256. Maggie losing it

Having looked last week at how Maggie Thatcher was running out of options for how to carve out a new role for Britain on the world stage, this week we look at how things were going at home. After all, she’d won a second landslide Commons majority in 1987, and that ought to be enough for anyone to shape politics to their wishes.

Well, it turned out not be that easy. Though it didn’t go far at this time, this was when the first stirrings for devolution, and eventually perhaps even independence, began to emerge in Scotland and Wales. After all, they’d been held together with England in Britain when there was a British Empire, and with that Empire gone, what held them together now?

And then there was the crisis over the HIV/AIDS worldwide pandemic. It had led to a surge in homophobia, as many mistakenly labelled the condition ‘the gay disease’. Some Labour-contraolled local councils had reacted by working with organisations from the gay community and even funding some of them. This was repugnant to Thatcher, who shared a widespread view that the family was the bedrock of society, and acceptance of gay lifestyles was a major threat to it. The result was the adoption of what came to be known as ‘Section 28’ banning the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local councils or in schools. No prosecution of a local authority under Section 28, but its mere existence and the uncertainty of just what constituted ‘promotion’ put a chill on work to support people suffering discrimination and to encourage safe sexual practices.

Then there was Northern Ireland, and one of the weirder Thatcher initiatives. This was to try to deny terrorist or terrorist-associated organisations what she thought of as ‘the oxygen of publicity’. She banned the broadcasting of the voices of the leaders of these organisations which led to the ludicrous state of affairs where actors were used to repeat the words of those leaders, as though somehow banning the voice mattered more than banning the words.

And then there was the economy. Things were beginning to turn a little nasty with unemployment and inflation both climbing worryingly. One approach favoured by some of Thatcher’s collaborators, notably her Chancellor of the Exchequer, was to ‘shadow’ the German currency, the Deutschemark. Since the Mark had joined the EEC’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, setting exchange rates between European currencies which were only allowed to vary by 6% above or below that rate, Britain was in effect accepting the constraints of the ERM without being a member.

When Lawson realised that advisers to Thatcher inside Downing Street were mocking his approach, he decided that he was being undermined in his work and resigned from the government.

After Michael Heseltine in 1986, this was the second Tory big beast to leave her Cabinet. One loss of a minister might be regarded as a misfortune, two looked like carelessness. A third one would start to look very bad, as we’ll discover next week.

Oddly, after Lawson had gone, to be replaced by his deputy, a man who’d made a remarkably rapid rise through the ranks of the government, John Major, Thatcher allowed herself to be persuaded to take Britain into the ERM. Sadly, because sterling went in at far too high a value, this only limited options for dealing with the worsening economic position.

So, as with foreign affairs, Thatcher was facing shrinking options on the domestic front too.

Illustration: 9 February 1988 Protest against Section 28. Photo by Maggie Honey

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License