Born at the start of the 1980s, I am, supposedly, one of Thatcher’s children. Isn’t that an incredible statement? Twenty-three years after Margaret Thatcher was booted out of power, her name defines a generation of people now in their early twenties and thirties. Had I been born a year or so earlier, I wouldn’t have been a Callaghan child. Had I been born a decade later, I wouldn’t have been a Major child. Regardless of what you think of what she did, she continues to define not just British politics, but also the Britain of everyone’s everyday experiences.
Thatcher’s death may be the end of an era, but I’m not so sure. To me, it feels more like the echo of an era. Politics in 2013 is about decline – is it to be managed or fought? Is anybody to blame? Who is bearing the cost? This isn’t uniquely a British phenomenon, but there’s no sense of decline in Poland, and neither is there in China, Brazil or India. And it isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to our times, because our times echo the times 40 years ago which set Margaret Thatcher on her accidental path to power.
Now, as then, there is a real feeling among people of all backgrounds that our children may do worse than we have done. Everybody has been hit by this malaise. The minimum wage is coming under attack and median incomes have stagnated for the best part of a decade. Families who used to be able to afford two of everything – cars, holidays – now find that their pay doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. Parents suffer a double-whammy of too much or too little work, both of which hit their family life. Decline isn’t just something for academics to discuss – it is felt in people’s pockets.
Those who lived through the 1970s must hear a distant echo of those days. Between 1973 and 1977, the percentage of people expecting their living standards to ‘fall sharply’ in the next decade doubled, overtaking the number of people who expected them to improve or stay the same. Disposable income dropped nearly 10 per cent in three years. The sense of apocalypse may have been greater then: strikes were much more a feature of economic life, and we have seen nothing like the three-day week since, well, the three-day week. But at least that generation of politicians had North Sea oil to look forward to.
The feeling in the mid-1970s was that Britain’s problems were structural, not cyclical. They wouldn’t disappear with a tweak here and an initiative there. They needed wholesale change. The same is true in our 2013 echo chamber. Most of us wish that we could lay back and wait for growth to return – and growth that would benefit everybody. That if we can just see off the deficit, all will be back to our normal cycle of mild boom and mild bust. But most of us know that this is wishful thinking. Most of us know that our economic problems are deeper than that: they are structural, not cyclical.
Politicians from the 1970s such as Tony Benn, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey understood that our issues were deep-seated. The problem was that moderate Labour leaders spoke out too late. James Callaghan admitted in his 1976 party conference speech: ‘For too long … we have postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our society and in our economy … We have been living on borrowed time … Governments of both parties have failed to ignite the fires of industrial growth in the ways that other countries have done’.
But by this point it was too late. Already the siren voices of left and right had taken over. Benn dragged Labour left, offering a big, structural solution to a big, structural problem: nationalise, regulate, spend and be damned. Thatcher dragged the Tories rightwards, like Benn offering a big, structural solution to a big, structural problem: privatise, deregulate, cut and be damned. Both were wrong, but both grasped early that structural problems cannot be solved with cyclical, piecemeal solutions. Both then took this insight and ran with it. The more moderate voices of Healey and Callaghan spoke for too long as if growth would return by simply treading water – waiting for the cycle to turn. Whether it would have turned or not, Thatcher didn’t give them time to find out.
Whatever they thought in private, in public prime minister Callaghan and chancellor Healey spoke of cyclical solutions to structural problems. This is just what all the main parties – but particularly the government parties – are guilty of at the moment. Spend a little on infrastructure in 2015, a penny off a pint of beer, tell councils to allow more planning applications and the cycle will soon turn. The trouble is that the public don’t buy this. They may not have the solutions to our economic woes, but they understand when a big problem isn’t going to be solved by tweaking.
The voters of the late 1970s understood the same thing, and that should bring back worrying echoes for Labour. Because those voters in 1977 and 1978 told pollsters that they were returning to Labour after their mid-1970s wobble. Yet, when the voters faced up to the ballot box, and thought of the Labour government not facing up to the country’s problems, they did what they said they wouldn’t do, and put Thatcher into No 10.
We need to show that, unlike this government, we share the public’s understanding. Big, bold solutions don’t have to be unworkably radical. Thatcher showed that standing up for the underdog isn’t always a leftwing impulse – we have to make it so. Guaranteeing an apprenticeship to every young person who wants one; a work programme which creates work; requiring the living wage for all public contracts: all radical in their results, but not in their conception. This is Labour stuff – we understand this. But we have to put it together in a way which shows that we know we aren’t tweaking – we are changing the rules of the game. Liam Byrne’s recent references to making full employment the centrepiece of our policy are a more-than-decent start.
We have to show that, much as we don’t like living through an echo of the mid-1970s, we have a bold plan which avoids living through a repeat of the destruction of the 1980s. Callaghan and Healey both recognised our economy’s structural problems, but acted too late, by which time one of the politicians offering a big solution was in power. If we do not show that we understand the depth of our structural problems, other politicians will step into the breach – and they truly will be Thatcher’s children, in conviction as well as age.
We don’t have power to lose in 2013, and the Tories aren’t led by a politician of Thatcher’s blind belief and ruthlessness. Yet, get this wrong, and we do risk being out of power for a generation. Thatcher’s children might be brash, egocentric and loud. But we are also insistent, driven and gutsy. Most of us – on the left or the right – entered politics because of her. Soon it will be our turn to take the reins of power. Labour’s response to our structural decline will determine who exactly takes those reins – those of us who set out to defeat her politics, or those who seek to perpetuate them.
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Mark Rusling is a Labour and Cooperative councillor in the London borough of Waltham Forest and writes the Changing to Survive column
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Not entirely sure here, I think but am open to correction that the the term “Thatchers Children” tends to refer to people who were still children when Thatcher came to power or born while she was in power. Someone in there early twenties would fall into that at a stretch. Tends to be used more in reference to people in their 30s and 40’s now.
Right on – to improve people’s lives we need to be electable – if we talk ideology all day it may shine up our egos but it won’t get us anywhere except increasingly up our own a****
Some people may say Labour is already looking from that position already
I want no government, no queen, no privilege. I just would like to live in a free country were people work together for the good of people not themselves and for things and pride.