Freedom and the Public

Abstract

The theme of the 1979 election would be ‘freedom’. In the neo-liberal view, personal freedom was linked to economic freedom and both rejected the fusty ties of a class society. The election campaign set the tone. The Sun newspaper, owned by one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite entrepreneurs, Rupert Murdoch, printed a three-page article urging its huge popular readership to ‘Vote Tory This Time’ with some impressive capitalisation: ‘FREEDOM to run your life as YOU want to run it, or to be shackled by the bureaucrats and the political bully boys. FREEDOM to work with or without a Union card – or be shackled to a dole queue in a declining economy’ (Lamb 1989:154). The Conservatives’ election broadcast claimed: ‘Those who want to work are left feeling guilty.’ Aspirant parents and hard-working businessmen plead ‘guilty’ to the sin of ambition. ‘Do you want better schooling?’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Did you make a profit?’ ‘Guilty: I’ll try not to do it again.’ ‘You’re sentenced to nationalisation!’ The interests of workers were presented as being in opposition to the interests of trade unions, and the interests of trade unions were characterised as ‘socialism’. ‘It’s a free society versus “socialism”,’ the right-wing Conservative politician and intellectual Enoch Powell had written back in 1965. For him, ‘everyone who goes into a shop and chooses one item instead of another is casting a vote in the economic ballot box’ (quoted by Letwin 1992:74). A debate between planning and competition, which dated back to the 19th century, was being revived (O’Malley 2009).