1979 UK Treasury files reveal familiar themes

A crusade to bring joy, wealth, and “patios for all”, helped to shape the views of Margaret Thatcher’s incoming Conservative government as it struggled with a bleak economic outlook, it emerged.

After the “winter of discontent”, with widespread strikes and pay rise demands, in 1979 the new government embarked on a “campaign to influence attitudes towards pay”, reduce the size of the state and make public expenditure cuts.

Many of the themes revealed in Treasury files made public in the National Archives are remarkably similar to the challenges facing the new Coalition.

The documents refer repeatedly to the bleak economic conditions, the need for cuts, the threat of unemployment, reining in the role of the state, and the need for British society to take responsibility for its own future. And like Prime Minister David Cameron, the government of the time was also emphasising the need for “rational” decisions in response to the economic crisis.

The documents reveal that Nigel Lawson, then financial secretary to the Treasury, told Chancellor Geoffrey Howe the “main exercise” should be about “a sustained campaign to educate the public about the economic facts of life”.

And another paper from Mr Lawson’s office said: “Never in the whole of post-war economic history - not even the oil crisis of 1974 - has the economic outlook been so utterly bleak.”

But not everybody was happy with the relentless pessimism.

A draft briefing document on the government’s economic strategy stated: “We have to dampen down the deeply entrenched expectations among the public at large that their money incomes should increase each year and that there is an entitlement for pay rates to be based on the rates paid by other employers.”

But responding to the briefing paper, Peter Cropper, Special Adviser to the chief secretary of the Treasury, said: “It is very heavy going. There is no hint of the reforming crusade that some of us think we are launched on, and no hint of the end goal of it all - joy, wealth, national power, two acres and a cow, a second car in every garage, interesting jobs, leisure, comfortable trains, channel tunnels, atomic power stations, gleaming new coal mines, everyone a bathroom, patios for all etc. etc.”