David Reynolds - Island Stories

In the years after 1918, those ‘hard-faced men’ and their political allies kept control of the government, and also the banks, mines, big industries, most of the press and the cinema. This, said Labour’s manifesto, happened in all the big industrialised countries. So, ‘The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.’ They acted solely in the interest of their own private monopolies ‘which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.’

Similar forces were at work now in 1945, the manifesto warned. ‘The problems and pressure of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace.’ On election morning, 5 July, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror told readers: ‘Vote on behalf of the men who won the victory for you. You failed to do so in 1918 . The result is known to all . ’ The paper devoted most of its front page to reprinting a Zec cartoon first published on VE Day in May. This showed a weary, battered soldier holding out a laurel wreath labelled ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’. The caption read: ‘Here You Are – Don’t Lose it Again.’[16]

This narrative of the lost peace, torn from the hands of the people by greedy capitalists, was sharpened by bitter memories of mass unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Together they informed Labour’s campaign of nationalisation after its triumph in 1945. The flagship policies of bringing the commanding heights of the economy – industries such as coal, steel, utilities and railways – into public ownership and providing a stronger social safety net through the welfare state and the National Health Service were presented as repayment to the people for their sacrificial efforts during two world wars in a quarter of a century.

Once built, however, Labour’s edifice became a central target of the declinist narrative of another Tory three decades later: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She outlined her stark version of history in the introduction to her memoirs, The Downing Street Years : ‘Britain in 1979 was a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it’ over the course of the previous century. In economic terms, Thatcher acknowledged that some degree of relative decline was inevitable, once rivals such as America and Germany caught up with Britain’s head start. But, she argued, the country had ‘failed to respond to the challenge effectively. We invested less; we educated and trained our people to a lower standard; and we allowed our workers and manufacturers to combine in various cartels that restricted competition and reduced efficiency.’ Most serious of all, after 1945 the country had indulged in a protracted and disastrous experiment with socialism. This ‘represented a centralising, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government’, which ‘jammed a finger in every pie’ on the principle that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.’[17]

Breaking the hold of Labour statism was not merely a domestic priority. Thatcher argued that ‘Britain’s weakened economic position meant that its international role was bound to be cramped and strained as well.’ She cited the failure of the Suez expedition of 1956 as a turning point – in her opinion a military victory undermined by ‘political and economic weakness’ because Anthony Eden’s government withdrew the troops that had regained the Canal after a run on the pound encouraged by Washington. ‘Whatever the details’, she continued briskly (and evasively), this defeat ‘entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world.’ Thanks to the ‘Suez syndrome’, as she called it, ‘having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence.’[18]

Her account of history was not just retrospective wisdom. Reversing decline was almost the leitmotif of Thatcher’s politics. ‘Britain’s prestige in the eyes of the world has gone down and down,’ she had declared during her very first election campaign in 1950, when she was 24: ‘We Conservatives are not afraid to face the future whatever problem it entails, because it is our earnest desire to make Great Britain great again.’[19] Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of her message in the 1979 campaign. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she exclaimed to a BBC interviewer. ‘We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now!’[20] She told an audience in Bolton: ‘Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time, like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.’[21] This was her refrain right to the end. ‘Let me give you my vision,’ she declaimed in her final election broadcast. ‘Somewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again; this I know in my heart.’[22]

Thatcher shared with Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill a Napoleonic belief in the capacity of a great leader to transform history through sheer willpower. Indeed, in her memoirs she applied to herself the famous words of William Pitt the Elder, during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63: ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can.’[23] And she employed her formidable will and conviction to cover inner insecurities and get her way in an overwhelmingly male world. Not only did she seem happiest when ‘up against a wall’, biographer Hugo Young observed. But ‘when she wasn’t actually embattled, she needed to imagine or invent the condition: embattled against the cabinet, against Whitehall, against the country, against the world’.[24]

After Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War, Cummings in the Daily Express (16 June 1982) shows her waving the Union Jack in triumph while white-flag merchants from the Foreign Office and the Labour party – Tony Benn (middle) and party leader Michael Foot (right) – lie flat on their backs.

Indeed one can say that her grand narrative of those Downing Street years was constructed around two triumphant battles royal against ‘decline’: the Falklands War in the spring of 1982 and the miners’ strike of 1984–5. Argentina’s shock capture of the Falkland Islands, which it claimed as the Malvinas, provoked a cross-party wave of anger in Parliament on 3 April, but Thatcher made the operation to liberate the 1,800 British islanders from Argentine rule into her own personal crusade. And she used the eventual victory over General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta to make a larger point. ‘When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts,’ she told a Tory rally in Cheltenham on 3 July 1982. ‘Those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were.’ But now, she proclaimed, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat … Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’[25] Or more pithily, to a jubilant crowd singing ‘Rule Britannia’ outside 10 Downing Street: ‘Great Britain is great again.’[26] Almost as if the mission she had set herself in 1950 had now been accomplished.