Making of Modern UK Thatcher and Legacy of New Labour and Murdoch press

N C Gardner MA PGCE
N C Gardner MA PGCE 1

 During most of the 20th Century, the British Prime
Ministership has not been a very important political
office. The change of political party holding office has
mattered a great deal more than the individual
occupying No. 10 Downing Street.
 The British system of government is not an American
system and the Prime Minister is not Head of State.
 Change the Prime Minister without also changing the
party in power and nothing much happens. The
importance of the office has been exaggerated.

 The Cabinet is the crucial element in the British system
of government and other Cabinet ministers such as the
Chancellor of the Exchequer determine major policies.
 Most Prime Ministers have not sought to be powerful
and have not had policy goals distinct from those of
their party. Most post-war Prime Ministers – Attlee,
Churchill, Macmillan, Wilson and so on – have not had
objectives which were not also the objectives of their
party.
 Prime Ministers are regarded mainly as the managers of
their government’s and their party’s political business:
maintaining party unity, preventing Cabinet
resignations, and winning the next election.

 In comparison with other post-war Prime Ministers,
Margaret Thatcher’s style of government was
entirely different.
 She had a broadly-based policy agenda of her own,
an agenda distinct from that of most members of
the Conservative Party.
 She ensured that her agenda was her Government’s
agenda and was therefore willing to assert herself
on an unprecedented scale compared to other
post-war Prime Ministers.

 The Conservative governments of 1979 to 1990 were
very much the governments of Margaret Thatcher.
 In her relations with her fellow ministers, civil servants
and Conservative M.P.s, her distinctive weapon was fear.
She sought to control the content of public policy and,
through it, Britain’s destiny.
 Mrs Thatcher had a formidable personality and used
hectoring, cajoling, threatening, wrong-footing,
bullying, embarrassing and even humiliating her
ministers and officials.

 As prime minister Mrs Thatcher put the fear of God
into people, and they usually responded well.
 More than any other prime minister, Thatcher used
her hiring-and-firing power single-mindedly to
produce a team of ministers loyal to her person
and, more importantly, to her policy agenda.
 At the same time she exercised her natural charm
and had genuine concern for the well-being of
many of her fellow politicians and their families.

 Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979 as the
first woman Prime Minister and left in 1990 as
the first Prime Minister for generations to lend
her name to an ideology.
 The economic and social prescriptions of
‘Thatcherism’ included control of the money
supply, and consequent cuts in public
expenditure, which had been foreshadowed
under Denis Healey’s Chancellorship in 1974 –
79.

 Through the new Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe,
Thatcher set in place the core economic
policies of monetary control and a shift from
taxes on income to taxes on consumption.
 The next four years (1979 – 83) saw Thatcher
and Howe holding their nerve in the face of a
rapid increase in unemployment, rising
inflation, and deteriorating industrial relations.

 ‘U-turn if you want to – the Lady’s not for turning’,
as Thatcher told the 1980 Conservative Party
conference.
 The 1981 Budget of Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor,
was a defiant response to economic difficulties,
raising taxes to reduce public borrowing and
interest rates.
 The political cost was extensive rioting in poorer
areas of London and other major cities in April
1981, and a civil service strike which lasted 21
weeks.

 The greatest challenge for Thatcher, though,
lay not on the streets of London and other
cities but in Cabinet, where she had to purge
the ‘wet’ colleagues who opposed her hard line
on cuts in public expenditure.
 A fierce attack at the party conference in
October 1981, led by Heath, was successfully
rebuffed, but confirmed that divisions within
the party were deep and lasting.

 The Conservative victory in 1979 was won
against the background of a decade of
recession in which materialistic expectations
were disappointed and, in four years out of ten,
average real living standards did not rise at all.
 In 1979 Labour suffered a massive
haemorrhage of working class votes. Its
policies were out of tune with the aspirations
of a significant section of its natural class base
who wanted to own their own house and pay
less tax.

 Class voting was in decline in the late 1960s
and 1970s.
 In 1967 an Oxford political scientist had stated:
‘Class is the basis of British politics; all else is
mere embellishment and detail.’ However, this
was ceasing to be true.
 Housing tenure was important in influencing
how people voted: owner-occupiers were more
likely to vote Conservative than council house
or private tenants.

 Voters identification with parties was growing
weaker; and, as loyalties weakened, this made
them more likely to decide their votes
according to the issues.
 The theory applied to both major parties but,
in practice, its implications for the Labour Party
were greater because the Labour Party was the
class party par excellence.

 At every election from 1951 to 1983, with the
exception of 1966, the Labour vote declined.
 The 1979 election was the third successive one on
which the Labour vote had fallen below 40% of the
votes cast, compared with 49% in 1951, 46% in
1955, 44% in 1964, and 48% in 1966.
 Social and economic conditions should have
favoured Labour. Macmillan’s ‘Affluent Society’ had
given way to recession in 1973 – 74 and, after the
events of 1968, the age of deference was no more.

 In 1979 manual workers were more in favour of
reducing the highest rate of income tax (a Tory
policy) than of introducing a wealth tax (a
Labour policy).
 Within the Labour vote there was a spectacular
decline in support for the collectivist trinity of
public ownership, trade union power and social
welfare.

 In 1964 57% of Labour supporters approved of
more nationalisation while 59% rejected the
idea that trade unions were too powerful.
 By 1979 these two opinions were held by about
only one-third of the electorate.
 Labour fought the 1979 election in opposition
to the sale of council houses to their tenants
but 85% of the electorate, and 86% of the
working class, were in favour of this
Conservative proposal.

 The essence of Thatcherism was the advocacy of a
market economy, where the state fulfills strictly
limited functions such as monetary control, the
upholding of the rule of law, and defence of the
realm.
 In the context of what had happened before 1979,
Thatcherism was ideological. Margaret Thatcher
adopted the free market vision of Adam Smith and
challenged the post-war consensus based on
nationalisation, Keynesian economics, government
planning, and the provision of universal welfare.

 After her decisive victory in the General Election of
June 1983, Thatcher embarked on her policy of
privatization which created millions of small
shareholders and significantly reduced the Public
Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR).
 Thatcher also took political revenge for previous
humiliations, challenging the miners by insisting
on the closures of uneconomic pits. The 1984 – 85
miners strike was marked by violence on both
sides, lasted a year but ended in the defeat of the
NUM in March 1985.

 The humbling of the miners, with their reputation
as the shock troops of the labour movement, was
followed by the defeat of the newspaper print
unions, whose tight hold over Fleet Street had
made them a byword for restrictive practices.
 Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Times Newspapers,
installed new computerized technology at a new
plant at Wapping. Murdoch with the help of the law
overcame union resistance to changes in working
practices and the technology used to produce
newspapers.

 The essence of Thatcherism was the advocacy of a
market economy and promoting free enterprise.
 Therefore Thatcher’s natural supporters were the
petit bourgeoisie – shopkeepers, foremen, self-
employed business people.
 Thatcher directed her attacks against the failures of
socialist and Keynesian policies, and rejected the
corporatist consensus of post-war Britain.

 Welfare spending accelerated under the public
spending boom of a Conservative government, that
of Edward Heath in 1970 – 74, so Britain’s welfare
spending from 1945 to 1970 was less than many
other West European nations.
 Although Mrs Thatcher wished to move from a
dependency culture to an enterprise culture,
welfare spending actually continued to increase
during the period of her governments in 1979 –
1990 and the majority of the public themselves
supported increased provision for public services.

 For Peter Riddell, another historian of the Thatcher
years, Thatcherism was essentially an instinct, a series
of moral values and an approach to leadership rather
than an ideology.
 Riddell agrees with Dr Shirley Letwin by writing that Mrs
Thatcher stood for the values of the English suburban
and provincial middle-class and aspiring skilled
working-class.
 Her style of conviction politics and self-conscious
radicalism were uncomfortable for the established such
as the universities, the Church of England, the Foreign
Office, BBC, and the professions.

 Thatcher was patronised and disliked by the liberal
intellectual establishment which was centrist in its
political thinking. Senior civil servants, lawyers,
university lecturers and BBC executives recoiled in
horror at Thatcher’s deliberate rejection of the
post-war consensus.
 However, international economic and political
changes i.e. the spread of neo-liberalism and the
fall of Soviet communism, changed intellectual
opinion towards acceptance of the market.

 However, centrist intellectual opinion still held
sway through the Thatcher Decade and still holds
for the majority today. The centrist establishment
still prevails in the BBC, the universities and the
senior civil service.
 For the majority of intellectual opinion, Mrs
Thatcher became an object of unthinking hatred
not endured by any other Prime Minister since
1945. The reason lay in the inability of progressive
orthodoxy, like any other orthodoxy, to tolerate
earnest and practical dissent.

 The hatred of Mrs Thatcher was infected by snobbery.
Intellectual snobbery for the non-intellectual Thatcher,
the snobbery of Arts graduates about Scientists
(Thatcher had a chemistry degree from Oxford), the
snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial
(Thatcher was from Lincolnshire), and the snobbery of
men about career women.
 In higher education, Thatcherite ideas were
overwhelmingly rejected by universities and dons. In a
public display of disapproval, Oxford University in 1985
refused to award Mrs Thatcher an honorary degree,
hitherto an almost automatic award to a graduate of
Oxford who had become Prime Minister.

 The Thatcherite view that the universities could,
and should, raise more of their own finance
escaped the thinking of many dons. The added
advantage that independence from state control
gives higher education more freedom, fewer
regulations and edicts from the Secretary of State,
and greater academic variety, was rarely
comprehended.

 Thatcher’s approach revolved around:
 1. a belief in Britain’s greatness and assertion of
national interests.
 2. a prejudice against the public sector.
 3. a backing for the police and the security services in
fighting terrorism and upholding law and order.
 4. a strong dislike of trade unions.
 5. a general commitment to the virtues of sound money.
 6. a preference for wealth creators over civil servants.
 7. a support for the right of individuals to make their
own provision for education and health.

 Thatcher saw key political issues in terms of Britain’s
past greatness, recent decline and the possibility of
recovery.
 Britain since the end of the First World War had
experienced long-term economic decline and faced a
growing Soviet threat from the 1970s onwards.
 Moreover in the 1970s there were high rates of
inflation, state subsidies for inefficient nationalized
industries, restrictive practices of trade unions and a
welfare culture that encouraged illegitimacy, the
breakdown of family life and replaced incentives
favouring work with encouragement for welfare
dependency.

 The Thatcher governments advocated policies to
encourage enterprise. Taxes were cut with the top
rate reduced from 83% to 40% and the basic rate
from 33% to 25%.
 The most obvious measure of a nation’s economic
performance is the growth of its GDP. Here Mrs
Thatcher’s achievement is not in doubt. Whereas
GDP grew by less than 1% between 1973 and 1979,
it grew by 2.25% in the 1980s. And in the other
OECD nations in the 1980s, there was no marked
improvement upon their low GDP growth rates of
the 1970s.

 The growth in productivity was the key element in
Britain’s improved GDP growth in the 1980s under
the Thatcher governments. During the Thatcher
years British productivity saw both absolute and
relative improvement.
 Britain’s productivity performance was transformed
during the Thatcher years. Britain leaped from 12th
place between 1960 – 73 to 5th place in 1979 – 94
in the league of OECD nations.

 The Thatcher governments altered the terms of the
economic debate. Post-war corporatism was ended and
Britain was transformed to a neo-liberal, free enterprise
economy similar to the United States.
 Free enterprise does not guarantee continuing
prosperity; but it does permit it, whereas the
alternatives do not.
 Free enterprise does not end the business cycle of
boom and bust. Thatcher realised that government has
a limited role to play to provide a framework in which
free enterprise can flourish.

 Thatcher’s economic philosophy was based on free
enterprise and a minimum role for government in
the workings of the economy. It ended the relative
decline of Britain and led her to leap to 5th place in
the OECD league table of GDP.
 Attitudes were developed in favour of free
enterprise and against corporatism and the ideas
of a state-controlled command economy. Britain’s
prospects were transformed and her influence in
the world restored.

 ‘It’s the fake femininity I can’t stand, and the
counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her
dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you
know she would change it all if she could, and be
born to rich people.
 It’s the way she loves the rich, the way she
worships them. It’s her philistinism, her
ignorance, and the way she revels in her
ignorance. It’s her lack of pity. Why does she
need an eye operation? Is it because she can’t
cry?’

 Unemployment did rise to over three million between
1979 and 1986 but then steadily declined due to the
Lawson boom of 1982 – 89. The Thatcher Governments
did fear the electoral impact of rising unemployment
but ended the Keynesian policies of artificially
increasing aggregate demand.
 Instead the Thatcher Governments embarked upon
labour-market reforms, business deregulation and the
encouragement of incentives to work.
 Adult unemployment fell for 44 consecutive months
from 1986 until April 1990 when it reached a low of 1.6
million, roughly half its mid-1980s peak.

 Britain in the 1980s moved from a manufacturing,
industrial economy to a services, knowledge
economy in line with world economic trends.
 During the 1980s employment in professional and
scientific services (mostly education and health)
increased by half a million, followed by
miscellaneous services (sport and leisure,
restaurants, clubs and pubs, as well as computer-
based services) and insurance, banking, finance
and business services.

 Privatisation (denationalisation) was central to
Thatcherism. The rolling back of the State and
encouragement of the free market were encapsulated in
the privatisation programmes of the Thatcher
Governments.
 40% of the industries nationalised in the corporatist era
of 1945 – 79 were privatised. Bus and coach routes
were de-regulated, local government services were
contracted out to private firms, private pensions, health
care and education flourished and professional
restrictive practices, such as the solicitors’
conveyancing monopoly, were eroded.

 The first large nationalised industry to be privatised was
British Telecom in 1984 and it was a huge success, not
just through the take-up of shares but through the
access the business gained to private capital with which
to invest in rapidly advancing technology.
 BT’s customers also gained in terms of price and
service.
 The next major privatisation was that of British Gas in
1986. However, the sale of British Gas didn’t promote
competition or much improved efficiency. It did liberate
the taxpayer from subsidising nationalised industry.

 When Margaret Thatcher came to power in
1979, much of the economy, and almost all
its infrastructure, was in state hands.
 For traditional socialists, state hands meant
‘the people’s hands’. For traditional Tories,
state hands meant ‘in British hands’.
 For Thatcher and her allies, state hands
meant ‘in the hands of meddling bureaucrats
and selfish, greedy trades unionists’.

 A third of all homes were rented from the state.
 The health service, most schools, the armed
forces, prisons, roads, bridges and streets, water,
sewers, the National Grid, power stations, the
phone and postal system, gas supply, coal mines,
railways, refuse collection, airports, buses, freight
lorries, air traffic control, much of the car, ship,
and aircraft building industries, British Airways
and other industries were in state hands in 1979.

 The background to Thatcher’s privatisation
revolution in the 1980s was stagflation, a sense
of national failure, and a widespread feeling,
spreading even to some regular Labour voters,
that the unions had become too powerful, and
were holding Britain back.
 Labour, and Thatcher’s centrist predecessors
among the Conservatives, had tried to control
inflation administratively, through various deals
with unions and employers to hold down wages
and prices.

 For Alan Walters, Thatcher’s chief economic
adviser, believed a key source of inflation and
the weak economy was the amount of
taxpayers’ money being poured into over-
manned, old-fashioned, government-owned
industry.
 Just as in the Soviet Union, Walters thought,
Britain’s state industries concealed their
subsidy-sucking inefficiency through opaque,
idiosyncratic accounting techniques.

 For Thatcher, privatisation was simply one of many
weapons to use in her battle against the unions,
which was, in turn, a single episode in her war to
exterminate socialism.
 Her great political inspiration, apart from her father,
was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944
book, ‘The Road to Serfdom’.
 ‘The Road to Serfdom’ claims that socialism inevitably
leads to communism, and that communism and Nazi-
style fascism are one and the same. The tie that links
Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany, in Hayek’s view, is
the centrally planned economy.

 Hayek was proven wrong. Across western
Europe, including in Britain, socialists came
and went from power, introduced a welfare
state and nationalised large swathes of the
economy without democracy and individual
freedoms being threatened.
 Private doctors kept their clinics on Harley
Street, young aristocrats still went to Eton,
the private shop windows of Harrods still
blazed at Christmas time.

 After Thatcher defeated the attempt by
Britain’s coal miners to starve off mass
redundancies and pit closures in 1984 – 85, she
wrote:
 ‘What the strike’s defeat established was that
Britain could not be made ungovernable by the
Fascist Left.’

 Privatisation failed to turn Britain into a nation of
small shareholders. Before Thatcher came to
power, almost 40% of the shares in British
companies were held by individuals.
 By 1981, it was less than 30%. By the time
Thatcher died in 2013, it had slumped to under
12%.
 Thatcher and Lawson’s vision of a shareholding
democracy failed to materialise.

 Privatisation failed to demonstrate the case made
by the privatisers that private companies are
always more competent than state-owned ones –
that private bosses, chasing the carrot of
bonuses, will always do better than their state-
employed counterparts.
 Through euphemisms like ‘wealth creation’ and
‘enjoying the rewards of success’ Thatcher
promoted the notion that greed on the part of a
private executive elite is the chief and sufficient
engine of prosperity for all.

 The ‘winner-take-all’ society created in the
1980s by the Thatcher governments has
resulted in the denigration of the concept of
duty and public service, according to the
critics.
 A squalid ideal of all work as something that
shouldn’t be cared about for its own sake,
but only for the money that it brings.

 Privatisation failed to make firms compete or
give customers more choice.
 Water companies were already a monopoly before
privatisation and remained so afterwards since
they had nobody to compete with and couldn’t
offer customers a choice.
 And the privatisation of electricity showed how
privatisation failed to empower individuals as it
was supposed to. It failed to provide customers
with information with even less comprehensible
pricing systems after privatisation.

 Margaret Thatcher’s greatest impact as Prime
Minister was upon Britain’s international
standing.
 Partly this reflected the transformation of
Britain’s economy and improved GDP growth
relative to other nations, but it also reflected
Thatcher’s willingness to use and develop
British military power, and to stand shoulder-
to-shoulder with President Reagan to defeat
Soviet Communism.

 Victory in the Falklands War in June 1982
transformed the political fortunes of Margaret
Thatcher. She knew after the Falklands victory
how to cope with war which she saw, as many
do, as the supreme test of statesmanship.
 Her domestic and international standing
soared. She was no longer a housewife, she
was a warrior. And the Falklands victory
meant that Britain was once again a power to
be reckoned with.

 Yet Thatcher did not let the Falklands War
victory go to her head. For example, she
knew Britain still had to negotiate with China
over the future of Hong Kong, on very much
Chinese terms.
 Also she never thought she could go it alone
in international affairs without the help,
support and alliance of the United States. The
realities of global power politics had not been
changed by the Falklands War victory.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
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 President Reagan piled on the pressure with the
continued superpower confrontation with the
USSR. Reagan knew that the USSR, because of its
weak economy, could not increase its military
spending, but that America could double its
military output with ease.
 While Thatcher believed that the Soviet Empire
would ultimately collapse because communism
was fundamentally unworkable, she did not share
Reagan’s view of its current weakness.
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 Thatcher acted as Reagan’s constant
supporter and provided him with mainly good
advice in dealing with the Soviet Union. She
was also a good personal friend for President
Reagan.
 Reagan saw Thatcher as an ideological soul-
mate in their joint battle against socialism
and communism. This gave Thatcher special
access, and at times influence, with the
President.
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 The most serious domestic crisis of Thatcher’s
premiership until her eventual downfall in
November 1990, was over a disagreement
concerning the Westland Helicopter Company.
Westland was the only British company to
produce helicopters but was in danger of going
into receivership (bankruptcy) in 1985.
 When Michael Heseltine (Defence Secretary)
learned that the Westland Board of Directors was
looking favourably upon a rescue package by the
American firm, Sikorsky, he declared that it
would be better to have a European rescue.
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 Thatcher, however, backed the view of Leon
Brittan (Trade and Industry Secretary), that it was
a matter for the Westland Board and did not
require government interference.
 Heseltine, both a pro-European and an
interventionist, had different ideas. He personally
built up a European rescue package. He clearly
went against the government’s policy of non-
interference, turning the issue into a full blown
political crisis.
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 Since Heseltine had gone against government
policy, his position eventually became
untenable and he resigned from the Cabinet
in January 1986.
 Heseltine was a hugely ambitious politician.
When he was an Oxford student, he had
written out a career plan aiming to become
an M.P., then a senior Cabinet Minister, and
eventually Prime Minister.
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 Heseltine bid his time on the backbenches after
his resignation in 1986 and four years later
played a major part in Thatcher’s downfall since
he stood against her for the party leadership.
 He secured enough votes on the first ballot for
the leadership to force a second ballot to be held
and at this point the Cabinet advised Thatcher to
stand down since a majority of the Cabinet no
longer supported her, thinking that Thatcher had
become an electoral liability and that she would
therefore lead the Conservative Party to defeat at
the next General Election.
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 Thatcher aimed to liberate the market to
preserve a social order (that of private sector
company owners and managers) since this
had been threatened by too much
government in the 1960s and 1970s.
 Thatcher wished to sustain a highly
traditional order, one in which trade unions
knew their place, two-parent families were
the norm and loyalty to the monarch was
unquestioned.
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 Thatcher’s rhetoric made a strong appeal to
well-off manual workers and reinforced
support within the expanding middle-class.
 Thus the Conservatives re-adjusted to their
previous ideas in favour of individual freedom
and private enterprise.
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 For Labour adjusting to the new individualism
and free market economy of the 1980s and
1990s was more difficult than it was for the
Conservatives.
 Much of the post-war settlement had been
dictated by the party’s assumptions about state
intervention.
 For the 1974 – 79 Labour Government it was a
painful time since they were forced by
international currency speculators to curtail
public spending and allow unemployment to rise.
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 Power within Labour fell into the hands of
activists following Labour’s defeat in the
1979 General Election, who accused their
leaders of betraying ‘socialism’.
 The left-wing activists created an alternative
economic strategy including more
nationalization, enhanced regulation and
higher taxes. Labour’s appalling performance
in the 1983 election demonstrated the
unpopularity of these policies.
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 After defeat in 1987, Labour leader Neil
Kinnock was determined to adapt his party to
the new economic climate of neo-liberalism.
Through a wide-ranging policy review,
Kinnock argued that Labour had to embrace
low inflation as government’s immediate
goal.
 Kinnock also recognized that taxing and
spending had to remain at ‘prudent’ levels.
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 After the policy review, Labour’s economic
policy proceeded from the assumption that,
while the state had an important role, it was
‘not to replace the market but to ensure that
markets work properly’.
 By the 1992 election, Kinnock’s left-wing
critics wondered there was between Labour
and the Conservatives.
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 However, Labour in the 1990s and since still
gives the state a more significant and
influential role than the Conservatives.
 Moreover, Labour’s object remained that of
furthering equality, and still does. This was
renamed ‘social justice’, so as not to frighten
middle-class voters.
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 Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party
(1994 to 2007), signified, many thought,
Labour’s abject surrender to Thatcherism.
 However, new Labour was ‘older’ than Blair
wanted to admit and while a ‘dynamic
economy’ was desirable, it would have to be
one ‘serving the pubic interest, in which the
enterprise of the market was joined with the
forces of partnership and co-operation’.
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 Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007,
very much accepted the Thatcher settlement, the
doctrine of free-market capitalism.
 Thatcher declared that her aim was to destroy
socialism in Britain and she succeeded. However,
the Conservative Party existed to oppose
socialism and indeed social democracy.
 So Thatcher removed the chief reason for the
existence of the Conservative Party, its
opposition to socialism and social democracy.
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 By identifying New Labour with the market, Tony
Blair was able to deprive the Conservatives of the
threat that had defined Labour for generations.
 As a result, the Conservatives were mired in
confusion for nearly a decade.
 Blair embraced without question the neo-liberal
belief that only one economic system (capitalism)
can deliver prosperity in a late modern context.
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 Blair’s One Nation Toryism was a political
marketing tool.
 He attacked his own party as much as the
Conservatives. He pressured Labour into
acceptance of the market.
 Blair carried on the agenda of privatisation that
had developed from Thatcher’s original
programme into core areas of the state such as
the justice system and prison service, and
inserted market mechanisms into the NHS and
education.
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 Blair consolidated Thatcherism, continuing
the marketization of British society and
institutions but he did not change Britain as
much as Thatcher had.
 Blair’s main impact was on his own party.
New Labour was constructed to bury the past
history of the party. It had few links to the
political tradition of Labour from Keir Hardie,
Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
12
9

 Neo-conservatives such as Tony Blair realised
that capitalism is a revolutionary force that
overturns established social structures but
also recognised that state power and military
force are needed to expedite the process.
 In international relations neo-conservatism
shaped Blair most deeply. He will be
remembered for taking Britain into the
ruinous war in Iraq and his part in this
destroyed him as a politician.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
13
1

 Blair broadcasted from Downing Street on the night
of September 11th, following the Islamic terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington.
 “This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world. The
people who perpetrate it have no regard whatever for
the sanctity or value of human life, and we the
democracies of the world must come together to
defeat it and eradicate it. This is not a battle between
the United States of America and terrorism, but
between the free and democratic world and terrorism.
 We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to
shoulder with our American friends in this hour of
tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil
is driven from our world.”
N C Gardner MA PGCE
13
3

 Blair’s ‘shoulder to shoulder’ broadcast from
Downing Street following 9/11 was defined in his
memoirs ‘Tony Blair: a Journey’ (2010) as follows:
 ‘I took this view for reasons both of principle and
of national interest. As a matter of principle, I
was sure that we should see the atrocity as an
attack not on the U.S. per se, but because the
U.S. was the leader of the free world, it was
therefore an attack on us too.
 It was also in our national interest to defeat this
menace and if we wanted to play a major part in
shaping the conduct of any war, we had to be
there at the outset with a clear and unequivocal
demonstration of support.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
13
7

 ‘I believed in the alliance with America, I
thought its maintenance and enhancement a
core objective of British policy, and I knew
that alliances are only truly fashioned at
times of challenge, not in times of comfort.’
 (Tony Blair: a Journey, published 2010)
N C Gardner MA PGCE
13
8

 After 9/11, Washington was going to ‘re-
order’ the world on western terms by a
combination of military power and the on-
going westernising process of globalisation.
 However, in Britain the public remained
hostile to the prospect of an Iraqi invasion.
The British public could simply not
understand why Blair had sided with President
Bush and joined in the fateful 2003 invasion.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
14
0

 All the opinion polls at the time (2003)
showed decisive majorities against the
invasion, an opposition made manifest by a
massive march and rally in central London.
 The main European partners, France and
Germany, were against the Iraqi invasion, the
intelligence was not clear-cut; and the UN
could not be squared. The UN did not support
the invasion and hence the U.S. and U.K.
violated international law.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
14
2

 Blair nailed his colours, and his legacy, to the
mast of a conservative Christian Evangelical
Republican President, George W. Bush.
 Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Chris
Patten wrote: ‘history will judge Blair as a
defender of Bush’s agenda above Britain’s’.
 Blair had taken the ‘special relationship’ to a
new level.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
14
4

 Following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, for
the first time since the imperial days of the British
Empire, British troops took over the military
occupation of Arab lands, in the south of Iraq
around Basra.
 To the late 20th century British mind the very idea
of British troops occupying a heartland Arab nation
after having toppled its government would have
seemed an act of blatant imperialism and wildly
far-fetched.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
14
6

 Once Washington had made up its mind to go
to war against Iraq in March 2003, the British
Prime Minister – any British Prime Minister –
had no alternative but to support the
President of the United States.
 In sum, Britain’s ‘special relationship’
demanded it; and when an American
President goes to war, and asks for Britain’s
support, such support is normally given.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
14
7

 Over the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the major
continental powers, France and Germany, not
only opposed Washington, they campaigned
against it in the United Nations.
 Blair was forced to choose between America
and Europe. But for Blair it was not a difficult
or agonising choice. From Downing Street,
the western geo-political power correlation
looked clear. Washington was still the
stronger of the two western contestants.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
14
9

 President Bush was adamant and committed,
and would go to war with Iraq anyway.
 And the Franco-German security core was in
its infancy.
 It has been argued that Blair believed that
what happened in the U.S. defined the limits
of the possible for Britain. Accordingly it was
simply ‘impossible’ not to support the United
States.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
15
1

 It was difficult for Tony Blair, and is for any
British prime minister, to sell the raw fact of
subordination to the United States to the
British public.
 At the time of the Suez Canal Crisis, 1956, Sir
Pierson Dixon, Britain’s UN Ambassador,
argued: ‘if we cannot entirely change
American policy, then we must, it seems to
me, resign ourselves to a role as counsellor
and moderator’.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
15
3

 Sir Pierson Dixon (Britain’s UN Ambassador,
1950s) added: ‘It is difficult for us, after
centuries of leading others, to resign
ourselves to the position of allowing another
and greater power to lead us.’
 Britain as America’s ‘counsellor’ and
‘moderator’ was a role Blair openly advocated
as Prime Minister.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
15
5

 As the tension rose in the run up to the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, the official British
line became what the leading columnist Peter
Riddell of The Times described as a ‘hug
them close’ strategy’ – the idea being that by
‘hugging them close’ Britain would secure
greater influence with the Americans than by
breaking with them.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
15
7

 By the time of his second term as Prime Minister
(2001 to 2005), Blair had basically adopted the
whole Bush-American world-view.
 Like Margaret Thatcher before him, he came to
identify with the United States more than he with
Britain.
 Blair saw the Bush presidency and his
premiership as conjoined, as one political unit
with common friends and common enemies.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
15
9

 Blair’s identification with the United States
had a considerable prime ministerial
pedigree. Winston Churchill identified with
America – after all he had an American
mother, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill.
 So too did Margaret Thatcher who had a close
personal and ideological relationship with
President Ronald Reagan.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
16
1

 Blair’s ties were with the American
presidency: he was very close to both liberal-
moderate Bill Clinton and conservative-cum-
neo-conservative George W. Bush.
Blair’s love affair was, at root, all
about power – the power and celebrity
of the American presidency.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
16
3

 Over time Blair’s love affair with the American
presidency turned ideological.
 He started his premiership in 1997 as a European
social democrat, with an ideology roughly similar
to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s SPD
and slightly to the left of Bill Clinton’s ‘third way’
Democrats.
 But later when Bush was in the White House
(2001 to 2009), Blair changed smoothly into a
full, red-blooded American radical conservative.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
16
5

 Blair, amazingly for a Labour prime minister,
signed up to each of the following
components of Bush’s radical conservatism:
1) Global neo-liberal ‘free-market’
economics
2) Global political rule from Washington
3) Christian-based ‘family values’.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
16
7

 Blair became the chief European advocate of
the need to accept ‘globalisation’.
 When used by politicians, ‘accepting
globalisation’ was code for the need to accept
a business-driven, cost-cutting agenda.
 To survive in the global economy – so ran the
business argument – nation states need to
ensure that their costs, that is wages and
taxes, are competitive.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
16
9

1) Labour markets need to be
competitive – flexible enough to
make it easy to ‘hire and fire’.
2) If governments don’t oblige, then
global capital will go elsewhere –
principally to lower-cost China and
India.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
17
1

In a Newsweek magazine article in
2006 Tony Blair pulled no punches:
‘complaining about globalisation’ he
said ‘is as pointless as trying to turn
back the tide. Asian competition can’t
be shut out; it can only be beaten’.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
17
3

 Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 there
has been a quantum leap in the power of
mobile capital over state and labour, and
neo-liberals argued that governments need
to yield to these ‘realities’.
 Blair was at the forefront of such yielding –
constantly arguing that the British people
should welcome ‘globalisation’, not resist it
nor even attempt to shape it.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
17
5

 Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times, The
Sun, Sky News, The Sunday Times, and The
Sun on Sunday, as well as media in the United
States and Australia, is the most powerful
media mogul in the world. He has been called
‘Britain’s second prime minister’.
 The Sun, as Britain’s biggest-selling national
daily newspaper, influences millions of
readers from all social classes each day.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
18
3

 Rupert Murdoch was born in 1931 in
Melbourne, Australia. He is a global media
mogul and is the founder, chairman and
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of global media
holding company News Corporation, the
world’s second-largest media conglomerate,
and its successors News Corp and 21st
Century Fox after the conglomerate split in
June 2013.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
18
5

 In 1981, Murdoch acquired the struggling
‘Times’ and ‘Sunday Times’ newspapers.
Together with The Sun and the News of the
World, Murdoch’s papers supported the
Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher.
 In the 1980s printed newspapers had larger
circulations and readerships than they do in
today’s world of the internet, and therefore the
support of mass-circulation newspapers such
as The Sun and of the ‘top peoples’ paper The
Times was very important for a political party.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
18
7

 The Times reflects the dominant values of the
dominant class. Indeed The Times has helped
define the British idea of social class.
 By 2011, when the phone-hacking scandal
led to the termination of the News of the
World, 1 billion people daily digested
Murdoch’s products – books, newspapers,
magazines, TV channels and films – and News
Corporation, his holding company, had
annual sales of $33 billion.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
18
9

 The power of The Sun, which Murdoch took over
in 1969, was based upon its mass circulation. It
outsold every other national daily newspaper.
 Murdoch championed Margaret Thatcher,
patriotism and national success, and identified
the left with the failed politics of national
weakness and trade union militancy.
 The Sun had a knack of articulating basic
populist views and appealing to the resentments
of its low-income and under-educated mass
readership.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
19
2

 Murdoch’s newspapers were major players in
British politics in the 1980s and 1990s.
Murdoch’s media empire was part of the
broad anti-trade union coalition.
 But the Murdoch papers also developed a
radical and meritocratic edge under the
influence of Sunday Times editor Andrew
Neil, who took as targets traditionalist Britain:
old money aristocracy and the monarchy, as
well as the trade unions.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
19
5

 In the 1980s Murdoch’s media empire including
his newspapers The Sun, The Times, The Sunday
Times, and the News of the World, turned into a
support system for the Conservative Party’s
campaign for a business-led economic and
political culture under the banner of the ‘free
market’.
 Murdoch’s papers also began a systematic, high-
volume opposition to the European Community
and Union, and Britain’s place in it.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
19
7

 Murdoch’s opposition to a European destiny
for Britain from the 1980s and up to the
present had little in common with the
chauvinism and nationalism exhibited in his
papers, particularly The Sun.
 Rather, the key Murdoch concern was what he
perceived as the anti-business culture of the
European Union and its highly regulated,
high-tax welfare societies – a culture that
Murdoch saw as hostile to his own media
interests as well.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
19
9

 Murdoch was aware that no political party
stayed in power for ever and he changed his
political horses in the mid-1990s, when he
began wooing Labour’s youthful leader Tony
Blair.
 Desperate to end Labour’s electoral
drubbings of 1983 to 1992, Blair made a
transcontinental pilgrimage to a News Corp
conference on Hayman Island off Australia in
1995, where he had talks with the kingmaker,
Rupert Murdoch.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
20
1

 After Blair had met Murdoch in 1995, News
Corp switched its support from the
Conservatives to Labour.
 In March 1997, two months before the
General Election, The Sun announced ‘The
Sun Backs Labour’. Blair went on to win by a
landslide not only in 1997, but, with
Murdoch’s support, in 2001 and 2005 as
well. (Although 2005 was a decisive win
rather than a landslide)
N C Gardner MA PGCE
20
3

 At the Hayman Island meeting of 1995, an
unwritten deal had been struck between Blair and
Murdoch. If Murdoch were left to pursue his
business interests in peace he would give Labour
a fair wind.
 According to the diaries of Piers Morgan, the
former News of the World editor, an apologetic
Blair told him: ‘Piers, I had to court him …It is
better to be riding the tiger’s back than let it rip
your throat out. Look what Murdoch did to
Kinnock.’
N C Gardner MA PGCE
20
4

 Irwin Steltzer was a key aide to Murdoch, an
intellectual guru and a major player in
transatlantic Murdoch politics. Steltzer met
Blair on many occasions and he saw early on
that Blair shared many ideas with the
American conservative right.
 ‘I know Tony Blair’, Steltzer once said, ‘Blair is
one of Thatcher’s children. I think he knows
it’.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
20
6

 Blair came into office in 1997 with very
positive views about Britain joining the Euro-
zone, but was never, throughout the whole
period of his premiership, able to act on
them.
 Before the 1997 General Election Blair was
forced into pledging a referendum of the
issue for fear of Murdoch supporting the
Conservatives in the campaign.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
20
7

 After entering Downing Street in 1997 Euro-
entry remained an objective of the New
Labour government, but because of fear
about Murdoch’s media influence in any
referendum campaign, the government was
never confident of winning a vote.
 Thus, a vote was never held, and Britain
stayed outside the Euro-zone.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
21
0

 The Mail on Sunday claimed that in the
original, uncensored ‘Diary of a Spin Doctor’,
Downing Street official Lance Price had
written that ‘apparently we (Downing Street)
promised News International (Murdoch’s
corporation) that we won’t make any changes
to our European policy without talking to
them’.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
21
2

 In July 2006 when Blair’s premiership was clearly
reaching its final phase, and Gordon Brown’s
team was preparing for the future transfer of
power, speculation about Brown’s political
options was rife.
 Murdoch issued what amounted to a public
‘ultimatum’ or ‘warning’ to Brown. He was told
flatly not to try for a quick general election but
rather to stay around for 18 months during
which the electorate could judge his merits
alongside those of the new Tory leader David
Cameron.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
21
4

 Murdoch, ever the vigilant Eurosceptic, was
worried that Brown might hold a quick
election, get a new mandate, and then be free
to develop his own European policy.
 In 2006 it was becoming clear that a new
joint German-Italian-French constitutional
initiative was possible and might well be
launched after the French Presidential
election in spring 2007.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
21
6

 Murdoch feared that Gordon Brown, just
installed as the new Prime Minister might well
sign up to it. Murdoch let it be known that
The Sun – the only paper New Labour’s
leaders – would not support Brown in any
quickly-called election campaign.
 Should Brown try such a manoeuvre it would
support Cameron.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
21
7

 New Labour received Murdoch’s intervention in British
democracy in a nonchalant way. Indeed the whole
British political class and press received Murdoch’s
intervention in a relaxed, unconcerned way.
 There was hardly a peep of protest. After a decade of
New Labour and three decades of Thatcherism,
Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen, domiciled
outside the UK, had become accepted as an arbiter of
Britain’s future.
 Murdoch had become as powerful as the whole British
cabinet combined.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
21
9

 Murdoch’s press empire was, though, not
the only sole pressure behind New Labour’s
growing extreme pro-Americanism. There
was also a general pro-American bias
amongst other powerful sections of the
media – not least the output of The Daily
Telegraph and The Spectator owned by
media mogul Conrad Black.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
22
0

 Mixing the political with modern
communications techniques, both Blair’s
New Labour and David Cameron’s Tories
took the media world very seriously indeed
and treated the media barons, such as
Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, as
legitimate policy-makers.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
22
2

 Mixing with conservative media barons such
as Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, and
heavily influenced in policy-making by their
political values, New Labour ceased to act as
a traditional left-of-centre political party.
 Rather, with cabinet and party weakened,
Blair’s team resembled a highly sophisticated
public relations company, media-friendly and
image-sensitive.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
22
4

 Blair’s public relations team cut out the
Labour Party – its factions, MPs, trade unions,
and activists – and made direct contact with
the voter.
 New Labour embraced party-less, American-
style politics, and became more and more
dependent upon media support and approval
from Murdoch’s media, The Sun, The Times,
and Sky News, and upon business and private
money for its campaigning.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
22
6

 New Labour’s embrace of party-less,
American-style politics and of the
conservative media and business community
led to ‘Britain’s most consistently business-
friendly party’ according to liberal
commentators.
 Murdoch media support and City of London
support demanded of New Labour business-
friendly policies in return.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
22
8

 New Labour promoted the American
economic model and downgraded British
integration in ‘social’ Europe.
 The business-friendly U.S. economic model
opened a global marketised world in Britain
with its pressures for ‘competitive’, low cost,
low wage, low tax economies with ‘flexible’
labour markets i.e. very easy to hire and fire
staff at will.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
22
9

 New Labour joined the chorus of Wall Street
criticism against the European Social Model.
 The European Social Model advocated on the
continent, including in the largest economies
– those of Germany, France, and Italy – is one
of high economic growth together with high
living standards, good working conditions,
and social protections for all citizens.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
23
2

 The business-led consensus of Blair’s Britain
(which has continued under the premiership of
David Cameron since 2010) had a powerful hold
and survived the puncturing of the hi-tech
bubble in 2000 and 2001, the huge and
dangerous financial imbalances of the U.S.
economy, and the corruption scandals of Enron.
 None of the crises of American capitalism shook
New Labour’s conviction in neo-liberal
economics.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
23
3

 New Labour’s love affair with America was not
only about a business-friendly McDonald’s
economy and being friendly with right-wing,
conservative media moguls such as Rupert
Murdoch.
 It was also about ‘Atlanticism’, promoting the
‘special relationship’ with America and
joining up with the Eurosceptic business
class.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
23
6

 Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff, is the
brother of the even more pro-American
Atlanticist , Lord Charles Powell, who was
Thatcher’s chief foreign policy advisor.
 The Powells represent the governing official
mindset of top political Britain. Like Blair they
are the product of public schools and also
like Blair, they have a touch of the old
imperial manner, and its attraction to power –
in the post-war world, the power of
superpower America.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
23
8

 Britain’s intelligence services had (and have) a
real ‘special relationship’ with Washington,
based on intelligence sharing not offered to
other European nations and Whitehall needed
to continue to please Washington for fear it
would be cut off.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
24
0

 The role of the intelligence services are
shrouded in mystery, but they have clear and
obvious advantages in Whitehall power
struggles:
1. The intelligence services are the sole
possessor of ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’
2. They have total and regular access to the
Prime Minister, more so than top cabinet
ministers.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
24
1

 The other Whitehall pressure group highly
supportive of Washington is Britain’s Royal
Navy, which since the 1960s has hosted
Britain’s nuclear weapons, carried in its
submarines.
 For Whitehall the ‘British bomb’ remains the
central nervous system of British power and
thus the key to the British establishment’s
‘world role’.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
24
3

 The United States, first through the Polaris
and then through the Trident nuclear missile
agreements, provided and provides
indispensable servicing requirements for
Britain’s submarine force and crucial satellite
targeting systems.
 The British bomb is independent but only if
the British government wants to launch a
‘spasm’ response.
N C Gardner MA PGCE
24
5

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