Labour and the left in the 1980s

By Manchester University Press

This volume of essays constitutes the first history of Labour and left-wing politics in the decade when Margaret Thatcher reshaped modern Britain. Leading scholars explore aspects of left-wing culture, activities and ideas at a time when social democracy was in crisis. There are articles about political leadership, economic alternatives, gay rights, the miners’ strike, the Militant Tendency and the politics of race. The book also situates the crisis of the left in international terms as the socialist world began to collapse.

Tony Blair's New Labour disavowed the 1980s left, associating it with failure, but this volume argues for a more complex approach. Many of the causes it championed are now mainstream, suggesting that the time has come to reassess 1980s progressive politics, despite its undeniable electoral failures. With this in mind, the contributors offer ground-breaking research and penetrating arguments about the strange death of Labour Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526106452

Book preview

Notes on contributors

Paul Bloomfield works at Anglia Ruskin University for the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences and is part of the Labour History Research Unit. Paul is currently completing a PhD thesis entitled ‘The Breakaway of the Social Democratic Party between 1979 and 1982 in the Context of Post-war Labour Party History’.

Robin Bunce is a historian based at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, where he supervises work on the history of ideas. His monograph Thomas Hobbes was published by Continuum in 2009. Subsequently he has worked on black power as an ideology and a movement in Britain. His most recent book, written with Paul Field, Renegade: The Life and Times of Darcus Howe, is published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

John Callaghan is Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford. He is the author of Socialism in Britain Since 1884 (1990), The Retreat of Social Democracy (2000) and Labour and Foreign Policy: A History (2007).

Richard Carr is a Senior Lecturer in History and Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. He has recently published a political biography of Charlie Chaplin with Routledge, and has written widely on interwar British conservatism, including a monograph Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War: The Memory of All That (2013). He co-authored Alice in Westminster: The Political Life of Alice Bacon with Rachel Reeves MP – which was named as one of the Guardian's Political Books of 2016.

Jonathan Davis is Senior Lecturer in Russian History and co-Director of the Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University. He is co-editor with Paul Corthorn of The Labour Party and the Wider World (2008), and with John Shepherd and Chris Wrigley of Britain's Second Labour Government, 1929–1931: A Reappraisal (2011). He is the author of Stalin: From Grey Blur to Great Terror (2008), and has published articles on delegates’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1920s in Revolutionary Russia, on the influence of the Russian Revolutions on Labour's ideology in Scottish Labour History, and on Labour's contemporary political thought in Renewal. He is currently writing a global history of the 1980s for Routledge.

Martin Farr is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History at Newcastle University. He has published on political biography, government and Parliament before, during and after the First World War, the politics of strategic bombing in the Second World War, seaside resorts and declinism, and package holidays in the 1970s. He is currently writing a book entitled Margaret Thatcher's World, and articles on imperial tropes in 1960s Britain, the film version of Oh! What a Lovely War, the deaths of Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith, and the relationship of Barack Obama and David Cameron.

Maroula (Mary) Joannou is Emerita Professor of Literary History and Women's Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Women's Writing, Englishness, and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 (2012), Contemporary Women's Fiction: From The Golden Notebook to The Color Purple (2000), and ‘Ladies Please Don't Smash These Windows’: Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918–1938 (1995). She is the editor of volume 8 of The Palgrave History of British Women's Writing (2012) and Women Writers of the 1930s, Gender, Politics and History (1998) and has published some forty book chapters and essays in peer-reviewed journals. In 1984 she was a member of both the St Albans Miners’ Support Group and the Cambridge Miners’ Support Group.

Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and co-Director of the Labour History Research Unit. He is a former President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. His publications include Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century England (1998), The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (2007) and articles on Victorian melodrama, Elsa Lanchester, Jonathan Miller and G. W. M. Reynolds. He is currently at work on a history of the West End of London since 1800.

Neil Pye completed a PhD in History at the University of Huddersfield which was published as The Home Office and the Chartists, 1838–48: Protest and Repression in the West Riding of Yorkshire (2013). Currently, he is conducting research about Metro Mayors and Combined Authorities, plus independent research about Michael Heseltine's role as the minister for Liverpool during the 1980s. Outside of academia, Neil previously served as a borough councillor in West Lancashire during 2011–15 and chaired the West Lancashire Labour Group which in 2015 took control of the council.

Eric Shaw is Honorary Research Fellow in the Division of History and Politics at Stirling University. He is author of Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party (1988), The Labour Party since 1979 (1994), The Labour Party since 1945 (1996), Losing Labour's Soul: New Labour and the Blair Government 1997–2007 (2008) and, with Gerry Hassan, The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (2012).

Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner and Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation: www.PeterTatchellFoundation.org.

Foreword

Peter Tatchell

The 1980s were the heyday of the Thatcher counter-revolution, with mass deindustrialisation destroying Britain's manufacturing base. The consequent lay-offs, and Tory economic policies designed to bolster business interests and maximise profits, cast 3.2 million people onto the dole queues by 1983.

The post-war consensus was torn to shreds, with the privatisation of public utilities, curtailment of local democracy and trade union rights, Section 28, cuts to local councils and public services, the poll tax and restrictions on civil liberties and the right to protest.

But this inequality and repression also provoked resistance, rebellion and rage: huge mass protests against government cuts and nuclear weapons, the People's March for Jobs and widespread rioting by working-class youth in Brixton, Toxeth, St Paul's, Moss Side and Tottenham.

It was a period of significant setbacks for left politics, most notably the crushing of the miners’ strike, Tony Benn's defeat in the Labour deputy leadership contest, abolition of the left-controlled Greater London Council, the surcharging and disqualification of councillors who resisted central government rate-capping, Labour's loss of the 1983 and 1987 general elections and my own defeat in the notorious 1983 Bermondsey by-election.

As Maroula Joannou's chapter 8 elucidates, the miners’ strike, and the semi-police-state methods used to destroy it, was a pivotal moment – and in many unexpected ways, not least because it spawned new forms of working-class solidarity and self-help and forged new connections between different and often separate struggles, most notably in the sphere of sexual politics. Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners challenged macho old-labourist attitudes on the coalfields, as did Women Against Pit Closures, which drew strongly on suffragette traditions and on the history of women campaigners during the General Strike of 1926.

These were not the only glimmers of hope amid the debacles and gloom of Thatcherism rampant. Something big stirred within Labour itself during the 1980s. The Left revived and grew. Atrophied and nepotistic local Labour parties were democratised, right-wing Tammy Hall local Labour leaders and MPs were ousted and a whole new generation of social and community activists joined the party. Many became councillors in left-dominated Labour local authorities and proceeded to enact a ground-breaking, visionary late twentieth-century version of municipal socialism in major cities across the UK.

The Conservatives had power at Westminster but the left captured large chunks of the local state and, despite Thatcherism and the more cautious Labour national leadership, transformed it in ways that advanced popular participation, community empowerment, social justice and equality.

Ken Livingstone's Labour administration of the Greater London Council (GLC, 1981–86) epitomised this new left politics and its exhilarating experiment in local democracy, local equality and local socialism. The previously stuffy, remote and exclusive GLC offices and committees were opened up to public consultations and community groups.

For the first time in Britain, politicians in power sought to engage seriously with women's issues and the concerns of marginalised minorities. They sought to tackle the too-often ignored inequalities of race, gender, disability, sexuality and gender identity. The GLC pioneered equal opportunities policies that have since become standard. It set up women's and ethnic minorities’ committees, with membership including outside experts and grass-roots community activists. It also created a Gay Working Party which later produced a report, Changing the World, recommending far-sighted and unprecedented policies to tackle anti-LGBT prejudice, discrimination and hate crime.

The GLC developed pioneering policies on housing, environmental protection and, especially, public transport. Its ‘fares fair’ policy cut travel costs by one-third, with the aim of aiding the mobility of low-income Londoners and incentivising people to not drive in central London, in order to cut congestion and pollution. It was hugely popular but was scuppered by a legal action brought by the Tories. A revised version was eventually implemented in 1983.

Livingstone's administration pioneered municipal economic planning; founding the Greater London Enterprise Board to create employment by investing in the industrial regeneration of London, mostly with money provided by the council and its staff pension fund. It proposed workers’ co-operatives and the creation of London Community Builders to construct new council housing and regenerate existing housing stock.

Similar initiatives were spearheaded by left-wing Labour councils in Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool (the latter, but not the GLC, is discussed at length in this book). Although their radical ambitions were often stymied by the Thatcher government's caps on local authority spending, they did nevertheless enact many tangible, positive reforms.

The 1980s was, in my mind, the most creative, exciting era for the left in many decades. It has had an impact on British politics and culture ever since. Many of its once trail-blazing radical ideas are the now mainstream consensus; especially around issues of equality, inclusion and diversity.

This book explores and illuminates some of these ideas and events – and many others – that collectively reshaped Labour in the 1980s and which, in some respects, still influence Labour today. The authors offer insights on the past that are issues for debate today regarding the future of progressive politics in the UK.

What happened in the 1980s has been made all the more relevant by the left-wing resurgence that led to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015. In contrast to the 1980s, this new, twenty-first-century left renaissance has focused on winning national, not local, power. The explosion in party membership far exceeds that in the 1980s and Corbyn is putting an even greater premium on democratising the party and its processes, to make them more participatory, collaborative, transparent and accountable.

Jeremy Corbyn is arguably the most socialist leader of Labour since George Lansbury in the 1930s and his agenda for radical social reform echoes that of Attlee – minus the nationalisation of major industries. However, winning power in the Labour Party is one thing; winning power in the country and Parliament is a much tougher task.

The future of Labour depends, in part, on learning lessons – positive and negative – from the past. The authors of this volume offer a mix of different political and historical perspectives on the 1980s. While I don't share all their analysis, they make points that deserve to be heard and discussed. Go read.

Preface

Labour and the left in the 1980s is the product of the Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University. We are very proud of Anglia Ruskin and its role in hosting discussions and events that explore the great issues of our time. The aim of the Unit is to develop new ways of thinking about the British Labour Party and progressive politics by employing the insights of historians as well as scholars in other disciplines. The present volume is one of the first to reassess the experience of the political left in the crucial decade of Thatcherism. It is based on a conference held at Anglia Ruskin in November 2014 in association with the Society for the Study of Labour History. It was a great day of exploration which really opened up a new subject. There were a number of excellent papers delivered that we were unable to use but we remain very grateful to the speakers. Some of the issues in this book have been explored in dialogue with members of the Cambridge Labour Party, whom we also thank.

Apart from the contributors, there have been many others who have assisted in making this book through direct input, support or just inspiration. The following list is far from exhaustive but we would like to thank Peter Ackers (who wondered aloud at our conference whether his generation in the 1980s was ‘too full of politics’), Alison Ainley, Tim Bale, Lucy Bland, Kelly Boyd, Marlene Buick, Anne Campbell, Luke Cooper, Paul Corthorn, Jon Cruddas MP, Nina Davis, Sharon Davis, Susan Flavin, Sean Lang, Keith Laybourn, Julia Long, the team at Manchester University Press, Daisy Payling, Emily Robinson, Sasha Roseneil, Robert Saunders, John Shepherd, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Tony Taylor, Ian Thatcher, Nathalie Thompson and Michael Ward. Special thanks must also go to Anglia Ruskin University for granting Jonathan Davis a sabbatical which allowed him to work on this book, and the archivists at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, where Neil Kinnock's papers are held. We are particularly grateful to Peter Tatchell for writing the passionate Foreword to our book.

As this book goes to press, the future of the Labour Party looks uncertain (just as it has done at many points in its history). Clearly, this is the right time to re-examine a comparable moment in Labour's past when it was in the wilderness. We do not claim that simple lessons can be learned, as the historical record is too complex, but we hope to prompt reflection on a decisive moment in the party's development. What we do believe is that histories of different forms of Labour and left-wing politics have a role to play in the ongoing search for social justice. This book is not exhaustive. We are very aware that we have not had space to consider many key issues. Tony Benn, the peace movement, environmentalism, grass-roots activism, the GLC, feminism and the issue of unemployment (to name just a few topics) need extensive treatment. The book lacks enough voices of working people themselves. We hope, however, that this book will kick-start a much-needed reconsideration of a formative moment in the history of the left.

Jonathan Davis

Rohan McWilliam

February 2017

Introduction: new histories of Labour and the left in the 1980s

Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam

The forward march of Labour halted

In 1980, notwithstanding the defeat of the Labour government the year before, the political left in its various forms remained a major presence in British life. Local government, the media, trade unions, pressure groups, the arts and academia: all were often dominated by left-of-centre voices that created networks of opposition to the recently elected Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Since the reforming Labour government of 1945, the liberal left had some reason to believe that it had shaped the orthodoxies of modern Britain with the welfare state, Keynesian economic policy and the liberal reforms that abolished censorship and challenged gender and racial discrimination. It was still possible, in 1980, for some to believe that a socialist future beckoned.

By the end of the decade, a wrecking ball had shattered these assumptions completely. Not only did the Conservatives win landslide majorities against Labour in the elections of 1983 and 1987 but the organised labour movement was defeated time and again, its rights heavily reduced and its bargaining power diminished by mass unemployment. Labour's left-leaning manifesto in 1983 was dubbed by Gerald Kaufman MP, ‘the longest suicide note ever penned’, and the party received just 28 per cent of the popular vote, barely ahead of the centrist alliance of the Liberals and the new Social Democratic Party (SDP). Right-wing newspapers ran articles about a so-called ‘loony left’ obsessed with political correctness but out of touch with ordinary people and popular culture. Attempts at creating a left-wing mass newspaper, the News on Sunday, failed miserably, while Rupert Murdoch's newspaper, the Sun, would go on to claim that it won the 1992 election for John Major. At a global level, the socialist world was collapsing, a transformation marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Gorbachev reforms in the country that soon ceased to be the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Great Britain actually wound itself up in 1991. Tony Benn argued that the challenge for the left was to win the argument for socialism. By any reckoning, the 1980s was the decade when the argument for socialism was lost.¹

Yet the 1980s was in many ways a creative decade for the left. Victories may have been few but there was no lack of energy. The party managed to get the first black MPs elected to Parliament.² In 1984 Chris Smith, Labour MP for Islington, became the first openly gay MP. Opposition to nuclear weapons resurfaced as a major agitation while the possible hazards of nuclear power were highlighted.³ The plight of the unemployed was placed at the top of the political agenda. Miners’ support groups created networks of solidarity.⁴ The Greater London Council (GLC) became a popular cause when faced with abolition and promoted new kinds of politics which helped to shape the wider social agenda.⁵ Feminists and anti-racism campaigners fashioned a new common sense about personal identities. There was an assault on the idea that it was acceptable to pay women less than men, while issues around sexual harassment became more prominent later in the decade. AIDS and the introduction of Clause 28 changed the gay community and gave it a renewed political focus. Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Ken Livingstone, Derek Hatton, Beatrix Campbell and Arthur Scargill were key figures of the age. Labour (while diminished by the defection of members to the SDP) ended the decade as the main opposition party, a position that had seemed in doubt after the 1983 election. The early years of Channel 4 television provided a platform for alternative forms of politics and social identity to be expressed. Films like The Ploughman's Lunch and plays like David Hare's Pravda challenged the Thatcherisation of society. Red Wedge, alternative comedians, Band Aid, television series like Spitting Image, Edge of Darkness, The Boys from the Blackstuff and A Very British Coup: these were all part of a thriving left-of-centre popular culture.

Where Thatcherism prided itself on family values, Britain became a society in which divorce and cohabitation without marriage became more common. Where Thatcherism suggested private enterprise was the answer, the British remained doggedly attached to the National Health Service. Polls at the end of the decade suggested that, despite substantial victories (on a diminishing share of the popular vote), Thatcherism had still not transformed popular opinion, which continued to value public services and many aspects of the so-called ‘nanny state’. The idea of a counter-culture is one that we associate with the 1960s, but it is fruitful to insist on the significance of alternative ways of living in the 1980s, evident in environmental activism (in 1989 the Green Party managed to get 14.5 per cent of the vote in the UK election for the European Parliament, although it gained no MEPs). After 1990, it was common to argue that the right had won the economic argument but the left had won the social and cultural argument.

The 1980s was therefore a contested and conflicted decade. Any account of the 1980s which simply looks at the triumph of Thatcherism is inadequate. Labour and the left may have failed electorally but they still mattered and shaped the political landscape. We need to think about the way in which Labour and the Conservatives defined themselves in relation to each other.⁶ Both the right and the left abandoned the post-war consensus at about the same time. The SDP spoke for a renewed progressivism of the radical centre that was in danger of being eclipsed by the drift of the main parties towards the left and the right. This kind of politics was as much part of the period as Thatcherism.

Historians need to make sense of the cultures of the left and explore where they failed, and also where they had an impact. Labour and the left in the 1980s is an attempt to excavate this territory. The deeper academic study of the 1980s is now commencing, driven in part by the release of cabinet papers for the Thatcher years and also through the need to come to a reckoning with the most decisive decade in recent British history.⁷ This book represents an attempt to make sense of this record and to establish the 1980s political left as a historical problem that requires rigorous research and analysis.

We adopt a wide understanding of the term ‘left’. The volume takes the left to be the kaleidoscope of political institutions, ideologies and mentalities that challenged laissez-faire capitalism and promoted what it considered to be social justice in different ways on both a domestic and a global level. The left, for example, was formed by the international situation: the Cold War and the arms race, the decline of the Soviet Union, but also left-wing regimes in Latin America and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.⁸ The chapters by Callaghan (chapter 6) and Davis (chapter 5) in this volume document the ways in which the left mentally lived abroad, taking up issues of oppression around the world. In this sense, the radicals of the 1980s generation were heirs to a strand of internationalism that had been a feature of left-wing politics since the Chartists and which had shaped the Labour Party throughout its history.⁹ It is difficult to understand the approach of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after 2015 without understanding the way that he was formed by the left-wing internationalism of the 1970s and 1980s.

The decade was the moment when the left had to fully confront changes in class structure, when issues around race, gender, sexuality and environmentalism began to challenge class as the dominant left-wing paradigm. Neil Kinnock's Labour Party (particularly after the 1987–88 policy review) and intellectuals around the periodical Marxism Today offered a fundamental revision of the standard left-wing project.¹⁰ Even before the decade began, Eric Hobsbawm's article, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ in 1978, had triggered a wave of debate on the left about whether class could provide the basis for mass mobilisation as it had previously done.¹¹ Political imagery based on the cloth cap was out of date in an age when workers bought their council houses, holidayed abroad and (briefly) purchased shares. This book recovers struggles that were sometimes unsuccessful but which were nevertheless an important part of the period. Despite the opprobrium directed at the so-called ‘loony left’, Labour remained true to the values of social liberalism, as Paul Bloomfield examines in chapter 3. Although liberal figures like Roy Jenkins defected to the SDP, it was Labour and the broader culture of the left which challenged sexism, racism and homophobia and stood for equal opportunities. This volume attempts an unsentimental analysis of the way that the forward march of labour was dramatically halted in the 1980s.

This Introduction (like this volume) does not claim to be exhaustive but sketches out some key ways of interpreting the trajectory of both Labour and the left in the age of Thatcherism. It begins with an examination of Labour's progress in the 1980s and the problems it ran into. We then seek to interpret the challenges of the decade by viewing them in terms of the longer history of Labour politics in Britain. Following that, we adopt an international lens, discussing Labour in the context of the global left in the era that saw the collapse of communism. The Introduction ends with an interrogation of the culture and ideology of the British left. We emphasise the kinds of identity that the left provided and suggest some leads that scholars of the future may wish to pursue.

Labour in the Foot and Kinnock era

There are worrying signs that the labour movement is simply not willing to grasp, or is incapable of grasping, the seriousness of the position into which it has fallen. (Stuart Hall)¹²

Objects, places and moments that defined the left in the 1980s. Michael Foot's shabby ‘donkey jacket’ at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in 1981. The cardboard city of homeless people on London's South Bank. A policeman's truncheon. Tony Benn's claim that eight million people voted for socialism in the 1983 election. Gay's the Word bookshop. The use of the term ‘The Cuts’. Riots at Toxteth in Liverpool. The branch meeting with uncomfortable seats in a cold community centre. The miners’ walk-out at Cortonwood Colliery, South Yorkshire in 1984. The SDP accepting payments by credit card. The women's peace camp at Greenham Common. Neil Kinnock taking on Militant at the 1985 Labour Party conference. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) insignia. A car on fire during the Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square in 1990. The Labour Party's red rose emblem. Billy Bragg's melancholic but defiant rendition of ‘Between the Wars’.

These are snapshots of the diverse left-wing culture in Britain. The Labour Party has never enjoyed a monopoly of the left. Many left-wing groups have been suspicious of it and even opposed to it. The SDP considered itself to be left of centre but felt compelled to abandon Labour as it seemed incapable of change. The left has often been fractured and subject to charges of betrayal. For many in the public, the evident divisions within the Labour Party (brandished across the media) rendered it unelectable.

After the defeat of Jim Callaghan's government in 1979, his party shifted leftwards.¹³ The 1974–79 Labour governments were believed by many to have failed. Labour was divided over Europe. In the 1975 referendum on the Common Market (as it was then called), Michael Foot and much of the left opposed Britain's continuing membership, while many on the right of the party (who would later join the SDP) supported remaining in Europe. But the divisions ran deeper still. Following the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis of 1976, Callaghan had been forced to make cuts in the welfare state which hit the very people Labour was meant to represent. The government had been elected in 1974 on the basis that it could deal with the unions, but this was fatally damaged by the chaos of the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979, when rubbish piled up in the streets and flying pickets brought the country to a standstill.¹⁴ Stagflation further undermined Labour's economic credibility although Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey managed to reduce both inflation and unemployment (and to pay off the IMF loan) by 1979. After that year's general election, there was bitterness about the government's record, which the Conservatives attacked but few on the left were willing to defend.

This volume focuses on the long 1980s (from the general election of 1979 to that of 1992). There were two broad phases of left-wing activity. Faced with the coming of Thatcherism, there was a dramatic mobilisation of the left. Tony Benn emerged as the left's champion, damning the compromises of the Callaghan government of which he had been a part and insisting that policy should be driven by the views of the party itself (unions and ordinary members rather than the Parliamentary Labour Party). Michael Foot, the left's tribune since the 1950s, became Labour leader in 1980 (triggering a civil war within the party which led to the formation of the SDP).¹⁵ The decision of the Conservative government to accept American cruise missiles led to the revival of the CND and Labour's decision to support unilateral nuclear disarmament (a cause Foot was associated with). Tony Benn, the new standard bearer of the left, challenged Denis Healey for the deputy leadership and was only narrowly defeated in 1981. The Militant Tendency emerged as a key left-wing movement in some cities, proving a challenge for the Labour leadership.¹⁶ In 1979, Labour moved left as the centre of political gravity in the nation moved right. It had entered a wilderness in which it would stay for eighteen years (until 1997).

In retrospect, this leftward swing came to an end not with Labour's massive defeat in the 1983 general election or the selection of Neil Kinnock as Labour leader that followed, but with the miners’ strike of 1984–85. There had been hopes by Labour activists that the miners could repeat what they had accomplished in 1974, when they in effect brought down the Conservative government of Edward Heath. The strike, however, was not mandated by a strike ballot, the miners ended up divided and the government had stockpiled sufficient coal to keep the country going. The miners were defeated just as they had been in the General Strike of 1926. The defeat of the print unions, who challenged Rupert Murdoch's move of his newspapers from Fleet Street to Wapping shortly after (in 1986), was no less momentous as it became a struggle over the introduction of new technology in which trade unions were perceived as the custodians of vested interests and restrictive practices. It was clear that the notion of extra-parliamentary opposition to the Thatcher governments was not going to work.

The labour movement and the left also had difficulty coming to terms with the larger economic forces unleashed by new technology and the global movements of capital epitomised by the Big Bang in the City of London. The left seemed backward looking, and Keynesian social democracy, which had once been considered so robust, now appeared fragile and a fleeting moment in Britain's post-war development. Opposition seemed increasingly futile because the left could not offer convincing alternatives to a world shaped by neo-liberalism. Yet this was a complex moment. The failure of the SDP and the Liberals (in an alliance) to make a breakthrough at the elections of 1983 and 1987 meant that Labour was confirmed in its role as the main party of opposition