In November 1977 two men produced an unpublished report called "Stepping Stones". The authors were of little experience politically; John Hoskyns and Norman S Strauss carved out their careers prior to the report in business. The former with IBM and the latter with Unilever.
The two men looked at Britain both socially and economically. They wanted to pare down and at best destroy the established order of organised workers and a stagnant UK economy. Their peers in the conservative establishment were fighting a battle they could not see ending. Hoskyns and Strauss saw how the bigger picture of repeated trade union victories were humiliating for Britain's standing in the world markets.
The timing of their report was culturally perfect. They saw a vulnerability opening in front of them. The same year the film Star Wars depicted one lonely warrior destroying what was seen as a monolithic Empire with one shot from his lazer cannon. The authors got their own shot very much spot-on.
They executed their ideas scientifically as they saw this process of elimination would lead to the greater success for the people who shared their ideas.
'Such thinking and planning is perhaps better described simply as "systematic", rather than strategic. Any game...which involves competitors, goals and a choice of routes, each with associated risks, demands a strategy. The question is whether such strategies are developed haphazardly or systematically. The systematic approach requires considerable initial effort, a higher ratio of "thinking time" to "doing time", in the hope of getting the consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'
To the hawks within the Tory right this document was the clearest objective they had yet to follow. Immediately it was foisted upon their leader, Margaret Roberts. She was two years before her election victory and here was the blueprint for a country coated in Tory blue. The majority of what was proposed in the report came true. North Sea oil was controlled; the steelworkers, dockers and miners as a community and force were emaciated; the Labour Party was riddled with in-fighting and chaos; the media was used to its full potential to push this agenda; the EU was shunned by xenophobia.
The two authors were never taught on the national curriculum as far as I and my peers are aware. They may have reached the hearts and minds of those privileged in society and somewhat clinical enough to appreciate this work. Indeed it is frightening how such a force in one document can hold so much portence and rapture without seeing the light of day.
Hoskyns and Strauss were, however, broaching a political system weighted towards the worker ever since the British worker got organised in the Victorian era. They wanted the scales tilted back to the entrepreneurial industrialist, and the corporate shareholder. British prime ministerial power has been an advocate of the Stepping Stones mantra since Roberts was shoved off her throne in 1990. It has reached the extent that the British Labour party betrayed their very foundations in 1994. In 1979 "Labour wasn't Working", according to the smart guys at Saatchi and Saatchi, however in 1994, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, Labour was working...with the free market economic structure at the very heart of their Treasuries.
However a Tower of Babel can come down, and coming down is what it is precisely doing now. At a chaotic pace the unions are now beginning to feel the sting of their demise. They are starting to protest. Once the veil of Labour dissolution cleared, the working classes are seeing their lives turn into the cathartic lives their elders experienced in the early 1980s under the Stepping Stone plan. The unemployed, an ever growing benefactor to the taking away of skilled labour, are bearing a brutal attack on their basic of needs.
In 2008 the world economy suffered a blow-out that has psychologically turned the tables on the ethics of free market engineering. As a "turn around strategy" Stepping Stones stated:
"the more factual, cool and rational that debate (regarding the trade unions of Britain at that time), the more it will open the public's eyes to the unions' existing privileges and destructive role..."
The unions, it could be argued, were not out to make a profit. Their very existence was to protect and harness the welfare of the worker who worked for the men who had the largest houses on the hill overlooking the slums. They were criticised in Stepping Stones for asking for more wages, vilified for collecting together and "holding the country to ransom".Today, "existing privileges" are out of the workers' hands: they're in the hands of the very same people who bought into the idea of Stepping Stones. Banks are now criticised for being bailed out by the taxpayer. Global capitalists fly into the country at short notice when they want to sway a policy the government into their own advantage.
The time for the zeitgeist to brook is imminent. What Hoskyns and Strauss could not have foreseen when they saw a world in which the working classes were cajoled was the invention of the world wide web. Communication in their time was a relic compared to the speediness of today's. (As you can see, they sent the report to Roberts in a badly typed form.) Normal people, who work in the jobs that keep them quiet and sedated have the tools to arm themselves. They can communicate, they can organise, they can criticise. Blogs are available for free and therefore opinion can be shared and our political representatives can be brought to book. It is tantalising to think how the world would have reacted in 1929, after the Wall Street crash, if everyone had access to an iphone or a PC. History may have taken a twist that could have perhaps averted the Second World War. However that is a different story.
On the televisions in the 1970s, leading directly up to the Stepping Stones report, there were talent shows dominating the airwaves. Music was peddling out often benile, pub sing-along tunes that said hardly anything to the people it reached. People were on the streets protesting against issues that struck them personally. This could be today.
With the adaptation of the Stepping Stones report to reflect principally and completely on the economic and political conflicts that we inherited out of Thatcherism, we can evaluate what the problems are when a large amount of capital is hoarded. We can evaluate the structure and power of the banks and corporations. We can disable them in the hope of getting the 'consistently....better performance which in the end separates winners from losers.'
To do this we need to take great strides over the stones.
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