'Back to Basics': 30 years on

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Thirty years ago this week, John Major took to the main stage at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool to give what was, arguably, his most important speech since succeeding Margaret Thatcher three years earlier. Already under fire, just over a year after steering the Conservatives to a fourth successive election victory, the Prime Minister was tasked with soothing his fractious party and persuading the hard-pressed public that the economy was recovering, after the longest recession since the 1930s.

As Sarah Baxter wrote in The New Statesman a fortnight before Major travelled to the North West, he was facing an uphill battle to get Conservative backbenchers on side again. With his office briefing the press that Major intended to do away with the autocue—as he had at the Welsh Conservative Party conference in June—Baxter noted that ‘addressing all those Union Jack-waving activists in a humble, folksy way when they are pining for the days of the imperious Maggie is a risky strategy’.

Greeted by what the BBC described as ‘wild acclaim’ as well as Union Jacks and even the odd balloon, John Major began by theatrically checking that his microphone was on, like Music Hall artiste father like son. He continued in a similar vein, telling the conference: ‘As I walked through the Winter Gardens, I passed the bookstalls … I see memoirs, memoirs to the left of me, memoirs to the right of me, memoirs in front of me, volley, volley, and thunder’. After a deluge of Conservative autobiographies—including Nigel Lawson’s The View from No.11 the previous year, as well as Ken Baker’s The Turbulent Years, Alan Clark’s diaries, and, of course, Baroness Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years in 1993—Major had a glint in his eye as he declared that ‘I’m not about to write my memoirs, not for a long time’.

Tending to testy Tories, Major reminded those assembled that ‘disunity leads to opposition, not just in Westminster but … in town halls up and down the country’. Counselling that members of any political party known ‘for commonsense and for competence’ should be able to have ‘our agreements in public and our disagreements in private’, Major urged those assembled to ‘channel all that energy together in a common effort against our opponents and for the policies we care about’. 

Turning to those outside, the Prime Minister recognised that the whole country had ‘sweated and slogged and suffered to turn this economy around’ and sought to reassure the public that ‘you may not see it yet, but it clearly is growing, and it will show’. He continued: ‘People have every reason to begin to start feeling better again: Inflation’s down. Interest rates are down. Exports are up. Productivity’s up. Retail sales are up. Manufacturing output is up. And the number of people in work is up’. The Prime Minister’s conclusion was that after two-and-a-half years without economic growth, the Government had mixed ‘the opportunity cocktail we’ve been wanting for years and it gives this country a head start on prosperity for the rest of this decade’.

To improve the Conservatives’ standing and restart his government, the Prime Minister proposed going ‘Back to Basics’. Attempting to give his administration a coherent mission—and, as Bruce Pilbeam has argued, to give substance to a ‘Majorite philosophy analogous to Thatcherism’—Major coupled his folksy, home-spun style (offering to ‘share some thoughts’ to ‘see if they strike a chord with your own experience’) with a pointed critique of ‘a world that sometimes seems to be changing too fast for comfort’. He saw ‘old certainties crumbling’ and ‘traditional values falling away’ and suggested that ‘for two generations … we have listened too often and too long to people whose ideas are light years away from common sense’.

As Major later wrote in the imaginatively-titled The Autobiography, his critique of the progressive reforms of the 1960s—including the construction of new ‘towers in the sky’, the removal of ‘‘traditional subjects – grammar, spelling, tables’ from the school curriculum, and the sense that ‘every criminal needed treatment, not punishment’—came from his ‘innermost personal beliefs’. Likewise, his crackdown on the ‘loathsome trade’ in pornography—he pledged to make being in possession of child pornography a criminal and imprisonable offence—and his intention to be ‘tough on crime’ (including ‘ending a prisoner’s right to silence’) was rooted in a growing sense that, even after fourteen years of Conservative administration, ‘professional wisdom had become divorced from public sentiment’. As Ben Williams has argued, the Government didn’t consider that these ‘deep-rooted challenges affecting key social issues … were perhaps reflective of a creaking state which lacked dynamism and which faced shortages in resources, equipment and facilities’.

While the Prime Minister’s call for a return to ‘traditional subjects’ and the ‘old ways of teaching them’ seemed to be at odds with his own unhappy school days—which he later described as ‘a penance to be endured’—‘Back to Basics’ was another indication, as Penny Junor wrote in The Major Enigma, that ‘one of his most successful qualities [is that] everyone is confident and convinced they have John Major as their ally’. The resonance of Major’s idea is evident in the fact that New Labour - who criticised the hypocrisy of ‘Back to Basics’ – assimilated much of his agenda on school standards, crime, and the need for a more responsive system of government to appeal to 'small "c" conservatives'.

While Major has repeatedly insisted that his ‘Back to Basics’ campaign sought to ensure that the government and the public didn’t turn their backs on ‘the old values of neighbourliness, decency, and courtesy’, it was a gift to both the reactionaries in his own party as well as those who wished to portray the Conservatives as ‘the nasty party’ – as Theresa May would describe them Major’s call for ‘self-discipline and respect for the law, consideration for others, accepting responsibility for yourself and your family’ was widely interpreted as an attempt to roll back the social reforms of the 1960s. Major stressed that he did not intend to ‘bash single mothers or preach sexual fidelity at private citizens’—both his sister and his mother-in-law had been single mothers—but his speech gave licence to those who did. As one Church of Scotland minister wrote to The Scotsman, the Prime Minister (who he compared favourably with Jesus, no less) appeared to be reaffirming the Bible’s condemnation of ‘not only unfaithfulness in marriage, but sexual laxity in all its forms’. For the final four years of his premiership, Major was haunted by what the Conservative Party claimed were ‘sensationalised’ accounts of the extra-curricular activities of its MPs, which the ‘Torquemadas of Fleet Street’ diligently kept track of.

Three decades on, at this year's Conservative Party conference, Rishi Sunak launched his own version of ‘Back to Basics’, proposing to break with ‘thirty years of a political system that incentivises the easy decision by making ‘Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future’. For Sunak, the Conservative Party’s purpose ahead of the next election is to present a contrast with the Labour Party’s belief in ‘power for the sake of power’, rather than ‘any higher purpose or brighter future’. However, just as Major did thirty years ago, I suspect that the Prime Minister will learn that ‘slogans can mislead’ and, as Sir John said in a speech at Westminster Abbey in 2017, ‘pervert’ even the best laid plans. For every time the Prime Minister proclaims that his administration has made a ‘Long-Term Decision’ ahead of the election, the Labour Party will surely remind voters of the Conservatives' striking failure to do just that over the last 13 years.

Tom Chidwick is the Manager of the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London.