C-3) The Miner’s strike March 1984-1985

a) Context and actors of Miners’ strike 1984-1985.

Thatcher stopped the subsidies which were used to shore up the ailing coal industries. Her reasoning went like this:
- money was coming from public purse and other areas were deprived from this money used to help failing ones.
- “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” made no sense economically if Peter was productive and Paul unproductive, re-
warding the inefficient at the expense of the efficient.
th
This lead to the crisis with the miners : through the 20 century British coal had become increasingly costly and
difficult to mine and nationalisation in 1948 had not altered it, and lack of public investment might have
worsened it.
With exception of a few pits producing particular types of coal, the mines were running at a loss.

* The Thatcher government announced its unwillingness to support an industry with practically no chance
of recovering and that not to take these hard measures would be delaying the inevitable.

* Opposite argument of the Trade Unions and other analysts was that a proper investment programme backed by
a commitment to use coal as a long term energy source could maintain the industry in a profitable manner.
Further arguments were concerning the social consequences of such closure.
In a context with high unemployment figures, this would  increase unemployment and social distress.

Opposing view points personalised in the leading protagonists in the coal strike :
- Ian McGregor, Canadian manager appointed by the National Coal Board, whose remit was to cut non profitable
parts of the coal industry.
- Arthur Scargill, Marxist president of the NUM (National Union of Miners, (very powerful Trade Union which
had been used to striking regularly under previous Labour governments) opposed to any closure of the pits.
- The government claiming its neutrality was in fact fully backing the National Coal Board.

It was said that this policy was part of a campaign to break the power of the Trade Unions.
Government had anticipated a long strike and had made careful plans:
• Norman Tebbit, Employment Minister had passed the Employment Act which reduced Trade Union
effectiveness : it forbade mass picketing and outlawed the “closed shop” (= the obligation that all workers in a
particular plant or factory had to be member of a Union).
It also declared that industrial action was illegal unless the members had voted for a strike in a formal union ballot.
• Government had also stockpiled coal and coke at the fuel stations and emergency plans were drown up for
importing further stocks.

* The strike began in March 1984, lasted for a year and saw violent clashes between miners and the
police but the Union knew they had very few chances of success. Furthermore they were not backed by other
Unions such as the power workers.
* Strike ended early in 1985 leaving a legacy of bitterness and recrimination.
It was a success for government and it meant the start of resistance from other employers to Trade Union
demands.

b) Media coverage and public opinion in the Miner’s strike March 1984-1985. (See theme 2 in syllabus)
The refusal of some miners to support the strike was seen as a betrayal by those who did strike.
The opposite positions held in Yorkshire (pro-strike) and in Nottinghamshire (against the strike= strike-
breakers/”scabs”/blacklegs) led to bitter confrontations.
There were instances of violence directed towards working miners by striking miners. Sometimes working miners
saw their houses, families, even pets attacked.

This tension was reported differently according to the media but on the whole, the media reflected a rather negative
view of the strike.
The Sun, a newspaper used to sensationalism, took a very anti-strike position, as did the Daily Mail.
Daily Mirror (Pro-Labour Party) and the Guardian became anti-strike as the conflict went on.
The Morning Star was the only national daily newspaper that consistently supported the striking miners and the
National Union of Miners.

The NUM and various socialist groups considered that mainstream media deliberately misrepresented the miners’
strike.
They felt that the reporting rarely gave a balanced view of the strikers, insisting on violence from their part whereas
“unarmed men and some women” had been subjected to “truncheons, shields and horses of a well-organised,
optimally deployed police force”.

It has been acknowledged by the BBC itself, that coverage wasn’t as balanced as it should have been.
Especially for the coverage of the Battle of Orgreave , pictures were intentionally reversed to show the miners as
attackers whereas it was the miners who had been attacked by the police.
 « The most blatant example of "press bias" was the BBC's news coverage of the police charge on miners
during a picket of Orgreave coking plant in south Yorkshire - the Battle of Orgreave as it became known. On 13
June 1984 horses and riot police bludgeoned unarmed strikers unconscious as they lay on the floor. By the the
time the BBC's film footage was shown on the news it had been cut and spliced to show the miners advancing first
and the police seeming to respond in self-defence. All the shocking scenes of police brutality had disappeared. »

« The Sun reported the day's events with their usual crude sensationalism, aiming to outdo the rest of Fleet
Street. They had a picture from below of Arthur Scargill waving at miners, but the wave looked a bit like a Hitler
salute. This was the paper that had just a year before during the Falklands War reported the sinking of an
Argentinian ship, the Belgrano - with loss of hundreds of lives - with the accompanying headline "Gotcha". The
Sun's editors wanted to headline Scargill's picture "Mine Führer", but at the last minute the paper's printers refused
to print the cover.
This shocking example of bias was really the tip of the iceberg. The day-to-day reporting involved more
subtle attacks, or a biased selection of facts and a lack of alternative points of view. These things arguably had a
far bigger negative effect on the miners' cause. » Taken from « The miners' strike 1984-5: lies, damned lies and the
press » By Mick Duncan, Submitted on 15 August, 2004.

« A number of journalists reflect on their role in the strike and are troubled, as Jones admits: "I got
ensnared by the seeming inevitability of the Thatcherite story line that the mineworkers had to be defeated in order
to smash trade union militancy."
He suggests that perhaps the news media should own up to a collective failure of judgment, and
concludes that while the role of the media was not decisive to the final outcome of the strike, if its "near-
unanimous narrative had not been so hostile to the NUM and had done more to challenge government then
Thatcher may have been forced to reach a negotiated settlement during the initial phase of the dispute".
(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/ A book review by Sian Moore of « Shafted: The Media, the Miners'
Strike and the Aftermath », published May 2009 ).

Public opinion
Public opinion was not united on this topic and varied according to social class and location.
« Public opinion during the strike was divided and varied greatly in different regions.
When asked in a Gallup poll in July 1984 whether their sympathies lay mainly with the employers or the miners,
40% said employers; 33% were for the miners; 19% were for neither and 8% did not know. When asked the same
question during 5–10 December 1984, 51% had most sympathy for the employers; 26% for the miners; 18% for
neither and 5% did not know.
When asked in July 1984 whether they approved or disapproved of the methods used by the miners, 15%
approved; 79% disapproved and 6% did not know.
When asked the same question during 5–10 December 1984, 7% approved; 88% disapproved and 5% did not
know.
In July 1984, when asked whether they thought the miners were using responsible or irresponsible methods, 12%
said responsible; 78% said irresponsible and 10% did not know.
When asked the same question in August 1984, 9% said responsible; 84% said irresponsible and 7% did not
know. »

However there were opportunities at times for solidarity with the miners and generally people felt for the miners’
and their families even if they not approve of their methods or objectives.

« (…) powerful accounts of union and political solidarity: the refusal of print workers at The Sun to allow the
newspaper to publish a doctored photo of Arthur Scargill appearing to make a Nazi salute; rail workers blocking the
delivery of coal to the Orgreave coking plant; attempts by the alternative media to counter the distortions of the
mainstream coverage; and the work of the local miners' support groups - all in the face of the reluctance of much of
the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress to mobilise support for the strikers. »

« But if the country never warmed to Mr. Scargill or to his union's case against the Government, the miners'
courage (and, many would add, their dignity) finally won the respect of large numbers of people who have never
seen a coal mine and never voted Labor. Perhaps it was because the strike seemed so forlorn a cry of agony.
The nation's conscience was touched, in a way, by the doomed resistance of the miners to the seemingly
inexorable erosion of their world. Peter Jenkins of The Guardian compared them the other day to the Polish cavalry
who charged the German tanks in World War II.”
Taken from ”At strike’s end, a lost cause wins some British respect” By R. W. APPLE Jr . Published in the New
York Times, March 10, 1985

Key terms : mass media in the context of a political crisis/ public opinion in the context of a political crisis.

C-4) Margaret Thatcher’s fall.

Two issues explain the end of Thatcher period in office : The European question and the Poll tax
The European question : - in 1988, in Bruges, Belgium, Thatcher delivered a speech in which she outlined her
opposition to proposals from the European Community for a federal structure and increasing centralisation of
decision-making.
- Although she had supported British membership, Thatcher believed that the role of the EC should be limited to
ensuring free trade and effective competition, and feared that new EC regulations would reverse the changes she
was making in the UK.
- “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a
European level, with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels".
- She was specifically against Economic and Monetary Union, through which a single currency would replace
national currencies, and for which the EC was making preparations.
- The speech caused an outcry from other European leaders, and exposed for the first time the deep split that was
emerging over European policy inside her Conservative Party.

The second is due to Thatcher’s will to bring local government into lines with her ideas of public accountability:
- Replacement of the existing system of local rates based on property values with a flat-rate charge for ser-
vices set by each local authority. The charge was to be paid by all the adults resident in the local area.
- Idea which came from the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) which suggested that 38 M poll-tax payers would be
better than 14 M rate-payers. People being also more conscious of the quality of the services provided.
- It was used by the government as a way to break the control of socialist groups over boroughs and areas
such as in London or Liverpool, and to push the people getting out Labour local government for high spending.

“Her dislike of the left-wing councils that dominated many British cities was so great that she did more than any
other post-war prime minister to bind local governments into an ever tighter net of restrictions. She had no time for
the idea of elected mayors who united real power with real responsibility. Britain became much more like highly
centralised France than gloriously decentralised America.”
th
The Economist, 13 of April 2013, Margaret Thatcher

Prelude was the elections of 1987 which showed an overall majority of 100 seats to the Conservatives, even if they
lost 22 from the 1983 majority. Thatcher saw it as a new mandate given to her for further reforms.
- Start with Standard Spending Assessments (SSAs) system enabling the central government to control local
authority spending levels. These local authorities had also to contract out their services to the companies which
would provide the best services at the lower price.
- Government thought this would attract the people to the next step which was the poll tax. Misjudgement :
people looked at this new tax as a regressive tax imposed by a grasping government trying to trap the people in a
same net. There were a list of exceptions from payment but the people were furious against the
principle.
- Opposition to the tax was immediate and organised : millions of people refusing or avoiding payments.
Furthermore when the tax was put into place in 1990, it doubled the estimate  unhappiness of the middle class.
- Further irony was that the poll tax cost twice and a half more to collect than the rates, due to the resistance it
aroused. Finally and in order to limit the charge of the tax , the government pushed the local authorities to reduce
their budget even if it meant reducing the services they provided >>> it looked like it was a measure even going
against the interest of the customer and not increasing the local government services.

There were also important failures associated with the Thatcher years :
* Years of social exclusion for the ones who did not benefit from the economic policies.
Example through social unrest in the cities, especially in 1981 in Brixton. This unrest was the consequence of the
high unemployment touching inner cities.
* Thatcher’s handling of the miners strikes in 1984-85 was not well seen by all. The extent of police powers used
during the strikes and the weakness of the miners as the result of the new reforms convinced many that the
Conservatives had gone too far.
* Little regard for civil liberties.
Disaster of the Government Finance Act 1988 culminating in the “Poll Tax riots” of 1989 was a crucial turning point.
Conservatives lost all 4 by-elections in 1989 an 1990, and the Labour in the polls had gained a 20 % lead
over the Conservatives, with Thatcher’s popularity the worse ever in her 11 years.
- Doubts inside the party on the possibility to gain the elections with her as a leader
- Thatcher’s treatment of her senior colleagues had made her powerful enemies by the end of the 80’s and in
1989, she became the victim of the same amended rules which she had been using against Heath.
- Challenge for the leadership by an obscure pro-European MP and she lost 1/5 of the Conservative MP support. -
Next year, more serious challenge from M. Heseltine and as it seemed she had lost the support of most of her
Cabinet colleagues, she resigned. After the first ballot Thatcher withdrew in favour of John Major, her choice as a
successor.
“This led to a rapid succession of tactical mistakes that eventually persuaded her own party to sack her, an act of
regicide that deeply shocked her and took the party a generation to get over. In November 1990 Geoffrey Howe,
the last remaining giant from her 1979 Cabinet, resigned as deputy prime minister over her refusal to agree on a
timetable to join a single European currency. As he left, he summed up in the Commons the difficulty of trying to
work with her: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the
first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”
Michael Heseltine, her most charismatic foe from the left of her party, immediately mounted a leadership challenge.
Mrs Thatcher won the first ballot, but not easily enough to avoid a second one. Her cabinet ministers eventually
persuaded her to take a bullet for the good of the party.”
The Economist, 13 April 2013, Margaret Thatcher.

5) The impact of Thatcherism

• In many ways policies failed (internal contradictions of sorts…)
There were more difficulties to roll back the state than what had been foreseen (in 1980 government spending 43.2
% of the GDP, 1995, 42.5 %)
Paradox is that under Thatcher the government became increasingly centralised and interventionist at a number of
levels.
Series of new powers over local government spending (while authorities remained controlled by Labour).
In education policy, national curriculum which set clear limits to freedom in state schools.
Privatisation of industry was accompanied by the introduction of regulatory bodies.
At other levels, accomplishments were more impressive :
Power of the trade unions drastically reduced ; the number of working days lost to strikes dropped from 30 Million in
1979 to 2 Million in 1990.
Pattern of housing ownership has changed even with the collapse of the Housing market in the late 80’s. >>> shift
toward the private sector.
Changes in Britain’s political culture : modernisation of the left and end of socialism as a force in domestic politics
among middle class voters and skilled workers.
Killing socialist alternative had been successful in the long term, according to the Tony Blair election in 1997.

IV. CONSERVATIVES STILL IN POWER FROM 1990 TO 1997.

Learning focus: Politics after Thatcher - the emergence of a new consensus to 1997.
Detailed framework: the nature of the new consensus and the emergence of New Labour.

In November 1990, elections were held in the Conservative Party to see who would take leadership after
Margaret Thatcher. Her popularity ratings were quite low and the Conservative Party did not want to risk
losing elections to Labour, a new leader had to be found.
The second ballot gave John Major the leadership and he was Margaret Thatcher’s choice as successor.

“Capable of arousing both intense admiration and deep dislike Margaret Thatcher had been the
dominant political figure of her time. John Major was not in the same mould. For some this was his
attraction. He did not have the abrasive, combative character of his predecessor. Yet personally likeable
though he was, he was not an inspiring figure.(…) Major’s problem was that he had no distinctive
strategy other than to continue in office.”
Taken from Modern British History 1900-1999 by Michael Lynch; Hodder and Stoughton, 2001, p161

JOHN MAJOR’S GOVERNMENT 1990-1997

John Major took the Prime Minister’s office but he made very no attempts to modify the changes introduced by
Thatcherism. The only exception was his attitude towards Europe which was a lot more enthusiastic than Margaret
Thatcher’s view.

In spite of his rather dull style, he was elected in 1992 and this came as a surprise as everyone was expecting the
Conservatives to lose to Labour after having been in power for 13 years.

Conservatives 336 seats 42% of votes

Labour 271 seats 34,2%
Liberal-Democrats 20 seats 17,9%
Other parties 24 seats 5,9%

How can this victory be explained ?

• Labour’s campaign was not well conducted. Labour felt they would win easily and organised a triumphalist
rally in Sheffield a week before the election results.
• Labour presented a shadow budget that seemed to promise large increases in taxation.
• The Sun newspaper was convinced by John Major’s key argument: “Conservatives can be trusted to run
the economy” and changed its support to the Conservatives.

John Major’s government ran its full term but as time went on there were more and more difficulties and problems
to deal with.
First area: Mounting problems in the Conservative Party itself.
These problems in the Conservative Party were linked to European policy and attitude to have towards Europe;
Major was a Euro-enthusiast, many in his party were not.
There was growth of strong Euro-sceptic group in the Conservative Party.
Major had signed the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and this caused considerable tension among Conservatives and an
almost split in the Party.

Second area: Politically John Major was weakened by the fact that by-elections were lost systematically by the
Conservatives all throughout in his time in office.
The government’s majority was smaller and less assured. John Major’s authority was openly challenged.
He won a Party election in 1995 but critics continued against him even in the Cabinet.

A press campaign against Conservatives contributed to give a negative image of the Party and the corruption some
politicians were guilty of. The “cash for questions” practise had been revealed as corruption. MPs would raise
questions on issues to promote the particular interests of commercial companies in exchange for financial perks.
th
Although Major was blameless, it did not prevent his administration from suffering the heaviest defeat in the 20
century. The Conservatives had clearly outstayed their time.
1997 was a delayed reaction to Thatcherism, and the rejection of 18 years of Conservatism.

Sources on Margaret Thatcher

Source 1
BRIEF PRESENTATION OF MARGARET THATCHER’S POLITICAL CAREER

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the daughter of a
grocer. She went to Oxford University and then became a research chemist, retraining to become a
barrister in 1954. In 1951, she married Denis Thatcher, a wealthy businessman, with whom she had two
children.
Early political career
Thatcher became a Conservative member of parliament for Finchley in North London in 1959, serving as
its MP until 1992. Her first parliamentary post was junior minister for pensions in Harold Macmillan's
government. From 1964 to 1970, when Labour were in power, she served in a number of positions in
Edward Heath's shadow cabinet. Heath became prime minister in 1970 and Thatcher was appointed
secretary for education.
Leadership
After the Conservatives were defeated in 1974, Thatcher challenged Heath for the leadership of the
party and, to the surprise of many, won. In the 1979 general election, the Conservatives came to power
and Thatcher became prime minister.
She was an advocate of privatising state-owned industries and utilities, reforming trade unions, lowering
taxes and reducing social expenditure across the board. Thatcher's policies succeeded in reducing
inflation, but unemployment dramatically increased during her years in power.
The Eighties
Victory in the Falklands War in 1982 and a divided opposition helped Thatcher win a landslide victory in
the 1983 general election. In 1984, she narrowly escaped death when the IRA planted a bomb at the
Conservative party conference in Brighton.
In foreign affairs, Thatcher cultivated a close political and personal relationship with US president Ronald
Reagan, based on a common mistrust of communism, combined with free-market economic ideology.
Thatcher was nicknamed the 'Iron Lady' by the Soviets. She warmly welcomed the rise of reformist
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
In the 1987 general election, Thatcher won an unprecedented third term in office. But controversial
policies, including the poll tax and her opposition to any closer integration with Europe, produced
divisions within the Conservative Party which led to a leadership challenge.
In November 1990, she agreed to resign and was succeeded as party leader and prime minister by John
Major.
The end of an era
In 1992, Thatcher left the House of Commons. She was appointed a peeress in the House of Lords with
the title of Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven and continued giving speeches and lectures across the world.
She also founded the Thatcher Foundation, which aimed to advance the cause of political and economic
freedom, particularly in the newly liberated countries of central and eastern Europe. In 1995 she became
a member of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of knighthood in England.

In 2002, after a series of minor strokes, Baroness Thatcher retired from public speaking.
She died of a stroke on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87.
 Taken from the BBC website
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/margaret_thatcher

Source 2
Margaret Thatcher | From the print edition of The Economist, April 13th 2013.

No ordinary politician
Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, died on April 8th at the age of 87.
We assess her legacy to Britain and the world

Several prime ministers have occupied 10 Downing Street for as long as, or even longer than, Margaret
Thatcher. Some have won as many elections—Tony Blair, for one. But Mrs Thatcher (later Lady
Thatcher), Britain’s only woman prime minister, was the first occupant of Number 10 to become an “-ism”
in her lifetime. She left behind a brand of politics and a set of convictions which still resonate, from
Warsaw to Santiago to Washington.
What were those convictions? In Mrs Thatcher’s case, the quickest way to her political make-up was
usually through her handbag. As she prepared to make her first leader’s speech to the Conservative
Party conference in 1975, a speechwriter tried to gee her up by quoting Abraham Lincoln:
« You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by
discouraging thrift. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. »
When he had finished, Mrs Thatcher fished into her handbag to extract a piece of ageing newsprint with
the same lines on it. “It goes wherever I go,” she told him.
And it was a fair summation of her thinking. Mrs Thatcher believed that societies have to encourage and
reward the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs, who alone create the wealth without which governments
cannot do anything, let alone help the weak. A country can prosper only by encouraging people to save
and to spend no more than they earn; profligacy (and, even worse, borrowing) were her road to
perdition. The essence of Thatcherism was a strong state and a free economy.
For Mrs Thatcher, her system was moral as much as economic. It confronted the “evil” empires of
communism and socialism. Many things caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the clarity
of Mrs Thatcher’s beliefs was a vital factor.
Her beliefs were fine-tuned in the political struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. But in effect they changed
little from what she imbibed at her home in Grantham, a provincial town in eastern England, where she
was born in 1925. The most important influence in her life was her father, Alfred Roberts, who ran the
grocer’s shop above which she was brought up.
He was a member of the respectable middle classes, the petite bourgeoisie of Marxist derision. As a
town councillor for 25 years, Alderman Roberts, a devout Methodist, preached the values of thrift, self-
help and hard work. Young Margaret, ever earnest, was inspired by his example.
A clever girl and a hard worker, she took a degree in chemistry at Oxford, where she began to be active
in Conservative politics. In order to get on in what was then a rather grand, aristocratic party, she started
to distance herself from her humble origins, marrying a successful businessman, Denis Thatcher, who
financed her political career. Training as a lawyer and shopping around for a safe seat, she dressed and
spoke as required: as a conventional upper-middle-class woman, with a nice house in the country and
the children at posh public schools. She entered Parliament in 1959 for the safe seat of Finchley in north
London, and quickly became a junior minister in 1961.
Just as she left Grantham well behind, so the new post-war Britain was leaving its old values and politics
far behind as well. The country shifted significantly to the left during the second world war, leading to a
landslide victory for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in 1945. Building on the forced collectivism of the war
years, the Attlee government embarked on industrial nationalisation and introduced the welfare state. To
a generation of politicians scarred by the mass unemployment of the 1930s, full employment became the
overriding object of political life.
Mrs Thatcher, like almost all ambitious politicians of her age, went along with this. But to keep
employment “full”, successive governments, Labour and Conservative, had to intervene ever more
minutely in the economy, from setting wages to dictating prices. In doing so, they crowded out the private
enterprise and economic freedoms that Conservatives were supposed to stand for. It was, as Mrs
Thatcher’s favourite intellectual guru, Friedrich Hayek, had warned in 1944, “the road to serfdom”.

A few intellectuals and politicians, Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph among them, rallied to Hayek’s
cause. But they were derided as dangerous mavericks, and Mrs Thatcher, for her part, contented herself
with climbing the greasy pole. She was made education secretary in Edward Heath’s government of
1970-74. Heath tried at first to inject a more free-market approach into economic management, but he
was forced into a humiliating U-turn as unemployment passed the 1m mark. The government then went
on such a huge spending binge to bring unemployment down that by 1975 inflation had reached 25%
and people began to hoard food.
It was then that Mrs Thatcher became a Thatcherite. She was led there by Joseph* ( *Conservative
thinker and minister), who argued that only a free-market approach would save the country.
These policies, extremely daring for 1975, became her agenda for the next 15 years.
Mrs Thatcher, a great patriot, had been hurt and bewildered by Britain’s precipitate decline since 1945.
Not only had Britain lost an empire; it was, by the mid-1970s, no longer even the leading European
power. Joseph’s critique seemed a way to halt, and even reverse, that decline. What Britain now needed
was an urgent return to the values of enterprise and self-help.
Thus Mrs Thatcher was reborn as a Grantham housewife. Out went the grating voice, hats and pearls of
the aspiring Tory grande dame; in came the softer voice, kitchen photo-opportunities in her apron, and
endless homilies about corner-shop values and balancing the books. She read her Hayek (which she
was also prone to produce from her handbag), but it was her new populist style that made her a winner.

The Lady’s not for turning

Mrs Thatcher won the Conservative Party leadership election of 1975, defeating Heath by a fair margin.
A woman had never held any of the highest posts in British politics before. With her twin children, a boy
and a girl—even that was done efficiently—her job and her energy, she seemed to be the very
“Superwoman” of Shirley Conran’s bestseller of that year. The Russians tried to mock her as “the Iron
Lady”. It backfired; she loved it, and used it to her own advantage.
But she was also cautious. Well aware that most of her party, let alone the rest of the country, did not
support her new policies, she proceeded slowly, appointing her supporters to a few key posts, but
otherwise doing little to suggest a radical break with the past. She relied more on the mounting
unpopularity of the Labour Party, unable to control the trade unions during the “winter of discontent” of
1978-79, to win the election of 1979.
Once in power, however, she revealed her true colours. Government spending was curbed to control the
money supply, exchange controls were abolished and the currency was allowed to continue to float
(rather than joining the new European Monetary System) —all decisive breaks with post-war
orthodoxies. Industrial subsidies were cut, sending many firms to the wall. Against the background of a
world recession, the result was a sharp rise in unemployment. By 1981, when joblessness stood at 2.7m,
police were battling Molotov-cocktail-throwing protesters on many city streets in Britain.
This was Mrs Thatcher’s low-water mark. She was, for a time, the most unpopular prime minister on
record. Most of her colleagues expected her to retreat, but instead she ploughed on. “U-turn if you want
to, the Lady’s not for turning,” she had cried the year before. She sacked all those ministers, the “wets”,
who wanted to change course, and stocked her cabinet with ideological fellow-travellers. The 1981
budget contained more spending cuts, further depressing demand, in the teeth of the recession; 364
economists condemned her policies in a letter to the Times.
This, more than anything, saw the birth of her reputation for ruthless decisiveness. With the economy still
at a low ebb, her political fortunes were turned by the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in April
1982. Shocked and angry, Mrs Thatcher launched a task force to re-take the islands, 8,000 miles away
in the South Atlantic. Her arguments—that she was going to defend the islanders’ choice to be British,
and that she would not “appease” the Argentine dictatorship—resonated strongly with a British public
disheartened by years of defeatism and retreat.
This, and the haplessness of the Labour Party under Michael Foot, won her a landslide second general-
election victory in 1983, which allowed her to press ahead with core structural adjustments to the
economy. In 1984 began the great round of privatisations, in which behemoths such as British Telecom,
British Gas and British Airways were sold off. Individuals were encouraged to buy shares, thus creating
the image, at least, of “popular capitalism”.
After vanquishing the enemy in the South Atlantic, she rounded on the “enemy within” at home: in the
BBC; the universities; and in local government, much of which she simply abolished. But her first target
was organised labour, which had made the country ungovernable—in particular the National Union of
Mineworkers (NUM), led by Arthur Scargill.
The NUM had cowed Heath’s government with its militant tactics. The inevitable showdown came when
the NUM went on strike in 1984-85. Mrs Thatcher outlasted the miners, arguing that it was a battle for
the right of management to manage over the arbitrary use of union power, and her victory broke the
unions for good. From a British perspective, it was the most important thing she ever did.
At the same time, she had not lost her talent for pragmatism. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) brought
out the iron in Mrs Thatcher’s soul: she was unmoved by members of the movement starving themselves
to death over their demand to be treated as political prisoners, and similarly undaunted when in 1984 the
IRA retaliated by blowing up the hotel where the Tory Party was holding its annual conference, almost
killing her. Yet in 1985 she put her feelings aside and signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, devolving some
power to Northern Ireland and preparing the way for a later peace settlement.
That year was perhaps the apotheosis of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. The success of her policies at
home and abroad made her, together with Ronald Reagan, the most distinctive advocate of a revived
capitalism in the world. Under her, the Anglo-American special relationship was an exercise in mutual
adoration. She was a staunch cold-war warrior, lauded wherever she went behind the Iron Curtain as a
herald of freedom, which she often was.
An act of regicide
The third term culminated in personal humiliation, though not at the hands of the British electorate. At
home Mrs Thatcher set about reforming the welfare state, attempting to introduce competition among
health and education “providers” and to hand day-to-day decision-making to schools, hospitals and
family doctors (thereby sidelining hated local-government bureaucrats). Abroad she was confronted with
the “European problem”—the fact that the European Common Market (which she had embraced) was
becoming an ever-closer European Union.
Mrs Thatcher’s domestic reforms pitted her against much wilier opponents than Mr Scargill. Middle-class
trade unions like the National Union of Teachers and august professional bodies like the British Medical
Association argued that Mrs Thatcher was hell-bent on dismantling the welfare state even as real
spending on the public sector rose. Many middle-of-the-road voters were now nervous, as well as rank-
and-file Tory MPs. Suddenly “their people” were complaining about “that woman”. And their nervousness
was increased by ever-sharper divisions in the party between Europhiles and Euro sceptics, which could
no longer be papered over.
Freedom fighter
Adding to all this was Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly imperial style. After her third victory she became
inclined to refer to herself as “we” and to ride roughshod over any opposition. She used a clique of
fellow-believers to design policy and sidelined backbench MPs. And she habitually asked colleagues
whether they were “one of us”. Even the Tory Sunday Telegraph accused her of “bourgeois
triumphalism”.
In October 1989 Nigel Lawson, her chancellor, resigned, infuriated that she was trying to undermine his
policy of shadowing the Deutschmark. She lumbered her party with a “poll tax” which required both
dukes and dustmen to pay exactly the same for their local-government services—a tax so unpopular that
her Tory successor rescinded it. She addressed the European question with increasingly high-octane
rhetoric, as in Bruges in 1988: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain
only to see them re-imposed at a European level.”
This led to a rapid succession of tactical mistakes that eventually persuaded her own party to sack her,
an act of regicide that deeply shocked her and took the party a generation to get over. In November
1990 Geoffrey Howe, the last remaining giant from her 1979 Cabinet, resigned as deputy prime minister
over her refusal to agree on a timetable to join a single European currency. As he left, he summed up in
the Commons the difficulty of trying to work with her: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to
the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken
before the game by the team captain.”
Michael Heseltine, her most charismatic foe from the left of her party, immediately mounted a leadership
challenge. Mrs Thatcher won the first ballot, but not easily enough to avoid a second one. Her cabinet
ministers eventually persuaded her to take a bullet for the good of the party.
A long shadow
Judged from the grand historical perspective, Mrs Thatcher’s biggest legacy was the spread of
freedom—with the defeat of totalitarianism in its most vicious form in the Soviet Union, and with the
revival of a liberal economic tradition that had gone into retreat after 1945.
Her combination of ideological certainty and global prominence ensured that Britain played a role in the
collapse of the Soviet Union that was disproportionate to its weight in the world. Mrs Thatcher was the
first British politician since Winston Churchill to be taken seriously by the leaders of all the big powers.
She was a heroine to opposition politicians in eastern Europe. Her willingness to stand shoulder to
shoulder with “dear Ronnie” to block Soviet expansionism helped to promote new thinking in the Kremlin.
But her readiness to work with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, also helped to end the cold war.
Mrs Thatcher’s privatisation revolution spread around the world. Other EU countries followed her
example, if not her rhetoric: in 1985-2000 European governments sold off some $100 billion-worth of
state assets, including national champions such as Lufthansa, Volkswagen and Renault. The post-
communist countries embraced it heartily: by 1996 Russia had privatised some 18,000 industrial
enterprises. India part-dismantled the licence Raj, and unleashed a cavalcade of successful companies.
Across Latin America governments embraced market liberalisation. Whether they did this well or badly,
all of them looked to the British example.
At home, her legacy was more complicated. Paradoxes abound. She was a true-blue Tory who
marginalised the Tory Party for a generation. The Tories ceased to be a national party, retreating to the
south and the suburbs and all but dying off in Scotland, Wales and the northern cities. Tony Blair profited
more from the Thatcher revolution than John Major, her successor: with the trade unions emasculated
and the left discredited, he was able to remodel his party and sell it triumphantly to Middle England. His
huge majority in 1997 ushered in 13 years of New Labour rule.
She was also an enemy of big government who presided over a huge expansion of it. Her dislike of the
left-wing councils that dominated many British cities was so great that she did more than any other post-
war prime minister to bind local governments into an ever tighter net of restrictions. She had no time for
the idea of elected mayors who united real power with real responsibility. Britain became much more like
highly centralised France than gloriously decentralised America.
Yet her achievements cannot be gainsaid. She reversed what her mentor, Keith Joseph, called “the
ratchet effect”, whereby the state was rewarded for its failures with yet more power. With the exception
of the emergency measures taken after the financial crisis of 2007-08, there have been no moves to
renationalise industries or to resume a policy of picking winners.
Thanks to her, the centre of gravity of British politics moved dramatically to the right. The New Labourites
of the 1990s concluded that they could rescue the Labour Party from ruin only by adopting the central
tenets of Thatcherism. “The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private
sector,” declared Mr Blair. Neither he nor his successors would dream of reverting to the days of
nationalisation and unfettered union power.
The Lady still casts a long shadow. She was a divisive figure, and the issues that she addressed
continue to confront and divide. The British state has gone on expanding after a period of continence.
Deficits have exploded. The relationship between some companies (this time banks rather than
manufacturers) and government has become too close. Margaret Thatcher and the -ism that she coined
remain as relevant today as they were in the 1980s.

Correction: This article originally stated that Mrs Thatcher allowed the pound to float in 1979. In fact the pound was
already floating, but Mrs Thatcher abolished exchange controls and chose to keep the pound out of the European
Monetary System. The article was clarified to reflect this on April 12th.

PART TWO: ECONOMY AND SOCIETY IN BRITAIN FROM 1945 to 1997

Learning focus
British economy
Britain’s economy between 1945 and 1997.
British society:
The emergence of modern British society:
Issues of equality and inequality, liberalisation of attitudes in society, 1945-2007.
Detailed framework:
Changing patterns in British society, 1945-1997
- The changing status of youth
- The changing status of women
- Social class, wealth and poverty
- The creation of a multicultural society
- The liberation of attitudes in society and its consequences
-
Key Terms
Affluent society
Permissive society
Immigration
 CHAPTER I. BRITISH ECONOMY FROM 1945 TO 1997
Review :
By the end of WWII the leaders of the western world had learnt the lessons of the 30s.
They started to organize together and a united nation monetary and financial conference commonly known as the
Bretton Woods conference was held in the US in July 1944.

The delegates from 44 nations met to discuss the post-war recovery of Europe as well as a number of monetary
issues. The conference was meant to regulate the international monetary and financial order and to set up joint
bodies so as to prevent major international crisis. The delegates reached an agreement (the Bretton Woods
agreement) and established an international monetary system of convertible currencies, fixed exchange rates and
free trade. For a lot of people, the Breton Wood agreement marked the end of economic nationalism. To facilitate
these objectives, the agreement created 3 international institutions :

1/ The International Monetary Fund (IMF) -> initially created in 1944 at the time of the conference to encourage
international collaboration in monetary matters. It aimed at stabilizing exchange rates and developing a
multicultural system between member states who contribute to the funds and draw on it if needed.
2/ The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, better known as "the world's bank", set up in 1945.
It was also meant to help the recovery of post-war reconstruction. For example, the first act to help this recovery
was a loan of 250 million pounds to France in 1947.
3/ The General Agreement of Tariff and Trade (GATT), 1947 : an international organization promoting the
expansion of international trade through the removal of restrictions (or tariffs) on cross frontier trade.

The leader of the British delegation to Bretton Woods was no other than Keynes, who also became chairman of the
World Bank. Following Keynesian lines governments attending the Bretton Woods conference also accepted that
they had a duty to intervene more in the running of national economies.

When WWII ended, Great Britain was considered as an industrial and economic power and its advance on
European allies was notable.
Great Britain’s assets in 1945:
- The industrial infrastructure was still standing and able to produce.
- The Commonwealth was immense and could provide resources.
- The City’s financial power in London.
This gave Great Britain a feeling it had found its former power.

The New Welfare State measures also gave the impression Britain was entering a new age of prosperity and social
peace which contrasted strongly with the economic and social difficulties, the political instability of many of their
European neighbours. However, there were also several disappointing aspects of British economy and the feeling
that Britain was in decline.
Most disappointing aspect of British economy since 1945:
The failure to match the growth performance of the other advanced industrialised countries.

This relative decline started in the late nineteenth century when a number of European countries began to outstrip
Britain. They had just entered their phase of modern economic growth and were able to achieve high growth rates
simply by imitating production methods and technologies already developed in Britain and the United States.
In any case, Britain was still the wealthiest country in Europe.

A) The rebuilding of British economy : 1945 – 1955

A-1) Rebuilding with new aspirations…

In 1945, Labour experienced a landslide election victory.
Clement Attlee, the new prime minister, was determined to rebuild the country with a fair share for all.
He was going to fight the combined evils of high unemployment and slow economic growth.

Economic measures taken:

• nationalization of 1/5 of the British economy including steel, coal, railways and shipbuilding.
• the creation of a Welfare State guaranteed better living conditions and health standards for everybody rich
and poor.

Review:
In the UK, the term Welfare State was introduced opposed to the German warfare system.
In 1942, William Beveridge was appointed by Attlee to investigate on how to help those who were in need of
assistance or poverty. Beveridge emphasized 5 giant evils in his report : want disease, ignorance, squalor,
idleness. To fight against these giants, Beverige stated that "all people of working age should pay a weekly national
insurance contribution : in return, benefits would be paid to people who were sick, unemployed, retired, widowed".
The Beveridge report also established the national health service (NHS), a publicly funded system of free and
universal health care that was finally set up in 1948 -> Everybody had to be covered by a system of national social
insurance, "from cradle to grave".

Both Attlee government and its Conservative successor Churchill were largely successful in reaching
rapid growth, low inflation and full employment.
In some ways Britain still seemed ahead of its European counterparts, in 1952, British GDP was double the GDP in
France or 30% higher than West Germany’s GDP.

A-2) And with financial difficulties…

Although the British received U.S aid worth 2.7 billion dollars from the American European Recovery Program
(Marshall Plan), which was the largest amount obtained by any other receiver country, there were considerable
problems on the way :

* Weak international position.

The US put an end to the lend-lease system that had supported the British war effort since 1941: arrangement
whereby the US government supplied military equipments and weapons to the UK, in return of British owned
military basis for instance in the British West Indies.
After this system ended, Britain had to negotiate an extra loan which emphasized its weak economic position
on the international level.

* “Export or die”…
In order to repay war time debts, Britain had to export massively. The slogan used by successive governments was
: "export or die".
As a way of increasing foreign revenue, some industries, e.g. the car industry, were forced by the government to
export through quotas.
Britain was helped by the fact that apart from the USA, all her economic competitors were still rebuilding after the
war. Yet, in concentrating on manufacturing for export, the country failed to modernize its industry.

* Rise of inflation.
Finally, the support of Britain to the United Nations at the outbreak of the Korean war (1950 - 53) was accompanied
by a massive rearmament program introduced by government in 1951.
This had 2 consequences :
1/ cuts were made to the welfare state to pay for the program
2/ it slowed down Britain's economic recovery by taking resources away from the export drive to the armament
industry.
Britain thus lost important export markets that were difficult to recapture. It also led to a sharp increase in inflation
as the price of imports rose.

Because of the rise of inflation (rises in prices, everything became more expensive) austerity measures had to be
put into place to limit imports which were costing too much (everything had to be bought in $ and the inflation rates
made the pound weak in comparison with the dollar).

B) Smooth growth or relative decline ? (1955 - 1973)

B-1) Behind an apparent growth, industrial decline…

Between 1955 and the beginning of the oil crisis (1973), the British economy in terms of GDP grew at a rate of
2,8% per year, a third higher than in the inter war period.
Appointed as Prime Minister in 1957 (until 1963), Conservative Harold McMillan came up with the following slogan :
"We've never had it so good".
In 1961, he set up the National Economic Development Council, also known as NEDDY.
This was a committee which gathered management, trade unions and government and it was appointed to draft a
5-year plan to boost economic growth both in the private and public sector. => it was the first British attempt to plan
economy.
Though McMillan managed to reach high growth and low unemployment, an important element was the
inevitable decline of industry that had traditionally been strong in Britain.
Shipbuilding declined from a 37% share of the world market in the 50s to only 3.7% in 1974.
The car industry started to have serious problems at the end of the 60s, when productivity felt well behind that of
European countries as well as Japan.
From the early 1950s onwards, Britain's growth tended to lag behind the other industrialised countries.
Britain's rivals had economies which were growing much faster.
Britain's share of the world trade declined from a quarter in 1950 to just over 10% in 1970

Among the six largest OECD countries, in 1950 only the United States had a higher level of National Income per
head than Britain. However, during the 1960s Britain was overtaken by both France and Germany. Then in the
1970s she was passed by Japan. In the late 1980s Britain was still slightly ahead of Italy, although the latter had
narrowed the gap significantly over the post-war period.
This became a great source of concern, as gradually one country after another overtook Britain.
The slow decline caused great anguish and the poor economic performance of the country was a dominant theme
of political debate.
By the late 1980s, although still rich in global terms, Britain had fallen well down the international living standards
league.

B-2) “Stop and go” policies

In the go phase, the domestic economy grew, reducing unemployment and increasing spending, which in turn,
increased demand and fuelled inflation.
Then, to control inflation, the government used tax increases and credit restrictions to curb demand which slowed
economic growth and increased unemployment = stop phase.
This phenomenon created a vicious cycle, that prevented long term economic growth.

It was difficult for industry to plan ahead and make the necessary investment to increase productivity.
 British goods were overpriced compared to those produced in neighbouring countries.
This therefore stimulated imports at the cost of export and created a downward spiral in British economy.

Another consequence of this stop-go policy has only been visible in the long run = stagflation appeared in the late
60s in Western economies, especially in GB.
Stagflation is the contraction of “inflation” (rise in prices) and stagnation of the economy’s growth rate.

B-3) Explanation for Britain’s sluggish growth rates:

Several reasons explain Britain’s difficulties renewing with strong economic growth rates.

* Britain had, what some historians have termed, a low social capability. This refers to the ability of a country to
exploit existing scientific and technological knowledge. This was seen in….
* …. A reluctance by companies to specialize or expand to meet international competitors.

Small businessman were often cautious and unwilling to invest in new projects which is why the Labor government
of Harold Wilson (1964 - 1970) encouraged the merger of smaller companies into larger ones through an agency
called the Industrial Reorganization Corporation, particularly in the car, computer, electrical engineering industries.

* Britain had had a low growth potential, because of her early economic start. The country had not been able to
grow as quickly as countries such as France, Germany and Japan, because it was industrialised much earlier and
this left the country at a disadvantage.

* Poor labour relations due to lack of training and adequate personnel.

* The strength of the trade unions has also been pointed out to explain this decline.
Major strikes were organized in Britain in the 60s:
The London dockers’ strike created delays in shipping for companies that were exporting, which further
worsened this situation.
The car industry strike. Both these strikes received wide media coverage.
The power of the TU kept Britain from modernising her industry in some ways. See text below.

“Trade unions emerged in the eighteenth century, before the development of mass production methods.
These early trade unions, therefore, represented craft workers, whose aim was to protect their economic position
by restricting entry into the trade and controlling manning levels. Furthermore, as these craft unions came to
dominate the ethos of the trade union movement at the end of the nineteenth century, British labour became
preoccupied with controlling work practices. The consequences have been restrictive labour practices, over
manning and, in as much as these adversely influenced profitability, low investment.
There is some empirical evidence to support this claim. Business histories suggest that in some industries, such as
shipbuilding and car manufacture in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a substantial degree of over manning with
productivity levels well below overseas standards. “

From Britain’s Post-war Economic Decline, Nicholas Woodward. University of Wales, Swansea New
Perspective, Vol. 1, Number 2, December 1995.

C. The roller-coaster economy (1973 – 200?)

C-1) From 1973 to 1979 (the last years of the Age of Consensus).

Since the early seventies, the British economy has experienced 2 major depressions and several shorter periods of
growth. The 70s were largely a period of stagnation:
growth was only about 2.5% a year when Conservative PM Edward Heath came to power in 1970.
His measures to wake up the economy were based on liberal principles of free market and trade:
* encouragement to free market policies.
* abolishing price and income controls.
* massive cuts in public expenditure.

As a consequence, there was a rising rate of inflation which was made worse when OPEC quadrupled prices in
1973.

The period was further characterized by industrial disputes, notably in the coal/mining industry, which drove Labour
and Conservative governments to take over specific endangered firms.
The Heath government for instance saved Rolls Royce by buying it along with other lame-duck industries.
For a conservative, saving an industry, albeit a symbol of British industry, was seen as treason of the liberal
principles and the right-wing of the Conservative Party criticized Heath.

The Labour governments of 1974 to 1979 under Harold Wilson had their own economic problems as well as the
government of his successor Callaghan :

* Reduction in wage rises had been put into place after 3 years of agreed pay deals between unions and the
government. This was positive for the economy but not so much for many workers in a phase of inflation.
* Buying power for workers was lessened because of wage caps and rise in prices.
In 1975, the retail price index showed an increase of 27% in just one year.
Unemployment reached one million for the first time since the 1930s.

* Lack of trust in the government especially from financial markets.

This was reinforced even further when Britain decided to seek a massive loan from the IMF, to stop the pound from
sliding against the dollar. It fell below 2$ for the first time in March 1976.

Yet, there was modest economic recovery between 1976 and 1978, thanks to the arrival of the North-Sea oil, which
reduced imports considerably.

The balance of payments and the inflation position both improved as the pound went up against the dollar. Thanks
to this oil, Britain was now trading with the wealthier, more developed countries of the world instead of being
restricted to its former empire.

But in fact the main change came from the Labour government of James Callaghan who decided to trade
keynesanism for monetarism.
Monetarism's main difference with keynesanism is that whereas Keynes was aiming for full employment,
monetarism tried to keep inflation under control.
This was done through control of the money supply even if this generated a rise in unemployment.
For many historians, Callaghan actually paved the way for Thatcherism.

The 70s were a decade in which all industrialized nations had to face new problems, which were mainly due to the
international impact of oil price rises in 1973 and 1979.

In Britain, this period specifically coincided with the collapse of the main industries coupled with problems of
industrial relations, inflation and cyclical unemployment.
These problems came to be seen as “Britain diseases”* and there was an overall feeling of pessimism in Britain,
which persisted in the following decades. Britain was the “sick man” of Europe.

C- 2) The economy under Margaret Thatcher (1979 and following…)

In 1979, the Conservative Party electoral manifesto clearly indicated : “The balance of our society has been
increasingly tilted in favour of the state at the expense of individual freedom. This election may be the last chance
we have to reverse that process.” Margaret Thatcher’s agenda was radically different from any other PM before.

Her first concerns were:

• liberalizing the economy by controlling inflation and restructuring industry,
• strengthening the authority of the state against pressure groups.

It was a double aim : privatization and crushing the Trade Unions.

In 1979 the nationalized industries accounted for 10% of GDP,
In 1988 the privatization campaign had reduced this number to 6,5% of GDP
in 1992 the nationalized industries accounted for 4% of the GDP.

This privatization was organized in various ways:

• selling a certain amount of shares on the market. Ex.: Jaguar and British Airways.
• selling to the companies' employees ex. the British transport road company.
• Some of the hospitals and services which belonged to the National Health Service started to subcontract to
the private sector.
One reason for this was obviously to make the new shareholders more open to the arguments of the managers and
less to those of the Trade Union (=“popular capitalism”).
This privatization program tolled the knell for many of the industries that had been nationalized by Labour after the
Second World War.
It was also much in keeping with Thatcher's desire to “roll back the frontiers of the state” = one of her mottos.

The first provisional budget for 1979, clearly followed liberal and monetarists lines (Milton Friedman’s ideas).
The government reduced :
* The money supply and tried to bring inflation under control in order to stimulate consumption.
* Public spending
* Income tax especially for the wealthy people where the top band was cut from 83% to 40%.

These new policies made employment and output decline.

* The worst effects were in manufacturing : 2 million manufacturing jobs were lost during the 80s, in engineering
and textile mostly.
Despite huge number of redundancies, British firms still had difficulties competing with foreign rivals.

In the late 1980s, demand rose but British industry lacked the capacity to meet it and imports rose.

As industry faltered, unemployment again became a significant problem, not only in Northern England, where
the old industries were located, but also in the second half of the 80s and in the early 90s, the new modern
industries of the south-east were hit by the recession.

The Thatcher government accepted a certain amount of unemployment as a necessary evil to keep inflation under
control. Margaret Thatcher's answer to this collapse of the British industry was to go on with privatization. Initially,
privatization formed only a small part of Conservative policy, but as the 80s and 90s progressed, it became
increasingly important.
Example : the first major privatization was the medical research through Amersham International in 1982.
British Telecom and British Airways followed in 1984 and British Gas in 1986.

The argument of the government was that privatization would boost the British economy by getting the state out of
managerial affairs (idea = boost competition as in a free market economy).
Problem: the privatized utilities became private monopolies with very little competition.
Privatization was nevertheless popular with the general public as quick gains could be made.

By the end of the 80s, the government was making 5 billion pounds a year from privatization.
Problem: the money was not invested in long term projects such as, for instance, the modernization of the
unreliable and sometimes dangerous transport system, but used for current spending.

Thatcher's policy success was controversial.

Her aim of reducing the role of the state was contradicted by the increasingly centralized and
interventionist government which developed while she was in office.
The privatization of the industry, for instance, was accompanied by a whole series of bodies and quangos (semi
public organisations with a form of autonomy and independence).
Another nickname of M. Thatcher was TINA (There Is No Alternative) along with the “Iron Lady”…

John Major administration from 1990 was in many ways a continuation of Thatcher policies = savings through
redundancies.
In the 1990s the continued advance of the service sector, especially the media and financial services characterised
British economy.
In 1992, measures taken for financing public projects:
Private contractors paid for the construction costs of certain buildings and projects and then rented the project to
the public sector. This allowed the government to get new hospitals, schools or prisons (former public services)
without raising taxes.
Results: it proved a disaster because the private sector had to divide the construction into different structures for
instance with British Railways, the carriages were made by one company, the tracks by another and there was a
lack of coordination between private investors.

In the middle of the 1980s, there were over 3 million unemployed and ten years later about 2,6 million.
Unemployment % continued to fall during the following years:
1985 11,2% of working age population was unemployed
1996 6,4%
1998 4,5% (about 1 million)

John Major’s government will best be remembered for the fiasco of the European exchange rate mechanism = the
first stage of the implementation of a single currency.
The rate fixed by the European Union meant that £1 was worth 2.95 Deutsch Mark, which was too high for the
pound.
The climax was the disastrous episode of Black Wednesday on the 16th of September 1992, when Britain was
forced to get out of this European mechanism. From a vast empire, Britain had thus been reduced to nothing but a
small island. At home, the government was able to bring recovery.

However John Major's Cabinet had raised billions of pounds in an effort to keep the pound into the European
exchange rate mechanism and this destroyed public faith in the Conservatives' economic policies.

CHAPTER 2 SOCIAL CHANGES IN BRITAIN SINCE 1945

Learning focus:
British society:
The emergence of modern British society:
Issues of equality and inequality, liberalisation of attitudes in society, 1945-2007.
Detailed framework
Changing patterns in British society, 1945-1997
- The changing status of youth
- The changing status of women
- Social class, wealth and poverty
- The creation of a multicultural society
- The liberation of attitudes in society and its consequences
-
Key Terms
Affluent society
Permissive society
Immigration

As many societies in Western Europe, Britain’s society changed significantly after 1945.
Many aspects of social life were put into question and modified:
Former social organisation and hierarchy  less hierarchy, different groups took on a more important role (ex.
women, young people)
Morals and behaviour codes inherited from the Christian past  more “permissive” society
British Culture  multicultural Britain
Lifestyles = freedom of choice // conformity through consumerism

From 1945 to 1997, Britain went from an industrial society to a post-industrial economy and society.
The 1960s were perceived as a time of social revolution with many areas of social life affected by important
transformations.

A) A more affluent society …

Living standards improved all throughout the period after 1945, in spite of the various financial problems Britain
went through. A great majority of the population gained in material prosperity.
Wages rose ahead of prices and credit became widely available, this enabled consumers to buy a wide array of
consumer goods (also called consumer durables).
In the period 1945-1960: the sale of private cars nearly quadrupled.
Impressive growth in house buying thanks to banks and building societies that provided capital to buy houses
(=mortgages). The increase in the number of home owners led to using the expression: a “ property owning
democracy”.

This expression was used by the Conservatives for the first time in the 1950s. Their aim was to provide the
economic conditions so that a maximum of citizens could become home owners  this would give citizens a
genuine stake in society.

Households in Britain with consumer durables (% of households)

1972 1981 1991 1993
Colour television 48 74 95 96
Black & white 45 23 4 3
Television only
Telephone 42 75 88 90
Washing machine 66 78 87 88
Video Recorder - - 68 73
Microwave - - 55 62
Tumble drier - 23 48 49
CD player - - 27 39
Dishwasher - 4 14 16

Housing tenure, England and Wales (%)

Owner Occupiers Council Tenants Private Tenants Others
1914 10.0 1.0 80.0 9.0
1939 31.1 14.0 46.0 9.0
1966 46.7 25.7 22.5 5.1
1977 54.0 32.0 9.0 5.0
1985 61.9 27.3 8.3 2.5
1990 67.0 24.0 7.0 2.0

th
By the end of the 20 century, all the evidence was that material poverty had been largely eradicated.
The standard of living had risen for the whole population.
Even for the poorest, the range and quality of their resources improved so much that the notion of poverty itself had
to be reassessed.
There has been an overall gentrification or affluentisation of the population, what is sometimes called
embourgoisement.

This trend has combined with a general loosening of the previously rigid class system.
The second most obvious feature of British society today, as compared to the 1940s, is the relative lack of deep
class stratification.
Most British people have become essentially middle class in their jobs, incomes and in their attitudes.
Some good examples to illustrate these changes can be seen with regard to telephones, Hoovers, washing
machines, motorcars, refrigerators and bank accounts. Very few people possessed these items in the 1920-50
period, except the very rich and upper class or professional persons, mostly men.
Today, of course, almost everybody possesses all of these items. This clearly illustrates the process of
embourgoisement in British society over the last fifty years.
On the other hand, the upper classes no longer have the same impact on British society as they did in the 1940s.
Language and attitudes have changed and the upper class English (the BBC English) is no longer considered as
the official English of the upper and middle classes.
A form of proletarianisation or also a “casualisation” has occurred in British society.

B) Important social changes introduced in the 1960s.

This period known as the “Swinging Sixties” or the “Long Sixties” covers the period from 1958 to 1974 during which
important social changes in Great Britain occurred.
This period was characterised by :
- a form of affluence which benefited all of society.
- a questioning of former social categories and class based society.
- a questioning of moral values and traditions.
- a more multi-cultural society.

B-1) The changing status of youth

In the early 1960's, almost 40% of the population was under 25. This gave the British population a distinctive
dynamic and energy.
The increasing affluence of Britain's youth provided them with greater personal choice and freedom, creating the
youth culture which rejected established values and traditions, focusing itself instead on music, drugs, sex and
fashion ( with the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Hendrix for music and gangs such as Teddy-Boys, Mods and Rockers )

Youth culture not only challenged tradition, but also authority, organising strikes on key issues of the time such as
nuclear disarmament, environmental issues, women’s rights and anti-Vietnam War protests.
Therefore, an irrevocable change in the youth culture of British society occurred in this period.

1969, voting age reduced from 21 to 18  more involvement of young people in political and social issues.

B-2) Revolution in Education

After the failure of the system, based on the Butler Act of 1944 which aimed to set up a more egalitarian
educational system, giving students from working-class families the same chances as the ones from a wealthier
background, Harold Wilson established the Comprehensive school system.

This system is based on meritocracy* and had a great success from 1957 to 1967 with an increase of 130 % of
people attending Universities from working class backgrounds. The Labour government tried to keep with this
demand through creating the Polytechnics and in 1969, Royal Charter introduced the Open University which is a
unique academy institution : it is a government-funded place of higher education.

*meritocracy is rewarding merit, not rewarding social background. Students were allowed into Universities on the
basis on their merit and results, not on the basis of their social background and former studies in a Public School.

These changes gave more University type training access to working class young people.

“School anger at Carey’s lesson in moral duty”

th
The Daily Telegraph, 6 July 1996
“The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday demanded that schools comply with the law requiring daily Christian worship
as the first step towards restoring the nation’s moral fibre. (…)
He told peers that schools had a duty not merely to turn out academically successful pupils but also young adults with a
clear sense of right and wrong.
“It would be a failure if our schools were to produce people with the right skills and aptitudes to take on our economic
competitors, but who cannot string two sentences together about the meaning and purpose of life, or who have no idea what it
means to be a good citizen and a moral person.”
His call for schools to play a more active and direct role in the remoralising of the nation’s children drew scornful attack
from teaching unions. (…)
Doctor Carey drew support both from the Government and at least one leading educationist. (…)
In his speech, the archbishop warned against “privatised morality and what he called the “widespread tendency to view
what is good and right as a matter of private taste and individual opinion.”
He launched a strong attack on “moral and cultural relativism” and said that Britain was in danger of “squandering” the
inheritance of faith and values that underpinned the ethics of our civilisation. (…) “

B-3) The changing status of women.

Female advance has been described as “playing catch up” that is women gaining constitutional and legal rights as
citizens on the same terms as men. Already by the middle of the century specific reforms had made a major
breakthrough. Among these were:
Sex Disqualification Act, 1919: opened all professions(except holy orders) and the universities (though not all the
individual colleges) to female entry.
Matrimonial Causes Act, 1923: gave the wife the right to divorce the husband on the ground of his adultery.
New English Law of Property, 1929: entitled married and single women to hold and dispose of their property on
the same terms as a man.
Representation of the People Act, 1928: gave women over 21 the right to vote in parliamentary and local
elections.
British Nationality of Women Act, 1948: gave British women the right to retain British nationality on marriage to a
foreigner.

Subsequent legislation covered a wide range of matters and could be said to have laid the formal and legal basis of
women’s equality. Among key measures introduced during the 2 ½ of the century were:
Equal Pay Act, 1970= women were to receive the same rates of pay as men for doing work of equal value.
Finance Act, 1971= allowed husband’s and wife’s earning to be taxed separately if they so applied.
Employment Protection Act, 1975= denied employers the right to dismiss pregnant employees and required them
to offer paid maternity leave.
Sex Discrimination Act, 1975= outlawed discrimination on grounds of sex to employment, education and training,
housing, provision of services, banking, insurance and credit.
Social Security Act, 1975= provided a special maternity allowance fund.
Social Security Pensions Act, 1975= required pension schemes to be open equally to women engaged in the
same work as men.
Finance Act, 1988 = introduced separate taxation for husbands and wives.

These reforms were in a large part a response to the feminist movement in Britain. It is hard to give a precise date
to the start of this movement, but what was certainly significant was the growth in formal education of women at
secondary and higher level. Moreover, the feminist movement had a great influence on Britain, since it was
combined with an increasing numbers of women entering higher education.

The introduction of labour saving devices meant that women were no longer tied to the household and had greater
amount of free time.
This led to the increasing awareness of the repression of women in the traditionally patriarchal society.

Therefore, women’s role in society changed a lot during that period, moving from the role of mother and wife to the
status of salary-earner so that society moved from a patriarchal model to a more egalitarian society model.

One aspect of feminism is that it illustrates the trend that developed in the 1960s for particular interest groups to
pursue their aims individually rather than as a part of a broad reforming movement for the change of society.
This suggested that people were losing faith in the traditional parties as forces of social change.

Feminists insisted on the need for a fundamental change of attitude in society, for a removal of traditional social
and moral restraints. There were important changes during the 1960s and they were termed “sexual revolution”.
Four different aspects:
• The Pill: the female oral contraceptive pill became widely available in the 1960s. For the first time in history,
women had control over their own fertility.
* The Lady Chatterley Case, 1960. In 1960, Penguin Books were prosecuted for publishing an obscene book,
D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which contained four-letter words and explicit
descriptions of sexual relations.

* The Abortion Act, 1967- permitted the legal termination of pregnancy where tow doctors certified there was
serious risk to the physical or mental health of the mother, or a strong possibility the child could be born with
serious abnormalities. This was highly controversial. Some moralists saw it as the State’s sanctioning of the murder
of the innocent, but most feminists hailed it as a major step in the liberation of women since it gave them the right to
choose.
* The Sexual Offences Act, 1967= was based on the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report of 1958. It
permitted male homosexual acts in private between consenting adults. Female homosexuality was not mentioned
in the Act as it had never been illegal.

It was because of these different aspects that some saw British society becoming more permissive.

Some Figures
Women as a percentage of those in higher education in the UK:
1929: 28% 1959: 25% 1989: 40%

A 1984 poll, showing the distribution of domestic duties in the UK

9/10 women did the washing and the ironing
7/10 women did the household cleaning
5/10 women did the shopping
1/16 women did the household repairs

Children born to unmarried mothers in the UK (% of all births)

1914: 3% 1970: 10% 1988: 25%

Divorce rates in the UK

Pre-1939: 1 for every 100 marriages 1960: 1 for every 10 marriages 1980: 1 for every 3 marriages

Women as a percentage of the workforce in the UK

1911: 33 1951: 31 1970: 35 1990: 43

Legal abortions in England and Wales

1968: 22,332 1975: 106,648 1980: 128,600 1985: 141,000 1990: 173,900

C) The creation of a multicultural society.

nd th
One of the most notable features of GB in the 2 ½ of the 20 c. was its development as a multi-racial and
multicultural society.

NB: Commonwealth
Old Commonwealth: largely Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and South Africans.
New Commonwealth: largely West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis

1. Immigration encouraged

The story may be said to have begun in 1948 with the sailing of a converted troopship, Empire Windrush, from
Kingston to GB; the ship carried hundreds of Jamaican workers; the majority were young males but there were also
a number of older men and families. They were warmly welcome because of labour shortages at the time.
Under existing law (1948: the British Nationality Act confirmed the right of Commonwealth citizens to come
and settle in GB), the newcomers had full rights of British citizenship.
This encouraged further immigration from the West Indies. The government encouraged this with organised
appeals for Caribbean workers to fill the vacancies, mostly in the hospital and transport services, that GB’s acute
post-war labour shortage had left.
By the mid-1950s employers in GB had extended their recruitment to the Indian sub-continent. Textile firms in
London and in the north of England eagerly took on workers from India and Pakistan.

2. Growing uneasiness

However, by the late 1950s, disturbing reactions had begun to occur among some of the white host population.
‘No coloured’ notices appeared in boarding house windows and on factory gates. Mutterings were heard to the
effect that the newcomers were attracted to GB as much by the generous welfare benefits as by the prospect of
work. The actual number of white residents who believed such slanders may have been small, but troublemakers
were able to exploit the housing shortage, which was a major problem in the poorer areas, by suggesting that it
was all the fault of the immigrants.
Race relations problems have never been simply about numbers.
Extremists who spoke of GB being ‘swamped’ by ‘waves of immigrants’ were talking nonsense.
The proportion of people of non-European origins has never been more than 6% of the overall population of
th
GB. Moreover, in every decade of the 20 c., net emigration exceeded net immigration.

Decade Outflow Inflow

1900-1909 4,404,000 2,287,000
1910-1919 3,526,000 2,224,000
1920-1929 3,960,000 2,590,000
1930-1939 2,273,000 2,361,000
1940-1949 590,000 240,000
1950-1959 1,327,000 676,000
1960-1969 1,916,000 1,243,000
1970-1979 2,554,000 1,900,000
1980-1989 1,824,000 1,848,000

The main difficulties arose over accommodation. Immigrants tended, quite naturally given their limited
resources when they first arrived in GB, to live in the poorer areas of cities and urban areas. This was where
cheaper properties for renting or buying were. But since GB suffered from a severe shortage of reasonably priced
houses there was bound to be competition between residents and newcomers.

Numbers and concentration of ethnic minorities in London in 1991

 The tensions that this caused were evident in the rioting that broke out in 1958 in Nottingham and Notting
Hill in London, while youths attacked West Indians.

“The thing about the so-called Notting Hill race riots is that they were not real race riots at all. People are always
fighting in an area like the ghetto; clubs are always being invaded and broken up; the general opinion was that a
few Teddy boys had simply been making a nuisance of themselves.”
Taken from the autobiography of Michael De Freitas, a Black Power activist, in 1968

Long prison sentences were imposed on the white ringleaders of the disturbances but the authorities
interpreted the disorder as indicating the need to control the number of new Commonwealth entrants.

A Commonwealth Immigrants Act was introduced in 1962. This was highly controversial and condemned
in many quarters as being racist since it placed restrictions on would-be entrants according to their ethnic origins.
nd
The Labour Party opposed the measure but once in office itself, it introduced a 2 Commonwealth Immigrants Act
in 1968. These two Acts restricted the right of entry to those who actually had jobs to go to. Both major parties had
concluded that limitations on entry into GB was necessary in the interests of good race relations;
Hence the Labour government introduced Race Relations Acts in 1965 and 1968:
st
- the 1 prohibited racial discrimination in public places and made incitement to racial hatred an offence.
nd
- the 2 one outlawed racial discrimination in areas such as employment and housing.
st
One consequence of the 1 Immigration Act was a rush of entrants into GB in the period before its terms
came into force. This peak in immigration fuelled the anxieties of those who called for a complete block on entry.
Enoch Powell gave voice to these concerns.

Enoch Powell (1912-1998)

He was an able but maverick Conservative politician, who was Minister of Health from 1960 to 1963. Ironically,
during that time, he had encouraged the recruitment of Commonwealth immigrants such as nurses and hospital
workers. An intense nationalist, he came to regard unlimited immigration as a threat to the character of the UK. In a
notorious speech in 1968 – Rivers of Blood -, he gave his nightmare vision of a future GB torn by racial conflict.
‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are
for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a
nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’

The speech was condemned from all political sides and E. Heath felt obliged to dismiss him from his shadow
Cabinet.
 All these measures were well intentioned but they had limited success in improving racial harmony. Again
the economic situation contributed largely to this. The inflation that followed the oil price crisis of the early 1970s
appeared to have the worst effects in immigrant areas where there were disproportionately higher numbers of
unemployed than in the population at large.
nd rd
The frustration of the immigrant community, particularly of 2 - and 3 -generation West Indians, who had
been born and brought up in GB, was expressed in serious riots in 1981 in Brixton, Birmingham, Bristol and
Liverpool, and tragically in 1985 when a policeman was killed during the Tottenham Broadwater Farm riot.
The feeling among the black community that they were subject to unwarranted harassment by the police
was a continuous grievance.

Salman Rushdie, “The New Empire within Britain”, New Society, 9 December 1982
“Racism is not a side-issue in contemporary Britain; it is not a peripheral, minority affair. Britain is
undergoing the critical phase of its post-colonial period. The crisis is not simply economic or political. It is a crisis of
the whole culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself. And racism is the most clearly visible part of the crisis, the
tip of the iceberg that sinks ships. (…)
How gracefully the British shrank back into their cold island, abandoning their lives as the dashing peoples
of their dreams, diminishing from the endless steaming landscapes of India and Africa into the narrow horizons of
their pallid, drizzled streets. (…)
The connection I want to make is this: those old colonial attitudes are still in operation here in Britain (…).
The British authorities, being no longer capable of exporting governments, have chosen instead to import a new
empire, a new community of subject peoples of whom they can think, and with whom they can deal, in very much
the same way as their predecessors thought of and dealt with ‘the fluttered folk and wild’, the ‘new-caught, sullen
peoples, half-devil and half-child’, who make up, for Rudyard Kipling, the white man’s burden.
If you want to understand British racism – and without understanding, no improvement is possible – it is
impossible even to begin to grasp the nature of the beast unless you accept its historical roots: unless you see that
400 years of conquest and looting, centuries of being told that you are superior to the fuzzy-wuzzies and the wogs,
leave their stain on you all; that such a stain steeps in every part of your culture, your language and your daily life;
and that nothing much has been done to wash it out.”

3. Contribution made by immigrants by the early 1970s

a. Economic impact

There are many examples of where immigrants have added huge value to the British economy. The garment
business, for instance, was and still is dominated by migrant communities. Ethnic forms of dress, fabrics and
accessories ar all popular influences in fashion, running through the work of fashion designers and street styles. In
addition, South Asian immigrants have been particularly influential in textile production. One of the reasons for this
was that in order to bear the costs of mechanisation, textile factories had to maintain production around the clock
and needed a large workforce.

b. Festivals and celebrations

st
The carnival tradition was a notable contribution of West Indian immigrants. The 1 carnival began in 1959 in St
Pancras Town and was a response to the depressing state of race relations at the time. In 1965, the carnival was
moved to Notting Hill, and by 1976 150,000 people were attending this annual event. It was in effect a
demonstration by which migrants asserted their right to be in the UK, and a gesture of solidarity by some local
residents.

c. Music

Throughout the 1960s, migrants’ music attracted and inspired a generation of white working-class youth, partly
because of its distinctive and rebellious sounds and associations. In particular, the arrival in England of reggae
music’s international superstar, Bob Marley, in 1976 had a particularly dramatic effect. Marley’s success helped to
spawn a Black British music industry based on reggae. His connection with the Rastafarian movement and the
language of his lyrics gave his music an authenticity and depth which inspired and influenced waves of young
Caribbean people, who, having been raised in GB, were beginning to want to discover their Caribbean roots.
Rastafarian movement: believes in a monotheistic religion that accepts both Jesus Christ and Haile Selassie I, the
former emperor of Ethiopia, as incarnations of God.

d. Other examples

By the late 1960s, South Asians had bought up to 2000 cinema houses that were being closed down or demolished
in places like Manchester and Glasgow, in order to show imported films from their own countries. As well as this,
immigrants have made a lasting impression on the British national diet. This includes the Huguenots who brought
oxtail soup; the Jews who brought smoked salmon bagels, chicken soup and fried fish; Indians who pioneered
Chicken Tikk Masala; and the Chinese who introduced Sweet and Sour Pork.

It is clear that by the mid-1970s immigrants had made a varied and telling impression on British society. However,
arguably the true test of whether a multicultural society had emerged by then is determined by whether or not there
was genuine economic equality between the cultures. Certainly the Race Relations Act (1976), which prevented
discrimination on the ground of race in fields such as employment and education, would suggest that the UK
government intended to have a multicultural society, but by then migrants were far less likely to receive as good an
education or as good a job as the white population.

D) Liberalisation of attitudes in society and its consequences.

One aspect of liberalisation of society is the decline of religious belief and practise:

The sixties were a period of decline for the Church which can be explained by the rising eminence of New
Age spiritualism and the exponential growth in alternative lifestyles.
This had several consequences at the social level:
- a change in the nation’s religious structure
- a cultural revolution.

All throughout the twentieth century religious practise and church-going underwent different periods of growth and
decline.
In 1900 there were about 5 million Protestant in Britain
In 1930 there were about 6 million
In the late 1970s there were about 4 million Protestant in Britain (Scotland 1 million, England Wales 3 million).

Catholics went through a different trend in Britain:

In 1900 there were about 2 million Catholics
In 1940 there were about 3 million Catholics
In 1971 there were about 5,5 million Catholics. However attendance at mass was half this figure and declining.
Because of the decline in numbers of Protestant church members and the lack of interest of many people for
religious activities, it has been said that British society has become secularised (secularisation).
This is a process that involves a shift of beliefs in transcendental and supernatural views to beliefs rooted in the
natural and present world.
But as secularization was going on, religious practice continued and was diversified. It is impossible to say that
religion has decayed completely, there are other forms of religious practice and allegiances in British society today.
th
Religious sentiment has taken on different forms in the second part of the 20 century.

In 1995, participation in religious services remained the single most popular voluntary activity.
Over 1 million persons attend a Church of England service each Sunday.
Other forms of religious experience, outside of Christianity have sprung up.
- Religious groups from the USA such as the Mormons or the Jehovah’s witnesses have doubled in
membership from 1970 to 1995.
- Immigrant religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism have grown in a striking way with the entry of
migrants bringing with them their culture and religious traditions.
-Between 1970 and 1995, the number of Muslims has increased from 250 000 to 600 000.

This secularisation can also be seen as a form of proletarianisation, because it imitates the working class
ambivalence towards religion, bearing in mind that regular church attendance in previous epochs was also very
much more a middle class than working class pursuit.
Thus, its decline can be seen as another form of casualisation and proletarianisation. It is another move towards
core working class beliefs and practices and away from middle and upper class beliefs and practices.

Liberalisation of society also means different attitudes and values:

The prevalent attitude towards many minority social groups has changed enormously, such as mental illness, the
disabled, sex, pornography, racial minorities, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, love affairs,
homosexuality...attitudes towards these were basically hostile, hidden, closet, Victorian, unacknowledged and
condemnatory in 40s and 50s Britain, but today they are all very largely out in the open, accepted, and more fully
acknowledged. Such liberalisation of attitudes and values has occurred especially since the 60s.