Making of Modern UK Thatcher and Legacy of New Labour and Murdoch press

N C Gardner MA PGCE

N C Gardner MA PGCE 1


During most of the 20th Century, the British Prime Ministership has not been a very important political office. The change of political party holding office has mattered a great deal more than the individual occupying No. 10 Downing Street.

The British system of government is not an American system and the Prime Minister is not Head of State.

Change the Prime Minister without also changing the party in power and nothing much happens. The importance of the office has been exaggerated.



The Cabinet is the crucial element in the British system of government and other Cabinet ministers such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer determine major policies.

Most Prime Ministers have not sought to be powerful and have not had policy goals distinct from those of their party. Most post-war Prime Ministers – Attlee, Churchill, Macmillan, Wilson and so on – have not had objectives which were not also the objectives of their party.

Prime Ministers are regarded mainly as the managers of their government’s and their party’s political business: maintaining party unity, preventing Cabinet resignations, and winning the next election.



In comparison with other post-war Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher’s style of government was entirely different.

She had a broadly-based policy agenda of her own, an agenda distinct from that of most members of the Conservative Party.

She ensured that her agenda was her Government’s agenda and was therefore willing to assert herself on an unprecedented scale compared to other post-war Prime Ministers.






The Conservative governments of 1979 to 1990 were very much the governments of Margaret Thatcher.

In her relations with her fellow ministers, civil servants and Conservative M.P.s, her distinctive weapon was fear. She sought to control the content of public policy and, through it, Britain’s destiny.

Mrs Thatcher had a formidable personality and used hectoring, cajoling, threatening, wrong-footing, bullying, embarrassing and even humiliating her ministers and officials.



As prime minister Mrs Thatcher put the fear of God into people, and they usually responded well.

More than any other prime minister, Thatcher used her hiring-and-firing power single-mindedly to produce a team of ministers loyal to her person and, more importantly, to her policy agenda.

At the same time she exercised her natural charm and had genuine concern for the well-being of many of her fellow politicians and their families.


Thatcher entered Downing Street in 1979 as the first woman Prime Minister and left in 1990 as the first Prime Minister for generations to lend her name to an ideology.

The economic and social prescriptions of ‘Thatcherism’ included control of the money supply, and consequent cuts in public expenditure, which had been foreshadowed under Denis Healey’s Chancellorship in 1974 –79.



Through the new Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe,

Thatcher set in place the core economic

policies of monetary control and a shift from

taxes on income to taxes on consumption.

The next four years (1979 – 83) saw Thatcher

and Howe holding their nerve in the face of a

rapid increase in unemployment, rising

inflation, and deteriorating industrial relations.



‘U-turn if you want to – the Lady’s not for turning’, as Thatcher told the 1980 Conservative Party conference.

The 1981 Budget of Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor, was a defiant response to economic difficulties, raising taxes to reduce public borrowing and interest rates.

The political cost was extensive rioting in poorer areas of London and other major cities in April 1981, and a civil service strike which lasted 21 weeks.





The greatest challenge for Thatcher, though,

lay not on the streets of London and other

cities but in Cabinet, where she had to purge

the ‘wet’ colleagues who opposed her hard line

on cuts in public expenditure.

A fierce attack at the party conference in

October 1981, led by Heath, was successfully

rebuffed, but confirmed that divisions within

the party were deep and lasting.



The Conservative victory in 1979 was won against the background of a decade of recession in which materialistic expectations were disappointed and, in four years out of ten, average real living standards did not rise at all.

In 1979 Labour suffered a massive haemorrhage of working class votes. Its policies were out of tune with the aspirations of a significant section of its natural class base who wanted to own their own house and pay less tax.



Class voting was in decline in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In 1967 an Oxford political scientist had stated: ‘Class is the basis of British politics; all else is mere embellishment and detail.’ However, this was ceasing to be true.

Housing tenure was important in influencing how people voted: owner-occupiers were more likely to vote Conservative than council house or private tenants.


Voters identification with parties was growing

weaker; and, as loyalties weakened, this made

them more likely to decide their votes

according to the issues.

The theory applied to both major parties but,

in practice, its implications for the Labour Party

were greater because the Labour Party was the

class party par excellence.



At every election from 1951 to 1983, with the exception of 1966, the Labour vote declined.

The 1979 election was the third successive one on which the Labour vote had fallen below 40% of the votes cast, compared with 49% in 1951, 46% in 1955, 44% in 1964, and 48% in 1966.

Social and economic conditions should have favoured Labour. Macmillan’s ‘Affluent Society’ had given way to recession in 1973 – 74 and, after the events of 1968, the age of deference was no more.



In 1979 manual workers were more in favour of

reducing the highest rate of income tax (a Tory

policy) than of introducing a wealth tax (a

Labour policy).

Within the Labour vote there was a spectacular

decline in support for the collectivist trinity of

public ownership, trade union power and social

welfare.



In 1964 57% of Labour supporters approved of more nationalisation while 59% rejected the idea that trade unions were too powerful.

By 1979 these two opinions were held by about only one-third of the electorate.

Labour fought the 1979 election in opposition to the sale of council houses to their tenants but 85% of the electorate, and 86% of the working class, were in favour of this Conservative proposal.









The essence of Thatcherism was the advocacy of a market economy, where the state fulfills strictly limited functions such as monetary control, the upholding of the rule of law, and defence of the realm.

In the context of what had happened before 1979, Thatcherism was ideological. Margaret Thatcher adopted the free market vision of Adam Smith and challenged the post-war consensus based on nationalisation, Keynesian economics, government planning, and the provision of universal welfare.



After her decisive victory in the General Election of June 1983, Thatcher embarked on her policy of privatization which created millions of small shareholders and significantly reduced the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR).

Thatcher also took political revenge for previous humiliations, challenging the miners by insisting on the closures of uneconomic pits. The 1984 – 85 miners strike was marked by violence on both sides, lasted a year but ended in the defeat of the NUM in March 1985.


The humbling of the miners, with their reputation as the shock troops of the labour movement, was followed by the defeat of the newspaper print unions, whose tight hold over Fleet Street had made them a byword for restrictive practices.

Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Times Newspapers, installed new computerized technology at a new plant at Wapping. Murdoch with the help of the law overcame union resistance to changes in working practices and the technology used to produce newspapers.



The essence of Thatcherism was the advocacy of a market economy and promoting free enterprise.

Therefore Thatcher’s natural supporters were the petit bourgeoisie – shopkeepers, foremen, self-employed business people.

Thatcher directed her attacks against the failures of socialist and Keynesian policies, and rejected the corporatist consensus of post-war Britain.


Welfare spending accelerated under the public spending boom of a Conservative government, that of Edward Heath in 1970 – 74, so Britain’s welfare spending from 1945 to 1970 was less than many other West European nations.

Although Mrs Thatcher wished to move from a dependency culture to an enterprise culture, welfare spending actually continued to increase during the period of her governments in 1979 –1990 and the majority of the public themselves supported increased provision for public services.



For Peter Riddell, another historian of the Thatcher years, Thatcherism was essentially an instinct, a series of moral values and an approach to leadership rather than an ideology.

Riddell agrees with Dr Shirley Letwin by writing that Mrs Thatcher stood for the values of the English suburban and provincial middle-class and aspiring skilled working-class.

Her style of conviction politics and self-conscious radicalism were uncomfortable for the established such as the universities, the Church of England, the Foreign Office, BBC, and the professions.


Thatcher was patronised and disliked by the liberal intellectual establishment which was centrist in its political thinking. Senior civil servants, lawyers, university lecturers and BBC executives recoiled in horror at Thatcher’s deliberate rejection of the post-war consensus.

However, international economic and political changes i.e. the spread of neo-liberalism and the fall of Soviet communism, changed intellectual opinion towards acceptance of the market.



However, centrist intellectual opinion still held sway through the Thatcher Decade and still holds for the majority today. The centrist establishment still prevails in the BBC, the universities and the senior civil service.

For the majority of intellectual opinion, Mrs Thatcher became an object of unthinking hatred not endured by any other Prime Minister since 1945. The reason lay in the inability of progressive orthodoxy, like any other orthodoxy, to tolerate earnest and practical dissent.



The hatred of Mrs Thatcher was infected by snobbery. Intellectual snobbery for the non-intellectual Thatcher, the snobbery of Arts graduates about Scientists (Thatcher had a chemistry degree from Oxford), the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial (Thatcher was from Lincolnshire), and the snobbery of men about career women.

In higher education, Thatcherite ideas were overwhelmingly rejected by universities and dons. In a public display of disapproval, Oxford University in 1985 refused to award Mrs Thatcher an honorary degree, hitherto an almost automatic award to a graduate of Oxford who had become Prime Minister.



The Thatcherite view that the universities could, and should, raise more of their own finance escaped the thinking of many dons. The added advantage that independence from state control gives higher education more freedom, fewer regulations and edicts from the Secretary of State, and greater academic variety, was rarely comprehended.


Thatcher’s approach revolved around:

1. a belief in Britain’s greatness and assertion of national interests.

2. a prejudice against the public sector.

3. a backing for the police and the security services in fighting terrorism and upholding law and order.

4. a strong dislike of trade unions.

5. a general commitment to the virtues of sound money.

6. a preference for wealth creators over civil servants.

7. a support for the right of individuals to make their own provision for education and health.



Thatcher saw key political issues in terms of Britain’s past greatness, recent decline and the possibility of recovery.

Britain since the end of the First World War had experienced long-term economic decline and faced a growing Soviet threat from the 1970s onwards.

Moreover in the 1970s there were high rates of inflation, state subsidies for inefficient nationalized industries, restrictive practices of trade unions and a welfare culture that encouraged illegitimacy, the breakdown of family life and replaced incentives favouring work with encouragement for welfare dependency.


The Thatcher governments advocated policies to encourage enterprise. Taxes were cut with the top rate reduced from 83% to 40% and the basic rate from 33% to 25%.

The most obvious measure of a nation’s economic performance is the growth of its GDP. Here Mrs Thatcher’s achievement is not in doubt. Whereas GDP grew by less than 1% between 1973 and 1979, it grew by 2.25% in the 1980s. And in the other OECD nations in the 1980s, there was no marked improvement upon their low GDP growth rates of the 1970s.



The growth in productivity was the key element in Britain’s improved GDP growth in the 1980s under the Thatcher governments. During the Thatcher years British productivity saw both absolute and relative improvement.

Britain’s productivity performance was transformed during the Thatcher years. Britain leaped from 12th

place between 1960 – 73 to 5th place in 1979 – 94 in the league of OECD nations.


The Thatcher governments altered the terms of the economic debate. Post-war corporatism was ended and Britain was transformed to a neo-liberal, free enterprise economy similar to the United States.

Free enterprise does not guarantee continuing prosperity; but it does permit it, whereas the alternatives do not.

Free enterprise does not end the business cycle of boom and bust. Thatcher realised that government has a limited role to play to provide a framework in which free enterprise can flourish.



Thatcher’s economic philosophy was based on free enterprise and a minimum role for government in the workings of the economy. It ended the relative decline of Britain and led her to leap to 5th place in the OECD league table of GDP.

Attitudes were developed in favour of free enterprise and against corporatism and the ideas of a state-controlled command economy. Britain’s prospects were transformed and her influence in the world restored.


‘It’s the fake femininity I can’t stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people.

It’s the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It’s her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It’s her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can’t cry?’



Unemployment did rise to over three million between 1979 and 1986 but then steadily declined due to the Lawson boom of 1982 – 89. The Thatcher Governments did fear the electoral impact of rising unemployment but ended the Keynesian policies of artificially increasing aggregate demand.

Instead the Thatcher Governments embarked upon labour-market reforms, business deregulation and the encouragement of incentives to work.

Adult unemployment fell for 44 consecutive months from 1986 until April 1990 when it reached a low of 1.6 million, roughly half its mid-1980s peak.



Britain in the 1980s moved from a manufacturing, industrial economy to a services, knowledge economy in line with world economic trends.

During the 1980s employment in professional and scientific services (mostly education and health) increased by half a million, followed by miscellaneous services (sport and leisure, restaurants, clubs and pubs, as well as computer-based services) and insurance, banking, finance and business services.


Privatisation (denationalisation) was central to Thatcherism. The rolling back of the State and encouragement of the free market were encapsulated in the privatisation programmes of the Thatcher Governments.

40% of the industries nationalised in the corporatist era of 1945 – 79 were privatised. Bus and coach routes were de-regulated, local government services were contracted out to private firms, private pensions, health care and education flourished and professional restrictive practices, such as the solicitors’ conveyancing monopoly, were eroded.



The first large nationalised industry to be privatised was British Telecom in 1984 and it was a huge success, not just through the take-up of shares but through the access the business gained to private capital with which to invest in rapidly advancing technology.

BT’s customers also gained in terms of price and service.

The next major privatisation was that of British Gas in 1986. However, the sale of British Gas didn’t promote competition or much improved efficiency. It did liberate the taxpayer from subsidising nationalised industry.



When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, much of the economy, and almost all its infrastructure, was in state hands.

For traditional socialists, state hands meant ‘the people’s hands’. For traditional Tories, state hands meant ‘in British hands’.

For Thatcher and her allies, state hands meant ‘in the hands of meddling bureaucrats and selfish, greedy trades unionists’.



A third of all homes were rented from the state.

The health service, most schools, the armed

forces, prisons, roads, bridges and streets, water,

sewers, the National Grid, power stations, the

phone and postal system, gas supply, coal mines,

railways, refuse collection, airports, buses, freight

lorries, air traffic control, much of the car, ship,

and aircraft building industries, British Airways

and other industries were in state hands in 1979.



The background to Thatcher’s privatisation revolution in the 1980s was stagflation, a sense of national failure, and a widespread feeling, spreading even to some regular Labour voters, that the unions had become too powerful, and were holding Britain back.

Labour, and Thatcher’s centrist predecessors among the Conservatives, had tried to control inflation administratively, through various deals with unions and employers to hold down wages and prices.



For Alan Walters, Thatcher’s chief economic adviser, believed a key source of inflation and the weak economy was the amount of taxpayers’ money being poured into over-manned, old-fashioned, government-owned industry.

Just as in the Soviet Union, Walters thought, Britain’s state industries concealed their subsidy-sucking inefficiency through opaque, idiosyncratic accounting techniques.



For Thatcher, privatisation was simply one of many weapons to use in her battle against the unions, which was, in turn, a single episode in her war to exterminate socialism.

Her great political inspiration, apart from her father, was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book, ‘The Road to Serfdom’.

‘The Road to Serfdom’ claims that socialism inevitably leads to communism, and that communism and Nazi-style fascism are one and the same. The tie that links Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany, in Hayek’s view, is the centrally planned economy.



Hayek was proven wrong. Across western Europe, including in Britain, socialists came and went from power, introduced a welfare state and nationalised large swathes of the economy without democracy and individual freedoms being threatened.

Private doctors kept their clinics on Harley Street, young aristocrats still went to Eton, the private shop windows of Harrods still blazed at Christmas time.



After Thatcher defeated the attempt by

Britain’s coal miners to starve off mass

redundancies and pit closures in 1984 – 85, she

wrote:

‘What the strike’s defeat established was that

Britain could not be made ungovernable by the

Fascist Left.’



Privatisation failed to turn Britain into a nation of small shareholders. Before Thatcher came to power, almost 40% of the shares in British companies were held by individuals.

By 1981, it was less than 30%. By the time Thatcher died in 2013, it had slumped to under 12%.

Thatcher and Lawson’s vision of a shareholding democracy failed to materialise.



Privatisation failed to demonstrate the case made by the privatisers that private companies are always more competent than state-owned ones –that private bosses, chasing the carrot of bonuses, will always do better than their state-employed counterparts.

Through euphemisms like ‘wealth creation’ and ‘enjoying the rewards of success’ Thatcher promoted the notion that greed on the part of a private executive elite is the chief and sufficient engine of prosperity for all.



The ‘winner-take-all’ society created in the 1980s by the Thatcher governments has resulted in the denigration of the concept of duty and public service, according to the critics.

A squalid ideal of all work as something that shouldn’t be cared about for its own sake, but only for the money that it brings.



Privatisation failed to make firms compete or give customers more choice.

Water companies were already a monopoly before privatisation and remained so afterwards since they had nobody to compete with and couldn’t offer customers a choice.

And the privatisation of electricity showed how privatisation failed to empower individuals as it was supposed to. It failed to provide customers with information with even less comprehensible pricing systems after privatisation.


Margaret Thatcher’s greatest impact as Prime Minister was upon Britain’s international standing.

Partly this reflected the transformation of Britain’s economy and improved GDP growth relative to other nations, but it also reflected Thatcher’s willingness to use and develop British military power, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with President Reagan to defeat Soviet Communism.



Victory in the Falklands War in June 1982 transformed the political fortunes of Margaret Thatcher. She knew after the Falklands victory how to cope with war which she saw, as many do, as the supreme test of statesmanship.

Her domestic and international standing soared. She was no longer a housewife, she was a warrior. And the Falklands victory meant that Britain was once again a power to be reckoned with.


Yet Thatcher did not let the Falklands War victory go to her head. For example, she knew Britain still had to negotiate with China over the future of Hong Kong, on very much Chinese terms.

Also she never thought she could go it alone in international affairs without the help, support and alliance of the United States. The realities of global power politics had not been changed by the Falklands War victory.

N C Gardner MA PGCE100


President Reagan piled on the pressure with the continued superpower confrontation with the USSR. Reagan knew that the USSR, because of its weak economy, could not increase its military spending, but that America could double its military output with ease.

While Thatcher believed that the Soviet Empire would ultimately collapse because communism was fundamentally unworkable, she did not share Reagan’s view of its current weakness.


Thatcher acted as Reagan’s constant supporter and provided him with mainly good advice in dealing with the Soviet Union. She was also a good personal friend for President Reagan.

Reagan saw Thatcher as an ideological soul-mate in their joint battle against socialism and communism. This gave Thatcher special access, and at times influence, with the President.



The most serious domestic crisis of Thatcher’s premiership until her eventual downfall in November 1990, was over a disagreement concerning the Westland Helicopter Company. Westland was the only British company to produce helicopters but was in danger of going into receivership (bankruptcy) in 1985.

When Michael Heseltine (Defence Secretary) learned that the Westland Board of Directors was looking favourably upon a rescue package by the American firm, Sikorsky, he declared that it would be better to have a European rescue.


Thatcher, however, backed the view of Leon Brittan (Trade and Industry Secretary), that it was a matter for the Westland Board and did not require government interference.

Heseltine, both a pro-European and an interventionist, had different ideas. He personally built up a European rescue package. He clearly went against the government’s policy of non-interference, turning the issue into a full blown political crisis.



Since Heseltine had gone against government policy, his position eventually became untenable and he resigned from the Cabinet in January 1986.

Heseltine was a hugely ambitious politician. When he was an Oxford student, he had written out a career plan aiming to become an M.P., then a senior Cabinet Minister, and eventually Prime Minister.


Heseltine bid his time on the backbenches after his resignation in 1986 and four years later played a major part in Thatcher’s downfall since he stood against her for the party leadership.

He secured enough votes on the first ballot for the leadership to force a second ballot to be held and at this point the Cabinet advised Thatcher to stand down since a majority of the Cabinet no longer supported her, thinking that Thatcher had become an electoral liability and that she would therefore lead the Conservative Party to defeat at the next General Election.



Thatcher aimed to liberate the market to preserve a social order (that of private sector company owners and managers) since this had been threatened by too much government in the 1960s and 1970s.

Thatcher wished to sustain a highly traditional order, one in which trade unions knew their place, two-parent families were the norm and loyalty to the monarch was unquestioned.


Thatcher’s rhetoric made a strong appeal to well-off manual workers and reinforced support within the expanding middle-class.

Thus the Conservatives re-adjusted to their previous ideas in favour of individual freedom and private enterprise.



For Labour adjusting to the new individualism and free market economy of the 1980s and 1990s was more difficult than it was for the Conservatives.

Much of the post-war settlement had been dictated by the party’s assumptions about state intervention.

For the 1974 – 79 Labour Government it was a painful time since they were forced by international currency speculators to curtail public spending and allow unemployment to rise.


Power within Labour fell into the hands of activists following Labour’s defeat in the 1979 General Election, who accused their leaders of betraying ‘socialism’.

The left-wing activists created an alternative economic strategy including more nationalization, enhanced regulation and higher taxes. Labour’s appalling performance in the 1983 election demonstrated the unpopularity of these policies.



After defeat in 1987, Labour leader Neil Kinnock was determined to adapt his party to the new economic climate of neo-liberalism. Through a wide-ranging policy review, Kinnock argued that Labour had to embrace low inflation as government’s immediate goal.

Kinnock also recognized that taxing and spending had to remain at ‘prudent’ levels.


After the policy review, Labour’s economic policy proceeded from the assumption that, while the state had an important role, it was ‘not to replace the market but to ensure that markets work properly’.

By the 1992 election, Kinnock’s left-wing critics wondered there was between Labour and the Conservatives.



However, Labour in the 1990s and since still gives the state a more significant and influential role than the Conservatives.

Moreover, Labour’s object remained that of furthering equality, and still does. This was renamed ‘social justice’, so as not to frighten middle-class voters.


Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party (1994 to 2007), signified, many thought, Labour’s abject surrender to Thatcherism.

However, new Labour was ‘older’ than Blair wanted to admit and while a ‘dynamic economy’ was desirable, it would have to be one ‘serving the pubic interest, in which the enterprise of the market was joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation’.



Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007, very much accepted the Thatcher settlement, the doctrine of free-market capitalism.

Thatcher declared that her aim was to destroy socialism in Britain and she succeeded. However, the Conservative Party existed to oppose socialism and indeed social democracy.

So Thatcher removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative Party, its opposition to socialism and social democracy.



By identifying New Labour with the market, Tony Blair was able to deprive the Conservatives of the threat that had defined Labour for generations.

As a result, the Conservatives were mired in confusion for nearly a decade.

Blair embraced without question the neo-liberal belief that only one economic system (capitalism) can deliver prosperity in a late modern context.



Blair’s One Nation Toryism was a political marketing tool.

He attacked his own party as much as the Conservatives. He pressured Labour into acceptance of the market.

Blair carried on the agenda of privatisation that had developed from Thatcher’s original programme into core areas of the state such as the justice system and prison service, and inserted market mechanisms into the NHS and education.



Blair consolidated Thatcherism, continuing the marketization of British society and institutions but he did not change Britain as much as Thatcher had.

Blair’s main impact was on his own party. New Labour was constructed to bury the past history of the party. It had few links to the political tradition of Labour from Keir Hardie, Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson.



Neo-conservatives such as Tony Blair realised that capitalism is a revolutionary force that overturns established social structures but also recognised that state power and military force are needed to expedite the process.

In international relations neo-conservatism shaped Blair most deeply. He will be remembered for taking Britain into the ruinous war in Iraq and his part in this destroyed him as a politician.



Blair broadcasted from Downing Street on the night of September 11th, following the Islamic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world. The people who perpetrate it have no regard whatever for the sanctity or value of human life, and we the democracies of the world must come together to defeat it and eradicate it. This is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism, but between the free and democratic world and terrorism.

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.”





Blair’s ‘shoulder to shoulder’ broadcast from Downing Street following 9/11 was defined in his memoirs ‘Tony Blair: a Journey’ (2010) as follows:

‘I took this view for reasons both of principle and of national interest. As a matter of principle, I was sure that we should see the atrocity as an attack not on the U.S. per se, but because the U.S. was the leader of the free world, it was therefore an attack on us too.

It was also in our national interest to defeat this menace and if we wanted to play a major part in shaping the conduct of any war, we had to be there at the outset with a clear and unequivocal demonstration of support.


‘I believed in the alliance with America, I thought its maintenance and enhancement a core objective of British policy, and I knew that alliances are only truly fashioned at times of challenge, not in times of comfort.’

(Tony Blair: a Journey, published 2010)



After 9/11, Washington was going to ‘re-order’ the world on western terms by a combination of military power and the on-going westernising process of globalisation.

However, in Britain the public remained hostile to the prospect of an Iraqi invasion. The British public could simply not understand why Blair had sided with President Bush and joined in the fateful 2003 invasion.



All the opinion polls at the time (2003) showed decisive majorities against the invasion, an opposition made manifest by a massive march and rally in central London.

The main European partners, France and Germany, were against the Iraqi invasion, the intelligence was not clear-cut; and the UN could not be squared. The UN did not support the invasion and hence the U.S. and U.K. violated international law.



Blair nailed his colours, and his legacy, to the mast of a conservative Christian Evangelical Republican President, George W. Bush.

Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Chris Patten wrote: ‘history will judge Blair as a defender of Bush’s agenda above Britain’s’.

Blair had taken the ‘special relationship’ to a new level.



Following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, for the first time since the imperial days of the British Empire, British troops took over the military occupation of Arab lands, in the south of Iraq around Basra.

To the late 20th century British mind the very idea of British troops occupying a heartland Arab nation after having toppled its government would have seemed an act of blatant imperialism and wildly far-fetched.


Once Washington had made up its mind to go to war against Iraq in March 2003, the British Prime Minister – any British Prime Minister –had no alternative but to support the President of the United States.

In sum, Britain’s ‘special relationship’ demanded it; and when an American President goes to war, and asks for Britain’s support, such support is normally given.



Over the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the major continental powers, France and Germany, not only opposed Washington, they campaigned against it in the United Nations.

Blair was forced to choose between America and Europe. But for Blair it was not a difficult or agonising choice. From Downing Street, the western geo-political power correlation looked clear. Washington was still the stronger of the two western contestants.



President Bush was adamant and committed, and would go to war with Iraq anyway.

And the Franco-German security core was in its infancy.

It has been argued that Blair believed that what happened in the U.S. defined the limits of the possible for Britain. Accordingly it was simply ‘impossible’ not to support the United States.



It was difficult for Tony Blair, and is for any British prime minister, to sell the raw fact of subordination to the United States to the British public.

At the time of the Suez Canal Crisis, 1956, Sir Pierson Dixon, Britain’s UN Ambassador, argued: ‘if we cannot entirely change American policy, then we must, it seems to me, resign ourselves to a role as counsellor and moderator’.



Sir Pierson Dixon (Britain’s UN Ambassador, 1950s) added: ‘It is difficult for us, after centuries of leading others, to resign ourselves to the position of allowing another and greater power to lead us.’

Britain as America’s ‘counsellor’ and ‘moderator’ was a role Blair openly advocated as Prime Minister.



As the tension rose in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the official British line became what the leading columnist Peter Riddell of The Times described as a ‘hug them close’ strategy’ – the idea being that by ‘hugging them close’ Britain would secure greater influence with the Americans than by breaking with them.



By the time of his second term as Prime Minister (2001 to 2005), Blair had basically adopted the whole Bush-American world-view.

Like Margaret Thatcher before him, he came to identify with the United States more than he with Britain.

Blair saw the Bush presidency and his premiership as conjoined, as one political unit with common friends and common enemies.



Blair’s identification with the United States had a considerable prime ministerial pedigree. Winston Churchill identified with America – after all he had an American mother, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill.

So too did Margaret Thatcher who had a close personal and ideological relationship with President Ronald Reagan.



Blair’s ties were with the American presidency: he was very close to both liberal-moderate Bill Clinton and conservative-cum-neo-conservative George W. Bush.

Blair’s love affair was, at root, all about power – the power and celebrity of the American presidency.



Over time Blair’s love affair with the American presidency turned ideological.

He started his premiership in 1997 as a European social democrat, with an ideology roughly similar to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder’s SPD and slightly to the left of Bill Clinton’s ‘third way’ Democrats.

But later when Bush was in the White House (2001 to 2009), Blair changed smoothly into a full, red-blooded American radical conservative.



Blair, amazingly for a Labour prime minister, signed up to each of the following components of Bush’s radical conservatism:

1) Global neo-liberal ‘free-market’ economics

2) Global political rule from Washington

3) Christian-based ‘family values’.



Blair became the chief European advocate of the need to accept ‘globalisation’.

When used by politicians, ‘accepting globalisation’ was code for the need to accept a business-driven, cost-cutting agenda.

To survive in the global economy – so ran the business argument – nation states need to ensure that their costs, that is wages and taxes, are competitive.



1) Labour markets need to be competitive – flexible enough to make it easy to ‘hire and fire’.

2) If governments don’t oblige, then global capital will go elsewhere –principally to lower-cost China and India.



In a Newsweek magazine article in 2006 Tony Blair pulled no punches: ‘complaining about globalisation’ he said ‘is as pointless as trying to turn back the tide. Asian competition can’t be shut out; it can only be beaten’.



Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 there has been a quantum leap in the power of mobile capital over state and labour, and neo-liberals argued that governments need to yield to these ‘realities’.

Blair was at the forefront of such yielding –constantly arguing that the British people should welcome ‘globalisation’, not resist it nor even attempt to shape it.









Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times, The Sun, Sky News, The Sunday Times, and The Sun on Sunday, as well as media in the United States and Australia, is the most powerful media mogul in the world. He has been called ‘Britain’s second prime minister’.

The Sun, as Britain’s biggest-selling national daily newspaper, influences millions of readers from all social classes each day.



Rupert Murdoch was born in 1931 in Melbourne, Australia. He is a global media mogul and is the founder, chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of global media holding company News Corporation, the world’s second-largest media conglomerate, and its successors News Corp and 21st

Century Fox after the conglomerate split in June 2013.



In 1981, Murdoch acquired the struggling ‘Times’ and ‘Sunday Times’ newspapers. Together with The Sun and the News of the World, Murdoch’s papers supported the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1980s printed newspapers had larger circulations and readerships than they do in today’s world of the internet, and therefore the support of mass-circulation newspapers such as The Sun and of the ‘top peoples’ paper The Times was very important for a political party.



The Times reflects the dominant values of the dominant class. Indeed The Times has helped define the British idea of social class.

By 2011, when the phone-hacking scandal led to the termination of the News of the World, 1 billion people daily digested Murdoch’s products – books, newspapers, magazines, TV channels and films – and News Corporation, his holding company, had annual sales of $33 billion.




The power of The Sun, which Murdoch took over in 1969, was based upon its mass circulation. It outsold every other national daily newspaper.

Murdoch championed Margaret Thatcher, patriotism and national success, and identified the left with the failed politics of national weakness and trade union militancy.

The Sun had a knack of articulating basic populist views and appealing to the resentments of its low-income and under-educated mass readership.




Murdoch’s newspapers were major players in British politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Murdoch’s media empire was part of the broad anti-trade union coalition.

But the Murdoch papers also developed a radical and meritocratic edge under the influence of Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, who took as targets traditionalist Britain: old money aristocracy and the monarchy, as well as the trade unions.



In the 1980s Murdoch’s media empire including his newspapers The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, and the News of the World, turned into a support system for the Conservative Party’s campaign for a business-led economic and political culture under the banner of the ‘free market’.

Murdoch’s papers also began a systematic, high-volume opposition to the European Community and Union, and Britain’s place in it.



Murdoch’s opposition to a European destiny for Britain from the 1980s and up to the present had little in common with the chauvinism and nationalism exhibited in his papers, particularly The Sun.

Rather, the key Murdoch concern was what he perceived as the anti-business culture of the European Union and its highly regulated, high-tax welfare societies – a culture that Murdoch saw as hostile to his own media interests as well.



Murdoch was aware that no political party stayed in power for ever and he changed his political horses in the mid-1990s, when he began wooing Labour’s youthful leader Tony Blair.

Desperate to end Labour’s electoral drubbings of 1983 to 1992, Blair made a transcontinental pilgrimage to a News Corp conference on Hayman Island off Australia in 1995, where he had talks with the kingmaker, Rupert Murdoch.



After Blair had met Murdoch in 1995, News Corp switched its support from the Conservatives to Labour.

In March 1997, two months before the General Election, The Sun announced ‘The Sun Backs Labour’. Blair went on to win by a landslide not only in 1997, but, with Murdoch’s support, in 2001 and 2005 as well. (Although 2005 was a decisive win rather than a landslide)


At the Hayman Island meeting of 1995, an unwritten deal had been struck between Blair and Murdoch. If Murdoch were left to pursue his business interests in peace he would give Labour a fair wind.

According to the diaries of Piers Morgan, the former News of the World editor, an apologetic Blair told him: ‘Piers, I had to court him …It is better to be riding the tiger’s back than let it rip your throat out. Look what Murdoch did to Kinnock.’



Irwin Steltzer was a key aide to Murdoch, an intellectual guru and a major player in transatlantic Murdoch politics. Steltzer met Blair on many occasions and he saw early on that Blair shared many ideas with the American conservative right.

‘I know Tony Blair’, Steltzer once said, ‘Blair is one of Thatcher’s children. I think he knows it’.


Blair came into office in 1997 with very positive views about Britain joining the Euro-zone, but was never, throughout the whole period of his premiership, able to act on them.

Before the 1997 General Election Blair was forced into pledging a referendum of the issue for fear of Murdoch supporting the Conservatives in the campaign.




After entering Downing Street in 1997 Euro-entry remained an objective of the New Labour government, but because of fear about Murdoch’s media influence in any referendum campaign, the government was never confident of winning a vote.

Thus, a vote was never held, and Britain stayed outside the Euro-zone.



The Mail on Sunday claimed that in the original, uncensored ‘Diary of a Spin Doctor’, Downing Street official Lance Price had written that ‘apparently we (Downing Street) promised News International (Murdoch’s corporation) that we won’t make any changes to our European policy without talking to them’.



In July 2006 when Blair’s premiership was clearly reaching its final phase, and Gordon Brown’s team was preparing for the future transfer of power, speculation about Brown’s political options was rife.

Murdoch issued what amounted to a public ‘ultimatum’ or ‘warning’ to Brown. He was told flatly not to try for a quick general election but rather to stay around for 18 months during which the electorate could judge his merits alongside those of the new Tory leader David Cameron.



Murdoch, ever the vigilant Eurosceptic, was worried that Brown might hold a quick election, get a new mandate, and then be free to develop his own European policy.

In 2006 it was becoming clear that a new joint German-Italian-French constitutional initiative was possible and might well be launched after the French Presidential election in spring 2007.


Murdoch feared that Gordon Brown, just installed as the new Prime Minister might well sign up to it. Murdoch let it be known that The Sun – the only paper New Labour’s leaders – would not support Brown in any quickly-called election campaign.

Should Brown try such a manoeuvre it would support Cameron.



New Labour received Murdoch’s intervention in British democracy in a nonchalant way. Indeed the whole British political class and press received Murdoch’s intervention in a relaxed, unconcerned way.

There was hardly a peep of protest. After a decade of New Labour and three decades of Thatcherism, Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen, domiciled outside the UK, had become accepted as an arbiter of Britain’s future.

Murdoch had become as powerful as the whole British cabinet combined.


Murdoch’s press empire was, though, not the only sole pressure behind New Labour’s growing extreme pro-Americanism. There was also a general pro-American bias amongst other powerful sections of the media – not least the output of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator owned by media mogul Conrad Black.



Mixing the political with modern communications techniques, both Blair’s New Labour and David Cameron’s Tories took the media world very seriously indeed and treated the media barons, such as Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, as legitimate policy-makers.



Mixing with conservative media barons such as Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, and heavily influenced in policy-making by their political values, New Labour ceased to act as a traditional left-of-centre political party.

Rather, with cabinet and party weakened, Blair’s team resembled a highly sophisticated public relations company, media-friendly and image-sensitive.



Blair’s public relations team cut out the Labour Party – its factions, MPs, trade unions, and activists – and made direct contact with the voter.

New Labour embraced party-less, American-style politics, and became more and more dependent upon media support and approval from Murdoch’s media, The Sun, The Times, and Sky News, and upon business and private money for its campaigning.



New Labour’s embrace of party-less, American-style politics and of the conservative media and business community led to ‘Britain’s most consistently business-friendly party’ according to liberal commentators.

Murdoch media support and City of London support demanded of New Labour business-friendly policies in return.


New Labour promoted the American economic model and downgraded British integration in ‘social’ Europe.

The business-friendly U.S. economic model opened a global marketised world in Britain with its pressures for ‘competitive’, low cost, low wage, low tax economies with ‘flexible’ labour markets i.e. very easy to hire and fire staff at will.




New Labour joined the chorus of Wall Street criticism against the European Social Model.

The European Social Model advocated on the continent, including in the largest economies – those of Germany, France, and Italy – is one of high economic growth together with high living standards, good working conditions, and social protections for all citizens.


The business-led consensus of Blair’s Britain (which has continued under the premiership of David Cameron since 2010) had a powerful hold and survived the puncturing of the hi-tech bubble in 2000 and 2001, the huge and dangerous financial imbalances of the U.S. economy, and the corruption scandals of Enron.

None of the crises of American capitalism shook New Labour’s conviction in neo-liberal economics.




New Labour’s love affair with America was not only about a business-friendly McDonald’s economy and being friendly with right-wing, conservative media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch.

It was also about ‘Atlanticism’, promoting the ‘special relationship’ with America and joining up with the Eurosceptic business class.



Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff, is the brother of the even more pro-American Atlanticist , Lord Charles Powell, who was Thatcher’s chief foreign policy advisor.

The Powells represent the governing official mindset of top political Britain. Like Blair they are the product of public schools and also like Blair, they have a touch of the old imperial manner, and its attraction to power –in the post-war world, the power of superpower America.



Britain’s intelligence services had (and have) a real ‘special relationship’ with Washington, based on intelligence sharing not offered to other European nations and Whitehall needed to continue to please Washington for fear it would be cut off.


The role of the intelligence services are shrouded in mystery, but they have clear and obvious advantages in Whitehall power struggles:

1. The intelligence services are the sole possessor of ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’

2. They have total and regular access to the Prime Minister, more so than top cabinet ministers.



The other Whitehall pressure group highly supportive of Washington is Britain’s Royal Navy, which since the 1960s has hosted Britain’s nuclear weapons, carried in its submarines.

For Whitehall the ‘British bomb’ remains the central nervous system of British power and thus the key to the British establishment’s ‘world role’.



The United States, first through the Polaris and then through the Trident nuclear missile agreements, provided and provides indispensable servicing requirements for Britain’s submarine force and crucial satellite targeting systems.

The British bomb is independent but only if the British government wants to launch a ‘spasm’ response.




Documents

Making of Modern UK Thatcher and Legacy of New Labour and Murdoch press