History of England 1-6

The Conservatives had been elected on a promise of economic salvation, reelected when recession turned into a boom, and elected again because enough of the populace had become wealthy. New wealth had created new types – along with the ‘yuppie’ was the ‘wide boy’, immortalized by the comedian Harry Enfield and his catchphrase ‘I’ve got loadsa money!’ This figure marked a revolution. There had been only a few epochs in English history in which ‘conspicuous consumption’ was not a matter for shame; this decade was one such epoch, but with a difference. The arrivistes of the Tudor or Victorian periods had attempted to array themselves in the ermine of pedigree, but the newly rich of the Eighties had no such anxieties. They did not seek to hide their origins or to emulate the accents of the upper class. They had ‘made good’ and that was enough.

In tandem with the wide boys strode the Sloane Rangers, a type made famous by The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. The ‘Sloanes’ were rich, conservative and rural in sympathy if not always in location; they dressed in tweeds and ‘ate jelly with a fork’. In many respects they were thought to represent the last hurrah of old money, but this was erroneous. By the end of the decade, those who had inherited wealth still accounted for the top 57 per cent of the wealthy. ‘Popular capitalism’ was the term Thatcher adopted to encapsulate her vision of a property-owning democracy, an expression that had little resonance and less charm for many of the poorest.

‘Care in the community’, as it became known in the late Eighties, was an offshoot of the influential Griffiths Report of 1983. The report’s main suggestion was that superfluous expenses might be removed if managers could oversee and correct an organization sometimes lacking in efficiency and accountability. In the same spirit, it encouraged the view that the elderly or mentally ill should receive treatment at home. Roy Griffiths believed fervently in the NHS, but he felt it could do better under something resembling a business model. Moreover, the notion that patients could be better served within their own homes seemed a more humanitarian proposition than a lifetime spent within an institution. But many could not thrive or even survive at home, and found too little around their home that could be called a community. The cumulative result was a rise in homelessness. The National Audit Office suggested that the figure in 1989 had reached 126,000.

When a little-known MP named Jeremy Corbyn rose in the House to call the soaring levels of homelessness a ‘disgrace’, Thatcher barely turned her head. In this case, she could not easily be blamed. By 1990, a startling 100,000 council houses stood empty, and the government was to spend £300 million renovating them. Another 600,000 private properties were similarly unused, and that was harder to remedy. Grants and other incentives to housing associations were provided by the Housing Act of 1988, but the crisis of homelessness could only be eased, not abolished.

The unions had been tamed, but another traditionally leftist foe had submitted neither to lash nor leash. For the Tories, animated by the principle that ‘central knows best’, local councils were a hydra of jostling irritations. The first of these, predictably, concerned money. True to her conviction that people can be trusted to take responsibility where they feel they have a financial stake, Thatcher was anxious about the seeming unaccountability of so many local councils. If, she reasoned, the rates levied on property were to be replaced by a tax on the individual, members of the public would become true local taxpayers, shareholders with the right to demand proper standards. Councils in turn would therefore have to justify their expenditure and their policies. The notion was first seriously mooted in 1983 and took some years to gestate. When at last the new tax was approved, it was given the most innocuous of titles: the community charge.

A second thistle hid within a paradox. The Tories might govern the land, but their rivals governed the cities. The consequences of this lay in education, which was the responsibility of local government and persistently overlooked by the Conservatives. Those children, the vast majority, who did not go to private schools, grew up under a right-wing government but received a left-wing education. This alone ensured that the shadow of the post-war consensus still stretched over the Thatcher government, and that years after the memory of the Seventies had dulled, Thatcher was still vilified in increasingly vague but no less vituperative terms.