Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Chung Hua University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-04

Thatcher & After

10.1057/9780230283169 - Thatcher and After, Edited by Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho



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Thatcher & After

Edited by

Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho



Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho 2010 Individual chapters © Contributors 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23331–7

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Contents vii

Acknowledgments

viii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction “The Lady’s Not For Turning”: New Cultural Perspectives on Thatcher and Thatcherism Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho

1

Part I Thatcher 1 “There is no such thing!”: On Public Service, Broadcasting, the National Health Service and “people” in the 1980s Patricia Holland and Georgia Eglezou 2

3

4

5

29

“New Times” Television?: Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette Alex Beaumont

53

The Gospel of Gandhi: Whiteness and State Narcissism in Thatcherite England Jason Mezey

75

Rural Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in the Thatcher Years: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival Lucienne Loh

96

There’s No Place like Home: Margaret Thatcher at Number 10 Downing Street Kevin A. Morrison

115

Part II After 6

Shameless?: Picturing the “underclass” after Thatcherism Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi

7

Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe Ryan Trimm v


137

158


List of Figures

vi Contents

9 Sarah Kane: Cool Britannia’s Reluctant Feminist Graham Saunders 10 Parodic Reiterations: Representations of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism in Late Twentieth-Century British Political Cartoons Heather Joyce Index

180 199

221

244



8 Let’s Dance: The Line of Beauty and the Revenant Figure of Thatcher Kim Duff

10.1 Peter Schrank, “His Master’s Voice,” The Independent, May 26, 1997. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of Peter Schrank.

229

10.2 Peter Brookes, “Happy Family Values,” The Times, October 16, 1996. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of The Times and NI Syndication Ltd.

230

10.3 Michael Cummings, “I thought I was a Super-Nanny until I saw YOU!” The Times Magazine, August 2, 1997. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons. ac.uk. By permission of Anne Marie Cummings.

233

10.4

Peter Brookes, “The Third Way,” The Times, September 30, 1998. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of The Times and NI Syndication Ltd.

235

10.5 © Dave Brown, The Independent, April 27, 1999. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons. ac.uk. By permission of Dave Brown.

236

10.6 © Dave Brown, The Independent, November 26, 2002. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons. ac.uk. By permission of Dave Brown.

237

vii



List of Figures

In September 2007, Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho attended a conference hosted by Exeter University and it was there that the idea for this collection was born. The editors, then, would like to thank the organizers of that conference, Paul Young and Becky Munford, for providing the space in which this collection could first be imagined. Since then, many people have helped this publication on its way and the editors owe thanks in several places. Firstly, to the contributors who have been patient with our suggestions and corrections and without whom this collection would not exist. We would like to extend a special thanks to Graham Saunders who agreed to contribute at relatively short notice. Secondly, to those who have read parts of the collection and shared their thoughts on Thatcher and her legacy with us: Meredith Goldsmith, Jane Elliott, Mary Ann O’Farrell, Marianne Sevachko and David Hadley. Finally, but not least, to our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Renée Takken, Christabel Scaife and Catherine Mitchell, who have supported this project from the outset. The editors and publishers wish to thank Visual Philosophy Ltd/Foursight for permission to reproduce the cover image of this collection. The editors and the author of ‘Parodic Reiterations: Representations of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism in Late Twentieth-Century British Political Cartoons’ would like to thank Dave Brown, Peter Schrank, Anne Marie Cummings and The Times and NI Syndication Ltd. for permission to reproduce material in this collection. They would also like to thank Dr. Nicholas Hiley, Jane Newton and the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent (www.cartoons.ac.uk) for assistance locating copyright holders and for providing images of the cartoons.

viii



Acknowledgments

Alexander Beaumont is a doctoral student in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York (UK) where he is completing an Arts and Humanities Research Council-sponsored project titled “Freedom and the City: Urban Culture in Post-Thatcher Fiction.” The thesis includes appraisals of Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, J. G. Ballard, Maggie Gee and Ian McEwan, and argues that in these authors’ novels a sophisticated conception of the subject as citizen develops alongside a theoretical reconnection of freedom to the polis as a response to the Thatcherite principles of the individual and the strong state. Anita Biressi is Reader in Media Cultures at Roehampton University, UK. Her research interests include tabloid culture, media spectacle, reality programming, documentary and factual film and television. Her publications include Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories (2001) and (with H. Nunn), Reality TV (2005) and The Tabloid Culture Reader (2008). She is currently undertaking further research in the areas of class politics and reality television, media spectacle and documentary film. Her new book (with Heather Nunn) titled Class in Contemporary British Culture is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. Kim Duff is a research student at the University of British Columbia where she is pursuing a doctoral project titled “From the Public to the Private: Urban Space, National Identity, and Thatcherism,” which explores how Thatcherite policies of privatization changed the relationship individuals had with urban spaces. Georgia Eglezou is working with Patricia Holland as a researcher on the AHRC-funded project “‘No such thing as society?’: Broadcasting and the public services 1979–1992.” She holds a PhD in History from the School of Historical Studies of the University of Birmingham and is the author of The Greek Media in World War I and its Aftermath: The Athenian Press and the Asia Minor Crisis (I. B. Tauris, 2009). She has published articles on the twentieth-century political, military and cultural history of Greece and has presented her research at many international conferences. Louisa Hadley has worked at the University of Edinburgh, UK, Grant MacEwan College and Concordia, University College of Alberta, Canada, where she taught a range of literature courses. She is the author of ix




x


Elizabeth Ho is Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College, where she teaches courses in contemporary British and postcolonial literatures. She is completing a book, Past Recovery: The Memory of the Victorian in the Present. Her publications include articles in Cultural Critique, Antipodes: A North American Journal for Australian Literature and College Literature. Patricia Holland is Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth Media School and Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project, “‘No such thing as society?’: Broadcasting and the public services 1979–1992.” She has recently completed a study of current affairs on ITV and is the author of The Angry Buzz: ‘This Week’ and Current Affairs Television (I. B. Tauris 2006). Her publications include books and articles on various aspects of photography, media and visual culture. Her recent work concerns television history and broadcast journalism. Heather Joyce is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ont.). Her research explores how contemporary British fiction reveals and intervenes in the cultivation of a cultural pathology of melancholia prevalent in post-Thatcherite Britain. Lucienne Loh is an associate lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, Oxford Brookes University and Brunel University where she teaches contemporary literature and culture and postcolonial studies. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a visiting research fellow at the University of Warwick. She has published on V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald and is currently working on publishing her PhD thesis which focuses on nonmetropolitan postcolonial spaces. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and book review editor for Contemporary Literature. Jason Mezey is Assistant Professor of English at St. Joseph’s University where he teaches courses on contemporary British fiction and world literature in English. He has published widely on postcolonial literature, particularly Indian fiction, in journals such as Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Intervention: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Modern Fiction Studies. Kevin A. Morrison is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University. His research interests, focusing on the Victorian period in Britain,



The Fiction of A. S. Byatt (2008) in Palgrave Macmillan’s Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism series and a monograph titled Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan (2010).

Notes on Contributors xi

Heather Nunn is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Roehampton University, UK, where she is also co-director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures. She has written on Thatcherism, reality television, documentary and factual programming, political representation and the media, cultural politics, gender, feminism and the media, national identity, formations of class and nation and images of childhood. Publications include Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy (2002) and with A. Biressi Reality TV (2005), The Tabloid Culture Reader (2008) and Class in Contemporary British Culture (2011). Graham Saunders lectures in Theatre Studies at the University of Reading, UK. He is author of Love me or Kill me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002), About Kane: the Playwright & the Work (Faber 2009), Patrick Marber’s Closer (Continuum, 2008) and co-editor of Cool Britannia: Political Theatre in the 1990s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). He is Principal Investigator for “‘Giving a Voice to the Nation’: The Arts Council of Great Britain & the Development of Theatre & Performance in Britain 1945–1995,” a five year AHRC-funded project. He is also series editor for Continuum’s Modern Theatre Guides. He has contributed articles on contemporary British and Irish drama to journals including Modern Drama, Journal of Beckett Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Research International, New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre and Performance. Ryan Trimm is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Rhode Island. His current project, “Contesting Heritage,” charts the political resonances of representing the past in contemporary British fiction and film through an examination of inheritance as trope in multicultural Great Britain.



include the intersection of material culture, literature and politics. He has forthcoming or recently published essays in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Literature and Culture and Comparative Literature, and his current book-length project is tentatively titled “Inhabiting Liberalism: Politics, Culture, and the Spaces of Masculine Professionalism, 1823–1890.”




“The Lady’s Not For Turning”: New Cultural Perspectives on Thatcher and Thatcherism Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho

In 2003, a man frustrated with the state of affairs in Britain beheaded a marble statue of Margaret Thatcher. While sentencing, the judge announced his sympathy to the man’s right to protest, but said that “the way you acted to knock the head off a politician who left power over ten years ago and whose party is no longer the party of government, was very much the wrong way” (2003 “Thatcher statue”). Four years later, another statue of Thatcher—a larger than life-sized bronze version—was erected in the House of Commons and attacked again, but this time by skeptical politicians claiming that “there are other PMs who played a much greater role in British life than Mrs. Thatcher” (2007 “MP’s bid”). The violent act of decapitation coupled with the MPs’ disavowal of the memory of Thatcher as a political force encapsulates the volatile contradictions that her image elicits and bespeaks the traumatic effects that the former prime minister continues to generate in the present. Thatcher & After takes as its argument this contradictory and emotionally fraught response to Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism and examines the former prime minister’s continued influence on the British imagination more than 20 years after leaving office. The chapters in this collection restore to the present the conditions which provoked the anonymous man’s rage and also examine the willed amnesia underlying the politicians’ insistence on downplaying her “role” in shaping “British life” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Both the man and the MPs’ responses suggest a powerful crisis of memory in Britain surrounding Thatcher’s absent presence. Their difficulties in assimilating Thatcher and her legacy suggest that “Thatcher” functions both as historical discourse and outside of historical discourse, where historical accuracy is “entangled” (1997, p. 5), to borrow from Marita Sturken, with British cultural memory of the 1980s. 1



Introduction

Introduction

Thatcher and the phenomenon of Thatcherism, we argue, function as a symbolic “wound” in the contemporary imagination, a palpable point where things can be said to have irrecoverably changed. The former prime minister’s cultural and political policies cut violently across institutions as diverse as industry, communication, and the arts, in controversial, often devastating ways, forever altering Britain’s postimperial identity at home and abroad. On the political level, she represented a “rupture” (Hall and Jaques 1983, p. 13) and an “irreversible break” (Corner and Harvey 1991, p. 1) from the Keynesian economic structures of postwar Britain. Consolidating Conservative power and a populist base of support, Thatcher essentially dismantled the Labor Party, trade unionism, and the efficacy of dissent represented by the Left. In their Marxist approach to Thatcherism, Jessop et al. lamented that the Left “did not really grasp the magnitude of the break . . . intended by Thatcherism” (Jessop et al. 1988, p. 23). Even for Conservative supporters ideologically suited to Thatcherism, the changes Thatcher wrought on Britain and the structure of the Conservative Party were “profound” (Evans 2004, p. 1). “Thatcher” as a persona and the effects of Thatcherism seem to be “unavailable to consciousness” and defy explanation or easy assimilation. Cathy Caruth defines trauma as an event experienced “too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and [which] is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (1996, p. 4). Unlike a bodily wound, trauma generates an internal wound that is a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (1996, p. 4). The persistent reappearances of Thatcher in the present are certainly akin to traumatic flashbacks—she reappears unbidden in the most unlikely places: for example, in the form of a Halloween mask in the background of Billy Idol’s dance scene in the movie The Wedding Singer (1998). The perceived “wound” left by Thatcher has generated a proliferation of texts in a range of genres attempting to measure the “magnitude of the break”: political texts seeking to define the “Thatcher effect” vie with biographical works trying to capture Thatcher’s charisma as an individual (more than 13 biographies have appeared since 2000), while cultural and literary texts imaginatively reconstruct the moment of Thatcherism making it available to a forgetful or nostalgic present. This escalation of textual material on Thatcher signals a culture of commemoration and commodification, but also its opposite, a profound cultural amnesia as to what the “magnitude of the break” actually was. For a post-Thatcherite generation there is nothing in the present to suggest, and little urgency to understand, that there was a “break” at all. As Francis Beckett, a historian who voted for Thatcher as the most effective



2

prime minister of the twentieth century writes, “today few people under 40 remember a time when trade unions were a real force in the land; when the public sector controlled large swathes of the economy; when local councils controlled education and other local services; when benefits were considered rights of citizenship” (2006 qtd. in “Thatcher and Attlee”). The invocation of the structures and vocabulary of “trauma” to express the memory of Thatcher and the history of Thatcherism provides us with a different narrative of contemporary British identity than Gilroy and Baucom’s influential diagnoses of “postcolonial” (Gilroy 2004, p. 102) and “postimperial melancholia” (Baucom 1999, p. 176). The impetus of this volume is the need to remember and revisit the originary moment of rupture as its peculiar and persistent nature forms the basis of an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991, p. 6). At stake is an understanding of contemporary Britain as a community imagined around a wound. Analyzing contemporary British culture through the lens of Thatcher and Thatcherism as a trauma contests a cohesive national narrative but it also transforms Britain into a nation of “survivors” that in turn raises questions about agency, complicity, and ethics. Furthermore, the “traumatized” British present is positioned against a recent British past perceived to have been a pure, homogenous space of culture and habit irreparably damaged by 20 years of Thatcherism. This perception, then, colors any discussion of recovery from or alternatives to Thatcherism as an unproblematic and attractive return to that edenic space identified by Beckett, when “trade unions were a real force in the land; when the public sector controlled large swathes of the economy.” One common concern of all the contributors to Thatcher & After is a negotiation of this recovery and the possibility of subverting Thatcherite ideology and launching an effective countermovement against Thatcherism. The chapters in this volume trace the inventive, but also deeply compromised ways in which Thatcherism co-opted the possibility of resistance itself, harnessing and silencing all critique. By returning to sites of memory such as Number 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence; to key moments of possibility such as the 1997 election of New Labour; and to the repetitive patterns of everyday life in best-selling books, television dramas, and reality TV shows our contributors perform acts of corrective recontextualization that allow us to recapture and reread the ways in which Thatcherism has been naturalized into national discourse and, as a consequence, forgotten. As a whole, Thatcher & After disturbs received notions of the past and intervenes in the ways in which Thatcher and Thatcherism form an obstacle in the “imagination of alternative futures” (Huyssen 2003, p. 2).



Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho 3

Introduction

We present Margaret Thatcher as a powerful personality and an equally powerful obstacle that occludes and forecloses an engagement with the political and social conditions of Thatcherism that continue to affect the present. Thatcher’s forceful personality provokes strong reactions: people either love her or loathe her. In 2002, she was voted 17th in the BBC poll to find the 100 Greatest Britons, and third in Channel 4’s Worst Britons poll only a year later. Brian Walden sums up the polarity of opinion that Thatcher inspires, stating that she “would be the choice of friend and foe alike as a rigid and uncompromising upholder of Tory ideology” (2006). Thatcher crafted her own life-story to exemplify the social values she sought to instill through her government’s policies. In speeches, biographies, and her own carefully crafted autobiographies, The Downing Street Years (1993) and Path To Power (1995), repeated emphasis was placed on Thatcher’s roots as a “grocer’s daughter” and her rise from Oxford scholarship girl to a Member of Parliament for Finchley (1958), Education Secretary (1970–4), Leader of the Conservative Party (1975), Prime Minister (1979–90), and Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven (1992). The narrative was unmistakably one of upward mobility, akin to the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, and was used as evidence that Britain was now controlled by meritocracy rather than aristocracy—a useful Conservative fiction. Thatcher often sought to identify herself with the electorate by reminding them that her values were those passed down by her Victorian grandmother and working-class father. Correspondingly, the domestic and financial security she received from her marriage to the wealthy Denis Thatcher in 1951 was played down. Mapped onto the nation, this narrative of Thatcher’s life was particularly seductive to her electoral demographic. Attacking or supporting Thatcher on the grounds of gender has been the most visible index of anxiety over her policies, an expression of the trauma we claim she represents. Thatcher herself declared that “she owed nothing to women’s lib” (qtd. in Birch, McDermott and McNay n.d., p. 66) making her a problematic figure for male and female commentators alike. Admiration for Thatcher was expressed as gender blindness or equality while critiques of Thatcher by the Left appeared antifeminist or misogynistic. Depending on one’s political affiliations, she was the monstrously bad mother, or “Thatcher the Snatcher,” a name she gained when, as Secretary for Education, she abolished free milk for children over the age of seven. As Leader of the Opposition, she was nicknamed, more positively, the “Iron Lady” for her condemnation of the Soviet government and socialism. At the same time, Thatcher exploited her femininity and her class, claiming that her experience as a “grocer’s daughter” and a “housewife” equipped



4

her for the role of prime minister, “I know what it’s like having to live on a budget. I know what it’s like having to cope” (qtd. in Birch et al., n.d. p. 12). When Thatcher was ousted from office, she cultivated a powerful myth of martyrdom: she was wounded femininity personified, betrayed by a male cabal thirsting for power and requiring the protection of her mostly male ministers. As one of Thatcher’s confidantes recorded when she resigned, “my brave darling, my heart bled for her” (qtd. in Evans 2004, p. 121). The infamous Spitting Image (1984–96) puppet, a hideous latexcast caricature of a cigar-smoking Thatcher in a man’s suit, epitomizes this contradictory blending of male and female attributes and underscores the spectacle of Thatcher moving easily between various incarnations of femininity, depending on the current political advantage.1 While attempting to “fix” Thatcher on gender grounds monopolized public opinion of her during her time in office, her image has become increasingly “queered” after her career ended. In this collection, chapters by Kim Duff and Heather Joyce address Thatcher as a gay icon and the media images of Tony Blair in drag as Thatcher that plagued coverage of New Labour’s 1997 election campaign. At a 2008 ceremony celebrating “Great Britons,” Thatcher wore a gold suit that prompted viewers to liken her to “Britannia” (Fleming 2008) and cross-dressing artist Grayson Perry to appear in a leather dress and wig inspired by Thatcher. These new queer articulations of Thatcher can be read as an attempt to extricate her from strict gender binaries and make her available for new interpretation and consumption. The continued cultural investment in the imagination of “Thatcher” reveals an ambivalence about appropriate modes of recovery: responses are torn between the need to domesticate or defamiliarize Thatcher’s controversial figure. Although she is now silenced, Thatcher’s current status is remarkably similar to Britain’s beloved Queen “Mum” who passed away in 2002. As the benevolent, national grandmother figure, the suggestion is that Thatcher continues to nurture or guide “Thatcher’s children”—the aphorism that describes an entire generation who has grown up knowing nothing but the aftermath of Thatcherite policies—and “Thatcher’s grandchildren.” These nostalgic and sympathetic responses to her risk closing down the potentialities of “queer” Thatcher and stalling any critical debate over the damage Thatcher caused to so many aspects of British life. As “Thatcher” has come to represent the cultural zeitgeist of 1980s Britain and indeed, Britain itself, the conditions—or the “-ism”—of her policies have been forgotten. As the traumatic effects of Thatcherism are transmuted into responses to Thatcher’s persona, we argue that it is the symptom, Thatcher’s persona, rather than the wound of her politics that is remembered.




Introduction

Not surprisingly, Thatcher herself contributes to the collective amnesia surrounding her policies and political impact; in an address to a conference on herself at Hofstra University, she quipped, “I don’t regard Thatcherism as an ‘-ism’ . . . if I ever invented an ideology, that certainly wasn’t my intention” (2003, p. 3). In disavowing her own “-ism,” Thatcher presents Thatcherism not as an ideological approach but as a natural historical development. At its simplest, “Thatcherism” designates the development and evolution of the Conservative Party during the years that Thatcher was in power. After rising through the ranks of the Conservative Party, a young Margaret Thatcher confidently challenged a beleaguered Edward Heath for party leadership. In 1975 Thatcher became the first female leader of a major political party in the UK and moved on, almost inevitably, to become prime minister when the Tories defeated the ailing Labour Party in 1979. She led her party triumphantly through three general elections (1979, 1983, and 1987) and won two landslide victories before being ousted from power in 1990. Here, she is projected as an evolutionary inevitability, a view to which Thatcher herself adheres. Thatcher’s “revolutionary” policies, however, mean that she is as often positioned as an evolutionary anomaly. Thatcher was elected to office in 1979 under the strong mandate of reforming Britain’s economy, turning the nation from the “sick man of Europe” (“Evaluating Thatcher’s Legacy” 2004) who needed to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, to a strong, competitive, and modern nation. To some, she enacted the so-called Thatcher revolution that established and consolidated free enterprise, competition, and a robust market economy. To achieve this revolution, Thatcher severely curtailed government spending, sold off previously nationalized industries, and promoted an economy based on individual ownership and an “enterprise culture.” Positioned in this contradictory way, “Thatcher” again prevents a critical engagement with the impact of her policies. Conversely, those who claim Thatcherism as an “ad hoc, ill thought-out and pragmatic set of policy initiatives” (Heffernan 2000, p. 36) risk missing the wound all together. Several chapters in this volume understand Thatcherism as an economic or ideological doctrine aimed at consolidating monetarism and political control over the underprivileged. In Thatcher’s first term alone, unemployment increased 141 percent to 3 million while Britain’s industrial production fell by 10 percent and manufacturing by 17 percent (Proctor 2004, p. 97), numbers that suggest Britain in the early 1980s was in fact a developing rather than developed nation. Thatcher’s desire to shift Britain from Keynesianism to monetarism—from a predominantly socialist welfare state to a society based on the individual, free-market,



6

and entrepreneurial spirit—required drastic reorganization. Ryan Trimm’s chapter “Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe” probes the wound of this moment, described by Stuart Hall as “iron times” (Hall 1987, p. 19). In an attempt to turn Britain’s economy around, Thatcher’s strategies involved controlling government spending, a delicate balance between raising taxes and heavy cuts in public spending that affected all departments from housing to local government (Local Government Act, 1980). Under Thatcher, the National Health Service (NHS), the vanguard of the welfare state, abandoned free dental and health checks in 1987; higher education was particularly hard hit by cuts and the Education Reform Act in 1988 established a number of measures that made education more consumer-focused. In his analysis of Coe’s novel What a Carve Up! (1994), Trimm likens these ruthless economic cuts to the violence of a “slasher” film to reveal the extent to which Thatcherism’s economic policies ripped apart the social fabric of postwar Britain and to diagnose this moment as both a tragedy and a comedy. Despite this rearrangement of economic priorities, the British economy was not particularly robust: unemployment remained high and the gap between rich and poor increased during Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister. Patricia Holland and Georgia Eglezou’s chapter takes on Thatcher’s infamous phrase that there was “no such thing as society, only individual men and women” which signaled the end of social solidarity (and the need for a welfare system) and can be considered a marker in what David Harvey has termed the “neo-liberal turn” (2005, p. 9). Holland and Eglezou turn their attention to the ways in which broadcasting in the 1980s dramatized and naturalized the experience of cuts to the NHS. These cuts, they claim, redefined the concept of “public services” and the “public” sphere by transforming viewers and patients into “consumers in the private domain, rather than citizens in the public.” Implied in Trimm’s and Holland and Eglezou’s chapters is the demise of the political Left and the ideals and structures of social democracy cut by Thatcher and seemingly abandoned by New Labour in the present. Stuart Hall, one of Thatcherism’s most outspoken and prolific critics, argues that the success or failure of Thatcherism cannot be measured in economic or electoral terms. Rather, “it should be judged in terms of its successes or failure in disorganizing the labour movement and progressive forces, in shifting the terms of political debate, in reorganizing the political terrain and in changing the balance of political forces in favour of capital and the right” (1983, p. 13). Thatcher’s attack on the Left was nowhere more apparent than in her attitude toward the Trade Unions. For Thatcher, trade unions were the “enemy” of enterprise culture, “much




Introduction

more difficult to fight, [and] just as dangerous to liberty” (1984), and she was determined to take a firm and unwavering approach to handling them. When coal workers across Britain joined in a strike against pit closures in 1984, Thatcher used the event as an opportunity to legislate trade unions out of their collective power.2 This moment is remembered in films such as Brassed Off (1996) and, more recently, Billy Elliot (2000) which function as memory work by documenting the demise of an industry, heroizing the pit worker, and “working through” the damage Thatcherism did to working-class identity. The success of these films emphasizes that the wounds of Thatcherism are still being artistically explored, sometimes revised, and made available for “Thatcher’s children.” However, these films offer rather uncomplicated and simplistic modes of recovery, their historical significance abstracted even further by their recent incarnations as hit West End Shows. Alexander Beaumont cautions us against such superficial modes of return. In his chapter, “‘New Times’” Television?: Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette,” Beaumont examines the Left’s imbrication in Thatcherism’s market economy through a consideration of developments in broadcasting. Beaumont close-reads Hanif Kureishi’s now canonical anti-Thatcherite film My Beautiful Laundrette within the slippery economy of its producer, Channel 4, whose origins were made possible by Thatcherism’s ideals of enterprise and market savvy as well as its coffers. In doing so, Beaumont offers us the “rehabilitation” of terms like “enterprise”, abandoned by the Left, for the Left. After effectively destroying trade unionism and robbing the Left of its most visible form of power, Martin Jaques could state that “Thatcherism has changed the face of British politics.” But it had done so by taking “the left by surprise” and leaving it “in a state of shock” (Hall and Jacques 1983, p. 40). Drawing on the vocabulary of trauma, Jaques calls for a need to critique and historicize Thatcherism lest the Left bear a “steady and continuous retreat” (1988, p. 40). Almost 20 years after Thatcher retired from office, we are still taking up Jaques’s call. The urgency of Jaques’s call to action is nowhere more clear than the loud accusations of “Blatcherism” (Cecar 2007) that plague the New Labour administration as it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between New Labour’s policies and Thatcherism. Under New Labour, privatization and monetarist economics have been actively pursued and the introduction of private sector management and structures into the public sector have done little to restore the centrality of trade unions or the promotion of public service interests. When he came to power in 1997, Tony Blair claimed that he would steer a path between the values of social democracy



8

and neoliberalism, “marrying together an open, competitive and successful economy with a just, decent and humane society” (qtd. in Hoge 1997). This “third way” of pursuing the free market economy beyond “Old” Labour and Thatcherism was a compromise read as severely compromising for New Labour. Traumatically for its hard-line members, New Labour’s strategy was to consolidate the threat that Thatcher made to “kill socialism in Britain” (qtd. in Birch et al., n.d., p. 66) by expunging socialism from its political agenda. In presentation, New Labour was importantly “not the Socialism of Marx or state control” (Blair 2004, p. 38); in practice, Blair offered a version of social democracy that did not challenge Thatcherism’s cementing of neoliberalism.3 Blair claimed that “our government will fail if it sees its task as dismantling Thatcherism” (Darnton 1996), and he and his successor Gordon Brown have repeatedly stated their desire to retain elements that Thatcher “got right” (Blair 1997). In the final chapter of this collection, Heather Joyce draws attention to the disappointment in New Labour as a viable political alternative that could heal the wounds of Thatcherism and return Britain to the socialist consensus of the postwar era. She examines the reappearance of the former prime minister in political cartoons surrounding the general election as an index of British anxieties about “Blatcherism.” Her analysis demonstrates that the rhetoric used to describe Blair’s relationship with Thatcher (and the disappointment over New Labour’s similarities to Thatcherism) was increasingly familial—with Thatcher labeled as “Labour’s mother,” sometimes as New Labour’s “midwife,” and Blair and Gordon Brown her “sons” and “heirs.” Blair himself has hit back on multiple occasions, attempting to distance himself from his predecessor: “the fact that I do not think about backing down from my policies,” he was caught fuming, “does not make me Margaret Thatcher” (McKenna 1998). Joyce’s chapter, in particular, casts New Labour’s 1997 election campaign as a nodal point of possibility where British voters could have recaptured a memory of Thatcherism and utilized it for real and effective change. The economic prosperity that Britain enjoyed in the 1990s and 2000s proved an obstacle to a serious critique of Blair’s economic strategies among the British public. In light of the current recession, however, memories of the bleak days of Thatcherism have resurfaced and have refocused attention on the impact of Thatcherism’s economic strategies on Britain’s industrial and social life. Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi’s chapter, for example, addresses the “shameless” forgetting of workingclass identity devalued by Thatcher’s attention to “enterprise culture.” They restore the memory of class politics to British culture by analyzing its remnants and representation in popular culture as the “underclass”




Introduction

caught in faltering dependency on the remains of the welfare state and the possibilities of New Labour’s economic boom. In many ways, New Labour puts pressure on definitions of “post”Thatcherism. For Blair and New Labour “post” merely designates after Thatcher: Blair promised that he would bring about a “New Britain,” a country “reborn” from his revitalization of a “New Labour” party. Under his leadership, “New Britain” would be a “creative,” “young country” (2004, p. 72) where “the extraordinary talent of the British people is liberated from the forces of conservatism that so long have held them back, to create a model twenty-first-century nation, based not on privilege, class or background, but on the equal worth of all” (Blair 1999). However, without a new rupture—a definitive break from Thatcherism— skepticism about New Labour’s “newness” abounds. Shortly after he was elected prime minister in 1997, the press bristled over a secret meeting Tony Blair had with Margaret Thatcher. On the eve of his first European Conference, Blair supposedly sought “advice” from the former prime minister on foreign policy in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Although it was not unusual for leaders and ex-leaders to meet, the press presented the meeting as clandestine, with a whiff of betrayal. Blair had been elected, the Guardian fumed, “to create a ‘Not-Thatcher’ Britain” and the meeting demonstrated that Blair did not understand “what was so wrong about Thatcherism” (“Blair meets Thatcher Before Summit”). Despite this uneasiness about Blair’s relationship to Thatcher and Thatcherism, the British public voted him in with a landslide victory in 1997 and returned him to power in the elections of 2001 and 2005. With the current prime minister, Gordon Brown, attention has once again been focused on the person of Thatcher. The highly publicized image of Thatcher shaking hands with Gordon Brown outside Number 10 Downing Street severs Thatcher from her policies and political effects. “[A]dmir[ing]” Thatcher as a “conviction politician,” and identifying himself as a “conviction politician like her” (Paris 2007), Brown valorizes Thatcher’s political persona and forecloses the imagination of what a “not-Thatcher” Britain would actually look like. Thatcherism’s ability to resist the “post” lies in Thatcher’s uncanny ability to manipulate public desire and forge consensus, or what Holland and Eglezou, via Hall, call “common sense,” over her neoliberal reforms. Thatcherism’s success as an ideology, Hall has argued, lies in its capacity to “address the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary. Mrs Thatcher has totally dominated that idiom” (Hall 1987, p. 19).



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With telling catchphrases such as “putting the ‘great’ back in Britain” and announcements that Britain has “re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before” (Thatcher 1982), the paradox of Thatcherism’s directionality is made clear. The movement backwards in time, to the heyday of the British Empire during the Falklands War (1982) or “Victorian values,” surprisingly accounts for Thatcher’s “radicalism.”4 Thatcherism’s appeals to the past enabled her to implement an array of policies which attacked the very foundations of British society. We contend that the anachronistic nature of Thatcherism as populism—the past appearing out of time in the present—contributes to the feelings of trauma. Critics such as David Monaghan were among the first to address this trauma and perform the recovery work we pursue in this volume. Monaghan reads the Falklands War as an opportunity for Thatcher to craft a “myth of national rebirth” (1998, p. xi). Interwoven with reminders of Britain’s “finest hour” in World War II, the Falklands War allowed Thatcher to “open up the way for a simultaneous retrieval of pre-Welfare state verities and radical change along monetarist economic lines” (1998, p. xi). The Falklands War did much to bolster Thatcher’s popularity and contributed to her reelection in 1983. Thatcher rallied popular and political support for the war, which reinvigorated British national identity and pride and repositioned Britain at the front of world events, at least in the hearts and minds of voters. She projected an image of the Falkland Islands as a rural, almost-English paradise, with a happy colonized population eager to remain under the benevolent protection of the British Empire. One of the memories being retrieved by studying Thatcher in the present is the way in which race tends to be absented and how, for many, the definition of Thatcherism is institutional racism. For postcolonial critics also engaged in acts of retrieval, the Falklands War made explicit the racial implications of the 1981 British Nationality Act which eliminated the right of former imperial subjects to settle in their “home” country. Despite occupying a separate category of citizenship as “British Dependent Territories Citizens,” the islanders had a closer affinity with the British public—Thatcher called the Falklands Islanders “our own people” (1982)—than the “immigrant” population living and working in Britain. This familial affinity depended on the visible marker of a shared identity: whiteness. The “forms of nationalism” associated with Thatcherism and exacerbated by fervor over the Falklands War created an environment where there was a “morbid celebration of England and Englishness from which blacks are systematically excluded” (Gilroy 1987, p. 12).5 Thatcher’s exclusionary rhetoric can clearly be seen in her speech to World In Action,




Introduction

“this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture” (1978) and Thatcherism’s response to decolonization and mass immigration was to legally redefine who gets to “count” as British. In this volume, Jason Mezey, for example, traces these questions of race and belonging by reconstructing the “ego” of Britain as based on the “sanctity of whiteness” that underlies both Thatcherite public policy and cultural texts like Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982). Two chapters in this volume challenge the perception of Britain as a “victim” of Thatcherism by turning their attention to the “heritage industry,” the machinery that promoted the idea of a national inheritance that needed to be held in trust, preserved and passed on to the future. Lucienne Loh and Kevin A. Morrison both argue that Thatcherism’s attention to heritage was crucial in securing the British public’s complicity in Thatcherism. In 1980 and 1983, the Tories passed National Heritage Acts that generated funding for the “preservation, restoration and display of historic properties whilst at the same time providing ‘heritage’ projects more generally with a new (and a commercially aggressive) public philosophy” (Corner and Harvey 1991, p. 48). Critics such as Robert Hewison and Patrick Wright lambasted Thatcherism’s commodification of the past, the public’s seemingly mindless consumption of “enchantment” (Hewison 1987, p. 24), and blamed the “heritage industry” for Britain’s “entropic decline” and the death of “creative change” (Wright 1986, p. 70). Regardless of the heavy-handed critique by such “heritage baiters” (Samuel 1994, p. 259), Thatcherism forged a national mythology of aristocratic and rural Englishness based around “social organicism” (Corner and Harvey 1991, p. 52) and exemplified by the manor house. This so-called Brideshead effect perfectly balanced the adventure, freedom, and capitalism of “enterprise culture.” In her chapter, Loh reveals the implicit racism in the discourse of heritage by turning her attention to V. S. Naipaul’s semiautobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Loh argues that Naipaul’s physical and narrative engagement with the rural landscapes and country houses dis-identifies them as “English” heritage and negotiates a narrow but important space for postcolonial subjectivities within a static and monolithic state-sponsored nostalgia. Kevin A. Morrison similarly explores the elided racial histories of Britain’s imperial past, but he takes as his “text” the prime minister’s residence, Number 10 Downing Street, as depicted in a two-part television documentary and accompanying book. Morrison argues that the “delightful interior” of Thatcher’s residence functions as a wound: his analysis of Thatcher’s domestic rhetoric opens up the home as “the bound[ed] and ordered space of the nation” which



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Thatcher tried to keep closed and opposed to the external “ocean of foreignness.” Consciously or not, when Blair came to office in 1997 he eschewed the political and cultural significance of Number 10 by opting to live at the chancellor’s residence (Number 11 Downing Street), which was more suited to a family. So far, Thatcher and Thatcherism have been bounded within the “narrow nationalism” (Blair 2004, p. 212) of Britain. While the subject matter of Thatcher & After remains tied to Britain, the transnational backgrounds of the contributors to this book suggest a new way of approaching Thatcherism. We offer a challenge to future scholars of Thatcherism to consider the memory of a “global Thatcher” and to map the perspectives of locations dislocated in varying ways from the original site of the wound. A truly international approach to Thatcherism would admit alternate vehicles of experience that convey and remember Thatcher differently. For example, devolution in Scotland and the continuing crisis in Ireland are beyond the scope of this collection but will significantly affect a unified “British” cultural memory of Thatcherism. Thatcher’s influence was felt in far-flung places like Hong Kong, as she passively oversaw the reunification of Britain’s last significant colony with China. Like many of her generation, she was deeply suspicious of postwar Germany and sought to delay East/West reunification; but, as the “Iron Lady,” she was also proudly received as a liberator against the tyranny of socialism in the Eastern bloc (Evans 2004, p. 109). By not supporting UN sanctions against South Africa, she implied endorsement of the white minority government; she was actively involved with the US against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait; and, without foresight, endorsed the election of Robert Mugabe in South Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Despite Young’s claim that Britain’s “proper place” (1990, p. 6) was as a minor player in world affairs, Thatcher’s foreign policy nonetheless directly affected locations whose situations remain unresolved in the present. As heir of Thatcherism, Blair has been forced to reprise Britain’s role in these areas, especially in the Middle East; this makes the imbrication of Thatcher and Blair of interest for many of the transatlantic contributors to this volume. Hedging her bets against the Europeans and with the Americans, Thatcher’s geopolitical vision maintained the national interests and boundaries of Britain, kept the European Union as perpetual outsiders, and aligned Britain along an axis of power that was transatlantic rather than communal to the EU. In her cranky but influential Bruges speech in 1988, Thatcher opposed Britain’s entry into the then European Economic Community based on the fear that Britain would be absorbed into Europe




Introduction

and be dominated by a “European super-state” (Thatcher 1988). This kind of “Euro-scepticism” (Evans 2004, p. 85) has been a stubborn legacy for all her successors and Major, Blair, and Brown administrations have improved on it only incrementally. Instead of aligning Britain with Europe, Thatcher saw the value of increasing her friendship with the US and its then President Ronald Reagan, himself an originary trauma in the rise of the political right in the US. Thatcher’s “special relationship” with Reagan was premised on the defense of democracy and free market capitalism against, usually, the “evil empire” (Thatcher 1999) of the Soviet Union and other Marxist or Communist powers. Politically, she and Reagan shared New Right ideas, especially on economics and fears over the threat of Russia and nuclear capable nations; personally, they shared a similar rags-to-riches story. Bumgardner has described the pair as “soulmates for liberty” based on their mutual commitment to “free enterprise, free trade, and personal freedom” (2003, p. 66). Although the “special relationship” was by no means equal—the US tested its friendship with the UK by invading Granada in 1983 and proved itself by far the superior power—Thatcher exploited Anglo-American relations to promote Britain’s position as the guardian of the interests of the free world which were threatened by the “darkness of socialism” (Evans 2004, p. 112). Blair’s foreign policy—his “new imperialist” (Mardell 2004) adventures in the Middle East, his “special relationship” with George W. Bush, and his investments in globalization—force us to reevaluate and emphasize Thatcher’s global reach and to recognize that her figure looms large in the reconsideration of Britain’s postimperial image both at home and abroad. Before turning to our contributors’ engagements with the wounds Thatcherism inflicted on British society, we would like to consider Thatcher’s own “rupture” from Thatcherism. The Community Charge, or “Poll Tax” as it became better known, is most often identified as the event that unmistakably revealed Thatcher’s unelectability and precipitated her demise. The implementation of the Poll Tax was grounded in the central tenets of Thatcherism: it was part of the Conservatives’ move to cut local government spending, but its presentation as a more equitable taxation system was intended to garner popular support. Thatcher, however, underestimated the public’s resistance to such a socially unjust tax: numerous Anti-Poll-Tax Unions were formed which encouraged nonpayment and organized demonstrations like the one in Trafalgar Square in March 1990 that erupted in violence. In implementing the Poll Tax, then, Thatcher grossly misread her electorate; “her” people, the property owners of rural and suburban England, she thought, would support her



14

against her own politicians (Evans 2004, p. 63). The underclass that she thought would be “dragged back into the ranks of responsible society” (Thatcher 1993, p. 661) rose up and reinvigorated the Labour movement she had sought to dismantle. Given this vehement resistance toward the Poll Tax, it is perhaps not surprising that the Lady who had so vigorously pursued the policy had to go. Geoffrey Howe’s resignation over Thatcher’s poor leadership vis-à-vis Europe and crisis in the Gulf exacerbated the situation and shortly afterwards Michael Heseltine launched an official challenge to her leadership. Despite initially claiming that she would “fight on” (Thatcher 1990), Thatcher was persuaded by her cabinet ministers and loyal supporters that she would not survive a second ballot. On November 22, 1990, she tearfully resigned from office, allowing Douglas Hurd and John Major, both loyal cabinet members, to enter the race against Heseltine. For a politician who inflicted multiple wounds on British politics, culture, and everyday life, Thatcher suffered her own political trauma and stubbornly remembers the events that led to her resignation as a traumatic “betrayal.” To address the interplay of history and memory in the traumatic experience of Thatcherism, this volume is divided into two parts, “Thatcher” and “After” with the ampersand in the title representing the entanglement between the moment of Thatcher and the post-Thatcher era. “Thatcher” contains chapters that revisit the original moment or “wound” of Thatcher and the development of Thatcherism during her term as prime minister. While Corner and Harvey claim that the 1980s can be “referred to as the ‘Thatcherite’ decade, a periodization likely to be consolidated by Mrs Thatcher’s resignation in 1990” (1991, p. 3), we argue in this volume that “Thatcherism” persists after her resignation, her presence recalled repeatedly to function as an index of anxiety in contemporary British culture and politics. The chapters in “After” examine the continuation of Thatcher’s legacy up to the present day and implicitly address the problems of staging a resistance to Thatcherism’s hegemonic strength. Thatcher & After participates in a conversation begun by texts such as Fires Were Started (1993, 2006) and Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (1991) but extends the focus of these influential collections beyond the consideration of national ideology and film and beyond the confines of Thatcher’s years in power. Considering Thatcher and Thatcherism within the discourse of trauma expands the scope of our archive: as Ann Cvetkovich has argued, “trauma puts pressure on conventional forms of documentation, representation, and commemoration, giving rise to new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into




Introduction

being collective witnesses and publics” (2003, p. 7). Our contributors take as their subject a variety of cultural and literary texts that function as memory work, texts that attempt to “work through” or evade the perceived sense of crisis that Thatcher engendered. While some contributors reread well-known texts, literary and cultural “monuments” if you will, from the 1980s as “performances” that conscript “witnesses” into Thatcherism’s redefinition of Englishness and nation, other chapters take as their subject popular culture and other forms of ephemera that underscore the “rituals” and everyday practices and forms of repetition that keep Thatcherism simultaneously revealed and concealed. Part I, “Thatcher,” opens with Patricia Holland and Georgia Eglezou’s chapter “‘There is no such thing!’: On Public Service, Broadcasting, the National Health Service and ‘people’ in the 1980s.” Taking Thatcher’s notorious claim that “there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and families” as their starting point, Holland and Eglezou argue that the 1980s saw a reformulation of the concept of “society” which moved it away from public and communal responsibility toward individual choice. Drawing on research for their larger Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, they identify the ways in which Thatcher’s political and rhetorical project of privatization entered popular culture through the broadcast media and eventually became accepted as “common sense.” Focusing on the representation of debates surrounding health care in the current affairs television programs Panorama and This Week/TVEye, Holland and Eglezou trace the “hollowing out” of the public realm. In analyzing these TV programs, Holland and Eglezou focus on the impact of such ideological shifts on three groups: health care professionals, ancillary health care workers, and patients. In their repeated focus on patients, they contend, these programs challenged the idea that society was absent and contest the rhetoric of individual choice that was implicit in Thatcher’s speech. Holland and Eglezou argue that the “political economy” of the broadcast media “illuminate[s] the ideological shifts of the decade as clearly as the content itself”; the infringement of market forces into public service broadcasting, then, narrowed the “spaces within which television could [. . .] mount a serious discussion of health policies.” While Thatcher’s declaration that “There’s no such thing as society” seemed to have become a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” Holland and Eglezou conclude with the suggestion that the current “creditcrunch” has opened up a new space in which the “common sense” of Thatcherism could be challenged. Alexander Beaumont’s chapter “‘New Times’ Television?: Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette” continues Holland and Eglezou’s concern



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with the possibilities that broadcast media offered for resisting the Thatcherite hegemony. Beaumont contests the standard narrative which positions Channel 4 as emerging out of and being inflected by Thatcherite discourse, arguing that such a narrative “elevates Thatcherism to a hegemonic position it did not yet occupy” rather than understanding it, like Channel 4, as a response to the historical conditions of post-Fordism. In contrast to such de-historicized accounts, Beaumont’s chapter pays attention to the specific historical circumstances out of which Channel 4 emerged in order to uncover its “true political potential.” Beaumont takes as his text Hanif Kureishi’s film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which has become widely accepted as a canonical anti-Thatcherite film. Beaumont, however, claims that the film’s relationship to Thatcherism is more complex than this positioning suggests. He argues that Stephen Frears’s, the film’s director, bitterness about Channel 4’s imbrication with Thatcherite policies is akin to “Left melancholia” and thus fails to recognize the possibilities for political resistance offered by the channel. Focusing on the “fractious space” of the laundrette, Beaumont uncovers in Frears’s own film a recognition of the political potential of both Channel 4 and the Left. Using both Kureishi’s film and the situation of Channel 4, Beaumont explores the opportunities for repairing a disaggregated Left by harnessing the political potency of one of Thatcherism’s most fundamental principles, “enterprise.” The next two chapters in “Thatcher,” by Jason Mezey and Lucienne Loh respectively, address the colonial nostalgia of the Thatcher era through a discussion of Richard Attenborough’s award-winning film Gandhi (1982) and Nobel-winner V. S. Naipaul’s novel, The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Both chapters explore how images of colonial England functioned throughout Thatcher’s terms to stress national unity and ground her radical modernizing policies. In “The Gospel of Gandhi: Whiteness and State Narcissism in Thatcherite England,” Jason Mezey presents a rereading of Gandhi in tandem with Thatcher’s rhetorical machinery, understanding both as symptomatic of a state narcissism which enlists the ideals of national identity and community to fashion a gratifying self-image. Mezey highlights the multidirectionality of narcissism, which simultaneously points to an ideal past and future while deriding the present—a position he claims is adopted in both Thatcher’s rhetoric (specifically in her 1982 Cheltenham Speech) and Attenborough’s film. Reading Attenborough’s film within the context of the Falklands War, Thatcher’s Cheltenham speech, and the Nationality Bill, Mezey explores the complex interaction of the ideas of state, nation, and whiteness. He argues that Gandhi becomes a “narcissistic mirror” which reflects the “ego-ideal”




Introduction

of the nation—this “ego-ideal,” however, does not reside in the figure of the “brown messiah” but rather in his “white disciples.” In allowing the audience to identify with these figures, Mezey claims that Attenborough’s film “preserv[es] an ethical center to white Britishness.” Consequently, he concludes that the film, like Thatcher’s discourse, “hide[s] the workings of the state behind a veil of nostalgia [. . .] and thus sanitizie[s] the colonial past and the postimperial present.” Lucienne Loh’s chapter similarly examines the function of colonial nostalgia within Thatcherite Britain, but whereas Mezey focused on the responses of the white filmmaker and his largely white audience, Loh turns her attention to the “ex-colonial” writer V. S. Naipaul. In her chapter “Rural Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in the Thatcher Years: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” Loh argues that the colonial nostalgia of Naipaul’s novel, which is set in the heart of rural England, distinguishes his writing from the metropolitan, multicultural postcolonialism of writers like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. Yet while Naipaul’s novel might initially seem “antithetical to any postcolonial project,” Loh argues against such a simplistic reading. In understanding Naipaul as an “ex-colonial” writer, Loh reveals the complex interrogation of nostalgia, heritage, and belonging that occurs within Naipaul’s novel. By literally inserting himself within an English pastoral tradition, and an English countryside, Naipaul “troubles the racial cordon sanitaire” implicitly constructed by the Thatcherite discourse of heritage. Consequently, he appropriates the “postimperial melancholia” that Thatcher claimed as the special reserve of “white Britain” as a “mode of articulating a demand for inclusion in the narrative of the nation’s past.” In this way, Loh argues, “Naipaul’s nostalgia both confirms and obliquely contradicts the racist imperial ideology promoted by Thatcherism,” an ideology which Loh suggests lingers in the supposedly postimperial, multicultural Britain of the post-Thatcher era. From the great houses of the country to the more humble architecture and domesticity of Number 10 Downing Street, Thatcher developed a new visual rhetoric for Britain’s postimperial “greatness.” In “There’s No Place like Home: Margaret Thatcher at Number 10 Downing Street,” Kevin A. Morrison considers the function of the prime minister’s residence as an “icon of Britishness” and a metonym for the nation. Taking as his text the BBC’s two-part television documentary and subsequent book publication on the anniversary of Number 10, Morrison explores how the rhetoric of interior and exterior, domestic and foreign, was mobilized by Thatcher to forge a fixed and stable sense of national identity. Through a detailed analysis of the presentation of the public spaces of



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Number 10, Morrison reveals how interior design is harnessed to an idea of “history.” Yet he argues that in focusing on interior design Thatcher, and the documentary’s producers, “evacuate [those spaces] of their actual historical referents.” As the nation’s home, then, Number 10 constructs an image of national identity that is circumscribed along racial lines. In the second section of his chapter, Morrison moves from a consideration of the public to the private spaces of Number 10, and correspondingly shifts his attention to Thatcher’s private role as housewife. In opening up Number 10 to the television crew, Thatcher seemed to collapse the distinction between public and private. Rather than “salving the national psyche,” however, such a move “bars entry to us all.” In place of healing, we are merely offered the opportunity to consume Number 10 and thus become exemplars of the “kind of citizenship” which Thatcher herself had “modeled” within the documentary. The cultural consumption of the Thatcherite past has itself become an important part of British national identity as contemporary cultural production compulsively returns to the rupture of the Thatcher era. The second part of the volume, “After,” turns to a consideration of such contemporary responses to Thatcher’s legacy. In the opening chapter, “Shameless?: Picturing the ‘underclass’ After Thatcherism,” Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi explore the symbolic function of the “underclass” in contemporary Britain, a category that has persisted despite the “disruption of class-based solidarities” brought about by Thatcherism. Tracing the depiction of the “underclass” in the popular media, reality television programs, and dramas, Nunn and Biressi suggest that such images reflect the “changing model of social and class relations under Thatcher, Major and Blair.” Nunn and Biressi ask why, in a period of relative affluence in Britain, underpinned as it is by the rhetoric of individual ambition and social mobility, these images remain so powerful and uncontested. In answer, they suggest that the “underclass” functions both as “avatars of blame” and as a “red herring” which “deflects public debate away from a sharper-eyed scrutiny of more widely embedded social values such as consumerism, property ownership, informed ‘choice,’ entrepreneurialism and individual aspiration”—social values that, as we saw in Holland and Eglezou’s chapter, became accepted as “common sense” under Thatcherism. In exploring the continued fascination with the “underclass” in post-Thatcherite Britain, Nunn and Biressi challenge the “common sense” presentation of Thatcherism’s ideology of individualism. Indeed, their chapter closes with a suggestion that the current credit-crunch may prompt a reassessment of Thatcherism’s legacy through a “dawning realization [. . .] that the ‘underclass’ occupy a region which is not so very far removed from the mainstream after all.”




Introduction

Ryan Trimm’s chapter, “Carving up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe,” continues Nunn and Biressi’s concern with the social impact of economic Thatcherism. Trimm reads Coe’s 1994 novel What a Carve Up! within the surprising context of popular “slasher films,” one of which provides the novel with its title, arguing that Coe connects the social and economic cuts of the Thatcher era to a “more murderous thrust.” Through the figure of Owen, Coe “personalizes the wounds” of Thatcherism, represented by the various members of the Winshaw family, to “bring home [its] realities.” For Trimm, however, Coe’s novel does not merely map the social restructurings brought about by Thatcherism but also challenges them. The novel’s formal strategies, its blending of genres, and its tragicomic mix, function as a “refutation of the homogeneity stressed by Thatcher.” Trimm argues that through the figure of Owen the novel reveals the public’s complicity in Thatcherism while offering a possibility for resistance. As both the narrator of the novel and the historian of the Winshaw family, Owen recognizes his complicity in the wounds inflicted on him and those close to him by the Winshaws and the Thatcherite values they embody. Although Owen’s death at the end of the novel might seem to foreclose the possibility of resistance, Trimm argues that it “frame[s Thatcherism] as an ongoing conflict.” Published four years after Thatcher resigned from office, Coe’s novel is part of an attempt to engage with and resist the legacy of Thatcherism, a legacy which left Britain cut from the social and cultural framework that had sustained it for decades. Kim Duff’s chapter “Let’s Dance: The Line of Beauty and the Revenant Figure of Thatcher,” takes as its focus the presence of Margaret Thatcher in Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel. In the novel, Nick Guest, the gay protagonist, reveals the “sociopolitical contradictions” of Thatcherism through his “intimate” encounter with Thatcher on the dance floor. Duff’s analysis of the novel moves away from “straight” versions of Thatcher’s gender to explore the more recent “queer” incarnations of Thatcher. Duff argues that in presenting Thatcher’s gender as “free-floating,” Hollinghurst reveals the paradox that the gay identities excluded by Thatcher’s policies (specifically Section 28) “have more in common with Thatcher [. . .] than the straight men and women that surrounded her.” In rewriting the 1980s, and the figure of Thatcher, Duff suggests, Hollinghurst attempts to make Thatcher accountable to gay history. Although Duff’s analysis focuses on the physical presence of Thatcher in the novel, she also explores the broader politics of inclusion and exclusion that characterized the Thatcherite decade. In pursuing policies of privatization and promoting consumerism, Thatcherism initiated a new



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form of national identity based on “material prosperity.” As a drug-using aesthete, Nick Guest exemplifies the consumptive drive of Thatcherism, yet as a homosexual he is merely a “guest,” denied access and belonging to Thatcher’s newly constructed English identity. Ultimately, Hollinghurst’s return to the 1980s in the early 2000s also reveals his “disappointment” over New Labour’s continuation of Thatcherism’s central tenets and, in particular, the continued oppression of the gay community. The disappointment in New Labour’s failure to put to rest the “revenant” figure of Thatcher is similarly explored in Graham Saunders’s chapter “Sarah Kane: Cool Britannia’s Reluctant Feminist.” Tracing the shifting landscape of the arts under Thatcher and Blair, Saunders examines the difficulty of providing appropriate political responses to the Cool Britannia enterprise of New Labour. In particular, Saunders probes the capacity of “in-yer face” drama to oppose the Cool Britannia mentality, often criticized for its “lack of political conviction” and its reliance on “consumer capitalism.” Saunders suggests that the “in-yer face” dramatists of the 1990s should be understood as “Mrs Thatcher’s disenchanted children” as “their writing reflects an anger and bewilderment at the legacy they have inherited, yet at the same time they are unwilling to believe in New Labour’s vision.” In this chapter, Saunders turns to the work of dramatist Sarah Kane in order to examine the limits of political engagement in a post-Thatcherite context by connecting Kane’s comment that she was emphatically not a “woman writer” to Thatcher’s infamous statement that “There is no such thing as society.” Both claims, he argues, reveal the collapse of socialism and collectivism as a viable political approach, a collapse which necessarily involves a redefinition of feminism. Saunders ends his chapter by claiming that Kane’s resistance to ideological labels and suspicion of moral absolutes had “unfortunate effects” in that it “disrupt[ed]” the work of women writers in the early 1990s who had “begun to reevaluate both the Thatcher period and the strategies by which feminism could be developed in a rapidly changing social climate.” The attempt to move beyond Thatcherism, then, is foreclosed by the collapse of viable political alternatives such as feminism. In the closing chapter of the collection, Heather Joyce similarly examines the absence of political alternatives in contemporary Britain, returning us to the question of whether it is possible to stage a resistance to Thatcher and Thatcherism. “Parodic Reiterations: Representations of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism in Late Twentieth-Century British Political Cartoons,” analyzes the reappearance of Thatcher in political cartoons surrounding the 1997 general election, which Joyce contends reveals the extent to which that election was “about the unresolved




Introduction

legacies of Thatcher and Thatcherism.” These images, then, become an index of wider cultural anxieties about the lack of an alternative to Thatcherism in contemporary Britain under Blair and New Labour. Joyce identifies the often gendered parodies of both prime ministers—Thatcher and Blair as mother and son or Blair as Thatcher in drag—as part of a scopic regime of meaning which effaced differences between the two. Yet Joyce also argues that such parodies risk privileging Thatcher’s “coherent signification over Blair’s derivative performance.” As we have seen in the reassessment of Thatcher as a “conviction politician,” such an approach can prompt a repositioning of Thatcher as a “locus of political and cultural nostalgia.” Although Joyce recognizes the risk of privileging the original, she maintains the subversive potential of such parodic reiterations, arguing that they can “challenge the notion of any authentic identity.” While the political cartoons most obviously criticize Blair in the relationships they establish between him and Thatcher, Joyce’s analysis also demonstrates how they can “disrupt” the “original” image of Thatcher and Thatcherism by revealing its equally constructed status. Joyce’s chapter, then, ends on a tentatively optimistic note with the suggestion that political cartoons can “intervene in [the] cultural pathology of melancholia” which characterizes contemporary Britain. Thanks to the “wound” of Thatcherism, “Thatcher’s children” and “Thatcher’s grandchildren” have been left without strong models of dissent and without radical political alternatives, and have been lulled into complacency and forgetfulness by the affluence created by New Labour. Thatcher & After’s urgent goal is to restore a Thatcherite past to the present and to provide strategies and opportunities to resist in the present, however belatedly, Thatcherism’s all-pervasive policies. This collection addresses the continued need to reify Thatcher, which necessarily involves forgetting but also functions as a reminder and a guide to versions of forgetting that enable new forms of identity and community. We conclude, therefore, with a more hopeful image than the decapitation of Thatcher we began with by drawing attention to the cover of Thatcher & After borrowed from the playbill of Thatcher: The Musical!: an image of the former prime minister that is reminiscent of pop chameleon David Bowie. In February 2006, Foursight Theatre, an all-female company, staged Thatcher: The Musical! at the Warwick Arts Centre. The company claimed that the show neither “glorified nor denigrated” (“Iron Lady” 2006) Thatcher’s legacy but rather sought to understand the lasting impact that Thatcher has had. The most interesting moment in this campy musical for this volume comes when eight Maggies appear on stage in feather boas singing about economic policy. This restaging



22

of Thatcher, with its repetition and parody, expresses the anxiety that Thatcherism has become so hegemonic that contemporary political debate can only repeat and rephrase it, rather than contest it. However, the musical offers a new perspective: as representatives and mockeries of the persistent “flashbacks” to Thatcher, the eight Maggies can also be read as a reminder of continuity and as the complementary rather than competing desire to achieve closure and to keep Thatcherism at the forefront of cultural memory.

Notes 1. For an insightful and influential examination of Thatcher’s contradictory manipulations of femininity, see Heather Nunn (2002) Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy. 2. During her terms in office, Thatcher launched five Acts of Parliament aimed at weakening trade union activity across the board. The Employment Act of 1980, for example, abolished the “closed shop,” or compulsory trade union membership and restricted “sympathy” strikes, while the 1982 Act redefined grievances that unions could legally strike for (Dorey 2003, p. 73) and subjected striking workers to criminal charges brought about by their employers. 3. At a Labour conference in 1994, Blair announced the jettisoning of the original Clause IV, with its commitment to nationalization and “common ownership” (Driver and Martell 2006, p. 14). In its place, Blair offered a new Clause IV that advocated free enterprise and the “rigour of competition” in the market that would lead to a “thriving private sector and high-quality public services” (New Clause IV). 4. Thatcher (1983) stumbled across the phrase “Victorian values” in an interview in January 1983 and adopted it to describe the “values when our country became great.” According to Raphael Samuel, the Victorian values of thrift, work and morality “struck a chord” (1992, p. 23) because Britons were disenchanted with the economic and moral fall-out of the 60s. 5. Paul Gilroy’s book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987) provided a language and an opportunity to rationally discuss the hysteria and anxieties around race and immigration following the riots in Brixton and Liverpool in 1981 and again in Birmingham in 1985.

Works cited Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, revised edn. London: Verso. Baucom, I. (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Birch, H., McDermott, Q. and McNay, M. (eds) (n.d.) The Thatcher Legacy: Right to the End. The Guardian collection No. 3. London: Guardian Newspapers. “Blair Meets Thatcher Before Summit.” BBC Politics 97, http://www.bbc.co.uk/ politics97/news/05/0525/thatch1.shtml. Accessed August 16, 2009.




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Blair, T. (1997) “Labour Party Manifesto: New Labour because Britain deserves better.” http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml Accessed July 24, 2009. Blair, T. (1999) Speech to the 1999 Labour Party Conference. 28 September, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/460009.stm. Accessed August 11, 2009. Blair, T. (2004) New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bumgardner, L. (2003) “Thatcher and Reagan: Soul Mates for Liberty” in S. Pugliese (ed.) The Political Legacy of Margaret Thatcher. London: Politico’s. pp. 58–67. Caruth, C. (1996) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cecar, S. (2007) Blatcherism: How Much Thatcherism is in Blairism? Germany: Verlag Dr. Mueller. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (1991) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London: Routledge. Cvetkovich, A. (2003) An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press. Darnton, J. (1996) “Labor Won’t Try to Undo Thatcherism, Chief says” The New York Times, April 3, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/03/world/labor-won-ttry-to-undo-thatcherism-chief-says.html. Accessed August 16, 2009. Dorey, P. (2003) “Margaret Thatcher’s Taming of the Trade Unions” in S. Pugliese (ed.) The Political Legacy of Margaret Thatcher. London: Politico’s. pp. 71–85. Driver, S. and Martell, L. (2006) New Labour. 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Evans, E. J. (2004) Thatcher and Thatcherism. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. “Evaluating Thatcher’s Legacy” (2004) BBC News. Politics. May 4, 2004, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3681973.stm. Accessed August 16, 2009. Fleming, A. (2008) “When David met Margaret,” BBC News. Politics. January 31, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7221324.stm. Accessed August 16, 2009. Friedman, L. D. (1993) Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism. London: Wallflower Press. Gilroy, P. (1987) “There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. London: Routledge. Hall, S. and Jaques, M. (eds) (1983) Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, S. (1987) “Gramsci and Us.” Marxism Today (June) 16–21. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heffernan, R. (2000) New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain. London: Macmillian Press. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Hoge, W. (1997) “Blair urges new way for Europe’s Left.” The New York Times. June 7, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/07/world/blair-urges-new-way-foreurope-s-left.html? Accessed September 15, 2009.



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Huyssen, A. (2003) Twilight Memories: Marking Time In A Culture of Amnesia. New York and London: Routledge. “Iron Lady Musical Takes to the Stage.” (2006) BBC News. February 7, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/coventry_warwickshire/4688764.stm. Accessed August 8, 2009. Jessop, B., Bonnett, K., Bromley, S. and Ling, T. (1988) Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. London: Polity Press. Mardell, M. (2004) “Blair—One Year After Iraq: Essay.” BBC News. March 19, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3524440.stm. Accessed June 19, 2009. McKenna, R. (1998) “Look I”m not Tony Thatcher right?” The Mirror. October 1. p. 2. Monaghan, D. (1998) The Falklands War: Myth and Countermyth. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. “MP’s bid to topple Iron Lady statue.” (2007) The Shields Gazette. February 28, http://www.shieldsgazette.com/jarrow-news/MP39S-BID-TO-TOPPLEIRON.2087143.jp. Accessed August 16, 2009. New Clause IV. http://www.thecitizen.org.uk/views/clause4.htm. Accessed August 15, 2009. Nunn, H. (2002) Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation. Lawrence & Wishart. Paris, N. (2007) “Gordon Brown ‘admires’ Margaret Thatcher.” The Telegraph. September 4, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1562097/GordonBrown-admires-Margaret-Thatcher.html. Accessed August 16, 2009. Proctor, J. (2004) Stuart Hall. London: Routledge. Samuel, R. (1992) “Mrs. Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values” in T. C. Smout (ed.) Victorian Values: Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, December 1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 9–29. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory, Vol. 1. London: Verso. Sturken, M. (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. “Thatcher and Attlee top PM list.” (2006) BBC News. August 29, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/5294024.stm. Accessed September 24, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1978) TV Interview for Granada Television World in Action. January 27, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=103485. Accessed August 16, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1982) Speech to Conservative Rally at Cheltenham. July 3. Cheltenham Racecourse, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/ displaydocument.asp?docid=104989. Accessed August 16, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1983) TV Interview for London Weekend Television Weekend World. 16 January. No. 10 Downing Street, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=105087 Accessed August 16, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1984) Speech to 1922 Committee. 19 July. House of Commons. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp? docid= 105563. Accessed August 16, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1988) Speech to the College of Europe. 20 September. Bruges Belfry, Bruges, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=107332. Accessed August 15, 2009.




Introduction

Thatcher, M. (1990) Public Statement. Outside No. 10 Downing Street. November 21, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=108252. Accessed August 16, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years. New York: Harpercollins. Thatcher, M. (1999) “The Language of Liberty.” Speech to the English Speaking Union in New York. December 7, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/ displaydocument.asp?docid=108386. Accessed August 30, 2009. Thatcher, M. (2003) “Reflections on Liberty” in S. Pugliese (ed.) The Political Legacy of Margaret Thatcher. London: Politico’s. pp. 1–8. “Thatcher Statue Attacker Jailed.” (2003) BBC News. February 20, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2779597.stm. Accessed September 24, 2009. Walden, B. (2006) “True Blues: A Point of View” BBC News Magazine. January 30, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4655204.stm. Accessed August 16, 2009. Wright, P. (1986) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso. Young, H. (1990) “Rough Justice for a Leader Born to Battle.” Rptd. in H. Birch, Q. McDermott, and M. McNay (eds) (n.d.) The Thatcher Legacy: Right to the End. The Guardian Collection No. 3. London: Guardian Newspapers. pp. 5–6, 8.



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Part I Thatcher





“There is no such thing!”: On Public Service, Broadcasting, the National Health Service and “people” in the 1980s Patricia Holland and Georgia Eglezou

“People” and “the public” I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! (Thatcher 1987) Three months after Margaret Thatcher was elected as prime minister for her third term ( June 1987) she gave an interview to Woman’s Own magazine in which she condemned those “children and people” who expected the government, as the representative of “society,” to sort their problems out. These reflections on personal, social and governmental responsibility, succinctly encapsulated later in the interview as “there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and families,” have resonated across the intervening years. That statement, made with such conviction, has become part of cultural history, fusing the image and the very person of Margaret Thatcher with the policies she was pursuing. It remains as a sort of pivot, a useful shorthand which pulls together many aspects of cultural attitudes and social policy in the Conservative 1980s. It is possible to develop its multiple strands: the shrunken conceptualization of “society” and its responsibilities, the oversimple elision of “government” with “society,” the evocation of “families” and family responsibilities (Nunn 2002, Chapter 4). Above all it has come to encapsulate a “hollowing out of citizenship” and the public realm 29



1

There is no such thing!

(Marquand 2004) and a shift in the very grounds of ethical and practical judgments. Significantly in the interview, the prime minister moved on to discuss “people” in general, and added, “no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first.” That image of individual men and women who “look to themselves first” and are criticized when, like children, they cast “their problems upon society,” will be at the center of this chapter. We will be considering ways in which that Thatcherite conceptualization of “people” and “the public” was expressed and circulated in television programs of the 1980s, against the background of that image of “society” as no more than a comforting myth. This chapter is part of a larger research project which traces the ideas and attitudes of the 1980s across the broadcast media, noting the ways in which factual information and shifting ideologies are embedded in interweaving debates, impressions, opinions, jokes, narratives and emotional attitudes across the genres.1 By winding back the clock and experiencing the television programs in their context, we aim to observe a cultural and ideological shift as it was happening. We document the ways in which political and organizational changes were reported and commented on and note the ways in which they became part of cultural expression. Our aim is to observe the political project of the 1980s as it entered popular culture and became a new common sense (Hall and Jacques 1983). Our focus is on those aspects of “society” most decried by Margaret Thatcher, the public services. In particular we consider those two institutions, often described as quintessentially British, the National Health Service (NHS) and public service broadcasting, both of which came under intense pressure from the Thatcher governments (Leys 2001). Issues of health and sickness demonstrate the prime area where problems are unavoidably “cast on society.” In dealing with those problems, public life is lived out in a particularly powerful way, and the vulnerability and interdependence of individuals becomes an unavoidable issue. As the sociologist Rudolf Klein has pointed out, “health policies inescapably raise questions about the nature of our society and our political system” (Klein 1996, p. 505). Debates around the nation’s health have been central to a national public sphere, and the UK system of public service broadcasting has provided an important space for those debates. By focusing on the NHS, this chapter aims to illuminate the links between policy and media representations. Stories of doctors and nurses, hospitals, accidents, birth and death have long been a fruitful source of fascination on the small screen ( Jacobs 2003; Hallam 2000). Fantasy, humor and fiction have been



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paralleled by an equally rich tradition of news, documentaries and current affairs programs. In the late 1980s the fictional Casualty (BBC1 1986–) was matched by the life-as-it-is-lived docusoap Jimmy’s (YTV 1987–94), filmed at St James’s University Hospital, Leeds, and by current affairs reports such as This Week’s observation of a real casualty department (Thames May 25, 1989). Viewers may move easily between these genres. They watch—and may well compare—both fictional and real medical staff as they cope with daily problems against the background of changing government policy. In the 1980s, as now, viewers will have compared the representations on the screens with their own experience, and will frequently have seen similar experiences reflected on the screen, as program makers sought out “ordinary people” to incorporate in their programs (see Philo and Henderson 1999). Attitudes to health care were contested across the 1980s in ways that were not always simple or clear cut, but which had practical effects on the lives of the population at large. We can trace changes in the tone and cultural resonance of the programs as the three Thatcher-led governments moved away from a commitment to “public” responsibility toward “individual” choice and individual responsibility. Elsewhere we will be looking more closely at drama, comedy and radio programs which dealt with issues of health (Wilson 2011; Chignell 2011). Here we are focusing on factual television, and will be looking in particular at two prestigious current affairs series, the BBC’s Panorama (1953–) and ITV’s This Week/TVEye (1956–92). However, as we high-light the programs, we must bear in mind that the political economy of the media, in particular television, was itself undergoing radical changes, and that pressures on the broadcasting organizations were intensifying. Therefore we begin by discussing the changing structures of broadcasting, which created the very conditions of possibility of the broadcast output. Uneven, and contested at every point, nevertheless these illuminate the ideological shifts of the decade as clearly as the broadcast content itself.

Changing definitions of “public service”: Policy on broadcasting and health “Broadcasting was one of a number of areas—the professions such as teaching, medicine and the law were others—in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high-minded commitment to some greater good” Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. (quoted in O’Malley 1994, p. 67)



Patricia Holland and Georgia Eglezou 31


The policies of the Conservative governments of the 1980s toward broadcasting paralleled those toward the health service (Leys 2001). Although very different in their activities and outcomes, both institutions had been created within a rhetoric of public service: the British Broadcasting Corporation by John Reith in the late 1920s, the NHS by Aneurin Bevan in the late 1940s. Both were to be funded by “the public” at large through a universal payment: a national insurance scheme for the NHS and a license fee on the ownership of first radio then television sets, for the BBC. Both were seen as a service to an undifferentiated “public” at large, with a scope way beyond those who were “casting their problems on society.” Both reached out to an inclusive national population who were seen as sharing certain needs. For Reith, this broad public needed information and education—and entertainment, too, even though this was rather reluctantly tagged on (Scannell and Cardiff 1991). For Bevan, the public needed physical care and medical attention “from the cradle to the grave,” to quote the report by William Beveridge which gave birth to the UK’s welfare state (Thane 1982; Hopkins 1991). However, this high-minded commitment to provide for body and spirit/mind was hotly contested throughout the history of both services. By the end of the 1970s both were under attack from different positions. Margaret Thatcher was not the only one to see their appeal to professionalism as arrogant, patronizing and centrist, denying consumer choice for users and opportunities for entrepreneurship for providers. On the one hand, libertarian left-wing movements were demanding responsiveness and inclusion, on the other, neoliberal think tanks were campaigning for privatization and competition. Both attacked elitism and claims to leadership. In his 1977 discussion of the concept of “professionalism,” media sociologist Philip Elliott stated, “It has become less clear in which direction society wishes to be led, or indeed whether, as a whole, it will stand for being led in any one direction” (Elliott 1977, p. 152). Two reports, initiated by the Labour government during the 1970s, posed the shortcomings of the two services. The Black Report on the health service (1980) criticized health inequality; the Annan Report on broadcasting (1977) proposed an Open Broadcasting Authority to expand access to the airwaves. Effectively, both were arguing for a broadening of a notion of who “the public” were, and pointing to the need to serve a diversity of “publics” and a more nuanced form of universality (DHSS 1980; Annan Committee 1977). Historically, the structure of television evolved differently from that of the NHS, because, from the mid-1950s, the concept of public service



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was applied to commercial as well as publicly funded organizations. “Tonight, 7.15 September 22nd 1955, a new public service is about to be launched over the rooftops of old London” declared the announcer on the first night of ITV (How TV Changed Britain 2008). As one of those pragmatic but workable compromises which have characterized broadcasting history in the UK, the network of commercial companies which was set up as Independent Television (ITV) was responsible to a regulatory authority, the Independent Television Authority (ITA). The ITA ensured that ITV programs were diverse and did not neglect the less popular areas. The commitment of the ITV companies to more than money making and audience maximization was embraced by energetic executives like Jeremy Isaacs at Thames and Sidney Bernstein at Granada (Holland 2006; Goddard et al. 2007; Fitzwalter 2008). The Thames Television current affairs strand, called at different points in its history This Week and TVEye (1956–92), together with Granada Television’s World in Action (1963–98) owed their continued presence at peak-time viewing to a “mandate” from the regulatory authority (Sendall 1983, pp. 232–3.). But the “cosy duopoly” of BBC and ITV was challenged by the competition-oriented approach promoted by a group of neoliberal think tanks whose ideas became a powerful influence on Margaret Thatcher (Levitas 1986; Chignell 2004). The BBC’s license fee was described as “a grossly unfair tax bearing no relation to consumption or income” by the Adam Smith Institute (1986). The think tanks argued for freedom from top-down regulated structures and for market solutions, and were suspicious of the very concept of “public service.” As Thatcher’s memoirs show, she saw a “high-minded commitment to some greater good” as no more than “special pleading by powerful interest groups” (O’Malley 1994, p. 67). Many on the libertarian left were, in the late 1970s, inclined to echo those views, and, with the launch of Channel 4 in 1982, their campaigning resulted in a new television channel (Darlow 2004). Whereas the Black Report on the health service was released on a bank holiday and received little attention (Berridge 2005), one of the strangest contradictions in the development of broadcasting in the 1980s was the arrival of Channel 4 in response to the Annan Report. Described by its chronicler, Maggie Brown, as a “brilliant accident of history” (Brown 2007, p. vii), Channel 4 is a prime example of the patchy and uneven nature of ideological shifts and the ways in which they may be embedded in institutions and reflected in cultural forms. The channel acted as a “publisher” rather than a producer, a structure much closer to the market





model favored by the neoliberals. It commissioned programs from newly established independent companies, and this opened the airwaves to outsiders and business entrepreneurs. However, like ITV, the new channel was knitted in to the public-service ecology of British broadcasting. It was owned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority and funded by a levy on ITV, which sold its advertising. Its brief was to serve interests not catered for by the existing channels, and this arrangement gave it a great deal of freedom to experiment. Under Jeremy Isaacs, its first chief executive, the channel’s innovative remit allowed it to explore many unexpected possibilities of the medium, and it began with an unprecedentedly radical output. In its first years it was the home for left-wing campaigners, feminists, black and Asian filmmakers, extreme political views, avantgarde filmmaking styles, auteur films and amateur filmmakers (Brown 2007; Blanchard and Morley 1982). A review of current affairs programs about health issues shows those on Channel 4 to be longer and more radically questioning than the other channels. The channel had barely been on the air for a year when it became the outlet for a savage attack on the NHS in a four-part drama from writer G. F. Newman, The Nation’s Health (1983) (Wilson 2011). The dramas were each followed by detailed and probing hour-long discussions on the issues addressed in the plays. Many commentators saw the new channel as a triumph for a broadening of democratic access and a significant expansion of the meaning and scope of “public service” in broadcasting (Darlow 2004). But for Margaret Thatcher it was a blow for market forces and the promotion of an entrepreneurial spirit in television. “Stand up for free enterprise, Mr Isaacs, won’t you?” she urged its chief executive (Isaacs 1989 p. 107). Following Thatcher’s second and third election victories (1983, 1987) the concept of “public service” became subject to challenge and redefinition, both in broadcasting and in health. Both services saw a significant government report in the middle of the decade and a white paper prefiguring a major act of parliament at the end. The Griffiths Report on the NHS (implemented 1984) and the Peacock Report (1986) on funding the BBC, were both oriented to efficiency, financial management and marketization, moving responsibility away from government—and hence, in Margaret Thatcher’s conceptualization, away from “society.” Following Griffiths, the NHS brought in general managers dedicated to “efficiency,” frequently with no prior knowledge of the service. The outsourcing of hospital cleaning, catering and laundry services was confirmed. According to those who worked in hospitals, this caused considerable disruption and a breakdown of the sense of teamwork on the wards—as well as dirtier hospitals.



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The Peacock Report went well beyond its original brief to consider the funding of the BBC. Although it rejected immediate funding of the corporation by advertising, it envisaged an eventual “full market” for broadcasting based on direct payment. For Peacock, the concept of “public service” needed to be rethought in monetary terms. “Public service,” Peacock argued, should be seen as a compensation for “market failure.” The best operational definition of public service is simply any major modification of purely commercial provision resulting from public policy. If a full broadcasting market is eventually achieved . . . the main role of public service could turn out to be the collective provision . . . of programmes which viewers and listeners are willing to support in their capacity of taxpayers and voters, but not directly as consumers. (Peacock Committee 1986, para 580) Supporters of the public service commitments of both broadcasting and health were deeply concerned about the two reports. Peacock, writes media historian Tom O’Malley, “redefined matters of social and cultural policy in terms of commodity exchange” and “shifted the definition of broadcasting itself from a public good to a private commodity,” effectively stripping “public service of its cultural and social connotations” (1994, pp. 97, 102; see also O’Malley and Jones 2009). Steve Iliffe, who was a general practitioner (GP) at the time, wrote that “the potential for inflicting damage to the basic structure of the NHS can be seen throughout” the Griffiths Report (Iliffe 1985, pp. 63, 66). In both reports there was an embracing of commercial values together with a rhetoric of populism and an appeal to democratic choice. Instead of an undifferentiated “public,” users of the services were encouraged to become discriminating consumers, “people who look to themselves first.” In 1986 came the “big bang” in the city, bringing the deregulation of the financial services sector. There was a license for city high flyers to become filthy rich and an invitation to the rest of the population to become part of a share-owning society, as the public utilities, British Gas and the British Airports Authority, were privatized. A squeeze was put on the BBC, as it was granted a lower license fee than it argued it needed, and there were equivalent tightenings in health service budgets. Both institutions were moved toward an “internal market” and there was an encouragement of private enterprise to supplement the public provision. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher was elected for a third term and denied the existence of “society.”




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The UK’s NHS has been, and continues to be, a focus of debates around the nature and the concept of “public service.” And such debates inevitably give rise to questions which go beyond the structure of the institutions within which public services are embedded. Questions about “public service” involve definitions of who the public are and what is due to them. They give rise to questions of relationships within the public sphere, and “the kinds of obligations we might have on the basis of our anonymous exposure to others” as the cultural theorist Judith Butler put it (Power 2009, p. 44). They involve questions of trust—in particular the trust of individual members of the public in the professionals, the institutions and the system itself. They involve questions about the nature of professionalism and the commitment of professionals to an ideal of “public service,” which takes seriously the sort of “high-minded commitment to some greater good” disparaged by Margaret Thatcher (when TVEye made a program called “Consultants on the Make” (February 7, 1985) the title itself seemed shocking). They involve questions about a particular a vision of “society,” as well as those questions raised by Thatcher about personal and governmental responsibility, and whether the society on which people “cast their problems” is no more than an illusion. Across the 1980s such questions gained a new intensity, and their political answers affected people’s lives. They were explored, not always explicitly, in both fictional and factual programs across the decade, in particular current affairs. We will now look at this genre in greater detail. By the mid-1970s the current affairs genre carried a great deal of prestige and respect. Several major, peak-time series were dedicated to what Jonathan Dimbleby described as “a mission to explore” (interview with PH). Panorama was the BBC’s long-established “flagship” which, in the 1980s was presenter-led and usually given over to a single item (Lindley 2002). Its weighty presence on Monday evenings was challenged by the ITV companies, notably with World in Action from Granada in Manchester and TVEye/This Week from Thames Television in London. Current affairs had had a richness and an energy in the 1970s, a period described by many who worked in it as a “golden age” of investigative journalism (Holland 2006, Chapter 3; McQueen 2010). But, already by the end of that decade, the changing mood in broadcasting was being felt. At Thames, This Week, under its editor David Elstein, was thought to be too assiduous in its crusading zeal, taking too much interest in “hard” international politics and controversial subjects at



Current affairs and questions of health: 1979–86

the expense of the “softer” domestic topics designed to attract an ITV audience. When it came to health issues, instead of the safer medical topics, reporter Peter Taylor had taken on the American tobacco companies. His four dramatic films on smoking and health began with a notorious sequence of cancerous lungs in a hospital laboratory (“if this man had not smoked he would be alive and this lung would be in his chest now,” says the surgeon prodding yet another pallid lumpy growth (“Dying for a Fag” May 3, 1975)) and ended with a critique of the popular advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes with its cowboys and wide open spaces. “Death in the West” showed real cowboys crippled by lung disease (September 9, 1976). The film became the subject of an injunction by tobacco company Phillip Morris and to this day cannot be shown publicly (Holland 2006, pp. 107–8). The reaction of Thames’s management to this unwelcome controversy was to take This Week off the air and replace it with TVEye and a brief to make something more palatable for 8:30 on Thursday evenings. Many on the This Week team were outraged by the change and accused TVEye’s editor Mike Townson, of being “unable to distinguish between the significant and the sensational” (Holland 2006, p. 171). And medical topics could well be sensational. The very first TVEye gained a scoop with a program on the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” surrounded by much hype and PR (September 7, 1978). “Soft” medical topics had a definite audience appeal. A form of “medical alarmism,” as one commentator calls it, “was once so favoured by TV Eye [. . .] that the programme became known in the trade as TV Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat” (Phillips 1995, pp. 24–5). But although the tone of the series changed, TVEye retained its journalistic clout and ran under the same editor until 1986, a period which included several powerful investigative programs on issues concerned with the politics of health.

Populating the programs An important role of factual programs, particularly current affairs, is to represent certain members of “the public” in specific, clearly defined roles or situations, to the broad, undifferentiated “public” at large, the viewers. In the case of the health service, such programs open up a space for (at least) three distinct groups of people to appear on national television screens, two of them defined by their jobs and status within the service, the third an almost random selection from the public at large. The first group consists of health professionals. They carry prestige and respect, and are regularly invited to offer their opinions and





share their expert insights in the programs. However, increasingly, as the 1980s progressed, the authority of these doctors, surgeons and consultants was seen to be challenged by a different type of expert: the managers, economists and efficiency specialists who were brought in to restructure the service. The second group is made up of others employed by the NHS, such as ambulance staff and ancillary workers, whose jobs are crucial to the smooth running of the service, but who are neither authoritative nor of high status. They do not frequently appear in factual programs and are very rarely invited to give an opinion. Nurses hold an uneasy position between these two groups. On the one hand they are seen as dedicated to the professional ideal, but they are also low-paid staff, pushed around and taken advantage of. And sometimes they appear as militant as the frequently demonized ancillary workers. The third group which populates these factual programs includes members of the public—random individuals at the point at which they fall sick or become directly affected by health issues. These are “ordinary people,” anybody, as they become patients or clients. While the first two groups deliver a public service and carry the weight of that service on their shoulders, this third group grows accustomed to claiming the benefits of the service as its right (in Margaret Thatcher’s words, they “cast their problems upon society”). It is their situation which becomes the rhetorical focus of the changes of the 1980s as questions are asked about the nature of that right. Thus each of these three groups came under pressure in the 1980s. Workers, who had established an assertive militancy in the 1970s, were pressured to become compliant and their jobs became less secure. Professionals were challenged by a managerial culture, which could, in David Marquand’s words, be described as a “systematic assault on professional autonomy” (Marquand 2004, p. 2). Users of the health service moved from being conceptualized as “patients” or “clients” to becoming “customers” or even “consumers.” It was a pressure which affected the ways in which each group was defined, and those changes in definition themselves had a deep effect on relationships within the health service across the 1980s. In the following sections we will look at examples of how these three groups were represented in Panorama and This Week/TVEye during this period. But first, it is important to note two different groups who are either visible or implied in these programs, and who have an important influence on the way the participants are shown. The visible group are the journalists (Holland 2009). Current affairs is structured and mediated by regular reporters, who are often familiar to the viewers. These



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are privileged individuals who guide the audience, ask questions which may be either sympathetic or challenging and generally set the tone of the programs they present. The implied group are the audience themselves. They are rarely present in the programs, but, as we saw with the change from This Week to TVEye, the program makers’ concept of the audience has an important effect on the style and content of the programs, and consequently on the presentation of the three participant groups we have identified.

The workers: Hospital in Crisis 1979 At the end of the 1970s those who worked in the NHS as porters, cleaners, caterers, maintenance people, and others who held similar jobs, were unusually visible. Represented by the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), and together with other low-paid workers in public jobs, they had been involved in vigorous campaigning to improve their situation. As the Glasgow University Media Group documented at the time, reporting in the press and television news was highly unsympathetic, focusing on the inconvenience to the users of the services rather than the grievances of those who worked in them (GUMG 1976). In 1979, a series of deeply unpopular public sector strikes had led to a “winter of discontent,” which was partly credited with bringing the Conservative Government to power. Despite the press outcry against the strikers, the spaces created by factual and current affairs programs enabled a greater understanding of the workers’ case than brief news bulletins. In “Hospital in Crisis” (February 24, 1979) TVEye documented a hospital workers’ strike with regular visits covering a fortnight of picketing at St Andrew’s Hospital in Bow, London. However, the main focus of the program was on the nurses, rather than the ancillary workers. On the fourth day, nurses who were NUPE members voted to join the strikers. We followed the meetings called to discuss the action, which were conducted with compassion, good humor and concern that the patients should not suffer, even though one nurse pointed out “you’ll get ‘a baby dies due to the strike’ . . . they always think of something to blame you for.” But in this particular hospital, the nurses tried to keep patient inconvenience to a minimum. The patients complained about paper sheets and delayed operations. (In fact the problems were remarkably similar to those portrayed later in the decade due to the government-imposed reduction in funding.) Throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government waged a consistent campaign against the trade unions, which culminated in the





decisive defeat of the powerful miner’s union in 1985 (Williams 2009). Strikes continued in the health service, but as the changes to NHS were implemented, ancillary workers became less organized and more vulnerable. Although porters and others appeared in sympathetic roles in dramas such as Casualty, where their contribution to the life of the hospital was recognized, they tended not to appear in factual programs in their routine, daily jobs, but only when they were protesting (for example TVEye’s “An unhealthy dispute” August 16, 1982). The outsourcing of hospital cleaning, laundry and catering services by introducing competitive tendering from private companies was made compulsory in 1983. It was described by Ron Keating, assistant general secretary of NUPE, as “a sword of Damocles hanging over 250,000 support jobs in the NHS” (The Times September 8, 1983) and it created a major upheaval for the hospitals themselves. However, the situation of these low-paid workers was hardly explored across the television output and low pay itself continued to be dealt with in terms of conflict and the effect on patients.

The challenge to professionals: “You can’t see puss and blood on a bit of paper” 1986 The shifts of the 1980s, toward privatization and the measurement of success in terms of monetary values, were challenging the connotations of professionalism. In 1980 TVEye was already speculating on “Going Private” in which private medicine is described as “one of our biggest growth industries” (February 5, 1980). As the decade progressed and funds for the health service were held back, the tension between a traditional form of professionalism and an approach measured in cost-effectiveness became visibly more stark. Professionals were forced to question their role and their status. In Panorama’s “Can We Afford the Doctor?” (July 4, 1988) a doctor holds the hand of a cancer patient. Viewers are warned that currently decisions on her long and costly treatment are made by medical practitioners but soon they will be made by health managers. And, in a service which was supposed to meet the needs of all, some appeared to be served at the expense of others. “Why are 1500 people suffering from kidney failure allowed to die each year without hope of dialysis or transplant when those who can afford £14,000 to have the operation done privately can be guaranteed a new kidney in four weeks?” asked TVEye’s “No Room for Sentiment” (October 11, 1984). BBC2 ran a series of five programs exploring such difficult decisions as government



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policy and financial limits were transmuted into ethical dilemmas (Doctors’ Dilemmas 1985). In TVEye’s “Consultants on the Make” (1985) monetary values had apparently won out. Researcher Dave Perrin uncovered ways in which certain consultants were making money, not only by taking private patients in National Health hospitals, which was legal, but by avoiding the fee that was due to the NHS. But these current affairs programs rarely accuse consultants of abusing their power (that was left to dramas like Channel 4’s The Nation’s Health). In these programs, the senior medical staff speak up for the patients, especially as facilities are cut and wards are closed. TVEye’s “The Closure of Ward 19” (April 10, 1986) was made at the pivot point of the decade. As the Griffiths report was implemented, the program was structured around a deep challenge to professionalism. “What price efficiency?” asks reporter Julian Manyon, as the dry language of business clashes with the humanitarian language of everyday care. Consultant surgeon Brian McEvedy of Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary has been on Ward 19 for 25 years, but, as he rushes between patients, he tells us he has been given no prior information about the proposed changes. Efficiency experts from Birmingham University are introduced. They use two key measurements: “turn-over interval” and length of stay. Dr McEvedy is scornful. “You can’t see how much puss and blood there is on a bit of paper. All you get is how many patients are being seen.” “Do these indicators . . . reflect the real values that the Health Service should be aspiring to?” asks Manyon. McEvedy replies, “They can’t. They can’t.” But the chair of the local health authority responds, “You can’t have clinical judgement dictating how much resource goes into the National Health Service.” And Tory MP Piers Merchant concludes, “The consultants and the surgeons have a duty to live in the real world . . . health is a business as is every other sphere of human activity that involves resources.” The exchange exemplifies in the starkest terms the critique of professionalism from a market perspective and the shifting power relations between experts and professionals. It strikingly documents the pressures on professionalism and on work itself, leading to what sociologist Richard Sennett has described as a “corrosion of character” (Sennett 1998). The program concludes as porters begin to clear the emptied ward. The hospital gets a rebate on the rates if the furniture is removed. The manager concludes that for him “It’s a question of efficiency . . . the quality of the output, the serving of the client.” The tragic image of the empty ward, cleared of furniture, had been prefigured in G. F. Newman’s drama




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The Nation’s Health (1983), in which the significantly named Nightingale Ward had been sold off and emptied.

By 1987/8 the shortfall in the budgets of hospitals and community facilities was serious, leading to even more severe cuts in services. Across the country nonurgent admissions were canceled, more wards were closed and staff vacancies were not filled (Ham 1992, p. 44). At the BBC, John Birt was appointed assistant director general with a brief to move the BBC toward an “internal market” and he initiated a policy of “producer choice” (O’Malley 1994, pp. 163–5). He reorganized the News and Current Affairs Directorate and argued that he was increasing its “professionalism” by bringing in specialists on topics such as economics and social affairs. Coming on the heels of a number of disputes between the BBC and the government, journalists were afraid that “a straightjacket was about to be imposed which would at best cramp and at worst stifle completely any innovation or creativity in BBC journalism—particularly journalism in awkward political areas” (Barnett and Curry 1994, p. 85; Lindley 2002, pp. 321–2). In a contrary move, in September 1986, This Week made a triumphant return, supported by Thames’s new managing director, Richard Dunn. “Nothing could do more to restore our status than to replace our current flagship with something more like a battleship or cruiser,” he wrote (Holland 2006, p. 190). Once more the series was prepared to irritate the establishment with a renewed period of tougher programming, including on issues concerned with health. When Kenneth Clarke became health secretary in 1988 and moved the NHS toward an “internal market,” the series responded with “Right Wing Medicine” (January 28, 1988), challenging the free-market philosophy and with “Private Health: Too High a Price?” (March 24, 1988), which took a close look at the small print in contracts with the private health industry. The clauses often came as a shock to patients brought up to expect the complete health service. That program included an interview with junior health minister, Edwina Currie, who had caused a scandal with her suggestion that people should give up second holidays to pay for private health care in order to reduce the burden on the NHS. When Edwina Currie visited St James’s Hospital, Leeds, she was filmed by a Yorkshire Television team for the twice-weekly docusoap, Jimmy’s. Nurses staged a vocal picket and viewers of the



The second half of the decade: This Week and Panorama 1986–90

docusoap saw the health minister scuttling away (Jimmy’s November 13, 1987; Gray 2010). A key date in the history of both the NHS and the public service broadcasting system was 1990. The Broadcasting Act and the National Health Service and Community Care Act would both have long-lasting consequences. Both were preceded by controversial white papers and considerable public debate and campaigning, with extensive discussion on all television channels. Both initiated radical changes which undermined the concept of “public service” as an obligation to “society” in general, preferring to address “people who look to themselves first.” The National Health Service and Community Care Act confirmed the “internal market” with self-managing trust hospitals (this was referred to as “opting-out”) and fund-holding GPs (Leathard, 2000, p. 53). (On ITV viewers saw the managers of Jimmy’s discuss the pros and cons of becoming an “opted out” trust (September 6, 1990).) The Broadcasting Act abolished the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which had guaranteed the public service commitment of the commercial television companies, and set up an Independent Television Commission (ITC) which would regulate with a “lighter touch.” Channel 4 was to undergo a radical change as the act ruled that it should cut its links with ITV and sell its own advertisements (Goodwin 1998, Chapter 3). Significantly, the act introduced competitive tendering for ITV franchises. Effectively, they would be sold by auction to the highest bidder. Although campaigning from organizations such as the Campaign for Quality Television succeeded in getting a clause inserted into the act requiring that “quality” should be taken into account in allocating the franchises, the pressures were toward maximizing the audience in a commercial competition (Davidson 1992). And among free-market campaigners there remained considerable scorn for noncommercial values: The “quality argument” is elitist, as a small group decide what the majority should see. High ratings ought to be accepted as the yardstick of what people want, and should not be regarded as an object of disdain. (Adam Smith Institute 1986) Throughout the 1980s the government had encouraged initiatives for broadcasting systems which would be outside the public service structure, including cable and satellite. In 1989 Sky Television was launched on the Astra satellite. Its controlling shareholder, Rupert Murdoch,





made his views on “public service” clear. “I do the public a service by giving them what they want,” he declared in an Edinburgh Television Festival speech (Murdoch 1989). His view was echoed by his son, James, now chairman of Murdoch’s News Corporation, in an anniversary speech 20 years later (Guardian August 29, 2009). As a consequence of these organizational changes, as well as increased commercial competition, it became more important for all channels to compete for audience numbers. Inevitably this led to a more populist approach which was condemned by many commentators as “dumbing down” (Holland 2001). Without the support from the regulator, current affairs series on ITV all but disappeared. This Week came to an end when Thames Television lost its license to broadcast in the first franchise round under the new “auction” system. Granada’s World in Action managed to continue until 1998 (Goddard et al. 2007; Fitzwalter 2008). The spaces within which television could, or was prepared to, mount a serious discussion of health policies were themselves shrinking. There was less and less space for programming given over to debate and analysis. Our examination of programs from the end of the decade will focus on our third group of participants, the patients.

The patients/customers: “The hardest thing is for people to be left in pain” The language of buyer and seller, producer and consumer does not belong in the public domain; nor do the relationships which this language implies. People are consumers only in the market domain. In the public domain they are citizens. Attempts to force these relationships into a market mould undermine the service ethic which is the true guarantor of quality in the public domain. In doing so, they impoverish the entire society. (Marquand 2004, p. 135) “Our big concern is the patients”; “They want us to treat our patients like a conveyor belt”; “The hardest thing is for people to be left in pain” was how the nursing staff voiced their opposition to the closure of Ward 19 (TVEye April 10, 1986). The figure of “the patient” is rhetorically evoked in all these programs which discuss the economics and the politics of the health service. The dilemmas faced by doctors, managers, nurses and others were, as we have seen, powerfully illustrated, but it was the patients, the ordinary people caught



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up in the system, who remained the central focus. Patients are a basic point of reference and the link between program and audience. It is as a “patient,” or potential patient, that viewers can most identify with the situations presented, and it is through the patients that the program makers seek to connect with their viewers. The experience of individuals in their contact with the health service was reported on, agonized over and used as a tool in an increasingly heated debate. “Consultants in the West Midlands say patients’ lives will be at risk if swingeing cuts to balance the books are implemented” (This Week “Whats up doc” March 29, 1990). “The shortage of nurses [is] so great that hospital staff say patients’ lives could now be at risk” (This Week “Nurses—Condition Critical” October 9, 1990). Whatever the main topic of a program, journalists, presenters and those putting all sides of an argument repeatedly returned to the effect on patients. Such warnings of helpless vulnerability recurred with increasing frequency—and usually in opposition to government moves. The dilemma, which intensified over the decade, became whether and how the needs of each individual patient could, or should, be met. The impression was not so much of an absence of society but a redefinition. Individual, named, patients tend to appear in these programs as case studies, to support or oppose economic and structural changes, or simply to illustrate the dilemmas. They may appear when the health service has failed them, or when their treatment poses a particular problem, especially as the cuts begin to bite and doctors and managers are increasingly faced with the problem of how to allocate expensive treatment. Panorama’s “NHS A Terminal Case” (February 1, 1988) begins with a doctor making phone calls to find a bed for an elderly patient, and we learn that the shortage is widespread throughout the system. Later in the program we meet young mothers satisfied with the personal attention they have received in the maternity unit of a small local hospital, but learn that the District Health Authority is planning to close it for financial reasons, despite protests from the community. Both Panorama’s “Can We Afford the Doctor?” (transmitted on the fortieth anniversary of NHS, July 4, 1988) and This Week’s “Right Wing Medicine” took up the tragic case of little Matthew Collier who died at the age of four and became, in Panorama’s words, “a symbol of the sickness afflicting the National Health Service.” In urgent need of openheart surgery, Matthew had his operation postponed three times due to a shortage of nurses. In Panorama the moving and shocking story is narrated by his parents who had gone to court to force the NHS to





fund the operation. The court had accepted the urgency of the situation, but had refused to intervene, implying that, in the NHS, there was no automatic right to treatment. This Week’s tone was rather different. It emphasized the political context of the dilemma by discussing the restricted funding of the NHS and examining the radical changes in provision being pushed by right-wing think tanks which had a powerful influence on Margaret Thatcher. It questioned whether the free-market philosophy could provide a fair and efficient health service. On Panorama, reporter Jane Corbin pointed out that the government’s policies would inevitably lead to a two-tier system, one public and one private for those who could afford it (see also Iliffe 1983, p. 243). Panorama goes on to illustrate the move to an internal market in which hospitals must “sell” their services to the local health authorities. Paul Matthews suffers from a serious kidney disease. Until a suitable kidney becomes available for transplant, he needs dialysis every few days. Under the old system his health authority did not pay for his treatment, but under the new scheme they will be charged. He travels to Guy’s in Central London, even though this involves a four-hour round trip. As Guy’s has a good reputation, it is confident that it will be able to attract “customers” even if, like Paul, this involves considerable inconvenience. The term “customers”—those who buy goods or services—is extensively used in Panorama to describe people previously labeled as “patients.” In March 1989, Panorama picked up on the title of the controversial white paper, Working For Patients, and asked, if we have “NHS PLC: What’s in it for the Patients?” (March 13, 1989). This program introduces Fred Timpson, a retired headmaster from Nottingham who does not have private insurance. He worries that budgetary constraints may mean that his GP may not be able to prescribe the most effective medication for his heart condition. And we meet a chronically ill patient who, prior to the age of 20, had suffered a heart attack and two strokes. As a result of cutbacks his asthma medication had been changed to a cheaper but less effective one. A GP sums up the logic of a commercial relationship: if you could manage 20 families on your list for the same cost as a single chronically ill patient, it would be difficult to accept that patient, as they would be a financial burden on the entire practice. In most of these narratives, patients/people are shown to be vulnerable and at risk. The idea that becoming a “customer” can give choice and empowerment seems far from their experience.



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To establish a wider context for these prestigious current affairs programs, it is worth looking briefly at what other factual programming was available for viewers who sought out health issues across the schedules in the 1980s. For example, the everyday experience of hospitals and health care, all too often used as a political argument in the major current affairs series, was sympathetically observed in other documentary formats. BBC2’s Just Another Day followed Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children (February 22, 1985) while Hospital Watch was a series of live reports on “everyday events in the lives of hospitals.” The fate of the patients in this series—here appearing for their own sake and not to illustrate a point—was updated several times (BBC1 February 17, 1986 and September 2, 1986, 1991, 1995). In November 1982 the arrival of Channel 4 had made a dramatic difference to the range of programming. Despite the derision with which the channel was first greeted by the press, all the other channels soon felt the need to respond to its radical new approach and unstuffy tone. In particular there was a greater involvement of “ordinary” people from a wider range of backgrounds. Channel 4 invited programs from small independent filmmakers and regionally based “workshops,” while the BBC’s Community Programme Unit facilitated access to the screens for local activists and campaigners (Dowmunt 2000, pp. 188–93). The schedules also included a number of educational and “social action” series, while studio debates such as The Time . . . the Place (Anglia 1987–98) and Kilroy (BBC1 1987–2004) made space for a wide range of participants to debate controversial topics (Livingstone and Lunt 1994). At the same time, regional current affairs series from the ITV companies, such as Thames’s The London Programme, Border Television’s 10.30 and Tyne Tees’s Northern Life, highlighted issues of health provision of local concern to their viewers. These low-key, educational and regional programs often tackled issues neglected by the high-powered peak-time series, with less concern to be punchy and dramatic and no need to attract a national audience. It was an outlet that, due to the pressures on broadcasting initiated in the 1980s, would, by the 2000s, have virtually disappeared (Holland 2003).

UK or USA?: Kentucky Fried Medicine The American system of privately funded medicine had long been admired by free-market theorists and was much discussed in these factual



Elsewhere in the schedules


programs of the 1980s. As we have seen, those members of the UK public who could afford it were increasingly encouraged to follow the American model and become “customers” purchasing their services from private providers. The theme of America and the American example, as something either to avoid or learn from, runs across the channels. A number of documentaries on Channel 4 looked at the American system and did not like what they saw. A recurring theme was the plight of those who could not afford health insurance. Kentucky Fried Medicine, four programs which included discussions and filmed sequences (May 23, 26, 30, 1988), featured a moving input from a doctor from a public hospital in Harlem, New York, which was desperately short of facilities and staff. The series, unusually for current affairs at this time, looked into the shortcomings of US companies already running private hospitals in the UK. Joan Shenton’s series Who Cares compared, unfavorably, the treatment of lung disease in the UK and New York (C4 May 7, 1985). In 1988 both Panorama and This Week (“Can We Afford the Doctor?” and “Right Wing Medicine”) went on to consider the American model. Both make it clear that, in the US, patients are becoming divided into two types—with and without insurance. Panorama visited a private hospital in North Carolina. A cheerful sequence shows a couple with their newborn child; the cost of delivery was paid by the mother’s insurance and subsidized by her employers. The parents chose the hospital for “its high tech appeal and the excellent reputation of the doctor.” By contrast, in the emergency room in one of America’s poorest inner-city areas, Newark Public Hospital, New Jersey, uninsured patients are treated without charge. But public funds are limited; the hospital suffers from shortages of beds and staff, and sometimes has to turn people away. Already in the UK life is very different for those with the money to pay for private insurance. In “Can We Afford the Doctor?” we see a patient about to have a kidney stone smashed in a revolutionary new machine installed at St Thomas’s Hospital, London. Although the hospital is NHS, the treatment is funded by the private insurance company BUPA. We are informed that the mixture of private and public funding means that the revolutionary treatment is available to both NHS and BUPA patients, and that the machine is used for NHS patients 75 percent of the time. “It is a collaborative scheme which works to the advantage of both,” says reporter Jane Corbin, hinting that private/ public collaborations may allow Britain to escape the two-tier system of the US. However, she points out that if this system were introduced in the UK, there would be a division in provision. The elderly and those



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Conclusion Despite contradictions, conflict and opposition, by the end of the decade the grounds of the debate had shifted. Against a background in which commercial values were underpinned by hedonism and the accumulation of wealth was valorised (caricatured on the small screen by Harry Enfield’s comic working-class lout waving his £50 notes and celebrating his “Loads o’ money” in Channel 4’s Friday Night Live 1988 (BFI Screenonline)), there was a sense that these shifts toward a more market-based system were inevitable. Broadcasting and the NHS were still considered to be “public services,” but the concept of the “public” had changed. The language of commerce had taken over the discourse; both viewers and patients could now be described as consumers in the private domain, rather than citizens in the public. The changes were reflected in the culture of television itself, as much as in the content of the programs. There was an expectation that the schedules would, above all, bring entertainment, as the drive toward lifestyle, shopping and a high-spending leisure culture took hold. Current affairs was in decline. Challenging or difficult programs were made less frequently. The era of multichannel television was on the horizon as the concept of public service came under attack. The 1980s had established a cultural change which would continue throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. “The business take-over of the airwaves has deep roots,” wrote media reporter Nick Mathiason, as he described the “how to get rich” reality shows of 2008: Margaret Thatcher and her share- and property-owning democratic drive suddenly turned the British public into market obsessives . . . The success of Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice and the Dragon’s Den confirm that Britain is a nation pretty much on the money. (Observer February 7, 2008) The moves toward the dominance of market values in every aspect of life were challenged and contested by campaigners, journalists, some politicians and much of the population. Many of those challenges were expressed on radio and television, across the genres and sometimes



with chronic illnesses in need of long-term care would be denied private coverage. Forced to rely on the NHS, they would be highly vulnerable to cutbacks. In “NHS PLC” Panorama’s Fred Emery also predicts an increase in inequality. A commercial relationship would “generate a culture of distrust” between doctor and patient.

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Notes 1. Our work is part of a research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through Bournemouth University (AHRC award No: AH/ E008682/1). Called “‘There’s no such thing as society?’ Broadcasting and the Public Services 1979–1992,” the research is studying the ways in which the changes made by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments were reflected in the broadcast media, both radio and television. Other contributors are Sherryl Wilson of the University of the West of England and Hugh Chignell of Bournemouth University. More information can be found at www.nosuch-research.co.uk.

Works cited Adam Smith Institute. (1986) Response to Peacock Report. London: Adam Smith Institute. Annan Committee. (1977) Report on the Future of Broadcasting. CM6753. London: HMSO. Barnett, S. and Curry, A. (1994) Battle for the BBC. London: Arum Press. Berridge, V. (2005) The Origin of the Black Report: A Conversation with Richard Wilkinson. http://www.sochealth.co.uk/history/blackorigin.htm, accessed September 24, 2009. BFI Screenonline. Saturday Live/Friday Night Live (1985–88). http://www.screenonline. org.uk/tv/id/500490/index.html, accessed September 24, 2009. Blanchard, S. and Morley, D. (1982) What’s This Channel Fo(u)r? An Alternative Report. London: Comedia. Brown, M. (2007) A Licence to be Different: The Story of Channel Four. London: BFI. Chignell, H. (2011) Public Issue Radio: Talks, News and Current Affairs in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chignell, H. (2004) BBC Radio 4’s Analysis, 1970–1983: A Selective History and Case Study of BBC Current Affairs Radio. PhD thesis. Bournemouth University. Committee on Financing the BBC (Peacock Committee). (1986) Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC. CM9824 London: HMSO. Darlow, M. (2004) The Independent’s Struggle: The Programme Makers who Took on the TV Establishment. London: Quartet. Davidson, A. (1992) Under the Hammer: Greed and Glory Inside the Television Business. London: Mandarin. Department for Health and Social Services (DHSS). (1980) Inequalities in Health: Report of a Working Group (Black Report). London: HMSO. Dowmunt, T. (2000) “Access: Television at the Margins” in P. Holland (ed.), The Television Handbook (2nd edn). London: Routledge.



in unexpected ways. But they remained at the margins of the shifting political consensus. Effectively, the statement that “there’s no such thing as society” would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as a commitment to public service gave way to a set of assumptions that prioritized the values of individualism, “efficiency” and profit.

Elliott, P. (1977) “Media Organisations and Occupations: An Overview” in J. Curran et al. (eds), Mass Communication and Society. London: Arnold/OU. Fitzwalter, R. (2008) The Dream that Died: The Rise and Fall of ITV. Leicester: Matador. Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG). (1976) Bad News. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Goddard, P., Corner, J. and Richardson, K. (2007) Public Issue Television: World in Action 1963–98. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goodwin, P. (1998) Television Under the Tories: Broadcasting Policy 1979–1997. London: BFI. Gray, N. (2010) “Jimmy’s: The Rise of the Docu-Soap and the Fall of YTV,” www. nosuch-research.co.uk. Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (1983) The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hallam, J. (2000) Nursing the Image: Media, Culture and Professional Identity. London: Routledge. Ham, C. (1992) Health Policy in Britain: The Politics and Organisation of the National Health Service. London: Macmillan. Holland, P. (2009) “Conflicting Pressures: Representing ‘the news’ in a Decade of Uncertainty” in J. Chapman and M. Kinsey (eds), Broadcast Journalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Holland, P. (2006) The Angry Buzz: “This Week” and Current Affairs Television. London: I. B. Tauris. Holland, P. (2003) “The Current Affairs Project on Terrestrial Television 1983–2002.” Bournemouth University: Unpublished research. http://eprints. bournemouth.ac.uk. Holland, P. (2001) “Authority and Authenticity: Redefining Television Current Affairs” in M. Bromley (ed.), No News is Bad News. London: Pearson Education. Hopkins, E. (1991) The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes 1918–1990. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. How TV Changed Britain (2008) London: Channel Four, 15 June. Iliffe, S. (1983) “Dismantling the Health Service” in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Iliffe, S. (1985) “The Politics of Health Care: The NHS Under Thatcher.” Critical Social Policy, 15(13): 57–72. Isaacs, J. (1989) Storm Over 4: A Personal Account. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Jacobs, J. (2003) Body Trauma TV: The New Hospital Dramas. London: BFI. Leathard, A. (2000) Health Care Provision: Past, Present and into 21st Century. London: Nelson Thornes. Levitas, R. (1986) The Ideology of the New Right. London: Polity. Leys, C. (2001) Market-Driven Politics: Neo-Liberal Democracy and the Public Interest. London: Verso. Lindley, R. (2002) Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride and Paranoia. London: Politicos. Livingstone, S. and Lunt, P. (1994) Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate. London: Routledge. Klein, R. (1996) “The NHS Reforms Revisited.” British Medical Journal, 313: 504–5. Marquand, D. (2004) Decline of the Public. Cambridge: Polity.





McQueen, D. (2010) “1970s Current Affairs—A Golden Age?” in L Forster and S. Harper (eds), Culture and Society in 1970s Britain: The Lost Decade. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Murdoch, R. (1989) “Freedom in Broadcasting: The MacTaggart Lecture,” presented at the Edinburgh International TV Festival. Edinburgh. August 25. Nunn, H. (2002) Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy. London: Lawrence and Wishart. O’Malley, T. (1994) Closedown? The BBC and Government Broadcasting Policy 1979–92. London: Pluto. O’Malley, T. and Jones, J. (2009) The Peacock Committee and UK Broadcasting Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, W. (1995) “The World of the News,” Television: The Journal of the Royal Television Society, 32(6) 24–5. Philo, G. and Henderson, L. (1999) “Why Go to Casualty? Health Fears and Fictional Television” in G. Philo (ed.), Message Received: Glasgow Media Group Research 1993–1998. Harlow: Pearson Education. Power, N. (2009) “The Books Interview: Judith Butler,” New Statesman 31 August. Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. (1991) A Social History of British Broadcasting Volume 1, 1922–1939. Oxford: Blackwell. Sendall, B. (1983) Independent Television in Britain Vol. 2 Expansion and Change 1958–68. London: Macmillan. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of the New Capitalism. New York: Norton. Thane, P. (1982) The Foundations of the Welfare State. Harlow: Longman. Thatcher, M. (1987) Interview for Woman’s Own. September 23. The Times, September 8, 1983. Williams, G. (2009) Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath. London: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. Wilson, S. (2011) “Dramatising Health Care in the Age of Thatcher,” Critical Studies in Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press.



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“New Times” Television? Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette Alex Beaumont

Channel 4, Thatcher and Post-Fordism The 1985 British film My Beautiful Laundrette marked the first collaboration between writer Hanif Kureishi and director Stephen Frears, two progressive voices that have become well known for their engagement with subject matter that does not always conform to prevailing political orthodoxies. It tells the story of an entrepreneurial second-generation Pakistani immigrant, Omar, who at the film’s outset shares a shabby flat with his father Papa, a self-pitying, alcoholic socialist. Papa finds Omar washing cars at his Thatcherite uncle Nasser’s garage, but Omar is not content with this menial work and, in an attempt to rise above the racism and poverty of south London, offers to take control of one of Nasser’s decrepit laundrette and turn it into a profitable business. He employs Johnny, a white former school friend who has since fallen in with a group of National Front thugs, to help him renovate and run the laundrette, and the two embark on a love affair that must be keep secret from their friends and family. Fractures appear in their relationship as the competing claims of their respective communities—whether middleclass Muslims or far-right lumpenproletariat—bear down upon them, but through their common endeavor they create in the laundrette a space that, while never utopian, can accommodate the full plurality of the film’s identities without establishing any one as hegemonic. The film identified Kureishi and Frears as astute commentators on the manifold tensions that existed in Britain at the time and became recognized as among the most original and incisive British films of the 1980s. There is some doubt, though, whether such challenging subject matter would have been seen by as wide and heterogeneous an audience as the film enjoyed without the financial patronage of Channel 4, then Britain’s 53



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“New Times” Television?

newest television network. This is because, in representing homosexual and interracial relationships, violence and drug use, the film ran completely contrary to the grain of conservative populism that characterized Thatcher’s Britain. Indeed, this was the principal reason why it was considered by many at the network to be a vindication of their goal of providing a new media space in which previously voiceless minorities might express themselves, and where the previously unsayable could be said. As Channel 4’s first chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, wrote in his memoir, My Beautiful Laundrette was “archetypal Film on Four”; when he saw it on air he “felt that, in a way, with this transmission Channel 4 itself had come of age” (1989, p. 160). However, it has been widely observed that the new network’s institutional framework reflected many aspects of Thatcherism’s neoliberal agenda—indeed, it was the Tories who ultimately arranged for its creation by pushing through the Broadcasting Act of 1980. This does not appear to have concerned Kureishi and Frears during the production of My Beautiful Laundrette. But by the time of their second collaboration— 1987’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid—Channel 4’s compromised position in relation to the Thatcher government had become a source of bitterness and anxiety. In his diary of the second film’s production, Kureishi records how midway through shooting Frears became miffed by the realization of how much Thatcher would approve of us: we’re a thrifty, enterprising, money-making small business. I say: But part of our purpose is to make popular films which are critical of British society. He says: Thatcher wouldn’t care about that, she’d just praise our initiative for doing something decent despite the odds; the real difficulty of making films in Britain today made more difficult by this government. (2002, p. 140) Now, perhaps Frears was right; perhaps he had been forced to throw in his lot with the enemy in order to get his oppositional films made. But if this is the case, his chagrin is a little difficult to understand as, for all their ostensible oppositionality, hadn’t he and Kureishi endorsed these very Thatcherite values in My Beautiful Laundrette? The successful laundrette can readily be appraised as a symbol for the virtue of hard work, and Kureishi himself attributes the film’s American triumph precisely to “its theme of success at any price” (2002, p. 152); hence it seems something of an overstatement to characterize it, as Susie Thomas does, as a scathing critique of “the ruthlessness of Thatcher’s enterprise



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culture” (2005, p. 33). Can it really be the case, as Asha Sen argues, that although “[o]n a superficial level, the laundrette appears to provide a pluralist space which accommodates all kinds of differences without conflict,” behind this “semblance of pluralism” resides a critique of “the territorializing power of capital[,] which is able to accommodate difference and thereby deprive it of its revolutionary power” (2000, pp. 69–70)? This characterization of the laundrette—as a pluralist space whose emancipatory potential is destroyed by its embeddedness in the political culture it seeks to critique—provokes a similar question about Channel 4’s origins, and cuts to the heart of Frears’s frustration. For how can the network—and the films it produces—be critical of Thatcherism when they appear to reflect some of the latter’s most cherished dicta, such as flexibility, financial savviness and enterprise? In order to answer these questions, this essay will reexamine the common critical assumption that Channel 4, in John Ellis’s words, was “inflected by Tory ideology but not born of it” (quoted in Giles 1993, p. 74). This perspective imagines the network as occupying a simultaneously privileged and compromised position “within” Thatcherism, and attributes its ability to curry favor with the Tory administrations of the 1980s to their disdain for existing arrangements at older terrestrial broadcasters like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Independent Television (ITV). As John Hill comments: [A]lthough it is often regarded as a paradox that the channel was able to support television programming which was so often at ideological odds with prevailing government attitudes, its ability to do so was partly reliant upon its role as a “Trojan horse” in the restructuring of the economic basis of British television towards a more “flexible”, “post-Fordist” mode of production that other television companies were then obliged to follow. (1999, p. 55) By “post-Fordist” Hill is referring to the upheaval in international capitalism that occurred during the 1970s, which witnessed a shift away from the mode of capital accumulation pioneered by Henry Ford and characterized by an emphasis on vertical integration, economies of scale and unionized labor, all of which entailed a great deal of inflexibility in production and consumption. Thatcher’s administrations were instrumental in recalibrating the British economy to a so-called postFordist mode of accumulation, which by contrast was and remains characterized by flexibility: specialization of production, economies of



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scope and nonunionized labor. Hill is quite right to note the relevance of post-Fordism to any discussion of Channel 4 and its relationship with Thatcherism, for it was the way in which Channel 4’s production arrangements reflected this economic shift—along with the hope that they could be exported to other broadcasting organizations—that vouchsafed the Tories’ support, despite the explicit and/or oppositional nature of some of the network’s programming. Moreover, his use of the Trojan horse metaphor is typical of how the network is imagined to have functioned in its early years, in implying that it operated principally by subterfuge, by subverting the economic logic of Thatcherism. However, as will become clear over the course of this chapter, such a conception of the network is quite inapt in that it fails to distinguish adequately between the new political, economic and cultural circumstances that arose in the West during the 1970s and the dominant political response to these changes—that is, Thatcherism. To some of Thatcher’s progressive antagonists, post-Fordism was rather more than merely a new mode of production: it heralded the evolution of an entirely new realm of social and political experience that demanded correspondingly new responses from Left and Right alike. They argued that neither end of the political spectrum was especially predisposed to this new experience; it was just that the Right had taken up the challenge with rather more gusto and radicality (albeit of a reactionary sort) than the Left had. One milieu that is particularly pertinent in this respect is the so-called New Times group, which for most of the 1980s found a home at Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain. This group—headed by the journal’s editor, Martin Jacques, and the former head of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall— argued that the dawning era of post-Fordism called for an entirely new leftist politics, no longer oriented around class, nor even necessarily around the confrontation between labor and capital. Hall, for instance, argued that the period evidenced “a shift towards a more flexible specialised and decentralised form of labour process and work organisation” involving “a contracting-out of functions and services hitherto provided ‘in house’ on a corporate basis” in order to facilitate “the ‘targeting’ of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by [. . .] social class” (Hall, 1989, p. 118). Plainly, this characterization of “New Times” appears also to describe quite precisely the economic predispositions both of Thatcherism and, as we shall soon see, of Channel 4. But while both the latter are manifestations of the epochal political, cultural and economic shift toward post-Fordism, this does not necessarily



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entail that the former “inflected” the latter. To assume as much is, I want to argue, retroactively to elevate Thatcherism to a hegemonic position it did not yet occupy when the network began broadcasting in 1982, and to obfuscate the true complexity of post-Fordism—both in the sense of the challenges it posed to the Left, and the new opportunities it provided. That both Thatcherism and Channel 4 were born into these same circumstances inevitably means that the two manifest certain common characteristics, but even a brief overview of the network’s history and institutional organization reveals significant points of divergence that have too often been overlooked in previous accounts. In the first half of this chapter I will highlight some of these points of divergence, which mark both Thatcherism and Channel 4 as discrete reactions to post-Fordism. The second half will comprise a new reading of My Beautiful Laundrette that I hope will go some way in explaining why critical material—and, most importantly, Frears himself—failed to recognize Channel 4’s true political promise.

Rereading the origins of Channel 4 Fundamental to Thatcher’s economic agenda was a shift from a protected national economy to a deregulated one exposed to the brutal caprices of internationalized markets. The cultural industries were anything but exempt from this agenda, and the latter’s implications for British cinema—historically among the most protected of these industries—are commonly perceived as disastrous. With some acerbity Hill writes: [A]s a number of commentators have observed of the government’s economic policies more generally, a reliance on the free play of market forces does not in itself reverse industrial decline but only reinforces existing market strengths and weaknesses. This was particularly so in the case of the film industry where state intervention was historically based upon a recognition that the British film industry did not, and could not, compete on equal terms within the international film market. By withdrawing its support, therefore, the government did not revive the industry, only enfeebled it further. (1999, p. 46) Previously, British cinema had benefited from a raft of financial protections that were steadily eroded over the course of the 1980s. The most egregious of the Tories’ attacks on the industry focused, according to Hill, on “the quota, the Eady levy, and the national Film Finance



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Corporation” (1999, p. 34). Exhibitors’ rosters had, since 1927, been obligated to comprise at a minimum 30 percent British films, but this quota was halved in 1982 and then abolished in 1983. Since 1957 the Eady levy had required a proportion of box office revenue to be invested back into the production of British films, but this was done away with in the Films Act of 1985. And the National Film Finance Corporation, which since its establishment in 1948 had issued loans to support the production and distribution of nearly 800 British features, was eventually replaced by the more commercially oriented British Screen Finance Consortium. Though the latter enjoyed auspicious beginnings with the private sponsorship of three investors, before long this number was reduced to just one. Hill concludes that by the end of the 1980s, “[f]ar from thriving, the traditional commercial sector of the industry had all but collapsed” (1999, p. 46). It was into these dismal circumstances that Channel 4 was finally born. However, the report of the Royal Commission on Broadcasting in 1977 is commonly identified as the moment when the new network took on much of its eventual form. Established by Harold Wilson’s Labour administration in 1974, and headed by author and academic Noel Annan, the commission—better known as the Annan Committee—worked to a wide brief that included formulating a proposal for the constitution of a possible fourth terrestrial television network, calls for which had grown increasingly vociferous since the early 1960s. It recommended that any fourth channel should be characterized by “diversity of services,” “flexibility of structure” and “editorial independence” (quoted in Harvey 1994, p. 111). It agreed with prior calls for a challenge to the existing duopoly in British broadcasting—terrestrial television prior to this point was limited to just three channels, two of which were operated by the BBC, one by ITV—and argued that there was a need for decentralization and increased representation of minority interests within the industry. This was partly in order to ameliorate community relations within Britain, and partly in order to provide a market for independent production companies operating outside the cosseted worlds of the established networks. It placed emphasis on the requirement for novelty and innovation and reflected an awareness of the new abundance of identities and lifestyles that existed within British society. The kind of majoritarian populism that had previously characterized the broadcasting industry was to be eschewed, it argued, because we do not want more of the same. There are enough programmes for the majority. [. . .] What is needed now is programmes for the



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different minorities which add up to make the majority. [. . .] We see the fourth channel not just as another outlet or even just as a means of giving a more varied service to the audience. It should be the test bed for experiment and symbolise all the vitality, the new initiatives, practices and liberties which could inspire broadcasters. (quoted in Harvey 1994, p. 113) It is important to underscore the report’s recognition of the growing pluralism of British society, for while its recommendations are often characterized as responding primarily to calls for institutional change from industry professionals, they are additionally—and perhaps more fundamentally—a response to the times themselves. Of course, to argue that these times were somehow politically “neutral” would be to dehistoricize them, but it is necessary to acknowledge that they were not “produced” by Thatcherism any more than, as Ellis contends, the latter “produced” the network. In this respect it is worth emphasizing that the Annan Committee operated under the aegis of a Labour government that identified strongly with the Left and that it delivered its report a full two years before Thatcher took office. This is important because it suggests that the report’s diction, with its emphasis on “diversity,” “flexibility,” “vitality” and “initiative,” was not connected to Thatcherite discourse until after Channel 4’s eventual form was conceived, and was used regularly in relation to the new network before Thatcherism became hegemonic. Indeed, when the Conservatives were elected to govern in 1979, many supporters of the fourth channel expected the new administration to impede its progress, as the previous Conservative government had not shown much interest in its cause.1 In the event, however, fears of Tory procrastination proved to be unfounded. One year after it took office Thatcher’s government pushed through the Broadcasting Act of 1980, which provided the legislative foundations on which Channel 4 could at last be built. Vitally, the function of the new network remained much as it had been envisioned by Annan’s report: it was to provide a flexible and pluralist media space in which previously voiceless minorities might have the opportunity to express themselves. But its organization and funding mechanism, which were not explored by the committee as fully as they might have been, had since evolved into something quite distinct from anything that had been previously imagined, and radically different from existing arrangements at the BBC and ITV. Despite paeans sung to its neutrality, the BBC had since 1946 depended on a mandate to levy funds from the general public—the television license fee—which could be sustained



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only with government support, and was closely related to the organization’s primary function of serving the public purpose. Hence, while it retained editorial independence, its remit and funding mechanism inevitably entailed a close and frequently tempestuous relationship with the government of the day. Given that the 1980s saw the rise of a highly socially conservative political agenda, it is hardly surprising that many cultural figures expressed bitterness at its circumspection during this period; as Kureishi wrote in 1986, “[i]f you want to show an arse on the BBC, they behave as if their entire license fee were at stake” (2002, p. 130). But then, as might be expected of a commercial broadcaster, ITV was hardly renowned for its risk-taking, either. Launched across Britain between 1955 and 1963, it was—theoretically—less of a monolith than the BBC in that, rather than being a single, highly centralized organization, it comprised a group of smaller companies that competed for franchises to provide television services across different parts of the country at different times of the week. In practice, however, ITV was not far removed from the BBC in its cumbersomeness, dominated as it was by a cartel comprising the four biggest companies that together divided and ruled the most lucrative parts of the network. Though it had a small public service remit, ITV was funded mostly through the regionalized, commercial sale of airtime for advertising; consequently it tended toward populism and shunned radicalism, whether formal or thematic. The most important point to note here, however, is that while their funding mechanisms were quite different, the production arrangements at the older networks were quite similar. Both used large-scale, in-house processes which had become increasingly expensive and inefficient, because—like many other British industries of the mid-twentieth century conforming to a Fordist production model—their workforces were large, rigidly organized and highly unionized,2 which entailed greater bureaucracy and higher production costs. Arrangements at Channel 4 were to be markedly different, and it is in this difference that the network’s embeddedness in Thatcherism is often deemed to be most visible. In November 1979, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) published a blueprint that imagined a system in which Channel 4 would be required to outsource all production to independent companies. This arrangement is often perceived as expressive of Thatcher’s fondness for deregulated, small-business economics and her opposition to the kind of intractable arrangements that persisted at the BBC and ITV. Moreover, the new channel proved itself from the outset to posses an immunity to many of the consequences of Fordist practices—such as debilitating labor disputes—that



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the Tories were so keen to dismantle, which only strengthens its perceived consonance with Thatcherism. Indeed, the scale of the existing networks’ relative inefficiency becomes clear when we consider that, at the beginning of his tenure as chief executive of Channel 4, Isaacs specified that the average program would have to be produced for £30,000 per hour, while just 11 months later the ITV companies indicated that they could not produce an hour of television for anything less than £100,000 per hour (Brown 2007, p. 43). As Maggie Brown notes, before long—and with a far smaller permanent staff than either of the older networks—Channel 4 was starting to sparkle as hundreds of small businesses [. . .] demonstrated that they could make public-service programming more cheaply than the BBC and ITV. Despite Mrs Thatcher’s dislike of the sexually frank material that often popped up on the channel, and her admiration for the clean-up-television campaigner Mary Whitehouse, she saw Channel 4 as a shining example of private enterprise in action. (2007, p. 119) By the end of the 1980s many of the older networks’ detractors— especially free market enthusiasts who disdained the BBC’s economic protectionism and the petite bourgeoisie that resented its cultural grandiloquence—were keen to draw attention to the fact that Channel 4 had proved wholly capable of fulfilling a demanding cultural remit with a far more efficient institutional organization at little cost to the taxpayer. So where its production arrangements are concerned, the case for the network’s embeddedness in Thatcherism appears strong. However, when we investigate its funding mechanism we discover a basic contradiction of Thatcherite economism. The origins of this mechanism lie in the IBA’s blueprint of 1979, which imagined that the ITV companies would collectively fund Channel 4 to the tune of between £60 million and £80 million per year, in return for which they would sell advertising between programs and pocket all profits generated. The justification for this arrangement was that it permitted ITV to maintain its monopoly on the sale of television advertising while ensuring that it exercised no editorial control over the new channel whatsoever. There would be a mood of cooperation rather than competition between the two, ensuring that Channel 4 did not have to tailor its output to maintain high advertising revenue and could concentrate on fulfilling



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its cultural remit of providing media space for the expression of minority interests. The most notable corollary of this arrangement was that while Channel 4 remained responsible for commissioning within its budgetary constraints, it was effectively exempt from the kind of rigid commercial economy that prevailed at ITV. And this is another point at which Channel 4’s purported Thatcherite inflection and the reality of its institutional organization diverge. For Channel 4’s funding arrangement contradicted Thatcherism’s laissez-faire agenda in two important ways: firstly, the overall sum the network received each year was, as far as could be anticipated, guaranteed irrespective of the vicissitudes of the market, and secondly, commercial risk ultimately resided elsewhere, at ITV. Of course, this was characteristic of the BBC too, but while Channel 4 remained accountable to the parliament, in the last analysis it was funded through a commercial mechanism and not a public levy, which rendered it popular with the Tory administration and hence somewhat less vulnerable to the kind of popular and political straightjacketing that affected the BBC. The point that Channel 4 was unusually sheltered from commercial accountability—even taking into account its public service remit—has sometimes been overlooked by reports seeking (often tendentiously) to confirm its embeddedness in Thatcherite discourse. Hence it is worth emphasizing again that, like the perceived need for diversity, flexibility and initiative in response to which it was created, there is little about the new channel that was essential to Thatcherism. In light of these points of divergence, the reason for Frears’s chagrined characterization of his and Kureishi’s endeavor as “a thrifty, enterprising, money-making small business” becomes yet more baffling. For while it might be the case that Channel 4’s flexible funding and production arrangements necessitated a degree of financial savviness on the part of the network and its contractors, can it really be said that this amounts to collusion with Thatcher’s ideological principle of economism? After all, Channel 4 appears to have paid little heed to the normalizing consumer logic that came to abound under neoliberalism: instead, it fostered and celebrated difference; its defining characteristic, alongside flexibility and enterprise, was pluralism. In fact, while we can easily agree with Ellis that Channel 4 was not born of Thatcherism—it was born of historical circumstances that also bore the latter—I think we can go farther than this: I think we can question his suggestion that Tory ideology even “inflected” the network. If it bore characteristics in common with Thatcherism, this is because both were responses to the same post-Fordist circumstances into which they were born, not because one, by dint of its dominant position in a putative hierarchy, inflected the



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other. In arguing this I do not mean to insinuate that there was no point of connection between the two whatsoever, but instead to attempt to correct a totalizing and dehistoricized understanding of Thatcherism that seems implicitly to assume the latter’s ineluctability, to deny the existence of any other historical agency, to admit of no point in the late twentieth century when Thatcherite hegemony was not either present or emerging. This perception has its origins in the deep malaise the Left experienced throughout the 1980s, and attests to the kind of bewilderment with which Thatcherism was received by many progressive leftists, who, in the face of a more radical politics than their own, came to lose sight of some of their most valuable and erstwhile historicist and materialist strategies. The effects of this bewilderment are far-reaching: they certainly register in Frears’s chagrin, and I think they have also served to cloud many accounts of Channel 4. I want now to investigate how this mindset emerged with specific reference to My Beautiful Laundrette, because here is a film that, firstly, features as its heart a pluralist space—the laundrette—that reflects many of the possibilities and problematics of the new media space at Channel 4, and, secondly, appears to endorse many aspects of Thatcherism that were subject to left-wing opprobrium. But I want to suggest that in its response to the political challenges of post-Fordism, as well as its treatment of concepts such as flexibility and enterprise frequently characterized as inimical to leftist praxis, the film imagines a potentially fruitful direction for the Left that ultimately owed very little to Thatcherism.

My Beautiful Laundrette and the failure of the Left The advent of embeddedness as a political preoccupation (or even obsession) owes a great deal to the work of Michel Foucault, whose arguments regarding totalized power relations and fragmentary subjectformation combined in the 1980s to challenge many formerly comfortable assumptions of the progressive Left, such as the grounding of social movements upon a single axis of difference (class, gender, race), the ability of progressives to effect meaningful social change, and so on. By this point in the twentieth century there existed a widespread attitude in academic discourse that the Right had won most of the ideological battles of the day. But its apparent victory owed less to the successful shift of emphasis away from democratic egalitarianism, welfarism and full employment toward private capital, individualism and liberty, on the epistemological rectitude of its position and the formidableness of its rhetoric, than to the Left’s (mis)perception that its own agency



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had been steadily, massively diminished. The various historicisms of the 1980s, for instance, repeatedly insisted that resistance to any hegemony (implicitly, to Thatcherism) must inevitably entail a degree of reinscription; they assumed, in other words, that all political activity is inextricably embedded in a dominant discourse. And this led to a situation in which, as Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques point out, the Left struggled to differentiate between “Thatcherism and the world which Thatcherism claimed to represent and aspired to lead. [. . .] That new world and Thatcherism were seen as one and the same thing. The latter, as a consequence, looked omnipotent, as if it was in command of history” (1989, p. 15). There is, I think, a connection between the crisis of confidence on the Left and the attitude toward Channel 4 demonstrated by Frears and reflected in much critical material dealing with the network. Whether baldly or implicitly, Frears and many of the network’s appraisers assume that Channel 4 exists “inside” Thatcherism, a situation that inevitably compromises its progressive political promise. And, as was the case with the academic Left of the 1980s, this embeddedness is perceived to limit its agency—its ability to oppose the hegemony inside which it is presumed to operate. Now, I do not want to suggest that the kind of malaise described above is exactly what Frears was experiencing when he complained of his and Kureishi’s embeddedness in Thatcherism, and I am certainly not arguing that, because it reflects this perception of embeddedness, criticism of the network possesses a left-wing sensibility. I am not seeking to conflate intellectual leftism, cultural activity and academic discourse, and “apply” their common anxieties straightforwardly in reading a media space. But in subscribing to the dehistoricised account of Thatcherism discussed earlier, both Frears and much existing Channel 4 criticism fail to imagine the latter’s various oppositional voices in anything other than intractably compromised terms, and it is here that the connection to the Left is instructive. For the attitude toward the network demonstrated by Frears and the critical material might be read as emblematic of a more profound consternation, reflecting what Wendy Brown identifies as the melancholy aspect of left-wing discourse at the end of the twentieth century. The concept of melancholia Brown constructs derives from Walter Benjamin and refers to the peculiar dogmatism the Left demonstrated when it was faced with a more radical ideology than its own around the time of the 1980s: We [have] come to love our Left passions and reasons, our Left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world



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that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholia, in short, is [. . .] a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. (Brown 2003, p. 460) In the context of the factional and recriminatory academic Left of the 1980s the consequences of this conservatism are dire, because, beyond the acrimony, true political promise is not being recognized and acted upon, and existing sound strategies are slowly atrophying.3 I want to suggest that this sentiment of “Left melancholia” is indicative of what Frears experiences in relation to Channel 4, and hints at the consequent failure to determine the latter’s true political potential. Frears fails to recognize both the network and Thatcherism as discrete responses to novel political, economic and cultural circumstances; instead, he reduces and totalizes Thatcherism to the ideological principle of economism, and becomes so preoccupied with his (supposed) conformity to this principle that the only oppositional practice he can conceive of is a willful refusal to balance the books. There is no point in taking aim at the deeply conservative system of normativity that undergirds Thatcherism, no use in critiquing its nationalism, heterosexism and so on. Rather than exposing its historical constructedness, the fault line that lies between its social conservatism and economic liberalism is simply accepted as another part of its entirely dehistoricized hegemony. Emphasizing the historical specificity of Thatcherism no longer serves a purpose: it is here now, and was hitherto forever in the process of coming. And so Frears embraces a presumed (and entirely spurious) “orthodoxy” of left-wing antieconomism and abandons the historicizing impetus traditionally valorized on the Left, whose ultimate purpose is social change. There are two reasons why this attitude is frustrating. Firstly, we can allege that Frears goes a great deal farther than Channel 4 ever did in embedding himself in Thatcherite discourse by affirming a perception of the Left as fiscally reckless. But most bewilderingly of all, he fails to realize that the answer to his chagrin lies in the eponymous space of a film that he himself is responsible for making. And it is this film that I want to discuss now, as I think that in it we can perceive the true potential of Channel 4 and what was lost by a Left that failed to recognize this potential. This reading of My Beautiful Laundrette will suggest two things: firstly, that the film appropriates two terms for progressive use—flexibility



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and enterprise—that are too often seen as irretrievably bound up with Thatcherism, and secondly, that its perception of the laundrette’s political promise reveals a similar political promise in Channel 4, something that Frears himself seems to overlook. It is important in this last respect to point out that, except in its superlative success, the film was a typical product of Channel 4’s commissioning process, which funded other films such as The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) in a similar way. In 1984, Kureishi’s screenplay was green-lit by David Rose, head of fiction at the network, who agreed to provide all of its £600,000 budget (Pym, 1992, p. 118) before contracting out production to Working Title, an independent company. There was no expectation that the resulting picture would receive a cinematic release; instead, it would show at the Edinburgh Film Festival before being broadcast to a modest audience of two million, possibly three. It was shot over six weeks on 16mm tape and prepared for presentation in the Scottish capital. Only after the film’s rapturous reception there was a theatrical release organized, and when it finally aired on February 19, 1987, 4.3 million viewers tuned in to watch (Pym 1992, p. 64). Leonard Quart has argued rightly that the production process at Channel 4, of which My Beautiful Laundrette was a fairly typical example, expressed “a general mood that encouraged economic risk-taking and experimentation with new and more innovative business practices” (1992, pp. 24–5). I would be less coy in my characterisation of this process, and suggest that it arose not merely out of a “general mood” of risk-taking but rather out of a recognizable culture of enterprise. What is more, I would also suggest that this culture of enterprise not only helped the network to flourish in the climate of the 1980s, but was crucial to the viability of its progressive aspirations. My Beautiful Laundrette, I want to argue, represents this scenario in microcosm. It is certainly right to read the film as a response to the growing currency of enterprise as a political and economic concept at the time it was made; however, rather than providing a critique of this concept, as much existing criticism would have it, I think that the film perceives in enterprise a progressive potential that has often been overlooked in accounts of Channel 4 that cannot countenance what they perceive to be the network’s concessions to Thatcherism. And I think this is because many critics of film, like those of the network, are also reluctant to recognize the distinction between Thatcherism and post-Fordism. In this respect the film and the network that broadcast it seem to have suffered the common affliction of appraisals that do not fully appreciate the circumstances into which they were born, and the political promise they contain.



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That said, it would be wrong to claim that this pessimistic perspective is characteristic of all critical responses. When it was released, the film was greeted by Stuart Hall as exactly the kind of radical response that the “New Times” demanded of the Left. Indeed, it was to My Beautiful Laundrette that Hall turned when he required an exemplar of his theory of “New Times” identities, and what interested him in particular was Kureishi’s refusal to present his audience with easy, sympathetic characterizations of themselves. As might have been expected, conservative critics were not overly enthusiastic about the film’s frank appraisal of contemporary Britain. Writing in the Sunday Times in 1988—shortly after he was appointed Thatcher’s European policy advisor – the Oxford academic Norman Stone lamented the film’s “vision of England” and argued that it “has nothing to offer an overwhelming majority of the potential audience” (quoted in Thomas 2005, p. 35). Of course, this was manifestly not the case: that the film was deemed to warrant a rejoinder in Britain’s newspaper of record indicates that it had, at the very least, touched a nerve. But more interesting to Hall was that the ire it provoked was not restricted to one particular group, or one particular constituency—that, in fact, My Beautiful Laundrette seemed to challenge the very idea of a writer’s “constituency,” whether that term is defined culturally or politically. Many south-Asian viewers—including members of Kureishi’s own family—were disturbed by his representation of one of “their” young men as homosexual, and of “their” culture as sometimes backward and superstitious: in one self-consciously ridiculous episode, for example, Nasser’s wife learns of his affair with a white woman, Rachel, and prepares a potion concocted out of cuttings from the back garden mixed with mouse droppings, with which to curse her. But at the same time, feminist critics objected to Kureishi’s representation of Nasser’s daughter Tania, whose second-wave politics seem engineered to come across as simplistic and outdated: in a tense exchange with Rachel, she spits that for a woman to live off a man is “a pretty disgusting, parasitical thing,” but Rachel responds with ease, “And who do you live off?” The implication is that we all inescapably “live off” one another, and that in speaking from any political position we must first take account of the immense complexity that characterizes contemporary social experience. For Hall, this has everything to do with the consonance that exists between the flexibility of the “New Times,” the process of subject-formation within these times and the highly mutable identities that emerge from this process. Referring to the broad range of objections that greeted the film, he writes, “[t]his is a text that nobody likes. Everybody hates it. You go into it looking for what are called



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‘positive images’ and there are none. There aren’t any positive images like that with whom one can, in a simple way, identify. Because [. . .] it has a politics which is grounded on the complexity of identifications which are at work” (Hall 1991, p. 60, emphasis added). Here he gestures at an argument that is present in much of his work of the 1980s and implies that such a conception of identity has profound implications for the Left. This is because in the “New Times,” class in the orthodox Marxist sense is no longer the overarching political determinant it once was: “there are certain other things it simply will not, or cannot decipher or explain.” If progressive voices are to remain relevant at the end of the twentieth century they need to be ready to challenge orthodoxies that may have served them well in the past but are becoming irrelevant in a world characterized by “increasing social diversity and plurality” (Hall 1991, pp. 46–7). Through the figure of Omar’s alcoholic, socialist father, Kureishi—like Hall—seems keen to distance himself from a Marxist orthodoxy that can only conceive of political identity in inflexible terms. Papa is sagacious and sometimes kindly, but also stubborn and self-destructive, and so driven toward a kind of sterile nostalgia—a form of Left melancholy, we might say. Though still capable of incisive critique, he lacks a vocabulary that is sufficiently sensitive to the complexity of the political circumstances in which he finds himself. He is clearly correct when he argues that we must “have knowledge [. . .] in order to see what’s being done and to whom in this country,” but we are troubled that these words are articulated by a socialist who sneers at his son’s menial work and opines condescendingly that “the working class are such a great disappointment.” Because, Kureishi implies, what use is such an unwieldy term as “working class” in the Britain of the 1980s, a place and a time of massively increased social diversity? How can such diversity be reduced to a single confrontation between the working class and the bourgeoisie—or, for that matter, the feminist and the patriarchal, the queer and the heteronormative, the subaltern and the eurocentric? In the film, none of these simplistic binaries is distinct from the others; rather, they are all engaged in a fractious but mutually constitutive dialogue. It is notable in this respect that nearly every character bears a trait that is potentially empowering and another that is disenfranchizing. While Johnny embodies the traditionally hegemonic character traits of whiteness and masculinity, these are offset by his homosexuality and the fact that when we meet him he is part of an unemployed, homeless underclass. And while Tania belongs to a wealthy family and possesses all the confidence and contrariness her mother lacks, her status



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as a woman and as an ethnic south-Asian continue to disempower her. As David Robinson argues, My Beautiful Laundrette “proposes no readymade villains or victims, unless (fulfilling both functions) it is the hopeless little knot of National Front punks” (quoted in Thomas 2005, p. 28)—who, white, male and nationalistic as they are, hardly represent the paradigm of Thatcher’s upwardly mobile Britain. In short, the film adopts a self-consciously pluralist and flexible attitude toward political identity that cuts across many axes of difference, and carefully establishes the nonconformity of all its principal characters, in that none embodies precisely the celebrated white, male, heterosexual and petite bourgeois norm of Thatcher’s brand of conservatism. But where My Beautiful Laundrette’s progressive promise is greatest—and where it is most suggestive of Channel 4 writ large—is in the laundrette itself. This is a fractious space defined by its ability to accommodate the full plurality of the film’s identities, all of which are in contention with themselves and one another. It is able to do this because Kureishi refuses to impose upon it the kind of rigid spatial logic that was characteristic of Fordism—typified, for example, by the importance attached to zoning in late modernist town planning, which was cast aside by postmodern and “Thatcherite” urbanisms—and chooses instead to embrace a much more flexible representation of space. The most relevant scene in this sense is also the film’s most famous. Just before the laundrette’s opening, Johnny and Omar go into an office behind a one-way window that allows them to look onto the floor of the laundrette while obscuring them behind a mirror. As they make love, Nasser and Rachel arrive for the opening party and, finding nothing to greet them except romantic music piped out of the laundrette’s sound system, begin to dance. In this way we are provided with the film’s most celebrated and complex image: while an interracial homosexual couple makes love in the foreground, an interracial heterosexual couple dances in the background, on the other side of the one-way window. Radhika Mohanram has argued that this scene creates “a hierarchy of desires” (1995, p. 126), and it is easy to see how this might be the case. But this perspective overlooks an important element of the laundrette’s spatial logic: for critiques emphasizing hierarchies of space very often rely on a vocabulary of rigidly private and public spaces, often with a direct proportionality between subversion and privacy (that is, the more subversive an identity, the more private must be the space in which it operates). However, it is important to emphasize that the laundrette’s spaces—and the boundaries that determine them—are portrayed as porous and transient, and blur the distinction between public and private



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by playing host to domestic desires and activities in a commercial setting. The mirror is a staple image for representing the porosity of boundaries (whether social, psychological or political), and just as the patrons enter from the street, Nasser enters the back room even before Omar and Johnny are finished making love, and so one of the National Front thugs throws a dustbin through the window of the laundrette at the film’s conclusion. In fact, we could readily read the scene as an attempt to expose the liberal conception of freedom (which imagines one is untouchable in the “private,” depoliticized realm of individual activity) as a fallacy, and ironically to emphasize the laundrette’s flexible spatial logic. In this way the laundrette is not distinct from Thatcherism simply by dint of its ability to accommodate a plurality of variously subaltern identities; its flexibility also challenges one of the foundational myths of neoliberalism—negative liberty—and, as such, militates against both Thatcherism’s conservatism and its liberalism. Hence we can see how Kureishi’s and Frears’s imagination of the laundrette appropriates some of those terms that I identified earlier in this chapter as having been “naturalised” to Thatcherism, such as “diversity” and “flexibility.” But we need not stop here, for there is another, more contentious term that the film rehabilitates for progressive use: enterprise. This is a term that not even the “New Times” group seemed prepared to recognize as having emancipatory potential, and it occupies a vexed and often explicitly negative position in many critiques of My Beautiful Laundrette. However, I want to suggest that it cannot be the case that the film is, as Thomas labels it, a critique of “the ruthlessness of Thatcher’s enterprise culture,” as in it enterprise is plainly endorsed as enabling. Nearly twothirds of the film is devoted to demonstrating the amount of effort Omar and Johnny put into creating the laundrette, first in finding the overheads, then in renovating it and finally in its operation. It is—tellingly—enterprise which enables Omar to escape the impotent, self-destructive socialism of his father, but, more fundamentally, it also enables him to create the very space that will accommodate his triply liminalized poor, black, gay identity, along with Johnny’s and many others’: and all under a political regime in which heteronormativity receives legislative protection and the concept of “Britishness” receives governmental endorsement to an extent unprecedented in postwar history. Here again the failure to recognize the distinction between Thatcherism and post-Fordism makes itself apparent, and here again we see a remarkable similarity between the laundrette and Channel 4: for both can be read as positive examples of enterprise in action, a term that, like “flexibility,” never “belonged” to Thatcherism in the way some commentators appear to believe.



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This presents us with a controversial but highly pertinent question: why, when figures connected to the “New Times” group—like Hall—were so keen to claim flexibility for the Left, wasn’t enterprise rehabilitated too? In the light of the present discussion, it hardly takes a monumental leap of political imagination to appreciate how the concept might have been deemed worthy of assimilation. It could, for example, have been appraised as a new form of flexible labor process, with a similar potential as its more rigid Fordist predecessor to become a basic component of left-wing praxis going into the twenty-first century. Why, then, was it so conspicuously avoided? The answer to this question, I think, lies in the fact that the “New Times” group was the principal agency behind the “cultural turn” in Left criticism in the 1980s. More than any other intellectual collective, they suffered the scorn of rearguard Marxists in their abandonment of economic determinism in favor of cultural politics. This iconoclastic dimension positioned them all the better to recognize the specificity of Thatcherism’s response to post-Fordism—a response that Hall characterizes as principally cultural—and thereby to historicize it. Paul Gilroy was among the most prominent Left culturalists, and his There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987) is seminal in its exploration of how racism had come to be expressed primarily in the cultural realm. However, as brilliant as the culturalist strategy was in exposing this form of racism, it has been criticized for abandoning traditional materialist critique (something this chapter attempts, in a small way, to address) and eschewing the realm of labor as a site of political emancipation in favor of play and pleasure. The latter complaint in particular forms the basis of Laura Chrisman’s critique of Gilroy’s second book, The Black Atlantic (1993). Chrisman questions Gilroy’s “equation of ‘wage labour’ with ‘labour’, so that the critique of capitalist wagelabour structures [. . .] becomes a rejection of productive labour itself, or self-realisation through labour” (Chrisman 2003, pp. 75–6). Seeking to reclaim labor’s political promise through an analysis of black American ghetto speech, she argues that in the latter, the word “work” can denote, equally, “labour”, “dancing”, and “sexual activity” suggest[ing] that, far from an opposition, there is a strong affinity among all the activities. What needs conceptualization is how and why such a fluid linguistic interchangeability between the spheres can occur. And that requires a methodology that can allow for dialectical and dialogical relationships rather than static oppositions. (Chrisman 2003, p. 76)



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Chrisman is not interested in precluding pleasure as a site of political possibility for the Left; she merely seeks to counter an “exclusively negative characterisation of labour” (2003, p. 82) that she perceives to be both epistemologically unsound and strategically deleterious. And I think that we might locate exactly the kind of “dialectical and dialogical” relationship between work and recreation that she calls for in My Beautiful Laundrette, a film in which “self-realization through labour” constitutes its principal narrative arc. Indeed, the lovemaking scene exemplifies neatly how labor, dancing and sexual activity can exist contiguously, for it combines these elements in a moment that is simultaneously transgressive and affirmative of all three. While Nasser and Rachel dance between the washing machines, Omar and Johnny make love in the back room, both couples exploiting the flexible space which the latter two characters—through their common endeavor, labor, enterprise—have turned into a commercial success. So Frears seems to demonstrate in My Beautiful Laundrette an awareness of some progressive promise that exceeds the film’s epochal circumstances and secures some critical leverage against Thatcherism by offering an alternative way of living, working and playing in a time characterized by pluralism and flexibility. And yet the new media space that brought it into being—whose problematics and possibilities the film foregrounds in the eponymous space—provokes in him a kind of political paralysis not unlike Papa’s. While My Beautiful Laundrette’s fruitful combination of new and old leftist preoccupations (space and identity, but also history and labor) represents a promising response to the political challenges of post-Fordism, any promise seems entirely lost when it comes to imagining how to formulate a kind of progressive praxis—even though, in the new, pluralistic media space at Channel 4, this praxis had in some small way already begun to be formulated. Frears fails to recognize that the politics of Thatcherism and the political, economic and cultural character of post-Fordism are pronouncedly different, something which may have aided him (as well as many of Channel 4’s appraisers) in understanding the network’s institutional arrangement as inflected not by Thatcherite ideology but by circumstances which far exceeded the purview of Thatcherism, and which were ripe for exploitation by social progressives. And yet the “New Times” group itself also appears to have failed to apprehend the true political promise of Channel 4: for though it embraces pluralism and flexibility, it was perhaps reluctant to engage with other opportunities that post-Fordism presented and assimilate them with the Left’s political arsenal.



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And so, finally, we perceive the truly traumatic effect of Thatcherism upon the Left’s consciousness, which imagined itself as embedded within a hegemony to such a complete extent that there was very little in its own politics that continued to possess political promise. In his rejection of left-wing politics in favor of an anachronistic and unsustainable antieconomism, Frears evidences a traumatized political mindset not unlike Wendy Brown’s melancholia. And Frears’s attitude toward Channel 4 is emblematic of the terrible impact of Thatcherism upon the Left, precipitating a complete failure to recognize the true extent of its own agency. Whether or not this trauma continues to haunt it is a significant question, and one that could not be answered with the necessary trenchancy here. But it seems clear that there is an urgent imperative for leftists to resist a tendency, firstly, to be overly pessimistic as to what has and can be achieved, and, secondly, to overlook the opportunities of the present, however apparently minor. Because while the story of Channel 4 might be a small one when contextualized within the desuetude of consensus politics in Britain, it is, nonetheless, immensely indicative. The New Right never achieved a popular vote of such enormity that it could legitimately claim to represent the spirit of the body politic and never managed to deliver quite as much as Thatcher’s frightening parliamentary majorities threatened. How, then, did it prove to be so insuperable? Because the story of the 1980s—indeed, the story of Thatcherism—is not really the story of the success of the New Right. It is the story of the Left’s failure to respond to the times.

Notes I would like to thank Jane Elliott for her invaluable guidance throughout the composition of this chapter. 1. Annan had, in fact, first been invited to form the committee on British broadcasting in May 1970 by the Labour Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, John Stonehouse, but he was informed his services were no longer required shortly after Edward Heath became prime minister in June of the same year. 2. A sign of how little the two older organizations interacted is the fact that their employees belonged to different unions: those at the BBC to the Association of Broadcasting Staff and those at ITV to the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians. 3. Indeed, we should note that in emphasizing the temporal specificity of Thatcherism, Hall and Jacques urge us not to abandon one of the fundaments of Marxist analysis: historical materialism.



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Brown, M. (2007) A License to be Different: The Story of Channel 4. London: British Film Institute. Brown, W. (2003) “Resisting Left Melancholia” in D. L. Eng and D. Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chrisman, L. (2003) Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism. Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press. Giles, P. (1993) “History with Holes: Channel Four Television Films of the 1980s” in L. Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started. London: University of Central London Press. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. London: Verso. Gilroy, P. (1992) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Routledge. Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (1989) New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (1991) “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” in A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, S. (1989) “The Meaning of New Times” in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds.), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harvey, S. (1994) “Channel Four Television: From Annan to Grade” in S. Hood (ed.), Behind the Screens: The Structure of the British Television in the Nineties. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hill, J. (1999) British Cinema in the 1980s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Isaacs, J. (1989) Storm Over Four: A Personal Account. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson. Kureishi, H. (2002) Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics. London: Faber and Faber. Letter to Brezhnev (1985) [Film] Directed by C. Bernard, UK, Yeardream. Mohanram, R. (1995) “Postcolonial Spaces and Deterritorialized (Homo)Sexuality: The Films of Hanif Kureishi” in G. Rajan and R. Mahanram (eds), Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism. London: Greenwood Press. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) [Film] Directed by S. Frears, UK, Working title. Pym, J. (1992) Film on Four 1982/1991: A Survey. London: British Film Institute. Quart, L. (1993) “The Religion of the Market: Thatcherite Politics and the British Film of the 1980s” in L. Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started. London: University of Central London Press. Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) [Film] Directed by A. Clark, UK, Umbrella Entertainment. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) [Film] Directed by S. Frears, UK, Working title. Sen, A. (2000) “Re-Writing History: Hanif Kureishi and the Politics of Black Britain.” Passages: Journal of Transnational and Transcultural Studies, 2(1): pp. 61–80. The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983) [Film] Directed by Richard Eyre, UK, Greencrest/ Goldcrest/Michael White. Thomas, S. (2005) Hanif Kureishi. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



Works cited

The Gospel of Gandhi: Whiteness and State Narcissism in Thatcherite England Jason Mezey

In his account of making Gandhi (1982), Richard Attenborough includes a photograph from the film set depicting Ben Kingsley in full costume with dhoti and shawl walking alongside two camera operators on a dolly. They are framed on the right by a line of khadi-clad Indian extras and on the left by the mike operator next to Attenborough, who is looking at his extras with his hands joined palm-to-palm and his fingertips raised to eye level. The caption reads, “I demonstrate a respectful pranam for villagers to emulate as Ben Kingsley strides past during the filming of the Salt March” (1982, p. 113). It is an image I find intriguing. I do not doubt Attenborough’s fondness for the pranam greeting—he describes it as “that most courteous of Hindu gestures” (ibid, p. 9)—nor would I question a filmmaker’s prerogative to direct his cast as he sees fit. However, for me this photograph captures the mix of sincerity and racial privilege that undergirds the making of Gandhi; we see a white man teaching a row of brown men how to show proper respect—using a specifically Indian gesture—to another brown man, half-English and half-Indian, born and raised in Britain, who is sufficiently light-skinned to require makeup to resemble the Mahatma (Great Soul) he impersonates. Attenborough’s sincerity for his project stands out from the spate of films and books from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s that revisited colonial India and has been frequently condemned for its exploitative cynicism. Salman Rushdie’s eloquent critique of this “Raj Revival” links it directly to the politics of Thatcherite England: And there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes 75



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nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitching of an amputated limb. Britain is in danger of entering a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and to posture like a great power while, in fact, its power diminishes every year. (1991, p. 92) Although Rushdie’s criticism of Raj Revival politics and Attenborough’s film remains influential, Gandhi demonstrates a much more complex dynamic between the British filmmaker and his Indian subject matter than Rushdie acknowledges. I will stipulate Rushdie’s claims that Attenborough evokes Indian exoticism and spirituality in the person of Gandhi, that Gandhi as a complex historical figure becomes flattened and Christianized by Attenborough’s depiction, and that Attenborough furthers a politically troubling notion of decolonization as a drama of “submission, and self-sacrifice, and non-violence alone” (1982, p. 102). However, the cultural psychosis diagnosed by Rushdie is only part of the story; Gandhi represents a much more specific affliction, namely a sense of narcissism shared not only by the viewers of the film but by the state itself. Symptomatic of a larger state narcissism, Gandhi fits into the Raj Revival by articulating a sympathetic British subject position in light of its colonial past: not directly pro-imperial per se, but still devoted to preserving an ethical center to white Britishness even while highlighting moments when the Raj was crumbling into a morass of political and moral failure. Depicting the eroding of the Raj and released at a time when England was celebrating its victory in the Falklands War, Gandhi carries particular weight in the story it tells not just about the colonial past but about the present nation-state under Thatcher. England in the early 1980s answered a number of political challenges at home and abroad by instituting interrelated reforms on immigration, the military, and labor, to name a few, that many saw as strengthening and consolidating state power at the expense of civil rights. As I argue below, the rhetoric of state narcissism naturalizes this centrality of the state—its exertion of control as the unified, sovereign, political voice of the nation—and extends beyond the specific sphere of the government’s institutional power into the cultural realm. The Raj Revival represented a particular iteration of state narcissism that directly confronted and exploited Britain’s imperial past. For Gandhi specifically, the goal was neither to glorify nor glamorize the Empire. Rather, the film seeks to achieve a sense of exculpation for previous imperial abuses and the current racism of Thatcher’s England.1



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However, the means by which the film does so are equally tangled up in the same racial discourses that undergirded Thatcher’s England. Indeed, the state narcissism expressed in Gandhi and writ large in England boils down to race. Just as Thatcherite England spends a great deal of energy validating whiteness as the source of normative Britishness, so too does the film spend a great deal of energy validating white characters for their recognition of Gandhi as saint. For both Attenborough and Thatcher, whiteness connotes individual character traits and qualities of national belonging that transcend the physical. In “Rereading Gandhi,” T. Muraleedharan provides a precursor to my own analysis in his discussion of Thatcherite politics latent in Attenborough’s film. Muraleedharan sees a similar undercurrent of reactionary politics rewritten as race, focusing primarily on the way the film visually establishes whiteness as both universal and superior: “[W]hiteness becomes visible only with reference to that which is not white—as if only nonwhiteness can give whiteness substance. This is what can be seen in Gandhi: the film begins with nonwhiteness, only to attempt a definition of white that is then cleverly camouflaged as the universal. The function of India in this film is to represent the non-whiteness that makes white visible” (1997, p. 61). By the end of the film, he continues, Gandhi himself is almost literally transformed into a white character. My reading of the film also examines its depiction of whiteness, particularly the seemingly ancillary white characters with whom the audience can identify as palatably postimperial yet still racially superior symbols of collective Britishness—a collective Britishness that reflects back upon Thatcherite state narcissism.

State narcissism On 3 July 1982 Margaret Thatcher took the podium at a Conservative Party rally in Cheltenham to celebrate the Falklands Islands victory and its portents for England’s renewed world power status. Her oftenquoted speech had a dual purpose, to cheer the resolute British spirit that achieved victory in the Falklands and to decry ASLEF2 for their rail strike in defiance of the “Falklands Factor”—England’s rediscovered (through the trials of war) dedication to realism, unity, and self-reliance.3 Underscoring the Falklands Factor is its recall of England’s past imperial glory: There were those who would not admit it—even perhaps some here today—people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but—in their heart of hearts—they too had their secret fears that



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it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. (1989, p. 161) Thatcher extends England’s colonial past into the contemporary political realm, invoking the Falklands War to reawaken a dormant imperial spirit that could sort out once and for all who is ultimately part of England’s future and who is working against it. In this articulation of Thatcherism, British national identity is no longer postimperial. She warps England’s timeline to restore a sense of England’s might as a reigning colonial and political power in world affairs. The resulting fetishization of the imperial past becomes an act of state narcissism. According to Freud, narcissists “are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object” (1991, p. 81), striving to return to the primary narcissism of childhood in their object choices and in the process misdirecting libidinal impulses from “normal” objects. For Freud, narcissistic selflove took four possible forms: (a) (b) (c) (d)

what he himself is (i.e. himself), what he himself was, what he himself would like to be, someone who was once part of himself. (ibid, p. 84)

As a diagnosis of institutional discourses, the fourfold split of narcissistic self-attraction resonates in Thatcher’s rhetoric, which projects in two temporal directions: toward England’s glorious past and its potential, equally glorious, future (what the nation was and what the nation would like to be). These two time frames put to shame England’s lackluster present, which is overrun by “waverers and the faint-hearts: the people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself; the people who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did; and those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were” (Thatcher 1989, p. 161).4 The Falklands War recalls England’s colonial history to the present day and brings about new hardheaded confrontations with current politics: The battle of the South Atlantic was not won by ignoring the dangers or denying the risks. It was achieved by men and woman [sic] who had



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no illusions about the difficulties. They faced them squarely and were determined to overcome. That is increasingly the mood of Britain. And that’s why the rail strike won’t do. We are no longer prepared to jeopardize our future just to defend manning practices agreed in 1919 when steam engines plied the tracks of the Grand Central Railway and the motor car had not yet taken over from the horse. (ibid, p. 164) This section of the speech pivots from the fighting in the South Atlantic to a domestic rail strike, a leap in logic made possible by the particular orientation in time implied by narcissism, a sense of a past identity animating the present and informing the future. Obsolescence is selective here: the 1919 railway practices are part of the bygone past, while the empire, which in that same year authored the Rowlatt Acts and committed the Amritsar Massacre, remains timelessly relevant.5 To borrow Homi Bhabha’s terms, the pedagogical (homogeneous, nationalistic) past is an imperial past, and it has colonized the performative (fluid, multicultural) present (1994, p. 145): What has indeed happened is that now, once again, Britain is not prepared to be pushed around. We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a new-found confidence—born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8000 miles away. That confidence comes from the rediscovery of ourselves, and grows with the recovery of our self-respect. (Thatcher 1989, p. 164) Thatcher’s final thrust, that “Britain found herself again,” employs the Falklands as a magic mirror, projecting the mesmerizing reflection of an idealized England that perfectly integrates its past with its present and future, an image highly refracted through the prism of imperialism. Based on Thatcher’s resounding success in the 1983 elections, this rhetoric was quite compelling for the voting public in England, suggesting a state narcissism that was broadly shared, and which could pass seamlessly from cultural belief to policy position and back again. Thatcher made no secret of the England, and thus Great Britain, she idealized and intended to will into reality. Of course, state narcissism is not simply a peculiarity of Thatcher’s England; this concept can be used to discuss the functioning of the state in general, particularly in relation to its political-ideological counterpart, the nation.6 As I have argued elsewhere, “the nation is the way in which



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the state desires to be known, and the state is the way in which the nation desires not to be known” (Mezey 2006, p. 180). State narcissism is in this sense the assertion of narrative control over a body politic, even (or especially) one whose definition has been subject to a process of constant change. The place for narcissism in the ideological makeup of the state thus becomes apparent. In order to address the tensions between the narrower interests of the state and the broader interests of its people, the state must claim for itself a sense of ideological and bureaucratic coherence, which it uses to establish its legitimacy and guard its status as the consented-to political voice of the nation’s people. The year before Attenborough’s film was released, the tension between the inclusive nation and the coercive state sharply and publicly erupted along racial lines over the Nationality Bill, which defined British citizenship along genealogical and generational lines rather than the principle of ius soli—defined as “the law of the soil”—that conferred British citizenship upon anybody born in British territory (Baucom 1999, pp. 8–9).7 In April 1981, the Brixton riots occurred, fueled in part—according to Ian Baucom—by outrage over the Nationality Bill, as well as the more localized “Sus” (search upon suspicion) laws.8 Three months later the rioting would spread throughout England. In much of the public imagination, descendants of African, Asian, and Caribbean peoples who migrated to England, all identified as “black” and foreign, were seen as those who would “swamp” England (Thatcher, cited in Gikandi 1996, p. 71), despite the fact that the major 1950s wave of immigrants arrived in England by invitation rather than invasion (cf. Bunyan 1981–2, p. 159). Once the threat Black Britain posed to England was identified, the state justified its internal repressions based on a rationale of external precautions: it could close its borders, limit immigration, and rigidly define nationality by biology as a means of foreclosing this threat.9 Against the backdrop of the Nationality Bill and the Brixton riots, discourses about England’s nonwhite citizens and inhabitants grouped broadly diverse peoples under the banner of racial difference while recasting the traces of Britain’s imperial past as a dangerous pollution. As Roger Bromley succinctly claims: “Ideologically, Thatcherism was predicated upon a series of representations of “what we were.” It is an ideal past, ethnically undifferentiated and white, and situated in a time prior to mass immigration, “people from other cultures.” Economically neoliberal, culturally Powellite, Thatcherism constructed a paranoia around welfare scroungers, militant strikers and immigrants” (2000, p. 149). However, as Donald Pease argues, the narcissistic identity of the state hinges upon denying its role in its abjection of the Other (1997, pp. 5–6).



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To refine our definition of state narcissism, then, we can say that it projects an idealized British nation, which shields the state from view as it openly partakes of and benefits from the racial divisions of its imperial past in the present. This did not occur solely through official discourse but through all sorts of popular texts; Gandhi is instrumental in this process by showing how British characters evinced the best of England’s imperial past through their recognition of Gandhi’s greatness. In this way, British audiences in 1982 could simultaneously align themselves with the enlightened white figures of the film while reaffirming the transhistorical power of white British identity. Although the state narcissism promoted by Attenborough’s film is less aggressive than Thatcher’s Cheltenham speech, an image of ideal Englishness still emerges, arising from an imperial backdrop and complementing, even enhancing, the state narcissism inherent in Thatcherism.

The gospel of Gandhi Five months after Thatcher’s speech at Cheltenham, Gandhi premiered first in New Delhi and then three days later in London. It would go on to gross over $60 million in the US and UK, and it would win eight Oscars and five BAFTA awards, including Best Actor for Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the Mahatma, Best Director, and Best Picture/Film at both ceremonies (“Box Office/Business for Gandhi”; “Awards for Gandhi,” n.d.). Its earnings and awards were the culmination of a 20-year investment of Attenborough’s career and energies, as well as the result of a mutual financial investment between an English filmmaker and the Indian government.10 Ultimately, the dynamic of narcissistic identification enacted in Gandhi is less compelling as a description of individual viewers of the film and more compelling as a description of the way in which the film presents a particular national identity. However, the state narcissism of Thatcher’s Cheltenham speech has been submerged in Attenborough’s film, replaced by a stance that is more skeptical of the imperial project. The layering of critical attitudes in the film is still indicative of narcissism. As Freud writes, “when, as [the narcissist] grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgment, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitution for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (1991, p. 88). In the case of Gandhi, the new ego ideal represents a form of Britishness distinct from an openly imperialistic Thatcherism. Instead, it projects an ideologically



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and morally just sense of Englishness from within the corrupted realms of empire. To relate this notion to a more specifically cinematic frame, I turn to Laura Mulvey. Mulvey’s sense of the male lead as ego ideal links to the parallel process of ego ideal formation as a result of narcissism (1992, p. 28). The male lead on screen represents the object of Lacanian misrecognition while also serving as the ego ideal of the spectator. While the erotics of the film’s title character are certainly worthy of comment—to a very great extent the figure of Gandhi is a scopophilic object, an othered but ordering presence in the British Raj (cf. ibid, p. 22)—I would argue that the drama of identification takes place not with the male lead (Ben Kingsley) but with the representatives of Britain who recognize his greatness. T. Muraleedharan concurs that “it is with [these sympathetic white characters] that viewers are made to identify and whose emotions they come to share” (1997, p. 74). However, their acknowledgment—crucial to the film’s success—depends upon Kingsley’s stunningly absolute embodiment of Gandhi. Even Rushdie, no fan of the film, refers to Kingsley’s performance as “luminous” (1991, p. 106). The politics of a classically trained English actor playing Gandhi are fraught, but what interests me most is how this stellar performance realigns cinematic narcissism away from the Great Soul and on to his British disciples. Ben Kingsley was not asked to read for the part of Gandhi until 1980. As early as 1963, according to Attenborough, the front-runner for the role was Alec Guinness, who was favored by Jawaharlal Nehru.11 Attenborough describes this conversation: [Nehru] said he felt that the development of skills and the technique of Indian artists—and one must remember this was 1963—were not of a sufficient caliber to be likely to throw up a figure capable of undertaking this mammoth task, covering, as it did, for the actor, at least sixty years. He thought under such circumstances the experience of a classical English actor, trained in the theatre and accepting a totally naturalistic style of performance, would be invaluable. Indeed, he questioned whether the film would be possible if we were not able ultimately to engage an English actor of the requisite stature to play the part. (1982, p. 110) Attenborough’s sense of the dearth of Indian talent did not improve in the almost 20 years that passed. He writes: “I had combed India for possibilities, but without success” (ibid, p. 188).12 In 1980, Kingsley received his invitation to audition for the role; Attenborough describes his acting bona fides—“one of the leading players in the Royal Shakespeare



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Company”—and concludes: “Talent apart, Ben had the considerable advantage of having an Indian father, obviously heightening his acceptability as Gandhiji” (ibid.). While there may indeed be theoretical space to view Kingsley as the embodiment of a racial cross-dressing fantasy—played out in the film—of becoming the other, or even as the cinematic enactment of a melancholic cannibalizing of the other, the most salient point for my purposes is that in Ben Kingsley Attenborough gets to have it both ways. With some shielding from Jawaharlal Nehru, Attenborough is able to uphold the cultural hegemony of the British—specifically a particular understanding of artistic representation and realism—while still demonstrating authenticity in his casting, due to Kingsley’s Indian father. If, according to Attenborough’s logic, Kingsley’s parentage gives his portrayal a sense of racial legitimacy, it also seems that his Britishness as an actor provides him with the training and talent necessary to “authentically” embody the Mahatma. Attenborough’s confidence in Kingsley’s ability to impersonate the same ineffable qualities and charisma that embodied Gandhi was such that the mere presence of the Mahatma and the revelatory power that emanated from him were depicted to be instantly recognizable by the audience beyond the intervening dialogue. The characters in the film who are moved by Gandhi to do right will not fully convey their investment unless the audience experiences it too. In this sense, the figure of Gandhi in the film becomes both the revelatory figure of the gospels and the mirror of narcissism for both the British characters and the film audience; in both cases, recognizing what is spiritually transcendent about Gandhi’s presence is tantamount to recognizing that which is right and good about their own presence. T. Muraleedharan comments on this feature of the film, arguing that Gandhi’s white followers and converts “construct Gandhi; in other words, the glory of Gandhi is their creation. They are the apostles of this new messiah” (1997, p. 75). This point operates in service of his argument that the film functions to deracinate Gandhi and establish him as a white character. Certainly, Kingsley’s qualifications as a British actor who happened to be half Indian seem to establish whiteness as a prerequisite for playing Gandhi in the film. In contrast to Muraleedharan’s reading, however, I believe that Gandhi is more significant as an othered presence throughout; the white characters who follow him are noteworthy for their ability to ignore race. A white messiah would be commonplace, but a brown messiah more truly demonstrates the colorblind loyalty of his followers. In this sense, Gandhi’s race is more of a



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fetishized quality than an effaced one; it works visibly to signify the higher motives of the sympathetic British characters. The filmmakers are themselves aligned with the sympathetic and morally just British characters, allowing them to extend both the fetish of racial difference and the concomitant self-exculpation for past imperial violence to the cinematic audience. Attenborough pursued his project with evangelistic fervor, some of which derives from his main source. In his account of producing Gandhi, Attenborough reveals his dependence upon Louis Fischer’s 1950 biography of Gandhi, which heavily influences the film’s structure and content. The tone of Fischer’s biography is set from the beginning, its depiction of Gandhi’s assassination followed by a long flashback that details the Mahatma’s origins, upbringing, and gradual transformation into a nonviolent freedom fighter and holy man. Fischer’s rendering of Gandhi’s funeral is itself a eulogistic montage, featuring statements from Nehru, Mountbatten, Sir Stafford Cripps, Albert Einstein, Pearl S. Buck, and General Douglas MacArthur, concluding with his own peroration: “He fought passionately and unremittingly against British rule of his country and against the evil in his own countrymen. But he kept his hands clean in the midst of battle. He fought without malice or falsehood or hate” (1950, p. 12). The tone of the biography is significant, as it conveys the impression of an extended eulogy rather than a work of history. Attenborough’s decision to follow the same narrative arc as Fischer, framing his film with Gandhi’s death and funeral, and even quoting from Fischer directly in the funeral scene, suggests that he is adapting this same eulogistic format.13 Interestingly, Attenborough participated on camera in Gandhi’s funeral scene, choosing along with his coproducers to don a British army uniform to blend in with the soldiers escorting Gandhi’s palanquin. This sequence works to privilege white mourners to describe the importance of Gandhi’s life to other white characters, and ultimately to the audience, itself constructed as white. With Attenborough himself a mourner on film, the roles of mourner, messenger, and filmmaker merge in his account, as becomes clear in his description of meeting with a British film executive to get funding for the Gandhi project: “I added, somewhat unwisely, that I really did believe the philosophies and attitudes that Gandhi displayed towards his fellow human beings ought to be known to the whole world” (1982, p. 80).14 This statement articulates a missionary mindset, with Attenborough no longer simply the enthralled devotee of Gandhi’s thought but also his evangelist. Viewing Gandhi as Christ and Attenborough as his disciple bearing cinematic witness establishes an intriguing comparison to the gospels



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as a narrative model.15 Gandhi is made in the same revelatory mode, fashioned to share the good news that someone of the Mahatma’s moral force could have existed in the twentieth century. Attenborough says as much while describing a key passage in Fischer’s book, when Gandhi and an Indian companion were forced to step into the gutter to allow two white South Africans to walk past on the sidewalk. At that moment, Gandhi turns to his companion and speaks: “‘It has always been a mystery to me’—he wasn’t angry, he was expressing surprise—‘it has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings’” (Attenborough 1982, p. 44; cf. Fischer 1950, p. 48). Although this moment had a tremendous effect on Attenborough (ibid, pp. 44–5), there is a discrepancy between Attenborough’s account of reading Fischer’s biography, Fischer’s biography itself, and the original incident as reported in Gandhi’s writing. In Fischer, Gandhi’s profound statement is not attached to any specific incident, and in Gandhi’s My Experiments with the Truth, it arises not in response to the actions of two white South Africans but rather to an Indian colleague who removes his turban to show Gandhi the same deference he would for a European (1966, p. 206). My point here is not to fault Attenborough on his recall of Fischer’s book, as he read widely to prepare for this film. Attenborough’s construction of this moment, however, translates it from a reflection on customs among Indians in South Africa to something much grander: a spontaneous utterance of a profound human truth made by the impossibly wise victim of a demeaning racist act, which also suggests that Gandhi could turn the other cheek with the best of them. A similar impulse fuels the film’s progress so that the force of Gandhi’s revelatory power shifts from his verbal command to his mere presence. Gandhi as the embodiment of righteousness becomes a figure who, rather than taking action, provokes reactions, both for the audience and the many characters who stand in for the viewers. Sympathetic characters respond respectfully and often adoringly to Gandhi, unsympathetic characters do not, and as the audience is moved to align themselves with the former group, the title character of the film that causes them to do so assumes the mirroring function of narcissism. Attenborough lays the groundwork for such mirroring in the film’s portrayal of events in South Africa, where Gandhi first undertook direct political action in an organized campaign.16 With the decision to cast well-known antiapartheid playwright and novelist Athol Fugard in the part of Jan Smuts, Attenborough provides us with an initial glimpse of the ability of a white representative of the British Empire to transcend



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the colonial inheritance of racial division. When Smuts in a crucial scene tells Gandhi that he will bring about the repeal of the Black Act, an ordinance calling for all Indians in the Transvaal to register themselves, be fingerprinted, and carry passbooks at all times, only in exchange for severe restrictions on future Indian immigration, Gandhi gazes fixedly at Smuts, briefly breaks off his gaze, and calmly replies: “Immigration was not an issue on which we fought. It would be wrong of us to make it one, now that we—we are in a position of advantage” (Briley 1983, p. 46). After a brief silence, Smuts orders the release of all prisoners, starting with Gandhi. Gandhi has won; he has claimed the advantage, and Smuts has tacitly accepted it. This scene presents an occasion for Gandhi to shine forth rather than highlighting the circumstances he attempted to redress as an advocate for Indians in South Africa. As Attenborough’s condensation of a lengthy process between Gandhi and Smuts, involving intermediaries, setbacks, and satyagraha campaigns, the historical weight that this one scene has to carry distills the entirety of the interaction between the South African government and its Indian community into a single meeting between two men. Not only does the moral force of Gandhi win the day but he does so while getting his chief adversary to agree with him. When Gandhi breaks eye contact with Smuts for the first time, lowering his head as if in meditation, the film conveys that the solutions to political conflicts come not from external considerations, but rather from within Gandhi himself. This portion of the film relies on two crucial dynamics: the first, that Gandhi emerges as the humble yet forceful negotiator for just causes; the second, that the audience sees Smuts spontaneously recognizing that fact and acting in accordance to Gandhi’s wishes, not just releasing Gandhi and others from jail but even forcing a subordinate to give his adversary money for a taxi. Specific abuses under segregationist British and Afrikaner officials fade in light of Gandhi’s personal impact. Athol Fugard, a prominent white proponent of antiapartheid thinking, gives Gandhi’s audience a character with which to identify, even in light of his historical counterpart’s role in a racist British imperial regime in South Africa. The best part of the empire, it seems, remains embodied in the white figures—and by extension that white audience—whose clarity of vision perceives the truth of the exceptional person standing before them. The narcissistic racial dynamic launched here extends throughout the film. If Gandhi’s power is recognizable as emanating from some wordless place within him, his message spreads far and wide beyond Gandhi’s person. As Chakravarty points out, integral to Gandhi’s revelatory force



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Gandhi is literally crawling with Western reporters, some of whom are also Hollywood stars (Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen). Since history and journalism are both forms of narrative, it seems natural to see them deployed together. And yet, in Gandhi, the use of Western reporters, of first-hand Western vision, is meant to authenticate Indian history and to legitimize its claim upon the attention of Western audiences. Gandhi’s own substantial journalistic writings are not used. (1993, p. 194) Attenborough’s liberal use of Western media figures bridges Gandhi’s humanistic–spiritual revelations and the politics of the British Empire. We see some early indication of this in the English reporter present when Gandhi is beaten for burning Indian passes in South Africa; he serves as a focal point for Gandhi and the audience throughout the scene. The Western media also helps constitute the intense drama of such scenes as the protest at the Dharasana Salt Works. As line after line of satyagrahis walk into a hail of lathi blows without resisting, Martin Sheen’s Walker, an American reporter, runs to a phone amidst a swell of music and proclaims as the finale to his news story: “Whatever moral ascendance the West held was lost today. India is free for she has taken all that steel and cruelty can give, and she has neither cringed nor retreated” (Briley 1983, p. 142). In this scene, the violence committed against the protesters is part of the spectacle of Indian determination to be free that the people of the West—both British colonizer and American spectator—must eventually acknowledge. However, the drama rests only partly on the actions of the Gandhian protestors, and primarily on Walker, another white character whose stirring words express what Gandhi’s nonviolence can accomplish, even when he is not physically present. This spectacle is emblematic of Gandhi as a figure of moral revelation who can win victories in the heartless realm of politics and the violent realm of colonialism, and whose actions are considered sufficiently newsworthy by white reporters and readers eager to consume stories about him. The presence of Westerners as those who can truly validate Gandhi’s message—separate and apart from either the runaway emotions of Indians in the crowd scenes or the misguided and calculating actions of the high-level Indian politicians in the negotiations for British withdrawal— underscores the theme of whiteness as a privileged individual identity in the film. However, the depiction of the British state also depends upon



is the role given to Western media in spreading the word once Gandhi’s movement has hit its stride:


the same dynamics of narcissistic identification. Attenborough negotiates carefully the ideological terrain of the British colonial state, which is noteworthy earlier in the film for its indifference to Gandhi as a person. In fact, it seems as if the business of maintaining empire distracts from the much more important business of being British. After Gandhi’s arrest at Champaran and the news of the riot-proportion crowds assembling for the trial, a batsman engaged in a cricket match frets at the interruption: “God, and it’s the best innings I’ve had since Oxford” (Briley 1983, p. 82). His Oxford reference and good-old-boy insouciance betray a sense of ignorance pervading, that some key British officials remain willfully blind to what is at stake in the continuation of the Raj. A more broadly satirized attitude arises later in the film, as one colonial official chides another for raising rents to finance a hunting expedition. Gandhi’s audience can mock or dismiss such imperial representatives, who in their detachment remain ancillary to the British imperial presence in India. These marginal characters point out the imperatives Attenborough must fulfill as he seeks to represent the Raj. Graphic depictions of systemic colonial oppression might alienate audiences, but Gandhi must face significant opposition from the British in order to triumph. Ultimately, state narcissism refocuses the audience’s attention away from the institution of the state and back to a white British nation; for this to happen, the film must depict enough people existing within the structure of British colonialism (either directly upholding it or indirectly privileged by it) sympathetic enough to become disciples of Gandhi. These criteria place the closest scrutiny on two of the film’s more noteworthy British characters, Edward Fox’s General Dyer and Trevor Howard’s Judge Broomfield. Both represent instruments of the British colonial state, in its military and judicial manifestations. With the exception of John Gielgud’s Lord Irwin, Dyer’s character represents the condensation of cold-blooded British imperial evil, a character whose actions threaten to expose the structural violence at the heart of British colonialism. As the figure presiding over what amounted to the summary execution of over one thousand unarmed civilians for holding a peaceful yet illegal demonstration, Dyer is certainly a lead contender for this role. However, Attenborough constructs the scene in which Dyer is finally brought to account quite deliberately to present Dyer as an atypical example of the British Empire. More importantly, Dyer shows that the imperial state can police its own abuses. In this light, I find compelling Muraleedharan’s reading that in this scene “the sin of colonial and racial oppression is replaced by the sin of having forsaken the values of a patronizing patriarchy” (1997, p. 82). Equally



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compelling is his analysis of the opening image of Dyer’s trial scene, which “begins with a close shot of Dyer’s profile with a flag of Britain in the background. Dyer is a blot on the national pride” (ibid). However, while Muraleedharan sees Dyer as extremely conflicted during this scene, Attenborough’s direction and Briley’s screenplay depicts him less like a man suffering internal conflict and more like a vigilante playing the imperial game by his own rules (Briley 1983, pp. 100–1). Dyer is automatic in responses throughout, his voice becoming strained only when confronted with his failure to provide for the wounded, particularly the children his soldiers gunned down. Dyer’s testimony in Gandhi is intriguing in its timing and dramatic payoff. The film cuts to Dyer’s inquest directly from the massacre, suggesting a swift and decisive official response as opposed to the sixmonth lag before the Hunter Commission convened in October 1919 (Sayer 1991, p. 146). In addition, focusing on Dyer’s neglect of the wounded suggests that what remains at stake in Amritsar is less the order to fire upon an unarmed crowd and more the composition of that crowd and British efficiency and control after the shooting began. One could almost conclude that the salient issue here is not that Dyer committed a massacre but that he massacred inaccurately, shooting some of the wrong people and not following through with the proper procedures afterwards. Dyer becomes in this sense a solitary extremist, rather than somebody who carried out the inherent violence of colonial rule in a too-visible fashion for the empire’s comfort. However, he is contained within a system of imperial justice that manages to silence him and plant a “seed of panic” (Briley 1983, p. 101) with a question about how a child shot with a high-powered, repeating rifle would apply for assistance after being wounded. The film rebukes Dyer’s actions, but does so primarily as a means of preserving the benevolent identities of white Britons in India. Certainly, benevolent white Britons are not the only disciples of Gandhi. Although Indian characters in the film tend to function in crowds rather than as individuals, Gandhi gathers Indian adherents from the elite figure of Roshan Seth’s Nehru to Om Puri’s Nahari, a grieving Hindu father and repentant murderer of a Muslim child during the partition riots in Calcutta.17 Ultimately, Indian disciples remain less powerful on screen. Indian disciples for an Indian messiah are to be expected; Gandhi’s strength ultimately resides in his ability to summon to his side those who might initially disagree with or dismiss him. White converts do double duty here: they highlight Gandhi’s power and diminish specters of imperial racism.



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Smuts puts it best early in the film, in what is perhaps an ironic metacomment, when he says to Martin Sheen’s Walker, “we Westerners have a weakness for these spiritually inclined men of India” (Briley 1983, p. 28), which comes shortly after Gandhi attracts his first western disciples, Ian Charleson’s Reverend Charlie Andrews and Gunter Maria Halmer’s Herman Kallenbach.18 More disciples, this time two Americans, come from the media. Walker is absorbed into the crowd following Gandhi to the seaside at Dandi for the salt protests, and Candice Bergen as Margaret Bourke-White is a frequent companion to Gandhi toward the end of the film, as is Geraldine James’s Mirabehn. However, Gandhi’s most intriguing convert, and the strongest rebuke to Dyer’s military excesses, is Judge Broomfield, who spontaneously rises when Gandhi enters the courtroom for his 1922 sedition trial in Ahmedabad. In doing so, he starts a chain reaction, causing barristers, journalists, soldiers, and eventually the Indians in the upper gallery to rise, as if he is educating not just his fellow countrymen but also the people who have ostensibly already acknowledged Gandhi as Mahatma. Gandhi has at this point said nothing; what makes Broomfield rise is Gandhi’s presence. Broomfield is General Smuts come full circle, a white representative of the imperial state who spontaneously comprehends Gandhi’s moral force. In doing so, he represents a crucial moment of narcissism of the film, an exonerating figure for the colonial state and a ready point of identification for the audience. Britishness here equates to an understanding of justice that transcends its imperial context. Attenborough describes his hopes for this scene in In Search of Gandhi: “It was a vital scene as far as I was concerned. I hoped that it would encapsulate in its brief but dramatic placing all that was best in the administration, and compassionate understanding of British rule in India” (1982, p. 221).19 He is more rhapsodic on the remastered DVD: “What a wonderful moment . . . wonderful evidence of the best of British behavior there in terms of their respect for this truly great man” (Gandhi, Director’s Commentary). As the film suggests, then, enlightened British characters intuitively perceive that they are dealing with somebody on a higher plane, and their actions are rendered as the spontaneous acceptance of this fact. When examining the screenplay, two particular moments stand out from this scene. The first concerns Gandhi’s response to charges of sedition: GANDHI: I have no defense, My Lord. I am guilty as charged. (Then testingly) And if you truly believe in the system of law you administer in my country, you must inflict on me the severest penalty possible. It is almost a cruel challenge to the obviously humane Broomfield.



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Just as Gandhi was able to stare down Smuts in South Africa, once again we see a white official blinking first. In addition, the stage directions describing the judge as “obviously humane,” and later with a respect for Gandhi that is “almost poignantly manifest,” suggest that doubt about imposing a ruthless sentence does credit to the court, the man who presides over it, and—because “the mere doubt in the Judge’s face reflects on the whole position of the British to India”—to the British as a whole. Resisting the imperial legal apparatus is unnecessary. Doubt suffices. Even more significantly, the judge’s behavior is ratified by Gandhi, the guarantor of all things moral in the film, at the end of the scene: “[Gandhi] stands, staring at Broomfield, and now it is his face that shows the respect” (ibid p. 124). Emptied of its imperial politics, this moment stands as a moment of narcissistic recognition. To be moved by Gandhi’s presence is one thing; to be acknowledged in return by Gandhi and not found wanting is so much more. Broomfield steps into the role of ego ideal, and Gandhi serves as both narcissistic mirror for Broomfield and the bearer of the audience’s gaze, allowing the audience to share in Broomfield and Gandhi’s mutual respect. At this moment, Gandhi is aligned with the British audience, while also showing the best of their white counterparts on screen.

Conclusion: “The Whole Position of the British to India” Why does Gandhi respect Judge Broomfield? Not for his devotion to his duty toward the laws of the Raj, as Broomfield’s discomfort at sentencing Gandhi belies that devotion. Not for his judicial actions, as Broomfield sentences Gandhi despite his discomfort at what is presumably the unjust nature of the punishment for somebody of Gandhi’s moral stature and political convictions. Ultimately, we are left with Gandhi showing respect for Broomfield because Broomfield has shown respect for him, a respect that is communicated primarily through his spontaneous rising from the bench to mark Gandhi’s entrance into the courtroom. In contrast to the imperial violence made manifest through General Dyer, the emotive response to Gandhi—rather than any direct political commitment—seems to be enough to grant sympathetic white characters absolution from the racism of the colonial system in which



The reporters scribble, watching the Judge even as they write, because the mere doubt in the Judge’s face reflects on the whole position of the British to India. (Briley 1983, p. 123)


they exist. In this way, the British who sympathize with Gandhi in the film are able to maintain both their colonial identity and their spiritual transcendence of the ugliness of empire. The ego ideal represented by a British character like Broomfield represents all of the trappings of imperial authority and the colonial state, but it is imbued with an appreciation for greatness, even seditious greatness, that constructs a more perfect Raj. The imperial fantasy is allowed to live, but it is shot through with a healthy dose of British liberalism. The film’s audience runs a parallel course to the characters that represent it; an emotive response to the film’s depiction of Gandhi’s nonviolence and martyrdom is sufficient to establish a measure of liberal credibility and enable state narcissism, obviating the need for political action in the here and now. This is not to say that I suspect any direct collusion between Attenborough’s film and Thatcher’s government. However, the relation between the cultural text and the state is remarkably in sync, as both function to hide the workings of the state behind a veil of nostalgia—in this case mourning a great historical figure—and thus sanitize the colonial past and the postimperial present. As the film and state do so, they simultaneously construct a population of spectatorsubjects under the prevailing assumption that it will be a predominantly white one, offering them a release valve, a safe site for the audience to reaffirm their allegiance to a history of British liberalism that can be projected not simply back in time but also forward to the present day. They are allowed the means to hold to the notion that nothing behooved the empire more than the loss of empire, and to do so without having to face up to the reactionary impulse of Thatcherite England. These beliefs are maintained, both through public policy and popular texts, by the sanctity of whiteness, which for both Attenborough and Thatcher embodies individual character traits and qualities of national belonging that transcend the physical. The reconstructed ego ideal of the British state in 1982 is not to be found in the brown saint of the past who was too good for the world, but rather in the British disciples past and present who, for the price of an imperial past and a movie ticket, can still purchase the privilege of mourning Gandhi.

Notes 1.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison responds to this notion of self-exculpation: “We are encouraged to believe that the making of these films is England’s way of coming to terms with, or making peace with, its colonial enterprise. That’s nice—or it would be nice if it made sense; but it takes two parties to make peace. . . . It’s for the Indians to forgive the British, not for the British to



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2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

forgive themselves. We don’t congratulate rapists for forgiving their victims” (cited in Desai 1985, p. 28). The Associated Society of Locomotive Steam Enginemen and Firemen. Full text available at www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=104989. In Out of Place, Ian Baucom refers to this perceived loss of past national glory as melancholic, the refusal to part with the lost object in favor of incorporating into oneself. I think there is considerable common ground here—Baucom points out the narcissistic qualities of melancholic identification (1999, pp. 184–5), and Thatcher’s speech certainly reads as a reincorporation of England’s imperial past into its postimperial present. I choose to focus on narcissism because, as I discuss below, of its emphasis on the image of the self as the loved object. I will discuss the Amritsar Massacre in the context of Gandhi; the Rowlatt Acts preceded the massacre by a month, allowing for the preventive detention and imprisonment of those accused of terrorism or sedition. Ranjana Khanna’s assertion that “[p]sychoanalysis describes the processing of subjects into the larger groups that constitute nation-states” (2003, p. 8) parallels Peter Brooks’s Freudian model of desire, which “seeks ‘to combine organic substances into ever greater unities’” (1984, p. 37). What, then, does the state desire in the processing of its subjects? Consent, for one, as Partha Chatterjee indicates when he describes the tension between nation and state as an attempt “to keep the contradictions between capital and the people in perpetual suspension” (1986, p. 168). Concealment, for another, as Michael Taussig characterizes the state as the bearer of “a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” (1992, p. 115), which is in need of the “deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 1994, p. 7) of the nation to mask it. State narcissism is born of this conflict, constituting itself through the narrative construction of images and ideologies that emphasize national unity and repress state coercion and violence. See also Rushdie 1991, pp. 129–38 and Gikandi 1996, pp. 69–83. For contemporary background and commentary on the riots, see “Notes and documents,” 1981–2, pp. 223–50. In her speech at Cheltenham, Thatcher set forth a security doctrine that rhetorically elevated internal enemies (labor unions; threats to a conception of white Britishness) to the status of external military threats (Argentina), a gesture wholly justifiable through the recursive and airtight logic of state paranoia (cf. Freud 1958, p. 63). According to Barbara Crossette, Gandhi was backed by, among others, “India’s National Film Development Corporation, which raised about a third of the film’s budget through private and public investors within India” (1982, para. 22). India contributed more than funding, however; according to Sumita Chakravarty, Gandhi was “entirely shot in India with the assistance of a sizeable technical crew from the Bombay film industry,” which had the additional effect of increasing India’s international exposure as a filmmaking power (1993, pp. 191, 193). Guinness would eventually portray an Indian character, Professor Godbole, in David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984). A claim that seems thin in light of the talent of accomplished actors like Naseeruddin Shah, who starred under the direction of Govind Nihalani



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13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

The Gospel of Gandhi (who worked as a unit director on Gandhi) with Indian actors who read for or performed in Gandhi (Smita Patil, Om Puri, Amrish Puri). Shah would go on to play Gandhi in Kamal Hasan’s Hey Ram (2000). This scene is narrated by a white radio commentator (identified as Edward R. Murrow; cf. Briley 4), whose lines come from Fischer’s introduction. While Attenborough describes with a great deal of pride the achievement of shooting a sequence that drew in between 200,000 and 300,000 Indian people (1982, pp. 211–12), the emotional gravity and sense of loss stemming from the sequence is centered upon the white mourners. I agree with Muraleedharan that Indian mourners are rendered much less recognizable as individuals due to their sheer numbers (1997, p. 74). The producer to whom he pitches scolds him about movies with messages, enabling Attenborough to establish the intensity of his commitment to making the film, against all cinematic odds or conventions (1982, p. 80). According to Joel Marcus, the gospel “is euangelion, a proclamation of good news” (2000, p. 69). Attenborough would revisit South Africa on screen five years later in Cry Freedom, in which the messianic force of a nonwhite character (Steve Biko) once again registers through his impact on a white character (Donald Woods). In this scene, Gandhi advises Nahari to adopt an orphaned Muslim boy and raise him according to the faith of his birth. Gandhi’s body as much as his words instructs those who cross his path, as the camera tracks his increasing frailty from the fast he undertook to protest partition violence in Calcutta. Charleson would have been easily recognizable from his role two years previously as Eric Liddel in Chariots of Fire—in which he played a missionary blessed with blinding speed who would eventually die while doing the Lord’s work in foreign lands. My reading of this scene is based on the notion that Broomfield did not actually rise to mark Gandhi’s presence in his courtroom, that it was an addition from Attenborough (Nanda, cited in Hay 1983, p. 91).

Works cited Anderson, B. (1994) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn. London: Verso. Attenborough, R. (1982) In Search of Gandhi. London: Bodley Head. “Awards for Gandhi (1982)” in The Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb. com/title/tt0083987/awards. Accessed 17 January 2009. Baucom, I. (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. “Box Office/Business for Gandhi (1982)” in The Internet Movie Database, http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0083987/business. Accessed January 17, 2009. Briley, J. (1983) Gandhi: The Screenplay. New York: Grove. Bromley, R. (2000) Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brooks, P. (1984) Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.



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Bunyan, T. (1981–2) “The Police against the People,” Race & Class, 23(2–3): pp. 153–70. Chakravarty, S. (1993) National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Chatterjee, P. (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Crossette, B. (1982) “A 20-Year Struggle Puts ‘Gandhi’ on Screen.” The New York Times, November 28, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/ bestpictures/gandhi-ar3.html. Accessed January 22, 2009. Desai, A. (1985) “The Rage for the Raj.” New Republic, November 25, pp. 26–30. Fischer, L. (1950) The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Harper. Freud, S. (1991) “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in A. Richards (ed.) and J. Strachey (trans.) On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin. pp. 59–97. Freud, S. (1958) “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.) Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. pp. 3–82. Gandhi (1982) Directed by Richard Attenborough, Columbia Pictures. 2007 [DVD] Sony Pictures. Gandhi, M. K. (1966) “An Autobiography: Or, the Story of My Experiments with the Truth” in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan. pp. 88–511. Gikandi, S. (1996) Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hay, S. (1983) “Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi.’” The Public Historian, 5(3): pp. 84–94. Khanna, R. (2003) Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Marcus, J. (2000) Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday. Mezey, J. H. (2006) “Neo-Colonial Narcissism and Post-Colonial Paranoia: Midnight’s Children and the ‘Psychoanalysis’ of the State.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 8(2): pp. 178–92. Mulvey, L. (1992) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in M. Merck, (ed.) The Sexual Subject: Screen Reader in Sexuality. London: Routledge. pp. 22–34. Muraleedharan, T. (1997) “Rereading Gandhi” in R. Frankenburg (ed.) Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. pp. 60–85. “Notes and Documents.” (1981–2) Race & Class, 23(2–3): pp. 223–50. Pease, D. E. (1997) “National Narratives, Postnational Nation,” Modern Fiction Studies, 43(1): pp. 1–23. Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. Sayer, D. (1991) “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920.” Past and Present, 131: pp. 130–64. Taussig, M. (1992) The Nervous System. New York: Routledge. Thatcher, M. (1989) “Conservative Rally. Cheltenham, 3 July 1982” in The Revival of Britain: Speeches on Home and European Affairs 1975–1988. London: Aurum. pp. 160–4.



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Rural Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in the Thatcher Years: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival Lucienne Loh

When urban riots in Brixton, Toxteth and Handsworth in the early and mid 1980s raised the specter of race so violently in the UK, they articulated the culmination of frustrations over a foregone imperial identity, shrouded in racism, in open conflict with the realities of a multicultural society. Throughout the 1980s, this conflict contributed to a fundamental source of social tension underlying British culture. During this period, the countryside was imagined as a space of reprieve from the turmoil of Britain’s cities, and the English countryside, in particular, was projected as a secure, nostalgic site infused with cultural and racial sanctity to buttress the influence of immigrants from the old empire. The countryside, along with its architectural icons—churches, abbeys, villages, cottages and manor homes—became incorporated in a burgeoning heritage industry. Government policies on rural heritage during the 1980s also reflected a commitment to preserving the English countryside as a projection of national pride and identity. This collective social and political movement appeared democratic and accessible to everyone “in terms of [its] large-scale civic programmes” (Corner and Harvey 1991, p. 45). Yet this movement was essentially conservative and racially circumscribed, constructed around the idea of rural heritage asa tangible record of past greatness inherently coded through white and imperial ideologies. Postcolonial writers throughout the 1980s critiqued these ideologies by extolling London for its multicultural possibilities, not only to denounce racism but also to envision a more tolerant postimperial Britain. Novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) celebrate hybridity, recombination and difference to advocate for—in Stuart Hall’s terms—“a transformed relation to Tradition,” one in which “there can 96



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be no simple ‘return’ or recovery of the ancestral past which is not reexperienced through the present” (1988, p. 30). In many ways writers such as Rushdie and Kureishi inaugurated what has come to be termed postcolonial literature. In the British context, postcolonial literature has been almost exclusively concerned with urban landscapes where race and the histories of empire are so visibly foregrounded. In marked contrast to this body of work, V. S. Naipaul’s 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, situated largely in an obscure corner of rural Wiltshire, steeped with admiration for English rural traditions, and expressive of a profound sense of imperial loss, appears quite antithetical to any postcolonial project. Yet when historically contextualized within Thatcherism, the novel affords an implicit postcolonial critique of the rural heritage industry under Thatcher and the racist colonial nostalgia that supported it. This postcolonial reading requires a double reading of Naipaul’s apparent adulation for Britain’s colonial past and his love for rural heritage in The Enigma of Arrival. Indeed, Naipaul’s ostensible celebration of English culture and values in the novel may explain the immediate national acclaim he gained upon its publication.1 His homage to rural England in the novel would have confirmed the purported superiority of white English culture and would have further justified the desire to revivify imperial pride through the heritage values that flourished under Thatcher. However, to perceive The Enigma of Arrival as merely pandering to the nostalgic needs of a nation mourning for the loss of the Pax Britannica denies the complexities posed by the novel’s ambivalent narrative perspective. Further complicating any attempt to link Naipaul to the colonial nostalgia underpinning the heritage industry is Naipaul’s acute awareness of his ex-colonial, Trinidadian and Indian heritage. I argue that he resists the racism that might be provoked by his background by instead claiming the rural landscape for himself. By fully engaging with all that rural England historically symbolizes, he participates in a national imaginary that would have necessarily shunned him. Yet in doing so, Naipaul symbolizes the irrecoverable loss of empire in a rejection of the racially exclusive boundaries of heritage England. The novel’s postcolonial vision is, however, ultimately limited. Naipaul’s fundamental quandary—at once within and without the conservative discourses underlying colonial nostalgia and rural heritage—underscores the impossibility of constructing a postcolonial epistemology within Thatcherism. Frequently regarded as an autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival is broadly divided into five distinct but interwoven sections. In the first section, the narrator, modeled on Naipaul, is a middle-aged



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Rural Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in the Thatcher Years

man settled in a cottage in Wiltshire on the grounds of the expansive Waldenshaw country estate. The second section recollects his initial journey from Trinidad to England as a young man, including details of a sojourn in London en route to take up a scholarship at Oxford University. In the third, fourth and last sections, he returns to his Wiltshire home. In these sections, the countryside and the personal relationships Naipaul forms provide physical and psychic healing from the traumas he believed he suffered both growing up in relative poverty in Trinidad and in the constant struggles to move to England. Throughout the novel, several characters symbolize an irretrievable and mythic national past, irrevocably changed in the 1980s by the impact of sweeping industrialization, globalization and decolonization. In response to these interconnected social and economic forces, the novel seems to project a collective conservative mourning for a more ancient, patrician and rural conservatism frequently coterminous with a sense of imperial loss. For example, toward the end of the novel, Naipaul encounters “a very old woman” who has come to the cottages he had renovated and moved into (p. 317). Accompanied by her grandson, she wants to retrace memories of “the cottage where as a child she used to come to stay with her shepherd grandfather” (p. 317). The young man tells Naipaul that his grandmother remembers and recognizes the lane leading down to a footpath and then a footbridge across the river that she had to cross in the mornings to fetch milk from the farm across the other side. However, she fails to recognize her grandfather’s cottage. While being captivated by the details of rural life offered by the old woman, Naipaul states pointedly that he “was horribly embarrassed” by the whole situation. He felt mortified by “all the things that had disorientated the old lady and made her question where she was” (p. 317). Naipaul is not less embarrassed in the presence of the old lady for what he had done, and more by being “an intruder, not from another village or county, but from another hemisphere; embarrassed to have destroyed or spoilt the past for the old lady” (p. 317). To Naipaul, the old lady physically and metaphorically embodies an irretrievable rural past. But Naipaul believes—to each other’s eyes—that he serves as a corruption of that past by being so visually and racially incongruous against the rural backdrop and by failing to offer the racial and cultural connections that the old lady was seeking. Both Naipaul and the old lady feel dislocated and deracinated by their vastly different histories brought together by their separate claims to the cottage. Naipaul imagines that his visible racial difference and the history of immigration underpinning



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his journey from colonial Trinidad to rural Wiltshire disrupts the racial and cultural genealogy the old woman had anticipated. The past has been tainted for the old lady and Naipaul sees his own presence as a shameful reality confirming not only a bygone rural age, but reiterating the definitive end of empire. Even though he has been able to regard the cottages as his own, meeting with the old woman reminds him that he reflects not the past represented by the old woman, the cottages and their surroundings, but a radically different history of racial subservience. Yet Naipaul overcomes this colonial history by embodying the pastoral landscape, both in literary and physical terms. In the novel, he describes his daily walks across the Wiltshire countryside and engages intimately with a landscape that maintains a sacred place within the English imagination. With its bare plains and its ancient roads and mounds, Wiltshire has always held a peculiar appeal to the English sense of place. The Wiltshire landscape, as Naipaul intimates in the novel, is the idealized landscape of Hardy, Shepard (p. 187), Constable (pp. 7, 187, 204) and Cobbett (p. 185) and maintains a lineage that supposedly stems back to the early-middle ages. Even though the old woman may view Naipaul as a disruption to this rural genealogy, he endeavors to close this gap in the novel. When Naipaul casts his eyes over the water meadows near his cottage that “Constable had painted one hundred and fifty years before” (p. 186), he feels that they had “the effect [. . .] of abolishing the distance between Constable and the present” (p. 187). The beeches at the edge of a farmyard remind Naipaul of George Borrow and his wanderings in The Romany Rye and Lavengro (p. 87). By describing these literary and physical connections to the land around him, Naipaul not only possesses pastoral England on his own terms, but also imbibes it. If Naipaul’s presence in rural Wiltshire signifies a categorical change in the country’s landscape, then the old lady serves as a synecdoche for a past that the heritage movement under Thatcher sought to champion. This particular understanding of the past was revived through inspiring nostalgia for the cornerstones of Englishness: empire, the countryside, the crown and aristocracy. But connections to this glorified past, as Naipaul recognizes in his encounter with the old lady, are formidably circumscribed by what John J. Su calls the “nostalgic essentialism” (2005, p. 129) of the Thatcher years. In other words, Thatcherism maintained that nostalgic claims to England’s treasured past were reserved exclusively for white Britons as a means of reinvigorating pride in the memory of historic greatness. One of the fundamental tenets of Thatcherism lay in a “simple patriotism” which recollected the glories



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of a burgeoning British empire during the last third of the nineteenth century. Under Disraeli and Salisbury, this patriotic appeal had similarly served as a highly effective vote winner for the Conservatives in the first age of mass politics (Evans 1997, p. 3). Joel Krieger argues that appeals to imperialist nostalgia and the subliminal racism that it implies were prominent during the Thatcher campaign of 1979 (1986, pp. 77–8). Demonstrated by Mrs Thatcher’s reference shortly before the 1983 election to the necessity of recovering lost “Victorian values,” Thatcherite conservatism, with its emphasis on order and tradition, relied heavily on appeals to the authority of the past (Hewison 1987, p. 47). By evoking a past based on the “greatness” of Victorian England, Thatcher was implying not only imperial power and pride but also a socially recognized code for white England. Stuart Hall has explicitly linked whiteness with heritage England. In Britain, he believes, the answer to the question “Whose Heritage?” is clear: “It is intended for those who ‘belong’—a society which is imagined as, in broad terms, culturally homogeneous and unified.” Hall suggests that the concept of heritage has been the imagined cultural cachet of whiteness. And if heritage “is always inflected by the power and authority of those who have colonized the past,” then heritage and whiteness underpin “[T]he very notion of ‘greatness’ in Great Britain [which] is inextricably bound up with its imperial destiny” (2005, pp. 26–7). In the more specific terms of rural heritage, The Enigma of Arrival suggests that a tacit postcolonial resistance to the institutional racism supported by the heritage industry is made possible by destabilizing its putatively fixed racial associations. Yet this resistance to Thatcherism is highly understated, as much of the novel can be read more evidently as an obsequious and unquestioning adoration of the “greatness” and superiority of English heritage. As a colored immigrant from the colonies, Naipaul’s fervent desire to adopt the conservative nostalgic values reflected in his deference to the rural traditions of “olde England” only serve to further reinforce white claims to the “greatness” of that past. In reminiscing about the historical foundations of the cottages he had renovated, Naipaul initially adopts a perspective that affects a white nostalgia for a foregone rural era: The walls and foundations of workers’ houses: generations of agricultural workers had lived on the site. And even in the pair of cottages I was renovating, the cottages that had been built early in the century over the foundations and debris of the old hamlet, many generations of workers, or many different people, had lived. Now



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Naipaul attempts to be highly sensitive to the countryside’s palimpsestic history as he reminisces about the workers’ houses and the cottages as repositories of history which evoke the immemorial bond between agricultural workers and the land. In these images, Naipaul continually depicts the Wiltshire landscape as the personification of deep England, finding evidence everywhere of what Patrick Wright in On Living in an Old Country terms the “closely held iconography of what it is to be English—all of them appealing in one covertly projective way or another to historical and sacrosanct identity of the nation” (1985, p. 2).2 However, in Thatcherite terms, Naipaul would be “an outsider,” and would have no claims to this national identity which he acknowledges is bound to “a special idea of the past, the assertion—with the wealth and power of an unbelievably extensive empire—of racial and historical and cultural virtue” (p. 203). Yet when Naipaul claims that he is “an outsider [. . .] creating a potential ruin,” he is asserting he represents only part of a broader change assailing the countryside and he is aware that others are similarly contributing to the destruction. By claiming the cottages for himself and by stressing that his actions are as destructive as what he “had been aware of others doing,” Naipaul downplays his racial presence and undercuts any exclusively white claims to rural land. Naipaul’s postcolonial subjectivity—his status as a “migrant”—undermines the notion of a “nostalgic essentialism” and shows that pining for Britain’s glory is not just about a white discourse of power. Postcolonial critics have, however, failed to acknowledge that Naipaul’s nostalgia both confirms and obliquely contradicts the racist imperial ideology promoted by Thatcherism. Instead, they view Naipaul’s professed enthusiasm for Thatcherite values solely as colonialist posturing and support for a racist and imperialist national ideology. In particular, they respond irately to Naipaul’s denigration of Trinidad which seems to offer further justification for Thatcherism’s commitment to resurrecting pride in imperialism’s civilizing mission. Naipaul believes Trinidad exists in a historical vacuum, where “nothing suggested antiquity, a past” (p. 157). In Trinidad, Naipaul lives merely in anticipation of a future in England. He declares that in Trinidad he “held my[him]self back, as it were, for the life at the center of things” (p. 130) where he could fulfill his “idea of civilization, and the idea of antiquity” (p. 153). In the novel’s second section depicting Naipaul’s



I, an outsider, was altering the appearance of the land a little, doing what I had been aware of others doing, creating a potential ruin. (p. 89)


journey between Trinidad and England, Naipaul presents Trinidad as a racially fragmented society enduring the stifling economic legacies of a colonial plantation world where Trinidad’s past and landscape are carved out by an imperial legacy which “was full of shame and mortifications” (p. 245). Trinidad’s “landscape—with all its colonial or holiday motifs: beaches, market women, coconut trees, banana trees, sun, big-leaved trees—had always [. . .] been the landscape of anxiety, even panic, and sacrifice” (p. 152). Much of Naipaul’s life in Trinidad was thus dedicated to securing fulfillment in England and attempting to claim a stake within its traditions. Postcolonial critics have expressed outrage at Naipaul’s scathing depiction of Trinidad and corresponding idolization of Wiltshire and England. Rob Nixon, for example, argues that “Naipaul’s affection for the values for the English bourgeoisie in their imperial prime is expressive of an only half-concealed colonial nostalgia” (1992, p. 36). Similarly Derek Walcott, Naipaul’s long-standing rival, wrote in his review of the book that it affirmed “the squirarchy of club and manor,” and Naipaul’s “virulent contempt toward the island of his origin” (1987, pp. 27–8). Michael Wood, in his essay “Enigmas and Homelands,” calls Naipaul an “old-style colonial subject” in contrast to Rushdie, who Wood believes is a “new-style global citizen” (2002, p. 77). And despite urging a materially situated reading of Naipaul’s work, Selwyn R. Cudjoe argues that “[T]he task, then, of Enigma of Arrival is to describe in a painstaking and meticulous way the manner in which Naipaul arrives at and accepts the universal civilization of the western world [. . .] [T]o do so however, he must always deny the validity and authenticity of the other’s culture; hence the magic of Wiltshire” (1988, p. 222). Cudjoe unequivocally argues that Naipaul’s later work, including Enigma of Arrival “is surely and securely located within the dominant imperialist ideology and racist preoccupations of the age” (1988, p. 226). Nixon, Walcott and Cudjoe typically represent critics—largely from the excolonial world themselves—who attack what they construe as Naipaul’s imperialist politics and latent racism. Whereas these critics often regard Naipaul as merely nursing a blind love for all things English, it is important to consider that Naipaul was also a product of a colonial system which would have obliterated Trinidad’s history and encouraged a hankering for English culture. Many Caribbean writers including Jamaica Kincaid, George Lamming, Merle Hodge, Austin Clarke and Michelle Cliff have underscored this harsh reality in their work.3 But it was also a colonial system that categorically failed to offer immigrants any space within this culture. Sam



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Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) emphasizes the irony in the fact that when immigrants from the Caribbean finally arrived in England in the 1950s and 1960s to adopt the British identity they had been brought up to claim, they found that England had no place for them. Before moving to Wiltshire, Naipaul confesses that “England [. . .] had nearly broken me [him] with disappointment” (p. 169). It is only in the Wiltshire countryside that Naipaul finds respite from this disappointment through a process he declares is nothing short of a miracle: For me, a miracle had occurred in this valley and in the grounds of the manor where my cottage was. In that unlikely setting, in the ancient heart of England, a place where I was truly an alien, I found I was given a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else. (p. 103) By describing his Wiltshire experience as a “miracle,” Naipaul seems to affirm white conservative beliefs in the great historical and personal values associated with the countryside. Yet, Naipaul’s elation over his “new,” “richer and fuller” life in rural England also shrewdly reveals the limits of conservative (and Thatcherite) ideology. Conservative thinking would have asserted that the countryside had no place for him, where he “was truly an alien,” and would have ostracized him on the basis of his race as inassimilable into white British culture. Naipaul, however, challenges such racist thinking by belying claims to any inalienable racial rights to “the ancient heart of England.” By proclaiming a sense of belonging in the countryside rather than in the city, Naipaul finally overcomes the overwhelming sense of dislocation encompassed in the Trinidad sections. Despite being “a racial oddity” (p. 191) in the countryside, Naipaul establishes a tenuous postcolonial rural identity and sense of place. Notably, the Nobel Prize committee, who awarded Naipaul with the prize for literature in 2001, viewed Naipaul’s perspective as an ex-colonial as altogether uncomplicated. The committee called the novel “a masterpiece” from the point of view of “an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle” elucidating the “reality of England” to create “an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture.”4 In deeming the novel to represent the “placid collapse” of an erstwhile colonial culture embedded in the English countryside, the Nobel committee seemed to present the novel more as a “placid” meditation on the ruins of empire than a fraught



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negotiation over questions of belonging. In contrast to the postcolonial critics, the committee emphasized Naipaul’s foreignness rather than his keen attempts to mimic English country sensibilities. However, the Nobel committee’s relatively superficial analysis of The Enigma of Arrival neglects a historicized reading that situates the novel within broader political and social discourses during the late 1980s in England. Indeed, Naipaul subtly undermines Thatcherism through many of the rural figures depicted in the novel. Throughout the Wiltshire sections, Naipaul expends considerable energy portraying Bray, a white, proudly self-employed car-hire man Naipaul befriends. Naipaul believes that Bray possesses a more rooted history with the village and manor than anyone else since Bray had lived all his life in the valley and Bray’s grandfather and his father in turn had spent a lifetime “in service” in the manor. Naipaul assumes that this lineage would inspire Bray to take pride in the racial and cultural claims to the vision of heritage that Thatcherism encouraged. Yet Bray proves unexpectedly to be a “man of puzzling views, a mixture of high conservatism and wild republicanism, a worship of the rich (the users of his cars) with a hatred of inherited wealth and titles” (p. 302). Naipaul’s confusion over Bray’s apparently contradictory views represents one of the fundamental paradoxes within Thatcherism. On the one hand, Bray’s entrepreneurial initiative and pride in his self-sufficiency reflect the “high conservatism” Thatcherism encouraged. On the other hand, Bray’s “wild republicanism,” located in his loathing of landed wealth, accentuates an inherent paradox in Thatcherite ideology. Even though the aristocracy was dismissed as a hindrance to the forward-looking spirit of personal dynamism promoted by Thatcherism, at the same time, Thatcherism depended on invoking an image of aristocratic wealth in order to resurrect memories of the nation’s great past. Bray further identifies himself as a “conservative,” “a down-and-out Tory,” but Naipaul is shocked by Bray’s uncharacteristic vehemence for “titled people and old families and people of inherited wealth” (p. 245). Naipaul’s belief that any connection to the manor and its heritage—however nebulous—should be a point of pride to be embraced rather than rejected is unsettled. Through Bray, Naipaul realizes that there is no naturally imbued sense of inheritance by virtue of being white, English and being connected to the land, and that these assumed strains conflating race, biology and heritage are merely socially constructed. While this realization creates a bond between Naipaul and Bray, both men are also similar in the sense that they have also broken with their pasts and have breached the social and cultural expectations of their particular working-class backgrounds. Thus both men



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also encapsulate another fundamental paradox in Thatcherite ideology. Thatcherism champions the need to retreat into a past of imperial glory and thereby to restore a society ordered around conservative racial and class hierarchies. Yet at the same time, these traditional impulses are contradicted by a simultaneous desire to advance private industry and individual enterprise, an impulse which requires much more accommodating attitudes to class and race strictures. Toward the end of the novel, Bray surprises Naipaul by unexpectedly embracing a quasi-religious group: “Bray had joined people whom the radical conservative in him despised: workers, people looking for employment,” showing sympathy instead for “people for whom in England, even in this well-to-do part of England, there was no longer room” (p. 305). Here, Bray acts against his conservative instincts to reveal how Thatcherism’s promotion of enterprise and market capitalism also created a socially oppressive social system, marginalizing not only immigrants like Naipaul but those on the peripheries of the class and economic system. Naipaul further demonstrates the limits of Thatcherism by revealing that many rural figures in the novel undermine rather than sustain an idealized rural past. The first section of the novel, “Jack’s Garden,” traces Naipaul’s efforts to project a romantic Wordsworthian fantasy of an old peasantry onto a terminally ill gardener called Jack. Naipaul believes that Jack “seemed emanations” of “literature and antiquity” (p. 21), but Jack eventually dies from pneumonia and Naipaul’s rustic imaginings are abruptly arrested by the harsh realization of Jack’s struggle with his illness and the harsh fragility of rural life. Similarly, in the Phillips, the caretakers of the estate, Naipaul fantasizes about knowledge inherited from a lifetime spent in similar estates, serving lords and ladies of manor homes, as Bray’s father and grandfather had done in the past. However, this vision is dashed by the fact that Mr and Mrs Phillips are really townsfolk with distinctly urban tastes, and that the landlord is reduced, through ill health, to an almost infantile dependency on them. Naipaul discovers time and time again that his relationships with these rural individuals are instead marked by a departure from the past he had imaginatively nurtured, rather than through immemorial racial and cultural bonds. Naipaul further complicates these bonds by his refusal to allow the coded racial undertones imbricated in discourses of national heritage and history to restrict his own admiration and love for an imperial past. This demonstrates the novel’s double vision which consistently troubles the racist ideologies around Thatcherism. Throughout, Naipaul assumes



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a nostalgic position he would have naturally been excluded from and claims for his own the “ancient setting” and the “sense of antiquity” (p. 20) surrounding rural Wiltshire and its rural traditions, architecture and history. Writing The Enigma of Arrival is an act of creation and ownership of “this idea of historical inheritance and succession” (p. 51). Deliberately inserting himself into a rural genealogy, Naipaul reminisces about a time when “landowners and labourers and men from the small towns round about were at one, united by old country instincts” (p. 185). In evoking memories of an innate connection to the land bestowed by antiquity, glorified through history and literature and thereby ennobling those who live on it, Naipaul personifies the very spirit of Thatcherism which would necessarily have rejected him. Even though he may have no “natural” claims to this memory, by adopting it as his own, he resists its racist presuppositions and its false cultural constructions. Despite his racial and colonial identity, Naipaul inserts himself within a pastoral tradition and contradicts the assumption that the idea of nation as conceived by Thatcher is both natural and continuous. By placing himself both on the postcolonial margins and at the imperial center, and both within and without Thatcherite ideology, Naipaul suggests that belonging in England—both racially and culturally—can be an unsettled, contingent condition rather than bestowed as a birthright. However, resisting racism from within a fundamentally racist discourse necessarily limits the degree to which the racial prejudices underlying Thatcherism can be overcome. Ironically, Naipaul resists racism precisely through what Paul Gilroy has negatively termed “postimperial melancholia” in the British setting. In After Empire, Gilroy argues that “postimperial melancholia” is associated with a “guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to characterize Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers who have intruded upon it more recently” (2004, p. 98). Prominent writers such as Jeremy Paxman, Roger Scruton and Peter Ackroyd5 best express these sensibilities by targeting the landscape as the site for moral and aesthetic rearmament by expressing “a special affinity of reverence for the past and a unique English affinity for the ‘natural’ landscape” (Gilroy 2004, p. 126). Instead Naipaul’s novel suggests a much more ambiguous and nuanced relationship between immigration, race, “postimperial melancholia” and the natural landscape. When ex-colonial subjects, such as Naipaul, expressly articulate that nostalgia, the ruptures within the construction of a cohesive imperial past by a racially exclusive cultural group, such as the heritage industry, are revealed. For example,



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So I grew to feel that the grandeur belongs to the past; that I had come to England at the wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire, I had created in my fantasy. (p. 130) By virtue of the fact that he positions himself as a “provincial” and hailing “from a far corner of the empire,” Naipaul’s apparently demonstrative postimperial melancholia elucidates not the racialized historical continuities of the past so desired by the conservatives but a definitive, irrecoverable break with that constructed past. Because the novel is so preoccupied with the significance of Naipaul’s own presence on the manor grounds and the manor’s symbolic weight, the trope of the manor home affords a more focused examination of Naipaul’s paradoxical colonial nostalgia within the context of Thatcherism and heritage England. As part of the broader conservative movement that swept across British society in the 1980s, the symbol of the manor home or country estate galvanized a heritage movement which endeavored to secure the richness of the material past against the waves of economic downturn and social and institutional upheaval. During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Britain witnessed a spectacular rise in the popularity of stately homes and an interest in defending the stature of some of the nation’s most treasured heritage sites. The image of the country house served therefore as a rallying symbol around perceived threats to national stability and security.6 Even though, as an immigrant himself, Naipaul would have been seen to represent a destabilizing social force, he refuses to see the country house as merely an innocent icon for the nation’s nostalgia or as a heightened symbol of racial divisions. Throughout the novel, Naipaul thinks in nostalgic terms about the country house and the empire as interchangeable symbols. The Enigma of Arrival paves the way for later critics such as Ian Baucom who has also argued that the “country house continues to symbolize, albeit only in fragments, the ordered hegemonic, moral economy of England’s privileged classes; the heyday of British capital; the national and imperial project of identity formation; the Pax Britannica, and it is in the name of all of this forgone stature, that the passing of the glory of the country house is mourned” (1999, p. 173). It is for this glory that Baucom believes “a current generation of English nostalgics



Naipaul convincingly mimics a Thatcherite appeal to England’s greatness and grandeur:


yearns” (1999, p. 172), yet Naipaul asserts that this nostalgia need not be the exclusive domain of white Englishness. Naipaul thus appears to be captivated by his landlord’s sensibilities as something “older, even antiquated, something he had inherited, like his house, something from the days of imperial glory” (p. 212). Naipaul also acts in awe of the speech and mannerisms his landlord seems to have preserved from “a more gracious age, the age before the deluge” (p. 290). Through such sentiments, Naipaul invokes mourning for the loss of white Edwardian and Victorian imperial success memorialized by the privileged lifestyle and material extravagance of landed wealth and leisure. In doing so, he very much intuitively captures the “Brideshead revisited” spirit—a predominantly white cultural phenomenon that contributed to the momentum of the heritage movement under Thatcher. To read Naipaul’s novel as a tacit form of postcolonial resistance, it is crucial to emphasize the cultural significance of the manor home as a key signifier of a racially exclusive discourse of heritage under Thatcher. In the 1980s, the National Trust enjoyed a significant rise in membership and extended its responsibilities. Its efforts were considerably aided by The 1980 National Heritage Act which set up the English Heritage or the Historical Buildings and Monuments Commission for England and subsequently gained 400 properties under its direct responsibility. English Heritage membership increased five fold between 1985 and 1989 and under Thatcher, the Department of Environment, charged with caring for historical buildings, spent 30 million pounds on Royal Parks and Palaces in a clear statement of the desire to reinstate national pride in Britain’s royal heritage and history, and by extension, the nation’s imperial history (Bradley 1998, p. 252). The National Trust’s vocabulary, however, rather insidiously positioned heritage icons as veiled symbols for the recuperation of imperialist sensibilities and anti-immigrant feelings. Angus Stirling wrote in the National Trust’s Annual Report in 1985 that “[T]he concept of benefit deriving from the Trust’s care of much of the country’s finest landscape and buildings has special significance at this time, when the nation is so troubled by the effect of unemployment, the deprivation of inner cities and rapidity of change in society.”7 By seeming to sympathize with conservative white anxieties about the compromised state of the countryside and its endangered country estates, Naipaul has unsurprisingly inspired the ire of postcolonial critics. Yet even while Naipaul recognizes that these anxieties stem from the tide of change sweeping across the countryside, carrying himself, among others, from the colonies, he paradoxically challenges the assumption that these are only white concerns. Naipaul participates in mourning for the past



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through regret for a countryside compromised by vast industrial changes, rather than as a landscape necessarily “swamped” (to use Margaret Thatcher’s term)8 by immigrants. He argues that “Change! New ideas, new efficiency [. . .] were all aspects of the new, exaggerated thing that had come upon us” (pp. 54–5). He also expresses sorrow for a country landscape besieged by modern development for “[O]nce there would have been many hamlets, settlements of farmworkers and shepherds, near the fording places along the river. These hamlets had dwindled; they had dwindled fast with the coming of machinery” (p. 91). Naipaul thus troubles the racial cordon sanitaire which bound white nostalgia and which used the countryside as a projection of a Thatcherite sanctioned racism. Naipaul instead includes himself in a celebration of the nation’s great history. He refers to the “security” and “stability” created from the wealth of empire, encapsulated by his landlord and the estate which was “full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections to the present” (p. 15). He thus claims colonial nostalgia as his own by willfully ignoring any assumptions that the present is profoundly compromised by the very presence of immigrants. Indeed, Naipaul is quite delighted to indulge in the evidence of English identity “rooted in England, wealth, empire, the idea of glory, material satiety, a very great security” (p. 212). Nostalgia in Naipaul’s novel becomes a mode of articulating a demand for inclusion in the narrative of the nation’s past, and as such, the novel resists modes of nostalgia authorized by Thatcher. Naipaul’s nostalgia enables ownership in the national discourse through performing whiteness that in the end reconfigures the English countryside to include the image of the migrant. The Enigma of Arrival could certainly be seen to have contributed to a spate of conservative publications in the 1980s that mourned the demise of the great homes of England, placing Naipaul within a nationalist discourse which Thatcherism would have reserved for white Britons. Such publications urged the need to preserve these homes as a means of salvaging the compromised soul of the nation in what David Cannadine has termed a “cult of the country house” (1997, p. 100). “The estate had been enormous,” Naipaul notes, and “much of the wealth for the Victorian-Edwardian manor, its gardens and ancillary buildings, had come from the empire, ventures abroad. [. . .] But its glory had lasted one generation [. . .], the past had been abolished” (p. 92). Naipaul deplores the fact that “[T]he life of the manor had altered; the organization had shrunk. Needs that had once ramified as if to match the resources and organization of the big house had not been permanent. The manor too had its ruins” (p. 49). Naipaul’s sympathy



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for his increasingly dispossessed landlord could be read as a lament for postimperial Britain, whereby he joins the ranks of other conservative white writers. But by refracting his own vision/version of heritage and the manor home through his immigrant experience, Naipaul also undermines a national heritage discourse that was racially essentialized. Naipaul insinuates that immigrants from the ex-colonies should have as much right to the countryside as anyone else precisely because colonial history links him, and them, to the countryside: [F]ifty years ago there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now my presence was a little unlikely. But more than accident had brought me here. Or rather, in the series of accidents that had brought me to the manor cottage, with a view of the restored church, there was a clear historical line. The migration, within the British Empire, from India to Trinidad had given me the English language as my own. (p. 53) Naipaul thus asserts his own presence in Wiltshire and inserts colonial history within the discourse of national heritage. By arguing that the countryside and its rural iconography—the manor home, country cottages and churches—have participated in a history of empire, he disrupts the “clear historical line” of heritage and resists the exclusive racial claims to rural England defended by Thatcherite conservatives. The double vision of the ex-colonial creates dissimulating qualities in Naipaul’s style that is capable of generating multiple, even contradictory, readings. In one, arguably more simplistic reading (also the Nobel committee’s assessment of the novel), Naipaul is merely depicting the reality of the waning splendor of Britain, a fact most Thatcherites acknowledged but struggled with. This reiterates, by implication, the stark truth of Britain’s fallen imperial status which Thatcherism would use as the inspiration for change. However, a second contradictory reading also exists; if this nostalgia further justifies a need to retreat into a collective past in order to readdress the perceived failures of the present, this move is obviated by the fact that an ex-colonial has chosen to articulate these truths. In other words, change through an appeal to an idealized past which negates the reality of the present will inevitably be a doomed endeavor. As such, the novel can be read as writing against the very nostalgia it apparently promotes by demonstrating the unstable artifice upon which this nostalgia relies. Under Thatcher, the vision of the country estate as a model of society that reconciles a fragmented



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Britain rent by class and racial tensions is rendered inescapably flawed. Read together, these antithetical interpretations paradoxically affirm the racial and cultural limitations of colonial nostalgia from within the discourse of nostalgia itself, revealing Thatcher’s promotion of imperial pride based on a discourse of heritage as impossibly conceived. The Enigma of Arrival thus reveals the contradictions within the heritage industry under Thatcher and ultimately points to a postcolonial epistemology that is rendered untenable. As the ideal colonial subject who idolizes Britain and thereby justifies Thatcherite discourse, Naipaul’s own idolization points to the limits of Thatcherism since he is neither blind in his worship of empire nor unqualified in his measurement of imperial decline. Even though, within the rhetoric of Thatcherism, Naipaul’s relationship to heritage and any attempts at a “historical inheritance and succession” (p. 51) in the nation’s imperial history are immediately abrogated by his identity as an ex-colonial, Naipaul’s presence in Wiltshire and his novel both subvert and fortify conservative claims on a whole spectrum of cultural signifiers. Naipaul accepts his subject position as an ex-colonial and acknowledges his debt to empire which “in the end explained my [his] presence there in the valley, in the cottage, in the grounds of the manor” (p. 191), but he is nonetheless unwilling to be reduced to the terms imposed on him through Thatcherism. A very tentative resolution to the postcolonial quandary posed in the novel is offered at the end of The Enigma of Arrival through the spiritual awakening engendered by the death of Naipaul’s sister, Sati. Sati’s “real death” inspires Naipaul to “write very fast about Jack and his garden” (p. 354). The novel itself then becomes a testament to Naipaul’s efforts to reconnect with humanity through “a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy” (p. 354). When Naipaul returns to Trinidad for Sati’s funeral, he renews ties with his family members, reconfirming the experiences of colonialism through which he negotiates epistemological claims to knowledge that Wiltshire both affords and disavows. Naipaul is inspired to realize the fact that grand histories are frequently fabricated by recognizing the false historical assertions made by an old distant relative who attends Sati’s funeral. Naipaul reflects upon the old man’s conversations with him: History! He [the old man] had run together the events of 1498, when Columbus had discovered the island [Trinidad] for Queen Isabella on his third voyage; 1784, when the Spanish authorities, after three hundred years of neglect, and out of a wish to protect their empire,



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opened up the island to Catholic immigration, giving preference and free land to people who could bring in slaves; and 1845, when the British, ten years after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, began to bring in Indians from India to work the land. He had created a composite history. But it was enough for him. Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there. (p. 353) Naipaul realizes that the sacredness and sanctity he so desperately sought in being attune to the historical antiquity of the English countryside need not reside in grand historical narratives or in epic landscapes. Instead this “sanctity” may be found in the richness of personal relationships with individuals such as Jack and Bray and with family members. These human connections and familial links are thus privileged over any tenuous, imagined claims to historical kinship as Thatcherism advocates. The course of the novel traces Naipaul’s efforts to work through the paradox posed by his presence in Wiltshire. At the end, he learns to distance himself from a myopic identification with British heritage. Naipaul challenges Thatcherism’s propensity to bind the nation in racially exclusive terms through emphases on racial (and colonial) difference. Instead Naipaul subsumes these differences under shared human affinities. Naipaul’s desire to be included in a Conservative narrative of the nation’s past is superseded by a stronger sense of the fallacy of national myths and false idealization of heritage as a means to bind people. Thatcher’s legacy defies simple resolution and serves to demonstrate the impossibility of constructing a vision of multicultural cohesion in the face of conservative desires to secure the past through terms of racial purity. The Enigma of Arrival critiques colonial nostalgia and postimperial melancholia as manifested through the heritage industry in order to more broadly address the way in which institutional symbols of Englishness and Britishness continue to be racialized and exclusionary even as the nation continues to negotiate the terms of its multicultural society. Indeed, the ambivalence surrounding the racial dynamics of British—and more specifically English—culture cannot be eradicated within postimperial Britain. A recuperation of Naipaul’s colonial nostalgia as a veiled postcolonial critique within the context of Thatcherite orthodoxy may provide alternative interpretations of Naipaul which have been traditionally polarized around



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Naipaul’s dismissal of the ex-colonial world and his exaltation of English culture.

1. Notably, none of Naipaul’s other novels had created any significant impact with the British reading public, but The Enigma of Arrival made it to the top of the English best seller list in 1987 (Mann, p. 870). 2. Wright offers an excellent overview of the particular English sensibilities associated with a constructed vision of the past under Thatcher. See especially his Introduction in Chapter 1: Everyday Life, Nostalgia and the National Past, pp. 1–28. 3. See for example Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1997), George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1970), Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey (1988) Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack (1980) and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone To Heaven (1987). 4. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001: V. S. Naipaul. 5. See Jeremy Paxman’s The English: A Portrait of a People (1999), Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy (2000) and Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002). 6. As Robert Hewison argues, “throughout the post-war period, the country house has retained a central position as one of the definitive emblems of the British cultural tradition—principally through appeals to its ‘national’ significance in the face of economic threat” (1987, p. 71). 7. Stirling, National Trust Annual Report, 1985 cited in Aslet and Powers 1985, p. 4. 8. See details of Margaret Thatcher’s television interview in 1977 (Kavanagh 1987, p. 201).

Works cited Ackroyd, P. (2002) Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Chatto and Windus. Aslet, C. and Powers, A. (1985) The National Trust Book of the English House. Harmondsworth: Viking/National Trust. Baucom, I. (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Location of Identity. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Bradley, C. H. J. (1998) Mrs. Thatcher’s Cultural Policies, 1979–1990: A Comparative Study of the Globalized Cultural System. New York: Columbia University Press. Cannadine, D. (1997) Pleasures of the Past. London: Penguin. Clarke, A. (1980) Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Cliff, M. (1987) No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Plume. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (eds) (1991) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Cudjoe, S. R. (1988) V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Evans, E. J. (1997) Thatcher and Thatcherism. London and New York: Routledge.



Notes


Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Oxford: Routledge. Hall, S. (2005) “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “the-heritage,” Re-Imagining the Post Nation” in J. Littler and R. Naidoo (eds) The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of “Race.” Oxford: Routledge, pp. 23–35. Hall, S. (1988) “New Ethnicities.” Black Film, British Cinema. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Hodge, M. (1988) Crick, Crack, Monkey. Oxford: Heinemann. Kavanagh, D. (1987) Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? Oxford: Clarendon. Kincaid, J. (1997) Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Krieger, J. (1986) Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Decline. New York: Oxford University Press. Kureishi, H. (1990) The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. Lamming, G. (1970) In the Castle of My Skin. Trinidad and Jamaica: Longman Caribbean. Mann, H. S. (1989) V. S. Naipaul, by Richard Kelly. Reviewed in Modern Fiction Studies, 35(4) 870–1. Naipaul, V. S. (1988) The Enigma of Arrival. New York: Vintage Books. Nixon, R. (1992) London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paxman, J. (1999) The English: A Portrait of a People. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses. London: Viking. Scruton, R. (2000) England: An Elegy. London: Chatto and Windus. Selvon, S. (1956) The Lonely Londoners. London: Alan Wingate. Stirling, A. (1985) Annual Report—National Trust. London: National Trust. Su, J. J. (2005) Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Nobel Prize in Literature. (2001) V. S. Naipaul 2001, http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/press.html. Accessed 17 September 2009. Walcott, D. (1987) “The Garden Path” New Republic 13: 27–31. Wood, M. (2002) “Enigmas and Homelands” in Z. Leader (ed.) On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 77–107. Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso.



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There’s No Place like Home: Margaret Thatcher at Number 10 Downing Street Kevin A. Morrison

In 1985, marking the 250th anniversary of Downing Street as the official seat of government, Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that Number 10 is “above all, a home—and it is a house of history” (cited in Jones 1985, p. 184). Elevating the status of Number 10 to that of a national symbol, Thatcher hinted at the complex position the building holds in the discourse of public and private space. Throwing open the doors of both the offices and the residence to the British Broadcasting Corporation for a two-part televisual documentary, “No. 10 Downing Street” and “Living Above the Shop,” as well as a book, Number 10 Downing Street: The Story of a House, Thatcher declared that behind the building’s “modest façade” is a “delightful interior” that reflects Britain’s “historic greatness” (1985). In so doing she revealed a conception of Britishness as a particular kind of ornamented space. What is at stake for Britishness if national identity is equated with interior decorating? This chapter explores how the concept of “interior” helped to fashion the nation into a home during a period in which emigration to England from current and former colonies became an especially charged political issue. Thatcher’s “delightful interior,” which I read as a metonym for the nation, is structurally dependent on its opposition to an exterior—not the “modest façade” of which she speaks and to which I will return but rather Downing Street’s urban setting. Whereas some on the Left saw London as a symbol of rich cosmopolitanism, with a range of traditions and intermingling peoples whose national identity was dynamic rather than fixed, Thatcher was essentially a Little Englander who believed in preserving the cultural insularity of the so-called island nation (Evans 2004, p. 78; Letwin 1992, p. 45). In a 1978 interview with the current affairs program World in Action, she validated the 115



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If we went on as we are, then by the end of the century there would be 4 million people of the New Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture, and you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and order, and so much throughout the world, that if there is a fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in. (cited in Krieger 1986, p. 76) Expressing her empathy for and solidarity with those frightened by the prospect of a significant change in the country’s ethnic makeup, Thatcher drew on the idiom of home. Built on a foundation of inclusions and exclusions, interior and exterior, home is “the desired place that is fought for and established as the exclusive domain of the few” (George 1996, p. 9). Thatcher presents the homeland of Britain as vulnerable by contrasting the bound and ordered space of the nation with an ocean of foreignness.1 If interior and home are synonymous terms in reference to the nation, they are also connected to an obvious geopolitical concept: the domestic (as opposed to the foreign). As Amy Kaplan contends, “domestic” and “foreign” are “not neutral and legal descriptions, but heavily weighted metaphors imbued with racialized and gendered associations of home and family, outsider and insider, subjects and citizens” (2002, p. 3). “Domestic has a double meaning that links the space of the familial household to that of the nation,” she observes, “by imagining both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of home” (p. 25). Hence the distinction between foreign and domestic policy, spatially organized by a Home and a Foreign Office, each with its own corresponding ministerial posts, is only intelligible if the nation is conceptualized as a domestically configured space and everything outside its borders as alien and potentially menacing. While an interior, a limit that is figured as spatial, can take structural form through borders and boundaries, and is therefore ordered, an exterior is boundless and amorphous—much like the tidal wave of immigrants that Thatcher evoked. Even when “interior” is used in reference to an intangible concept, such as an inward nature or soul, it is limited by the human corporeal frame that contains it. Thus, to



xenophobic anxieties among a large swathe of the electorate who considered immigration to be directly tied to rising urban violence:

the distinction between domestic and foreign, which helps to fashion Englishness through the related metaphorical associations of domesticity, home, and nation, we should add the cognate terms “interior” and “exterior.” A breakdown between interiors and exteriors leads to a sense of disorientation, loss, even trauma. The switch-point between the two registers, such as the English street overrun by violent immigrants, constitutes a kind of wound to the national psyche. Mark Seltzer uses the term “wound culture” as a way of indexing the contemporary public’s fascination with moments of conflation between interiors and exteriors, torn and open bodies, the public and the private, representation and reality (1988, p. 264). By speciously linking crime to immigration (rather than, say, to lack of economic opportunity) in her World in Action interview, Thatcher insinuated that a singular and distinctive British culture with its characteristic commitment to law and order was imperiled by those seeking to emigrate to the UK. This is what we might call Thatcher’s wound culture, in which the looming threat of trauma and injury is not only repeatedly invoked in speeches and in the news but is a crucial aspect of the subjectivities and the social formation her policies sought to craft. Because home is conceptualized in terms of its opposite, David Morley and Kevin Robins argue, it is principally “about sustaining cultural boundaries and boundedness. The ‘Other’ is always and continuously a threat,” they conclude, “to the security and integrity of those who share a common home” (1995, p. 89). Thatcher made this threat especially clear in one of her final speeches during the 1978 general election campaign in which she proclaimed: “Let us make this a country safe to walk in . . . [M]ay this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again” (cited in Butler & Kavanagh 1980, p. 195). This view, which invoked the “peace” so often associated with domestic retreat, resonated not only with Conservatives of Thatcher’s ilk but also with significant numbers of traditional Labour supporters, particularly in the aftermath of the Bristol, Liverpool, and London race riots of 1980–1.2 For all of them, the notion that the cosmopolitan metropolis might serve as a symbol of national identity was both illogical and incoherent.3 In other words, the metropolis was analogically related to the foreign and the exterior, and the “delightful interior” of Downing Street was related to the home and the nation. However, unlike Enoch Powell, the Conservative Member of Parliament whose notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech warned of the threatening influx of immigration, Thatcher saw the potential for immigrants to assimilate.4 Her own constituency of Finchley, a large percentage



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of whose members were Jewish and solidly conservative, provided the model. During her first few years in office, Thatcher sought to eliminate what she saw as the threat to the stability of a British character that depended on the notion of cultural unity (a united kingdom) posed by the four million immigrants from the New Commonwealth and Pakistan. She pursued two successive goals: The first was to pass the British Nationality Act of 1981, which distinguished between British subjects, who would, in the idiom of home, have the right of abode, and Commonwealth citizens, who would not. The second was to propagate assimilationist policies zealously. This goal was perhaps best represented by a 1983 election campaign poster of a black man with the caption: “Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British” (see Sewell 1998, p. 99). The cultivation of a cohesive Britishness that would replace any other identification was seen as the proper response to immigration; rising nationalist sentiment in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland; and European integration. Benedict Anderson has famously argued that modern nations are made or remade less through militaristic activities than through “images of communion” (1983, p. 15). Although Anderson fails to appreciate the ways in which competing symbols of the nation vie for supremacy, his notion of the “imagined community” remains useful for understanding how public edifices come to serve as particularly powerful focal points for national consciousness. These “images of communion” constitute the primary means by which national sentiments are fostered among a population whose members will never meet or hear about one another. In the dreams of intimacy and safety that the Thatcherite cultural discourse of interiors and exteriors engenders, foreigners are barred from entering the nation as home and those who already live within its borders are rigorously assimilated. Such dreams, I suggest, coalesced around Downing Street as it became mobilized against other competing symbols, such as the ethnically diverse metropolitan center.5 Like a modern-day Isabella Beeton, whose phenomenally successful book on household management (1861) had encouraged Victorian women to cultivate a national and class consciousness through their daily domestic tasks and rituals, Thatcher sought, in the physical and imaginary spaces of Number 10, a small portion of the nation that could be governed by the Victorian values she saw as a source for moral and social stability, to realize and preserve the dream of intimacy and safety by crafting a strong British identity and evoking yet redrawing the boundaries of gender roles.



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In what follows I consider the surprisingly understudied function of Number 10 as an icon of Britishness that served to anchor the “imagined community” of Thatcher’s island nation. Produced and directed by Jenny Barraclough and written and narrated by Christopher Jones, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent for radio and television news from 1964 to 1989 who also penned the companion piece, “No. 10 Downing Street” and “Living Above the Shop” offered a national audience its first sustained glimpse into the historic building. Following the format of the documentary, the remaining two sections of this chapter focus respectively on Number 10’s public and private spaces and on the role that representations of them played in fashioning an “image of communion.” While my discussion of the private spaces of Number 10 forwards an argument about the gendering of national identity, I begin by considering how the discourses of national and racial identity inflect the historic building’s public spaces.

At home with Britishness When Thatcher exclaimed to a crowd of jubilant thousands on the completion of military operations in the Falklands that the lesson to be derived from the experience was “that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities that shine through our history,” she invoked the notion of an organic nation, steeped in tradition and secure in its character (cited in Weight 2002, p. 624). The figurative terminology that she used in this context, the “sterling qualities” of the British, describes these heroic and valiant characteristics not only as historically continuous—metaphorically relating them to a form of currency that has existed since Norman times—but also as distinctly English. Although I might be willing to ascribe this wording to simple insouciance, as some critics have done, Thatcher repeatedly used the more capacious term of Britishness, even as she restricted its meaning to Englishness, in the discourse of the nation as home.6 Take, for example, her efforts to restore national pride through the “rediscovery” of British history and sites of common heritage. These sites and the artifacts contained within them were designated as part of the nation’s cultural inheritance and extended beyond the borders of England itself to include Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Yet the country house—the symbol of these efforts to preserve cultural inheritance— was quintessentially English.7 Indeed, the country house, an emergent veneration of which was already discernible in the late 1950s, came to stand during a period of economic and imperial decline as a reminder





of what national life had been and should be—stable, secure, ethnically homogenous, and proud. The country house was a particularly effective symbol for this constellation of desires because it was considered to be “the chief national artistic achievement” (Waugh 1960, p. 10). It functioned as a kind of synecdoche: a part of England was made to stand for the nation as a whole, and its characteristics of stability, security, ethnic homogeneity, and pride were taken to be essentially British. Other Conservative figures preceded Thatcher in their belief that physical edifices could stand as visible symbols of national identity. Yet many of these individuals did not hesitate to use the less inclusive term “English.” During his tenure as Conservative prime minister between 1970 and 1974, Edward Heath had presided over an elaborate restoration of Number 10. As Heath explained to Jones in “No. 10 Downing Street,” “Having visited so many places in the capitals of Europe and elsewhere, seeing the beautiful treasures which they [had] . . . I became convinced that Number 10 ought to be representative of English culture” (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). With its walls covered in silk and its pieces of historic furniture brought in from museums, Downing Street was restored to its likeness in the days of Sir Robert Walpole—King George II’s principal minister, who took up residence as the First Lord of the Treasury, the official capacity in which all prime ministers have subsequently occupied it. Although Heath sought through this decorative scheme to fashion Number 10 into an image of communion, it took Thatcher, in the great upswing of heritage culture and capitalizing on the fetish of the country house, to clearly link interior decorating to nationalist rhetoric. Once in office, Thatcher, eager to restore “dignity and greatness” to the physical home that she sought to fashion as an icon of national identity, decreed that the portraits of national achievers should line the walls of Number 10. Her insistence that the work of important artists should decorate its rooms was part of her effort to foreground what she saw as the “continuity and dignified authority” that pervaded “every nook and cranny of this complicated and meandering old building” (Thatcher 1985). But she took a different rhetorical tack from Heath by emphasizing Britishness rather than Englishness. “I felt strongly,” she explained in her memoir, “that when foreign visitors come to Downing Street they should see something of Britain’s cultural heritage” (Thatcher 1993, p. 24). As Bernard Ingham, the chief press secretary under all three of her governments, recounts, soon after defeating the Labour prime minister James Callaghan at the polls, “Thatcher strove to make Number 10 a national display of our arts



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and history” (Ingham 1991, p. 208). This more capacious sense of a contemporary British cultural heritage, however, is in fact delimited by the primarily English historical artifacts that she chose to represent it. Working with museum and gallery curators to secure loans of various cultural artifacts for the state rooms, Thatcher and her staff oversaw the redecoration of Number 10 using “works by contemporary British artists and sculptors, as well as those of the past” (Thatcher 1993, p. 24). The Small Dining Room was decorated with portraits of three eminent scientists—Edmond Halley, Joseph Priestley, and Humphry Davy—along with a marble bust of Isaac Newton, perhaps in a nod to the portfolio Thatcher held as Secretary of State for Education and Science during the Heath government. Portraits of political figures, including Peel and Nelson (the latter a particular hero of Thatcher’s), were selected for the Blue Drawing Room, where the prime minister receives guests at formal receptions and dinners. Staffordshire figurines of Gladstone, Wellington, Disraeli, Peel, and Cobden as well as paintings by J. M. W. Turner were selected to adorn the White Drawing Room. The long corridor that leads to the Cabinet Room was decorated with portraits of the leading Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry and the actor and manager David Garrick, as well as a reclining sculpture figure designed by Henry Moore. “You could feel the continuity of British history,” Thatcher enthused on completing the transformation of the interior (Thatcher 1993, p. 24). Using the inclusive term “Britishness,” Thatcher assumed a more welcoming posture than her predecessor. Her stance correlated with certain Victorian notions of female hospitality—the means by which nineteenth-century women entered the public sphere as women while also affirming social hierarchies. Indeed, Thatcher’s substitutive logic—in which English paintings, porcelain, and sculpture are placed in the context of a national culture that is otherwise defined as British—is intimately associated with domesticity. Thatcher cast an image of the nation as a hospitable home delimited by its distinctly English interior. Referring less to a condition of stasis than to a state of vigilant activity, domesticity entails “conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien” (Kaplan 2002, p. 25). The homogeneity of the national community Thatcher evoked was premised on a notion of historical durability rather than change, assumed the orderly assimilation of cultures different from but similar to one’s own, and was based on, if nothing else, geographic propinquity. By nationalizing a story of England’s cultural and scientific distinctions and achievements through the minutiae of home decorating, Thatcher incorporated Scotland, Wales, and Ireland into the common history





that she wanted to tell. This made possible the notion of an island nation, distinct from the threatening cultures of the commonwealth. National identity thus trumped regional and cultural differences.8 If domesticity implies “conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien,” as the assimilation of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish cultures into a narrowly conceived Britishness suggests, then to what extent do these traces remain legible in the public spaces of Downing Street? Since Thatcher’s “delightful interior” synecdochically stands for the whole, the absence of Scottish, Welsh, or Irish artifacts from this national space goes unregistered. Englishness, in the context of contemporaneous debates about devolution, is presented here as the distinctive thread that weaves together the fabric of the nation. This has, of course, always been the essence of the imperial dream: an England unaffected by its empire, and an Englishness that remains forever and eternally unchanged despite the incorporation of other identities that make up the so-called multinational nation state. It is in the modest spaces of Downing Street, a representative instance of which I will shortly analyze, that the phantoms of other imperial conquests haunt the enclosed interior of home and nation. Modesty was another one of those Victorian—perennial and essentially English—values that Thatcher so prized.9 A discourse of humility was the visual and rhetorical means by which Downing Street as a symbol of historical continuity was framed. “It is modest compared with houses of other prime ministers,” Thatcher told Jones. “I have seen some very grand ones, much grander than this. But, you know, history matters more than grandeur. And we have the history” (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). The distinction that Thatcher drew between history and grandeur—which can all too easily manifest itself as haughtiness or arrogance—equates the former with temporality and the latter with spatiality. Whereas “grandeur” in this context refers to an opulence and splendor that is distinctly visible and located, “history” suggests an extensive and distinguished cultural heritage (the “continuity and dignified authority” of which Thatcher spoke) that accumulates over time. It is something that one feels or lives, not something that one displays. Paradoxically, however, history can be understood only through the humble spaces and objects that evoke it. But this history is partial and circumscribed. It is a celebration of the past that elides its darker elements. Consider, for example, Christopher Jones’s singling out of the Cabinet Room, in his handsomely illustrated book on Number 10, as a particularly redolent historical space: “Many companies have boardrooms which are far more grand and expensively



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furnished and decorated but none of them has, even remotely, the history this room contains” (1985, p. 160). The simple, tasteful, and evocative decorations confer on the room a kind of auratic charge. “Without its immense historical connections,” Jones observes, “it would seem simply a rather large, bright and well-proportioned room, lit by high windows” (1985, p. 160). The original solid-mahogany chairs upholstered in tan-colored leather that date back to Disraeli’s and Gladstone’s time cluster around an imposing 25-foot table with the prime minister’s seat situated in the middle. A portrait of Robert Walpole is positioned directly behind the prime minister’s chair, above the mantel of the fireplace, as if to suggest the unbroken continuity of British governance. “Like so much about No. 10, the Cabinet Room,” “the very centre of power and authority in Britain,” Jones concludes, is “understated and undramatic” (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). The terms power and authority are here evacuated of their actual historical referents—the human costs that made a United Kingdom and a global empire possible—so that one is left with a vague but distinct satisfaction in all that Britain has accomplished without a critical understanding of the nation’s history. This version of history, rewritten to support an assimilationist agenda that could not, of course, ask formerly colonized subjects, including New Commonwealth immigrants, to celebrate their own past domination, focuses on art and decorative objects rather than on military conquest and exploitation. In his ruminations, Jones makes only the vaguest of references to Downing Street’s imperial past. Observing that near the entrance to the Cabinet Room is a long-case wooden clock with the inscription Ind Bd, he notes that the India Board once operated out of the government offices on Downing Street. Without an accompanying explanation of the board’s responsibilities for supervising the East India Company, Downing Street’s significant role in Indian imperial administration is displaced onto a wooden clock whose “chiming mechanism [is] turned to ‘silent’” (Jones 1985, p. 160). This silent clock, a symbol of the muting of Britain’s violent past, is an apt metaphor for monumental spaces as theorized by Henri Lefebvre. In these spaces, Lefebvre writes, “[b]rutal reality . . . is replaced by a materially realized appearance” (1991, p. 221). “To the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice,” he observes, “the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror” (1991, p. 222). Jones’s presentation of the Cabinet Room as a monument to British greatness, however humble it may be in





appearance, reflects the way in which such spaces always transform reality into a kind of outward show. The temporal narrative of history, then, is registered through the humble space and “modest façade” of the Cabinet Room. The rhetoric of modesty, so ostentatious in its repeated insistence, is therefore the mode through which the historical past is aggrandized. Modesty preserves both a respect for the past and the continuity of tradition that the objects within Number 10 are supposed to symbolize. Throughout the two-part documentary, Downing Street is described by various public figures as a row house on an unassuming cul-de-sac that is itself located in an unfashionable part of London on an obscure side street off Whitehall. Although Number 10 was erected in the eighteenth century, the simplicity and restraint of its façade lent itself to the Thatcherite discursive romance with Victorian values. In so doing, it also implicitly evokes that era’s imperial project. Although Jones’s vague references to power and authority obfuscate it, the rhetoric of modesty has long been linked to imperialism. A popular souvenir book that circulated throughout the 1950s, during the period in which the empire began to be dismantled, notes that most people are “astonished” when they see that so “unpretentious [a] house” can serve as the “nerve center of the commonwealth” (Pictorial Illustration c. 1956, p. 1). The implication is that the edifice itself reflects that quintessentially Victorian principle of self-help that Thatcher herself would later extol: from modest beginnings, a world empire.

Life above the shop Just as the BBC televisual documentary shifts from the historical aspects of Number 10 in one segment to the way that Thatcher, as the thencurrent occupant, inhabited its public and private spaces in another, I will now consider the private dimension and tease out some of its implications for rallying an audience around a certain conception of Britishness. The somewhat ironic title of the documentary’s second part, “Living above the Shop,” suggests that domesticity and upward mobility were aspects of the televisual narrative of Thatcher’s inhabitation of Number 10 that both she and the BBC production sought to emphasize. Thatcher’s personal story of upward mobility is clearly linked in the documentary to her gender and her desire to put the “great” back in Great Britain. Until Edward Heath’s election as leader, the Conservative party was dominated by aristocratic figures. The son of a builder, Heath represented a new era in which the accession to a leadership post in



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the party was tied to meritocratic achievement rather than familial wealth or connections. But if Heath’s election was intended to signal the Conservative party’s entry into modernity, it failed miserably. Many viewed him as unapproachable, insensitive to the needs and concerns of ordinary Britons, and, as a bachelor in his early 50s, sexually suspect. His aloofness is captured in the juxtaposition between his views of Downing Street’s private flat and Thatcher’s. Dismissing the apartment, which was built in a portion of the attic, as “unsatisfactory” and “badly designed,” Heath complains principally about its lack of a drawing room—hardly a concern that would be shared by the populace (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). Alluding to Thatcher’s upbringing in Grantham above the grocery store owned by her father, “Living above the Shop” immediately frames the prime minister as down-to-earth. The private flat is, according to Thatcher, more than comfortable, although Jones describes it in the documentary as “understated” and “positively pokey by international standards.” It is, she admitted, a place “where the staff used to live, many years ago. But we love it.” “We feel at home here,” she exclaimed (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). This connection between Thatcher and the staff, spatially forged through inhabitation of the same private quarters, is reinforced by the film’s opening. Images of the employees mopping the front steps to Number 10, polishing the iconic entrance’s brass plate, on which “First Lord of the Treasury” is embossed, and sweeping the interior staircase are interspersed with shots of Thatcher preparing her simple breakfast of instant coffee and a “large dose of vitamin C” in the private flat’s kitchen: JONES: No one could call this a particularly grand kitchen . . . THATCHER: No, it isn’t. It isn’t. And you’ll see what I mean. There’s absolutely no way in which you could eat in here because there’s no place where you could get a small table in. I have always longed for a really lovely kitchen, which I’ve never really had—one that would go straight out onto a patio where you could eat breakfast. (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986) Thatcher’s confessed inability to eat breakfast in this space without a small table and her longing for a patio reflect a distinctly uppermiddle-class disposition that provides a jarring contrast with the workers whose labor opens the film. Yet by foregrounding Thatcher’s lack of a capacious kitchen and her unfulfilled wish for the sort of





space she has “never really had,” the scene suggests an ordinariness both about her morning routine and her consumer desires. The flat, as Jones describes it, is similar to a “home for a successful businessman, perhaps, in mid-career” (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). Thatcher is, therefore, framed as triumphant—she is, after all, prime minister—but still living above the shop and remaining one of the people, occupying cramped quarters once associated with staff and now only comparable to a place in which a middle manager might live. The rapidity and efficiency with which Thatcher makes her coffee, foregoing tea because it takes longer to prepare, so that she can get on with the tasks of the day, also undercuts a reading of this opening scene as solely about staging class difference. For even if Thatcher had a kitchen that opened out onto a lovely patio, the strenuous work ethic on display here points to an essential similarity to the cleaning women mopping the street and sweeping the stairwell and the majordomo polishing the name plate on the front door. This scene, then, invites the viewer to identify with the respectable and the socially ascendant—that is to say, with the images of Britishness that the film crafts in a montage of hard work. Reasserting the familiar Victorian values of prudence and a disciplined work ethic, these images evoke the possibility of rising to a higher rank of society. In so doing, this presentation supports an ideology of cultural assimilation in two ways: it asks individuals to think of themselves as individuals, rather than as part of a larger demographic group, thereby obscuring how class, ethnicity, or gender might differently configure one’s economic and social opportunities; and yet, paradoxically, it also invites individuals to identify with one another as part of a new collective of the consumptive and the upwardly mobile.10 In highlighting the domestic labor undertaken by women, including the prime minister, the documentary explores the extent to which Thatcher’s gender affected the Conservative narrative of upward mobility.11 Born during an era in which the possibility of social and economic ascent for women was extremely limited, Thatcher lamented that her own mother “was weighed down by the home” (cited in Webster 1990, p. 20). Yet Thatcher herself was a staunch supporter of traditional notions of family and gender. She reveled in her domestic roles of housewife and mother and frequently advised women in interviews on how to make parenting and domesticity priorities in their lives. While many commentators have addressed what they see as a tension between Thatcher’s dual role as a housewife and a prime minister,



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I argue that Thatcher removed any inherent conflict between her public and private personas by reconfiguring the basis of this division. In Jürgen Habermas’s classic formulation, the private and the public are dialectically opposed. The private sphere and the family that dwells therein provide a “scene of psychological emancipation that . . . [corresponds] to the political economic one” (1989, p. 46). Scholars have frequently argued that in making the home a precondition for life in the public sphere Habermas casts the latter as an essentially male domain. For example, the home, in Doreen Massey’s view, emerges as a “stable symbolic centre,” constructed as the woman’s province, while the realm of civil society is coded as masculine (1994, p. 180). Thatcher’s visual and verbal rhetoric, however, foregrounds the way in which homemaking is essential to the cultivation of a national and class consciousness that can compete with more dynamic notions, such as those symbolized by London’s teeming streets. Because the domestic sphere plays a crucial role in anchoring notions of gender, Downing Street became the nexus at which the discourses of gender, class, and nation coincided. Throughout both the BBC documentary and the accompanying book, viewers and readers are reminded that Thatcher, despite having obtained a position of worldhistorical importance, had a more firmly fixed role as a housewife with middle-class sensibilities. Emphasizing the way in which she presided over the private residence, situated in the attic of Number 10, Jones notes: “Prime Ministers’ wives have reacted very differently to the private flat. Lady Wilson found it sunless and cutoff; Mrs Callaghan found it sunny and welcoming. Mrs Thatcher has made it very much her own” ( Jones 1985, p. 180). Here Thatcher is presented in the domestic space of the private flat not as the prime minister who happens to be a woman but rather as one of several wives who have occupied that space—signified by the use of the conventional title of courtesy (Mrs) rather than the honorific designating the office that she holds. But unlike the classic distinction between the public and the private that is applicable to the wives of other prime ministers, Thatcher inhabited both domains: she frequently delighted in pointing out that the latter had especially equipped her to assume the duties of the former. Indeed, Thatcher cultivated, and the media helped produce, an image of home as the ground of possibility for her public responsibilities. Especially during her first term, she propagated homemaking as crucially connected to political governance: “Any woman who understands the problem of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country” (cited in Blundell 2008, p. 193).





In this formulation, domestic management begets state management. “As every housewife knows,” was a phrase that Thatcher often used in speaking about the priorities of the state’s budget or defending free-market ideology.12 This rhetoric of “commonsense” enabled her government to make massive cuts to the welfare state while cultivating a “can do” spirit in the population most directly affected. Indeed, Ros Blunt points out that by framing her policies in terms of everyday experience—“the realm of the housewife, of putting the best face on it . . . of care with the household budget” (Brunt 1987, p. 24)—Britons were asked to make great sacrifices to get national home affairs in order.13 Thatcher’s preparation in the private sphere for her assumption of a public role serves another purpose, more closely tied to my argument. Women are placed at the center of Thatcher’s formulation of the nation as home in two ways: their common sense is invoked when sacrifices need to be made, and their thoughtfulness in furnishings and décor is seen as essential to preserving the nation’s heritage from the threat of cultural alterity that she invoked in her World in Action interview. In the documentary, when discussing with Thatcher her vision of transforming Number 10 into a showcase of British art and scientific achievements, Jones comments: “Sounds like a housewife’s dream to be able to go through these great cases [at various museums and select which pieces you would like].” Thatcher responds: “Oh, they won’t let you have the best, they hide it when you go around” (Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History 1986). Thatcher’s role as housewife and prime minister are here conflated in the image of her out shopping for the best art and furnishings to decorate the interior spaces of Number 10 as a kind of national home. Perhaps, Thatcher ruminated to Jones, she is, as a woman, more attentive to such details as furnishings and art than a man would be. Essentially, Thatcher’s version of British domesticity, with its gendered associations, as well as the values of which she spoke so frequently, were less explicitly Victorian than they were “creative reworking[s],” as Corner and Harvey argue, “of old themes in the context of new realities and imperatives”—the purpose of which was representing “national identity for a post-imperial age” (1991, p. 9). This new identity, under the umbrella term “domesticity,” combined thrift and hard work, familial respectability, and consumption. More a vigilant practice than an achieved stasis, Thatcherian domesticity was offered up as a source of moral and social stability and as the means of securing intimacy and safety in the face of looming threats such as immigration. From her desire for a spacious kitchen that opens out onto a patio to her decorative schemes and attention to detail, Thatcher modeled the



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kind of citizenship through consumptive practices that was the bedrock of her economic philosophy.14 This philosophy, she claimed, was “colour-blind” and thus entirely consistent with her culturally assimilationist view. “It was part of my credo,” she once wrote, displaying yet again her Victorian frame of mind, “that individuals were worthy of respect as individuals, not as members of classes or races; the whole purpose of the political and economic system I favoured was to liberate the talents of those individuals for the benefits of society” (1995, p. 406). Consistent with the market-oriented society that the government’s policies were helping to construct, Downing Street was made available for cultural consumption. In her introduction to Number 10 Downing Street: The Story of a House, Thatcher consciously presented the building as a commodity: How much I wish that the public—the people, after all, on whose behalf No 10 exists—could see beyond that famous front door, could share with me the great enjoyment that I am now privileged to derive from the elegant rooms of the house . . . Alas, that cannot be, but I am delighted that, through the medium of this book, with its many photographs and pictures of the house both past and present, they will at least be able to see that delightful interior . . . [of a] very special place in our national life. We are all left peering behind the famous front door, invited to see in—but not to enter its privileged spaces—and, by way of portable (and private) icons of Britishness, to identify with others as part of Thatcher’s national community.

Conclusion: Downing Street and wound culture If we take Downing Street as a metonym for the nation, then Thatcher’s “delightful interior” and the dream of intimacy and safety that she crafts through asserting a British identity governed by Victorian values, contrasted with a threatening pluralism, and through redrawing gender boundaries, bars entry to us all. We gather, not unlike the crowd around a car crash in Seltzer’s analysis of wound culture, fascinated by the spectacle of inclusion. As spectators, we shuttle back and forth between images of public urban violence spawned by lax immigration policies and images of private—domestic, national—peace. This movement, representing the extent to which real life has become penetrated by representation, exacerbates the wound. Indeed, although ostensibly





offered as a way of salving the national psyche, the opening up of the private interior of Number 10 to the public exterior perpetuates the very trauma it seems intended to address. Downing Street is a place accessible only through instruments of representation and reduplication. Healing is endlessly deferred, rather than realized, through the consumption of objects: a televisual documentary, a subsequently purchasable VHS recording, a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. But this deferment is at least partly the point of one strand of Thatcherism, which sought to create a new social formation by offering people various cultural identities within which they could live their lives as consumers, decorators, and homemakers (Leadbeater 1989, p. 17). By collecting these portable icons, a phantom nation gathers around scenes of Britishness in the act of private consumption.

Notes 1. See Gikandi (1996), who has pointed out that Britons generally take pride in their imperial past yet see one of its aftereffects, the increased number of colonial or former colonial subjects emigrating to the metropole, as both threatening and potentially destabilizing. 2. See Bachelard, who provides the classic account of home as a cradle—a “felicitous space” of stability and protection in which one is “well and happily” housed (1994, pp. xxxv, 10). 3. Following Thatcher’s remarks on World in Action, the Conservative party’s favorability ratings increased by more than nine percent (Krieger 1986, p. 125). In the 1979 election, unskilled manual workers, usually providing solid Labour support, moved farther to the right in percentage terms than any other social group. Trade unionists and youth voted in significant numbers for the Conservatives as well (Gould 1998, p. 20). 4. As Parekh notes, “Although not entirely happy with blacks and Asians and the concomitant cultural pluralism, she took the view that they can and should be assimilated into the British “stock” and way of life” (2000, p. 101). Thus, as Smith sums up this position, Thatcher “was far more effective in representing her racist views as the moderate position which stood between extremist demands on both the right and the left” (1994, p. 179). 5. I endorse Elizabeth K. Helsinger’s critique of Anderson’s imagined communities, which observes that, “A narrative of nation making that includes unmaking, asserting and contesting, constructing and dissolving ideas of collective identity may more closely approximate historical experience” (1997, p. 11). 6. The meanings of Britishness and Englishness have been contested by a number of critics including Samuel (1998, p. 21), Evans (cited in Pittock 1999, p. 10), and Colley (1994, p. 6). New Labour has propagated the “current small vogue for the idea of Britishness” as an antidote to Thatcher’s conflation of



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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

Englishness with home (Samuel 1998, p. 21). To a great extent, however, the party has been redefining a term that Thatcher herself used quite frequently, although in a far less inclusive sense, to denote Englishness. The country house is one of the key spaces of Englishness theorized by Baucom 1999, especially pp. 164–89. For discussions about the place of the country house in debates on heritage, see Hewison 1995, 1997; Mandler 1997; and Wright 1985. As the Conservative commentator Ferdinand Mount notes, “When a politician invokes ‘national identity’, he is not referring to something fixed and ‘pre-political’; on the contrary, he is helping to make something, often by manipulation of the evidence of history or geography, and what he makes may well have a momentous impact on events for good or ill” (cited in Ali 1991, p. 210). I refer to her famous interview with London’s Evening Standard about what she had learned from her “Victorian grandmother”: “[W]e were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught selfreliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness was next to godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values” (cited in Samuel 1992, pp. 13–14). Meritocratic advancement was one of the primary vehicles by which the Conservative party sought, as Charlie Leadbeater has argued, “to align itself with rising social groups” (1989, p. 17). For differently focused explorations of the significance of Thatcher’s gender to her politics, see Nunn 2002 and Warner 1987. This phrase, part of Thatcher’s strategic femininity, recurred in a variety of settings during her first term (1979a, 1979b; see also Campbell 1987, pp. 233–47). Although Thatcher deployed a more militant persona following the Falklands conflict, as several critics have pointed out, she also continued to emphasize her femininity when politics required it—from her appearance on “The Englishwoman’s Wardrobe,” in which she discussed her taste in clothing and spoke of her “thrift and inherited skills as a dressmaker’s daughter” (cited in Cockerell 1988, p. 310) to her appearance in “No. 10 Downing Street” and “Living Above the Shop.” Thatcher’s tendency to frame policies in terms of everyday experience could first be glimpsed as early as 1975, when she told a crowd of Shipley Conservatives that “Perhaps it takes a housewife to see that Britain’s national housekeeping is appalling” (1975). Campbell argues that “Rather than waging an ideological offensive to consign women to their separate sphere within the home, thus reuniting women and the family, Thatcherism was concerned with something bigger than both of them: the family as the anchor of the new right’s anti-statism and economic liberalism. Citizens were to realize themselves not in their social being, not through politics, but through consumerism” (1987, p. 159). Under Thatcher, personal consumption grew between 1982 and 1987 by 4.6 percent, doubling what it had been for the past 20 years (Peacock 1999, p. 23).




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Ali, Y. (1991) “Echoes of Empire: Towards a Politics of Representation” in J. Corner and S. Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London: Routledge. pp. 194–211. Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon. Baucom, I. (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blundell, J. (2008) Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady. New York: Algora. Brunt, R. (1987) “Thatcher Uses Her woman’s Touch.” Marxism Today (June) 22–4. Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. (1980) The British General Election of 1979. London: Macmillan. Campbell, B. (1987) Iron Ladies: Why do Women Vote Tory? London: Virago. Cockerell, M. (1988) Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television. London: Faber. Colley, L. (1994) Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. London: Pimlico. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (1991) “Introduction: Great Britain Limited” in J. Corner and S. Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London: Routledge. pp. 1–20. Evans, E. J. (2004) Thatcher and Thatcherism. London: Routledge. George, R. M. (1996) The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and TwentiethCentury Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gikandi, S. (1996) Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Gould, P. (1998) The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers saved the Labour Party. London: Little. Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. T. Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press. Helsinger, E. K. (1997) Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hewison, R. (1995) Culture and Consensus: England, Art, and Politics since 1940. London: Methuen. Hewison, R. (1997) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Ingham, B. (1991) Kill the Messenger. London: HarperCollins. Jones, C. (1985) Number 10 Downing Street: The Story of a House. London: BBC. Kaplan, A. (2002) The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Krieger, J. (1986) Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Decline. Cambridge: Polity Press. Leadbeater, C. (1989) “New Times: Back to the Future.” Marxism Today (May) 12–17. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Malden: Blackwell. Letwin, S. R. (1992) The Anatomy of Thatcherism. London: Fontana.



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Mandler, P. (1997) The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. New Haven: Yale University Press. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. London: Polity. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity, Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge. Number 10 Downing Street: A Unique Film History. 1986 (video recording), London: BBC. Nunn, H. (2002) Thatcher, Politics, and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Parekh, B. (2000) “Defining British National Identity.” Political Quarterly 71(1) 4–14. Peacock, D. K. (1999) Thatcher’s Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties. Westport: Greenwood. Pictorial Illustration of No. 10 Downing Street (c. 1956) London: Pitkin. Pittock, M. (1999) Celtic Identity and the British Image. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Samuel, R. (1992) “Mrs. Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values” in T. C. Smout (ed.) Victorian Values: A Joint Symposium of Edinburgh and the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 9–29. Samuel, R. (1998) Theatres of Memory, vol. 2.: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. London: Verso. Seltzer, M. (1988) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge. Sewell, T. (1998) Keep on Moving: The Windrush Legacy: The Black Experience in Britain since 1948. London: Voice. Smith, A. M. (1994) New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality, 1968–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thatcher, M. (1975) Speech to Shipley Conservatives, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches. Accessed June 21, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1979a) Speech to Conservative rally in Darlington, http://www. margaretthatcher.org/speeches. Accessed June 21, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1979b) TV interview for Granada, Bolton 500, http://www. margaretthatcher.org/speeches. Accessed June 21, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1985) “Preface, by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Margaret Thatcher, MP,” in C. Jones, Number 10 Downing Street: The Story of a House. London: BBC. Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years. London: HarperCollins. Thatcher, M. (1995) The Path to Power. London: HarperCollins. Warner, M. (1987) Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of Female Form. London: Picador. Waugh, E. (1960) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. London: Methuen. Webster, W. (1990) Not a Man to Match Her: The Marketing of a Prime Minister. London: Women’s Press. Weight, R. (2002) Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000. London: Macmillan. Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso.








Part II After





6 Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi

This chapter explores key political and popular discursive features of the so-called “underclass” since Thatcherism. In doing so it offers a consideration of “underclass” positioning as morally dissolute, “shameless” and socially corrosive. It explores its location as marginal to the social but also symbolically central and its importance as a focus of collective fascination as well as of concern and even anxiety. We begin by unpacking the vocabulary of the “underclass” and its cognate terms in relation to a considered understanding of class hierarchies and the changing model of social and class relations under Thatcher, Major and Blair. We then go on to highlight various exemplary depictions of the “underclass” since the 1990s such as the British “underclass” film cycles, the films of Penny Woolcock and the television series, Shameless. During the 1980s the terminology of class was increasingly cast off in political discourse and much of the activism underpinned by class politics was also subdued or subsumed into other kinds of campaigning. For many people, class loyalty and affiliations no longer seemed to make sense; their irrelevance due primarily to the rise of Thatcherism with its attendant disruption of class-based solidarities and its exhilarating promotion of social mobility and individualized consumer aspirations. The promotion of home ownership, the purchase of privatized shares and the rhetoric of choice was part of a broader cultural shift in which consumer goods and brand names became not only markers of the good life but also symbols of the good society in which social distinctions were eroded or at least masked over. The economic changes of the early 1980s produced, in the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, “a veritable industrial holocaust” as the working classes and especially unskilled and semi-skilled labor “visibly became the victims of the new technologies,” of the atrophy of industrial development and a series of economic crises (1995, p. 304). However, 137



Shameless?: Picturing the “underclass” after Thatcherism

Shameless?

the real crisis was “not one of the class, but of its consciousness”; a crisis lengthy in gestation but perhaps only fully realizable in Thatcher’s Britain (“an extreme case” globally) as the pressures of neoliberal economic and social policy helped fracture the unity between the “top end” of the working class, flexible and skilled, and those at the bottom whose economic situation worsened (Hobsbawm, pp. 305–8). Of these a section came to be regarded as an “underclass” subsisting on the benefits provided by their industrious and above all “respectable” betters. Inevitably these shifts contributed to a growing confusion in popular and political discussion regarding the value and relevance of class-based identifications and by the end of the Thatcher years an outright rejection of working-class (self)identification in particular for great swathes of the population.1 As Stuart Hall (1983, p. 31), the cultural theorist who first identified the seemingly irresistible currency and appeal of Thatcherism, observed, “the repertoire of Thatcherism” included a proposed reorganization of the relationship between the dominant and dominated classes so that both would work together in the service of capital and the old opposition between labor and capital would be dissolved; the class politics that underpinned it rendered redundant. This alliance rooted in the attractions of consumerism and social aspiration and sealed through a forfeit of collective working-class affiliation made sense to working people who saw an opportunity to make good their responsibilities as bread winners and homemakers through the acquisition of bricks and mortar and the consumer goods that were emblematic of social success. Suddenly, it seemed, a new spectrum of opportunity was open to all and a bandwagon of consumption was boarded by a number of those who had previously considered themselves to have been left standing at the roadside. For some, the transition to a new, apparently middle-class lifestyle, occurred quickly, inadvertently and without a conscious sense of drive toward social mobility. As Mandy Nichol (1990, p. 48) wryly observed, recalling her life during the 1980s, “there I was, I had become a product of Thatcher’s Britain. I had the good husband, the house, the twenty-five-year mortgage and . . . all it took to be acceptable and respected . . . I’d become a nasty shade of blue.” In this context the growing dis-identification of working people with class politics and class labels made good sense and today it continues to inform the ways in which classifications are deployed in relation to the self and others. In the recent BBC White season of television programming, which proposed and explored a growing marginalization of the white working class in particular, the documentary Last Orders (2008) nicely encapsulated the complicated architecture of class positioning in



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the wake of Thatcherism.2 In one scene family members debate whether they can be described as working class. Father and daughter claim strong working-class affiliations through heritage and community links whereas the son-in-law is insistent that he has left the working class behind because he is a homeowner, owns his own car and phone and because he holidays abroad. For him, the new working class are Eastern European laborers who take on the low-paid manual jobs that the English no longer need to do. So if the classless mainstream and the new immigrant classes of service and manual workers are all employed in working through the new alliance between capital and labor, what of those who are unable or unwilling or ill-equipped to lead economically productive lives on the terms offered? How has their position altered or shifted in the political and popular imagination in the aftermath of the Thatcher governments? How is their alleged economic ineptitude and social marginality to be understood and where are they to be located in the new industrious and acquisitive “classless” society? Well, as already indicated, one classed category was allowed to persist before being refashioned into the new language of New Labour, that of the “underclass” often equated with the “undeserving poor,” a collective frequently stereotypically associated with the rebarbative “dependencies” of a faltering welfare state. Images of the single mother, the benefit-rich council estate family or the unemployed degenerate teenager (Sir Keith Joseph’s “denizens” of the criminal realms as set out in his controversial speech of 1974) are frequently characterized in popular media imagery through powerfully gendered and often racialized notions of masculine fecklessness and indisciplinarity, of feminine dependency and emotional as well as financial incontinence.3 From this period and throughout the 1990s both governmental and criminological projections onto the figure of the single mother, in particular, characterized the “broken home” as the “emotional space of criminogenesis” and the conduit of a terrible inheritance from the 1960s of moral weakness, drug abuse, lack of respect for authorities and “deviant” sexualities (Young 1996, p. 147). Criminologist Alison Young demonstrates how the early 1990s witnessed a reinvigoration of these projections with a confluence of journalistic and governmental discourses situating the single mother, especially the never-married “wilfully” single, younger lower-class mother, as the breach in the social contract whose rejection of responsibility for her children would in turn lead them to reject their own social responsibilities (see Young, pp. 155– 68). Government speeches throughout the 1993–4 period increasingly took care to distinguish



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between the“blameless” or “decent” single parent (widowed or unavoidably divorced) and the hapless girl who “drifts” into pregnancy only to end up “married to the state,” lured by the “attractive prospect” of welfare support (Young, p. 155). Conservative policy (the Child Support Act 1991, the establishment of the Child Support Agency and redefinitions of priority status in local authority housing) sought to lessen these attractions and to reassure “responsible” taxpayers that they weren’t being tapped to support feckless and criminogenic lifestyles. The notion of the poor family and the single-parent family as subject to economic forces or social limitations (through inferior education, housing, health provision etc.) whose structural features were simply too difficult to negotiate or overcome was resisted throughout the four Conservative administrations and beyond. During the 1980s in public debate the term “underclass” came to the fore and was integrated into popular journalistic discourses as a descriptive shorthand for the lifestyles signaled above. “Underclass” soon eclipsed the term “underprivileged” which seems now to have fallen out of common usage. As Raymond Williams (p. 324) noted in 1983, the term “underprivileged” was a euphemism for the poor or oppressed and the term “under” often combined “sympathy for the victims of a social order” with a conviction or an assumption that this order of things was fairly immutable. The poor invited commiseration because their “underprivileged” status arose from a belief that intractable structural disadvantages such as racism, poor housing, inadequate schooling and so on, were to blame. The term “underclass,” which superseded “underprivileged” and has enjoyed several subsequent revivals of usage, was deployed in Britain from the 1970s often in the context of debates about structural (e.g. racial) inequalities and their impact on the material conditions of marginalized, often ethnic minority groups (Lister 1996, p. 2). The term also surfaced during the 1980s in the US via debates about the values of the socially excluded and/or the structural limitations of the labor market and was picked up and reworked in Britain by Ralf Dahrendorf (1987) who identified a series of social pathologies and a “syndrome of deprivation” whose neglect by mainstream society cast doubt on the very social contract of inclusive citizenship. The term was again reinvigorated and arguably popularized in Britain by the American social policy analyst Charles Murray whose 1990 article for the Sunday Times, “The Emerging British Underclass,” set out to argue that the usage of “underclass” merely as a euphemism for the especially poor was inadequate because “the term does not refer to degree of poverty, but to a type of poverty” (p. 23) characterized by illegitimacy, crime (“the habitual criminal is the classic member of an underclass” p. 33),



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willful unemployment and the lack of socialization into work culture for a proportion of British youth (our emphases).4 In his 1994 rejoinder article “Underclass: The Crisis Deepens” Murray narrowed his focus more closely on family unit breakdown as one of the primary factors in what he characterized as a “crisis.” A sound understanding of the way in which an “underclass” is both identified and characterized in any particular period helps us to understand not so much the real material difficulties and dispositions of people living in poverty or social marginalization but rather their symbolic functions as avatars of blame, social concern and popular fascination— as scapegoats, specters of failure, as comical rogues or even as entrepreneurial antiheroes surviving in the black economy. As John Welshman (2006, pp. 157–8) explains in his own history of the “underclass,” there are four intellectual positions adopted in relation to the proposition of the “underclass” as an identifiable social category. Firstly, what he calls the “moral turpitude” thesis that sees behavioral problems as central and as socially threatening. Secondly, there is the thesis based on an understanding of an “underclass” created via structural factors. Thirdly, there is a more “agnostic view” which admits of the theoretical possibility of an “underclass” but sees no substantive empirical evidence. Finally there is the more skeptical view of “underclass” theory as a “red herring” or even canard, which is empirically unfounded, theoretically confused and even politically dangerous. As Welshman suggests, it is the first of these which is most explicitly allied to a conservative analysis and which is infused with notions of “culture and individualism.” We would stress that it is the first of these which intersects most closely with Murray’s formulation (and Joseph’s early 1970s statements) and our concern here is its subsequent reinforcement as a common sense explanatory model of social failure via media and journalistic depictions of the poor as social outcasts; as socially subordinate by virtue of their values as much as by their apparent economic dependency. The notion too of the “underclass” thesis as an intellectual and/or political distraction, implied perhaps by Welshman’s fourth position, falls within our remit because we would argue that the disproportionate and voluble coverage of “underclass” issues, some of which will be outlined later, deflects public debate away from a sharper-eyed scrutiny of more widely embedded social values such as consumerism, property ownership, informed “choice,” entrepreneurialism and individual aspiration, values which, sometimes assumed by default if not by design, must underpin the majority of citizens’ lives. For Raymond Williams (1983, p. 32) the problem of “under formations,” as he refers to them, is precisely




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that they are often indicative of “ideological certainties” and of unspoken and therefore unexamined assumptions of what the underprivileged, underdeveloped or “underclass” and so forth are understood to be sitting below. Those judged to be “under” seem to lodge beneath that which is “normal,” mainstream and beyond critique. In the example used by Williams of “underprivileged” he argues that the consequent troubling articulation of “privilege” as a “normal condition” may be summed up in the assertion that “we are all (or almost all) middle class now”—those few at the margins being “the special case” perhaps, the exception that proves the rule, the “residuum,” to use that evocative Victorian term, of collective success rather than of collective failure.

A very modern problem Social exclusion is one of the scourges of modern times. Driving communities apart and leaving broken lives in its path. Many of the problems we faced at the start of this century have come back to haunt us at the millennium.5 (Fabian Society pamphlet 1997) The late 1990s is a key period in any British account of the discursive shifts in the construction of the allegedly irredeemably poor and “unproductive” as an intractable social problem. “Underclass” continued to be used as a useful shorthand by social commentators in the media even as it fell out of favor with policy makers. In both policy and academic circles however the phrase “social exclusion” also came to the fore, partly due to the influence of the European Union (Walker 1997, p. 7). Generally speaking “social exclusion” was distinguished from “in poverty” as a descriptor because although including low income as a factor it also encompassed “the inability to participate effectively in economic, social, political, and cultural life, and, in some characterisations, alienation and distance from the mainstream society” (Duffy in Walker, p. 8). Under New Labour “social exclusion” became the descriptor of choice. And although it can be used constructively to indicate the ways in which poorer people are excluded from civic life without their consent it is arguable that from the late 1990s it actually became part of a double discourse which sought to attack “welfare dependency” and attributed that dependency to the embedded moral deficiencies of the socially excluded (Levitas 1998). In 1997 Tony Blair declared that the “very modern problem” of social exclusion went beyond material poverty and that the greatest harm rested not simply in a damaging lack of economic



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security but the concomitant injury to self-esteem, self-motivation and its likely transmission to future generations. It was, argued Blair, a matter of “enlightened self interest” to tackle “an underclass of people cut off from society’s mainstream” (in Welshman, pp. 183, 191). It seemed that the modern citizen growing tall under Conservative stewardship and reaching maturity together with New Labour was an individualist in temperament and aspiration who needed an appeal to selfinterest in order to act for the collective good.6 Indeed, it has been argued that New Labour extended the promotion of social mobility into its imperative form and that the signifiers of success were intimately bound up with public display of power, consumer affluence or entrepreneurial achievement (Dench 2006, pp. 12–13). It was paid employment above all that would be the marker of social success during the Blair years and critics such as Ruth Levitas would argue that failure to earn was increasingly identified as emblematic of both social failure and moral turpitude. During the 1990s, lifestyle and reality TV programming underscored this broader ethos of personal success in the public realm through an emphasis on the acquisition of taste, personal presentation, correct conduct and the skillful display of the consumerist lifestyle. Property, personal finance and makeover shows in both the UK and the US normalized the (implicitly middle class) processes of self-improvement required to brand oneself in the spheres of work and personal identity (Palmer 2008; Ouellette and Hay 2008). In this climate, those that could not or would not comply or whose personal values and measures of self-esteem were rooted in the private, the makeshift domestic or in nonconsumerist local domains would find themselves at best invisible, at worst labeled unambitious and underachieving. Makeover programs, reality crime shows and observational documentaries often represented the socially subordinate as shameless scroungers, overdependent, unproductive, disruptive and unmodern—as badly out of step with the times and its values (Biressi and Nunn 2008). The cycles of British “underclass” films which sprung up in the 1990s arguably engaged with and perhaps even added to the growing contradictions of the drive to social mobility articulated in mainstream culture. Film theorist John Hill (2000) proposed “Brit-Grit” 1990s cinematic realism as a rather problematic “movement towards social extension,” a reconfiguring of the working class in film that acknowledged the persistence of poverty and social exclusion in a country on the brink of a new millennium. Films such as Ken Loach’s Raining Stones (1993) and Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) exhibited a conscious regret for the damage wrought under Thatcherism to working-class values, affiliations and patterns of work and leisure. This overt acknowledgment of lost collective




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experiences (and potential political action) was matched by a range of nineties mainstream filmic takes on male loss of confidence, self-esteem and the impact of long-term unemployment. These films, either youthoriented such as Trainspotting (1996) and Twin Town (1997) or more mainstream such as the The Full Monty (1997), only superficially and rather deceptively marked the return to a class-conscious perspective (Monk 2000, p. 274). The films, which were clearly “post-working class” and which often focused on a group whose difficult circumstances was resultant from social and economic decline, nonetheless were in tune with the aims of New Labour’s drive to modernize Britain’s image and make it marketable (Monk, p. 274). On the surface, this “underclass cycle” presented a democratized British identity which was urban, working or post-working class, blagging its way out of economic deprivation and social despair. In retrospect, they also appeared to underscore the inexorable momentum of the individualist ethos, championing the benefits of consumption, flexibility and entrepreneurial zeal. In other words, they “occupy an ambiguous cultural terrain” celebrating the experiences of local socially marginalized groups while repackaging their experiences for sale in the global market (Hallam 2000, p. 270). Films like Trainspotting arguably addressed a generation of Thatcher’s children for whom the meshing of subcultural dissent and entrepreneurial capitalism appeared far from inconsistent. As Claire Monk (p. 286) notes, from the ironic conclusion of Trainspotting in which the characters make money as traders in either the housing or the drugs market to the ebullience of The Full Monty’s literal revelation that entrepreneurial inventiveness can overcome all obstacles, the films act as a riposte to the stereotype of the “underclass” as passive and outmoded. But at the same time they imply that the only route out of poverty is via an embrace of the free market and a turn to the self both as a resource and as the sole bulwark against dependency and redundancy (from both a fulfilling family life and paid employment). In contrast, the future, on film at least, for those families and individuals less well equipped to move with the times was unrelieved in its bleakness with dramas such as Loach’s My Name is Joe (1998), Nil by Mouth (1997) and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994) depicting family breakdown and dysfunction, petty crime, domestic violence and alcoholism. As both Monk and Hill make clear, the context for all of these films is one in which the bonds of patriarchal authority have shattered alongside the certainties of a working life underpinned by job security and collective labor affiliations. Hill identifies in these last films an increasing emphasis on the domestic lives of the “rough” working class, arguing that despite an intimation that social and economic pressures



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contribute to unacceptable behavior, overall the films disengage from debates about the larger socioeconomic moorings of extreme social marginality. In the case of Nil by Mouth its close attention to family dynamics “is only achieved by excluding the wider patterns of social life (neighbourhood, work, politics) that were once seen to shape and define working-class experience” (Hill, p. 253). The 1990s–2000s council estate films of Penny Woolcock articulate a different perspective yet again in their depiction of colorful characters in bleak circumstances in Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham and the Rhondda Valley. Woolcock’s films deal with economically deprived neighborhoods that were decimated by the closure of heavy manufacturing industry. These were communities fractured by the unemployment and alienation that hit the estates which had grown up around the steelworks and mines of Britain’s industrial north. Such communities were made conspicuous in the early 1990s by a series of riots which spread across the municipal suburbs of Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside. In some cases the riots involved racial attacks as white youths attacked community buildings and targeted Asian shops. In others, the targets were the police, neighbors or the scrubland and streets which were used to stage ritualistic bonfires, joyriding and other antisocial behavior. These forms of unrest were regarded by some as the excessive and violent expression of defeat and exile. After a decade of Thatcherism these agitators were not only on the margins of politics but also of the social: they were “neither legitimate citizens nor consumers” but were cut adrift from all recognized forms of authority (Campbell 1993, p. 95). The media foregrounded the otherness of these estates; “demonised domains” where undesirables had been transported, places harboring non-taxpayers and those excluded from the electoral register; their status often slipping from symbolic victim to “symbolic culprit”: the unemployed male, the single mother, the “problem family” all coming together as the “undeserving poor” (Campbell, p. 172). As we have indicated, these people were often crudely united by the theorists of the “underclass” and mythologized by the media. In these and in earlier examples of social unrest, the mostly invisible realm of “underclass” living became central to a riveting media spectacle; providing imagery which also found its way onto television dramas such as The Cops (1998) and Shameless.7 Appositely, Clare Ramsaran (1990, pp. 175–6), writing about the earlier riots of 1981, recalled: My area of London, Hounslow, became like a ghost town . . . people on the whole were off the streets, glued to TV sets, watching the riots in glorious Technicolour. The news dished out nightly footage of




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The landscape of the urban estate was embedded in this popular iconography of “underclass” poverty and social mayhem. The monolithic windswept tower blocks, burnt-out rubbish chutes, empty cans of Special Brew and listless kids hanging round outside the chip shop composed a “pejorative shorthand” for the popularly perceived deadened lives of the inhabitants of Britain’s large council estates (Hanley 2007, p. 8). Woolcock’s films entered these “no-go zones” and revealed a world of hardship made tolerable by humor and an extensive involvement in the black economy, addressing estate life in the post-Thatcher era against this unpromising backdrop. Tina Goes Shopping (“shopping” a euphemism for thieving) (1999) and Tina Takes a Break (the break being a stay in a drug rehabilitation center) (2001), both focused on the residents of a Leeds housing estate characterized by its “baroque poverty” (Billen 2001) and a rather theatrical pandemonium.8 In these films the estate is represented as theatrically grim, being both the raw underside of an iniquitous class system and also the stage for dramatic menace and the risky excitement of everyday life. Like the protagonists of the “underclass” films, her characters are resourceful, canny and entrepreneurial and far from passive; their flair for survival and making ends meet act as a vulgar rebuke to official culture and to New Britain. They are shamelessly skilled in the arts of begging, borrowing and stealing. Equally, the shift in gender relations reinforced by changing patterns of employment are articulated here in newly complex patterns of power with the women holding the fort and the men divided into successful entrepreneurial criminals and marginalized, dependent hangers on.9 In the first Tina film, Tina, the unemployed mother of two, claims that her way of life has arisen through choice rather than necessity, but two years later the circumstances of the second film show that “socioeconomic determinism has proved her wrong” (Billen 2001). For by 2001 Tina has slipped into heroin addiction, the local pub is a drug den and the figure of a suicidal young man teeters on the roof edge of a tower block. With Tina’s two young children left to survive with their ineffectual father the family descends into dirt, disorder and almost carnivalesque inversions of power. This is a world where only women’s networks or powerful male criminals thrive; the unemployed white male is absent from the frame, only fleetingly caught in the image of the drunken father. The film achieves a tenuous poise between comedy and tragedy; the humorous



burning barricades and shadowy sillouhettes. And the nation was captivated by a combination of voyeurism and horror at the breakdown of law and order.

or even exhilarating moment is carved out of a lifetime of banality. Tina Takes a Break ends with a powerfully tragicomic scene in which, quite surreally, a local ice-cream vendor (her own father) hands out ice creams to the children and drugs to the local women—and a good time is had by all. As this dénouement suggests, Woolcock’s films refrain from making judgments. They refuse to condemn the class-based decisions of parents that keep their son at home when he could escape with an educational scholarship or the canny reluctance of neighbors to call an ambulance for a badly beaten adolescent. Woolcock reveals and valorises the alternative systems of care and codes of behavior which sustain these communities during hard times. And unlike much of the work of Ken Loach, Tony Garnett or Jimmy McGovern, for example, her films make no explicit political comment and avoid a campaigning agenda. Instead they offer an engaging hybrid of the everyday and the outlandish, positioning the marginalized “underclass” centrally and revealing a resilience which may be as intimidating for onlookers as it is necessary for the survival of those involved. One critic at least argues that nonetheless Woolcock has “fallen for primitivism, believing that the underclasses are residually more simple, their appetites more raw” (Munt 2007, p. 140). Even Billen (2001), whose view seems more sympathetic, suggests that Woolcock ultimately contributes to a “collective urban myth about our very own underclass.” The Tina films featured nonactors playing roles apparently in tune with their own experiences of subsistence living in an inhospitable and deteriorating environment. Their lives are lurid yet uproarious. Whatever one’s judgment most would agree that the films’ characters are allowed to adopt a defiant, survivalist stance which was rare enough at the time to be utterly refreshing. In contrast, a different image of concentrated poverty, bare life and insular disadvantage can be found in the work of the young artist Richard Billingham. When Billingham photographed the lives of his “dysfunctional” family at home in their midlands council flat during the early 1990s the images which appeared in the 1994 Barbican group exhibition Whose Looking at the Family? and then in the album Ray’s a Laugh (1996) were regarded as groundbreaking, with his subsequent 1999 video Ray in Bed nominated for the Turner Prize. The album in particular seemed to document a family in disarray and even in distress: Billingham’s alcoholic and housebound father (the eponymous Ray), obese mother and drug-addicted brother were pictured amid the dirt and detritus of their home. The color photographs were often blurred, sometimes with the “protagonists” (people, cats, dogs) off center—possibly




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emblematic of skewed domestic lives. Many of the shots resembled family snaps, but of the kind one would edit out of a conventional family album as they depicted Billingham’s relatives drunk, falling over or slumped on sofas. The Billingham family, along with their pets, their tattoos, their décor and their sedentary and often inebriated lifestyle, was regarded by some critics as the embodiment of the “underclass” habitus entrenched since Thatcherism. The images, which begin with a doublepage spread aerial view of their housing estate, were read by some as a timely spur to New Labour’s pledge to end poverty. Others situated the work in the context of the rise of reality programming: an exhibition of the private and a potentially exploitative exposure of family life which affirmed the extension of the new voyeurism from television to all cultural fields. For these critics, the frisson of looking in on a seemingly stripped bare, but in fact carefully captured and framed, raw naturalism raised problematic notions of voyeurism; the series exposed a “shameless curiosity in poverty” (see Remes 2007, pp. 1–2). What is striking about the various readings of Billingham’s work is that they arose and persisted in spite of the artist’s denial of their pertinence. The artist declared that the people in his photographs were not portraits but merely reference points in pictures which would later source his paintings. But as Outi Remes (2007) explains, whether Billingham’s claim was disingenuous or not, the fact remained that viewers seemed unable to get past or see beyond the ostensible subject matter: the catastrophe of poverty and the drama of the damaged family.10 We suggest, in fact, that once the images broke into the public domain they bore a doubled trope of both shame and shamelessness, a complex which may throw light on the continuing centrality of the “underclass” in British media culture and its problematic articulation in many political discourses. Firstly, the images were considered to epitomize the shameful ineptitude or even neglect of the socially excluded in social policy during the final years of the Conservative regime and hence a spur to greater and better efforts by New Labour. Secondly, there seemed to be something shameless in the exhibition of the damaged family, the public exposure of the private realm and also in audiences’ fascination with the “train wreck” culture of “underclass” living. A quotation on the back cover by Robert Frank proclaims “Flash into the face of Mom and Dad. A British family album so cool that I can see and hear what goes on between the frames. No room for judgement or morality . . . reality and no pretence. Richard Billingham is the son and he knows—his family.” Billingham’s pictures are frank, nonjudgmental and without shame but the promotion of his album as both real and cool suggests that it also offers the thrill of authenticity and



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the absolution of critical distance endorsed by the art world; an absolution which underwrites the publisher’s invitation to cultural slumming.

Woolcock’s Tina films also anticipated the much-debated Channel 4 drama Shameless (2004–) which focused on the Gallagher family living on the slyly named Chatsworth estate in Manchester—a name that alluded to another group of social freeloaders, the English aristocracy.11 Shameless traded in similar images of “underclass” living as bizarrely comic, entrepreneurial and resilient; part of its appeal for critics, at least, residing in its authenticity as an idea conceived by Paul Abbott, who in interviews, recalled his own difficult, emotionally fraught, impoverished and even “primitive” early life.12 Each episode of the first series begins with a voice-over by father Frank Gallagher introducing his children and his neighbors before focusing in to an outdoor “party,” which we learn only at the end of the series to be a carnivalesque scene of flames and screeching police sirens. As with the second Tina film, the first series is largely played out in the context of the absent mother, though in this case in turns out that she left Frank to live with another woman. Shameless was authenticated as a fictionalization of Abbott’s own childhood experiences and thereby frequently referred to in the press as a reliable verification of “underclass” living as scandalous, chaotic and uninhibited. The first ten minutes of the first episode revealed “that it is all about family, fucking, class and violence” and whatever Abbott’s own intentions, television critics were quick to describe the protagonists as animalistic and irredeemably savage (Munt, pp. 135–6). If this is the critics’ view then it is open to challenge when the series is considered in the round. In fact, bearing in mind that Frank is frequently completely debilitated through alcohol and drugs (and perhaps mental ill-health), that violence and mishaps are never far away, that money is hard to come by and promiscuity is rife, his children and neighbors are remarkably resilient, quick witted and well organized; their own cultural capital proves useful in extricating them from a variety of tragiccomic predicaments. Many “underclass” stereotypes are confounded through the depiction of the Gallagher children: the oldest son Lip is academically bright, Ian is both gay and having an affair with a Muslim and oldest daughter Fiona effectively keeps the family together and dates outside of her class. So too, the humor and grotesque surrealism of the narratives do not entirely mask over the political context and material conditions of life on the



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Chatsworth estate. In the second episode viewers are reminded of the commitments of the Blair/Brown government as the family, gathered in front of the TV, talk over a news report on Britain’s unenviable position in the European league tables on poverty and later Lip tells his spendthrift father exactly how much (or rather little) food money his children manage to scrape together between them each week. Overall, the script seems to refuse the “shameful recognitions” (Reay 2000, p. 156) with which “underclass” lives are frequently associated in political and popular discourses but at the same time its characters are still confined to a representational “no-go” area, a bizarre hybrid of The Beggars’ Opera and Booze Britain.13 For the attraction of Shameless and the earlier Woolcock films owes rather less to their insights into the social damage arguably wrought under successive governments and more to the unapologetic exhibitionism of the canny individuals who survive through a parody of the entrepreneurialism and resourcefulness which was supposed to rescue the economically beleaguered in the first place. Between February and April 2008 the series itself became a reference point in the national debate about a real family whose conduct, relationships and economic status came to be regarded as an example of “underclass” values writ large. The notorious case of Karen Matthews, a woman who caused a media storm through false claims that her daughter had been abducted, was notable not only because child abduction was still high on the news agenda following the earlier long-running case of Madeleine McCann but also because it exemplified, for large sections of the media at least, a way of life which was inherently immoral—and this all long before she was found guilty of any crime. The early coverage of the girl’s disappearance exemplified the media’s tendency to characterize the “undeserving poor” as a significant social problem and as a threat to core social values. Matthews’ seven children by five fathers, her engagement in serial relationships, her call on welfare benefits and her poor parenting skills seemed to sum up the “chav” lifestyle already firmly established in popular journalism; with “chav” being the most recent popular British epithet for the (usually) white “undeserving” poor. Reportage focused on the “squalor” of the estate in West Yorkshire where Matthews lived, with best-selling tabloid Sun bearing the headline “Estate is Nastier than Beirut” (Taylor 2008). It was observed that Matthews, in contrast to her parents and her sister, who maintained large families within stable long-term relationships and continuous employment, had slipped down and away from solid working-class structures into the realm of the disrespectable “underclass.” The Daily Mail even produced an illustrated family tree for Matthews and her partner Craig Meehan which



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depicted in graphic form the family’s slippage from working-class respectability. In addition to births, marriages and deaths attention was drawn in red print to criminal convictions, unemployed status and children living away from their mothers. The Mail’s researchers traced the family back through many generations in an attempt to illustrate the family’s fall from respectability (see Biressi and Nunn 2009). The moral as opposed to the legal case against Matthews was made on the economics of so-called underclass living which was sketched out in accounts of her income and expenditure. The interested public could learn how much Meehan earned working at cut-price supermarket Morrisons, what Matthews received in benefits and disclosures that she spent money on junk food instead of nappies for her children. And the case against her was strengthened by the revelations that the family owned home computers and a widescreen television. As we have noted elsewhere (Biressi and Nunn 2009), the journalistic shorthand of benefit scrounging and misdirected consumption deployed in the coverage of the Matthews case was effortlessly understood by readers because it is securely located within a broader discursive landscape outlined above in which one classed category persists above all others from an earlier political period—that of the shameless, undeserving, feckless and/or downright disorganized poor. Columnist John Gaunt, writing in the popular tabloid Sun declared, “these people aren’t equal to you and me and they need to be told so before they breed another generation that will only be more irresponsible and useless” (in Bartholomew 2008). Following the revelation that Matthews had arranged the abduction herself in order to claim the reward, most newspapers were quick to suggest, despite the police’s dismissal of the claim (see Wainright 2008), that she had been inspired by an episode of Shameless, with one commentator arguing that shows such as this were essentially “documentaries of their lives” (Bartholomew 2008). Residents of the Matthews’ estate, however, perceived a profound difference between fact and fiction with one observing, “This isn’t Shameless because that’s fiction . . . here it’s real life, and these are real emotions people are going through” (Taylor 2008). The post-Conservative characterizations of the poor and socially excluded in much popular journalism, documentary and even in reality television has arguably demonstrated a drive to train and direct the uncooperative where possible, to instruct them into reform or, where this is not possible, at the very least to shame them. The speed with which the media linked not only the Matthews family but also their neighbors to the series Shameless was remarkable and arguably based not only on the news values of entertainment and intertextuality but also on the




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convenience of the series as a representation of the shameful condition of the welfare dependent. We have discussed elsewhere (Biressi and Nunn 2009) the continuities of tabloid news, for example, in wielding classed labels such as “chav,” “pramface,” “single mum,” “estate rat,” “benefit fiddler” and other equally ripe epithets. The Matthews case presented an ideal opportunity to bring these to the fore and at the same time to both inspect and to dramatize them. “Underclass” entertainment in its broadest sense (comedy, observational documentary, reality TV etc.) has been variously criticized for providing a platform for cheap and tasteless amusement which seems to condemn both its subjects and its audiences to shameful relations, to unseemly display and overeager consumption. But the appeal of these depictions, whether journalistic, documentary, fictional or even political, arguably says more about the act of viewing than it does about the real lives of poor people. As Sally Munt (2007, p. 141) suggests in her discussion of class tourism from an earlier era, the attraction and repulsion of the poor was relished even though it was laced with disavowal and disapproval; she observes of these “cultural slummers” and voyeurs, “perhaps they were ashamed, split between their scopophilic curiosity and an internal conscience.”

Conclusion: “Credit crunch” classes As we have indicated in this chapter, the “underclass” as a trope in our popular vernacular implies more than persistent poverty, it implies exclusion from mainstream society and its core values. From the Thatcher years onwards there has been an emphasis on affluence, property ownership, consumption and credit-worthiness as the markers of value that differentiate mainstream “classless society” from those experiencing the worst of economic and social deprivation. Indeed, for all sectors of society the relationship of the self and one’s family unit to the market has been one of the core factors in a consideration of the social stratum to which one might belong or aspire to belong—and attached to this is a notion of the measure of moral self-worth. Rising unemployment, the collapse of confidence in share capitalism, the decimation of sure credit, the fall in property values and the threat of negative equity are the constant concern of current public and political debate. What happens then when the bedrock that secures membership to the mainstream—a job, affordable credit, a mortgage, the ability to buy with relative security from supermarkets or online—is suddenly undermined? In recent media coverage of the recession the similarities between conservative and liberal newspapers is remarkable. In both domains personal



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narratives of middle-class survival predominate: how to shop strategically at cut-price stores; how to use up leftover food and how to forage; how to trim heating bills; how to shop for credit; how to knit, grow vegetables and so on. If the fantasy of the good consumer that sustained Thatcher’s dream of a generation growing tall has gone bad then the fantasy of entrepreneurial self-reliance and an embattled middle-class endures in new (charity shop vintage clad) accents. In these new stories of strategic consumption and the salvaging of property and lifestyle the “underclass” will continue to occupy a powerfully symbolic role. For example the Daily Mail (bastion paper of middle England) reported in “Credit crunch bites down hard, why middle-class debt is threatening us all” (May 19, 2008) that debt advice agencies, “more used to dealing with the financial problems of social housing tenants and benefit claimants,” were overrun with middle-class families no longer able to pay their bills: “Nationally, such requests for assistance have risen by 85 per cent but in middle-class heartlands like Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and Congleton, Cheshire, they have more than trebled.” In this article the folly of living beyond one’s means is raised only to be swiftly deflected onto those claiming sickness or unemployment benefit funded by taxpayers. The Mail identifies the beleaguered middle-class taxpayer as “almost anyone with their own home, a job, and a car” and who is “able to subsidize only so much profligacy and indolence.” From a different perspective but in similarly critical vein Guardian newspaper writer Andrew O’Hagan (2009) begins by bemoaning the death of the politically collective, respectable working class, now supplanted by an apathetic “disinherited” nonworking class whose “traditions, habits, jobs, even in some places their speech” have been given over “to new forms of transcendence offered by celebrity culture and credit cards and the bogus life of the fantasy rich.” He argues that the financial crisis has “brought a generation up against the limits of its own fantasies.” This generation, it seems, are not the middle classes who rode high on the housing market but “the leisured poor” who were “Blair’s gift to Britain.” This newly inflected version of the “underclass” is both confused and confusing; described as a depoliticized spiteful class whose “free-floating anger masquerading as moral outrage” informs the mobs gathered outside courthouses or whose emotional incontinence led to the swelling of the Princess Diana funeral crowds. In this mutable specter of a superficial, anti-intellectual, apolitical, greedy, amoral and essentially “sociopathic” tribe the “underclass” becomes again the scapegoat for both established and more recent social ills; mindless consumerism and pointless aspiration based on an infantile identification




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with celebrity culture. It seems that these subjects alone are greedy, acquisitive and troublingly conservative: “the people who craved not values but designer labels and satellite dishes . . . hopped up on vengeance, tabloids, alcopops and sentiment” (O’Hagan, ibid.). Even a cursory survey of news coverage will show how the “credit crunch” is placing the model of the successful, self-reliant entrepreneurial individual and family unit under extreme pressure. And in this context it seems that the “underclass” will continue to occupy an important role as an avatar of blame: either overly dependent or overconsuming and even more of a drain on the financially squeezed mainstream. But with the recession threatening to turn into a depression and the more affluent turning to credit advice agencies, cut-price supermarkets and charity shops a dawning realization may soon emerge that the “underclass” occupy a region which is not so very far removed from the mainstream after all.

Notes 1. It is important not to overstate the contribution of the working-class vote in keeping Thatcher in office and to understand the ways in which its importance was as much symbolic as real. As Valerie Walkerdine (1990, p. 206) argues, the new class affiliations with Thatcherism were all too easily incorporated into already long-standing and damaging myths of the working class. She notes, “we are stupid, ignorant, deprived, depriving; we are repressed, authoritarian and above all, we voted Thatcher into her third term in office.” 2. This was a 2008 BBC season of five documentaries and one drama designed to ask if the white working class in Britain was becoming invisible or marginalized. It situated the challenges of the white working class firmly within a context of immigration and multiculturalism and triggered widespread debates in the media on these issues. 3. Joseph declared “Mothers least fitted to bring children into the world” are “producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters . . . our human stock is threatened”(in Welshman 2006, p. 110). For a thorough account of Joseph’s position regarding the “cycle of deprivation” theory and a consideration of New Labour’s attachment to it see Welshman (2006). 4. There are competing, less dominant definitions, for example Labour MP Frank Field’s (1989) view that the “underclass” is the product of growing inequalities and consists of impoverished pensioners, single parents confined to welfare and the long-term unemployed—he attributed these inequalities in part to the individualist ethos of Thatcherism, a suggestion with which Murray did not concur. Field advocated a reorganization of welfare on the basis of a particular understanding of human nature as primarily self-interested. 5. Back cover text from Fabian Society pamphlet no. 581 by Peter Mandelson, an architect of New Labour (1997).



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6. This is a reference to Thatcher’s (1975, p. 16) declaration “Let our children grow tall and some grow taller than others, if they have it in them to do so.” 7. The Cops was produced by Ton Garnett for BBC 2. Much of it is set in a grim working-class estate in Manchester whose inhabitants are despised by the police as unmanageable scum. 8. These Tina films are the first two in a trilogy. The final film Mischief Nights (2006) is produced by the same producers as Shameless and is the first to locate the characters in a multicultural context. 9. An earlier version of this discussion of Woolcock’s work appears in the context of a longer analysis of class and documentary history in Biressi and Nunn (2005). 10. A statement from Billingham on the album’s back cover which begins “This book is about my close family” supports the view that the series is, in fact, to be viewed as a kind of family album. 11. This linkage with the aristocracy was underscored when Shameless’s patriarch Frank Gallagher delivered the Channel 4’s “alternative” to the Queen’s Christmas speech on Youtube.com in 2007. The working-class comedy series The Royle Family (BBC 1998–) also, of course, alludes to Britain’s ruling family. 12. Abbott was frequently called upon to link the series to his own autobiography —a call he answered somewhat ambiguously: “We were a mess. But how were we to know that? Ignorance being bliss was our most treasured human asset. We were loud, aggressive, primitive and anarchic. But I never once recall us feeling shameless.” (Paul Abbott in Rampton 2005). 13. Booze Britain (2005) was a fly-on-the-wall television series airing on British satellite TV channel Bravo in half-hour episodes documenting the excessive public drinking culture in various towns and cities in the UK.

Works cited Bartholomew, J. (2008) “Karen Matthews ‘a one woman advertisement for welfare reform,’” http://thewelfarestatewerein.com/archives/2008/12/karen_ matthews.php. Accessed 31/1/2009. Billen, A. (2001) “Twisted Tales,” New Statesman 28 May, http://www.newstatesman. com/print/200105280040. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2005) Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. London: Wallflower. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2008) “Bad Citizens: The Class Politics of Lifestyle Television” in G. Palmer (ed.) Exposing Lifestyle Television: The Big Reveal. Hampshire and Burlington, US: Ashgate. pp. 15–24. Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2009) “The Undeserving Poor,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Issue 41 “Recession Blues,” 107–16. Campbell, B. (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places. London: Methuen. Dahrendorf, R. (1987) “The Erosion of Citizenship and its Consequences for us All,” New Statesman, June 12, p. 13. Dench, G. (2006) “Introduction: Reviewing Meritocracy” in G. Dench (ed.) The Rise and Rise of Meritocracy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/Political Quarterly, pp. 1–14. Field, F. (1989) Losing Out? The Emergence of Britain’s Underclass. Oxford: Blackwell.




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Hall, S. (1983) “The Great Moving Right Show” in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds) The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 19–31. Hallam, J. (2000) “Film, Class and National Identity: Re-Imagining Communities in the Age of Devolution” in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds) British Cinema: Past and Present. London: Routledge, pp. 261–73. Hanley, L. (2007) Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta Books. Hill, J. (2000) “From the New Wave to ‘Brit-grit’: Continuity and Difference in Working-Class Realism” in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds) British Cinema: Past and Present. London: Routledge, pp. 249–60. Hobsbawm, E. (1995) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Abacus (orig. 1994). Levitas, R. (1998) The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour. London: Macmillan. Lister, R. (ed.) (1996) Charles Murray and the Underclass: the Developing Debate. IEA Health and Welfare Unit/ The Sunday Times. Mail Online (2008) “As the Credit Crunch Bites Down Hard, why Middle-Class Debt is Threatening us All,” May 19, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article567196/As-credit-crunch-bites-hard-middle-class-debt-threatening-all.html. Accessed February 4, 2009. Mandelson, P. (1997) Labour’s Next Steps: Tackling Social Exclusion. London: The Fabian Society. Monk, C. (2000) “Underbelly UK: The 1990s “Underclass” Film, Masculinity and the Ideologies of ‘New Britain,’” in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds) British Cinema: Past and Present. London: Routledge, pp. 274–87. Munt, S. (2007) Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. Hampshire: Ashgate. Murray, C. (1990) “The Emerging British Underclass” ‘reprinted’ in R. Lister (ed.) (2006) Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate. IEA Health and Welfare Unit/The Sunday Times, pp. 23–53. Nichol, M. (1990) “Shades of Blue” in J. Scanlon (ed.) Surviving the Blues: Growing Up in the Thatcher Decade. London: Virago, pp. 45–54. O’Hagan, Andrew (2009) “The Age of Indifference,” The Guardian, January 10, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/10/andrew-ohagan-george-orwellmemoriallecture/print. Accessed February 4, 2009. Ouellette, L. and Hay, J. (2008) Better Living Through Reality TV. Oxford: Blackwell. Palmer, G. (ed.) (2008) Exposing Lifestyle Television: the Big Reveal. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rampton, J. (2005) “Paul Abbott: My Shameless Life,” The Independent, December 20. Ramsaran, C. (1990) “So Who’s Next in the Firing Line?” in J. Scanlon (ed.) Surviving the Blues: Growing Up in the Thatcher Decade. London: Virago, pp. 172–83. Reay, D. (2000) “Children’s Urban Landscapes: Configurations of Class and Place” in S. Munt (ed.) Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change. London: Cassell, pp. 151–66. Remes, O. (2007) “Reinterpreting Unconventional Family Photographs: Returning to Richard Billingham’s ‘Ray’s A Laugh series,’” Visual Studies Workshop 2007 available at http://entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/print/165167343. html. Accessed January 17, 2009.



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Taylor, A. (2008) “Estate is nastier than Beirut” in the Sun 9 April. Thatcher, M. (1975) “Let the Children Grow Tall” in A. Cooke (ed.) Margaret Thatcher: The Revival of Britain Speeches on Home and European Affairs 1975– 1988. London: Aurum Press. Wainright, M. (2008) “Shannon Matthews Case has ‘no link to Shameless episode’” The Guardian, December 4, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/ uk/2008/dec/04/shannon-matthews-shameless. Accessed January 31, 2009. Walker, A. (1997) “Introduction: The Strategy of Inequality,” in A. Walker and C. Walker (eds) Britain Divided: The Growth of Social Exclusion in the 1980s and 1990s. London: Child Poverty Action Group, pp. 1–13. Walkerdine, V. (1990) School Girl Fictions. London: Verso. Welshman, J. (2006) Underclass: A History of the Excluded, 1880–2000. London: Hambledon Continuum. Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press, revised edition. Young, A. (1996) Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations. London: Sage Publications.




Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe Ryan Trimm

Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! lifts its title from a campy 1960s horror film, a slasher comedy the 1994 novel raids to satirize the economic and social cuts of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The Thatcher years targeted the postwar consensus on social welfare and nationalized industries and services. These transformations were aimed at stimulating enterprise and finance sectors but severely impacted the lower and middle classes. Coe’s novel uses its generic source to offer furious indictment of the prime minister and the impact her economic slashing had on Britain. The novel personalizes these wounds through the complex relations between novelist Michael Owen (Carve Up’s narrator) and the aristocratic Winshaw family. Owen is hired to chronicle the Winshaws, whose Conservative members lead a vast array of Thatcherite projects in politics, finance, the media, industrial agriculture, and trade in art and arms. As Owen discovers, these projects, manifestations of Conservative slashing, are indirectly responsible for personal wounds he suffers— most especially the deaths of loved ones that bring home the realities of Thatcherism. The novel’s censure of the Winshaws condemns Thatcher’s policies and the social, economic, and cultural climate she brought into being. Because of their enthusiastic enactment of Tory policies—and their support for Thatcher’s government—the novel’s portrait of the Winshaws systematically denounces a nation focused on the bottom line drive of “value for money.” This harsh judgment is delivered in a format sprawling over a wide range of forms, intertexts, and themes, a fragmented structure refracting the novel’s politics and highlighting their relation to Owen as “writer” and narrator. Ultimately Owen, as a man of letters, is impacted by writing just as he crafts worlds and histories through his words, a mirroring dissolving the divide between realms of the fictional and the real. These dreamlike reflections reveal a 158



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complicity in allowing a nightmare world to come into being but finally suggest Owen’s writing itself as means of taking up battle. Jonathan Coe is a rising star in contemporary British fiction, one whose early publication career much resembles that of his narrator Michael Owen: novels about nonmetropolitan characters trying to establish themselves, more commercial biographies about public figures. What a Carve Up! was his fourth novel and marked his arrival on the literary scene, garnering the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of fiction by an author under 35. It was also his first fictional work to offer an explicit and extended engagement with postwar British politics: later novels The Rotters’ Club (2001), winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse award for comic writing, and its sequel The Closed Circle (2004) built on the political focus of Carve Up by bookending the Thatcher years, offering accounts of the 1970s and then the 1990s up until the second Gulf War. Coe’s politics are much defined by the changing Britain represented in What a Carve Up!: the unraveling of postwar consensus in the 1970s due to economic and political crisis, Thatcher’s attempts to systemically destroy the institutions of the welfare state—and the outrage thus engendered. Such a situation demanded the lethal comedy characterizing Coe’s political satire, a balancing act of anger and humor. Here Coe’s impetus for the novel was taking the title from Pat Jackson’s 1961 film and giving it yet another twist: “The way into it [the novel] . . . was to write about the films I’d been obsessed with when I was a child, the one I recalled most strongly being that film, and when I made that choice to use it, the political idea immediately came to be at the same time, because I thought What a Carve Up is the title I want for a novel about the Thatcher years” (quoted in Moseley 2001, p. 71). Coe’s novel then derives its odd blend of affects and genres from the original film, one whose unstable mixture was manifest even in the title: a “carve up” is a division or sectioning, an act that could be a social event (as in the cutting up of a large piece of meat at a dinner party) as well as the gory murders punctuating the movie. Coe added a political dimension by stressing the carving up of formerly public institutions under Thatcher, industries and services such as British Steel and British Telecom that were broken up and privatized. Linking Thatcher to a film oddly fusing comedy and horror, the title positions Coe’s novel as an angry satire framing the Thatcher era as a gross inversion of social values, a distorted mirrorworld simultaneously comic and tragic, one that sold off public goods for private gain. The novel is intricately plotted, weaving Winshaw family history (as both narrative and text) into the life of narrator Owen. A prologue



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begins with a section later revealed to be an excerpt from the family history penned by Owen: individual Winshaws are revealed, almost without exception, to be a cold and greedy lot. The section concludes in a personal vein, tracking the ambivalent memory of Owen’s ninth birthday, a celebration culminating in an interrupted viewing of What a Carve Up! This partial screening sets up the present day (1990) personal collapse of Owen: blocked now both emotionally and creatively as a writer, he repetitively watches only portions of films (a slate featuring What a Carve Up!) huddled in the safety of his flat. A budding relationship with new neighbor Fiona springs him from this situation. This development is recounted in sections of first person narration alternating with chapters chronicling the current generation of Winshaws, all of whom participate in Thatcher’s revolution. These contributions also indirectly lead to the deaths of Owen’s father by heart attack and Fiona succumbing to lymphoma and NHS neglect. The final section, told in third person, uneasily blends humor and horror as the familiar plot from the original film is re-enacted: during a dark and stormy night, occupants of the Winshaws’ country house are murdered one by one. This restaging leaves all Winshaws slaughtered while the first Gulf war is launched. Owen himself is offered the possibility of an emotionally and physically fulfilling relationship with a nurse/art student named Phoebe staying at the house, a resolution undone when the last surviving Winshaw deliberately crashes the plane containing Owen. This sprawling plot is mirrored by a multitude of forms: journals, excerpts from newspaper/magazine articles and columns, minutes from meetings, and Owen’s own memories and musings. The multiple texts, genres, and fragments receive further postmodern amplification through numerous allusions and intertexts compulsively marked by the novel: art house cinema (especially Jean Cocteau’s Orphée), Dickens, Ovid, Arthur Conan Doyle, the game Cluedo, and popular movies (especially the Jackson film). These varied shards, parings carved off larger works, offer formal refutation of the homogeneity stressed by Thatcher, revealing a text foregrounding fragments and other voices. Coe’s novel is hence an unstable mix, one recording the onset of the Tory revolution and its repercussions in a roiling blend, producing, in its own words, a “fantastic, funny, angry, satirical book” (p. 299). These Tory transformations stressed finance capital rather than maintaining full employment, denationalized industry, and dictated balance sheet values for services such as the NHS, a financial efficiency greatly impeding the actual provision of health care. The Winshaws are present for each of these “carve ups”: financier Thomas enjoys “snatching



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these huge state-owned companies from the taxpayers’ hands and carving them up among a minority of profit-hungry shareholders” (p. 321); Mark and his fellow munitions merchants savor “carving up” Iraqi defense expenditures (p. 396); Owen himself writes about the Winshaws because of an anger for those who have “pretty well carved up the whole bloody country between them” (p. 107). This financial and political sense is, as with the film, echoed by a more murderous thrust: Roddy (the arts) and Hillary (media) participate in deadening of cultural life, Dorothy (industrial agriculture) and Mark (arms trading) are associated with slaughter, Thomas (finance) and Henry (privatization of the NHS) are linked to the deaths of Michaels loved ones. These carvings and killings are visited upon the Winshaws themselves at novel’s end. The novel then enacts the transformation of value taking place during the Thatcher years, changes rending the sociality associated with the postwar consensus, alterations leaving the narrator feeling he has entered a mirrorworld in which all is now reversed. **** Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979 by promising to end the economic decline Britain had experienced in the 1970s. Perry Anderson notes Thatcherism envisioned itself as rescuing a native national capitalism hamstrung by bureaucracy, taxes, and strident labor. In short, Thatcher wanted to give finance capitalism free reign, thus moving the nation away from the post-Beveridge social welfare institutions that had by seeming consensus been the focus for political life since the end of World War II.1 Consequently, “[t]he solution to the nation’s ills was to restore the primacy of the market, which alone could make the country economically competitive once again, and to contract the state to its proper, neglected functions of police and defence” (p. 179; see Harris p. 121). Shrinking the state imposed drastic cuts in social funding, cuts seemingly against national interest. However, this sense of disconnect was avoided by suggesting that providing industry and capital free reign were patriotic policies marking a return to mythic national values such as enterprise. Politics by emotive appeal to national values and symbols replaced notions of collective good—Margaret Thatcher famously told an interviewer, “There is no such thing as a society.” Given that many in Britain experienced Thatcher’s premiership as not ending economic hardship—and in many cases substantially worsening matters—the overall effect was a coarsening of the nation into a realm hard-hearted and tight-fisted, a



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place where only economic arguments and values held sway. It was in short a world tailor-made for the Winshaws. What a Carve Up! then can only chart changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher by situating them against the previous era: because Thatcherism attacked the social welfare net that had characterized the postwar social contract, its ascendance brought to an end a greater sociality linked with democracy after the Beveridge Report and the rise of social welfare. For example, Owen remembers his parents slipping into conversation with strangers quickly, “an easy sociability which they seemed to enjoy . . . [that] had more to do with the times” (p. 32). Likewise, in the “old days you’d have to have talked with someone: going into shops and things. But now you can do all your shopping in the supermarket, and you can do all your banking by machine” (p. 54); this human interaction is reflected in the lengthy discussions necessary to complete any exchange at the old Nuttall farm of Owen’s childhood (p. 160). This sociability, lost in the remoteness of automated transactions and franchise stores of the 1980s, marks a historically contingent ethos firmly linked with the postwar social contract.2 The decline of society and the notion of a public itself means a loss of engagement with one another. This loss afflicts Owen: the writer finds himself isolated in his apartment, going years without talking to another person (p. 54), his concentration sapped by too much television (p. 52). Similarly, he seems unable to go more than a few pages without buying or consuming name brand chocolates.3 The world he inhabits is increasingly disenfranchised and disengaged, an isolation exemplified in the mass alienation of the Underground scene (pp. 95–9), a slow moving horror show of people estranged from one another in a society no longer concerned with things, such as public conveyance, held in common. His alienation from others—the way his life has become mediated and insulated through reliance on mechanical, prepackaged, and technological devices and products during Thatcher’s premiership—is best evinced in his attempt to switch off his neighbor Fiona with his remote control (p. 58). Further, his repeated partial screenings of What a Carve Up!, a film with adolescent and sexual connotations for Owen, seems to echo Thatcher’s “nostalgic” politics as a type of emotional regression and blockage, an obsession with the image of the past preventing address of present and future.4 Consequently, Owen diagnoses quality of life under Thatcher’s leadership: “The 1980s weren’t a good time for me, on the whole. I suppose they weren’t for a lot of people” (p. 102). Indeed, in Owen’s life and those around him, there is a repeated victory of “vested interests” making “people’s lives even harder than they already were” (p. 403).



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For Owen, vested interests personified in the Winshaws signal the triumph of Thatcherism, a political victory bringing hardships to many. They are directly and indirectly responsible for multiple events fatally impacting lives close to the writer. Roddy exploits his position at the gallery to sexually use Phoebe, the onetime art student who befriends Owen at the novel’s end; Mark, the arms trader, orders the murder of Phoebe’s old housemate to quash a documentary exposé of his dealings; Thomas’s financial maneuvers defund Michael’s father’s pension funds (p. 324); Dorothy’s food products’ division markets meals deadly with saturated fats, dinners leading to Owen’s father’s fatal heart attack (p. 256); the former politician Henry’s gutting of the NHS facilitates Michael’s neighbor Fiona’s all-too-preventable death. In short, Michael experiences the Winshaw family—and Thatcherism—as a quite personal assault, a series of directed attacks; as he tells Fiona in the hospital, [y]ou’re here because of Henry Winshaw . . . He wants you to be here because he can’t bear to think that his money or the money of people like him might be used to stop things like this from happening . . . All we need now is to get hold of the murderer and bring him to justice. And . . . the rest of the family, while we’re at it. They’ve all got blood on their hands . . . There’s no end to the people who’ve died because of Mark and his obscene trade. Dorothy was the one who killed off my father, feeding him all that junk; and Thomas added a twist of the knife, making his money vanish into thin air just when he needed it. Roddy and Hilary[:] . . . If imagination’s the lifeblood of the people and thought is our oxygen, then his job’s to cut off our circulation and hers is to make sure that we all stay dead from the neck up. And so they sit at home getting fat on the proceeds and here we all are. Our businesses failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. (p. 413) The Winshaws, as tendrils of Thatcherism, present the Conservative political project as an attempt on the physical, economic, cultural, and intellectual life of the nation. In doing so, they work a turn on the murder mystery/horror flick underlying Coe’s novel. It is not just the family residing at the mysterious manor who are subject to systematic horrors; rather, it is the family, through their participation in the Tory policies of the 1980s, who are responsible for a prolonged attack, a carve up,



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on the national core. The callous actions of the Winshaws lead to any number of hardships, privations, and deaths. In terms of carving up the nation, it is the Winshaws—and the Thatcherism they espouse—who are responsible in this whodunit. The Winshaws thus are at the center of Carve Up’s comedy of horrors. Though the gothic elements of the novel are largely atmospheric and comic, the Winshaw lineage is ghoulish: they are “parasites . . . leeches in human form” (p. 438); “liars, cheats, swindlers and hypocrites, the lot of them” (p. 477); “a family of criminals” (p. 88); “the meanest, greediest, cruelest bunch of back-stabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth” (p. 209). From the slave trade to the present, “every penny of the Winshaw fortune . . . derived . . . from the shameless exploitation of persons weaker than themselves,” a practice Owen labels “criminal” (p. 89).5 Mortimer Winshaw himself acknowledges the family operates “where greed and madness become practically indistinguishable. One and the same thing” (p. 485). Their house embodies this treacherous avarice: its towers “resembled nothing so much as a giant black hand, gnarled and deformed: its fingers clawed at the heavens, as if to snatch down the setting sun which shone like a burnished penny” (p. 186). This mad cupidity manifests throughout the family: Lawrence betrays brother and country by passing on secrets to the Nazis; Hillary’s columns, a “raging torrent of overpaid words” (p. 465), are formulaic attempts to generate revenue; Henry jumps parties and sells out political principles by carving up the NHS; Roddy’s manipulation of the art market robs “the country of its own culture” (p. 197); Dorothy operates a farm with brutality and indifference to both animals and consumers; Thomas carves up companies and public sector entities for the profit of a few; Mark markets munitions with depraved indifference as to their use. All operate without regard save for profit, an inconsideration of others in line with Thatcher’s disavowal of society. Concordantly, the family represents a constellation of financial and cultural interests coming to the fore during the Thatcher era: “they seem to get everywhere . . . That’s the whole point of them” (p. 468). The drive for wealth, the opportunism, the lack of scruples—these family traits correspond with the theory and practice of Thatcherism. Individual Winshaws thus reveal the extent of Thatcher’s impact, a survey of how the Iron Lady’s Conservative Revolution impacted Britain. Henry Winshaw is the family member most directly involved in Thatcherism. As such, he charts the historical and ideological trajectory of Thatcher’s ideas; indeed, Henry’s section is composed of journal entries chronicling her very rise and fall. He feels closely linked with



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Thatcher, sensing “our destinies are inextricably bound” (p. 128), a premonition verified by her continual presence in his life. Henry becomes a strong advocate for Thatcherism, assisting her drive to sell off national companies such as BP and British Telecom (pp. 134–5) and serving as point man in her reworking the NHS around the bottom line (pp. 137– 9). He takes her teachings to heart, professing with the Iron Lady that consensus is “‘the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies’ and ‘something in which no one believes and to which no one objects’” (p. 135), an attitude behind Thatcher’s repeated refusals to compromise. This steadfastness in not accommodating others produces thoroughgoing opportunism—during the decisive leadership struggle when the prime minister is finally forced to resign, Henry cheers for strict pragmatism: “‘Dump the bitch . . . And fast.’ Nothing must be allowed to stop us’” (p. 141). If Thatcher offered a revolution, then the upheaval of values ultimately stressed only expediency and the bottom line. This hard-hearted unwillingness to compromise balance sheet values reveals Henry as embodying dry Toryism.6 A youthful confusion about the “Beaveredge Report” (p. 119) foreshadows adult loathing of the postwar social contract forever linked to William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services. Henry’s Oxford dalliances with Probability Tutors and Conservative Associations (p. 121) foretell the synthesis of his profession that “Quality is Quantifiable . . . that there was no condition—spiritual, metaphysical, psychological or emotional—which could not be expressed mathematically, by some sort of formula” (p. 123). This calculation is later famously espoused in Thatcher’s formulaic stress on “value for money,” itself a valuation understood solely in quantified terms. This belief is manifest in Henry’s long-running obsession with the NHS, one stemming from his uncle Lawrence’s observation that “the idea of having a centralized Health Service made a lot of sense, because ultimately it could be run as a business, with shareholders and a board of directors and a chief executive, and that was the way to make sure it was efficient, to run it along business lines, i.e. with a view to making a profit” (p. 123). Henry takes this line of thinking to its ultimate conclusion, developing Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) as a statistical measure: “The idea is that you take the cost of an operation and then calculate not just how many years” life it saves, but what the quality of the life is. You simply put a figure on it. Then you can work out the cost-effectiveness of each operation: and so something basic like a hip replacement will come out at around £700 per QALY, while a heart transplant is more like £5000 and a full hospital haemodialysis will cost



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a cool £14,000 per QALY” (p. 140). The idea of value for money then can comprehend quality only in terms of pounds sterling, a monetary valuation quite calculatingly applied to human life—decisions on care determined solely by what was judged economically sound. Similarly, for Henry, the goal of health care is to have hospitals operate like supermarkets (p. 134), an utterly economic concern making utterly economic decisions: “their sole purpose . . . to provide services . . . purchased from them by Health Authorities and fundholding GPs through negotiated contracts. The hospital becomes a shop, the operation becomes a piece of merchandise, and normal business practices prevail: pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap” (pp. 139–40). Henry himself views his prime managerial task as squashing the “dewy-eyed belief that people can be motivated by anything other than money” (p. 137). Margaret Thatcher and Henry Winshaw would have health and human services become enterprises concerned solely with cutting costs and maximizing profit, an industrialization of medicine.7 The result is what Owen’s neighbor and love interest, Fiona, experiences: “I don’t really trust my GP . . . most of his energy these days goes into balancing his budget and trying to keep his costs down. I didn’t get the sense that I was being taken very seriously” (p. 143). In thinking value and incentive only in pecuniary terms, concerns and practices not immediately manifesting financial return are deemed not worthwhile. Thatcher’s project to have all government expenditures operate on the domestic wisdom of receiving value for money ultimately leads to a radical revaluation, one only understanding value in monetary terms. If Henry represents the political calculations involved in Thatcher’s revolution, banker Thomas Winshaw represents the financial. Indeed, Thomas highlights the role Thatcher played in liberalizing financial markets to unfetter exchange and speculation. Just as Henry’s project consisted of freeing state enterprises from considering non-economic motives, even in extreme cases such as health care, Thomas represents Thatcher’s financial policies, market and capital liberalizations that aspired to free monetary practice from regulatory obligation to the actual world of humans. Thomas personifies this detachment through his role as a grotesque eschewing personal interaction for ocular selfsatisfaction: “Thomas’s world had always been apprehended entirely through the eyes” (p. 311), an interest “in watching, not touching” (p. 13). Tellingly, Thomas is in Tory eyes a vigorous figure of the new virtue of value: “Mrs Thatcher had transformed the image of the City and turned the currency speculators into national heroes by describing them as ‘wealth creators,’ alchemists who could conjure unimaginable



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fortunes out of thin air. The fact that these fortunes went straight into their own pockets . . . was quietly overlooked” (p. 310). Thomas the financial alchemist prizes banking as the “most spiritual of all professions,” etherealizing itself through a multitude of “commissions, interest, fees, swaps, futures, options: it was no longer even paper money. It could scarcely be said to exist” (p. 310). This enriching spirituality, one endlessly transmuting transactions into wealth without seeming need of—or connection to—the material world, depends on remaining above the people linked to the figures he juggles, a conclusion clear from his ecstasy at the digitization—and deregulation—of financial trading after the 1986 Big Bang: “At last, to his delight, there was no longer any need for dealers ever to come in contact with one another, and every transaction was reduced to the flicker of electric pulses on a video screen . . . It seemed . . . that there was no end to the glassy barriers which he could put up between himself and the people (did they really exist?) whose money formed the basis of each day’s intoxicating speculations” (p. 309). Freeing the market means absolute divorce from human interaction—and regulation—a separation rendering the humans impacted by exchange things of doubt at best. Just as with the recent financial market crash, the abstraction of trading conceals the impact of his speculations. The result is indifference to the lives he alters—people who cannot see him for he has spent his life constructing screens behind which to hide: “Blinded by the many screens which had been put up between himself and the rest of the world, he was no longer in a position to catch even the most fleeting glimpse of the people whose money he was gambling with” (p. 323). In the novel, this failure to consider the impact of his transactions is most forcefully conveyed by Thomas contributing to the death of Michael’s father through asset stripping defunding the senior Owen’s pension, a “victimless crime” for which Thomas “continues to profess his amazement at the scale of the fraud, and to plead his own baffled ignorance” (pp. 323–4). Financial deregulation in fact mystifies the market, obscuring victims for the players and concealing traders from those thus injured. Thomas reveals the financial transformations associated with Thatcher—a focus on “sound money,” the valorization of speculation and finance capital—as a misuse of the national economy, a reconfiguration of the rules permitting enrichment of those like the Winshaws and an indifference to those injured in the process. It is, however, Mark Winshaw who extends to its most extreme Thatcherite stress on deregulation and the bottom line—and disregard of consequence. Mark is more directly deadly than other Winshaws, for he works not through the indirection and delay of depleted funds



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and understaffed hospitals but by marketing munitions. Mark’s rise is redolent of Thatcher’s sly winks to the arms trade, cynical Cold War transactions leading Britain to become the third largest arms merchant in the world. These trades, justified as protecting Western democratic interests or spurring British economy, all too frequently went to despotic strongmen such as Saddam Hussein. Just so, Mark “make[s] it a habit . . . of not inquiring into the uses” of the munitions he sells (p. 377), an unquestioning stance exemplified when he fails to exhibit any curiosity about the circumstances of his father’s death (pp. 377–8). Even when transactions contain a personal element, Mark will not let himself be distracted from profit. Further, when Mark’s wife is killed by a car bomb intended for him, he is “devastated by the loss”—but of the rare automobile destroyed with his young bride (p. 383). What had been in Thomas a desire to estrange himself from others is expressed in Mark as callous disregard of life, a coldness seen most viscerally when he initiates a drunken game of shooting apples off the heads of waitresses in Baghdad (pp. 397–8). Even his mother is not exempt from his disregard of others: he indifferently remarks he less “despises” her than fails to “see the point of the sort of life you’re leading” (p. 379). Certainly, as a munitions merchant who cannot abide his own mother, Mark represents the most extreme Thatcherite shift from postwar consensus. This departure is most evident in the explicit contrast of World War II, “a good war for pulling a country together” (p. 477), and the more suspect First Gulf War, a conflict foreshadowed by Mark’s cynical shrug about selling weapons to Saddam Hussein: “what does it matter what he intends to do with them? If it starts to look as though he’s in a position to do any harm, then we find an excuse to attack him and wipe out the whole arsenal. And then we start selling again” (p. 387). Of course, the arms sold by Mark are used by the Iraqis against coalition forces (including the British), a development that fails to trouble him. Mark’s obsession with selling arms is so extreme even one of Saddam’s generals reprimands his lack of “honorable intentions”: “all you are interested in is doing deals” (p. 375). Mark Winshaw offers a portrait of perfidious Albion in the age of Thatcher, a “nation of opportunists” scorned even by Saddam Hussein and his allies. Thatcherite enterprise is revealed to be so centered on greed as to operate without regards to consequences, even when military wares might be turned against British troops.8 The impact of Thatcher’s drive to deregulate industry is perhaps most visible in the equally deadly form of Dorothy Winshaw, a magnate of industrial farming and food processing. Further, in Dorothy’s hands, this disregard of others’ welfare is revealed to be the tactics of class warfare,



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one designed to undermine Tory opponents. A proponent of industrial agriculture, Dorothy works with something akin to a Midas touch, transforming everything she encounters into stilled unnaturalness. She turns a “quiet, old-fashioned, modestly run family farm into the biggest agrochemical empire in the country” (p. 242). Her turkeys (like her own marriage) are unable to reproduce through distortions produced by her singular focus on maximizing yield (p. 242), a Thatcherlike single-minded obsession with the bottom line. Eschewing her husband’s joy in the daily rhythms of farm life, she instead nurtures political contacts into bountiful subsidies for her enterprises (p. 244) and fosters the conversion rate of feed to yield of meat (p. 18). Thatcher’s entrepreneurial focus then shifts governmental assistance from individuals and small farms to big business. Likewise, Dorothy’s focus is not on ensuring her stock’s welfare (p. 19) but guaranteeing “profits by controlling every stage of production” (p. 245). This vertical integration puts a “stranglehold” on smaller farms, compelling them to maintain the same high volume, high mortality conditions exhibited in the industrial broiler house Michael finds at the former Nuttall farm (p. 248). Dorothy develops numerous “innovations” to solve difficulties generated by removing animals from natural conditions, taking them from the farmyard and crowding them in inhumane conditions leading to aggression and cannibalism (pp. 248–51, 256–7). As with the abattoir profiled in the Georges Franju documentary, Dorothy’s agri-business is no longer a farm but “an organization of deaths” (p. 252). Dorothy herself passes verdict on the quality and healthiness of her wares by avoiding the products of her own mass-production farms, opting instead to keep free-range animals for her own use: she “had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public” (p. 253). Indeed, even the products generated from her industrial agriculture are less food and more a synthetic manufacture only marketed as edible, an unnaturalness indicated by the labels (pp. 255–6). This transformation of basic natural processes and foods into something with elaborate additives and packaging seems a malicious gag: “All at once I had the feeling that someone, somewhere, was enjoying a monstrous joke at my expense. And not just at my expense, but at all our expenses. I suddenly took this photograph [of a Brunwin heat-up dinner] to be an insult aimed both at myself and at the world in general” (p. 258). It is a bitter prank: farms that are no longer natural places, food that is quite unhealthy. The Thatcherite elevation of the market at the expense of the nation as political society positions citizen-stakeholders as the butt of the prank, for they are marketed deadly



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dinners, deprived of pension funds, and stripped of effective health care, all in their own name. The novel takes this further, hinting the unwholesomeness of Dorothy’s dinners is a conscious political strategy, one designed to physically and mentally weaken the political underclass: “As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy” (pp. 254–5). If Mark betrays Thatcherite callousness toward British citizenry, Dorothy reveals a more active contempt and outright attempt to subjugate by “foisting” her lethal wares on political and class foes. The Winshaw legacy is not just one of greed but explicit class warfare, one designed to weaken a nation to permit sustained perpetuation of privilege. It is the youngest Winshaws, art gallery owner Roddy and media figure Hillary, who extend the critique of Thatcherism into the cultural realm. Like the elder generation, both are driven by avarice, a greed manifest even during their childhood (p. 20). This desire for affluence betrays a corruption of the arts and media under Thatcher’s regime. If Thomas and Mark represented a subversion of vision during the Thatcher era, Roddy signifies a debasing of the image itself. Indeed, Roddy is continually linked with mystified images, particularly self-image, that bespeak a cultural faltering. His art gallery is tellingly named “Narcissus” (p. 169), a labeling chiming with one of Michael’s publishers: the Peacock Press, headquartered at Vanity House (p. 108). This concern with selfreflection extends even to artistic production where only those in the public eye, regardless of merit, find recognition for their works: books “written by some bloke who reads the weather on the fucking television” (p. 103) are marketed along with visual artworks by a “pampered socialite’s daughter” (p. 196). Such an industry trades on notoriety and public image, not artistic quality. Driven by what sells, what sells is the notoriety of the creator, a stress on fame producing this narcissistic cultural synergy: “In today’s market . . . it’s naïve to suppose that you can promote an artist’s work in isolation from his personality. There has to be an image, something you can market through the newspapers and magazines. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the pictures are: if you’ve got nothing interesting to say about yourself when the woman from the Independent comes around for an interview, then you’re in trouble” (p. 178). Similarly, Roddy’s gallery cultivates an atmosphere to distinguish its own brand: it is “hushed, clinical and exclusive” (p. 175). Likewise, the young artist Phoebe would have been better served “deciding what to wear” (p. 176) than compiling her portfolio for the marketingobsessed Roddy. It is no longer the artistic image that sells but rather the image surrounding the art—the artist is no longer an expressive soul



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but a branding device, a type of packaging. This stress on marketing the aesthetic links Roddy’s practice to Fredric Jameson’s characterization of postmodernism: it is the moment when the “semiautonomy of the cultural sphere . . . has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism” (1991, p. 48), when art is traded and valued solely as commodity. Thatcher’s emphasis on enterprise and value for money produces an art seen only as economic investment. Conceiving the aesthetic solely as an arena for marketing, management, and speculation as yet another area in which value is measured solely in financial terms, Roddy does seem criminal: his gallery depends on “inflating” reputations and promoting “mediocre work”—and “even when a good painter does manage to slip through the net you’ve already pushed the prices up so high that the smaller galleries can’t afford to buy them and it all ends up going into private collections. So what you’re doing, in effect, is robbing the country of its own culture” (pp. 196–7). By trading on the image of the artwork (and artist) rather than the artwork itself, Roddy circulates counterfeit art and speculatively drives up prices of truly meritorious art. As Thomas financially impoverished those on the wrong end of his speculations, so too does Roddy defraud the nation of its artistic vision. This trading on image as marketable commodity is further developed through Hillary Winshaw’s media career. Again, this critique is established through contrast with pre-Thatcher practice: the promise of the media promoted by her onetime mentor, Alan Beamish, who envisioned television with postwar idealism as “one of the fibres that holds the country together. It collapses class distinctions and helps create a sense of national identity” (p. 68). By contrast, Hillary offers the rhetorical strategies and values of Thatcherism in her newspaper columns, “common sense” seeking only financial, not social, profit. This received wisdom operates through attacks on political and class opponents, permanently undoing any possibility of the consensus once central to postwar Britain. Ironically, these attacks draw on purportedly Victorian values and sensibilities formulated with, in Thatcher’s words, “the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour” (quoted in Samuel 1998, p. 339). The novel cannily highlights how Hillary’s columns make use of Thatcherite domestic idiom: “tightening our belts,” “shame on you,” “beady little eye,” “pursestrings,” “self-appointed nannies,” “Mad Dog,” (pp. 64, 72, 74, 77). These stock phrases allow her to hold “forth with equal conviction” on a range of topics, a self-confidence that is the singular selling feature of her columns: “Countless thousands of readers seemed to have been charmed, over the years, by her endearing



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habit of professing almost total ignorance of any subject which she chose to discuss—her specialty in this regard being a willingness to put forward the most strident opinions relating to controversial books and films while cheerfully admitting that she had been unable to find the time to read or see them” (pp. 62–3). Hillary disarmingly reinforces opinions, utilizing stock phrases to confirm the received wisdom of clichés dividing the country along seemingly preset lines. As such, her columns defuse critique and thinking through issues—and reinforce the Thatcherite division of the nation. Indeed, Hillary demonstrates that, despite appeals to domestic values from both Thatcher and the media organizations behind her, what actually mattered was the bottom line: “the only kind of . . . values anybody seems to care about are the one that can be added up on a balance sheet” (p. 102). Hillary’s newspaper certainly makes decisions based not on newsworthiness but on a story’s ability to sell papers, decisions demonstrating responsibility only to profits. This media failure to inform is manifest everywhere, for not only do Hillary’s columns of received opinions flourish but even publishing is dominated by books on teddy bear collections (p. 75) and novels like Hillary’s own: “[c]heap tricks, mechanical plot, lousy dialogue, could have been written on a computer. Probably was written on a computer. Empty, hollow, materialistic, meretricious. Enough to make any civilized person heave” (p. 103). For Hillary, such economic motives are synonymous with protecting the Tories, as seen in her argument to bury a High Court decision against the Thatcher government for a titillating story complete with pictures: “Who wants to read another union story? . . . why should we run a story that’s damaging to the government?” (p. 75).9 Considerations about the importance of the story and the need to inform are ignored, a disregard all the more strenuous when the story would cast Thatcher’s government in a negative light. Such consideration is returned in the government’s decision to deregulate the media (p. 77), a quid pro quo accentuating intimate relations between industry and the Thatcher regime. Because of the stress on political and economic return, because of the reliance on stock phrases and attitudes, even Hillary must look scornfully at her own “hatchet jobs” (p. 388): “It’s only a bit of junk for the newspapers . . . You don’t think I’d share my beliefs—anything that was actually mine—with all those people, do you?” (p. 198). In fact, Hillary, much like Dorothy and her industrial food products, will not even watch her own television programming (p. 253), finding it “‘rubbish’ for ‘brain-dead morons’” (p. 78). As with Dorothy, Hillary’s career appears an extended operation in class warfare. Like Margaret Thatcher (who famously relied on the advertising firm



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Saatchi and Saatchi to help craft her campaigns), Hillary convinces the middle and working classes to operate against their own interests, to vote Tory and support Thatcher’s positions even given the negative impact Conservative decisions have on their lives.10 She operates to kill informed debate, “to make sure we all stay dead from the neck up” (pp. 84–5). As the Winshaws demonstrate, Thatcher’s legacy manifests in myriad ways beyond politics. Indeed, Winshaw ubiquity in these scattered arenas gives credence to Henry’s Thatcherite advice to Thomas: “The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There’s no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what’s hit them” (p. 313). In the Winshaws, Thatcher’s project is revealed as a progressive stripping away of social welfare and community, an unstitching conducted in the name of the free market. This unraveling appears as a series of outrages, escalating offenses against the social body that takes away public goods for private gain, a step that, in the Winshaws, appears at the point where “private enterprise starts shading into crime” (p. 223). Indeed, in the years since Thatcher’s premiership, the continued development of a number of trends begun under her watch have seemed to edge into the criminal: the replacement of public institutions with inefficient public/private partnerships or outright—and mismanaged—private ownership; increased corporatization; a growing media emphasis on treating viewers and readers solely as consumers; declining food standards; a burgeoning arms trade; reckless military ventures; and cavalier financial speculation in a deregulated marketplace. **** In many ways, the full impact of Coe’s novel might be best revealed through contrast with other contemporary British novels directly engaged with Thatcher and Thatcherism. The most striking difference with other fiction negotiating Thatcher’s premiership is the predominance of a realist—or largely realist—vein in the other novels. Margaret Drabble’s Headleand Trilogy (The Radiant Way [1987], A Natural Curiosity [1989], and The Gates of Ivory [1991]), for example, operates in classic nineteenth-century Condition of England manner: a cast of characters indexing a swath of (then) current issues inaugurated with the 1979 Tory victory in a thoroughgoing engagement with the sweep of Thatcherism. Even novels such as Ian McEwan’s 1987 The Child in Time



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and Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 The Buddha of Suburbia that depart somewhat from classic realism are clearly concerned to define themselves against Thatcherism but never in clear focus: McEwan’s novel, set in 1987, has the main character bump into various aspects of the prime minister’s government, but the PM’s gender is curiously and cagily suppressed; Kureishi’s novel tracks the social and cultural life of the late 1970s, significantly fading out on the night of the 1979 election that brought Thatcher to power. Salman Rushdie’s 1989 The Satanic Verses utilizes magic realism but its portrayal of Thatcherism (in scenes such as the Club Hot Wax meltdown of “Maggie Torture”) is conducted mainly in support of other themes in the novel. A post-Thatcher novel such as Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) actually brings the Iron Lady into the plot, most famously a brief instance where the main character dances with the prime minister; by briefly introducing her as a character, the novel operates still within the realist frame, albeit in a somewhat whimsical vein. In all these cases, Thatcher is invoked or appears directly (albeit in a minor role)—but only to set the atmospheric scene. The Iron Lady and her politics then are less direct concern and more means for contextualizing largely realistic concerns of these novels—even the more seemingly fantastic plots such as Rushdie’s might be seen as demonstrating a very materialist concern with immigrants making their way in a new land. In short, Thatcherism operates largely as period backdrop to other thematics. In contrast, the multiple moving parts of Coe’s novel keep characters and plot at a remove: narrator Owen is offstage for much of the novel (displaced by his own texts); his own story is often a very British comedy of embarrassments, such that Owen is never an engaging or fully sympathetic creature; certainly, the Winshaws are presented as so uniformly vile that identification is never an issue. Consequently, the characters seem less important in themselves and more for what they disclose about an era (rather than the more realist impact of the era framing the field of possibilities for the characters in focus): the baleful policies of Thatcherism and a quick index of its social impact. The characters (especially the Winshaws) mostly operate as screens or allegorical figures, each one representing a specific piece of the Thatcherite puzzle. Particularly given the curious ending of the novel (Owen’s rather contrived death), What a Carve Up! is more about the political and social impact of Thatcherism than about the little life of any character depicted within the bounds of the novel. Coe’s novel stands then as a mirror of a political era, one constantly changing its angle of attack to offer a full portrait. Oddly, even though the entire novel is filtered in some way through Owen,



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the use of different texts and voices by Owen to convey his reaction to Thatcherism works to both deepen (as a personal account chronicling very personal losses) and broaden (in the survey of Thatcherism in all its different forms) his narrative’s range. The political punch of form most distinguishes What a Carve Up! from other fictional engagements with Thatcherism. As John Simons indicates, form impacts the presentation of the Winshaws: the family history is not a continuum, a linear history suggesting progress but rather “a set of fragments which require assembly” (p. 54). By breaking the family history into sections devoted to one Winshaw at a go, a carving up of the family formally mirroring the brutality of the murders at novel’s end, Coe’s novel produces a more thoroughgoing presentation of how Thatcher transformed Britain. The stress on connections between the sections, though, also points to the role of Michael Owen, the fictive narrator who writes and arranges these fragments. Not only do the Winshaw chapters alternate with those involving Owen but even those Winshaw sections bristle with personal interjections and bursts of self-conscious narration. The novel begins by striking such notes: “Tabitha Winshaw . . . [is] the patron and sponsor of the book which you, my friendly readers, now hold in your hands” (p. 3); “Meanwhile, up in the nursery, there are two more Winshaws with a part to play in the family history” (p. 19). Owen reveals the reason for this admixture: The more I saw of these wretched, lying, thieving, self-advancing Winshaws, the less I liked them, and the more difficult it became for me to preserve the tone of the official historian. And the less I was able to get access to solid and demonstrable facts, the more I had to bring my imagination to bear on the narrative, fleshing out incidents . . . speculating on matters of psychological motivation, even inventing conversations . . . out of my loathing for these people came a rebirth of my literary personality. (p. 90) Research on the Winshaws produces knowledge erasing objective distance; gaps in evidence necessitate creative solutions to fill in the narrative. Both strategies highlight more personal engagement, one resulting in a curious and unstable text, “a serious mess. Parts of it read like a novel and parts of it read like a history” (p. 91). Owen’s reaction to the Winshaws manifests itself as generic and stylistic schizophrenia. This split personality is all too aware of its own textual status—footnotes in



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Henry’s section refer to Owen’s history (which itself incorporates the purported collection of journals comprising Henry’s chapter), a volume yet to be published but described as “speculative” (p. 120) and “characteristically overheated” (p. 129). This intersection, fictional author merging with fiction purportedly penned, offers proof of Owen’s faith “in the power of letters to transform my existence” (p. 157). These words impact the narrator’s life just as he frames the Winshaw world through his own language; consequently, the novel appears as a mirror’s surface, a fragile line dividing world and reflection. Owen therefore feels “stamped for ever as a man of imagination rather than action: condemned, like Orpheus, to roam an underworld of fantasies” (p. 263). Consequently, devices such as the self-consciousness of the novel’s first sections, the schizophrenic style and form, all appear as struggles within Owen, attempts to grasp the magnitude of the world he finds himself in. Owen, though, cannot for the bulk of the novel, properly forge connections between the emotional privations of his own life and the carve-ups of Thatcherism and the Winshaws until he is able to grasp his own location in the tale. The key is an awareness of complicity, much like the realization he has while playing Cluedo when he discovers he himself is the culprit: “Surely there was no precedent for this situation in real life? I wondered what it would actually feel like, to be present at the unraveling of some terrible mystery and then to be suddenly confronted with the falseness of your own, complacent self-image as disinterested observer: to find, all at once, that you were thoroughly and messily bound up in the web of motives and suspicions which you had presumed to untangle with an outsider’s icy detachment” (pp. 302–3). This feeling is brought home in the novel’s final section where Owen is stripped of his own first person address. Realizing it was “no longer . . . possible to think of himself as detached, disinterested,” he finds himself “suddenly at the centre of things . . . ‘I’m part of it’” (p. 472). Owen’s epiphany is not the happiest realization, for it suggests a larger collusion, one concerning his failure to stop the Winshaws and the values they signify. Indeed, as Mortimer Winshaw warns, it is not just greed that is linked to madness but a failure to stop it that makes one complicit: “And there comes another point, where the willingness to tolerate greed, and to live alongside it, and even to assist it, becomes a sort of madness too. Which means that we’re all stuck with it” (p. 485). Given Thatcher’s widespread support and ability to repeatedly win elections, the implications of Owen’s realization resonate starkly: Owen— and the British public—are complicit in failing to stop Thatcherism and the Winshaws. Such a recognition is akin to awaking from unpleasant



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dreams: “If you sleep, if you dream, you must accept your dreams. It’s the role of the dreamer” (p. 487). The world Owen awakes to, one in which public goods have become private gain, in which a nation rushes to war with a foe to whom it had previously sold arms, is nightmarish, but one he—and the electorate more broadly—failed to prevent. Indeed, the continual allusiveness of Coe’s novel seems dreamlike, an impression furthered by its circular structure—the novel begins and ends with The Winshaw Legacy (also the title of the first American version of the novel), the text Owen is writing. Owen’s confession about dreams refers to the novel’s epigraph, a passage where the lines are quoted in French from Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. This film, strange and dreamlike in its use of mirrors as portals to the world of the dead, casts the novel’s circular structure in a very different light. This intertext reframes the Thatcher years as a realm in uncertain relation to the world from which it opened up. This strange and surreal world is peopled by the dead, lifeless figures who disrupt the daylight land of poets, marriages, and cafes. It is a world ruled by a harsh queen who finally is subjected to her own laws. However, it is a spell the dreamers have allowed to be cast on them, a complicity rendering them culpable for the violent acts the rigid queen commands from beyond the mirror. And yet the queen, like the Winshaws and Thatcher herself, cannot contain the reflections generated. Thatcher shatters consensus politics, a fracturing reflected in the shards of narrative depicting the Winshaws. However, the end of unities points to a new and uncertain Britain, one in which the unification of the nation can no longer be taken for granted but continually forged anew amid the roiling of devolution, multiculturalism, and political tacks (Third Way politics, David Cameron and the new Conservatives). The divided world with which the novel concludes presages a stark new politics, one in which Britain finds itself enmeshed in situations from which it cannot divorce itself (Gulf Wars old and new), political parties seem mirror images of one another, and old verities no longer hold. Likewise, in the final section, Owen loses the detached voice of the spectator, his old role as man of letters without the “necessary brio” (pp. 199, 477), once he admits his own engagement with the events surrounding him. It is a rebirth at once literary and political, an acknowledgment of his own investment in the story and a resolution to take action. His engagement proves to be short-lived, though, as he is unable to outrun Winshaw madness: he is killed in a plane crash by the last remaining member of the family. His death leaves the novel open-ended, Owen’s awakening inaugurating a struggle he is pulled from, an ending that fades just as battle lines



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are drawn. The struggle with Thatcherism is thus framed as an ongoing conflict, a conclusion prescient for foreseeing the way political common wisdom after Thatcher vilifies public ownership while enshrining the market. Thatcherism does not end with Thatcher’s premiership. Coe’s novel then offers an inverted world of carve-ups satirizing those who had callously wielded the financial shears in the Thatcherite revolution. The novel’s plurality of accounts and uneasy blend of horror and farce paints Thatcherism as a tragicomedy. Such an ending highlights the destabilization resultant from Thatcher’s premiership, an undermining of the economic, cultural, and social values that had imbued Britain after Beveridge. Carve Up! portrays a radical revaluation of the social and cultural consensus and a rending of this postwar social contract. In its stead is a jarring juxtaposition of forms and genres stressing the isolation and free-floating status of the Winshaws and those impacted by them. Consequently, the novel offers a Britain unmoored from the communal ground that had once facilitated social exchange. What a Carve Up! depicts Britain emerging from the Thatcher years sundered from the social and cultural framework that had sustained it for decades.

Notes 1. Because Britain had been disrupted by strikes and social upheaval during World War I and the subsequent decade, there was much concern the populace needed to be convinced they were fighting for their own well-being and not for the traditional ruling classes during World War II. William Beveridge drew up a document (the 1942 Beveridge Report) during the war calling for a variety of social insurance services to be offered by the government: education, health care, unemployment benefits, etc. The Labour victory after the war led to a quick implementation of these policies, policies and institutions whose popularity seemed to unify the nation for decades after the war’s end. Thatcher called this system of support the “chrysalis of socialism” (Seldon, p. 2). 2. John Simons makes a similar point about the novel (pp. 49, 53). 3. This obsession reflects John Corner and Sylvia Harvey’s observation that Thatcherism rewrote citizenship in terms of consumerism (p. 11). 4. Thatcher was accused of having a “retro” style politics due to rhetorical gestures such as her call for a return to Victorian values and her claim she had retrieved the “greatness” of Great Britain during the Falklands campaign. 5. This ominous family seat underscores the persistent role of the Winshaws in British affairs echoes the Nairn-Anderson thesis that Britain never thoroughly modernized, a failure seen in the continued political power of the ancien régime. See Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain and The Enchanted Glass. Quite strikingly, Keith Joseph, a prominent figure in Thatcher’s first two cabinets and a walk-on in Henry Winshaw’s journals, offers a similar assessment—see Kaye (86).



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6. “Wet” was public school lingo for weak, a term leveled against Conservatives who quailed at Thatcher’s stringent financial policies. “Dries,” of course, supported these moves. 7. The supposed rationalization this change would make is mocked in the transcript of Henry’s television interview, one recording a nonsense of acronyms, statistical figures, and purportedly authoritative formula and numerical comparisons (pp. 137–9). 8. A more personal link between Thatcher and the arms trade was revealed when her own son Mark was charged in 2004 for taking part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. 9. This deference is later reprised with regards to Thatcher’s policies on transforming the NHS (pp. 82–3), the suppression of the documentary on Mark Winshaw’s arms trading (pp. 84–5), and a failure to prevent government representatives’ ham-handed deflection of scrutiny (p. 135). 10. This is best exemplified by a driver who gives Michael a lift at novel’s end: the man complains about the effects of Thatcher’s deregulation on public transit and road conditions—“It’s a crime”—but then sniffs “Mind you, I wouldn’t vote for the other lot” (p. 430).

Works cited Anderson, P. (1992) English Questions. New York: Routledge. Coe, J. (1994) What a Carve Up! New York: Penguin. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (1991) “Introduction: Great Britain Limited” in J. Corner and S. Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritage. New York: Routledge. pp. 1–20. Harris, J. (2003) “Tradition and Transformation: Society and Civil Society in Britain, 1945–2001” in K. Burk (ed.) The British Isles since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 90–125. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kaye, Harvey J. (1991) The Powers of the Past: Reflections on the Crisis and the Promise of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Moseley, M. (2001) “Jonathan Coe (1961–)” in M. Moseley (ed.) British Novelists since 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Boston: Gale. pp. 67–73. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain. London: Verso. Nairn, T. (1994) The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy. London: Vintage. Samuel, R. (1998) Island Stories. New York: Routledge. Seldon, A. and Collings, D. (2000) Britain under Thatcher. New York: Longman. Simons, J. (1996) “Beyond Human Communities,” Critical Survey 8(1): pp. 49–57. Thatcher, M. (1987) “Interview for Woman’s Own” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=106689. Accessed January 16, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1989) The Revival of Britain: Speeches on Home and European Affairs 1975–1988. Trans. and Compiled by Alistair Cooke. London: Aurum Press.



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Let’s Dance: The Line of Beauty and the Revenant Figure of Thatcher Kim Duff

In 1984, soon after the general election that secured Margaret Thatcher a second term in office, the British television show Spitting Image aired for the first time. The program gained immense success during the 1980s in its satirical approach to popular and political personae of the decade. Out of all of the caricatures that were created, the Margaret Thatcher puppet became the most recognizable. The Thatcher puppet most often wore a men’s suit and sported Thatcher’s unmistakable coiffed hair, her unforgettable voice, and the piercing blue eyes that those around her both feared and revered. The Spitting Image puppet portrays Thatcher as a harsh, uncompromising, and bellicose figure whose clothing and style embody the excesses of power, politics, and consumption that became hallmarks of the 1980s. The puppet manipulates our ideas about gender expectations as it imagines Thatcher’s gendered identity as freefloating and fluid in a way that challenges Marjory Garber’s theory of a figure in drag as represented through an “over determination” of gender. While traditional (i.e. straight) approaches to Thatcher’s gender position her as “fragmented” or “drag,” the Spitting Image puppet blurs these distinctions in a way that illustrates, and essentially spotlights, the free-floating nature of Thatcher’s gender. The focal point of the Thatcher puppet becomes its intense red lipstick or cultivated, lower, and more masculine voice, purposely drawing our attention to the alternating, and free-floating, ways in which her gender is performed. While the puppet engages Garber’s “over determination” of gender through its intense lipstick and voice, it also makes “straight” the overlap of gender (i.e. man dressed as woman, or woman dressed as man) inherent to drag costumes by making Thatcher’s identity more fluid, and thus more “queer,” than homosexual or drag identities. In this sense, such representations make apparent Butler’s theory of gender performance as Thatcher’s body comes 180



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to stand for “fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs” of her socioeconomic policies (1999, p. 173). The Spitting Image puppet thus “outs,” or makes external, the kinds of “gender trouble” (Butler 1999) that often caused the Thatcherite body to be fragmented in order for it to make cultural sense to a nation that had never encountered a politically gendered figure such as Thatcher. As Thatcher oscillated between gendered roles, the symbolic nature of her body became integral to public interpretation of her as a political figure. The problem was not that she was a woman trying to be a man but rather that she was feminine and masculine at the same time. The way in which the Spitting Image puppet moves between masculine and feminine representations of Thatcher wrestles with such fragmentation and oscillation as it not only draws attention to the way that Thatcher was self-figured through, for example, speech therapy and her choice of clothing (both of which the Spitting Image puppet satirically focuses on) but also the ways in which those around her reacted to such self-figuring with a mixture of fear and loathing. Parceling out these gendered fragments through the Spitting Image puppet in turn spotlights the way that English culture remained suspect of a woman taking on the traditionally masculine role of prime minister. In some sense, her presence not only created a gender crisis within the cabinet but also called into question the ways in which an intensely public political figure could so seamlessly float between gendered roles, and how such movement implies a kind of “queering” of the role of the prime minister. This chapter examines Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize winning novel The Line of Beauty (2004) as it adapts the representational politics of the Spitting Image puppet in a way that queers the figure of Thatcher through her interaction with gay antagonist Nick Guest. In this chapter, I argue that Hollinghurst’s novel provides a fictional portrayal of Thatcher that embodies the consumer driven economic and privatizing policies of 1980s Britain through its representation of parts of Thatcher’s body (for example her eyes, her hair, her mouth, and her clothing) coveted by the men (mostly MPs) that surround her. It is only the gay drug-addicted aesthete Nick Guest, however, who is able to synthesize, and subsequently queer, the fragments of the Thatcherite body through an intimate interaction with her on the dance floor. Through his portrayal of Thatcher as a queered, consumable, and free-floating gendered figure, Hollinghurst pursues the kinds of problematic, and often reductive, representations of gay and transgendered identities in 1980s Conservative Britain. As such, I will uncover the ways in which Hollinghurst, a gay novelist who lived in London during the 1980s, confronts traditional depictions of Thatcher



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as a political drag queen and a revenant Oedipal mother figure that haunts 1980s bourgeois society. The Line of Beauty, the first “gay” novel to ever win the Booker prize, traces the experiences of Nick Guest, a young, gay, academic who, after moving into the Kensington Gardens house of his college friend Toby Fedden, is taken up with the consumptive aura of Thatcher’s London. The sense of hero worship, and often fearful reverence, of Hollinghurst’s Thatcher permeates the novel—particularly in the case of Toby’s father, MP Gerald Fedden, whose idea of political accomplishment includes meeting the PM and “the accolade of a Spitting Image puppet in his likeness” (p. 361). While Hollinghurst’s previous works, notably The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Folding Star (1994), have focused on pre-AIDS gay life in London, The Line of Beauty folds in ideas of homosexuality, AIDS, and drug abuse into the Conservative Thatcherite lifestyle of the 1980s upper classes in a way that makes ironic bedfellows of homosexuality, consumption, and Thatcherite Conservatism. Hollinghurst’s work became significant during the late 1980s when The Swimming Pool Library came out in the same year that Thatcher’s government enacted Clause 28 to prohibit local authorities from funding anything that might promote homosexuality. While Thatcher left office in 1990 and the Conservatives soon lost power to Labour, Hollinghurst’s work returned to 1980s London through The Folding Star and The Line of Beauty as Tony Blair brought the Labour majority closer in line with the Right than ever before. The setbacks that the gay community felt in the mid-1980s remained intact throughout Blair’s term, and for writers such as Hollinghurst the defeat of the ideals of the Left became ever more poignant as the 1990s marched on while Thatcher continued to haunt contemporary social policy. Arguably, it is this poignancy that lead Hollinghurst to address traditional conceptions of Thatcher in an attempt to rework, perhaps even rewrite, Thatcher’s engagement with, and impact upon, the gay community during the 1980s and beyond. While much of Hollinghurst’s text refers to the revenant figure of the prime minister, the singular physical appearance of Thatcher in the text, at the Fedden’s anniversary party, points to 1980s British flirtatious, and often adulterous, engagement with ideas of consumption and ownership in a way that articulates the signifying body of Thatcher as the ultimate 1980s sociopolitical commodity. The process each of the MPs goes through in coveting Hollinghurst’s Thatcher is affected by various discourses of inclusion/exclusion and private/public. In wrestling with these issues, Hollinghurst draws on the sociopolitical context of the 1980s, exploring how the politics of inclusion/exclusion affected Thatcherite ideas about consumption and wealth, and private



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Public and private shifts: Britain, Thatcher and the 1980s The 1980s was a period of significant social upheaval in Great Britain as Thatcher’s government left few stones unturned in the drive to prop up the failing British economy. Such propping up included a determined shift toward an American style free-market economy through the turning over of publicly owned industry to private enterprise, and social housing to private ownership. As a result of such drastic sociopolitical changes, the ways in which Britons were able to identify themselves as British subjects in the 1980s altered significantly. While many people on the Right have celebrated Thatcher’s determination to “free up” the economic market through privatization, other critics have cried foul that Thatcherite policies created an exclusive economic opportunity for wealthy individuals and the upper middle classes at the expense of marginalized identities including gay, lower class, immigrant, and the unemployed. As John Corner and Sylvia Harvey suggest, there was a distinct contrast in 1980s Britain between lower class families “struggling to make ends meet” and upper class wealthy individuals who were “benefitting from the purchase of council houses or the purchase (and often swift resale) of shares in some of the major and previously nationalized industries” (1991, p. 4). Thatcher’s decision to divorce the state from a socialist network broadened the gap between the wealthy and the poor and left the wealthy with a private ownership of, and investment in, previously public industries and properties that had contributed to the fabric of British society. The politics of privatization brought about a stringent form of inclusion and exclusion that, as critics such as Stuart Hall, Robert Hewison, Raphael Samuel, and others have suggested, changed the way that the individual citizen was identified as a contributing member of society. Owning shares in public-turned-private industries that still held the national name implied an economic shift in who could, and who could not, own a stake in what had previously been a mainstay of the British economy and British identity. The move toward private ownership as the previously state-owned industries were sold off to private investors also signaled a kind of consumption of national identity. In the case of The Line of Beauty, such investors were drawn mainly from the upper class



and public space. In this sense, Hollinghurst’s text illustrates the way that the specter of Thatcher haunts 1980s British bourgeois society as she is coveted socially and politically, and how some 20 years later she continues to haunt British society through issues of deregulation, immigration, and gay rights.

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Conservative Right who, like MP Gerald Fedden and his cohort, desired to possess the nation through property and political dominance. Those that could afford to own pieces of the national infrastructure could, in effect, control those citizens that were less financially secure. Ideas of public and private ownership and, in turn, public and private space and access to those spaces became part of the “lust,” “greed,” and “power” that Heather Nunn links to the figure of Thatcher during the 1980s (2002, p. 172). Such shifts in public and private ownership also changed the type of access individuals had to spaces within British cities, and what kinds of identities could be formed within those spaces. Bianchini and Schwengel highlight that in the course of the 1980s the distinction between public and private space became less and less clear, with the emergence of “private public spaces”: that is, privately owned and managed spaces offered for public use. The proliferation of this kind of space was in some cases presented as an extension of public space, and therefore [made possible] opportunities for public sociability and for the development of local citizenship and identity. (1991, p. 220) As Bianchini and Schwengel suggest, the “extension of public space” was ostensibly the private masquerading as “public space.”1 Interaction between individuals became increasingly rooted in consumerism and private investment as the commons were replaced by shopping malls and other consumer-focused spaces under the apparent purpose of providing “public space.” This idea of public private space, and the policing of those spaces, is confronted in Hollinghurst’s text when, for example, Nick Guest engages in elicit homosexual encounters within the private gardens behind the Feddens’ house. When a neighbor discovers Nick with his lover Leo (a black, lower class, gay man) just after such an encounter, Nick is forced to reveal his position as an “insider” with the key to the gardens, thus responding to a kind of suspicious surveillance that permeates the public private spaces that Bianchini and Schwengel draw attention to. Nick’s position as an outsider, a “guest” in the gardens as it were, is subverted once he reveals his relationship to the Feddens. As Daniel Hannah so aptly points out, “the gay observer is retained as the perfect guest, the refined observer, in the heteronormative house of capitalist acquisition so long as evidence of his sexuality is reduced to pure aesthetic taste, so long as bodily signs of his gayness remain private, invisible” (2007, p. 85). While Nick discloses his relationship to the Feddens and his subsequent



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permission to be in the gardens, he does not disclose the nature of his visit to the garden, or his relationship to Leo for fear of disrupting his comfortable place within the “heteronormative house of capitalist acquisition.” The way in which Nick is continuously figured as the “guest” “calls into question [Nick’s] place . . . as the invited other,” and as such, the novel “points to the gay citizen’s status within the nation-state as the everinvited yet excluded “guest” of both the conjugal family and the family’s institutional extension, the state” (Hannah 2007, p. 85). As such, Nick is only ever temporarily included into the spaces of exclusion, and is forever policed while he exists within those private spaces. While Nick’s intimate relationships with, for example, Wani Ouradi and Catherine Fedden in some sense provide him with a special vantage point by which to observe the contradictions inherent to the Thatcherite Conservative upper class, Nick’s inability to fully assimilate into the aristocratic lifestyle because of his sexuality rubs up against the very problematic Thatcherite policies of exclusion of homosexuality from publicly funded programs. As “the development of local citizenship and identity” became progressively tied to private enterprise, the marginalized populations such as the lower classes, immigrant populations, and gay identities were imagined as a different type of citizen, in a way always a “guest,” than the individual who could afford to move freely within private, commercialized spaces such as shopping malls, or the Feddens’ private gardens (a private space that is accessible via the purchase of real estate and, thus, a demonstration of wealth and inclusion). As private industry began to participate in the very concept of public space, the ideas of citizenship that were historically rooted in public spaces became privatized as well. Thatcher’s shift away from socialism changed not only the industries and spaces that had been state run but also suggested a shift toward a British identity that was becoming increasingly privatized. In keeping with Thatcherite economic ideals, the raising up and commodification of historical “Englishness” was concomitant with the revitalization of a national identity and economic stability that no longer relied on socialist economics or national industry but rather neoliberal ideas of material wealth and upward mobility. As Hall points out, “the numbers of people who are not” part of the kind of English identity that Thatcherism prescribed included not only those that were racially excluded but also large numbers of those that were excluded based on their economic, ethnic, or sexual identities (2005, p. 26). Such sentiments of exclusion were widespread throughout the Conservative party during the 1980s: in an April 1988 speech, Home Secretary Douglas Hurd advised “material prosperity is the very precondition of the existence of active citizenship” (qtd. in Bianchini and Schwengel 1991, p. 223).



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The implications of race, homosexuality, and wealth are drawn out in The Line of Beauty through the character of Wani Ouradi, the son of an immigrant Lebanese grocery store magnate, in a way that demonstrates the conflict of individual identity (sexual and racial) and the more general Conservative desire to gain wealth and real estate. Hollinghurst troubles Thatcher’s promotion of individual citizenship reliant on material wealth through Wani’s intense addictions to drugs and promiscuous gay sex, and his eventual demise from AIDS. However, Wani also represents the immigrant identity that has taken up the Thatcherite desire for personal wealth, allowing him to become part of the Conservative upper classes in a way that Nick never could. Arguably, Wani’s wealth coupled with his covering up of his homosexuality and drug addiction make it possible for him to be part of the upper class in a way that remains out of reach for Nick. In some sense, material wealth allows Wani and his family to overcome the kinds of ethnic roadblocks that Stuart Hall wrestles with, while Nick’s obvious homosexual identity relegates him to be the perpetual “guest” despite being from an “English” family from the country. For the Tories, individual economic success mandates a kind of materialism that leads to a more entitled sense of national identity and citizenship. Such “material prosperity,” however, was extremely difficult to attain for many Britons as unemployment grew exponentially during the decade, and already marginalized identities were pushed even further from the center.

Let’s dance: Consuming the Thatcherite body The introduction of the figure of Thatcher into Hollinghurst’s text reveals some of the sociopolitical contradictions surrounding 1980s British privatization. Specifically, Hollinghurst represents these contradictions as he imagines an intimate engagement between his fictional Thatcher and the character Nick Guest. The figure of Nick Guest acts as a foil for the constructed public persona of Hollinghurst’s Thatcher not because he is an entrepreneur or a capitalist who invests the money Wani gives to him while marketing himself as an aesthete in order to gain a position at Ogee Magazine but rather because of the extreme consumption, desire for “history,” and free-floating gendered identity that he comes to embody during the latter half of the novel. Nick embodies the consumptive “lust” and “greed” that, as Heather Nunn argues, became synonymous with Thatcher’s signifying body. While in real life Thatcher publicly denounced the kinds of consumption that Nick partakes in (specifically gay sex through the enactment of Clause 28), there is a tangible



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irony in the way that Hollinghurst’s Thatcher is able to have the first meaningful contact with Nick before any of the other men at the Feddens’ party. Arguably, she is portrayed as a Janus-faced matriarchal leader. Nicky Marsh compares the two sides of Thatcher to the English currency as it was given the nickname “Maggie” during the 1980s: “‘Maggie’ became the term of the pound coin that was newly minted in the 1980s because, it was said, ‘it’s brassy, two-faced and thinks it’s a sovereign’” (2008, p. 40). Marsh’s comparison between Thatcher and the pound coin is significant because it implies a kind of social currency represented in the Thatcherite body. The excesses of “lust,” “greed,” and “power” that Thatcher’s economic policies brought about were intimately tied to an exclusive national identity rooted in Thatcherite ideas of wealth and consumption. Keeping these ideas of privatization and inclusion/exclusion in mind, this section turns to Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty in order to examine Thatcher’s appearance at the Feddens’ party, and her intimate interaction with Nick Guest. In doing so, I uncover the way that Hollinghurst queers the Thatcherite body through his portrayal of Thatcher as socially commodified through her intimate connection with the figure of Nick Guest, and the way in which Nick observes and consumes her through their intimate interaction. Arguably, the greater significance of the appearance of Thatcher at the Feddens’ party is the way she is revealed as an interstitial figure as she performs a kind of floorshow of gender and politics through her interaction with Nick Guest and the other men at the party. In some sense, ideas of gender and the sociocultural representations that images of her body and clothing have come to represent are enacted in a fluid way as Thatcher is accompanied out onto the dance floor with Nick. Hollinghurst thus troubles Thatcherite politics of, for example, Clause 28 and the suppression of homosexual identities and culture within British society as his fictional representation of Thatcher accepts Nick’s request to dance despite being asked by other, heterosexual, men prior to Nick. However, the Bowie-esque fluidity of her role as PM, modern “royalty,” and mother figure is brought to an abrupt end when Gerald Fedden sees Nick dancing with her. The way that Gerald takes over Nick’s position on the dance floor, and dances with Thatcher for a lengthy time after, suggests the Conservative desire to restore what Hannah calls the “heteronormative house of capitalist acquisition” and thus also return Thatcher to a knowable and “safe” position relative to the men’s Oedipal desire for her. In a sense, Gerald subverts Nick’s attachment to the fictional Thatcher in a way that denies Nick a real position in the aristocratic Conservative circle because of his sexuality. Gerald also subverts, and essentially denies, the way that



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a figure such as Nick is able to reveal the existence of a free-floating gendered identity inherent to Thatcher’s constructed public persona. In her study of Thatcher, fantasy, and gender, Heather Nunn approaches the myth of Thatcher as a sociocultural signifier for the 1980s. Discussing Peter York’s six-part BBC series 80s that aired in January of 1996, she says “Thatcher appeared as a signifier of the decade—rarely a whole image—but a flash of blue cloth, a harsh close up of her mouth or as a waxwork image in Madam Tussauds. She appeared as an emblem of the excesses of the decade: power, lust, greed, heady success, self-indulgence, [and] egotism” (p. 172). Nunn draws attention to the way that Thatcher’s fragmented body became symbolic of a new kind of consumerism and national identity borne of Thatcherite neoliberal and privatizing policies. As Thatcherite policies moved toward an American style free-market economy, fragmented representations of Thatcher (her hair, her handbag, her clothing, etc.) that appeared in such media venues as Spitting Image became recognizable as symbols of her neoliberal promises of private investment and ownership that tipped the scales of “greed” and “heady success” in favor of the wealthy upper classes at the expense of those that relied on state support and union organization to survive. As the Spitting Image puppet spoofs, Thatcher’s neoliberal economic policies were elided with specifically gendered representations of a black suit, a cigar, and brash tone that were juxtaposed to her coiffed hair and dark lipstick that call into question traditional ideas of gender identity. Taking into account Nunn’s argument of the fragmented Thatcherite body, I am interested in the way that Hollinghurst queers the figure of Thatcher by moving beyond a merely straight interpretation of Thatcher’s symbolic identity as fragmented toward a representation of Thatcher as freely moving between gendered identities that creates an opportunity for Nick to access her in a way that the other, straight, men are excluded from. The MPs at the party are unable to connect with Hollinghurst’s Thatcher in any meaningful way because while they possess a similar kind of “selfindulgence” and “lust” that the figure of Nick Guest embodies, they also engage in an Oedipal fantasy of Thatcher that makes initiating intimate contact, and consuming Thatcher as a social commodity in the way that Nick does, almost impossible. The interaction that Hollinghurst constructs between Nick and Thatcher is significant because Nick’s composite identity as a gay, academic, drug-addicted aesthete outwardly portrays the “power, lust, greed, heady success, self-indulgence, [and] egotism” that, as Nunn suggests, the images of Thatcher’s body come to represent (p. 172). In this sense, Nick’s interaction with the fictional Thatcher uncovers her body as a sociopolitical commodity that he consumes within the



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social space of the party—yet only briefly. Such consumption disrupts the expectations of gender and authority that the MPs struggle with in such a way that associates Thatcher with the figure of Nick Guest more so than with the straight men and women at the party. The greater implication, as I will demonstrate, is that while Thatcherite social policies included excluding gay identities from, for example, public school curriculum (as was the case in Clause 28), it is also possible that those excluded gay identities have more in common with Thatcher, in terms of floating gender identities, than the straight men and women that surrounded her. As Gerald Fedden prepares for the party that Thatcher is scheduled to make an appearance at, his desire to control the PM’s every move borders on obsessive. In addition to painting the front door blue (thus altering his domestic space to appear aesthetically, and publicly, Conservative) he explains to his wife Rachel “where the Lady would sit, whom she would speak to and how much she would have to drink” (p. 323).2 Gerald’s desire to manipulate Thatcher’s movement and interaction not only suggests a sense of anxiety at having such a public figure enter into his domestic space but perhaps more so an anxiety rooted in his desire to be close to, and eventually intimately associate with, Thatcher in a way that puts him into a real position of control over the kind of sociopolitical excess she represents. Bertrand Ouradi (the Lebanese convenience store magnate who knows Thatcher on a social level) says to Nick, “I do know [Gerald’s] madly in love with the Prime Minister. But it’s not quite clear if the passion is returned. She may be playing hard to get” to which Mr. Ouradi’s wife retorts “Ah, they’re all in love with her. She has blue eyes, and she hypnotizes them” (p. 193). As Nunn points out, many “descriptions portray Thatcher as exceptional rather than an everyday or normal woman. They mark her as different, even inhuman in her capacity and ambition. Furthermore, they frequently contain an undertow of sexual anxiety, and a frisson of desire on the part of the male and female commentators” (p. 41). Thatcher’s public persona as PM is, in this sense, sexualized because, as both Garber and Butler would agree, the way in which Thatcher (both the fictional and the historical) performs, or is made to perform through the expectations of others, troubles traditional expectations of the gendered role of women in British, and certainly Western, 1980s society. Hollinghurst teases out Thatcher’s fragmented identity through the way the MPs, and men such as Bertrand Ouradi, sexualize Thatcher’s role as a national matriarch who is constantly gendered female despite her attempts to encourage a more fluid gender identity through her determination to simultaneously occupy roles that are traditionally gendered male and female. Watching over and directing the movement of Britons



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onto the global stage of capital during the 1980s, Thatcher could, in this sense, be envisioned as an Oedipal figure through mediated representations of her body (her eyes, her hair, etc). Since, as Nunn has suggested, fragmentary representations of her became symbols of “heady success” and “excess,” possessing her in an Oedipal sense would provide the men with a fulfillment of their desire to get close to, and possess, a piece of the ultimate success in British sociopolitics. The desire to gender Thatcher solely as a woman provides the MPs that surround her a way to construct her as Other (according to Lacan woman is always already Other), and thus she can be imagined as the symbolic mother. As the prime minister, she is the female figure that attends to the needs of the people; thus she becomes “the mother in her role as the primordial Other. It is she who introduces the child into language by interpreting the child’s screams and thereby retroactively determining their meaning” (D. Evans 2001, p. 119). In this way, we could suggest that Thatcher becomes the mother figure as she, through public policy and social reform, “interprets” the “screams” of the citizens to control the economy and social infrastructure of Great Britain. In Gerald’s case, he needs the fictional Thatcher to acknowledge him within his domestic space in a way that demonstrates his social and political importance within his circle of colleagues and friends. Gerald’s desire is for a proximity to power, and a potential to possess or harness the power that her body comes to represent, rather than simply Thatcher as an individual woman. Just like the Oedipal son who never fully conceives of the mother as an individual sexual being but rather a prize won after competing with the father, Gerald wishes to possess Thatcher in a way that the other MPs cannot. Hollinghurst’s portrayal of Thatcher at the party, and specifically her interaction with Nick Guest, however, disrupts the Oedipal pursuit of the MPs. Nick essentially disrupts the male desire that is centered on the figure of Thatcher as a woman in a way that denies the kinds of heterosexual implications that, for example, the Spitting Image puppet also subverts. Understanding Thatcher through an intense gendering of her provides the MPs with a known entity on which to reflect their actions and desires. Hollinghurst ruptures the nickname “Iron Lady” in his description of Thatcher’s entrance into the Feddens’ house. He portrays Thatcher as slightly insecure and unsure of herself until she is able to perceive herself reflected in the eyes, and desires, of others. The image of a “clums[y]” Thatcher “scuttl[ing]” through the front door is not the usual image of her brazenly arguing and defending her politics in the House of Commons (p. 328). Hollinghurst frames her as out of her element in a domestic “unknown house” where the “high hall mirror” reflects the “faces of



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welcomers” as well as Thatcher’s “long-suppressed embarrassment” of her “clumsiness transmuted into power” (p. 328).3 Hollinghurst illustrates the domestic as “unknown” and “unfamiliar,” which is yet rendered legible through Thatcher’s ability to see herself as a kind of “modern royalty” within that space. The figure of Thatcher is “welcomed” by the crowd and the “high hall mirror” in “a kind of rapture, that was bold and shy at once” (p. 328). She shifts from being embarrassed and clumsy to “cheerful and practical” in response to the crowd’s reception of her (p. 328). As Nunn suggests, “recollections of an initial public encounter between a woman leader, colleagues and Conservative rank and file present Thatcher as troubled and nervous but also anxious to learn and mould herself as a competent professional politician” (p. 67). Arguably, the way others look at her during this passage in the text, specifically the way the MPs (all of who are men) construct her through their gaze, transforms Thatcher from an awkward guest to sexually coveted “modern royalty.” In this sense, it is the male desire that transforms Thatcher from “clumsy” and “scuttl[ing]” to “royalty.” Hollinghurst’s portrayal of Thatcher as a coveted and sexualized figure (that is never named but only referred to as The Lady, Prime Minister, or PM) within the Feddens’ domestic space reveals the way in which fragmented images of her body that crop up in contemporary society have become cultural signifiers of “lust,” “greed,” and “power.” As the PM moves through the party, there is a “covetous glance at her hair” (p. 334) or more overt expressions of lust as “Sir Jonty . . . lurched off after another passing female, which happened to be that of the PM. He looked back with a shake of the head: “Marvelous, you know . . . the Prime Minister” (p. 331). While the other men desire her in a way similar to Gerald’s Oedipal fantasy, Nick envisions her as an aesthetic artifact of social position—where her face “was a fine if improbable fusion of Vorticist and the Baroque” (p. 335). As Hannah suggests, “if public space is marked out in the novel by lines of privilege and homophobic exclusivity, style and its serpentine lines of beauty are, for Nick, key to cutting across those barriers” (p. 88). Nick thus turns his engagement with Thatcher into an aesthetic experience that provides him with an intimate proximity to her in a way that the other men at the party, particularly Gerald, cannot achieve. Nick imagines a costumed version of her as he envisions her as disheveled yet overly made-up: [H]air [that] was so perfect [and] started to picture it wet and hanging over her face. She was wearing a long black skirt and a wide shouldered white-and-gold jacket, amazingly embroidered, like a Ruritanian



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His fantasy of Thatcher is couched in an intimate impression of her with “wet hair” and “the motherly fatness of [her] neck” that combines an image of the mother with a kind of social royalty represented in her “magnificent pearl necklace” and elaborate clothing. Nick’s vision of her is quite different from the “covetous glances” and Sir Jonty’s musings about her “bottom.” Nick’s comparison of her outfit to “a Ruritanian uniform” invokes the often-spoofed genre of the Ruritanian Romance from the late Victorian period in a way that takes up the costumed pageantry that Thatcher invoked at the end of Falkland’s war.4 Nick’s observation of her clothing draws attention to a Ruritanian-type England she has attempted to resurrect through her espousal of Victorian ideals, as well as the disparity between the rich and the poor that is so prevalent in Ruritanian Romances.5 Clothing her in a “Ruritanian uniform” is not only a tonguein-cheek suggestion that the figure of Thatcher has outdated taste in fashion (Nick tells Catherine that her clothing makes her look like “a country and western singer” (p. 333)) but also that she is ideologically rooted in a made-up land with fictional ideas about the kinds of prosperity possible through neoliberal ideas of consumption, privatization, and individual opportunity that are impossibly at odds with entrenched English ideas of class separation. Nick’s role as the aesthete provides him with a kind of insight into Thatcher’s choice of dress and jewelry that moves beyond the superficial to one that gestures toward a greater social commentary. Arguably, his desire to queer the figure of Thatcher is borne out of his recognition that she occupies a similarly complicated gendered social space to the one in which he also exists. Beyond gaining an intimate interaction with Thatcher, Nick is also able to occupy the private space of the Feddens as a venue for his performative engagement with Thatcher that will be publicly talked about in newspapers and tabloids. Nick’s desire for “commentary . . . history” (p. 335), fueled by drugs and alcohol, pushes him to ask Thatcher to accompany him onto the dance floor (even though “dons were not the PM’s favourite people” (p. 331)) while the other men around him “sniggered and recoiled at an audacity that had been beyond them” (p. 335). Her response to his approach, as “she smiled back with a certain animal quickness, a bright blue challenge” (p. 335), echoes Nunn’s attention to the signifying “flash of blue . . . [and] harsh close up of her mouth”



uniform, cut low at the front to display a magnificent pearl necklace. Nick peered at the necklace, and the large square bosom, and the motherly fatness of the neck. (p. 329)

(p. 172) in a way that suggests Hollinghurst’s awareness of the fragmented representations of Thatcher that were prevalent in the 1980s. Such an echo, however, also implies Hollinghurst’s desire to uproot Thatcher from an intensely gendered role to one that is not only free floating but also floating between the human and the “animal.” Where the other men worry about engaging with Thatcher as they approach, “obviously longing for [their wives] to get lost so [they] can have a hot date with the Lady” (p. 333), Nick envisions Thatcher as a political and social artifact—something that can be possessed and displayed as though she were a fine piece of antique furniture that has the “commentary” and “history” he desires to be publicly associated with. For Nick, she does not represent the sexualized “hot date” but rather she becomes a sociopolitical commodity and an emblem of excess that Nick wishes to consume in a way that will furnish him with a kind of social high, perhaps similar to the one he gets from the cocaine and illicit sex he pursues immediately following his encounter with Thatcher. His role as a drug-addicted aesthete is thus emboldened by his ability to access and consume Thatcher in a way that the other male figures are unable to until he paves the way. It is only after Nick dances with Thatcher, effectively outing her as a kind of floor show, that Gerald steps in and dances with her for the majority of the remaining evening. As Nick walks Thatcher onto the dance floor, he thinks to himself that “Gerald hadn’t got it quite right: she moved in her own accelerated element, her own garlanded perspective, she didn’t give a damn about squares on the wallpaper or blue front doors—she noticed nothing, and yet she remembered everything” (p. 336). In Nick’s mind, Thatcher is completely removed from the domestic because she holds an almost inhuman ability to “notice[s] nothing, and . . . remember[s] everything.” Nick imagines that Thatcher has a kind of magical, perhaps even inhuman, ability to control and “hypnotize” the men around her with a “certain animal quickness” (p. 335) that separates her from the other women in the text. Her figure is still sexualized in Nick’s interaction with her—Gerald notices that “a couple of whiskies on, [Thatcher] was getting down rather sexily with Nick” (p. 336)—but in a way that suggests a specific recognition and reverence of her “animal quickness” and “garlanded perspective” (p. 335). Dancing with her to the Rolling Stones (whose front man Mick Jagger has often toyed with ideas of sexual ambiguity and androgyny, much like David Bowie and others from that era) invokes a sense of public performance. The intimacy between Nick and Thatcher gestures toward a sense of gender transgression when, as Butler argues, “the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically



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independent of sex, gender itself becomes free-floating” (Butler 1999, p. 10). While the other men are unable to fulfill their Oedipal desire of her, Nick—a gay figure that purposely straddles the line of his gendered identity in order to fit into the aristocratic circle of the Fedden’s and Ouradi’s—is able to connect with Hollinghurst’s Thatcher in a more meaningful and intimate way because he embraces a fluid gender identity similar to the one that Thatcher has cultivated in the novel as well in her everyday life. For example, Thatcher demonstrated this kind of gender transgression publicly many times as when, in an interview for the Yorkshire television show Woman to Woman, she spoke about herself as the first female prime minister: “I do not think of myself as the first woman Prime Minister. I am thrilled to be the person who is in here.”6 In this sense, she is not denying her femininity, but she is also not embracing it in a way that firmly plants her in one camp or the other. Her gender, by her own construction, becomes “free-floating.” Thatcher does not manipulate her femininity to her advantage, but rather moves between masculine and feminine identities in a way that “queers” our expectations of specifically gendered roles, and in this sense echoes the ways that masculine and feminine qualities are transgressively represented in her Spitting Image puppet.

Conclusion: Two sides to every Thatcher In conclusion, I would argue that there is a social commerce that takes place at the Feddens’ party where Nick, as the aesthete, is able to acquire and invest in the social currency of the PM as a partner on the dance floor because he synthesizes the fragments of Thatcher’s body in a way that demonstrates her free-floating gendered identity does not need to be fragmented, as Nunn suggests many such as Peter York imagined, in order to be socially understood. In this sense, Nick successfully consumes Thatcher’s body in terms of his own social production, and thus also engages in a postmodern capitalist exchange where he purchases “history” through the social currency he acquires as a result of his intimacy with Thatcher. Nick seems to understand the relevance of his engagement with Hollinghurst’s Thatcher in terms of the “overarching cultural situation” and significations that her body has come to represent within 1980s British society (Antonio 2003, p. 207). He consumes her in a way that buys him “history” amidst the partygoers and tabloid journalists. It is not Thatcher herself that he is interested in, but rather the social currency he is able to distill through his physical engagement with the kinds of social signification she has come to represent.



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Certainly, writing during Blair’s cabinet in 2004, Hollinghurst takes aim at the ways Thatcherite policies of privatization, immigration, social reform, centralization, and issues around gay rights still haunt British culture. As he has suggested in interviews, the Thatcherite revolution “led to huge changes in British society and changes which I think we are still living with now.”7 Hollinghurst has expressed disappointment in Blair’s Labour government for carrying out political moves that Thatcher herself may have hesitated to do.8 The failed attempt by the Labour Government to overturn Clause 28, coupled with the direct involvement in the Iraq War, provide a sense of nervous nostalgia where war and the oppression of marginalized groups are implemented to create a greater sense of national identity and patriotism. Hollinghurst’s novel can be read as a commentary on his disappointment in Labour in the years following Thatcher, and thus in this sense Hollinghurst imagines the ghostly, revenant, presence of Thatcher that haunts contemporary British sociopolitical ideas. By reworking the traditionally straight ideas of a fragmented representation of Thatcher, Hollinghurst rewrites Thatcher for the contemporary moment through her interaction with Nick Guest, thus suggesting that while there remains the specter of Thatcherite social policy during Blair’s government, the way in which she is taken up by gay and other marginalized communities can be rewritten. Contemporary ideas of Thatcher within gay communities have begun to frame her as a gay icon. As Philip Flynn has suggested, “even in a book as scathing as Hollinghurst’s there is a note of quiet admiration for its ghostly subject herself, whilst slowly and beautifully unpicking her decimation of the country. It’s easy enough to see why. Straight, powerful men feared Mrs. Thatcher. They were emasculated in her presence. And if that is enough to bestow the status of gay icon upon Cher—and believe me, it is—then history may yet prove it to be sufficient to crown the unlikeliest gay icon of them all.”9 In this sense, Hollinghurst’s novel portrays Thatcher as haunting contemporary British sociopolitics not only through the policies and free market strategies her government set in motion, but also through the way in which her free-floating gendered identity troubled traditionally male gendered roles. Such a representation thus allows marginalized identities, such as Nick Guest, to reconfigure her gendered identity in a way that “straight” men simply could not. In this sense, Hollinghurst’s portrayal of Thatcher builds upon, and pushes even further, the kind of “gender trouble” that the Spitting Image puppet engaged in. Hollinghurst reworks the representation of Thatcher to include the implications of Thatcherite policies that endured well into the 1990s.



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1. Such a masquerade is arguably similar to the kind of gendered masquerade Thatcher enacted in the way that it links up ideas of class, identity, and social policy. 2. There are various moments in the text that refer to Thatcher as an object to be protected and watched over. Perhaps the most obvious is when Nick observes “one of the men standing directly behind the PM, like a showman, protecting and exhibiting her” (p. 334). 3. Perhaps this is an ironic portrayal compared to the real-life Thatcher that embraced her power, at least outwardly, with emphasis and delight. However, many people close to Thatcher during her political career, including her personal aide Andrew Thomson, have suggested that the public image of the “Iron Lady” was often a show that covered up a persona taken up by an often tearful and doubtful Maggie. The symbolic public persona, the “Iron Lady” as it were, struggled against the private “real” woman. 4. Thatcher turned the “long drawn out return of ships and men” from the Falklands War, into a moment of English victory through “a seemingly endless media exposure” that was “consumed vicariously through press and TV” in a way that adapted the nostalgic colonial national identity that Thatcher coveted for the late twentieth century (Gray 1983, p. 274). 5. Anthony Hope and his novels The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), The Heart of Princess Osra (1896) and Rupert Hentzau (1898) were set in the fictional kingdom of Ruritania. Over time, the fictional kingdom has come to stand for any made up country lacking in name or specific geography. The stories themselves often revolve around mishaps of love and betrayal in aristocratic circles. 6. See http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/displaydocument.asp?docid= 105830 for full interview. 7. See http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/11/talkasia.hollinghurst. script/index.html for full interview. 8. See http://www.readings.com.au/interview/alan-hollinghurst for full interview. 9. See http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/paul_flynn/2006/05/by_paul_flynn. html.

Bibliography Antonio, D. (2003) “Virgin Queen, Iron Lady, Queen of Hearts: The Embodiment of Feminine Power in a Male Social Imaginary” in S. Pugliese (ed.) The Political Legacy of Margaret Thatcher. London: Politico. pp. 199–213. Bianchini, F. and Schwengel, H. (1991) “Re-Imagining the City” in J. Corner and S. Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London; New York: Routledge. pp. 212–34. Bradley, C. H. J. (1998) Mrs. Thatcher’s Cultural Policies, 1979–1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (eds) (1991) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture. London; New York: Routledge.



Notes

Evans, D. (2001) An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Brunner-Routledge. Evans, E. J. (1997) Thatcher and Thatcherism. London: Routledge. Flynn, P. (2006) “Margaret Thatcher: Gay Icon,” 16 May. Guardian: Comment is Free, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/paul_flynn/2006/05/by_paul_flynn. html. Accessed April 29, 2009. Garber, M. (1992) Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Gould, J. and Anderson, D. (1987) “Thatcherism and British Society.” Thatcherism: Personality and Politics. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. Gray, R. (1983) “The Falklands Factor” in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds) The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. pp. 271–80. Hall, S. (1997) “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity” in A. King (ed.) Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 19–39. ——. (2005) “Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “The Heritage,” Re-Imagining the Post-Nation” in J. Littler and R. Nadoo (eds) The Politics of Heritage. London, New York: Routledge. pp. 23–35. Hahn, L. (2005) “Alan Hollinhurst TalkAsia Interview Transcript,” 7 May. CNNInternational.com, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/05/11/ talkasia.hollinghurst.script/index.html. Accessed April 29, 2009. Hannah, D. (2007) “The Private Life, the Public Stage: Henry James in Recent Fiction,” Journal of Modern Literature 30(3) 70–94. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry. London: Methuen. Hollinghurst, A. (2004) The Line of Beauty. New York: Bloomsbury. “Interview: Alan Hollinghurst.” (2007) Readings: Books, Music, Film. 29 October, http://www.readings.com.au/interview/alan-hollinghurst. Accessed April 29, 2009. Lacan, J. (2006) “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 237–68. Leung, L. (1997) “The Making of Matriarchy: A Comparison of Madonna and Margaret Thatcher,” Journal of Gender Studies 6(1) 33–42. “Local Government Act 1988: Chapter 9.” (1988) Office of Public Sector Information, http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/ukpga_19880009_en_1. Accessed April 29, 2009. Marsh, N. (2008) Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Murray, A. (2005) “Exorcising the Demons of Thatcherism: Iain Sinclair and the Critical Efficacy of a London Fiction,” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London (Sept): 22 pars, http://www.literarylondon.org/ london-journal/september2005/murray.html. Accessed April 29, 2009. Nunn, H. (2002) Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation. Lawrence and Wishart: London. Ogden, C. (1990) Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power. New York: Simon and Schuster. Samuel, R. (1994) Island Stories: Theaters of Memory Volume II. London: Verso. Thatcher, M. (1983a) “Speech to Glasgow Chamber of Commerce,” 28 Jan. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=105244. Accessed April 29, 2009.



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Thatcher, M. (1983b) “Speech to Finchley Conservatives,” 7 March, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=105266. Accessed April 29, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1983c) “Radio Interview for IRN Programme The Decision Makers,” 15 April, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/ displaydocument.asp?docid=105291. Accessed April 29, 2009. Thatcher, M. (1997) The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher. Ed. Robin Harris. London: Harper Collins. Thomson, A. (1989) Margaret Thatcher: The Woman Within. London: WH Allen.



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9 Graham Saunders

In his influential book In-Yer Face Theatre: British Drama Today, the critic and journalist Aleks Sierz identified a group of brash young playwrights who emerged during the mid 1990s from London’s new writing theaters the Royal Court and the Bush. Their work was provocative, not only in subject matter, but as the name of Sierz’s book suggests, in style as well. Names included Mark Ravenhill, Judy Upton and Anthony Neilson, and their plays Shopping and Fucking (1996), Ashes and Sand (1994) and Penetrator (1994) represented a clear ideological break from the previous decade: plays such as David Hare’s Pravda (1985), Doug Lucie’s Fashion (1987) and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) by contrast, were often shaped through recognizable political concerns, and often in direct opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s government who held sway over that decade. In contrast, the “in-yer face” dramatists of the mid 1990s, identified by Sierz as “Thatcher’s Children,” came of age during a period of successive conservative administrations at home, while in Europe the dismantlement of the Berlin Wall had led to an unravelling of clear oppositions in political ideology. For Sierz, the new generation of writers represented an exciting phase in political drama: The fall of the Berlin Wall and the exit of Margaret Thatcher showed those under twenty-five that, despite the evidence of political ossification, change was possible; the end of Cold War ideological partisanship freed young imaginations. Youth could be sceptical of male power without being dogmatically feminist; it could express outrage without being politically correct . . . theatre shook off the style police and began to explore a new found freedom. (2001, p. 36) 199



Sarah Kane: Cool Britannia’s Reluctant Feminist

Sarah Kane

The theater director Dominic Dromgoole even went as far as to assert that the opening of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing in 1993 was “one of the more significant nights in post-war theatre” and that “new writing and particularly political new writing, would never be the same again” (qtd. in Bradwell 1997, p. 71). Harvey’s romantic comedy about a developing love affair between two teenage boys on the Thamesmead estate in London broke what Dromgoole calls “The Miserablist Tendency” in British playwriting, as “cowed by the monster Thatcher, much of English theatre went into various forms of hiding during her reign” (qtd. in Bradwell 1997, p. 72). Dromgoole then launches into a fierce diatribe against some of the shortcomings of plays written during the 1980s: This dry, dusty hideaway housed a ton of dead drama; state-ofthe-nation plays rehearsing arguments already settled long before the audience arrived; journalistic plays on single issues; work plays exploring the tensions in a DHSS/minicab/newspaper office; ghastly plays of opinions; autobiography therapy theatre dressed up as confession, and the long endless nights where the left would argue all night with the radical left, and dawn would break, and someone would burst into tears. Small subjects, small plays. (qtd. in Bradwell 1997, p. 72) However, other commentators were less convinced by Sierz’s and Dromgoole’s optimistic claims. In his slim 1998 book, The Future of Theatre (a work that in some ways anticipates the in-yer-face dramatists), Benedict Nightingale defines the group as “Mrs Thatcher’s disorientated children” (1998, p. 20), while others were suspicious of what they saw as vibrant hollowness in comparison to the more politically committed work produced during the 1970s and 1980s. In an important collection of essays titled Theatre in a Cool Climate, published to mark the end of the millennium, Vera Gottlieb’s assessment is far more skeptical: All these writers are very much in touch with the malaise amongst their generation, all too aware of consumerism, but in effect the plays end up as “products”: the themes of consumerism, drug culture and sexuality paralyse the plays. . . . If the Eighties demonstrated a search for the language of opposition, then the plays of the Nineties seem to have moved even further from the politically oppositional, and to have given up any attempt to engage with significant public issues. (1999, p. 212)



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All too often what this newfound freedom and break from the ideological constraints of the 1980s actually meant, and were represented by plays such as Joe Penhall’s Pale Horse (1995), David Eldridge’s Serving it Up (1996) and Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), were environments in which individuals, entrapped or cut adrift from society, reflected a sense of desperate pessimism in the millennial decade. The most prominent dramatist from among this group of dramatists, both at the time, and subsequently since her suicide in 1999, has been Sarah Kane. Her debut Blasted (1995) was notable for being greeted by almost unprecedented critical hostility as “a play which appears to know no bounds of decency” (Tinker 1995), containing “scenes of masturbation, fellatio, frottage, micurition, defecation . . . homosexual rape, eye gouging and cannibalism” (Billington 1995). Rightly or wrongly, Kane’s writing has been taken as an exemplar for the break in style and sensibility that new drama after 1994 represented from what had come before. Kane’s work also serves as an instructive case study, not only in helping to chart the radical changes that theater underwent from 1979 to 1990 but in particular women’s theater. While the work of Sarah Kane has been associated with the reassertion of a masculinist celebration in playwriting during the 1990s, and an associated hostility toward feminist theater, I want to argue that the picture is much more complicated than it at first seems: indeed, far from being an exponent of postfeminism, Kane’s drama frequently revisits and is influenced by the preceding generation of dramatists, whose work was forged out of the sharp ideological positions that characterized the 1980s, often in direct opposition to Thatcherism itself. Nevertheless the criticisms raised by Vera Gottlieb and others concerning a refusal for the in-yer-face dramatists of the 1990s to take a recognizable ideological or political position is indisputably writ large in Sarah Kane’s own pronouncements on her work. For instance, in an early afterword to the first published version of Blasted she commented: Blasted now exists independently of me. . . . If a play is good, it breathes its own air and has a life and voice of its own. What you take that voice to be saying is no concern of mine. It is what it is. Take it or leave it. (Kane 1994, p. 51) However, it was a remark made in a 1997 collection of interviews by women playwrights, “I have no responsibility as a woman writer



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because I don’t believe there’s such a thing” (qtd. in Stephenson and Langridge 1997, p. 134), that seemed to draw a clear ideological line— theatrically at least—in ways comparable to Mrs Thatcher’s infamous assertion that “we don’t belong to society, we are just individuals doing the best we can” (qtd. in McGrath 1990, p. 3). There seemed to be little doubt that Kane meant her comment as a way of calling for a clear distance to be placed between her generation and writers such as Sarah Daniels, Sharman MacDonald and Clare McIntyre, who had come to prominence during the 1980s. As mentioned, this chapter will attempt to argue that Kane’s drama shares both a number of close points of contact with feminist playwriting associated with the Thatcher period and at the same time distances itself from some of the ideological thinking associated with it. In order to do this we need to come to an understanding of how theater in the 1980s—and particularly plays by women—had undergone some fundamental changes by the 1990s. First it is necessary to explain the cultural context of the 1990s that produced Kane and her generation of dramatists, and to compare this with the playwriting culture produced during the Thatcher period, before returning to Kane’s problematic straddling of these two very different sensibilities.

“Cool Britannia” Kane’s notorious interview took place in 1997, at the height of what has been termed “Cool Britannia.” This cultural period, lasting between 1994 and 1999, saw a youthful resurgence in (Brit)art, fashion and (Brit)pop. The American playwright and critic Ken Urban, in language that draws parallels with the “swinging sixties,” saw its impact as highly significant: No longer would Britain be the land of bad food and crooked teeth; London was now to be the epicentre of a cultural renaissance, its inhabitants no longer citizens of a fading imperial power, but the vital members of a country blazing into the new millennium high on a rush of newness. (2004, p. 355) Although largely a cultural phenomenon, Cool Britannia also became associated with politics, and in particular the rise of the Labour Party (or “New Labour” as it was frequently termed), following the death of its leader John Smith in 1994. Much of the reason for this can be found in its title: Cool Britannia made seductive appeals to a populist sense of



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nationality. In music for instance, a self-conscious Englishness became a quintessential feature. In 1993 Brett Anderson, lead singer of beat-group Suede had criticized the dominance of American “grunge” bands such as Mudhoney, Nirvana and Soundgarden over that of emerging British bands such as Blur. Their album Modern Life is Rubbish (1993) was indicative of Britpop’s sensibility, with many of its songs both lyrically and stylistically evoking a sense of nostalgia for a lost sense of Englishness; in this respect Blur had much in common with a far earlier album, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968), an often cited influence on many of the britpop artists; here, whimsical and disparate characteristics of Englishness such as marmalade and music hall were both celebrated and mourned. Britpop also adopted other associated images: racing greyhounds on the front of Blur’s Parklife (1994) album, a seaside pier on Oasis’s Roll with It (1995) single and a “Mod” scooter on Ocean Colour Scene’s single The Day we Caught the Train (1996). Britpop also succeeded in reinventing the iconography of nationalism through the symbol of the Union Jack, wresting its former associations with right-wing politics and racism to become a potent fashion item. Asked why Oasis had chosen the British flag as their choice of cover on a demo-cassette, Liam Gallagher replied: “It’s the greatest flag in the world. It’s going down the shitter, and we’re here to do something about it” (qtd. in Cavanagh 2000, p. 552). This was also shown by various self-conscious acts such as Suede’s Brett Anderson and Oasis’s Liam Gallagher and his wife Patsy Kensit, draping themselves in the Union Jack for the covers of Select and Vanity Fair magazine; yet perhaps its most startling manifestation came with the appearance of Spice Girl Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack minidress worn at the 1997 Brit Awards. New Labour was quick to exploit the opportunities that reinvention under the banner of Cool Britannia offered. While John Major after his election victory in 1992 soon found himself bedevilled by rebellious former Thatcherites protesting over European policy (with even Mrs Thatcher herself intervening on occasions when her policies seemed threatened), New Labour, by associating itself with a renaissance in the arts that celebrated British culture, found an ideal vehicle to shake off memories of “Old Labour’s” wilderness years after the defeat of 1979. In their glossy 1997 booklet Creative Britain, which outlined government arts policy, the front cover displayed a Damien Hirst painting, while inside Culture Secretary Chris Smith praised the work of artist Rachel Whiteread. In turn, many leading figures from britpop aligned themselves with New Labour’s ambitions to win the 1997 election. Borthwick and Moy observe that from 1993 onwards, “Britpop . . . became inextricably



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connected to the collapse in support for the John Major-led Conservative government” (2004, p. 183), and while this may be something of an exaggeration, britpop did support New Labour through a number of gestures. For instance, 1996 saw Noel Gallagher from Oasis express support at the British Phonogram Industry (BPI) awards ceremony with Tony Blair in attendance. The following year saw Creation Records sponsoring a Labour “Youth Experience Rally” in Blackpool, and its owner Alan McGee making a donation of 50,000 pounds to the party. Election day in May 1997 also saw McGee and Jarvis Cocker from the band Pulp attending the official party at the Royal Festival Hall. On July 30, and less than two months after gaining office, leading Britpop figures including Noel Gallagher and Alan McGee were invited to an official reception at 10 Downing Street. When it became clear that New Labour would not only be keeping to the Conservative’s spending plans during its first term, retaining Thatcherite trade union legislation and even Tony Blair’s invitation to Mrs Thatcher for tea at Downing Street shortly after his election, it began to dawn on some of the artists associated with Cool Britannia that they had been duped. Britartists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who had formerly been closely associated with Cool Britannia, eventually turned against New Labour, raising over 100,000 pounds from sales of their work to help renegade Labour MP Ken Livingstone stand against the official New Labour candidate, Frank Dobson, in the bid to become mayor of London in 2000. In theater, the relationship was very different from the offset; both the in-yer-face dramatists and New Labour seemed mutually circumspect toward each other. While theater writing of the 1990s has been accused of abandoning overt political engagement, it was at least never ready to cosy up to New Labour in the same way that britpop and britart so readily appeared to do. At first this might appear to be surprising, as the in-yer face dramatists, with their preoccupation of the aberrant seemed to share much in common with their counterparts in britart: here works such as Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995) which depicted the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley in a painting made out children’s handprints, or the fused child fibreglass mannequins in Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Tragic Anatomies (1996), much like the plays of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, were often accused of deliberately using images of violence and sexuality for exploitative effect; yet the in-yer-face dramatists never commanded the degree of media attention that britart received—nor was it ever readily embraced by the New Labour project.



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Despite frequently setting out to deliberately provoke and upset, britart found New Labour—both in opposition and government—to be among its earliest champions. The first culture secretary, Chris Smith, even cited individuals such as Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili and Jenny Saville as representative of a youthful energy and identifiable “brand” of British creativity. The reasons for this are not difficult to find: despite the work often appearing to challenge on grounds of decency or taste, what made britart appealing to New Labour was its absence of any political engagement. Jo Littler observes that while much of britart succeeded in being viscerally disturbing, it did so whereby distressing images, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Auswitschz-inspired death camp in Hell (1999), often became “reduced to a spectacle of fascination . . . that appears to privatize one’s response to events” (2000, p. 215). This was also the same response that Tony Blair managed to exploit so skillfully early into his premiership over the death of Princess Diana. His famous eulogy, where he spoke about “the People’s Princess,” did much to divest the event of any debate about the function and role of Princess Diana, or indeed the Royal family itself in the lives of the British people; instead the death of a public figure was sublimated into a narrative of personal loss. While gaining approval on a governmental level, one of the chief criticisms leveled at Cool Britannia as a collective enterprise was that its three chief cornerstones of music, art and theater not only lacked political conviction but were reliant upon consumer capitalism. Again, this was most in evidence with britart, and although there were notable exceptions, such as Chris Ofili’s painting No Woman No Cry (1998) as a response to the 1993 Stephen Lawrence murder, Jo Littler points out that much of the work from this period “made no reference to the social world which avant-garde art purports to critique” (2000, p. 217). Hence, despite its antiestablishment posturing, much britart was inherently reactionary: the taint of Thatcherism by association could also be attributed to the figure of Charles Saatchi, the assiduous patron and collector of many of these artists; yet for many he was also closely associated with past Thatcher governments, masterminding advertising campaigns that have been credited with their electoral successes. Moreover, the Thatcherite ethos of artistic worth being measured through its commercial potential was made clear in Saatchi’s celebrated 1997 Sensation exhibition, where despite its air of youthful bravado, artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin soon became better known for the commercial viability of their work rather than any intrinsic artistic value it might hold. In contrast, work of the in-yer face dramatists was often staged at small venues such as the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs and the Bush,



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and unlike their britart/britpop counterparts, for the most part their work was unglamorous and unmarketable. Nor had they very much positive to say about Tony Blair’s “New Britain.” This is not to say that plays such as Judy Upton’s Bruises (1995) with its bleak depiction of out of season coastal resorts or David Eldridge’s East London council estate in Serving it Up were ever directly critical of the new government; rather, it is perhaps more accurate to describe the in-yer face dramatists as Mrs Thatcher’s disenchanted children. And while their writing reflects an anger and bewilderment at the legacy they have inherited, they were still unwilling to believe in New Labour’s vision for Britain. In-yer-face drama also stood apart from Cool Britannia for another reason. Unlike its counterparts in britart or britpop it failed to offer up any high-profile media opportunities or events. While it is true to say that Kane and Ravenhill’s work (as well as Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting in 1994) to a degree popularized theatergoing among a younger generation, and appeared to capture the 1990s zeitgeist, the brutal imagery in Kane’s drama and Ravenhill’s scathing exploration of consumerism and club culture went beyond the modish. Despite Shopping and Fucking being frequently cited as theater’s main contribution to Cool Britannia, it is significant that the play was publicly condemned in 1998 by Education Secretary David Blunkett after a British Council–funded European tour. Blunkett’s comments about the play being a waste of taxpayers’ money lost much of their sting when later it was revealed that he had neither seen the play nor been aware of its endorsement by Culture Secretary Chris Smith. No wonder New Labour kept a wary distance from new theater writing, with Tony Blair instead expressing his admiration for “our musicals” (1997). His comment is significant as the British “Mega-Musical,” represented by shows such as Cats (1981) and Les Misérables (1985), reached its apogee during Mrs Thatcher’s time in power. Blair’s preference for both the lavish spectacle and political conservatism that these musicals display is also significant when one considers the figure of Ben Elton—a onetime socialist stand-up comedian and trenchant critic of Thatcherism, who by the time New Labour came to power was writing undemanding West End fare such as Pop Corn (1996) and librettos for the new mega musicals of the 1990s such as the Lloyd Webber collaboration The Beautiful Game (2000) as well as the millennial “juke-box” musicals We Will Rock You (2003) and Tonight’s the Night (2003). News that he is collaborating again with Lloyd Webber on a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera (1986) only serves to confirm that for onetime socialists such as Blair and Elton, the 1980s can come full circle.



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New writing in British theater between 1979 and 1990 was marked by a series of remarkable gains and a decline that eventually led to a crisis. On one hand the period was marked by a growth in women’s theater that built upon gains established during the 1970s. As the playwright David Edgar puts it, “the third wave of new playwrights—those who emerged in the early to mid 1980s—didn’t answer to names like David [Hare/Edgar], John [Osborne] and Howard [Brenton] but to names like Sarah [Daniels], Bryony [Lavery], Louise [Page] and Clare [McIntyre].” Taking the output of new plays at the Royal Court as an example, he notes that between 1956 and 1980 eight percent of the plays presented were by women, but by the 1980s it was 38 percent (Edgar 1999, p. 8). Women’s drama also found its way into the mainstream when in 1981, 1984 and 1988 Nell Dunn, Sharman MacDonald and Timberlake Wertenbaker won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright award for Steaming, When I was a Girl I used to Scream and Shout and Our Country’s Good. All three plays subsequently transferred to the West End. Not only did women’s theater make inroads into established venues such as the Royal Court and the Bush but the 1980s also saw a consolidation and growth of touring companies such as the Women’s Theatre Group, Monstrous Regiment and Siren. Frequently the work presented was polemical and ideologically driven, often based around a collective socialist agenda. This sense of shared purpose can be seen in the amount of devised work that groups such as Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment undertook during the 1970s and 1980s—most notably their collaborations with the playwright Caryl Churchill in the plays Vinegar Tom (1976), Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Cloud Nine (1979). Although the Arts Council was an early target for spending cuts after Mrs Thatcher’s election in 1979, the early years of the new decade began well with commitments to support the arts from Labour controlled councils such as Sheffield, Liverpool and the Greater London Council (GLC). This gesture can be gauged by figures that show that between 1980 and 1985 expenditure by these local authorities on the arts doubled to over 100 million pounds, and actually exceeded funding by the Arts Council. The sense of purpose and increasing prominence of women in theater was in no small part emphasized by what seemed like a collective loss of nerve by many of their male counterparts, who during the 1960s and 1970s had embraced a broadly Marxist-Socialist position. Following



Theater under Thatcherism

Sarah Kane

Mrs Thatcher’s election, the dramatic strategies that seemed to suit the former political climate no longer seemed relevant, and as the decade progressed one gained a sense that many of these dramatists did not fully understand either the philosophy that underpinned Thatcherism or its widespread appeal via “popular capitalism” and a “home-owning economy” to many working-class sections of the country who traditionally would have voted for the Labour Party. Theater’s responses to Thatcherism included Howard Brenton and Tony Howard’s A Short Sharp Shock (1980), which attempted to use early 1970s agitprop techniques and broad satire as an early response to the new government;1 other dramatists such as Edward Bond in his trilogy The War Plays (1985), chose not to directly engage with Thatcherism itself but rather the issue of nuclear war. Writing toward the end of Mrs Thatcher’s term in office, the theater critic John Peter gloomily concluded, “British drama hasn’t found a language to deal with the 1980s when the issues are starker, the politics tougher, and the moral choices more extreme” (1988). Rather, it was television, with dramas such Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) and Alan Clarke’s Christine (1987), that could best claim to directly engage with the economic realities of Thatcherism on industrial cites like Liverpool in the early 1980s. Even the satirical puppet show Spitting Image (1984–96) arguably found its targets far more frequently and effectively than much of the political theater of the time. Women’s theater, while not always being directly oppositional to Thatcherism was consciously political in other important ways. Ideas generated by Anglo-American feminism during the 1970s and 1980s not only included consciousness-raising groups at its roots but also more large-scale political activism that in Britain included a number of “Take Back the Night” marches in several northern cities during the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the early 1980s; it also came most notably through the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp that was established in 1983 as a response to the arrival of American nuclear missiles. Feminist discourse was further promoted and disseminated through the burgeoning women’s presses that had opened throughout the 1970s and 1980s, together with the increasing presence of Women’s Studies being taught as a degree subject in British and American universities. Yet the 1980s were also turbulent for British theatre: the Thatcher government was profoundly sceptical about the need for state subsidy through the Arts Council, while in the subsidised theatres themselves commercial interests increasingly dominated. When inflation was taken into account, the standstill meant a decrease in real terms.



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As the 1980s progressed this led the Arts Council to make cuts or disband funding to some of its clients entirely. Also, with the abolition of the GLC in 1986 and other Labour controlled councils facing rate capping by central government, another important source of revenue for theater companies was eventually cut off. This produced a polarity, whereby 1980s British theater was defined on the one hand by extravagant musicals such as The Phantom of the Opera and ornate stagings of Shakespeare and Chekhov at the Royal Shakespeare Company, while elsewhere saw a slow but inexorable struggle for the survival of an alternative theater culture. Yet the 1980s did produce some notable plays that managed to dissect with some insight the changes that Thatcherism sought to effect. For instance, David Hare and Howard Brenton’s collaboration Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (1985) anatomized, through the figure of the newspaper proprietor Lambert La Roux, both the energy and ruthlessness of such individuals who flourished under Thatcherism. In the same vein Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money (1987), set on the trading floor of the London Stock Exchange, also displayed new social types who had been forged out of the brutal logic of the free market. Perhaps less successful in finding its target, but nevertheless accurate in identifying the bourgeois family unit as one of Mrs Thatcher’s key voting groups, was Alan Ayckbourn’s A Small Family Business (1987). However, perhaps the most influential play of the 1980s, not only through its acuity regarding the effects of Thatcherism at the time but also for anticipating the specter of postfeminism, was Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. Through the central figure of Marlene, Churchill makes some direct comparisons with the figure of Mrs Thatcher herself. Both women set themselves against the collectivism of their time and instead advocate a form of bourgeois feminism that privileges individual achievement, adopt and exploit male patterns of thinking in order to succeed within patriarchal culture and refuse to acknowledge women as a group meriting special pleading. From Mrs Thatcher’s comments on the subject it seemed that the battle for women’s rights had been won shortly after the First World War, and the agitation made by secondwave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s was just one more symptom of the “permissive society”: The battle for women’s rights has largely been won. The days when they were demanded and discussed in strident tones should be gone forever. I hate those strident tones we hear from some Women’s Libbers.2



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Marlene, the successful manager of the Top Girls employment agency criticizes her sister Joyce’s continuing espousal of socialism as symptomatic of still being “Dadda’s little parrot” (Churchill 1990, p. 138), yet she does exactly the same herself through a series of neo-Thatcherite statements that include, “I don’t believe in class” (p. 140); the working class “doesn’t exist anymore” (p. 139) and “anyone can do anything if they’ve got what it takes” (p. 140). As Elaine Aston points out, “Top Girls shows the dangers of feminism without socialism” (2003, p. 20); Churchill’s dystopian vision came of age in the decade to follow.

Into the 1990s Top Girls ends with Marlene’s daughter Angie uttering the single word “frightening” (p. 141) after coming out of a nightmare and much the same could also be said for the state of women’s theater as the 1990s progressed. While D. Keith Peacock records a decline in small touring companies from 220 in 1985 to 187 in 1990 (1999, p. 57), women’s theater was under assault from a number of factors during the decade. Interviewed in January 1995, the same month as Sarah Kane’s Blasted premiered, Tasha Fairbanks, a founder member of the lesbian theater company Siren, expressed her fears about the decade: “[S]ometimes I feel there’s a tide coming in and its obliterating everything we’ve written in the sand” (qtd. in Goodman 1996, p. 85). Chief among these erosive forces was funding; successive cuts during the 1980s finally caught up with many of the most well-known women’s groups, and between 1992 and 1993 companies including Siren, Monstrous Regiment, Spare Tyre and The Chuffinelles all lost Arts Council funding. Vacuums by their nature create spaces that are immediately filled, and with the sudden absence of so many long-established feminist companies came a recolonization: the men were back. If new theater writing of the 1980s was defined as female focused, in the 1990s the agenda had shifted firmly back to a masculinist one. Writing in 1999 David Edgar outlined the trend: Although I understand why writers resist the notion of being part of a movement, it seems to be unanswerable that the mid 1990’s had an over-arching theme, embracing gay plays like Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing and Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg, boys’ bonding plays like Tim Firth’s Neville’s Island (and the boys’ betting plays of Patrick Marber and William Gaminara), lads’ plays like Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Simon Bent’s Goldhawk Road, girls-in-a-boys’



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Some of the reasons for this new trend are understandable: for instance, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s led to a number of plays in the mid part of the following decade including Kevin Elyot’s My Night with Reg (1994) and David Greer’s Burning Blue (1995). While these were important explorations about the effects of AIDS on the homosexual community and its testing of male friendships, other plays such as Tracey Lett’s Killer Joe (1995), Jez Butterworth’s Mojo (1995) and Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy (1996–7) were rather different. While euphemistically described in the media as studies of “masculinity in crisis,” more often these dramas seemed little more than shallow celebrations of misogyny and male violence. Viewing this trend with dismay, the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, who in works such as The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) and Our Country’s Good (1988) had done much in the 1980s to reenergize the relationship between women’s history and drama, commented on the new vogue: “You sense a relief that we can shut those women up and get back to what really matters, which is what men are saying” (1999). One of the men who spoke loudest—or at least to many young male British dramatists in the 1990s—was the Chicago-born playwright David Mamet. His use of harsh yet rhythmical language in plays such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) and Edmund (1983) can also be seen in the work of Patrick Marber and Joe Penhall during the 1990s, as well as a male sensibility that was often violent and misogynistic. The controversial British premiere of Oleanna in 1993 (directed by Harold Pinter) was also interpreted by some as an attack on second-wave feminism, whereby the charges of sexual harassment that Carol, a female student, makes against her male professor have been manipulated by a 1980s-style feminist “group” she has been attending. The dramatist Mark Ravenhill cites Mamet as a major influence on the new writing of the 1990s, but also makes mention of Canadian-born playwright Brad Fraser’s Love and Human Remains (1992) and the socalled Generation X group of novelists such as Dennis Cooper, Douglas Coupland and Jay McInnery (2004, p. 311). Out of control masculinity also preoccupied the American director Quentin Tarantino, whose films Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) wallowed in a glorification



gang plays like Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (and indeed the subgenre of girls-in-and-outof-a-boys’-bonding-play, of which genre Terry Johnson’s Dead Funny remains the market leader). (p. 27)

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of cartoon-like violence that was enthusiastically incorporated into the Cool Britannia element of British cinema through a cycle of gangster films including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Essex Boys (2000). As mentioned, while these developments were vaguely described in some quarters as somehow being profound studies of faltering male identity, it is perhaps more accurate to say that their ubiquity only highlighted the real crisis that was taking place in feminism as it attempted to mount an appropriate response to this surge of testosterone-fueled drama. The dramatist and journalist Clare Bayley observed, “In our post-Tarantino age, all that is mean, violent, ironic and fasttalking sells. Most university bred men with a gift for slick dialogue can turn it out . . . it’s just a shame that the male view of masculinity seems so limited and cliché ridden” (1996); the dramatist Phyllis Nagy was even driven to say “if things carry on the way they are currently, with this ‘laddism’ . . . then I for one, will stop writing plays” (qtd. in Stephenson and Langridge 1997, p. 28). This celebration of male bravado and misogyny was also viewed by some women as confirmation of predictions made in Susan Faludi’s 1992 book Backlash that warned about a concerted antifeminist attack that had been launched during the late 1980s in the media in order to reverse gains made during the 1970s and 1980s. Faludi also saw the ascendancy of postfeminism as a great enabler in facilitating the backlash. Whereas the figure of Marlene in Top Girls was a representative prototype for a new breed of women who took their philosophical outlook directly from Mrs Thatcher, it was not until the 1990s that this generation fully came into its own. In its pursuit of individual achievement over concerns for wider inequalities among women, postfeminism enabled a dismantlement of the two principal elements that had defined much second-wave feminism, namely the socialist principles that underpinned feminism as a political movement and with it the sense of collectivism that was both so empowering and powerful. Instead, it gradually became apparent that a new femininity was emerging in its place—depoliticized individuals who equated achievement with personal wealth and with it access to a world of consumerism; this became the way by which “Marlene’s Children” defined themselves during the 1990s. Little wonder that Geri Halliwell of pop group The Spice Girls (and in a sense inheritors of Madonna’s aggressive style of individualism in the 80s), and who in popular culture did much to define the latter part of the decade, also promoted a postfeminist ideology termed “Girl Power” and cited Mrs Thatcher as inspiration for being “the original Spice Girl” (qtd. in Whelehan 2000, p. 54).



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Against this background it is easy to see why Sarah Kane’s rejection of the category of woman writer seemed to place her firmly among the postfeminists and those hostile to the aims and beliefs of an earlier generation of playwrights. This impression seemed to be reinforced by Kane’s seemingly clear identification with masculinist values. Apart from one brief mention of Caryl Churchill’s adaptation of Thyestes (1995) in an interview, it was male dramatists such as Edward Bond, Howard Barker and Harold Pinter who most roused her admiration.3 This, together with her love of football and accounts of drinking to excess, reinforced an impression originally put forward by early critics such as Aleks Sierz, who categorized her work as sharing the same concerns of the other young male in-yer-face writers. Yet, Kane’s work does not offer the same reflectionist models of contemporary British society that can be found in the work of male dramatists such as David Eldridge, nor indeed female contemporaries such as Judy Upton and Rebecca Prichard, which show the social consequences of Thatcherism. Instead, Kane’s first three plays—Blasted (1996), Phaedra’s Love (1996) and Cleansed (1998)—are dominated by violently misogynistic antiheroes, while the women are shown to be compulsively drawn to the suffering that their male tormentors inflict. Early suspicion and hostility toward Kane from theater critics was also shared by feminist theater scholars. Elaine Aston, whose 2003 book Feminist Views on the English Stage was the first major study to take account of the changes women’s theater had undergone during the 1990s, conceded that Kane’s work, apart from brief mentions in Michelene Wandor’s revised edition of Look Back in Gender in 2001 and Aston’s own (in collaboration with Janelle Reinelt) Cambridge Companion to Modern Women Playwrights in 2000, had received little in the way of serious critical attention. In this respect, Aston’s study is important as it was among the first to acknowledge (in a phrase borrowed from Raymond Williams) that “new structures of feeling” (2003, p. 10) had emerged following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the deposition of Mrs Thatcher the following year. Not only had reactions to feminist theater changed but so had feminism as a belief structure. However, feminist theater scholarship throughout the 1990s not only largely failed to acknowledge the significance these changes had on playwriting culture but many indicators of this change—from the rise of the “ladette” to popular men’s magazines such as Loaded—now



Sarah Kane: Back to the 80s?

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meant that the 1990s required a major reevaluation of what feminism constituted. All too often the academy simply took a complacent assumption that a continuum from the 1980s would somehow establish a way forward for itself into the 1990s, but it soon became all too apparent that the entire theoretical and structural apparatus of feminism was changing (or more accurately collapsing) all around them. More worrying still was the attitude taken toward Sarah Kane. The strategy adopted seemed to be to one of simply ignoring her in the hope that she would quietly go away so as not to bother the continuum in feminist theater history that had been established since the 1970s. This regressive tactic is shown all too clearly in the chronology of significant women’s plays produced in Lizbeth Goodman’s 1996 book Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre. Here, the significant theater events of 1995, according to Goodman, include Emma Thompson’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Keatley’s Our Father and Sharman McDonald’s The Borders of Paradise. Sarah Kane’s Blasted is entirely missing from the list. While even the most trenchant opponent of Kane’s work at the time could not deny that the controversy surrounding Blasted had made it the theater event of the year, Goodman’s decision to overlook the play is comparable to excluding John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger from a list of the significant plays of 1956 and replacing it with Hugh Mills’s House by the Lake as the landmark play. Although much beloved by amateur companies, Mills’s entertaining thriller could hardly ever be described as revolutionary or canonical. Kane’s second play Phaedra’s Love is also excluded from Goodman’s list for the following year, although several of its contemporaries such as Rebecca Prichard’s Essex Girls and Tamsin Ogelsby’s Two Lips Indifferent are included. Looking through Goodman’s list of plays from 1990 to 1996, the bias is clear: those dramatists whose work corroborates existing historical and theoretical narratives are included—those who do not are simply ignored. As with the recent controversy over attempts to exclude Mrs Thatcher from a worldwide list of the most significant female politicians from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,4 in the case of Sarah Kane feminist theater criticism demonstrated that it was every bit as willing to collude in making biased lists or narrow definitions of a female canon. In her study of 1990s women playwrights Elaine Aston is keen to draw together what she calls “feminist continuities and connections” (2003, p. 10) from previous decades; these bonds to an existing feminist discourse are much stronger in Kane’s work than have previously been acknowledged or even appear at first sight. Even her notorious



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comment about women playwrights needs to be qualified by her subsequent remark, “I want my work to be judged—on its quality, not on the basis of my age, gender, class, sexuality or race” (qtd. in Stephenson and Langridge 1997, p. 134). This sentiment in fact is no different from comments made by earlier playwrights such as Sarah Daniels, who not only expressed irritation at the arbitrary differences made between male and female dramatists, but a further, even more contentious demarcation: “[the] label ‘feminist playwright’ matters because it feeds into the way people see you: it gives them an expectation which is often prejudiced, of yourself or your work” (qtd. in Goodman 1993, p. 99). Feminist theater criticism has also displayed this same reductive tendency to categorize, grade and label. For instance, Michelene Wandor in her influential study Carry on Understudies consigns Louise Page’s Salonika (1982) and Real Estate (1984) into the slot representative of bourgeois feminism (1986, pp. 180–1), while elsewhere this overly prescriptive approach has even extended to criticisms about subject matter. For instance, Lizbeth Goodman, while recognizing that Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money is “a very powerful play by a British socialist feminist [it] is not itself particularly ‘feminist’ either in terms of its content or intent” (1993, p. 216). This interpretation is worryingly narrow; Goodman’s assessment fails to realize that Serious Money is an important feminist play, not only as a development of ideas from Top Girls in respect to Thatcherism’s social and economic progress but also for what it represents as a development of new insights into the corresponding rise of postfeminist ideologies through new “top girls” who emerge in Serious Money such as Scilla Todd and Jacinta Condor. Sarah Daniels’s suspicion of labels perhaps served as a useful warning to Sarah Kane and her generation. Out of the 1980s generation of playwrights labeled as “feminist,” Daniels has suffered the most from accusations of misandry in response to her 1983 play Masterpieces, which drew comparisons between pornography, rape and male violence.5 The work of Daniels and Kane also provides a useful point of comparison, not only between the major generational and artistic differences of the 1980s and 1990s but also perhaps more surprisingly on the many points of connection between the two dramatists. Kane’s own relationship to Daniels’s work appears contradictory. For instance, in a letter written to Aleks Sierz in 1999 she commented, “I loathe her work . . . she was definitely not an influence,” yet in a conversation I once had with Sarah Kane’s brother he describes an incident where one of the first things she recommended him to read as an introduction to modern drama was Sarah Daniels’s Plays 1.



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He also recalled that each page was heavily annotated in his sister’s handwriting. Without access to the volume in question such anecdotes should be treated with circumspection; however, David Ian Rabey in his book English Drama Since 1940 also recognizes that Masterpieces in some ways “importantly anticipates Sarah Kane’s Blasted” (2003, p. 175), although it is worth adding that the influence is present throughout her work—namely the associations between masculinity and violence (particularly rape) and a tendency to make connections that on the surface seem extreme. For example, in Masterpieces the argument that “looking at [pornographic] pictures never hurt anyone” (1991, p. 164) is projected to a brutal logic where a scene in a so-called snuff movie is described; here the “climax” of the film culminates in a woman’s torture and death for the audience’s sexual gratification (p. 229). Similarly, in Blasted, Kane draws deliberate comparisons between Cate’s rape by her former lover Ian in a Leeds hotel room during the first part of the play and the soldier’s accounts of rape in wartime in the second part of the play. Daniels calls Masterpieces “unashamedly an issue play” whereby “I censored myself from writing the detail and contradictions which give a character depth” (p. xi). The issues that motivated the play—namely pornography and male violence directed at women—were dominant topics during the 1980s both within the women’s movement and the media. Daniels explained that the play was written after she had read the American feminist writer Andrea Dworkin’s book Pornography—Men Possessing Women (1981), which also made direct connections between male violence and the consumption of pornography. Just as many women’s plays from the 1980s such as Eve Lewis’s Ficky Stingers (1986) and Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic (1988) are filled with threats of violence against women, all of Kane’s plays are haunted by male abusers: these range from Cate in Blasted talking about her fits returning “since Dad came back” (2001, p. 10) to the torturer figure of Tinker in Cleansed, or the character simply known as C in Crave (1998), who “watched my father beat my mother with a walking stick” (p. 179). Yet in interviews Kane was equally suspicious of drama based on specific issues; so whereas Daniels used Andrea Dworkin’s work as a starting point in Masterpieces, Kane’s response to both Dworkin and the issue of pornography are very different: I read Andrea Dworkin when I was at Bristol [University] as an undergraduate. I was just so horrified by it. I thought how can someone be filled with such hatred—be so blind and this politically stupid? . . .



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I do always think that in fantasy anything goes, and I do think that it’s completely possible to spend your entire life fantasizing about killing and raping people, but actually have no desire to do that in reality at all . . . my whole problem with Andrea Dworkin is that she assumes that people aren’t intelligent enough to know the difference between fantasy and reality. (Saunders 2009, p. 62) In the same interview, and reminiscent of the scene from Masterpieces concerning the snuff movie, Kane discusses one particular pornographic image she inadvertently saw after receiving a letter for a previous tenant who had been on a mailing list for hardcore pornography: There was one particular image that I’ve never managed to get rid of which was a woman being fucked by a horse whilst having her head chopped off. Now, I kept looking at it and thinking that it looked completely real. . . . So does it matter whether it’s real or not? And of course it does, because if it’s real there’s somebody who’s dead who shouldn’t be dead. It really did horrify me. I’ve always tried to think you could fantasize about anything and that’s fine—and I still do think that, but I just don’t want post like that coming through my door! (Saunders 2009, pp. 62–3) Kane’s references to Andrea Dworkin and pornography also demonstrate some important differences in intergenerational sensibilities; while male violence preoccupies Kane’s work, she is not ready to state the clear cause and effect that Dworkin and Daniels advocated. And while both Masterpieces and Blasted uncompromisingly conflate and draw comparisons between domestic and global violence, the crucial difference lies in the depiction of gender relations in Kane’s work. Whereas in Masterpieces Daniels deliberately sets out to erase all traces of moral complexity, in Kane’s work the boundaries between male perpetrators of violence and female victims is blurred. For example, Cate in Blasted moves from positions of victim (p. 24) to attacker (p. 31) during the course of the play, while in Crave the figure of “A” is the abuser who is given a poignant love speech delivered directly to their victim (pp. 169–70). It is this suspicion of moral absolutes that most clearly separates Kane from much of the feminist drama of the 1980s and makes her representative of the new writing that emerged midway through the following decade. Yet her dominance in theater discourse has had some unfortunate effects. Chief among these is the disruption her work caused to a



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brief period in the early 1990s where a number of women dramatists had begun to reevaluate both the Thatcher period and the strategies by which feminism could be developed in a rapidly changing social climate. Plays included Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991), Break of Day (1995), April de Angelis’s The Positive Hour (1997) as well as the American writer Phyllis Nagy’s Weldon Rising (1992), which Elaine Aston identifies as a play that sat “at a crossroads where a contemporary feminist past meets a present that is looking to move out of the recognisable structures and arguments of identity politics” (2003, p. 113). However, what Sarah Kane and Cool Britannia did collectively was to sweep away these tentative alternatives, and while the millennial decade has seen an unprecedented number of women writing for theater, the collectivism that defined the 1970s and 1980s is no longer discernible. Angie’s nightmare at the close of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls was a stark premonition of what the 1980s held in store for girls who were neither ambitious, clever nor attractive. This motif still haunts women’s drama in the millennial decade through work such as Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now (2008), Polly Stenham’s That Face (2007) and Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses (2005). Yet memories of the collective feminist endeavor that marked the 1970s and 1980s are occasionally recalled and mourned by the generation of dramatists who succeeded Sarah Kane. One such young playwright is debbie tucker green, whose 2005 play stoning mary perhaps articulates this loss most poignantly: So what happened to the womanist bitches? . . . The feminist bitches? . . . The professional bitches. What happened to them What about the burn their bra bitches? The black bitches The rootsical bitches The white the brown bitches The right on bitches What about them? (2005, p. 63)

Notes 1. Agitprop was frequently associated with a style of left-wing polemical drama with the aim to politicize its audiences. Action was frequently fast paced with a style of characterization that eschewed psychological verisimilitude in favour of broad satire and social stereotypes.



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Works cited Aston, E. (1995) “Daniels in the Lion’s Den: Sarah Daniels and the British Backlash,” Theatre Journal, 47(3) 393–403. Aston, E. (2003) Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bayley, C. (1996) “So Why are these Men All Writing about Men?” The Independent, September 13. Billington, M. (1995) “The Good Fairies Desert the Court’s Theatre of the Absurd,” The Guardian, January 20. Blair, T. (1997) “Britain can Make it,” The Guardian, July 22. Borthwick, S. and Moy, R. (2004) Popular Music Genres. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Bradwell, M. (ed.) (1997) The Bush Theatre Book. London: Methuen. Campbell, B. (1987) The Iron Ladies: Why do Women Vote Tory? London: Virago Press. Cavanagh, D. (2000) The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize. London: Virgin Books. Churchill, C. (1990) Plays: 2. London: Methuen. Daniels, S. (1991) Plays 1. London: Methuen. Edgar, D. (ed.) (1999) State of Play: Playwrights on Playwriting. London: Faber. Goodman, L. (1993) Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each her Own. London: Routledge. Goodman, L. (1996) Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary Theatre. London: Routledge. Gottlieb, V. (1999) “Lukewarm Britannia” in V. Gottlieb and C. Chambers (eds) Theatre in a Cool Climate. London: Amber Lane Press. green, d. t. (2005) stoning mary. London: Nick Hern Books. Groves, J. (2009) “Maggie who? Harman Airbrushes Thatcher from Her List of Most Powerful Women in Politics,” The Mail Online, September 17, http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213977/Harriet-Harman-forced-acknowledgeMargaret-Thatcher-oversight-airbrushes-Iron-Lady-political-history.html. Kane, S. (1994) Blasted in Frontline Intelligence: New Plays for the Nineties, selected and introduced by Pamela Edwardes. London: Methuen. Kane, S. (1999) Letter to Aleks Sierz. January 18. Unpublished. Kane, S. (2001) Complete Plays. London: Methuen. Littler, J. (2000) “Creative Accounting: Consumer Culture, the ‘Creative Economy’ and the Cultural Policies of New Labour” in T. Bewes and J. Gilbert (eds) Cultural Capitalism: Politics After New Labour. London: Lawrence and Wishart. pp. 203–23. McGrath, J. (1990) The Bone Won’t Break. London: Methuen. Nightingale, B. (1998) The Future of Theatre. London: Phoenix.



2. M. Thatcher. Speech made for the Dame Ashley Memorial Lecture, July 26, 1982. Quoted in Campbell 1987, p. 25. 3. See Saunders 2009, pp. 39–41, 67, 83. 4. For example, see Groves 2009. 5. For a sustained discussion on the critical backlash see Aston 1995.

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Peacock, D. K. (1999) Thatcher’s Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the 1980s. London: Greenwood Press. Peter, J. (1988) “How to Make a Play a Failure,” The Sunday Times, May 15. Rabey, D. I. (2003) English Drama Since 1940. London: Pearson Education. Ravenhill, M. (2004) “A Tear in the Fabric: The James Bulger Murder and New Theatre Writing in the Nineties,” New Theatre Quarterly 20(4) 305–14. Saunders, G. (2009) About Kane: The Playwright and the Work. London: Faber. Sierz, A. (2001) In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber. Stephenson, H. and Langridge, N. (1997) Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. London: Methuen. Tinker, J. (1995) “This Disgusting Feast of Filth,” The Daily Mail, January 19. Urban, K. (2004) “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty and the “Nineties,” New Theatre Quarterly, 80, 354–72. Wandor, M. (1986) Carry on Understudies. London: Routledge. Wertenbaker, T. (1999) Interview with Michael Billington. The Guardian, November 25. Whelehan, I. (2000) Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: The Women’s Press.



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Parodic Reiterations: Representations of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism in Late Twentieth-Century British Political Cartoons Heather Joyce

The reoccurrence of Margaret Thatcher’s image and memory through single-frame political cartoons in the years surrounding the 1997 General Election signaled that in addition to the immediate question of leadership to be decided between John Major and Tony Blair, the election was also about the unresolved legacies of Thatcher and Thatcherism. Given the tendency of political cartoonists to portray the Conservative and Labour parties “only through their most recent leaders and supporters” (Mumford 2001, p. xi), political cartoons that gloss over Major (and Major’s successor William Hague) reflect Thatcher’s domination of the late twentieth-century political landscape despite her departure from political office. Depictions of Thatcher in relation to Blair by political cartoonists in both liberal and conservative dailies, in this respect, can be read as symptomatic of widespread anxieties regarding the continuation of Thatcherism in the late 1990s. Rather than setting Thatcher and Blair in opposition to each other as might be expected, however, Peter Brookes and Michael Cummings of the Times and Peter Schrank and Dave Brown of the Independent, for example, tend to efface differences between the politicians and, in doing so, treat Blair as either a repetition or parody of Thatcher.1 Such depictions, which critique Blair’s ability to offer the electorate a distinct alternative to Thatcherism, are in line with the tendency of political commentators like Simon Jenkins, for example, to retrospectively describe Labour’s changing image under Blair’s leadership in terms of the party’s conversion to Thatcherism. Even as Thatcher clearly functions as a vehicle through which political cartoonists are able to critique Blair’s policies, depictions of Blair as a repetition or parody of Thatcher recast her as a locus of nostalgia in 221



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the late twentieth-century political imaginary: for both Right and Left, Thatcher’s clear conviction politics are preferable to Blair’s and New Labour’s less clearly defined ideologies. Prime ministers in British political cartoons in the latter half of the twentieth century, especially, represent not only their government’s policies but also come to stand for the nation,2 further complicating the cartoonists’ straightforward treatments of Blair’s policies and revealing the risk for comparisons of the politicians to domesticate and reinforce not only Thatcher’s political but also her former cultural hegemony. Thatcher’s appeal as a leader despite her revolutionary policies, which are generally understood to have irreparably and, for the most part, unfavorably altered the late twentieth-century British political landscape, is attributable to a large degree to the strong image of postimperial nationhood she offered her electorate. Her handling of the Falklands crisis, for example, enabled Thatcher to gain the public approval that had been lacking during her first years in office through her active cultivation of the electorate’s perception of her ability to stand for the nation. Moreover, the proliferation of masculine images of Thatcher during her involvement in the Falklands conflict definitively revealed the important role Thatcher’s negotiation of conflicting gender roles played in constructing and maintaining what cultural theorist Stuart Hall has described as Thatcher’s “symbolic majority” (1987, p. 33). The underlying gendered dynamic in political cartoons in which Blair steals Thatcher’s policies, which is foregrounded in portrayals of the politicians as mother and son and, more provocatively, in depictions of Blair in drag as Thatcher, enables cartoonists’ critiques of Blair’s policies but also repeats the images that formed the basis of Thatcher’s symbolic appeal. Such representations, then, make Thatcher a locus of cultural nostalgia: Thatcher’s exceptional ability to inhabit both masculine and feminine roles while maintaining a cohesive “feminine” appearance contrasts with the discrepancy that emerges between Blair’s sex and the gender roles he assumes as he takes on Thatcher’s characteristics, situating Thatcher in the cultural imaginary as an original and unified model not only of political conviction but also of postimperial nationhood. The resulting dynamic risks privileging Thatcher as the original source of Blair’s reiterations. Yet, by revealing Thatcher’s cohesive image to be a construct, political cartoons that depict Blair parodying Thatcher paradoxically also provide the basis for challenging an identifiable culture of melancholia in late twentieth-century Britain, the very culture that gives rise to Thatcher’s alignment with a mythic “lost” original national identity in comparison to Blair.



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As a medium which makes use of condensation to compress “a complex phenomenon into a single image that is purported to capture its essence graphically” (Morris 1993, p. 200) and which also operates by addressing a specific community of reference, the political cartoon provides a unique space of analysis in which to explore the place of Thatcher and Thatcherism in the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century British political and cultural imaginaries. Using condensation, political cartoonists translate the “new discursive articulations” Thatcherism forges between the “liberal discourses of the ‘free market’” and the “organic conservative themes of tradition, family and nation” (Hall 1988, p. 2) and Blair’s rhetoric of the New Britain into representations of Thatcher and Blair. Through this process, “tabs of identity” come to “condense a likeness, and often aspects of personality too, into a few telling features” (Seymour-Ure 2003, p. 243); these “tabs of identity” enable the skimmer3 to identify the figure being portrayed and also allow the cartoonists to “stretch the metaphorical circumstances into which he may be placed” (Seymour-Ure 2003, p. 243). While these representational strategies are common to political cartoonists’ representations of other political figures, in his broader analysis of the relationship between prime ministers and the media, Colin Seymour-Ure argues that the prevalence of prime ministers in political cartoons can be explained by the representative scope they offer the political cartoonist. “At one extreme,” he explains, “the prime minister—his character or behavior— is the stuff at issue” (Seymour-Ure 2003, p. 240); “at the other extreme” he adds, “the cartoonist wishes to comment on an issue or event with which in truth the prime minister may have had little if anything to do” (Seymour-Ure 2003, pp. 241–2). Even as the immediate context of the political cartoon conveys what is at issue in the cartoonist’s depiction of the politician, the skimmer’s interpretation of the image is also informed by images of the politicians he or she has come across not only in other political cartoons but also in his or her wider experience of the politicians. Rather than closing off meaning by reducing the “complex to the simple, the unique to the archetype” (Morris 1993, p. 200), by enabling political cartoonists to foreground what they believe to be the core issues at stake and also revealing the cartoon’s dependency “on the audience participating in the argument by utilizing its pre-existing knowledge” (Ross 2006, p. 303), condensation allows images in political cartoons to signify more broadly than might be expected.



Images and affiliations: Political cartoons and their cartoonists


Because interpretation is informed by the knowledge the skimmer brings to the cartoon, political cartoonists’ depictions are influenced by the “make-up of the readership and the preferences of the proprietor or editor” (Seymour-Ure 2003, p. 254) as well as by their own opinions of the figures they represent. Peter Brookes, for example, expressed his caution in agreeing to draw leader cartoons for the Times in 1992 because of his sense that he was more left-leaning than editor Peter Stothard; his acknowledgment that his views were “not that far apart from The Times’s,” however, suggested his recognition of the capacity for his cartoons to appeal to a conservative editor and readership (The British Cartoon Archive, 2009). As Seymour-Ure points out, though, “cartoonists are not normally so loyal to a party . . . that their urge to criticize is stifled” (2003, p. 256). While he argues that political cartoons have a discernible critical function, Seymour-Ure nonetheless identifies a pronounced willingness for political cartoonists in late twentieth-century Britain to extend their criticism of politicians beyond their expected political affiliations. “In the 1990s,” he observes, “cartoonists on all sides took advantage of the scope for attacking John Major’s weak and accident-prone government” (Seymour-Ure 2003, pp. 256–7); also, “Blair, in his turn, found himself attacked caustically by the left-wing Guardian cartoonists Steve Bell and Martin Rowson after 1997” (Seymour-Ure 2003, p. 257). Timothy S. Benson similarly acknowledges that, although political cartoonists do not always have clearly definable views despite publishing in partisan periodicals, the current generation of political cartoonists “cannot be pigeonholed” as easily as earlier cartoonists (2007, p. 9). For Benson, Steve Bell’s professed dislike of all politicians, for example, is consistent with a more widespread cynicism among political cartoonists regarding the state of politics in the 1990s. The trend Benson and Seymour-Ure identify can be explained by the tendency for the political cartoon in its broadest sense to act as a register of the contemporary political and cultural imaginaries. According to Charles Press, rather than necessarily affirming a specific political viewpoint, political cartoons convey cartoonists’ diagnoses of “what is happening in their cherished community” (1981, p. 62). Although he acknowledges that “cartoonists, like other critics, look at politics from a vantage point,” for Press their “special loyalty is less to a set of ideas than to the community of individuals that the cartoonist thinks needs nurture” (1981, p. 62). This does not mean that political affiliations do not matter. While the political affiliations of the cartoonists may be unclear, the expected political affiliation of the readership will continue to inform how political cartoons will be interpreted, as already noted.



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The tendency for single-frame political cartoons in both liberal and conservative dailies to efface differences between Thatcher and Blair, in this respect, can be read as being indicative of a wider cultural pathology of melancholia that has as its basis anxieties regarding not only the lack of distinct political choices available in late twentieth-century Britain but also the lack of a clearly defined national identity.

“Imaging” the alternative: From Thatcherism to Blatcherism Interpreting the results of the just-completed 1987 General Election, cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued that Thatcher’s third electoral victory could be explained by a trend observable from 1983 on: when “asked what policies they supported, significant majorities consistently preferred Labour on unemployment, health, housing, education—the ‘welfare’ issues” (1987, pp. 30–1); when “asked about image—who was ‘doing a good job’, ‘giving the country a lead’, making people ‘feel good to be British again’—a majority consistently said ‘Maggie’” (1987, p. 31). “One way of interpreting this trend,” Hall argued, is that the electorate in “advanced class democracies” are “thinking politically, not in terms of policies but of images” (1987, p. 31). For Hall, then, Thatcher’s ability to construct a “symbolic majority” (1987, p. 33) could be traced, at least in part, to the electorate’s perception of her ability to meet the needs of the present and future imagined community through the image of nationhood she came to represent and which dated from her resolute reaction to Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands. Widely interpreted as having enabled her to gain approval that was lacking during her first years in office,4 Thatcher’s handling of the Falklands crisis was “both throwback and throw-forward” (Marr 2007, p. 403). “For millions,” Andrew Marr explains, the Falklands conflict “seemed utterly out of time, a Victorian gunboat war in a nuclear age”; for millions of others “it was a wholly unexpected and almost mythic symbol of rebirth” (2007 p. 403), the connotations of which came to be associated with Thatcher herself. Blair’s rise to leadership in 1994 appeared to promise the radical reform that Hall, among others, diagnosed as being necessary for Labour to present a viable alternative to Thatcherism. Successive electoral defeats throughout the 1980s appeared to signal the failure of Labour’s traditional “image, ideology and constitution” ( Jenkins 2006, p. 206) to appeal to the late twentieth-century electorate. While controversy surrounding Thatcher’s poll tax appeared finally to offer then Labour leader Neil Kinnock “a winning issue for a 1991 election” ( Jenkins 2006, p. 212), anxieties regarding Thatcher’s electability led to Michael Heseltine unexpectedly challenging



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Thatcher for party leadership in November 1990. After falling just short of the majority required in order to avoid a second ballot, Thatcher came to realize that she had lost cabinet support and reluctantly withdrew from the competition, backing John Major who then defeated Heseltine. The change in leadership enabled the Conservatives to retain power and, despite Thatcher’s removal from political office, led to the continuation of Thatcherism under Major. Major’s unlikely victory over Kinnock in the 1992 election also appeared to reconfirm the need for reform within the Labour party and can be read as a contributing factor to Blair’s ascendancy within the party. With the death of Neil Kinnock’s successor John Smith, Blair, viewed to be a modernizer, assumed leadership of the party and implemented a vigorous strategy of reform that not only broke ties with old Labour but also proclaimed his intent to “change Britain” ( Jenkins 2006, p. 235). Rather than countering Major’s perceived continuation of Thatcherism and fulfilling the promise implied by his rhetoric of the “New” Britain,5 Blair increasingly came to be perceived by critics (particularly on the Left) as having made his party electable by in effect engineering its conversion to Thatcherism. Blair’s refusal to let issues of law and order that had traditionally been associated with the Conservatives (Hall 1979, p. 19) remain the property of the Tories in line with his values agenda is evidence of the perceived rightward shift in Labour’s politics under Blair’s leadership.6 Peter Brookes’s depiction of politicians Jack Straw7 and Blair as “maggiepies” in possession of necklaces that read “Law” and “Order” in his cartoon, published on January 11, 1997, in the Times, for example, conveys anxieties already in circulation in anticipation of Blair’s May election regarding his ability to offer the electorate a distinct political alternative to Major’s continuation of Thatcherism. Expressing a more widespread disillusionment regarding the entrenchment of Thatcherism in the British political landscape and discrediting Blair’s positioning of himself and his party in opposition to the Conservatives, the birds’ scientific classification, “Tendencia Thatcheritis,” suggests that Blair’s inheritance of Thatcherite policies is organic. Blair’s thieving tendencies also ironically counterpoint the politician’s association with law and order, and, by extension, call into question the integrity of Blair’s electoral promises. Brookes’s straightforward critique of Blair, based on his depiction of Blair’s thefts of Thatcher’s policies, however, is complicated by the gendered dynamic that emerges within this political cartoon. Heather Nunn, for example, has dealt with Thatcher’s negotiation of sexual and gender differences in relation to the nation. According to Nunn,



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Thatcher’s “authority seemed to derive from both her movement across gender identities, troubling the binaries of sexual difference, and also through the way she endorsed an unequal gender divide by locating women within the domestic and moral sphere and placing men as active public subjects” (2002, p. 17). The unavailability of Thatcher’s model of gender to other women, based on her advocacy of traditional gender roles in keeping with her rhetoric of the family, was, as Nunn suggests, central to Thatcher’s paradoxical status as both exemplary and exceptional. Thatcher’s cultivation of the electorate’s perception of her as possessing masculine attributes enabled her to position herself as a remedy to national decline; at the same time, the “scrupulously safeguarded” (Webster 1990, p. 83) femininity of her outward appearance enabled her to avoid criticism for being unfeminine or unnatural. Thatcher’s political strength and force of character were frequently conveyed through masculinized depictions of her during her time in office. When her popularity declined, Seymour-Ure advises, such representations of Thatcher in political cartoons “gave way to ‘stereotypical sexist images’” (2003, p. 242). In relation to Blair, however, Thatcher is predominantly represented through tabs of identity that convey the carefully cultivated image of disciplinary femininity which enabled her to avoid criticism and to stand for an image of cohesive national identity despite her gender bending, lending credence to Seymour-Ure’s argument that despite Thatcher’s “long premiership and her unique status as a female British prime minister” she “was fortunate not to become stuck with a damaging cartoon image” (2003, p. 264). Brookes, for example, depicts a smaller version of the Blair “maggiepie” perching on Thatcher’s handbag, from which the Blair “maggiepie” steals his “pearls” of law and order in addition to the images of Straw and Blair that appear in the foreground of the cartoon. Thatcher’s handbag was a tab of identity that became closely associated with her in political cartoons as an object “with which she was supposed to hit people” (Mumford 2001, p. xii). Predictably, then, the difference in scale between the Blair-magpie and Thatcher’s iconic accessory indicates Thatcher’s dominance over Blair, already conveyed through his apparent “thefts” of her policies. At the same time that it came to be associated with her authoritarianism, however, Thatcher’s handbag was also a central image that Thatcher used to convey her femininity. Blair’s close association with the iconic image, then, contributes to his feminization but also results in a more sympathetic treatment of Thatcher than might be expected. As both a symbol of dominance in comparison to the feminized Blair and the female victim of Blair’s unrestrained appropriations, Thatcher, in Brookes’s



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cartoon and elsewhere, becomes the locus of a complicated political and cultural nostalgia.

While Brookes’s skeptical depiction of Blair might be expected, given his conservative affiliations, Dave Brown of The Independent similarly alludes to Blair’s unethical appropriation of Thatcher’s policies in his political cartoon of April 11, 1997. Making use of the reader’s presumed knowledge of a contemporary news story regarding British sculptor Anthony Noel-Kelly, who was suspected of stealing human remains, to comment on the close affiliation of the politicians, Brown depicts a figure identifiable as Blair whistling in front of a display that consists of Thatcher’s head and upper shoulders hanging from a chain. The newspaper that Blair conceals behind his back, the headline of which reads “Sculptor quizzed over body parts thefts,” again positions Thatcher as the source of Blair’s “New Works”: Thatcher’s brain, which forms the word “privatization,” directs the reader’s attention to Blair’s appropriation of the key component of Thatcher’s economic revolution. Brown’s depiction of Thatcher also makes use of the convention for political cartoonists to emphasize Thatcher’s sharp features in order to convey her aggressiveness and, presumably, within this context, the undesirability of Blair’s adoption of her revolutionary policies. By positioning Blair in the role of Noel-Kelly, however, Brown transfers the negative moral and ethical connotations of the sculptor’s thefts onto Blair. Meanwhile, Brown’s depiction of Thatcher as a dismembered corpse conveys anxieties regarding the fate of old Britain in the context of Blair’s rhetoric of the new. Blair’s meeting with Thatcher two weeks after he took office and before he met with any other former leader, Labour or Conservative, seemed to bear out the concerns expressed through Brookes’s and Brown’s political cartoons preceding the election regarding Blair’s adoption of Thatcher’s policies. Published the day after the politicians’ meeting, Peter Schrank’s cartoon likens Blair to the dog and Thatcher to the gramophone in the iconic painting, “His Master’s Voice,” and thus implicitly positions Thatcher as Blair’s master (Figure 10.1). Schrank’s animalistic depiction of Blair crouching and listening attentively to the Thatcher-gramophone composite undercuts Blair’s political autonomy by intimating his submission to Thatcher and further repeats prevailing perceptions that Thatcher continued to function as a locus of authority even after her time in office. Even as the shape of the gramophone lends itself to Schrank’s portrayal of the sharp facial features which were frequently used by



Stolen policies and unexpected sympathies

Figure 10.1 Peter Schrank, “His Master’s Voice,” The Independent, May 26, 1997. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of Peter Schrank.

cartoonists to indicate “Mrs Thatcher’s force of character” (SeymourUre 2003, p. 242), the tabs of identity Schrank evokes when combined with the spatial positioning of the politicians give the gramophone the appearance of a mask into which Blair leans, anticipating Blair’s future appropriations not only of Thatcher’s policies but also, ultimately, of her image as well. Despite effacing differences between the politicians on the basis of Blair’s acquisition of Thatcher’s policies, Brookes’s, Brown’s and Schrank’s depictions of the politicians’ contrasting agencies intimate the existence of a more complex relationship between the politicians. Blair’s active positioning of himself in relation to the gendered “tabs of identity” with which Thatcher came to be associated renders the relationship between the politicians agonistic, or, in other words, in a process of continual negotiation and contestation even as differences between the politicians continue to be effaced, an issue that becomes even more apparent in cartoons depicting Thatcher and Blair as mother and son.

“Family Values”: Political inheritance and political cartoons The central place of inheritance in conservative discourse perhaps explains the tendency for conservative dailies in particular to depict the politicians in a familial relationship. Published alongside an article that describes Blair’s introduction of the family as an important election



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Figure 10.2 Peter Brookes, “Happy Family Values,” The Times, October 16, 1996. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of The Times and NI Syndication Ltd.

issue for Labour, Brookes’s “Happy Family Values,” which alludes to the card game “Happy Families,” addresses the central role of the family in constructing a strong cohesive society in both Thatcher’s and Blair’s rhetoric (Figure 10.2; 1996, p. 22). In depicting Blair and Harriet Harman8 as Master and Miss Bigstick and Norman Tebbit9 and Thatcher as Mr and Mrs Bigstick, Brookes positions Blair within the very lineage that he both critiques and seeks to oppose through his rhetoric. Brookes’s depiction of Thatcher and Blair overtly reflects Blair’s diminished authority in comparison to Thatcher’s even as he suggests important affinities between the politicians by positioning their cards next to each other. By returning Thatcher to a traditional female role that was perceived to naturalize her authority,10 Brookes implicitly legitimizes her authoritarianism, conveyed in this depiction through the rolling pin that she brandishes in front of her. In contrast to Thatcher, Blair appears as a boy scout who, in keeping with his place in the set, wields a stick. The difference in size between the politicians’ respective sticks reinforces Thatcher’s dominance over Blair, an authority already implied by the parent–child dynamic of the relationship. While Thatcher’s authoritarianism is overt and in keeping with her perceived role as “mother,” the tension that emerges between Blair’s role as boy scout and the violence that he threatens (and conceals—intimated by the positioning of the stick



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behind his head), alludes to a discrepancy between Blair’s construction of himself (and his party) through his rhetoric and his innate character that is mirrored by his positioning within the line of inheritance of the political Right despite his ostensibly Left affiliation. Blair’s masculinity is also called into question by Thatcher’s possession of a bigger “stick” than Blair’s, a disparity which contributes to Thatcher’s masculinization and, in this sense, sets the politicians in relation to each other in a predictable Oedipal configuration. At the same time that Thatcher functions as a locus of desire for Blair, conveyed through his close affiliation with and implicit emulation of her, Thatcher is also depicted as a rival that Blair seeks to surpass. For Nunn, the ambivalence produced through Thatcher’s negotiation of gender identities importantly draws on “assumptions made in recent feminist cultural analysis that the image of the ‘woman’ in Western society functions as both guarantee of stability and as destabilizing problem” (2002, p. 17). According to Nunn, “on the one hand, her [Thatcher’s] bellicose leadership seemed to symbolize the guarantee of a political power that upheld an aggressively phallic economy of control. On the other hand, as a woman, she was also read as potential point of excess or collapse of that systematic control and order” (2002, p. 18). In Brookes’s depiction of the politicians, Thatcher, because pictured in a traditional female role, functions as a guarantor of stability. Conversely, Brookes’s depiction of Blair’s emasculation predicts his capacity to function as a point of excess. Overlapping Thatcher’s, Blair’s card signals his desire to surpass Thatcher but also intimates the danger of his doing so based on the tension between the image he seeks to project through his rhetoric and the actions he performs. After Blair’s election, Brookes returned to this representational strategy in order to critique Blair’s defense of the government’s decision to implement Tory proposals to cut benefits for single parents, an issue which exposed dissent within New Labour for the first time and was perceived to mark “a shift in mood” within the party (Riddell 1997, p. 12).11 Brooke’s depiction of Thatcher as Blair’s smothering mother in his “Singular Mother,” published on December 11, 1997 in the Times, is perhaps surprising given his Conservative affiliations and Blair’s implementation of Tory policy. Thatcher’s control of Blair, conveyed by Blair’s confinement in the stroller which she pushes, and her obvious forward momentum express anxieties regarding Thatcher’s domination of not only the present but also the future political landscape. Her role as “Singular Mother” further undercuts Blair’s political autonomy; it also, however, reiterates the exceptionality of her negotiation of



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gender roles by implicitly setting her in opposition to the alternative female role of “single mother,” a figure that in Conservative discourse was generally understood to be a “source of social decay” (Nunn 2002, p. 101). Repeating Thatcher’s indomitability and her capacity to signify as emblematic of British resolve even as he evokes Thatcher’s authoritarianism, Brookes recasts Thatcher in relation to Blair through his depiction of Blair’s complicity with Thatcher’s actions. Although he is secured in the stroller, Blair smilingly leans back in toward Thatcher, suggesting his complete and desirous submission to her. Brookes’s intimation of Blair’s strategic association of himself with Thatcher repeats the dynamic evident in political cartoons that depict Blair’s thefts of Thatcher’s policies. Furthermore, the strong generational dynamic that comes to the forefront in depictions of Thatcher as Blair’s mother positions her as being representative of the old, clearly bounded Britain in contrast with Blair’s claim to represent a new and more unpredictable model of British nationhood.

The third way: Gender parody and subversion While some cartoonists critiqued the Thatcher/Blair relationship through Oedipal images, others chose to express their anxieties about the political scene in transgendered terms. For example, in “I thought I was a SuperNanny until I saw YOU!” published in The Times Magazine on August 2, 1997 in anticipation of assessments of Blair’s first 100 days in office, Michael Cummings depicts Blair parodying Thatcher to both convey and undercut the extremity of Blair’s authoritarianism (Figure 10.3). In addition to enabling Cummings’s specific critique of Blair, Blair’s appearance in drag as Thatcher also reflects a larger cultural crisis to which Cummings’s political cartoon responds. According to Marjorie Garber, who theorizes the social and cultural implications of cross-dressing and transvestism, the “apparently spontaneous or unexpected or supplementary presence of a transvestite figure in a text (whether fiction or history, verbal or visual, imagistic or ‘real’) that does not seem, thematically, to be primarily concerned with gender difference or blurred gender indicates a category crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the margin” (1992, p. 17). Like depictions of Blair stealing Thatcher’s policies and political cartoons which position the politicians in relation to each other as mother and son, cartoons in which Blair parodies Thatcher set the politicians in continuous relationship with each other in order to



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Figure 10.3 Michael Cummings, “I thought I was a Super-Nanny until I saw YOU!” The Times Magazine, August 2, 1997. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of Anne Marie Cummings.

express anxieties regarding Blair’s appropriation of Thatcher’s policies. Blair’s parodying of Thatcher, however, not only reflects anxieties regarding the continuation of Thatcherism through Blair but more specifically locates the cause of the anxieties which Blair’s performance provokes in the skimmer in the radical challenge that the Blair-Thatcher composite, representative of Blair’s Britain, poses to the existence of any fixed identity. Thatcher’s reoccurrence as a symbol of cohesive national identity in the preceding cartoons in this respect is symptomatic, arising in response to concerns regarding the shifting terrain of national identity in late twentieth-century Britain. Judith Butler, like Garber, identifies the disruptive potential of transvestism in terms of its capacity to challenge the very notion of an “original” or stable identity. At the same time, however, she acknowledges the risk for gender parody “to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantasmatic, and mimetic—a failed copy, as it were” (Butler 1990, p. 200). Even as Cummings uncovers the causes of anxieties regarding Blair’s historical repetition of Thatcher, anxieties that go beyond those surrounding Blair’s acquisition of her policies, he risks reinforcing the divide Butler describes by privileging Thatcher’s coherent signification over Blair’s derivative performance



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of her. Despite striking similarities between the figures in the political cartoon, Thatcher’s feminine authority is strengthened by the handbag she wields, while the absence of the iconic accessory in Blair’s parodic reiteration of her suggests that Blair not only lacks masculine authority but also feminine authority. The role of nanny, in this respect, is a disciplinary role in keeping with Thatcher’s character and also her sex;12 in contrast, Blair’s appearance as simultaneously male and female indicates his potential for unrestrained excess, reminiscent of the effects of Brookes’s more subtle feminization of Blair in his “Happy Family Values.” Indeed, the difference in scale between the politicians as well as Thatcher’s reassessment of herself in comparison to him (indicated through the embedded text, “I thought I was a Super-Nanny until I saw YOU!”) recasts Thatcher as a more moderate political figure than Blair. Cummings’s political cartoon not only threatens to reframe Thatcher’s policies but also revisits the image of traditional nationhood she came to represent while in office. Although not “of” the people, Thatcher appears alongside the inhabitants of Blair’s “Nanny State” and shares in their collective concern regarding the challenges that Blair’s “No. 10 Commandments” pose to traditional Britain, conveyed through the list’s references to devolution and reform of the laws governing fox hunting, for example. Given the publication of his cartoon in a conservative daily, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cummings’s depiction of the politicians lends itself to the privileging of the original over the reiteration of which Butler warns. While the depiction risks aligning Thatcher with a “lost” national identity in comparison to Blair’s modern Britain, Blair’s parodying of Thatcher nonetheless disrupts her performance as “Nanny,” revealing her role as Nanny not only to have been a reassuring fantasy that legitimized her authority during her time in office but also, in this context, to authorize the image of nationhood she represents in comparison to Blair.13 Brookes’s “The Third Way,” published in the Times on September 30, 1998 in accompaniment to an article entitled “The Invisible Party,” in which Jenkins argues that rather than there being a “third way”—a mainstay of Blair’s rhetoric—there is “the Tory way, down which the present Government is loyally plodding” (Figure 10.4; 1998, p. 20), lends itself to subversive interpretation more easily than Cummings’s. In Brookes’s portrayal of him, Blair literally embodies the “third way.” Blair’s acquisition of Thatcher’s gendered characteristics from the waist down reveals his phallic authority to be lacking: Thatcher’s are the legs upon which Blair and his rhetoric stand. Paradoxically, however, the context in which the political cartoon arises—Blair’s bracing of his



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Figure 10.4 Peter Brookes, “The Third Way,” The Times, September 30, 1998. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of The Times and NI Syndication Ltd.

party for the year to come—implies that Blair’s acquisition of Thatcher’s female attributes in fact shores up his masculine strength. Reading John Major as a man who, following Thatcher, “offers self-effacement as the model of masculinity in power” (1995, p. 52), for example, Jacqueline Rose has more generally suggested that “perhaps it is only a woman leader today who can claim so literally to embody the phallus” (1995, pp. 52–3). Blair’s apparent possession of both masculine and feminine traits destabilizes his ability to signify as a symbol of a cohesive political and national identity but his acquisition of Thatcher’s gendered characteristics as a means of gaining political authority also implicitly disrupts the straightforward signification of Thatcher’s outwardly feminine appearance. Brown similarly challenges Thatcher’s apparently cohesive signification in his portrayal of an alternative line of political inheritance than might be expected in his political cartoon of 27 April 1999 (Figure 10.5). The gendered tabs of identity that enable Blair to signify as female, and which are clearly borrowed from Thatcher, paradoxically evoke Thatcher’s masculine attributes. By depicting Thatcher’s iconic handbag and also the breasts Blair assumes as weapons, for instance, Brown, like Brookes, denaturalizes the visible gendered signifiers that lend Thatcher her coherent appearance even as he reveals Blair’s political image to be a construct. While Cummings’s depiction of Blair in Thatcher drag enables



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Figure 10.5 © Dave Brown, The Independent, April 27, 1999. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of Dave Brown.

his critique of Blair based on the opposition that emerges between Blair’s feminine appearance and his male sex, Brookes’s and Brown’s depictions of Thatcher more contentiously suggest that Thatcher’s feminine attributes, rather than her masculine attributes, are unnatural. By revealing Thatcher’s as well as Blair’s “gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification” (Butler 1990, p. 192) to be, in Butler’s terms, performative, all three depictions of Blair parodying Thatcher reveal political and national identifications to be in continual contestation. Brown’s depiction of Thatcher, Blair and Hague also reveals the partially concealed or “closeted” Thatcherite basis of the ostensibly centrist politics brought into being through Blair and similarly alluded to in Brookes’s “The Third Way.” The difference in scale between Hague, on the one hand, and Thatcher and Blair (who appear to be of equal stature, signaled by Blair’s ability to comfortably wear Thatcher’s clothes), on the other, conveys Thatcher’s and Blair’s domination of the political landscape to the exclusion of Hague. Hague’s acquisition of Blair’s clothing, however, importantly presents the logical conclusion of the radical challenge Blair’s parodying of Thatcher poses to seemingly fixed political categories: Labour becomes the potential source for the formulation of distinctive Tory policies in the wake of the Left’s adoption of issues that had traditionally been the property of the Right. While the



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close affinities between Thatcher and Blair are indicative of a lack of distinct political choices in the present, Hague’s anticipated appropriation of Blair’s political identity anticipates a lack of political choice in the future as well. Blair’s handling of the firefighters’ dispute of 2002 and 2003 raised questions about party identity by forcing New Labour to revisit “Old” Labour’s close relationship with unions, which provoked comparisons of Thatcher and Blair that gave credence to Brown’s concern regarding the lack of political choice after Thatcher’s radical restructuring of the political landscape. In Brown’s political cartoon, published on November 26, 2002 in the Independent (one day after Blair called a press conference to clarify his government’s position on the firefighter’s pay demands), Blair states “Not so keen on that one . . .? You’ll like this . . .” as he kicks aside Thatcher’s iconic tabs of identity in favor of an ensemble that is evocative of Winston Churchill (Figure 10.6). By depicting Blair replacing Thatcher’s image with Churchill’s, Brown not only critiques and ultimately challenges Blair’s strategic appropriation of Thatcher’s strict union policies but also intimates the existence of a more pervasive gap between image and substance in Blair’s policy that political commentator Peter Riddell, for example, attributes to New Labour’s genesis “as an electoral rather than a governing strategy” (2005, p. x). According to Riddell, “the resulting language—the triangulation electoral tactics of distancing New Labour both from the Tories and from Old Labour, and the search for

Figure 10.6 © Dave Brown, The Independent, November 26, 2002. Source: British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, www.cartoons.ac.uk. By permission of Dave Brown.



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a ‘third way’ strategy—often confused people about what New Labour stood for, and deliberately masked the considerable continuities with the past” (2005, p. x). The continuation of Blair’s “triangulation” into his successive terms of office, for Riddell, explains Blair’s association with a brand of politics based on image rather than substance. Brown’s emphasis on the interchangeability of the political images which Blair assumes also follows this line of criticism. In Brown’s cartoon, Blair’s adaptation of Churchill’s iconic “We shall fight on the beaches,” speech in order to profess his government’s resolve in dealing with the confrontations at “the picket lines” and the “negotiating table” is ironically undercut by his additional quip: “alternatively,” he offers, “I know half a verse of ‘My Way!’” In addition to conveying that Blair’s assertions of firm political commitment are laughable, Brown also reveals Blair’s parodying of other politicians to efface Blair’s own political image. Like the preceding political cartoons which compare Thatcher and Blair, Brown’s cartoon not only contrasts Blair’s unclear political ideologies with the resolute politics of Thatcher and Churchill but also sets Blair in opposition to the perceived cultural authenticity of the politicians he emulates. Blair’s performance as Thatcher and then Churchill reveals continuities with the past which Blair disingenuously seeks to efface through his rhetoric of the new; in exposing Blair’s active association of himself with Thatcher and Churchill, Brown suggests that Blair’s performance is, in fact, motivated by anxieties regarding national identity similar to those that critics like Hall, for example, argue gave rise to Thatcher’s exclusionary and defensive forms of nationalism. Strong associations of Thatcher and Churchill with an “authentic national identity” came about through their professed ability to remedy national decline.14 In contrast to Churchill’s and Thatcher’s reassurances of the possibility of remedying decline, as Brown’s and the preceding political cartoons show, the lack of an authentic core that defines Blair’s politics pertains to the state of Britain under Blair as well. Interpreting the results of the 2001 General Election, Tom Nairn argued that “Blairland” was “less the continuation of historical Britain than a degenerate parody of it—a substitute kept going only because it has, as yet, proved impossible to abolish the former state and system of political authority” (2002, p. 12). While Nairn sets Thatcher’s and Blair’s Britain against “historical Britain,” claiming that Thatcher and Thatcherism began an “unarrestable disintegration” that was “quite distinct from the longer cadences of ‘decline’ which had gone before,” in arguing that the 2001 General Election indicated the impossibility of entering “the historic realm of Britain again” (2002, p. 12) he implicitly



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suggests that while such entry was at least possible under Thatcher and even into Blair’s first term in office, the continuation of Blair’s parodic Britain has closed off the possibility of return. In setting Thatcher and, more pressingly, Blair against the “United Kingdom of the long era” (2002, p. 12), Nairn’s analysis can be located within the prevailing mood of loss that, in political cartoons, gives rise to Thatcher’s alignment with an original and historical cohesive national identity. According to Arthur Aughey, the “persuasiveness” of the argument Nairn set forth in his seminal The Break-Up of Britain, and in his subsequent works regarding the United Kingdom’s decline, “depended upon the fascination with a narrative of disintegration and the appeal of that narrative” (2007, p. 73). While depictions of Blair and Blair’s Britain as a degenerate parody in political cartoons seem to fulfill a similar desire for the privileging of an original (if only defined in terms of loss) that resituates Thatcher in the contemporary imaginary, visual depictions of Blair parodying Thatcher simultaneously challenge the notion of any authentic identity and, in doing so, engender a subversive agency. For Butler, “because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects,” agency “is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (1990, p. 198). Depictions of Blair repeating or parodying Thatcher threaten to resituate Thatcher as a locus of political and cultural nostalgia; the discrepancy that emerges between image and substance also, however, destabilizes the image of coherent nationhood for which Thatcher comes to stand even beyond her time in office. Butler explains, “the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary” (1990, p. 201). Cartoons which depict Blair repeating or parodying Thatcher and, less commonly, Churchill (as in Brown’s cartoon), reveal all three politicians’ identities, and by extension the versions of nationhood they come to represent, to be “effects” rather than fixed. By challenging the foreclosure that Butler describes, such representations have the capacity to intervene in a cultural pathology of melancholia. While depictions of Blair parodying rather than “repeating” Thatcher lend themselves more readily to subversive interpretation, the collective symbology of political cartoons suggests that such depictions can render subversive more straightforward depictions of the politicians as well. Butler’s remarks made in the context of her critique of the assumptions



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that underlie traditional modes of feminism have application here: according to Butler, “if identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of readymade subjects, a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old” (1990, p. 203). Even though the extent to which political cartoons influence the electorate remains largely indeterminate, there is nevertheless strong evidence that political cartoons can help “set ‘the agenda of politics’” even if the “effects are almost impossible to measure precisely” (Seymour-Ure 2003, p. 263). While SeymourUre concludes that political cartoons remain more likely to “reinforce attitudes more than they change them” (2003, p. 263), Josh Greenberg argues that the ideological importance of political cartoons rests in how they “provide a lens through which an implied version of the past may be examined vis-à-vis present conditions” and as such “have repercussions for how societies relate to their own histories [Edy, 1999: 73]”; for Greenberg, then, political cartoons also have the capacity to “constitute the subjectivities and identities of social subjects, their relations, and the field in which they exist [Purvis and Hunt, 1993]” (2002, p. 185). In a context in which elections continue to be decided on the basis of image rather than policy and in which image in fact increasingly appears to determine policy, political cartoons have the capacity to intervene in the existing political landscape by denaturalizing the fixed image of the present, future and even the past that politicians appear to offer their respective electorates. By “opening” up the possibilities of signification and revealing the skimmer to be implicated in the perpetuation of melancholia that gives rise to the privileging of conceptions of an original national identity, political cartoons in which Blair repeats or parodies Thatcher paradoxically suggest the possibility of countering the stagnation aligned not only with the lack of distinct political alternatives but also with the rhetoric of “loss” that informs late-twentieth- and earlytwenty-first-century conceptions of nationhood in Britain.

Notes 1. The Independent offers strong examples of political cartoons that efface differences between Thatcher and Blair; such examples also appear in the Guardian, for instance, which, like the Independent, appeals to a liberal readership. Similar depictions of Thatcher and Blair, to those which appear in conservative publication the Times, can be found in the Daily Mail, which is of the same political affiliation.



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2. Martin Walker argues that “with the 1930s and the coming of the dictators, the national ruler took over from the national symbol as the identifying mark” for nations in political cartoons (1977, p. 17). Within a specifically British context, the “John Bull figure” became the property of foreign cartoonists; British readers came to “see the nation symbolized in the familiar features of a Harold Wilson, an Edward Heath, or a Jim Callaghan” (Walker, 1977, p. 17). 3. In The Carnivalization of Politics Raymond N. Morris introduces the terminology of the “skimmer” or “glancer” to describe the intended audience of the political cartoon; for Morris these terms “convey better than ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’ the almost instantaneous manner in which readers seek to ‘get the point’ of a cartoon” (1995, p. 4). 4. Earl A. Reitan, for example, explains that “in her first three years, Margaret Thatcher had been one of Britain’s most unpopular prime ministers”; he continues, “with the victory in the Falklands War, that changed” (2003, p. 48). 5. Writing in 2005, Peter Riddell observes that “opinion polls have shown that the hopes of voters in May 1997 have not been fulfilled” (vii). In keeping with the tendency for representations of politicians in political cartoons to change over time in order to express fluctuations in the electorate’s mood, representations of Blair in political cartoons increasingly conveyed the growing disillusionment of political cartoonists as well as the electorate. Benson cites Brookes as an example of this trend: “‘I used to draw Blair with eyebrows up looking eager’ Peter Brookes observed, ‘Now he has one eyebrow down, showing his authoritarian tendency. There is a menace that was not there before’” (2007, p. 238). 6. As early as 1993, as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, Blair criticized the Tory government for “having given up on crime” ( Jenkins, 2006, p. 216). 7. John Whitaker Straw, or Jack Straw, is a prominent British Labour Party politician. 8. Harriet Harman held the position of Shadow Secretary of State for Health from 1995–6 and Shadow Secretary of State for Social Security from 1996–7. After the 1997 election, when Labour gained power, Harman was appointed Secretary for Social Security and Minister for Women (1997–8). She has held a series of cabinet positions since then. 9. Prominent member of the Conservative party Norman Tebbit was a key Thatcherite minister. During his time in cabinet, Tebbit held the positions of Employment Secretary and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Appointed chairman of the Conservative party in 1985, Tebbit resigned from cabinet in 1987. He became a life peer in 1992. 10. Thatcher’s fulfillment of the traditional roles of wife and mother, for example, was an important “certificate of conformity” (Warner, 1996, p. 53) that rendered the power she wielded as a Conservative woman in office palatable. 11. According to Jenkins, “Labour’s conversion was . . . every bit as revolutionary as had been the transformation of the Tory party by Thatcher herself. Just as accepting Thatcher took the Tories into a period of conflict and self-doubt, the same was true of Blair and Labour” (2006, p. 206). 12. Depictions of Thatcher as “nanny, matron, governess,” Marina Warner argues, “are perceived to be in character because they are women of discipline” (1996, p. 52).



Heather Joyce 241


13. Webster explains that “an emphasis on the femaleness of Mrs Thatcher’s power” attributes Thatcher’s power to the fact that men “were rendered feeble, puny and bewildered in their response to a powerful and aggressive woman” (1990, p. 118). She adds, “there was a number of variations on this theme, as men played child to Mrs Thatcher’s nanny, schoolboy to her headmistress, masochist to her sadist, conjuring up a picture of a particular upper class male sexuality with resonances of punitive nannies, public school floggings, homosexuality, and overwhelming guilt and a taste for punishment” (Webster, 1990, p. 118). 14. David Cannadine observes “that since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Britain has in many ways been a nation ‘in decline’” (2003, p. 26); surprisingly, however, for Cannadine, only three politicians fall into the category of “statesman in an age of decline”: Joseph Chamberlain, Churchill and Thatcher. Both Churchill and Thatcher, as well as Chamberlain, according to Cannadine, developed a “coherent, doom-laden and apocalyptic vision, part historical, part geopolitical and part prescriptive” (2003, p. 27).

Works cited Aughey, A. (2007) The Politics of Englishness. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Benson, T. S. (2007) The Cartoon Century: Modern Britain Through the Eyes of its Cartoonists. London: Random House. The British Cartoon Archive (2009) “Peter Brookes,” http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/ artists/peterbrookes/biography. Accessed April 20, 2009. Brookes, P. (1996) “Happy Family Values,” The Times, October 16, p. 22. Brookes, P. (1997) “Singular Mother,” The Times, December 11, p. 22. Brookes, P. (1997) “Maggiepies,” The Times, January 11, p. 26. Brookes, P. (1998) “The Third Way,” The Times, September 30, p. 20. Brown, D. (1997) The Independent, April 11. The British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, catalogue record PC1291, http://www.cartoons.ac.uk. Accessed May 20, 2009. Brown, D. (1999) The Independent. April 27. The British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, catalogue record DB0192, http://www.cartoons.ac.uk. Accessed May 20, 2009. Brown, D. (2002) The Independent. November 26. The British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, catalogue record 63048, http://www.cartoons.ac.uk. Accessed May 20, 2009. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cannadine, D. (2003) In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cummings, M. (1997) “I thought I was a Super-Nanny until I saw YOU!,” The Times Magazine, August 2, p. 3. Garber, M. (1992) Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Greenberg, J. (2002) “Framing and Temporality in Political Cartoons: A Critical Analysis of Visual News Discourse.” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 39(2): 181–98.



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Hall, S. (1979) “The Great Moving Right Show,” Marxism Today, 23(1): 14–20. Hall, S. (1987) “Blue Election, Election Blues,” Marxism Today, 31(7): 30–5. Hall, S. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. Jenkins, S. (1998) “The Invisible Party: Blair may Bully the Left in Blackpool but Real Labour will be Back One Day,” The Times, September 30, p. 20. Jenkins, S. (2006) Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts. London: Allen Lane. Marr, A. (2007) A History of Modern Britain. London: Macmillan. Morris, R. N. (1993) “Visual Rhetoric in Political Cartoons: A Structuralist Approach,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8(3): 195–210. Morris, R. N. (1995) The Carnivalization of Politics: Quebec Cartoons on Relations with Canada, England and France, 1960–1979. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mumford, A. (2001) Stabbed in the Front: Post-War General Elections through Political Cartoons. Canterbury, Kent: Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature, University of Kent. Nairn, T. (2002) Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom. London: Verso. Nunn, H. (2002) Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Press, C. (1981) The Political Cartoon. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Reitan, E. A. (2003) The Thatcher Revolution: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and the Transformation of Modern Britain, 1979–2001. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Riddell, P. (1997) “New Mood Gives Blair a Dose of Political Reality,” The Times, December 11, p. 12. Riddell, P. (2005) The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair’s Quest for a Legacy. London: Politico’s. Rose, J. (1995) “Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Ellis” in E. Carter, J. Donald and J. Squires (eds), Cultural Remix: Theories of Politics and the Popular. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Ross, E. (2006) “The Representation of Immigrants and Immigration in UK Political Cartoons from 1968 to 2005,” International Journal of Comic Art, 8(2): 283–306. Seymour-Ure, C. (2003) Prime Ministers and the Media: Issues of Power and Control. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Schrank, P. (1997) The Independent, May 26. The British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, catalogue record PC1866, http://www.cartoons.ac.uk. Accessed May 20, 2009. Walker, M. (1977) Daily Sketches: A Cartoon History of Twentieth-Century Britain. London: Muller. Warner, M. (1996) Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. London: Vintage. Webster, W. (1990) Not a Man to Match Her. London: Women’s Press.



Heather Joyce 243

Abbot, Paul 149, 155fn12 see also Shameless, television drama Agitprop 218fn1 Arts Council 207, 208, 209, 210 Attenborough, Richard 75–95 see also Gandhi Baucom, Ian 3, 80, 93fn4, 107, 131 Beautiful Thing, (1993) 200, 210 Beeton, Isabella 118 Beveridge Report 32, 161, 162, 165, 178, 178fn1 Billingham, Richard 147–8 Billy Elliot (2000) 8 Blair, Tony 8–9, 10 on “underclass” 142, 143, 153 on “Cool Britannia” 202–206, 212, 218 and gender 222, 226–227, 229, 231, 232–240 and New Labour 8–9, 10, 23fn3 and Number 10, Downing Street 13 and political cartoons 221–240 compared to Thatcher 9, 10, 22, 221–240 and “the Third Way” 8–9, 234 global impact 13, 14 Blasted (1994) 201, 210, 213, 216, 217 “Blatcherism” 8, 225 Brassed Off! (1996) 8 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 32, 34, 35, 42, 73fn2 licence fee 32, 33, 35, 59–60 and public service 34, 35 British Empire 11, 75–76, 78, 85–6, 87, 88, 92, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 109, 110, 111, 122, 124 British film industry 57 British Nationality Act, 1981 11, 118 broadcasting see under BBC, Independent Broadcasting Authority, ITV, ITA,

ITC, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky Television The Annan report (1977) 32, 33, 58–59, 73fn1 The Broadcasting Act (1990) 43 The Broadcasting Act (1980) 54, 59 The Peacock Report (1987) 34, 35 and public service 30, 32–35, 43–44, 49, Brookes, Peter 221, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230, 235, 241fn5 ‘Happy Family Values’ 230 ‘Singular Mother’ 231 ‘The Third Way’ 234, 235, 236 Brown, Dave 221, 228, 236, 237 Brown, Gordon 10 view of Thatcher 10 Butler, Judith 36, 180, 189, 233, 234, 236, 239–240 Cameron, David 177 Channel 4 advertising 43, 61–62 birth 33, 47, 58 and enterprise 34, 54–55, 61 funding of 61, 62 Isaacs, Jeremy, Chief Executive 33, 34, 54, 61 left-wing 33, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 73 minority programming 34, 58, 61–62 neo-liberalism 33–34 production arrangements 34, 56, 60–61, 66 public service 34 relationship to Thatcherism 34, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 64, 72, 73 Child Support Act (1991) 140 Churchill, Caryl 199, 207, 209, 213 Top Girls (1982) 199, 209, 210, 212, 215 244



Index

class aristocracy 12, 99, 104, 124, 149, 155fn11, 185, class politics 10, 56, 63, 68, 105, 126, 137 and Thatcher 4–5, 8, 15, 105, 126 upwardly mobile 4, 69, 124, 126, 185 working-class identity 8, 68, 104 see also “underclass” Clause 28 182, 186, 187, 189, 195 see also homosexuality Coe, Jonathan 159 What A Carve Up! 158–178 “Cool Britannia” 202–206, 212, 218 “common sense” 30, 128, 141, 171 Community Charge, the see under Poll Tax Conservative Party 2, 4, 6, 32, 39, 59, 77, 100, 104, 107, 120, 123–4, 130fn3, 131fn10, 177, 178 n.5, 182, 226 current affairs programmes 31, 33, 34, 36–37, 38–39, 41, 42, 44, 47, 49 see also Panorama, This Week, TVEye Currie, Edwina 42–43 Cummings, Michael 221, 232, 233 ‘I thought I was a Super-Nanny until I saw You!’ 233

economy “Big Bang” 35, 167 consumer capitalism 62, 129–130, 131fn14, 137, 138, 141, 143, 184, 200, 205 international economy 2 privatization 8, 20–21, 32, 40, 183, 192, 195, 228 Education Reform Act, 1988 7 The Enigma of Arrival (1987) 97–113 autobiographical novel 97–98 colonial nostalgia 97, 102, 107, 109, 111, 112 immigrants 98–99, 100, 102, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112 national identity 97, 101, 105, 109, 112 nobel prize 103–104 rural heritage 97, 99, 100, 108, 110 post-colonial 97, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 111, 112 “postimperial melancholia” 106, 107, 110, 112 race 97, 98–99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 enterprise/enterprise culture 6, 7–8, 12, 23fn3, 34, 54–55, 61, 66, 70–71, 105, 161, 168, 185 Europe 10, 203 Thatcher’s views on 13–14, 203 European Economic Community 13

Daniels, Sarah 215 Masterpieces (1983) 215–217 Downing Street, Number 10 13, 18, 115–130 as a commodity 129, 130 as a home 115, 117, 124, 125–126, 127 domesticity 118, 122, 127–128 immigration 118, 122, 123 national identity 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 129 public space 122–123 race 122, 123 Drabble, Margaret 173 Dworkin, Andrea 216–217

Falklands Islands’ War 11, 77–79, 119, 178fn4, 196 n.4, 222, 225 Foursight Theatre 22 see also Thatcher: The Musical! Frears, Stephen 53, 54–55, 62, 63, 64, 65, 70, 72–73 Freud, Sigmund 78, 81, 93fn6 free market capitalism 6, 9, 14, 42, 43, 46, 47–48, 61, 144, 183, 209 The Full Monty (1997) 144 Gandhi (1982) 75–95 Attenborough, Richard 75–95 brown messiah 83–84



Index 245

Index

Gandhi (1982) – continued immigration 86 Kingsley, Ben 81, 82, 83 nation 76, 77–78, 79, 81, 88 nostalgia 92 “Raj revival” 75–76 reception 77, 81, 82 saint 77, 92 state narcissism 76–78, 79–80, 81, 88, 92, 93fn6 whiteness 77, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94fn13 General Election 1978 campaign 117 1979 6, 100, 130fn3, 161 1983 6, 11, 34, 79, 100, 118 see also “Victorian Values” 1987 6, 34, 35, 225 1997 203, 221, 226, 241fn8 2001 238 Gilroy, Paul 23fn5, 71, 106 green, debbie tucker 218 stoning mary (2005) 218 Habermas, Jürgen 127 Hague, William 221, 236, 237 Hall, Stuart 7, 56, 64, 67, 73fn3, 96–97, 100, 138, 183, 185, 186, 222, 223, 225 ‘Happy Family Values’ 230 Harman, Harriet 230, 241fn8 Harvey, Jonathan 200 Beautiful Thing (1993) 200, 210 Heath, Edward 120, 124–125, 241fn2 heritage 12, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 119, 120, 128 legislation 12, 108 manor/country house 96, 104, 107, 110, 119, 120, 131fn7 see also rural heritage Hollinghurst, Alan 174, 181, 182, 195 The Line of Beauty (2004) 174, 181–195 homosexuality 67, 68, 182, 185, 186, 242 Hope, Anthony 196fn5 Hurd, Douglas 185

immigration 12, 23fn5, 80, 86, 98–99, 100, 103, 115–116, 117–118, 122, 123 British Nationality Act, 1981 11, 118 The Enigma of Arrival 98–99, 100, 109, 110 Gandhi 80, 86 My Beautiful Laundrette 53 Thatcher on 11–12, 80 see also national identity, racism, riots imperialism 14, 76–78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 88–89, 90, 91–92, 93fn4, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107–108, 111, 122, 123, 124, 130fn1 Independent Broadcasting Authority 43, 60 Independent Television (ITV) 33, 43, 44, 60 advertising 34, 43, 61 launch 33 production arrangements 60, 61 structure 33, 60 India 75, 77, 90, 93fn10, 110, 123 individualism 50, 126, 129, 143, 186 individual choice 31 individual responsibility 31 “In-yer-face” drama 199–218 and feminism 208–218 and feminist ‘back lash’ 209–212 Isaacs, Jeremy 33, 34, 54, 61 Jimmy’s 31, 42–43 Kane, Sarah 199–218 Blasted (1994) 201–202, 210, 213, 214, 216–217 Kinnock, Neil 225, 226 Kureishi, Hanif 53, 54, 62, 66, 67, 68, 96, 174 see also, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) Labour Party 10, 202, 208, 226 Left, the 2, 7–8, 17, 56, 59, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72–73, 182, 236 failure of 2, 8, 17, 56, 63, 64, 65, 67–68, 72, 73



246

“left melancholia” 17, 64, 65 Marxism Today 56 “new times” group 56, 67, 70, 71, 72 Last Orders (2008), documentary 138 The Line of Beauty (2004) 174, 181–195 and 1980s Britain 183–186 and Clause 28 182, 186, 187, 189, 195 and consuming Thatcher 186–194 and homosexuality 180–195 and private space 184, 185, 190–191 and public space 184–185 and queering of Thatcher 181–195 and race 186 and Thatcher’s fashion 190–193 and Thatcher as gay icon 195 and Thatcher as Oedipal figure 187, 188, 190, 191, 194 Loach, Ken 144–145 Nil By Mouth (1997) 144 Major, John 203, 204, 221, 224, 226, 235 Masterpieces (1983) 215–217 Matthew, Karen 150–151 McEwan, Ian 173 miners’ strike (1984) 8 My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) 53–73 Channel 4 53, 54, 55, 63, 65–66, 69, 70, 72 class 68 enterprise 66, 70–71 feminism 67, 68 Frears, Stephen 53, 54, 62, 65–66 funding 66 immigration 53 Kureishi, Hanif 53, 54, 66–67, 68 laundrette’s spatial logic 53, 54, 55, 65–66, 69–70 National Front 53, 69 race 69, 71 Naipaul, V. S. 96–114 “ex-colonial” writer 97, 103, 106, 110, 111 Nobel Prize 103–104 see also, The Enigma of Arrival

National Health Service (NHS) ancillary workers 38, 39, 40 The Black Report (1980) 32, 33 compared to American health care 47–48 efficiency 34, 38, 41, 46, 50, 160 The Griffiths Report (1984) 34, 35 health care professionals 36, 37–38, 40, 41 health managers 34, 38, 41, 43, 166 market values 35, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 166 National Health Service and Community Care Act (1990) 43 National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) 39, 40 patients 38, 41, 42, 44–45, 46, 48, 49 strikes 39–40 ward closures 41–42 and What A Carve Up! 160, 162–164 national identity 11, 19, 78, 101, 115, 120, 121–122, 144, 185, 186, 187, 225, 233 British 11, 101, 115, 121–122, 131fn8, 144, 185 English 11, 78, 120, 185 National Front 53, 69 see also immigration, racism, riots neo-liberalism 8–9, 33, 54, 70, 138, 185, 188, 192 “neo-liberal turn” 7 “New Britain” 10, 146, 206, 223 New Labour 7, 8–10, 22, 130–131fn6 “and enterprise” 23fn3 “General Election” 2001 238 “and ‘underclass’” 15, 137, 139, 142–144, 148 “and ‘cool Britannia’” 202–206, 212 “and ‘working class’” 138–139, 144, 153 Nil By Mouth (1997) 144, 145 nostalgia 68, 92, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107–108, 109, 110–111, 112, 195, 203, 221–222 Nunn, Heather 184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194



Index 247

Index

Panorama 36, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49 political cartoons 221–242 and gender 221–242 and 1997 General Election 221, 226–240 and representational strategies 223–225, 241fn3 comparing Thatcher and Blair 221–240 comparing Thatcher to Winston Churchill 237–239 Poll Tax, the 14, 15 Anti-Poll Tax Unions 14 post-colonial 3, 96–97, 100, 101, 103, 106, 108, 111, 112 post-Fordism 56, 63, 72 post-imperial identity 3, 14, 77, 78, 93fn4, 96, 106, 110, 112, 222 post-Thatcherism 2, 15 private health care 42, 47–48 private space 124, 184, 185, 192 privatization 8, 20–21, 32, 35, 40, 183, 192, 195, 228 British Gas 35 British Airports Authority 35 public space 69, 122, 183, 184, 185, 191, 192 public, the 10, 29–30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 49, 59–60, 129, 162, 173, 222 public services 8, 23fn3, 30, 32–33, 34, 35, 36, 43, 44, 49, 50 see also broadcasting, National Health Service (NHS) race 11, 23fn5, 53, 71, 76, 77, 83–84, 89, 91–92, 96, 97, 100, 103, 106, 109, 117, 186, 203 British Nationality Act, 1981, 11, 118 see also immigration, national identity, riots “Raj revival” 75–76 Reagan, Ronald 14 “special relationship” with Thatcher 14

riots 1981 23fn5, 80, 96, 117, 145 1990’s 145 rural heritage 96, 97, 100 Rushdie, Salman 75–76, 82, 96–97, 102, 174 Schrank, Peter 221, 228–229 Shameless, television series 137, 149–152 ‘Singular Mother’ 231 Sky Television 43–44 socialism 4, 9, 13, 14, 185, 210 society social responsibility 29, 31, 34 see also ‘There’s no such thing as society’ Spitting Image 5, 180, 181, 182, 188, 208 Thatcher puppet I, 180, 181, 182, 190, 194, 195 state narcissism 76–78, 79–80, 81, 88, 92, 93fn6 stoning mary (2005) 218 Straw, Jack 226, 241fn7 strikes 8, 23fn2, 39–40, 77, 79, 80, 178fn1 Tebbit, Norman 230, 241fn9 Thames Television 33, 36, 37, 42, 44 Thatcher, Margaret autobiographies and biographies 2, 4 class identity 4, 124–126, 127 and “common sense” 10, 128, 171 as conviction politician 10, 222 cultural amnesia surrounding 2, 6 elections 6, 11, 34, 35, 79 100, 117, 118, 130fn3, 161, 225 and Europe 13–14, 203 and feminism 4, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214, 218 and gender 4, 5, 126, 127, 131fn11, 180, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 222, 226–227, 229, 231–236, 241fn10, 241fn12, 241fn13 global impact 13, 14 and heritage 12, 96, 99, 107, 111, 119, 120, 122, 128



248

and history 77–78, 108, 115, 119, 120–121, 122–123, 131fn8 as housewife 4–5, 126–7, 128, 131fn13, 241fn10 images of 1, 2, 5, 10, 22–23, 188, 196fn3, 221, 227 see also Spitting Image impact on the Left 2, 7–8, 63, 64, 65, 73, 226 interviews 23fn4, 29–30, 115–116, 117, 131fn9, 194 as “Iron Lady” 4, 13, 190, 196fn3 life 4, 6, 15, 125, 126 as “Maggie” 187, 196fn3, 225 oedipal configurations 187, 188, 190, 191, 194, 231, 232 and political cartoons 221–240 and popular appeal 11, 14, 73, 79, 241fn4 queering of Thatcher 5, 180, 181, 187, 188, 192, 194–5 relationship with America 14 resignation 5, 15 speeches 6, 11–12, 13–14, 7–79, 93fn9, 117 Spitting Image puppet 5, 180, 181, 182, 190, 194, 195 as “Thatcher the Snatcher” 4 trauma 1, 2–3, 5, 11, 15, 73, 117, 195 “Victorian Values” 11, 23fn4, 100, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 131fn9, 171, 178fn4 compared to Winston Churchill, 237–239, 242fn14 Thatcher, Mark 179fn8 Thatcher: The Musical! 22–23 “Thatcher’s children” 5, 8, 22, 144, 199 Thatcherism 1987 General Election 6, 34, 225 and Clause 28, homosexuality 182, 186, 187, 189, 195 economic policy 6, 7, 9, 22, 56, 57, 79, 128–129, 131fn14, 137, 152, 158, 159, 161, 181, 183, 185, 187, 228 free-market 6–7, 14, 34, 49, 57, 105, 129, 161, 169, 173, 178, 183, 209, 223

ideological doctrine 4, 6, 10, 104–105 privatization 20–21, 40, 181, 183, 192, 195, 228 and race 11, 76, 106, 109, 117 resistance to 3, 15, 20, 22, 64, 72, 73, 100, 221, 225, 226 and women’s theatre 207, 208, 210, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218 as a wound/rupture 2, 3, 6, 8, 13, 22, 117 ‘There is no such thing as society’ 29, 50, 161 ‘The Third Way’ 9, 234, 235, 236 This Week 33, 36–37, 42, 44, 46, 48 see also TVEye Tina Goes Shopping (1999) 146–147 Tina Takes a Break (2001) 146 Top Girls (1982) 199, 209, 210, 212, 215 trade unions 3, 7–8, 23fn2, 39–40, 204 Employment Act, 1980 23fn2 Employment Act, 1982 23fn2 Miner’s Union 39–40 National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) 39 Thatcher’s view of 7–8, 23fn2, 39–40 see also strikes Trainspotting (1996) 144 TVEye 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41 Twin Town (1997) 144 “Underclass” 136–154 artists, see also Richard Billingham 148 “credit crunch class”, relationship to 152–154 definition under Thatcherism 140–142, 143, 154fn4 definition under New Labour 139, 142–144, 148 film, see also The Full Monty, Twin Town, Trainspotting 143–147 gender 139, 140 Matthews, Karen 150–151 television series, see also Shameless, Tina Goes Shopping, Tina Takes a Break 149–152



Index 249

Index

“Underclass” – continued and United States 140 Woolcock, Penny 137, 145–149, 150 “undeserving poor” 139, 145, 150, 151 “Victorian Values” 11, 23fn4, 100, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 131fn9, 171, 178fn4, What a Carve Up! (1995) 158–178 and 1961 film 158, 159 and critique of Thatcherism 161–178

and cuts to NHS 161, 165, 166 and Gulf Wars 159, 160, 168, 177 and the media 170–173 White, A Season of Programmes on BBC Two 138, 154fn2 Woolcock, Penny 137, 145–149, 150 Tina Goes Shopping (1999) 146 Tina Takes a Break (2001) 146–147 World in Action 33, 36, 44 Thatcher interview 11–12, 115–116, 117, 128, 130fn3



250

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There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters

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