Why voters turned to Thatcher

I was a teenager in the 70s. I remember so clearly the rubbish piled in the streets due to binmen’s strikes, playing monopoly for hours around the kitchen table in candle light with the gas over on and open to keep us warm during the interminable power cuts caused by untilities strikes. I have upon occasion tried to describe this to young ‘woke’ friends who felt that Corbynism was the answer to all the evils they saw in the country, from the majority daring to vote to leave Europe to a collective failure to accept critical race theory and the assumption that we are all racists whether we know it or not.

The below snippet was written by Janet Daley for the telegraph. It was discussing why 65% of voters supported the increases in taxation, (because we all know that debt run up by the Covid largesse will have to be paid off somehow), and cited the wholesale move of voters towards Thatcherism in the 1979 election. This expresses how I felt at the time. It was the first time in my life that I was old enough to vote, and I can still remember the cheering and delight in my Wolverhampton Polytechnic hall of residence as it became clear that the Thatcher had won. 

Janet Daley article 8^th March 

No one who did not live through the 1970s can imagine the extraordinary, suffocating grip of the unions which controlled virtually all of the services essential to normal life – transport, gas and electricity supply (even the sale of household appliances), telecommunications and the press, plus local council provision of refuse collection, road maintenance and, of course, schooling.

Not to mention the major industries: car and steel production, and most notoriously coal mining. Any or all of these things that were necessary parts not just of the economy but of everyday existence, could be (and frequently were) shut down at a moment’s notice by union bosses who could call official or unofficial (“wildcat”) strikes without legal constraint.

Governments had been judged through the 1960s and 70s on how they managed to cope with this impossible dilemma: Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act collapsed in ignominious failure. Harold Wilson was elected to office on the promise that he could reach deals with the union bosses over “beer and sandwiches” at No 10. In other words, by agreeing to share power with them.

It was this desperation – the realisation that the country had become ungovernable – that drove voters to Thatcherism. They may have benefited from the tax cutting and deregulation in the medium and long term but it was not the principal appeal. The overwhelming mood of that moment – if you are too young to remember it, ask your parents – was rage and despair, and the sense that if the tyranny of the unions could not be broken, the country was finished.