Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present

Introduction

The International Monetary Fund loan and structural adjustment programme accepted by the Labour government in December 1976 stabilized the plummeting value of the now free-floating pound, and by the summer of 1978 inflation had fallen from 23 to 8 per cent while the number of unemployed had levelled out at 1.4 million or 5 per cent of the workforce. To keep inflation in check the government insisted that public sector wages should continue to be set below the rate of inflation, in part to offset the wage inflation in the private sector. In 1978, with inflation hovering between 8 and 10 per cent, it sought to impose a 5 per cent pay deal upon public sector workers who were represented by two of the largest unions with 1.4 million members. The resulting strikes and disruption to public services – from rubbish collection to grave-digging – became known as ‘the Winter of Discontent’. During it, the leftist social theorist Stuart Hall took stock of what he called Britain's ‘Great Moving Right Show’. After all, a Labour government had ceded sovereignty over economic policy to the IMF, cut public services, partly privatized BP, and taken on the powerful public sector unions. These policies had a striking resemblance to those of the Conservative Party under its new leader Margaret Thatcher. Describing these for the first time as ‘Thatcherism’, Hall suggested they had been remarkably successful at forging a new ‘populist common sense’. The new creed combined a belief that only the competitive pressures of free markets could end welfare dependency and restore personal responsibility, with an insistence upon respect for the rule of law and the primacy of the Christian family. Three months after Hall published this article, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party was elected to form a new government.

In the decades that followed, Conservative and Labour governments continued ‘The Great Moving Right Show.’ Within a generation the central pillars of Britain's post-war social democracy had been largely dismantled. The aspiration of government was no longer to manage a mixed economy to provide prosperity and social security for all.