Dominic Sandbrook On Britain In The Early 80s

Particularly pertinent given how Labour in the UK got smashed (though unfortunately not wiped out), to weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth, inability to understand statistics in the form of polling, claims of media bias, accusations of election rigging and predictions that the UK is going to be ruined and the NHS sold off:

Dominic Sandbrook On Britain In The Early 80s | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘Lots of people doing well, and that was one of the ironies wasn't it? The late 70s, they come out of what you described as one of the gloomiest decades in modern British history. But yet for a lot of people life was more comfortable than ever. They had central heating. They had more things’

‘Yes, absolutely. They had, I mean, that's the great paradox, isn't it? And you get that when you talk to people about 70s and the 80s, that you can tell a story about it, which is all doom and gloom, particularly the 70s. You know, the strikes, having to get a humiliating bailout from the International Monetary Fund. The Heath government broken by the miners, the Callaghan government broken by the unions in 1979. A sort of story of ungovernability and failure.

And that's the story that a lot of British people told about their country. They would sort of say, yes, I'm personally better off than ever, and I'm going on holiday, and I've got my new telly, and all the rest of it. However, the country as a kind of corporate entity is going to the dogs, and that we are falling behind our competitors, we haven’t got Empire anymore.

And I think psychologically, that it had become quite embedded by the end of the 70s. And it's, it's not just among people who are kind of, you know, civil servants and business leaders and so on, but actually you see it so much in popular culture. I mean, the classic example that I give at the beginning of the book is Fawlty Towers. The hotel is a sort of metaphor for Britain itself. You know, the famous episode when the American Waldorf salad, the American tourists arrive, and nothing works, they can't get a hot meal. You know, Mr. Hamilton, the American guy has pitched up says, you know, this is the crummiest shoddiest hotel in all of Western Europe. And he's not really just talking about Fawlty Towers, he's talking about Britain…

Margaret Thatcher's genius as a politician is that she's able to tap both those things. So she appeals to people's anxieties about what's happening to their country and about national decline. But she's also able to tap their aspiration, the new kind of materialism, the consumerism, and there, I think it really helps that she's a woman. Because she says, oh I understand about the family budget, I'm a housewife and mother just like you and all this kind of thing. And that appeal to domesticity is, I think, a really important part of her appeal. I can't think of any other politician in British history, who's been so successful at both sort of playing the Imperial warrior, but also playing the I'm an ordinary person like you, who, you know, just wants to spend an evening cooking and and she probably couldn't have done what, she certainly couldn't have done it if she hadn't been a woman...

[When Thatcher wasn’t PM] Life at Downing Street was actually pretty calm measured, you know, everyone knew what they were doing. They didn't have huge shouting matches. This is sort of, you know, we're all good chaps and we can get on with this sort of ethos. But with Mrs. Thatcher life was incredibly histrionic. You know, if you disagreed with that, she took it very personally. She held grudges. You know, there were endless kind of shouting matches, sort of this sort of apocalyptic mood in the early 80s. Everything's going wrong. And she's not the politic, you know, she's, it's not really in her makeup to come into the room and say, calm down everyone, this will be fine. It's actually much more in her makeup to work herself into this incredible lather and to get really overwrought about things in a way that was often hidden from the public...

There's a book I talk a little bit about called authors take sides on the Falklands, and it was modeled on a book from the 1930s called authors take sides on the Spanish Civil War, and basically the organizers got all these intellectuals and writers and stuff and said, ‘What do you make of the Falklands?’. And most of them thought it was absolutely awful.

And what they objected to, you know you, you don't even need to read between the lines. They say it quite bluntly. What they hate about it is that it has reawakened this patriotism in the British people that they think, thought was dead since the 1960s. You know, Salman Rushdie says at one point, he doesn't even want to talk about it, it just makes him feel so ashamed. And, you know, that's the interesting thing that this, that I think is what distinguishes her from other prime ministers. And actually, what distinguishes this period, really from the 70s, or the 60s, is the revival of this populism.

And it's populism taking center stage, you know, the patriotism of the common man and woman that the elites have supposedly sneered at for the last 20 years or so. And it was, you know, I'm sure, one reason why this theme struck me so strongly is obviously because I was writing the book, just before, during and after the 2016 referendum...

Make America or Britain or wherever great again, is a standard political device. So Trump's not the first president to use that phrase. Bill Clinton used that phrase, Ronald Reagan used that phrase, and making Britain great again, is what, all opposition leaders pretty much say. The country was great in this golden age before the current government took over. We will recapture that lost greatment . I mean, that's a pretty standard political device...

I talked in the book about her use of the phrase ordinary people. So she uses it something like 250 times during her time in office. She doesn't talk about you know, I'm for the middle classes, or I'm for that, she says I'm for ordinary people. And the implication is that people who oppose her are not ordinary. They are of course in this sort of Tory demonology, they are trade union barons, rent a mob, student protesters, strikers, stuck up steering snobs, you know, all that sort of stuff.'...

People look for somebody to blame. And it really matters that the person who's presiding over all this is a Tory woman. And that I think, explains a lot of the personal bitterness towards Margaret Thatcher. And there's no doubt that her policies made things worse.

But the one thing that always struck me is, France, since the 19, well, since the 1990s, has had this cripplingly high youth unemployment rate, which we don't have. So one in four French kids is basically out of work. But no French person ever says, Jacques Chirac, what an evil man. Francois Hollande cackles while young people are thrown on the scrap heap. Nobody says that kind of stuff. But people still say that about Margaret Thatcher, they still say she's, you know, that woman blah de blah de blah.

Again, I think the fact that she's a woman matters enormously, of course, she invited some of this. She's so strident and confrontational... the fact that she's a woman, I think, makes it very easy for people to personalize it and to blame what is the result often of huge kind of global economic forces on one person. And you know if she hadn't, she'd fallen under a bus in 1978, Michael Foot had been Prime Minister, would there have been a recession in the early 80s? Yes. Probably not as bad, but yes. And would Britain be full of, you know, gigantic car factories and coal mines full of people and all that kind of thing today? Obviously not...

Some of the biggest Thatcherites were dead against [the Falklands War]... Why would you do this, you know, spend so much money retaking islands with 1800 people. It doesn't make any strategic sense, it’s so risky, could ruin everything we've worked for. It's just mad. That's their take on it. Alan Walters used to send around these papers saying it might be much cheaper to bribe the Falkland Islands to come and live in Devon or something or send them to New Zealand where they can sort of talk to sheep to their heart's content.

But Mrs Thatcher's immediate instinct was: we’ve got to get them back. The public want us to get them back. And she was right… Two out of 10 people wanted to attack Argentina itself, basically to invade Argentina. The public were very bellicose, that's what horrified kind of intellectuals and kind of, you know, academically kind of people who were just sort of where did all of these people come from? It’s like they climbed out of their rocks, all these patriots…

Everything about the war is perfectly you know, no script writer could have invented a better scenario. The Falkland Islanders are these kind of harmless, old fashioned sheep farmers. They look like people from the 1950s. They've never hurt anybody. They were just, you know, prodding along having their sheep dog trials and stuff when the archies pitched up. The Argentines are a fascist dictatorship with a track record of kind of attaching electrodes to their poets and throwing them out of aeroplanes over the Atlantic, you know, they’re baddies basically. You know that that there's no way of sort of selling this another way. The UN backs Britain, the United States eventually backs Britain, France backs Britain, even Argentine’s neighbor, Chile, they hate Argentina. They help Britain...

There's the spectacle of the task force leaving, the ships plowing across the ocean. The landings under enemy fire, the little figures, little green figures with their big packs kind of trudging across the landscape through the rain. It all feels like a little rerun of the Second World War basically. And it's, it's perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of people who've grown up watching the Dambusters and Dad's Army. And you know, you look at the press reaction, the sort of almost hysterical outpourings of excitement and then of enthusiasm when victory is won.

And I do think it changes the story. It drives unemployment off the front pages, it banishes the idea of Britain being ungovernable. It, for the first time in Mrs. Thatcher’s Premiership, it shows people actually she is capable of doing what she says. You know, it's not all going to kind of fall apart as soon as she touches it... the image that sums it up is the image, the very famous of the troops marching across the moorlands, and there's one of them with the Union Jack sticking out of his backpack, the photo that's always used for the Falklands War.

And it's the flag that makes it. Because when people, many people had not associated the flag with success for 30 years, you know, 40 years. When people had seen the flag on the news it’d been in the context of it coming down. You know, Prince Philip is in the Gold Coast for their independence kind of thing. The flag comes down, the new flag comes up. It's the kind of, falling flag basically. And when people have seen the British Army on the news, it'll be in the context of Northern Ireland. They've just killed somebody. Or they've been blown up in a horrific kind of roadside bomb. So it's like that. Yes, it's, the record has been changed. And it gives people a taste for things that that had been lost..

There was a huge furore about the BBC. The BBC didn't want to call the British forces, our forces, which a lot of Tory MPs thought was basically tantamount to treason. And the Brit, the BBC also saw its role as to basically report the news, objectively, sort of arbitrating between the Argentine and British versions. Again, a lot of people complained about, they said that British Broadcasting Corporation should be on Britain's side. You know, as you were in the Second World War...

Columnists and writers at the time often said, you know, basically you go to a council estate, you go to a sort of industrial town and when you, Labour, people go canvassing, they report that on the doorstep time and again, people say I really admire Maggie for the Falklands. Of course, we should be fighting them, of course, all this kind of thing.

And yet they would say themselves, Guardian writers like Peter Jenkins, the Guardian’s kind of star political writer of the day would sort of say, I don't know anybody who supports the war. You know, that's a little bit, I don't know anybody who voted leave, kind of stuff...

I did think to myself, how accurately some of this prefigures, the debates we have right now. That there is a kind of, even in the 80s there is a sort of real sense of a gulf between the kind of people who kind of write and read literary novels, shall we say, who are just appalled by the whole enterprise and embarrassed by what they see as the jingoism and the glory and slaughter and so on. And then, you know, the sort of the voices of the football grounds, who just cannot see why there's anything wrong with, why you wouldn't fight to recapture your territory when it's been invaded. And yeah, there is a class dimension there I think. I think there's a sort of, you know, there's a working class patriotism, that the Falklands specifically stirs...

There’s a definitely a class element to all this… For a lot of the 20% who don't support the war, there's a sense of, just a sense of shock, I think that what they see as their country has been taken away from them, and that is a very kind of remainy sentiment I can remember reading after the Brexit referendum.

Paddy Ashdown says that he said to his wife: I don't recognize this country anymore. You know, what's happened to this country? You hear people say all the time, what's happened to this country? Well, people were saying that in 1982. Alan Bennett the playwright wrote in his diary after victory in the Falklands, he wrote, you know, I don't feel English now. They're singing Rule Britannia in Downing Street. How can this be happening?

You know, I think there's a whole generation who had come of age in the 1960s. And they've gone through the 70s, feminism, gay rights, the Labour Party moving to the left. And they sort of felt that history was on their side. They were young, you know, you do feel that when you're young. And you’re in University, you're the kind of master of your own little universe. And you sort of think, you know, those fuddy duddies, those tweedy, Tory reactions of the 50s have been kicked into the dustbin. And we will remake society and we will, we will bring in a kinder, gentler, more equal Britain.

And then this ghastly woman becomes Prime Minister in 1979 and goes around telling people that it's, you know, it's good to be ambitious and to make money and, you know, you shouldn't feel guilty about that. And then, you know, she clearly loves the Falklands War and says how thrilling is her word, thrilling it is to be fighting for freedom.

Instead of arguing about kind of welfare policies or whatever, and all these people respond to this and think this is great, and you, the sort of 60s product, you know, with your cherished copy of EP Thompson's the Making of the English Working Class and your copy of John Lennon's Imagine and stuff. You think, Christ, what's happened. This isn't the country I thought I was in. We were in control of the future. And now the future has been taken away from us by these vulgar Tory materialistic jingoists. And there is a class dimension to that, I think. And I think that that actually runs right through modern politics to this day"


Women and "stereotypes"!

Is it still unfair to say that liberals hate their countries, if patriotism is seen as shameful? It's interesting that patriotism is associated with populism

Of course in Labour demonology, “for the many, not the few” implies that if you oppose Labour…

Ironically, feminists hate Margaret Thatcher so much. But they're just being sexist

Apparently singing "Rule Britannia" is un-English. Who knew? Is it English to hate your country?