Free Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart

Overcoming fellow members of a drafting committee that included Michael Foot and Tony Benn necessarily involved some
brinkmanship on the prime minister’s part, and it was perhaps surprising that the one issue over which he threatened to resign if it were included was a commitment to abolish the House of
Lords. 19
The Economist
duly pronounced the resulting manifesto,
The Labour Way Is the Better Way
, ‘as moderate as any on which
the Labour Party has campaigned during its 79 years’ existence’. 20
    If Labour’s manifesto was driven by its party’s right wing, the content of the Tory manifesto was cast by its left wing – in the guise of its drafters from the Conservative
Research Department, Adam Ridley and, particularly, the up-and-coming young voice of Heathite moderation, Chris Patten. Even Mrs Thatcher’s introductory message was prepared for her by Sir
Ian Gilmour, who was not remotely from her wing of the party. Mostly absent was the authentic, uncompromising voice of the leader herself. Nevertheless, even if Thatcher had been left unchecked to
write the whole manifesto, it might be mistaken to imagine that it would have been as radical as the monetarist and free-market think tanks would have wished. For all her talk of being a conviction
politician, she could be remarkably cautious if she felt the circumstances were not propitious. As Nigel Lawson later wrote of the Tories’ preparations for government, ‘little detailed
work had been done’ on privatization policy, because of ‘Margaret’s understandable fear of frightening the floating voter’. 21 It was sometimes the manifesto’s omissions that showed where Thatcher’s influence on policy had been greatest: her predecessor’s support for Scottish
devolution was ditched, and there was no flirtation with proportional representation – despite the feeling of many within her shadow Cabinet that proportional representation and European
integration might be the only mechanisms available to curtail a future radically left-wing government. To Margaret Thatcher, the thought of office being dependent upon the sufferance of David Steel
did not appeal.
    For all the efforts of James Callaghan and Chris Patten to remove the ideology from election issues, there were five battlegrounds on which Labour and the Conservatives offered very clear
choices over what would become of Britain in the eighties. These were housing and education policy, trade union power, how to control inflation, and the level of taxation.
    In 1979, a third of Britain’s housing stock was owned and maintained by local councils. This represented an all-time high which Labour promised to supplement by building more council
flats, seeing the further extension of council estates as the answer to the nation’s needs. In stark contrast, theTories believed the future lay with home ownership and
promised that local authority tenants would have the right to buy their own council houses. This was to give impetus to one of the most important shifts of the 1980s, the vast increase in home
ownership, bringing with it a revolution in the nation’s attitude to borrowing and personal finance.
    On education policy, the two parties were also polls apart. Labour pledged to wipe out the last remaining grammar schools with the single sentence: ‘Universal comprehensive education,
which is central to our policy, must be completed in the 1980s.’ But it was not just the few examples of selection in the state sector that the party had in its sights. ‘Independent
schools still represent a major obstacle to equality of opportunity. Labour’s aim is to end, as soon as possible, fee-paying in such schools’ and to abolish their ‘remaining
public subsidies and public support’. There was thus a genuine prospect that the long tradition of private education was about to end in Britain. The future for such institutions looked bleak
even if the legislation to make them illegal did not get