Spectators or Citizens? British Political Culture, 1974-1994

This thesis is an examination of different aspects of British political culture from the fall of Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1974 to Tony Blair’s election as Leader of the Labour Party in 1994, defined for the purposes of this thesis as the ‘long 1980s’. Seeking to move beyond traditional narratives of the period, dominated as they are by the figure of Margaret Thatcher and narratives of the collapse of the ‘post-war consensus’, this thesis adopts a political culture approach, seeking out changes in the conduct and operation of the political system itself. Examining three distinct ‘sub cultures’ of the wider political culture, namely politics on television, citizenship discourse and scandal culture, this thesis paints a picture of a polity in which the agreed rules of political conduct were in a state of considerable flux, defined overwhelmingly by a decline in automatic deference to political elites. In taking such an approach, this thesis draws upon wider social and cultural changes from the period, including the ubiquity of consumerism, the developments in mass media and wider discussions in the public sphere. It draws from a rich variety of sources, including newspapers, magazines and periodicals, television programming, opinion polling, contemporary academic literature, and archival material, to demonstrate how the debates generated by these changes in political culture played themselves out in the public sphere. The thesis concludes by illustrating how, in so many ways, the convulsions of political culture in the long 1980s, and the developments of the three aforementioned ‘sub cultures’, find their purest expression in the period which followed it: that of the ascendancy of New Labour.