The election of a Tory government headed by the infamous ‘milk-snatcher' of the social services and the ‘iron maiden' of the Cold War, with its industrial policies under the direction of an ideologue of the ‘new right', has given rise to widespread apprehension on the left that we are about to face an all-out onslaught against the historically accumulated gains of the workers' movement.
This view is clearly expressed by Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today. Resting his interpretation upon a view of Thatcherism as ‘a new kind of global rightism' expressing a resurgence of middle class, populist right-wing sentiment, he writes: ‘Already it is clear that the Tories meant what they said. A wide-ranging attack on the position of the working class and on the democratic achievements of the post-war period has commenced, the ferocity of which will overshadow anything we have witnessed since the war.' (1)
Sentiments like this, based on the ideological significance of ‘Thatcherism', are rarely very clear about the relationship of class forces constricting the action of Thatcher and her supporters. But this is decisive, for if the expected attack is launched in an unfavourable context — if the working class is able to resist as it was under the Heath government — then Thatcher may well face crushing defeat.
Implicit in the view of those who warn that a right-wing offensive is imminent is that the government is not short-sighted, that working-class strength has been seriously eroded over the past five years. Defensive struggles for basic rights would then seem the task of the hour. Jacques and other contributors to Marxism Today go further, calling for ‘a new kind of mass politics', ‘a new set of alliances' that will ‘champion a new kind of national alternative, a new type of democratic modernism for British society, with broad popular appeal.' [illegible] unclear (reflecting, I suspect, the authors' uncertain and confused conception of the present government). But the intent seems to be something like a ‘new version' of the popular front of the 1930s whereby the labour movement is to undercut Thatcher's populist rightism by evincing a greater sensitivity to the concerns of its middle-class base.
It is my view that the Thatcher government cannot be understood as the product of a new right-wing sentiment in the country reflected in a fortified Tory middle-class base that has imposed its will on the party leadership. Nor was Thatcher's triumph the outcome of a battle between competing ideological factions in the party. Both these factors may be elements in the situation, but neither is dominant. In essence, the Thatcher government represents a new tactical course for the Tory leadership and the ruling class as a whole; the lessons of the 8th government have been drawn, and the new context analysed. Underlying this new course is a far more perspicacious assessment of the relationship of class forces than that upheld by many on the left, for the ruling class has understood that the working class has lost none of its potential combativity since the fall of Heath. But the rulers are equally well aware of the weaknesses of the British working class and its organizations, and the aim of the new course is to manipulate these weaknesses ‘taking due account of the strengths' in the interests of British capital. Thatcher's ‘radicalism' thus enjoys a very wide consensus among the Tory leaders, but it is strictly circumscribed by the prevailing pattern of class relations.
Those who interpret this government's policies primarily in terms of the ideological pronouncements of its leading figures have short memories. The most cursory examination of the programmatic roots of the Thatcher government finds them firmly implanted in the early years of the Heath administration, when ‘Selsdon man' set out to rout the ‘lame ducks' of British industry. Reinvigoration of the market economy, reduction of the public sector, tax cuts, curtailments of ‘trade-union power' — all these are watchwords of the pre-1970 Heath opposition and of its first period of office. [illegible] Heath's retreat in the face of the unexpected strength of working-class opposition to his policies. The result was that a government ostensibly committed to lifting socialism's foot from the neck of the free-enterprise economy presided over one of the sharpest increases in the weight of state spending in total national output since the end of the war. Public spending for counter-cyclical objectives did not prevent the economy from plummeting into a deep recession, and the share of GNP accounted for by the public sector consequently soared towards the magic 50 per cent threshold.
Resentment at this abandonment of deeply held political aims was considerable among Tory back-benchers, but the very nature of the parliamentary system and the relative flexibility of the Conservative Party kept it effectively bottled up until Heath's policy came to grief and resulted in electoral disaster. Heath's ouster and Thatcher's victory represented the ascendancy of those who wanted to return to the Tory fundamentalism of Selsdon Park and who felt that the mid-term reversal of Tory policies had been unwise and unnecessary. (2)
Margaret Thatcher, the one member of the Heath cabinet to have mounted any serious resistance to Heath's change of direction, and front-bench figures like John Biffen (now first secretary at the Treasury), one of the most persistent back-bench thorns in the side of the Tory whips over such issues as state aid to industry and incomes policy, rose rapidly within the party as a result of the shift in the political balance. But it must not be forgotten that this was but a change in the relationship of forces within the party — not a dramatic upheaval in its structure or leadership. As the Economist pointed out in the wake of the formation of the government: ‘If she (Thatcher) was ever inclined to create an administration of the radical right — and we doubt she ever was — there were clearly not the ministerial resources to do so. The upper echelons of the Conservative party remain a coalition and this was the material from which she had to build her team. So, despite the apparent radicalism of the Thatcher revolution, her 22-member cabinet contains 18 of Mr. Edward Heath's ministers.' (3)
[illegible] government was analysed incisively at the time by Robin Blackburn. His words are worth recalling here, for in general they apply equally to Thatcher: ‘Because the Left has not yet understood the new political formula which Heath is developing, it postulates that some fundamental mutation in the form of bourgeois domination is imminent. What is argued in this article is that the innovation involved is at the level of fundamental policy options, not at that of the political form of the state... With Heath the Conservative Party has produced a leader who promises to defend effectively and coherently the interests of a major sector of British capitalism and to develop a new formula for both foreign and domestic politics. In formulating a strategy for restoring the fortunes of British capitalism, he intends to jettison the backwardness of British bourgeois politics — its sentimentalism about old friends and old customs — and to exploit the backwardness of the British working class — its parliamentarism and economism.' (4)
Blackburn correctly pointed out that Heath's outlook entailed the reorientation of Britain's international ties from America to Europe and the replacement of the ‘consensus' politics of Toryism in the fifties and sixties by a sharp prosecution of the class struggle in the interests of the bourgeoisie. These were two sides of the same coin, for the success of the ‘European' project depended upon British capitalism's overcoming (or at least reducing) its historic weakness relative to its EEC partners; this, in turn, required that the workers shoulder the social burden of rebuilding British capitalism, with the inevitable erosion of the traditions of steadily rising real incomes and full employment. These objectives are not incidental policy goals, but fundamental coordinates of any capitalist government in contemporary Britain, whether headed by Heath, Thatcher, or even Callaghan. Failure to understand these basic class coordinates and the unity of purpose they impose upon bourgeois politicians leads to misunderstanding of the dynamics of contemporary British politics. Andrew Gamble, for example, in an often perceptive analysis of the origins and ideology of ‘Thatcherism',(5) attempts to explain Tory policies in terms of counterposed factions in the Conservative Party. He is thus compelled to posit a chasm between the ‘traditional Tory' (Heathite) and ‘new right' (Thatcherite) wings of the party and thereby minimizes the distinctive features of the Heath government. He notes that ‘the Selsdon Park conference in 1970 and the manifesto that followed it showed many concessions to the weight of New Right opinion. It is also true that the early period of the Heath Government is often seen as marking a sharp break with consensus politics and as a harbinger of Thatcherism'. But he then dismisses this view: ‘This was radicalism, however, in pursuit of the central objective of the postwar Social Democratic state — a prosperous national economy. The Heath Government, after the frustration and the failures of Labour's administration, experimented with measures to make the economy more efficient and productive without questioning the real fundamentals of Social Democracy or Keynesianism. It continued to fund high levels of welfare spending and to accept responsibility for the level of unemployment and the rate of growth.'
This analysis, however, cannot stand up. To begin with, a ‘prosperous national economy' is not the desire solely of ‘the postwar Social Democratic state' but of all capitalist governments — the problem is how to achieve it. Moreover, Gamble ignores the fact that the relationship of class forces forced the Heath administration to introduce its policies somewhat selectively (but it must be said that any government prepared to introduce the Industrial Relations Bill, the ‘lame duck' policy, and the Housing Finance Bill was a good deal more ‘radical' than Gamble allows). More important, it was this relationship of forces — not some ideological revulsion to unemployment and economic stagnation — that obliged Heath to change direction sharply. After the bitter resistance to the Industrial Relations Bill, the liquidation of UCS, the National Industrial Relations Court, and the 1972 miners' strike — all initiated by the very rank-and-file trade-union organization the Tories most wanted to undermine — it would have been impossible either to ignore the problems of mounting inflation and unemployment or to have tried to enact an incomes policy without making concessions to the trade unions in spheres other than wages.
Gamble also finds it necessary to magnify the degree of antagonism within the present government, calling it ‘more divided than at any time since the 1930s'. This claim is based on his contention that the ‘prospect of policies that seek to dismantle Social Democracy by "rolling back" the state in economic affairs, and rolling it forward to confront trade union power, fills many of the present Conservative leadership (Gilmour, Pym, Prior, Carlisle, Walker, and Whitelaw among them) with alarm'.
It is certainly true that there are political differences in the government, some of them potentially important. But they operate within a certain framework. For example, the right agrees that the relationship of forces compels a cautious approach, and is thus willing to leave such areas as trade-union relations to a Tory ‘centrist' like Prior. At the same time, although Thatcher has pulled back from the European connection to a certain extent, drawing closer to Washington, this shift represents a response to changing circumstances more than a break with established policies. The heady optimism of the early days of the EEC has proved largely unfounded. The ‘European Community' has actually become little more than a ‘common market', political integration remaining limited to the symbolic constitution of a parliamentarians' kindergarten in Strasbourg. On all decisive matters — foreign policy, defence, energy, monetary policy, etc — the respective national governments retain a tight grip on their power and have even shown unwillingness to coordinate policies. Indeed, the economic crisis is throwing governments back towards policies in which domestic considerations predominate.
The ruling class has always understood the intimate relation between politics and economics. And the failure of European political integration has two consequences: Britain has some scope to bid for ‘great power' status once again; and the position of the United States as the key imperialist power, despite its political and economic difficulties, remains unaltered. London's aspiration for a ‘world role', important for material and ideological reasons, therefore implies a turn to Washington. The problem of Britain's ‘independent nuclear deterrent' sums up the situation. The present Polaris system is thoroughly outdated. In the absence of a coherent European defence strategy, and given their present outlook, the Tories will surely want to renovate it. But that will almost certainly mean acquiring a new American system, which may bind Britain even closer to Washington, since Moscow may insist that the British missile component be included with the American for the purposes of SALT. But none of this amounts to a real reversal of Heath's European option. All areas of government responsibility having a special ‘European' significance remain in the hands of ‘loyal Europeans': Carrington and Gilmour in the Foreign Office; Peter Walker in Agriculture; John Nott in Trade.
At the same time, the Tory ‘centre' shares many of the conceptions of the Thatcher circle. Sir Ian Gilmour, one of the most articulate of Tory moderates and a staunch defender of Macmillan's ‘middle way', expounded his views in considerable detail in 1977. He expressed himself as follows on the unions: ‘The trade union leaders are as unrepresentative of their rank and file as was the mediaeval Church of the laiety, or as were the bishops of the inferior clergy.... Finally, much as Luther believed that the Church of his day was a barrier between the Christian and his God, so trade unions are now an obstacle to the prosperity of their members.... Whatever the other reasons for Britain's economic failure, strong trade unions are certainly one of them. Although they did so in the past, these costly antiques do not now further the interests of their members. ‘Nevertheless Britain is heavily unionized and likely to remain so.... The political task therefore is to make trade-union activity less self-destructive and to bring home to the average trade-unionist that union power is only legitimate within limits, that it should be subject to the rule of law, and parliamentary government, and that he has an obligation to his country, to the community, and to his family as well as to the union.' (6)
On economic policy: ‘The eclectic Conservative... is not averse to governmental intervention in the economy. He sees it as a fact of life throughout the Western world. But he does not believe that a government can now unnecessarily spend itself out of a recession without unacceptable inflation. In the last three years he has seen high public expenditure in conjunction with both inflation and unemployment. He accepts that monetary policy is important, and he considers it to be an essential weapon against inflation.... He agrees with Keith Joseph that "monetarism is not enough."' (7) ‘Finally the Conservative will help industry by mastering inflation... in tackling inflation no tool of economic management should be discarded. To conquer inflation the British government will need to maintain strict control of public expenditure and the public sector borrowing requirement; it will need a strict monetary policy; it will need some form of incomes policy; and it will need to develop its policies in consultation with all sides of industry.' (8) And on foreign policy: ‘The international outlook is much bleaker. There has been what the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Haig, has called "an explosion" in Russia's military capabilities.... They have been turning Russia into a vast arsenal because they wish to increase Russian influence and eventually dominate the world.... The Conservative will restore the faith of our allies in Britain's will to resist by seeing that our armed forces are once more properly equipped to fight. Only a strengthened and united West will be able to ensure that Russia pursues a non-aggressive course.' (9)
What we see here are certainly important areas of divergence from the Thatcherite wing of the party — especially over the need ‘for some kind of incomes policy' — but nothing like the sort of deep split Gamble suggests. It is ironic that those who exaggerate the extremism of the Thatcherites and the current government are led to overestimate its weakness. What makes a genuine working unity within the government possible is awareness of the urgency of the situation and of the need for some policy that can move towards breaking the political deadlock, whatever that policy might be. The Tory moderates are thus quite prepared to give the right considerable rein to see what they can do. Lest it be thought that to ascribe a deep sense of urgency to the Tory leadership is to distort the real situation, it is worthwhile to quote Lord Gowrie, himself a junior minister throughout the Heath administration: ‘While there does exist a threat to the survival of our democratic institutions, it comes less from the unions than from the tendency of all governments to offer the electorate a number of irreconcilable alternatives simultaneously: stable prices; full employment; a steady rise in consumption; ever-increasing welfare benefits; significant personal liberties. So long as governments, and I have to include Conservative governments, go on trying to square the circle, our economy will be in danger of collapse. Collapse will not involve simply a change of administration or leadership, a period of belt-tightening or dusting down of the Dunkirk spirit. It will put an end, for the rest of the century at least, to the relative improvement which our time has made to mass living standards and expectations. It is hard to see how the kind of personal choices and democratic freedoms we enjoy could stand an immediate and permanent (so far as our own lifetimes are concerned) reduction, to some quarter or half of present levels, of the standards of working people's life in this country. We would be in the position of East Germany, say, in 1950; and with rather worse prospects.' (10)
In a remarkably perceptive analysis founded on bourgeois class consciousness he went on to pinpoint the weaknesses of Heath's strategy and recommended what has become the course of the present government: ‘But tempting as a permanent wages policy may appear, it nevertheless remains a chimera. Workers of all kinds are at least as interested in differentials and special rewards for special skills as in what TUC rhetoric calls "fair shares". We have, too, the evidence of the referendum on Europe, as well as of all Conservative electoral victories, to show that the political aims of union leaders are very often at odds with those of their rank and file. It should not be part of Conservative industrial relations policy to politicize the trade union movement further. We know from experience that a wages policy has special dangers for the Tories, since for political rewards in the short term, and no economic rewards in the long term, it brings the leadership of a party opposed by Labour in Parliament into direct confrontation with the leadership of the labour movement in industry.... What a government can do, and what a Conservative government should do, is allow free collective bargaining but offset the effects through cuts in its own expenditure.' (emphasis in original) (11)
Lord Gowrie then advocated a ‘withdrawal of government' far more extensive than that contemplated by the present government and suggested counterbalancing it by a system of ‘negative income tax' allowances to the poor. But the basic approach is clearly in resonance with Thatcher's.
This policy builds upon the lessons of the Heath administration and subsequent events. It grasps the economic and political weakness of the British working class, which was able to defeat the Heath government's economic policy but was incapable of constituting any alternative to the Wilson/Callaghan leadership, which accomplished through stealth much of what Heath failed to accomplish with force. The Tories therefore propose to minimize confrontation on the economic terrain by accepting ‘free collective bargaining' and taking a cautious approach to trade-union ‘reform'. They will rely instead on a combination of manipulation of market forces and political control of social expenditure to attack working-class living standards in the interests of profit. The working class, they reason, will be unable to respond to this on the industrial level, and the traditional political response, through the Labour Party, will be confined to parliamentary channels that pose no threat to a government that commands a secure majority.
Certainly this approach will have serious consequences on the social scene and bring results more slowly than an incomes policy. A return to an annual inflation rate near the 20% mark and an unemployment figure on the order of 2 million would be in prospect, with all the agitation that would be generated within the working class. But Britain has now been through this before: the shock will not be so great after the experience of 27% inflation and 1.5 million out of work under a Labour government. Moreover, the labour movement has shown no sign of an effective fight against unemployment. And as long as wage rises can be held at least marginally below the rate of inflation, there will be scope to raise profits through redistribution from public spending (spending and tax cuts) and through increased productivity (once the international recession eases). Indeed, a labour shake out from less productive sectors combined with productivity bargaining can provide significant gains for British capital. In this sense the steel dispute is meant to serve as a model for all British industry.
Undoubtedly, the Tories expect a stormy time, but if it can be ridden out during the early years of the government, then the results — greater profitability, renewed investment and growth, slower inflation — will be reinforced by an upturn in the international economy before the next election. The government could then claim to have made the first dent in solving the country's economic problems. That the gains were small and transitory, and that they had been scored at the cost of squeezed real wages, deteriorating social services, and mounting unemployment, might then be overshadowed, especially if the Labour movement were in sufficient disarray because of its inability to halt these attacks. A Tory government with a renewed mandate would then deepen this sense of demoralization in the working class, and then some of the more dire predictions about Thatcherism might come close to the truth.
What are the possibilities for resisting this rather bleak scenario? They are not inconsiderable. For one thing, the rigid division between the ‘economic' and ‘political' in the British labour movement has tended to become blurred during the past decade. Just the sort of politicization Lord Gowrie warns about is now becoming part of the tradition of the labour movement, and a change of tack by the Tories cannot wipe the slate clean. A significant section of the labour movement — though still a minority — will understand the content of the Tory attack and the need for a centralized and coordinated struggle against it. The Tories are not unaware of this — it is no coincidence that the Prior proposals are so preoccupied with ‘secondary picketing', a weapon that grants the ranks, as opposed to the bureaucracy, key power in industrial struggles. Even if the deviousness of Tory policy makes it more difficult for ordinary workers to identify the enemy (is it the boss who is going out of business? the Labour council that puts up the rates and the hospital administration that tells you a year for an operation?), they will be in no doubt that something is wrong. If these hundreds of thousands of trade-union militants who do understand who is behind it all are organized, with a coherent programme that explains what is wrong and what must be done, then real mass action of the sort that plunged the Heath government into crisis is possible once again.
The steel strike has shown that the government cannot avoid deep involvement in serious tests of strength. All it can hope to do is to hold such struggle to a minimum. The left, on the other hand, must link every struggle to defend wages against inflation, every fight against redundancies and closures, every battle to defend social services, with the actions and intentions of this government. At the same time, these struggles must be connected to the debates going on in the Labour Party: when the mass of working people instinctively turn to Labour as the crisis bites, they must find something there that encourages them to fight for an alternative to Tory austerity and to avoid the dead-end of parliamentary manoeuvring.
The central problem is not to modify the policies of the left in an attempt to drive a wedge between Thatcher and her middle-class supporters. The Tories themselves are quite clear about the central problem they face. It is to undermine the combativity of the working class. If they cannot do this, their electoral base — a decisive portion of which comes from the working class — will fall into disarray as it did in 1974, and will then begin to seek an alternative.
As Martin Jacques correctly stresses, the left must ‘demonstrate its breadth, practicality and vision' through ‘popular, practical alternatives'. But these cannot be hazy schemes for ‘a new type of democratic modernism for British society'. They must be socialist policies that expose the roots of the present crisis and project the anti-capitalist measures needed to extirpate them. Above all — and this is another side of the same coin — they must constitute a programme for struggle.
Footnotes
1. Marxism Today, November [illegible].
2. For [an account] of the sense of betrayal many Tory back-benchers felt at Heath's turn, see Jock Bruce-Gardyne, M.P., Whatever Happened to the Quiet Revolution?, London, 1974; for a Thatcher supporter's view of the part this played in her election to the leadership [illegible].
3. ‘Cabinet-maker', The Economist, 12 May 1979, p. 13.
4. Robin Blackburn, ‘The Heath Government: A New Course for British Capitalism', New Left Review, no. 70.
5. [illegible]
6. Ian Gilmour, Inside Right, London, 1977, pp. 238-[240].
7. Ibid., p. 232.
8. Ibid., p. 252.
9. [illegible] eds., The Conservative Opportunity, London.
10. [illegible]
11. Ibid., pp. 143, 149. Emphasis in original.
12. Ibid.