London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Sep 18, 2025

Let’s not go back to the denial and delusion of the Thatcher years

Let’s not go back to the denial and delusion of the Thatcher years

Nostalgia, royal navel-gazing and angst: modern Britain is in danger of repeating the mistakes of 40 years ago
Midway through last week, I spent a couple of hours in Redditch, 15 or so miles south of Birmingham. My daughter plays the drums, and she wanted to see the new statue of the late John Bonham, who grew up in Redditch, joined the hugely successful hard rock group Led Zeppelin, and died a tragic death in 1980. We found the impressive memorial in the local market square – an obviously popular meeting place, sullied by a conspicuous line of vacant shops.

Redditch has had a rough time of late. Even now, its Covid infection rate is among the highest in the country. Like so many places, the town has said goodbye to its branch of Marks & Spencer, and is about to lose its Debenhams department store too. In the spring sunshine, it felt pinched and forlorn. This was thrown into sharper relief by what we then listened to on the car radio: endless chatter about the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, the supposed magic and wonder of the royal family, and the arrangements for his funeral.

Not for the first time lately, the combination of visible decline and royal spectacle took me back to a time I can just about remember from my childhood: the period of national angst that ran from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, punctuated by the Queen’s silver jubilee of 1977 and the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Histories of the period chronicle the messy end of the postwar consensus and plummeting economic prospects. Given that I was at primary school, my memories have more to do with sticky-floored supermarkets, power cuts and an everyday life that sometimes felt strikingly difficult.

Then as now, monarchy did what it was programmed to do, and offered people a nostalgic reassurance. The basic story is laid out in The Writing on the Wall, a very readable account of national decline by the Labour MP turned TV journalist Phillip Whitehead, published in 1985. “The second Elizabethan age, of superpower status on vanished means, and brave new ventures from [the trailblazing UK-made plane] the Comet to the conquest of Everest, had not turned out as planned,” he wrote. In the jubilee’s sea of red, white and blue, there was both a momentary distraction, and a reminder of old glories. “One way to confront a future that might not work,” he said, “was with the trappings of a past which had worked.”

But there were also dissenting, more disruptive voices. In the 1970s, both Plaid Cymru and the SNP enjoyed surges of support – the latter ended up topping Scottish opinion polls. As Whitehead wrote, “it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom itself might break up”. There is a chapter in his book titled Black British, about the decade’s toxic racial politics, and the struggle of people of colour to achieve even a basic level of esteem and respect. It contains an insight that, after the government’s recent race and ethnic disparities report, has a grim modern resonance: “Racism in the institutions was the fundamental issue. Too often it was shirked.”

Which brings us to Margaret Thatcher, who spoke the populist language of patriotism and national destiny, and sometimes tilted towards the language of the far right. In 1979, the Conservative party was elected to power on an 11% swing among skilled workers, and 9% among those classified as unskilled. Political analysts warned that the Labour party was facing “a working-class electorate with only a minimal sense of class interest”. Because the economy was in such a mess, everything was being upturned and fragmented: to some extent, things have remained that way ever since.

Indeed, underneath the brittle optimism created by Covid vaccines and the equally fragile promise of a return to normal, the UK of 2021 displays many of the same essential themes as the country of four decades ago. Thanks to the backward-looking fantasies of Brexit, the union is straining more than ever before, and there are frightening developments in Northern Ireland. After 10 years of austerity, and in the midst of an economy being transformed by the internet, millions of people’s immediate environment has once again turned shabby and hollowed-out.

Labour has been reminded that its supposed core vote is nothing of the kind. Some parallels, meanwhile, show that whatever politicians’ vanities, we have come a lot less far than many people would like to think – something vividly demonstrated by recent analysis by the Guardian showing that 40% of young black people in the UK are now unemployed – the same level of joblessness as the early 1980s and the inner-city riots.

There is, moreover, the same sense of living in a troubled country that has reached the end of an era and has yet to find out what might come next – but with one crucial difference. Whereas the pain of 40 years ago was all about the end of a postwar settlement based around state planning, trade union power and large-scale economic interventionism, we may now have reached the demise of what replaced it: the small-state, free-market approach that was weakened by the crash of 2008, and surely rendered obsolete by the vast level of state intervention necessitated by coronavirus.

This development might suggest grounds for optimism, were it not for a key political fact: continued Conservative dominance of England, partly based on a set of essentially cultural ideas with loud echoes of the 1970s and 80s. Back then, the brilliant writer and thinker Stuart Hall said that Thatcher authentically spoke “for those people who felt they were left behind by permissiveness, threatened by affluence, challenged by the sexual revolution, who never wanted a libertarian society, who believe in greater authority, in the family, in paternal authority”. Boris Johnson might not believe in that kind of Conservatism, but in a modified form it remains at the heart of his party, and the wider interests it speaks for. It is the credo of such activists’ favourites as Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg; it enters the national conversation on a regular basis via the Daily Mail.

Somewhere in the cloud of nostalgia and deference kicked up by recent royal events, you can discern the same stuff. The key question of our time, it seems to me, is whether those beliefs will endure, or if we will finally find a view of ourselves and the world more suited to the 21st century. The delusions and denial of 40 years ago, after all, were damaging enough the first time around; to go on repeating them would be the stuff of truly surreal folly.
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Massive Strikes in France Pressure Macron and New PM on Austerity Proposals
Trump Seeks Supreme Court Permission to Remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook
Hillary Clinton’s Reckless Rhetoric Fuels Division After Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
NASDAQ Rises to Record as Intel Soars More Than 20%, Nvidia Gains 3%
Nvidia’s $5 Billion Bet on Intel Reshapes AI Hardware Landscape
Trump and Starmer Clash Over UK Recognition of Palestinian State Amid State Visit
Trump’s Quip on Biden and Google Lawsuit Revives Debate Over Antitrust Legacy
Macron and his wife to provide 'scientific photographic evidence' that she is a real woman
US Tech Giants Pledge Billions to UK AI Infrastructure Following Starmer's Call
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
DeepMind and OpenAI Achieve Gold at ‘Coding Olympics’ in AI Milestone
SEC Allows Public Companies to Block Investors from Class-Action Lawsuits
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Federal Reserve Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals More to Come
Effective and Impressive Generation Z Protest: Images from the Riots in Nepal
European manufacturers against ban on polluting cars: "The industry may collapse"
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Trump: Cancel quarterly company reports and settle for reporting once every six months
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
US Launches New Pilot Program to Accelerate eVTOL Air Taxi Deployment
Christian Brueckner Released from German Prison after Serving Unrelated Sentence
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Hong Kong Industry Group Calls for HK$20 Billion Support Fund to Ease Property Market Stress
Joe Biden’s Post-Presidency Speaking Fees Face Weak Demand amid Corporate Reluctance
Charlie Kirk's murder will break the left's hateful cancel tactics
Kash Patel erupts at ‘buffoon’ Sen. Adam Schiff over Russiagate: ‘You are the biggest fraud’
Homeland Security says Emmy speech ‘fanning the flames of hatred’ after Einbinder’s ‘F— ICE’ remark
Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin Tyler Robinson Faces Death Penalty as Charges Formally Announced
Actor, director, environmentalist Robert Redford dies at 89
The conservative right spreads westward: a huge achievement for 'Alternative for Germany' in local elections
JD Vance Says There Is “No Unity” with Those Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Killing, and he is right!
Trump sues the 'New York Times' for an astronomical sum of 15 billion dollars
Florida Hospital Welcomes Its Largest-Ever Baby: Annan, Nearly Fourteen Pounds at Birth
U.S. and Britain Poised to Finalize Over $10 Billion in High-Tech, Nuclear and Defense Deals During Trump State Visit
China Finds Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws in Mellanox Deal, Deepens Trade Tensions with US
US Air Force Begins Modifications on Qatar-Donated Jet Amid Plans to Use It as Air Force One
Pope Leo Warns of Societal Crisis Over Mega-CEO Pay, Citing Tesla’s Proposed Trillion-Dollar Package
Poland Green-Lights NATO Deployment in Response to Major Russian Drone Incursion
Elon Musk Retakes Lead as World’s Richest After Brief Ellison Surge
U.S. and China Agree on Framework to Shift TikTok to American Ownership
London Daily Podcast: London Massive Pro Democracy Rally, Musk Support, UK Economic Data and Premier League Results Mark Eventful Weekend
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Le Pen Tightens the Pressure on Macron as France Edges Toward Political Breakdown
Musk calls for new UK government at huge pro-democracy rally in London, but Britons have been brainwashed to obey instead of fighting for their human rights
Elon Musk responds to post calling for the murder of Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk: 'Either we fight back or they will kill us'
Czech Republic signs €1.34 billion contract for Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks with delivery from 2028
USA: Office Depot Employees Refused to Print Poster in Memory of Charlie Kirk – and Were Fired
Proposed U.S. Bill Would Allow Civil Suits Against Judges Who Release Repeat Violent Offenders
Penske Media Sues Google Over “AI Overviews,” Claiming It Uses Journalism Without Consent and Destroys Traffic
×