Making Thatcher's Britain: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Thatcherism and the seventies

More than any peacetime Prime Minister since 1931, Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979 amidst a mood of national crisis. The Conservative manifesto had described the recent contest as ‘the most crucial election since the war’, a ‘last chance’ to stave off national disaster; and Thatcher herself invoked the spirit of Pitt the Elder in 1756: ‘I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.’ In office, appeals to the ‘seventies crisis’ proved a powerful rhetorical device, framing the actions of the Thatcher governments against a gallery of apocalyptic alternatives. The decade became a shorthand for a set of nightmare images, when ‘the dead went unburied’, ‘rubbish piled up in the streets’ and a British Chancellor went ‘cap in hand’ to the International Monetary Fund: ‘a chronicle of the collapse of confidence which ensured the acceptance of the Thatcher revolution’. Yet Thatcher did not simply exploit a sense of crisis; she offered a specific interpretation of the seventies that privileged particular responses. As Colin Hay has argued, crises ‘are above all public constructions’, which ‘need bear no direct correspondence with the symptoms they narrate’. This is not to say that they are false, or that the events they describe are not real and serious; but they require an active process of narration, in which the ‘raw materials’ of crisis are bound together and given meaning. The diagnosis offered by the Thatcherites was far from the only reading in play, even within the Conservative Party. That it became the hegemonic narrative was Thatcher’s first great achievement, and served as a foundation for all the others.