Promised You a Miracle: UK 80-82 by Andy Beckett - review

Pivotal years of the recent past. By Andrew Neather
Tanks for the memory: Mrs Thatcher on a visit to British forces in in 1986
AP
Andrew Neather27 August 2015

For those who remember the early Eighties, one of the unnerving things about the current Labour leadership election is how little the electoral argument of the far Left has changed since: ie, if only voters were at last offered real socialism, they would flock to Labour. Jeremy Corbyn’s unchanged Eighties mantras only throw the changes in the land since into sharper relief. Journalist Andy Beckett believes the years 1980-82 were the pivot for that transformation.

His book is rooted in a series of interviews — with advisers to Margaret Thatcher such as Patrick Minford; Greenham Common peace activist Helen John; SDP co-founder David Owen; Greater London Council leader Ken Livingstone; new wave band ABC’s lead singer, Martin Fry, and others. Beckett has a fine eye for detail, even if he overwrites a little. He believes these key figures in different spheres were all at this moment “groping towards their own versions of Britain” — a restless impulse far more evident then than in the late Seventies.

Beckett’s argument thus goes beyond politics and the economy: beyond the Thatcher revolution. He highlights the era’s cultural energy, from gritty TV dramas such as Boys From the Blackstuff and new media experiments (Channel 4) to unashamedly hedonistic bands such as Simple Minds (to whose 1982 single he owes his title) and ABC.

He finds patriotism getting a new lease of life, as evidenced by the 1981 royal wedding, the new Mini Metro, the film Chariots of Fire and, most of all, the first flag-waving British military victory in years, in the Falkland Islands.

He is right to focus on the role of London. The capital hit bottom — in terms of population and, arguably, tattiness — in 1983. But the seeds of its future dominance were already being sown in the transformation of Docklands — after Thatcher’s financial deregulation “Big Bang” in 1986, the City never looked back. Beckett finds lasting change too in London government, though that is surely less thanks to the GLC’s gender and racial equality policies that he highlights and more to Livingstone’s return to power in 2000.

We may quibble with Beckett’s periodisation. Some of the upheavals look limp today. The monetarists cherished money supply policies — who cares in the era of quantitative easing? And the SDP’s lasting influence is questionable: their Lib-Dem successors barely survived the polls this year, while the hard Left are once again laying waste to Labour’s Right.

More important, while Thatcher’s politics remain the basic paradigm today — as Labour’s flailings suggest — 1980-82 didn’t at the time feel like a turning point. These were Thatcher’s roughest years, beset by economic meltdown, riots and strikes. She was only narrowly rescued from oblivion by the Falklands, North Sea oil and the 1983 recovery. And while Beckett is right that she made some key reforms early, notably right-to-buy, her most radical phase was not until her second term.

As he observes, she survived in part because she could live off the capital of social democracy: the Seventies bequeathed her a relatively equal nation. That may not be a luxury available to her successors in our richer but more divided Britain. But she survived too because “Britain had a burst of energy in those years”. It feels like we could use that today.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in