Maggie’s Revolution on the Line

On the very first day of the British election campaign, Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader, promised to rescind the general tax cut that the Conservative government had just made, and Denis Healey, the Labour Party’s chief spokesman on foreign affairs, observed, “The Soviets are praying for a Labour victory” [see also Brian Crozier, p. 26]; which seemed, in both cases, an odd way to go about winning friends and influencing people—except people who would be voting Labour anyway. The chief danger to the Conservative Party at that stage looked like being complacency.

Every election is presented by those involved as a historic turning point: but there really have been two such watersheds in Britain since the Second World War. The first was in 1945, when the electors opted for a Labour government and a welfare state; an option that was hardly challenged by subsequent, ostensibly Conservative governments. The concomitant policies of high public spending and high taxation, appeasement of the trade unions, and a ratchet whereby leftward change was deemed irreversible were continued through a quarter-century of national decline. The second watershed came in 1979, when, recoiling from the brink of hyperinflation and appalled by the “winter of discontent,” in which trade-union militancy had left the dead unburied and piles of trash uncollected in the streets, the voters turned to a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, who broke the postwar mold.

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Anthony Lejeune

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Margaret Thatcher

Britain

British Conservative Party

On the very first day of the British election campaign, Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader, promised to rescind the general tax cut that the Conservative government had just made, and Denis Healey, the Labour Party’s chief spokesman on foreign affairs, observed, “The Soviets are praying for a Labour victory” [see also Brian Crozier, p. 26]; which seemed, in both cases, an odd way to go about winning friends and influencing people—except people who would be voting Labour anyway. The chief danger to the Conservative Party at that stage looked like being complacency.

Every election is presented by those involved as a historic turning point: but there really have been two such watersheds in Britain since the Second World War. The first was in 1945, when the electors opted for a Labour government and a welfare state; an option that was hardly challenged by subsequent, ostensibly Conservative governments. The concomitant policies of high public spending and high taxation, appeasement of the trade unions, and a ratchet whereby leftward change was deemed irreversible were continued through a quarter-century of national decline. The second watershed came in 1979, when, recoiling from the brink of hyperinflation and appalled by the “winter of discontent,” in which trade-union militancy had left the dead unburied and piles of trash uncollected in the streets, the voters turned to a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, who broke the postwar mold.