Ditching the class baggage

When Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, British public discourse remained heavily stamped by the impress of social class. Indeed, arguably ‘languages of class’ were more ubiquitous in the 1970s than they had been a decade earlier. In the 1960s, Wilson’s shrewd campaign against the Conservatives’ ‘thirteen wasted years’ had traded heavily on a classless populism. In the anti-establishment rhetoric of Wilson’s proposed technocratic revolution, the rule of the privileged ‘classes’ was to give way to a new meritocracy capable of reversing Britain’s relative economic decline. Reworking earlier tropes about the unity of workers ‘by hand and by brain’, Labour tapped into the new managerial, ‘technicist’ strand in post-war thinking to proclaim that a ‘New Britain’ could be built from a production-centred alliance of planners, technicians and workers. The political rhetoric of the mid 1970s was very different. Left-wingers like Michael Meacher looked forward to ‘the coming class struggle’ and argued that only ‘class politics’ could deliver the ‘radical political change’ that Britain needed. Writing in December 1976, Robert Kilroy-Silk (of all people) declared ‘there must be no truce in the class war’; ‘the Labour Party’, he insisted, ‘is a class party. God help us when it ceases to be so. It is a class party because it was formed by and for the working class to protect and advance its interests.’ True, more mainstream Labour figures generally avoided such explicit appeals to class feeling, but the tone of their pronouncements was nonetheless more conflictual than a decade earlier. Not only did the two election manifestos of 1974 place the defence of workers’ rights and interests centre-stage, but during the February campaign Denis Healey famously declared that the party would ‘squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak’ (that political mythology quickly translated this into the more generalised pledge to ‘squeeze the rich’ tells us much about the febrile social and political context in which Thatcher emerged as Conservative Party leader).