Culture Wars Page 4

  This was bound up with a broader debate about the reform of local government. The new urban left and new right were both critics of local government, as it was then constituted. The left’s critique of local council ‘paternalism’ led it to explore new ways of involving and empowering the public. By contrast, the new right’s diagnosis of local government ills was more damning, and its prescription more far-reaching. It argued that local councils were ‘monopolistic’ providers of services that put the interests of bureaucracy and staff unions before those of the public, and were consequently costly and inefficient. It also maintained that councils under left-wing control were not fully accountable in local communities dominated by Labour.43 Therefore, their operation had to be restructured through privatisation, competitive tendering, local tax reform and central financial controls.

  Both sides were trying in different ways to ‘improve’ local government. This led to a running battle over the level of public spending, the role and autonomy of local government and the organisation and management of local public services. How this conflict was reported, and how the public responded, was to influence the development of municipal politics and local government for a long time to come.

  Generational war

  However, the battle between the urban left and new right was not simply an extension of the clash between collectivism and neoliberalism, and of the class-based constituencies these two traditions represented, to the area of local government. What gave this clash an added bitterness was that it was caught up in a war between generations. In 1985, the elders in the government, such as the Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher), Deputy Prime Minister (William Whitelaw) and Education Minister (Sir Keith Joseph), were in their sixties. The coming men of the radical right, like Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson, were in their fifties. So, too, were all five Environment Ministers between 1979 and 1989 (Heseltine, King, Jenkin, Baker and Ridley) with the partial exception of Heseltine in the early part of his watch. The overwhelming majority of the 1983 cabinet reached their majority in the 1940s and 1950s.44

  The leading personalities of the mid-1980s government had grown up at a time when Britain ruled an empire; young men were taught discipline through national service in the armed forces; patriarchal values were entrenched; gay sex was criminalised; and much of the media were subject to strict moral regulation. The new generation that came of age in the 1960s partly turned its back on this legacy – its shared values, cherished memories, sense of hierarchy and stifling conformism. This had provoked a cultural clash between generations. Many in the older generation resented what they saw as the rejection of their values, and the withholding of respect. They had deferred to their parents, and not been accorded the same deal by their children’s generation. Indeed, the youth culture of the 1960s very publicly and pointedly satirised the notion that age brought wisdom through accumulated experience.45

  In the early 1980s, a section of the older generation struck back. It argued that the sixties cultural revolt had undermined authority and promoted indiscipline, selfishness and anti-social behaviour. This attack was led not by disgruntled letter-writers from Cheltenham, but by the democratically elected leadership of the country.46 Their assault was both explicit and eloquent. Thus, Rhodes Boyson, a fifty-seven-year-old Conservative politician (and former head teacher) proclaimed in 1982: ‘the permissive age, which blossomed in the late 1960s … has created a pathless desert for many of our young people’. Sixties permissiveness, he continued, had fostered debased morals and false values, encouraged the break-up of stable families, and given rise to growing crime. ‘Society’, he warned, ‘has reaped dragons’ teeth’ sown in the sick decade.47 The same theme, and even the same imagery, was repeated by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, when she responded to a national debate about the causes of urban riots and the rise of ‘black crime’. ‘We are reaping what was sown in the 1960s’, she warned, when ‘the old virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated’.48 Her protégé, Norman Tebbit, then Trade and Industry Minister, reprised the same argument, with the same imagery, in a well-received public lecture. In the 1960s ‘was sown the wind: and we are reaping the whirlwind’. The ‘permissives’ of the 1960s, he warned, had laid the foundation for ‘today’s violent society’.49

  These jeremiads, delivered by middle-aged, right-wing politicians, were supported by the outpourings of middle-aged, right-wing journalists.50 Thus, fifty-five-year-old George Gale proclaimed that Britain’s riots in 1981 were caused by a ‘revulsion of authority and discipline’ that had taken place during the ‘permissive revolution’ of the 1960s.51 Colin Welch, in the Spectator, also thought that the broadly defined 1960s generation had much to answer for. ‘The decade of the 1960s (or perhaps more precisely ’65–75)’, warned Colin Welch, had ‘injected poisons’ into society that ‘course still through its veins’. Indiscipline was rife because ‘the revolting students of the 1960s’ had become ‘the revolting teachers of today’.52 Christopher Booker, an ambivalent figure in the culture war,53 reworked the same theme in a more apocalyptic mode for Daily Mail readers. ‘The demons of drugs, pornography, violence and permissiveness in all its forms, are now raging out of control’, unleashed, he argued, by the forces first set in motion during the 1960s.54

  The ‘sixties’ became a code word in this generational backlash. It symbolised for some all the negative changes that had taken place in the recent past: the country’s decline in the world, the rise of crime, the erosion of a sense of community, young people with more money than sense, the decline of courtesy and respect. Indeed, a growing legion of folk devils – black muggers, punk rockers, flying pickets, Irish terrorists, football hooligans, single parents, illiterate youngsters and ‘race’ rioters – came to be viewed as facets of a common problem: the loss of authority and erosion of tradition that had begun in the 1960s.55 Some called for an all-encompassing solution – a return to the values of Victorian Britain, its social discipline and sense of order.

  The indignation expressed by middle-aged ministers and journalists at the ‘antics’ of the new urban left in the early 1980s should be understood in the context of this generational conflict. Young politicians like ‘Red Ken’ were the unrepentant representatives of sixties culture. They promoted its values, advanced its political agendas, and even lavished taxpayers’ money on organisations that perpetuated its transgressive legacy. These unreconstructed councillors were viewed as incorrigibles stuck in a time warp of the past, seemingly oblivious to the damage that they and their kind had wreaked and apparently determined to thwart the will of parliament. If the cancer of the 1960s was to be treated effectively, then chemotherapy had to be directed towards the infected cells of local government.

  While this generational conflict drew upon manifold and sometimes unrelated discontents, it was in essence rooted in a genuine value conflict. This was especially the case in relation to the high-voltage issues of race/nation, homosexuality and gender.

  In the late 1970s, ageing traditionalists recalled a time when there was a strong sense of national unity based on ethnic oneness, a shared culture and common heritage. They attributed the erosion of that world, in part, to mass immigration. John Biffen (a member of Thatcher’s first cabinet) wrote bitterly in 1978 that ‘the scale of immigration that has transformed the heartland of many English cities … has not been willed by the British people’.56 His concerns were spelt out by Margaret Thatcher in a pre-election interview:

  If we went on as we are, then by the end of the century there would be 4 million people of the New Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means people are really afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture. And, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world, that if there is a fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.57

  Margaret Thatcher spoke up for traditionalists fearful tha
t their culture would be ‘swamped’ because she instinctively understood their fears, and was seeking their electoral support. With equal empathy, she understood the denting of pride which traditionalists of her generation experienced when Britain so hurriedly discarded its empire between 1947 and 1964. It was this elegiac feeling of loss and uncertainty that Thatcher addressed in her historic speech to a euphoric crowd of some 5,000 people celebrating the Falklands War victory:

  There were those who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did. Those who believed that our decline was irreversible … those [who feared] that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well, they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities that shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage and in resolution.58

  The Falklands War confirmed to conservative commentators that Britain was still a force to be reckoned with, and that its bulldog spirit was undiminished. The victory had a powerful resonance because it entailed rescuing distant kith and kin from foreign despotism. ‘If the Falkland islanders’, wrote Peregrine Worsthorne in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘were British citizens with black or brown skins, spoke with strange accents or worshipped different gods it is doubtful whether the Royal Navy and Marines would … be fighting for their liberation’.59

  The Thatcherite sense of community was that of a nation, bonded by its ethnic unity, proud heritage and resurgent confidence. It was an image of Britain as a recuperated country that had resumed its rightful place in the world. While this was only one part of a complex discourse,60 it was informed by nostalgia and a backward-looking desire to restore what had been lost. It was thus at odds with the new urban left’s attempt to come to terms with the past in a different way – by building a new sense of community. Thatcher’s evocation of an organic nation, bounded by tradition, united by the Union Jack and secure in its ‘British character’, implicitly conflicted with the municipal left’s desire to celebrate London’s rich mixture of peoples and traditions, its cosmopolitanism and its identity as a global city.

  The Thatcher government, and the forces it represented, also became locked into a confrontation with the new urban left over sexuality. The traditional right viewed homosexuality with visceral hostility. It entailed in their view unnatural acts, a view endorsed by conventional morality and Christian proscription. However, there was a liberal strand within traditional Conservatism that favoured ‘live and let live’ tolerance, and had supported the decriminalisation of sex between consenting adult males. These two strands of Conservatism came together in opposition to radical councils because both were affronted by the left’s active support for gay liberation. This was harmful and dangerous, in their view, because it ‘pretended’ that homosexuality was a valid alternative, and was liable to confuse the young and impressionable. This merging of hardline and liberal strands of conservatism is perhaps best illustrated by the views of Max Hastings, a leading, one-nation, Conservative journalist (and, later, editor of the Daily Telegraph). In 1983, dining with his family at a Knightsbridge restaurant, he noticed that three men at a neighbouring table were wearing make-up. This galvanised him into putting his thoughts on paper in an impassioned article that had as its main target the new urban left. ‘A powerful and influential section of opinion makers’, he warned, has gone beyond ‘seeking just sympathy for homosexuals in their misfortune, and now seeks to persuade us that homosexuality and heterosexuality are equally desirable states’. This is dangerous and misguided, he argued, because adolescents ‘should be given every encouragement to choose heterosexuality’ since ‘it is obvious to any but the most absurd militant that the lives of homosexuals are frustrated and tormented, not because of outside persecution, but because of the very nature of their predicament’. Hastings concluded with a rhetorical flourish:

  When we lack the courage to declare this, when we allow ourselves to be intimidated by the threat of denunciation as ‘reactionary’, when we tolerate the granting of public money without protest to ‘gay’ groups in the sacred name of minority rights, then we shall have become not only a cowardly and hypocritical society, afraid to express the obvious, but also a truly decadent one.61

  Battle lines over gender, by contrast, were not as clear cut as they were over sexuality. The urban left had chauvinist elements,62 while the radical right in Britain was less centrally involved in the backlash against women’s liberation than its counterpart in the United States.63 This was partly because the leader of the new right in Britain, Margaret Thatcher, was a woman who had surmounted patriarchal attitudes in the Conservative Party to become the nation’s first female prime minister. Yet, as Stuart Hall convincingly argues, the discourse of the British new right in the 1980s had as ‘a continuous subterranean theme, the restoration of the family, the bulwark of respectable society and conventional sexualities with its fulcrum in the traditional roles for women’.64 This was conveyed through attacks on single mothers, and through nostalgic references to Victorian values when women’s place was recognised to be in the home. It was also mobilised through negative portrayals of feminism. Indeed, one of the ways in which the urban left was attacked was to portray it as the sponsor of ‘loony’ feminist follies such as ‘judo mats for lesbians’ in Islington.

  However, the portrayal of the conflict between the new right and urban left as a generational war needs to be qualified. The radical right included anti-statist libertarians whose outlook was influenced by 1960s’ values, while the urban left included authoritarian traditionalists. Both groupings were coalitions containing different elements. Moreover, while generations tended to differ in terms of their general orientation towards social issues, groups within each generation opposed the attitudes prevailing among their contemporaries. There were fogeyish young people, and ageing radical libertarians. This said, the clash between central and local government in the 1980s was in part a battle between middle-aged ministers whose world-view was formed by the immediate post-war period, and younger councillors who were products of the 1960s’ cultural revolt. This cultural conflict was mainly over issues to do with race, gender, sexuality, tradition and authority. The bitterness it engendered stemmed from the fact that the two sides were set on a collision course. One side was seeking to turn the clock back and undo the harm that it felt had been wrought by a misguided generation; the other was intent on using town halls to promote progressive cultural change in their local communities.

  Retrospect

  In brief, the battle between the new right government and the new urban left in the early 1980s was a confrontation between dynamic opposites. The new right was seeking to regenerate Britain through the fostering of an enterprise culture, while the new urban left was seeking to change local communities as a prelude to transforming society. The struggle that ensued between the Conservative government and radical town halls was one between opposed political philosophies and the different social constituencies these represented. It also became a contest about what local government should do, with both sides disagreeing fundamentally about its role and purpose. Above all, what imbued this struggle with added bitterness was that it was a clash over cultural values between two generations.

  At this point, it is worth introducing the magisterial verdict of local government academics.65 The new urban left, they argue, introduced some new policies that influenced subsequent local administrations. But the new urban left is also criticised for being prone ‘in some instances to a degree of zealotry’,66 although this is an issue which, according to some,67 is clouded by media mythology. More generally, new urban left councils are portrayed as attempting to do too much without adequate administrative experience or financial controls. They are also accused of failing to recognise conflicts of interest between council staff and trade unions (‘producer groups’) and users of council services. Above all, they are portrayed as
failures. They were tamed by central government controls, and lost support within their own party. By 1990, the leaders of most left-wing councils were distinguished from their predecessors by ‘the more modest nature of their political agenda’.68

  The first limitation of this dismissive verdict – though it has some substance on its own terms – is that it is framed narrowly in terms of local public administration. Local government academics seem unaware that a culture war was being conducted between the new right and new urban left. This had its origins in the 1960s, and was to be played out over the next half-century with an unexpected outcome.

  The second flaw in their verdict is that it was written shortly after the developments they describe. It was in effect a first draft of history with no knowledge of what was to come. Yet, the people who were so soundly defeated in the 1980s – and who were written off by local government specialists as architects of an interesting but failed experiment – supplied the future leadership of the Labour party. They turned out not to be career ‘losers’ after all.

  Notes

  1. In a lecture delivered in 1978 (reprinted in M. Jacques and F. Mulherne (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London: Verso, 1981)), Eric Hobsbawm pointed to the long-term economic and social changes that seemed set to halt Labour’s hundred-year rise. His warning was followed by Stuart Hall’s celebrated essay, ‘The great moving right show’, (Marxism Today, January 1979), which highlighted both the failings of Labour’s leadership and the populist appeal of the radical right. These two essays implicitly anticipated Labour’s defeat in the 1979 general election, and strongly influenced the left’s post-mortem. A good collection arising from this extended inquest is S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds.), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983).