How Thatcher’s Class War Remade the Tories
The Tories have always been capitalism’s representatives, but Margaret Thatcher approached that brief in new and brutal ways – taking class war to the very heart of British politics.
Margaret Thatcher celebrating at the Tory Party Conference in 1985. Credit: Gary Stone / Getty Images
Given the party’s formidable electoral strength and uncanny ability to outmanoeuvre Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, Phil Burton-Cartledge’s Falling Down: Parliamentary Conservatism and the Decline of Tory Britain seems to come at a strange time. Burton-Cartledge, known for his A Very Public Sociologist blog, documents the decline of the Conservatives as a culturally relevant, mass membership organisation.
Drawing on the work of Ralph Miliband, Burton-Cartledge argues that the Conservatives are a ruling class party who faithfully represent capitalism. But this isn’t to be understood in a crude fashion where the party constantly furthering the interests of capital – rather, the Conservatives are presented as making ‘socially situated’ decisions reflecting their own circles and internal pressures, acting to pursue the perceived interests of capital.
Crucial to Falling Down’s narrative is the shift from the paternalist one-nation Tory Party of the post-war consensus to the party’s reconfiguration as a Thatcherite vanguard engaged in open class warfare and punitive, divide-and-rule tactics. This ‘two-nation’ conservatism of Thatcher is described as ‘opposing a nation of law-abiding, decent people to a minority of malcontents and troublemakers.’ While there are risks in overstating the scale of this shift in Conservative ideology, this does represent a very real move from a paternalist, consensus politics to the authoritarianism and acquisitive individualism of Thatcher and beyond.
Central to the book’s thesis of the Tory Party’s evolution and direction is Burton-Cartledge’s account of class. By exploring the changing and ‘contradictory’ class position of the UK, the author charts the evolving political landscape of the country. As Laurie Macfarlane has argued, widened asset ownership was used to ‘unmake’ the British working class and splinter people’s sense of solidarity – reminding us of Thatcher’s famous claim that the ‘object’ was ‘to change the soul’. Mass homeownership and the widening of pension and share ownership allowed for the fundamental logic of Thatcherism to become a social norm.
Though the Thatcher era may have been the decisive moment for the transformation of class, the author rightly emphasises that the roots of these changes trace back to at least the 1940s. Though some argue that neoliberalism won the battle and was subsequently used to reshape society, there are reasons to cast doubts on this narrative.
Instead, Burton-Cartledge points to the rise of asset ownership since the war, and the way in which these economic changes steadily eroded the social foundations of the post-war welfare state. Here, the contradictions in the economic regime of the mid-century eventually brought on its own demise. However, rather than a never-ending trend toward growing asset ownership and private affluence, a stark divide has emerged between a generation of asset owners and a generation locked out of these same privileges.
Burton-Cartledge’s account of the Thatcher era is a useful counter to narratives that stress economic liberalism was at the heart of the Conservative’s programme. Instead, he draws on Stuart Hall’s work and foregrounds the roles played by law and order politics, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’, and growing centralisation during the 1980s.
As Hall describes in The Great Moving Right Show and The Empire Strikes Back, the moral panic around law and order in the 1970s and early 1980s as well as the resurgence of British nationalism were crucial to securing consent for Thatcher’s political project. The ‘two nation’ narrative saw those cast as public enemies—Black people, trade unionists, and dissident local councils—on the receiving end of harsh government intervention. Rather than an era of liberalisation, the 1980s were a period of restriction, with new curbs on local democracy, trade union rights, British citizenship, and—with the ramping up of stop and search—basic civil liberties.
From Thatcherism to Majorism
Burton-Cartledge’s description of the role played by John Major’s government is also of immense value. Despite the description of the period as an interregnum, it showcases the role of law and order and crackdowns on rave in carrying Thatcherism forward. Likewise, he demonstrates how Thatcher’s strategy was entrenched under Major so as to eventually find itself continued by the Blair government.
The Private Finance Initiative (PFI), later to symbolise New Labour’s move toward neoliberalism, was a product of the Major era. The author’s account of the commercialisation of departmental practices in Whitehall leads us on to how this approach was next rolled out to healthcare, beginning the trend towards NHS plc. The language of private sector ‘efficiency’ (and public ‘waste’) and the reframing of public service through ideas of consumer choice helped facilitate the market-oriented shift which has dominated government policy since.
This was not just true of the social policy of the late 1990s and 2000s but also the approach to civil liberties and criminal justice. As Burton-Cartledge notes of New Labour, their ‘subsequent record saw… restrictions on liberties entirely consistent with the authoritarian Tory line.’
Crucially, the Major government saw the growth of a significant intergenerational divide. Where the Thatcher government had enjoyed a degree of support from younger voters, the demonisation of youth groups under Major saw the young become increasingly anti-Tory and a greater share of older voters embracing Conservativism. While the Conservatives embraced some socially liberal rhetoric in the late 2000s, the onset of austerity and subsequent mass inequality has ensured this phase was short-lived, and this generational divide has only widened.
Class and the Generation Conundrum
The changes to the economy and class composition since the mid-twentieth century have led to enormous intergenerational inequality, with large parts of the post-war generation amassing great wealth. While far from inevitable, these trends have helped facilitate enormous electoral divisions based on age – social aspects which Falling Down is indispensable for helping us to understand. Changes were capitalised on by the Thatcher and Major governments, with these trends only accelerating since the beginning of austerity since 2010.
Nonetheless, there needs to be a word of caution. Many of the problems younger people find themselves beset by are not uncommon among older generations. Precarity and poor job security have been growing problems for the last decade or more. Millions of pensioners in the country are in poverty. And there are considerable gaps in income and wealth between pensioners, as well as between young and old.
It is tempting to argue that inheritance jeopardises the viability of Burton-Cartledge’s thesis. Though it is important to understand the degree to which generational wealth transfers drive inequality, transfers typically take place between the very elderly and recipients predominantly between the ages of 55 and 64. While this may have some implications for the political cohesiveness of ‘generation left’ any such trend will take decades, while many younger people remain poorer and less secure than previous cohorts.
There are gaps in the argument in places: Burton-Cartledge’s account of the Conservative Party as the only party to be ‘relied on to defend their class system’ is not fully convincing. When push has come to shove, many Labour governments have been willing to pass the buck onto workers, from the Wilson government in the late sixties to the Callaghan government a decade later and the Brown government a decade ago.
The book does not make a substantial case for the decline of the Conservatives as the ruling force in politics. But we get an informed, compelling account of the hollowing out of the Tory Party as an institution, and how this reflects the changing relationship between class, age, and political loyalties.
Over the last few years, we have seen a depth to the well of support for the Conservative government. One response to this is for Labour to chase older homeowners in the so-called ‘Red Wall’, and to push for their interests against the competing interests of Labour’s actually existing social base. This has proved a risky strategy, with the party having suffered two of its worst-ever by-election defeats and on track to potentially lose many more seats.
Falling Down ends by noting that ‘a fifth election victory is within the Conservative Party’s reach’. This statement will surprise few people. The solution to this problem is not obvious.
But for the left, there is value in the hope, as Stuart Hall notes, quoting Antonio Gramsci’s observation that ‘a crisis is not an immediate event but a process: it can last for a long time, and can be very differently resolved’. There is still time for a positive, entirely different outcome to what seems likely at this current juncture – and Falling Down is a valuable tool for reaching that radically different form of social resolution.