Why Liz Truss’s UK is nothing like Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 UK

Truss may be much more Thatcher than May, who always saw herself as little more than a senior official, a manager… another thing is that the social and political moments are similar. They hardly are. Forty-three years have passed and perhaps the only thing that resembles the context of 1979, with nuances, is that The UK is once again facing an energy crisis and it continues to have a clear foreign enemy with imperialist desires: then, it was Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, which would begin the invasion of Afghanistan a few months after Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street; in 2022, Putin’s Russia is still trying to do the same with Ukraine.

Everything else is different enough to be wary of comparisons. input, coming to power itself is radically different. In 1979, the United Kingdom came from an evident political instability: after winning the 1974 elections, Labor had governed with the veteran Harold Wilson until 1976, later giving the command to James Callaghan. With the hiatus of the four years of government of Edward Heath (1970-74), the progressive prime ministers had chained eleven of fifteen years in power.

Liz Truss’s inaugural speech as Prime Minister: “I will make the UK work again”

The arrival of Thatcher had much of a break with that labor tradition, its difficulty in bringing order to the streets, the increase in taxes, the energy problems arising from the 1973 crisis and the fear of reaching into key sectors of the traditional British economy. For her part, Truss is the fourth Conservative prime minister since David Cameron’s victory in the 2010 elections. If there is a tide, it is purely internal. The “Tories” have been in power for twelve years, so where Thatcher was a break with the “status quo”, Truss is pure continuity. Not in vain she is one of the closest collaborators of Boris Johnson.

Less growth, more debt

Economically, the UK is not the same country either. In 1979, contrary to what is usually believed, the country was in full economic expansion: that year and the previous one, the GDP rose by around 4%. Now with the corrective factor for the pandemic is around 1-1.5%… and at risk of a possible recession due to environmental problems. What does this mean? That Thatcher inherited a booming country and it was relatively easy for her to lower taxes, even if that meant that in 1980 and 1981 there was negative growth. Let’s say it was an investment that the UK could afford in the medium term (in 1987 and 1988, growth exceeded 5.5%).

Truss won’t have it so easy now. From 2015 to 2019, GDP rose a little over 1.5% annually. What was lost in the year of the pandemic (-9.3%) could not be recovered in 2021 (+7.4%). The total GDP with which the country ended last year is practically the same as in 2015. Similarly, the public debt in 1979 was just over 40% -the last year of Thatcher it fell to 28.52%- when it is now above 95%. These are unsustainable figures that have been skyrocketing since the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and that make it very difficult to cut taxes.

As is the case in the rest of the planet, the state needs to collect as much as possible, even more so in a warlike context in which the United Kingdom is being, together with the United States, Ukraine’s main military and economic ally. Is this compatible with the announced Truss tax reform? We will have to see it. The fact that inflation is at 10.1% year-on-year implies an indirect increase in income… but it also forces the state to buy more expensively on international markets. The pound is at its lowest values ​​against the dollar since 1985.

A less violent society

Although the UK of the late 1970s was growing faster economically, it was much more socially unstable. Coinciding with the twenty-five year reign of Elizabeth II, punk invaded the streets and never left. It was a move that reflected the frustration of youth, as reflected from the other side of the political spectrum, the “skinheads”common in lower-class neighborhoods where immigration was trying to gain a foothold after the withdrawal of the British Empire and the decline of the Commonwealth.

In the 1979 elections, the National Front, a far-right party, won 0.6% of the vote, reaching almost 200,000 votes. Four years later, its successor, the British National Party, numbered just over 14,600. The problem was not so much political as social. The image of the country was greatly damaged by the actions of the “hooligans” of different teams, particularly after the Heysel stadium massacre in 1985. It was not a new phenomenon, precisely.

Liz Truss is already prime minister with the ‘atypical’ blessing of Elizabeth II at Balmoral

Nothing to do with that generation of hatred with today’s youth, in love with Harry Styles and Dua Lipa. The years have softened social relations, despite the increase in immigration. The mayor of London is a Muslim son of Pakistanis without anyone being scandalized by it. He won the elections in 2016 and won them again in 2020. The English Football League is the largest collection of international and interracial talent to be seen in contemporary sport. One no longer associates the UK with violence and that is one less problem for Truss to deal with.

However, the main change is the disappearance of terrorism. In 1979, the IRA was a constant presence in British life. That year alone, the Irish terrorist group caused seventy-six deaths: prison officers, retired or active military, Protestant figures in Northern Ireland… On August 27, less than four months after the elections that led to Thatcher In power, the IRA killed the Earl of Mountbatten, Queen Elizabeth II’s first cousin…and eighteen British soldiers in an ambush near Warren Point. In 2022, although Sinn Fein is the most popular party in Ireland, violence is a thing of the past.

the two pillars

International relations have also changed. Truss will not have, like Thatcher, to fight with the European Union for everything since the United Kingdom does not belong to the Union as it did in 1979. In that sense, lose an enemy to blame for all ills, which will have to be seen how it manages. Its Atlantic ties with the United States remain just as strong, as does the commitment shown to NATO in the Ukraine war.

It is true that Joe Biden does not seem as collaborative an interlocutor as Ronald Reagan was during most of the 1980s, but we are talking about two countries whose foreign policies coincide in practically everything without any effort. Truss, in principle, will not face territorial tensions overseas either: there will be no Falklands war to end his first term, and no transition of power in Hong Kong to carefully prepare for.

From 1979 until the arrival of Tony Blair in 1994, Labor was unable to find a leader who would engage its electorate, more inclined to vote even for the Liberal Party or the Social Democrats. If then the years of Labor in the opposition were seventeen, now we are already twelve. Now, then, the polls marked the end of a Labor era. Now, they do it from a conservative era. Sir Keir Starmer has an advantage of up to twelve points in the face of the chaos experienced in the last years of the Johnson administration. Truss’s challenge is not so much to start a years-long project, as Thatcher’s was, but rather to resist external attacks… and internal ones.