. It is not without irony then that she spoke of the importance of friends; she clearly knew how to pick them...

While she clearly galvanized a rich oppositional counterculture, she ultimately made the terrain much less fertile for any future such sub-cultures. This has left mainstream culture a mean, bland and barren ‘business friendly’ zone. In music, from the Specials to Sudden Sway to Elvis Costello to Roger Waters to Morrissey to Kirsty MacColl to Crass to The Housemartins, there was articulate and implacable opposition to her anti-humanism. Red Wedge saw not just Weller and Bragg, but Prefab Sprout and The Smiths appearing on stage in necessary union.

On Monday, David Stubbs wrote in The Quietus of the earlier 1980s post-punk response: ‘Everything about the new music of the 1980s – forward-looking, racially diverse, permissive, insolent, gleefully engaged in the “promotion of homosexuality”, to use one of the more vile phrases of the Tories – flew in the face of the tetchy, small-minded, prudish, selfish flight behind the net curtains of pre-Beatles mores represented by Thatcher and her ilk’.

The progressive culture was vanquished, even if some of its values became accommodated in the mainstream from the 1990s on. Ultimately, the repellent cash-till market dogma of Mick Jagger’s ‘Let’s Work’ won out over The Human League’s ‘Open Your Heart’, whatever those songs' chart placings when released.

An eminent literary man of her and our time, Ian McEwan, has produced a tepid, ineffectually ‘balanced’ ode to her in The Guardian. He wasn’t personally affected for the worse by Thatcherism in the 1980s, unlike working-class people in the north, Scotland or Wales. This fact explains, but does not excuse, the lack of empathy in this liberal individualist novelist’s words – as well as his unconvincing explanation of why the 1970s were so bad.

Right-wing pundits’ attacks on the 1970s ring hollow besides the Thatcher-inspired disaster zone we are now living in. Harold Wilson, flawed PM though he clearly was, has an increasingly impressive legacy in comparison to hers, on all of the important measures. He did less harm to human beings and society.

A society one of the most equal in Western Europe by 1979 now stands as one of the most unequal and divided.

‘NO. NO. NO.’

The Guardian, 15/11/1990

[Shudder]

Ah yes… that ‘last term’. From 1979-87, she had been a dangerous but clearly formidable political force. Whatever clever judgement she had once possessed completely deserted her following her third victory. She started using the royal ‘we’ – “we are a grandmother” – becoming an irrational, ranting little Englander, with her attacks on Europe.  In this twilight of her ‘reign’, she was utterly obstinate, self-righteous and messianic. Other than the current coalition, surely no three years of any other government has ever produced quite so much pernicious, culturally degrading legislation as the following:

Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988

The Football Spectators Act 1989

The Broadcasting Act 1990

The Community Charge (poll tax) 1989-90

‘Think for a Minute’, as the Housemartins urged. What is her actual legacy? A coarser public discourse. The lexis is more News International, rather than Chaucer. No, we don’t have Alan Plater doing a modern-day northern adaptation of The Canterbury Tales on ITV now. We’ve had The Sun dominating. Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney freeloading. Richard Littlejohn. A newly licensed yobbery: whether on the council estates or the City of London stock-market. Lives, working or otherwise, were sacrificed for an economic experiment dreamed up by marginal think tanks and that despicable crank Sir Keith Joseph. She paraded an inverse-snobbery regarding the arts and public services, reducing everything to its monetary price. The old nineteenth-century ‘cash nexus’.  He’s not Yosser Hughes, he’s nobody.

The Guardian, 07/06/1983

She took sociopathic delight in dividing communities and attacking ‘the enemy within’, who were largely workers concerned for their jobs and localities, not a uniform bloc of Stalinist revolutionaries.

She should have taken a career as a scientist.

The Falklands War. A new friend I met recently, who was around 20 at the time, noted how the atmosphere in country seemed to tangibly shift in a matter of days; previously sensible, liberal or progressive people were swept along in a fundamentally distasteful jingoistic tide. Denis Healey’s description of Thatcher ‘glorying in slaughter’ does not seem unfair when considering the Belgrano episode and how she posed for the press in its aftermath. Military dictator General Galtieri was indeed hateful; but so was the act to sink a boat that was out of the designated exclusion zone and moving away from the HMS Conqueror. 323 Argentinian lives were ended. Whatever claims some have made regarding her understanding of the gravity of war and desire to reduce casualties, she gave credence to the mindless ‘GOTCHA’ mentality.

“NO. NO. NO.”

No: to thoughts of a work-life balance. No: to oppose the ‘yes’ of Molly Bloom. ‘No such thing as society’. No: to the post-WW2 political culture and the idea that organised labourers should have a say. See Joseph Strick’s 1966 film The Hecklers here if you don’t believe me: we had a mainstream culture thoroughly engaged with politics in a way that seems alien to us today. 

It is highly ironic that this conviction politician created and fostered attitudes that range from the apathetic or resigned to the poisonously ignorant. A year or so before 1979 election, she cynically spoke of immigrants ‘swamping’ the country; she introduced Section 28; she tried to introduce ID cards for footer fans; she ran down public services and infrastructure; she presided over mass unemployment and then directed blame towards those unlucky enough to be unemployed. We live with the after-effects: the horrible rhetoric of ‘skivers’, ‘shirkers’, ‘sponging asylum seekers’ and ‘immigrants taking our jobs’.

She presided over policies that abetted immigration – as global capitalism always will, yet she indulged the mean-spirited, who take the benefits of market liberalism but are averse to seeing immigrants taking jobs that are not necessarily a God-given right to anyone under such a system. Therefore, her legacy includes the risible UKIP, with their ‘three million Bulgarians are coming to Eastleigh’ and a daily avalanche of disgraceful tabloid falsehoods.

Her legacy is further dividing the society she claimed didn’t exist. She encouraged people to scapegoat trade unionists, immigrants, gay people or Osborne’s ‘shirkers’. All of which conceals a colossal transfer of resources away from the average working person and towards the City of London and Tory donors. That is History, that is what happened – an 'enemy within' was gleefully vanquished and power redistributed.

“NO. NO. NO.”

No: to the life of the many, ultimately. When I think of Thatcher's impact, her legacy is in the single file insularity I have seen around me. It is in that tendency among 'Thatcher’s children' to accept being atomised and cut off from other people; I have to fight this off, but it isn’t easy, as this way of life has had currency for decades now. Showing empathy for others is going against the grain today. A good deal of the pettiness, cruelty and entitlement I have been witness to can be laid at her door, directly or indirectly.

In the booklet to the BFI’s Miners’ Campaign Tapes DVD, is reprinted a New Statesman article from the novelist David Peace, composed twenty years on from the Strike and circa the publication of his acclaimed novel, GB84. He sets out what was at stake in 1984-5: ‘Sacrifice and selflessness versus brutality and bribery, fear and greed. And we all know who won. And we all know who lost – their jobs, their families, their communities, their culture, their heritage – 150 years of socialist heritage. British heritage, not nostalgia. Not romanticism. A heritage of sacrifice, of selflessness. A sacrifice and a selflessness born out of compassion and empathy – qualities that cannot be bought or stolen from you.’

I refuse to accept that we are, to quote Nye Bevan on Hugh Gaitskell, ‘desiccated calculating machines’. That it is in our nature and interests to relentlessly weigh up our interests in mere pecuniary, self-interested terms. Thatcher commandeered the language and enforced the cheerless ideas that now seem to hold the public in a vice-like grip. It is an urgent necessity, as Mark Fisher argues, for the many of us who despise her corrosive legacy to be pro-active in over-turning all this fundamentally evil, weird shit.

      (1)     Byrne is, however, wrong to primarily credit Thatcher with bringing Nissan to the North East; this was mainly the work of Sunderland’s Labour Council leader Charles Slater, and, to an extent, Thatcher’s arch-enemy in the Tory party, Michael Heseltine at the DTI. He has always been rare in modern Conservative circles for advocating that government cash should go into stimulating industry.

      (2)    This production was also adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Drama strand, TX: 29/09/2012.