Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (67 page)

What the global audience witnessed included seventy-four thousand young people filling Wembley – a mere six weeks after the Heysel stadium disaster had brought disgrace to English football
crowds – and responding with wild cheering to the arrival of the Prince and Princess of Wales, accompanied by the first act on stage, the Coldstream Guards, who played the national anthem,
followed, appropriately enough, by Status Quo. The most memorable performance was delivered by Queen, whose lead singer, Freddie Mercury, bestrode the stage with such self-confidence that he even
successfully engaged in a
pas de deux
with the cameraman busy filming him. Thanks to a seat on the Concorde supersonic jet, Phil Collins performed in mid-afternoon at Wembley and then less
than ten hours later in Philadelphia. The real star, of course, was Geldof, who found himself being serenaded by the Wembley crowd with a spontaneous chorus of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good
Fellow’. Geldof, who remained apprehensive that the event was failing in its primary function and was under the impression that scarcely more than £1 million had been raised, fired off
expletives of outrage during a backstage live interview. However, the final sum raised exceeded £50 million, and considerably more in the longer term. What Live Aid did not do was – in
the repeated refrain of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ – ‘feed the world’. It did not even end the suffering in Ethiopia, where news reports better conveyed the
natural disaster than the extent to which it had been man-made by the collectivization policy of the Marxist Mengistu regime in Addis Ababa and its conflict with Eritrean and Tigrayan
insurrectionists. Some of the aid ended up partly funding the war, which, together with the politically motivated resettlement programme, significantly added to the death toll.
⁷⁰
But more than any single event of the eighties – or, indeed, of the last quarter of the twentieth century – 13 July 1985 encapsulated how
youthful
idealism and modern technology could be harnessed in the
effort
to do good. And it was at an event primarily organized in London that the embodiment of
borderless, common humanity was fleetingly glimpsed.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?

One pop concert did not a world of plenty make. But Live Aid caught the popular imagination and spawned imitators. Comic Relief was launched in 1985 and in 1988 Red Nose Day
began with a live seven-hour ‘telethon’ on BBC 1 in which comedians and television celebrities performed silly acts as a means of raising money for Africa. The first Red Nose Day raised
£15 million and the formula thereafter became a television staple, with related events springing up in schools, workplaces, sports and social clubs throughout the country. The scale of this
and other events (most notably the London Marathon, which was founded by Chris Brasher and John Disley in 1981 and became the world’s largest annual charity fundraising event, securing
£500 million for ‘good causes’ in its first thirty years) did not suggest the eighties was marked by a greater degree of self-centredness than prior decades – though, of
course, it could always be argued that the occasional charitable gift or sponsored run is insufficient as an indicator of more altruistic attitudes in society. Indeed, while the size of donations
increased, the proportion of the population who undertook regular voluntary work did not markedly change between 1981 and 1992.
⁷¹
The motivations
of those who did give their time and money can only be guessed. Some may have been prompted to share the personal wealth that greater opportunities and lower taxes had afforded them. Others may
have participated as a conscious rebuke to what they perceived as state-sponsored selfishness or indifference to those in need. The British Social Attitudes survey found that the percentage of the
public who agreed with the statement ‘the government ought to help more and not rely on charity to raise needed money’ increased from 80 to 88 per cent during Thatcher’s
premiership.
⁷²
When she enthused about ‘Victorian values’ she was thinking of the great benevolence of Victorian philanthropists. To
many listeners, though, the term doubtless conjured images of paupers and poor law commissioners, for charity was simultaneously evidence both of a sense of social obligation and of the failure to
stamp out inequality.

Even the most optimistic observer of the eighties could hardly describe it as a period of relative political and social harmony, though the same generalization would surely have been no less
applicable to the years of strife and industrial disputes, rancour and punk rock that had distinguished the seventies, against which Thatcherism had positioned itself as the cure. Not since her
1979 misattribution to St Francis of Assisi had the prime minister
articulated the value of harmony – other than on her own terms. The fear of nuclear war and the
spread of Aids, the ongoing terror campaigns in and from Northern Ireland, the public drunkenness of ‘lager louts’, strife on the football terraces and between police and disaffected
youths, particularly those from ethnic communities, the pit villages divided over the 1984 miners’ strike and the assault on the collective bargaining powers of the unions which defined one
stratum of working-class solidarity, unprecedented levels of crime and family fragmentation, the lack of opportunities for those without skills or jobs to apply for – all represented
challenges to the notion that the kingdom was united in anything other than name. Most of all, the division was evident among leading opinion-formers and in Parliament – in the almost polar
opposite prescriptions for national recovery set out by the two main parties, whose policies were further apart than at any time since the 1930s.

Yet in ways that were as least as profound if less newsworthy, the country was actually becoming more integrated. From the 1940s to the 1970s, grammar schools had offered a challenging and
highly academic education to about one quarter of children over the age of eleven, leaving the majority of adolescents to stick to the basics in secondary modern schools. Swept away during the late
1960s and the 1970s – even while Thatcher looked on in dismay and impotence as Heath’s education secretary – the grammar school sector had been all but wiped out (except in Kent,
Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Northern Ireland) by the eighties, and did not make a comeback. Whether this was good or bad for education and social mobility remained contentious given the
disappointing performance of so many of the successor comprehensive schools, but in terms of removing a clear delineating barrier in education the result was clear-cut. Unlike the previous forty
years, nine out of ten teenagers growing up in the eighties shared a common adolescent institutional experience. What they learned would thereafter be made more uniform too. The Education Reform
Act 1988 (which took full effect in England four years later) replaced state schools’ freedom to teach what they liked with a national curriculum.

At the same time, single-sex education was all but confined to the private sector. Even there, it was during the eighties that boys-only public schools ceased to be the majority even among the
elite institutions affiliated to the Headmasters’ Conference, as the numbers admitting girls – either just to the sixth form or throughout – proliferated. Segregation also broke
down in higher education, with single-sex university halls of residence becoming rarities. Male and female students at Glasgow University had separate student unions until 1980. Until that point,
female guests to the (all-male) Glasgow University Union were confined to socializing in an inauspicious annexe, leaving the main building’s Scots baronial splendour to the tender mercies of
male bonding. Although a dwindling number of all-female institutions remained, Oxford’s last all-male college went co-ed in 1985, and Cambridge’s last bastion of
testosterone in tweed, Magdalene, followed suit three years later. Unimaginable to a previous generation of oarsmen, even the Boat Race went mixed – at any rate, to the extent that in 1981
Sue Brown became the first of a new generation of female coxes to steer her men to victory. Where other universities had led in seeking a more balanced admissions’ policy, the two most
venerable institutions followed, and during the decade the proportion of female undergraduates at Oxford increased from 30 to 43 per cent and at Cambridge from 28 to 40 per cent.
⁷³
In contrast to the undergraduate experience, however, among the dons the gender imbalance remained starkly evident.

Between men and women who did find work, life after formal education had ended also involved less segregation. Great focus was placed at the time on the emasculating effect of the dwindling
number of jobs in heavy industry and mining, and it was not unreasonable to assume – as commentators regularly did – that some of the displays of thuggish behaviour were a psychological
reaction to the identity crisis this loss of association, as much as status, brought about. But looked at from another perspective, the decade’s increasing opportunities to work in the
offices of the service sector, rather than on the factory floor or in the shipyard, not only shifted society’s once iron division between white-collar and blue-collar decisively in favour of
the former, it was instrumental in breaking down the workplace division of the sexes. What was more, it was women who were increasingly donning the white collars. In 1975, women comprised 4 per
cent of trainee bank managers. By 1989, they represented a quarter – the same proportion as among the country’s accountants. Half of lawyers were women by the decade’s end. It was
in middle management (one in ten) and senior executives (one in fifty) that women had not yet made the decisive advance.
⁷⁴

The process of dismantling the divide between the sexes was also evident in the social life that followed the day job. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 outlawed licensed premises that either did
not serve women or else corralled them in their own designated lounges, and during the eighties pubs continued to become more inclusive in their ambience and clientele as brewers and landlords
sought to create an environment that would appeal to accelerating female spending power and the reality that – with greater integration in the work place – social networks were becoming
equally integrated. At no previous stage in the twentieth century had the places where Britons worked and socialized been so open to both the sexes. In this regard, an important rider needs to be
made to the assertion that the country was becoming more socially fractured.

Which Side Are You On? – The Miners’ Strike

‘There is a class conflict, we do live in a class society,’ Arthur Scargill, who was about to become president of the National Union of Mineworkers, reassured
readers of the magazine
Marxism Today
in April 1981. In keeping with Marx’s teaching, Scargill regarded sociology as a binary discipline: ‘There are two classes in our society
– those who own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange and those who work by hand and by brain. There is no middle class as is suggested by those academics and
intellectuals who would like to stratify society.’
¹
The son of a miner and the husband of a miner’s daughter, Scargill was immersed in
the politics and culture of the collieries. Yet for him, the task of running the NUM extended beyond defending the narrow interests of his union’s members. It was also to awaken all workers
to the false consciousness that led them to cooperate with capitalism and its institutions. Suitably led, they would recognize that it was within their power to become the masters. As he
elucidated: ‘The only way in which we can achieve socialism, in the first instance, is by involving in mass struggle workers for an alternative economic policy now, but one that does not
include or involve worker’s control, seats on boards of management, or worker participation’ – because such collaboration risked contaminating the revolutionary purity of those
sucked into it. Rather: ‘I am for the trade union movement itself exercising power, exercising authority and compelling management, be it private or nationalized, to do certain things in
terms of investment, planning, extension and development in the same way that we’ve been able to do on wages and conditions, for many, many years.’
²

The boldness of Scargill’s vision was conveyed in his telling description of socialism as something reachable in ‘the first instance’. The real destination
was something that particularly worried Thatcher, who was in no doubt that the NUM was now led by those who regarded ‘the institutions of democracy’ as ‘no more than
tiresome obstacles on the long march to a Marxist Utopia’.
³
In reality, Scargill’s socio-political theories had shifted from
Marxism–Leninism towards syndicalism, but even in public he scarcely dissented from Thatcher’s interpretation of his revolutionary motives, assuring the NUM conference in July 1983 that
because of the Tories’ landslide victory in the general election the previous month, extra-parliamentary action was ‘the only course open to the working class and the labour
movement’.
⁴
From 1973 onwards, every Home Secretary, Labour or Conservative, had renewed the warrants necessary to allow MI5 to tap
Scargill’s telephone – a fact of which he seemed to be aware, occasionally shouting abuse down the phone to those he rightly assumed were eavesdropping.
⁵
Even senior ‘wet’ Conservatives who despaired of their prime minister’s instinctive desire to stimulate argument harboured a fear-sharpened loathing of
Scargill and the threat they believed he posed to constitutional government.

The Barnsley-born son of a lifelong communist, whom he followed down the local mine at the age of fifteen, Scargill had spent seven years in the Young Communist League before joining the Labour
Party in 1962. As a Yorkshire NUM militant, he had led the decisive action of the 1972 miners’ strike, picketing and closing down the Saltley coke works, that hastened Edward Heath’s
Conservative government’s capitulation to a 27 per cent pay demand. His role in persuading the NUM to strike all over again in January 1974 forced Heath to initiate a partial shutdown of the
country’s energy supplies by instituting a three-day week and calling a snap general election, which, amid signs of a country descending into chaos, the Tories duly – if narrowly
– lost. The incoming Labour government moved quickly to sue for peace with the NUM. Scargill was nevertheless incredulous that after becoming prime minister Callaghan ‘once again tried
to reform the capitalist system’ and thereby missed the opportunity of pending national bankruptcy in 1976 to announce ‘we take into common ownership the means of production,
distribution and exchange’.
⁶
But he bided his time and when, in February 1981, the Thatcher government attempted to close twenty-three of the
most seriously loss-making pits, he demanded a miners’ strike with immediate effect. In Whitehall there was every reason to panic. At that moment, four fifths of the electricity output of the
state-run Central Electricity Generating Board was generated by coal-fired power stations.
⁷
Without sufficient stockpiles to see off a prolonged cut
to energy supplies, Thatcher felt obliged to surrender rather than risk repeating the fate of the last Tory administration. As Scargill crowed: ‘The very fact that miners, within thirty-six
hours of 40,000 of them coming out on strike, were able to
change a government’s course as far as pit closures were concerned is a clear demonstration that it can be
done.’
⁸