Read Online Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Graham Stewart
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nation’s finances back into the black.
Callaghan doing the shopping could never have struck the same chord. All the same, as the market research suggested, it was his team’s less inventive approach that won the propaganda war of
1979. The press’s cameramen were tipped off in time to photograph Callaghan with his grandchildren emerging from a local church service, even though few could recall him being a noted
attendee outside of election time. When, as the campaign reached its denouement, he walked out of an interview because he objected to the persistent line of questioning about the unions, his team
leant on ITN to broadcast neither the interview nor his temper tantrum. 17 ITN duly obliged. Deference to Downing Street was not entirely dead.
Five Weeks that Shaped a Decade?
Despite the claims of both sides that the very future of a prosperous or fair Britain was at stake, the 1979 election never descended into a slanging match, with both Thatcher
and Callaghan avoiding making personal remarks about each other. Front-bench spokesmen in danger of offering policy hostages to fortune – Tony Benn for Labour and the Conservative Sir Keith
Joseph – were kept from fronting press conferences as much as possible. Indeed, the only major gaffe came from Callaghan’s predecessor, Harold Wilson, who appeared to suggest his wife
Mary might vote for the Conservatives because they were led by a woman.
At the campaign’s outset, on 30 March, a bomb exploded under the car of Airey Neave, the shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, as it pulled out of the House of Commons car park.
An IRA splinter group, the INLA, claimed responsibility. Neave, a Colditz escapee, had been Thatcher’s campaign manager for the Tory leadership in 1975. His murder brought both cross-party
condemnation and the fear that the election campaign might be marred by bombings and assassination attempts. Instead, the five weeks passed without further serious incident, although Callaghan was
dogged by hecklers from a group calling itself (without evident irony) Socialist Unity, who tried to break up the Labour leader’s speaking engagements by chanting ‘Troops out of
Northern Ireland’.
The handling of Ulster’s Troubles was one of the few areas in which Labour and the Conservatives were in close agreement. Although on some other issues the difference was only a matter of
degree: the Tories promised not to cut NHS spending, focusing instead on reversing their opponents’ discouragement of private health provision; both parties were committed to keeping British
forces in NATO, although only the Tories promised significant increases in the defence budget. Labour’s preparedness to nationalize more companies was kept imprecise, with merely a pledge to
keep ‘using public ownership to sustain and create new jobs’. The Tories restricted their privatization crusade to those industries most recently nationalized – shipbuilding and
aerospace – and the National Freight Corporation. The big industries and utilities – coal, steel, telephones, gas, etc. – would remain in state ownership. There would be no
dramatic dismantling of the mixed economy. While a subsequent generation came to see 1979 as marking the end of the post-war consensus, voters at the time actually perceived the main parties to be
closer than during the heyday of ‘Butskellism’: in 1955, 74 per cent of those polled by Gallup believed there were important differences between the main parties; in 1979, only 54 per
cent did so. 18
The ideological chasm might have been broader but for the fact that the Labour leader kept tight reins on what went into his party’s manifesto, whilethe Conservative
leader had much less input into what went into hers. Callaghan’s insistence that nothing became an election pledge unless he agreed with it ensured that proposals to nationalize one or more
of the big four banks or to give up the nuclear deterrent were dropped.
Callaghan doing the shopping could never have struck the same chord. All the same, as the market research suggested, it was his team’s less inventive approach that won the propaganda war of
1979. The press’s cameramen were tipped off in time to photograph Callaghan with his grandchildren emerging from a local church service, even though few could recall him being a noted
attendee outside of election time. When, as the campaign reached its denouement, he walked out of an interview because he objected to the persistent line of questioning about the unions, his team
leant on ITN to broadcast neither the interview nor his temper tantrum. 17 ITN duly obliged. Deference to Downing Street was not entirely dead.
Five Weeks that Shaped a Decade?
Despite the claims of both sides that the very future of a prosperous or fair Britain was at stake, the 1979 election never descended into a slanging match, with both Thatcher
and Callaghan avoiding making personal remarks about each other. Front-bench spokesmen in danger of offering policy hostages to fortune – Tony Benn for Labour and the Conservative Sir Keith
Joseph – were kept from fronting press conferences as much as possible. Indeed, the only major gaffe came from Callaghan’s predecessor, Harold Wilson, who appeared to suggest his wife
Mary might vote for the Conservatives because they were led by a woman.
At the campaign’s outset, on 30 March, a bomb exploded under the car of Airey Neave, the shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, as it pulled out of the House of Commons car park.
An IRA splinter group, the INLA, claimed responsibility. Neave, a Colditz escapee, had been Thatcher’s campaign manager for the Tory leadership in 1975. His murder brought both cross-party
condemnation and the fear that the election campaign might be marred by bombings and assassination attempts. Instead, the five weeks passed without further serious incident, although Callaghan was
dogged by hecklers from a group calling itself (without evident irony) Socialist Unity, who tried to break up the Labour leader’s speaking engagements by chanting ‘Troops out of
Northern Ireland’.
The handling of Ulster’s Troubles was one of the few areas in which Labour and the Conservatives were in close agreement. Although on some other issues the difference was only a matter of
degree: the Tories promised not to cut NHS spending, focusing instead on reversing their opponents’ discouragement of private health provision; both parties were committed to keeping British
forces in NATO, although only the Tories promised significant increases in the defence budget. Labour’s preparedness to nationalize more companies was kept imprecise, with merely a pledge to
keep ‘using public ownership to sustain and create new jobs’. The Tories restricted their privatization crusade to those industries most recently nationalized – shipbuilding and
aerospace – and the National Freight Corporation. The big industries and utilities – coal, steel, telephones, gas, etc. – would remain in state ownership. There would be no
dramatic dismantling of the mixed economy. While a subsequent generation came to see 1979 as marking the end of the post-war consensus, voters at the time actually perceived the main parties to be
closer than during the heyday of ‘Butskellism’: in 1955, 74 per cent of those polled by Gallup believed there were important differences between the main parties; in 1979, only 54 per
cent did so. 18
The ideological chasm might have been broader but for the fact that the Labour leader kept tight reins on what went into his party’s manifesto, whilethe Conservative
leader had much less input into what went into hers. Callaghan’s insistence that nothing became an election pledge unless he agreed with it ensured that proposals to nationalize one or more
of the big four banks or to give up the nuclear deterrent were dropped.
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