Observing the 1980s
George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984 describes a totalitarian government bent on total manipulation. For many on the left, Margaret Thatcher's government represented elements of an 'Orwellian state', in which the social democratic consensus established after the end of World War Two was replaced by a free enterprise economy and a centralised state. For those on the political right, the 1980s Thatcher governments championed the re-assertion of individualism, British nationalism and a retreat from the so-called 'nanny state' in which the fight against the 'enemy within' was as important as the fight against the enemy without. In cultural terms, most writers point to the 1980s as being marked by creative pessimism, with 'anti-Thatcherism' the dominant cultural theme. This course will examine key events of the 1980s and reflect upon whether Margaret Thatcher's most famous quote, 'There is no such thing as society', is a suitable epitaph for the 1980s. Topic studied include: 1982 Falklands War; the 1984 miners' strike; the re-emergence of mass unemployment, peaking in 1986 at over 3.5 million; privatisation of industry and challenge to trade union power and the violent mass protest against the Community Charge (1990). Rather than producing a top down political history of the period, this course is interested in exploring the wide variety of evidence available to the contemporary historian. It is built around the Observing the Eighties project which includes oral histories from the British Library and holdings of the Mass Observation Project and ephemera from the University of Sussex