The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country by Tom Hazeldine

Author:Tom Hazeldine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

8

Enemy Damage

A new regional journal, Southern History, appeared in 1979 just as the long economic downturn brought Thatcher to power in Whitehall. Editor John Lowerson, a historian of the leisure pursuits of the English middle classes, hailed from a Doncaster mining village and had studied at the University of Leeds during Northern History’s gestation period. However, his academic career swiftly removed him from this Yorkshire milieu. He taught in Lincoln and Northampton before finding a congenial berth at Sussex University, where he stayed until retirement. Immersion in the culture and society of the South Downs not only elicited from him a history of the county of Sussex but also nurtured a grievance that southern England had ‘been treated as a pale shadow of the other regions, despite its earlier social, economic and political predominance and its return to that state after the comparatively short-lived shift in gravity produced by the Industrial Revolution.’1 A hint of the triumphalism that would characterise the Thatcher years may here be discernible.

Under Thatcher’s rule, the Conservatives tightened the austerity introduced by Callaghan’s Labour, carried through the industrial shake-out Heath had attempted a decade earlier, broke the back of a labour movement responsible for bringing down the last two administrations, and completed the transformation of the City of London from a British into a freewheeling international oligarchy. With an electoral coalition firmly based in England’s lower half – three-quarters of Tory seats won in the South and the Midlands, as the ‘wealth generated by London’s booming financial-services industry turned neighbouring regions a deeper shade of blue’ – the New Right would see off inner city riots, steel and coal strikes, and protests against cuts in northern and inner London municipalities.2 Scargill’s Yorkshire miners, seeking to fight the idea that ‘any industry inside capitalist society – whether public or private sectors – has the right to destroy the livelihood of men and women at the stroke of an accountant’s pen,’ went down to complete defeat, demonstrating that Whitehall at least had the power to do so.3 The legitimacy of bottom-line capitalism would not be challenged in like fashion again.

When Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, a monetarist wolf in sheep’s clothing, began to turn the screws in his June 1979 budget, he was able to point to ‘common ground’ with his Labour predecessor over the need to cut public spending in order to rein in price inflation.4 Healey had bowed to pressure from the Bank of England during the IMF crisis to publish official estimates for annual growth in the money supply. Interpreted as hard targets by the financial markets, the forecasts were likened by a senior Bank of England official to a ‘rope round the chancellor’s neck’.5 The Labour heavyweight had also helped to clear the ground for the Conservative assault on organised labour, berating workers who abused their industrial power to ‘scoop the pool’ in pay negotiations.6 He could have few complaints when Howe proceeded to squeeze corporate profits in order to stiffen managerial resolve when faced with inflationary wage demands from the shop floor.

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