Matt Biscay

The first priority for the Thatcher Government in 1979 was the economy and the enterprise culture. Changes were proposed to decrease direct taxation (i.e. income tax) and increase indirect taxation (i.e. VAT).

The Government also began a policy of privatisation and proposed to sell off council houses to their tenants. A prime objective was to reduce the inflation rate which had peaked briefly over three months in 1976 at the equivalent rate of 27% per annum.

It seemed the Government was keen to reduce the power of Local Authorities, which were often Labour, especially in the big conurbations, and increase the power of central government.

Mrs Margaret Thatcher had a clear notion of the relationship between the individual and society :

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.

– M. Thatcher, Woman’s Own, October 31, 1987

and later on :

I was an individualist in the sense that individuals are ultimately accountable for their actions and must behave like it. But I always refused to accept that there was some kind of conflict between this kind of individualism and social responsibility. I was reinforced in this view by the writings of conservative thinkers in the United States on the growth of an ‘underclass’ and the development of a dependency culture. If irresponsible behaviour does not involve penalty of some kind, irresponsibility will for a large number of people become the norm. More important still, the attitudes may be passed on to their children, setting them off in the wrong direction.

I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons – not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or – the phrase I originally used – ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had away of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering – they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’. Both groups should be given help : but it must be help of very different kinds if public spending is not just going to reinforce the dependency culture. The problem with our welfare state was that – perhaps to some degree inevitably we had failed to remember that distinction and so we provided the same ‘help’ to those who had genuinely fallen into difficulties and needed some support till they could get out of them, as to those who had simply lost the will or habit of work and self-improvement. The purpose of help must not be to allow people merely to live a half-life, but to restore their self-discipline and through that their self-esteem.

I was also impressed by the writing of the American theologian and social scientist Michael Novak who put into new and striking language what I had always believed about individuals and communities. Mr Novak stressed the fact that what he called ‘democratic capitalism’ was a moral and social, not just an economic system, that it encouraged a range of virtues and that it depended upon co-operation not just ‘going it alone’. These were important insights which, along with our thinking about the effects of the dependency culture, provided the intellectual basis for my approach to those great questions brought together in political parlance as ‘the quality of life’.

– M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 1995

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Inequalities between women of different social categories are nothing new. Despite the effects of the Welfare State, there remained several inequalities right into the 1960s.

In the field of abortion for example, some managed to find a compliant doctor and the money to pay for the abortion and there were those who either were unable to find the means of terminating an unwanted pregnancy or who resorted to back street butchery.

The Family Planning Act was passed in 1967 and was to have a great effect on women’s lives. Abortion became more easily available: in 1968, 22,000 abortions were carried out in public hospitals; in 1969, the number reached 31,000. The figure for single women continued to rise in the 1970s and 1980s: in 1971, 44,300; in 1990, 116,200. However, for married women, the figure actually fell slightly during the same period (1971, 41,500; 1990, 38,200).

Young mothers have always had difficulties in returning to work, especially if they were unable to find a willing child-minder. One reason is that until the 1990s, children usually did not go to school until the age of 5.

And child-minding was usually quite expensive as the local authorities only provided a limited number of places. This was not surprising as successive Government policies had encouraged women to remain at home to look after the children rather than to enter the workplace.

The number of births to unmarried mothers remained fairly stable from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1960s at approximately 4% of the total of births. From the 1960’s onwards, the percentage doubled. Then followed a period of relative stability (due probably to the effects of The Family Planning Act). Later, the percentages rose (luring the 1980’s and 1990’s.

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According to Seymour-Ure (in The Political Impact of Mass Media, 1974), the disturbances in Notting Hill in 1958 symbolised a turning point in British race relations.

Previously, immigration had been a relatively peripheral political issue; after 1958 it became one of the most important and the most sensitive.

In 1962, the Conservative Government passed the Commonwealth Immigration Act, introducing controls through a voucher system to limit the flow of West Indian and Indian sub-continent immigrants.

When the Labour Government came to power, instead of repealing the legislation, as they might have (cf. Race Relation Act, 1976 – Chapter 74) been expected to do (the Labour Party had opposed the introduction of the 1962 Act but the defeat of the Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon-Walker at the 1964 General Election in the Midlands constituency of Smethwick, with a large percentage of “immigrants”, was a sign that Labour had to tread softly on this issue), they in fact tightened by the Act in 1965 by limiting the number of vouchers still further.

In the mid-1960s, a growing number of Kenyan Asians were settling in Britain. The Labour Government then passed the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, stopping “coloured” immigration, though with a voucher scheme for Kenyan Asians.

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