Page 88 - Cultural Theory

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••• Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School •••

destabilization of the country. At the industrial level, wage militancy from the
manual working class pointed to the re-emergence of class tensions.
The drift towards the ‘law and order’ society (1970–78). The surprise election of the
Heath Conservative government in 1970 was based on a ticket of restoring national
unity and enhancing economic competitiveness. The national interest was defined
against ‘extremists’ and recourse was made to the law to protect ‘universal’ civil lib-
erties. The Industrial Relations Act of 1971 restricted workers’ rights and introduced
the Industrial Relations Court to manage the ‘rational’ reform of labour. The commit-
ment to interventionism was off-set by a controlled return to laissez fair principles,
in which ‘lame duck’ companies were left to fend for themselves. Laws against civil
disobedience were introduced to act as ‘deterrents’ to demonstrators, squatters and
student activists. The police regrouped to focus intensively on ‘dangerous’, ‘crimo-
genic’ areas. This involved heightened policing of ethnic communities, presumed to
be the main source of violent crime, including ‘mugging’. The Emergency Powers Act
of 1971 was hastily introduced to halt the increasing civil unrest in Ulster. What
could no longer be won by consent was replaced by fiat.
1972 is ‘the moment of the mugger’, the point at which anti-permissive opinion
recognizes an emphatic symbol of the degradation of British life. Policing the Crisis
(1978b) demonstrates how media amplification exaggerated the severity of violent
crime and further legitimated the move towards a more authoritarian state. This pro-
duced successive waves of industrial unrest between 1972 and 74, which produced
an apparent U turn in government policy. Following the 1972 Budget a new Industry
Bill was passed injecting huge sums of public money into industry and unprece-
dented powers for the state to produce a ‘healthy’ climate for growth.
A statutory incomes policy was introduced to control wage militancy and an
attempt was made to revive the tripartite system of corporatism that had operated
during the years of consensus. However, state policy was contradictory. On one side
they sought to encourage public investment and ‘rational’ co-operation and dia-
logue; on the other, they created unrest by strict wage and price regulation. The state
dealt with the second miner’s strike in 1974, by the imposition of fuel-saving restric-
tions that led to the damaging three day week. Heath called a snap election in the
same year on the issue of ‘Who governs the country?’ The defeat of the Conservatives
sowed the seeds for more authoritarian solutions in the Party which culminated in
the election of Margaret Thatcher. The victorious Labour government struggled to
reintroduce consensus around the ‘Social Contract’, which promised public invest-
ment in return for agreed wage and price restraint. Despite achieving early success,
the measure disintegrated ending in the fiasco of ‘the winter of discontent’ in which
a barrage of strikes in the public sector left refuse uncollected and the dead unburied.
This symbolized the failure of consensus politics organized around corporatism and
seemed to legitimate a more authoritarian solution, which was duly delivered in the
Thatcher adventure.
The political and cultural history of Britain in the 20th century is usually conveyed
in progressive terms as the decentralization of power to the working class and,
through this, the extension of civil rights. Hall’s thesis stands this history on its head

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