Citizen Smith, Thatcherism and the “Loony Left”
We have heard these scroungers and benefit cheats stories before…
In “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936), Keynes argued for an interventionist state which, through mechanisms such as taxation, would operate as a check to the free market. For Keynes, writing in the context of the economic depression of the 1930s, full employment was a fundamental tenet of a civil society. Keynes’s redistributive economic philosophy inspired Beveridge’s pivotal ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ (1942), a report that became the blueprint for the creation of the welfare state in Britain. However, it was Marshall’s pivotal essay, Citizenship and Social Class’ (1950), that placed the concept of citizenship at the centre of debates about the establishment of a new ‘civic bargain’ between the individual and the state. Marshall is still the most influential theorist of citizenship in Britain and, in a series of essays and books written over three decades, he laid down the principles of a new social citizenship founded in equality and political solidarity across social classes.
Conversely, however, Gary Day has argued that citizenship was instituted in Britain as a way of breaking up class allegiances through processes of atomisation and individualization (Day, 2001, p. 159). As he writes, ‘the idea of citizenship was […] largely formulated in opposition to class […] it was based on the age-old distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, but women, children, the insane, prisoners and migrant workers were among a number of groups who fell outside this apparently universal category’ (Day, 2001, p. 159-160 see also chapter seven).
Nira Yuval-Davis similarly describes the ways in which the invention of citizenship in post-war Britain was a measure which, by design, produced a cast of ‘moral aliens’ at the periphery of the national ‘moral community’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997, p. 17).
Certainly, by the mid-1970s, the toxic combination of global economic recession and rising inflation (stagflation), high unemployment, spiralling taxation and working class militancy began to test Marshallian notions of social citizenship severely, and a right-wing backlash galvanized against the perceived excesses and failures of rights-based citizenship and the post-war social contract. Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the opposition Conservative party, was one of the politicians central to the recasting of Marshallian social citizenship as a failed socialist programme of reform. As she stated in a 1977 speech at the University of Zurich:
“Socialism promised to raise the provision of education, health, and housing. As is becoming patent to almost everyone, the result has been the opposite. […] Socialism whetted appetites for more, but has resulted in less being available. People of all backgrounds are casting off socialist illusions in the light of socialist reality. […]The class struggle is withering away – to adapt a well-known phrase of Marx and Engels” (Thatcher, 1977).
It was in this context that the British television sitcom, Citizen Smith (BBC, 1977-1980), provided a rare explicit popular representation of British citizenship. Through the figure of naïve, unemployed, petty criminal ‘Wolfie’ Smith (Robert Lindsey), Citizen Smith offers us a window into the social and political struggles over the meaning of citizenship which was taking place in Britain during the 1970s, a period of austerity economics and unprecedented strike-actions that culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ (1978-9) and the election of the neoliberal Thatcher Government in 1979.
Wolfie, adorned with a beret, a Che Guevara t-shirt, and a fake fur coat was the self-proclaimed leader of an odd-ball group of friends who called themselves the ‘Tooting Popular Front’. The opening titles sequence depicts Wolfie walking out of Tooting tube station in London to a rousing rendition of internationalist socialist anthem The Red Flag and culminates in his cry, with a raised fist, ‘Power to the People’. The comedy of Citizen Smith hinges on age-old distinctions between the authentic/sham and deserving/undeserving working class (see chapters six and seven of Revolting Subjects). This is dramatized in the programme through skirmishes between the welfare-dependent, “feminized masculinity” of Wolfie and the “authentic” working-class masculinity embodied by the father of Wolfie’s girlfriend, Shirley, ex-miner Charles (Peter Vaughan, Tony Steedman).
In Episode 13, Series 1, after arranging a failed ‘right-to-work’ protest, Wolfie is forced by the local labour exchange (job centre) to take a position as a security officer at a local factory, where, it transpires he will be working directly under Charles. By the end of his first day at work, and much to Charles’s horror, Wolfie has formed a union, initiated a strike and resigned. Wolfie’s comic and drag-like performances of ‘political citizenship without a cause’ revealed the precariousness of the post-war contract. For while Citizen Smith was affectionate in its depiction of Wolfie, this comic infantilizing depiction of class-struggle, unionism and left wing militancy is a precursor to the popular stereotype of the ‘loony left’ that emerged in tabloid newspapers in the 1980s and communicated a growing middle-class intolerance of the perceived economic burden of the welfare state and the feckless, workless youth and parasitical dependents it was imagined to have created. See for example this story about “marxist coffee” in The Mirror from 1985 “Barmy Bernie Goes Coffee Potty” 
During the ‘Winter of Discontent’ Thatcher’s Conservative party election campaign incited and capitalized on the fears of the populace that the state was disintegrating. In an election broadcast in January 1979, Thatcher spoke of the ‘industrial action directed straight at the public to make you suffer – directed even at the sick and disabled. […] picketing that threatens to bring the country to its knees – emptying our shops, endangering our farms, closing our factories, taking our jobs’ (Conservative Party, 1979a). She ended her address, proclaiming ‘We have to learn again to be one nation, or one day we shall be no nation. If we have learnt that lesson from these first dark days of 1979, then we have learnt something of value’ (ibid.).
What “learning to be a nation again” meant for Thatcher was eradicating the failed project of social citizenship by diminishing ‘the big state’. This entailed creating the conditions in which the state and state-borders could be most thoroughly penetrated by ‘the free market’. As she argued, ‘the post-war settlement has failed […] the tide is beginning to turn against collectivism, socialism, statism, dirigism, […] and this turn is rooted in a revulsion against the sour fruit of socialist experience’ (Thatcher, 1977).
The Conservative party finessed their message in an election broadcast in April (Conservative Party, 1979b), produced by the advertising firm, Saatchi & Saatchi, which opened with apocalyptic news footage of mountains of uncollected rubbish piled in the streets, empty shelves in supermarkets, stationary lorries, grounded airplanes, closed cemeteries and picketed hospitals, over-laid with an increasingly hysterical voice-over declaiming ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, a phrase that had been misattributed to the then Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan by The Sun newspaper (Murdoch run).
With the election of the right-wing Thatcher Government in May 1979, the post-war consensus was at an end and citizenship was not only thoroughly dislocated from any Marshallian redistributive ideals, but also from any positive political project.
Loïc Wacquant describes this shift as a period of state ‘remasculinization’ provoked by ‘the institutionalization of social rights [worker’s rights and the rights of women and other minorities] antinomic to commodification’ (Wacquant, 2010, p. 201). As he writes:
This new neoliberal ‘daddy-state’ was personified in Britain by Thatcher’s public persona as the ‘Iron Lady’, a public image that was caricatured in a notorious sketch from the popular satirical puppet show, Spitting Image (ITV, 1984-1996), that depicted Thatcher wearing a man’s suit and pissing at a urinal alongside male cabinet ministers.
The constellation of the welfare state, social rights and class equality which inaugurated the birth of British citizenship was hijacked by penal definitions of citizenship concerned with borders, immigration and security and the punishment of the poor. Citizenship was redesigned as an abjectifying technology, a mode of neoliberal governmentality which in turn produced and continues to produce new abject classes of failed and stateless citizens within the British state.
