My first clear political memory is of Margaret Thatcher’s victory in May 1979. (I was, looking back, way too interested in elections for a seven-and-a-half-year-old.)
I don’t remember anything about the Callaghan administration; but I do remember the sense of despair that hung about the country like a cold mist in the late 1970s. I recall being shocked at the way adults talked. Britain was finished, they were forever telling me. Things were going to the dogs. It was time to emigrate. Remarkably similar to how people talk now, in fact.
You can’t grasp the magnitude of Thatcher’s achievement without understanding the collapse that had preceded her. Those who lived through the Seventies have repressed the memory, rather as a later generation seems to have done with the lockdowns. Those born afterwards can struggle to believe that things could truly have been that bad.
A three-day week, a Conservative Government setting prices and incomes, trade union barons being better-known household names than Cabinet Ministers, double-digit inflation, 83 per cent income tax, power cuts, strikes. It did indeed feel as if Britain was finished.
Who could guess that, with the election of an initially underwhelming Tory leader exactly fifty years ago yesterday, we were on the cusp of a réveil national? Britain, Europe’s slowest-growing economy in the 1970s, became its fastest-growing in the 1980s (other than Spain, which was bouncing back from an even lower place).
Thatcherism was about many things – free contract, lower taxes, enterprise, graft, home ownership, privatisation, victory in the Cold War. But, above all, it was about revival. “I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t,” the great lady told an interviewer shortly before the 1979 election. “We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now.”
The alloy of cultural conservatism and economic liberalism that constituted Thatcher’s philosophy had few European equivalents. Thatcherism led, in time, to Brexit. Other countries had Euro-sceptic movements, obviously. But the sense that Brussels was holding us back, that we would be more prosperous if we were free to scrap some EU regulations – that was peculiarly British.
EEC membership was a product of the extraordinary national pessimism of the early 1970s. Britain was in decline, the Commonwealth didn’t seem to be going anywhere and the Germans had bounced back from defeat to outperform us. It is hard to imagine the 1975 referendum producing the same result 20 years earlier or 20 years later.
By the time Thatcher left office, things felt very different. Now, it was Britain that was buccaneering and Europe that was ailing. That sense, exacerbated by the Euro crisis after 2010, fuelled the rise of Vote Leave.
And now? All of a sudden, it feels as if we are in the Seventies again. A Tory government that was too weak to take on the anti-growth coalition has been replaced by a Labour government that actively embraces it. We are back to high spending, high taxes and high regulation – and, therefore, low growth.
As the mood darkens, even our Euroscepticism is turning Continental – that is, introverted, statist, sceptical of foreign investment and of even high-skilled inward migration. Successive governments used their Brexit freedoms to give us tighter regulations than before, increasing the amount of capital that banks must hold, setting tougher green targets, extending VAT to schools.
At the time of the miners’ strike, Thatcher spoke of NUM militants as “the enemy within”, provoking much huffing and puffing on the Left. The enemy these days is more deeply embedded into the state. Radical miners did not occupy senior positions in the civil service or the judiciary. They were in no position to sabotage government policy through lawfare.
Then, our national revival depended on defeating Scargillism. Today, it depends on defeating Harmerism – that is, the Leftist judicial activism preached by Richard Hermer, Keir Starmer and the rest of the progressive barristocracy.
It will be an uglier, scrappier fight. Thatcher’s conflict resembled the Battle of Kursk, a vast confrontation that made the steppes thunder with the noise of tank shells. The next one will be more like the Battle of Stalingrad, a grim house-by-house campaign of attrition.
Yet it must be fought, and fought urgently. Just as the 1980s witnessed, not only our economic recovery, but a recovery of our pride and patriotism, so we need to dispel the self-abnegation that characterises Harmerism.
Our young people are being turned against their own country and everything it stands for. Only 41 per cent of Gen-Z are proud to be British, down from 80 per cent 20 years ago. Forty-eight per cent believe that Britain is a racist country, up from 34 per cent. If this goes on much longer, there will be nothing left to salvage.