Militant action and increased wages caused greater production costs, which caused inflation, which, led to greater erosion of wages. This all contributed to making recovery impossible.
These explosive problems took on a new urgency. Something had to change to break the stalemate. Marx said that the only way to achieve change was through revolution after a crisis. The right was also convinced, perhaps for the first time in post war political history, that everything could not continue in the old way. The right was forced to renovate and reform itself. It formed a political ideological force of an altogether new kind. It committed itself to the philosophy that in order to conserve it must reform.
The Labour governments of 1966 and 70, and again between 1974 and 79 played an ideological role in constructing popular concepts of the crisis, its causes and conditions through a series of discourses which classically set the unions against the nation, the people against the classes, the consumer against the producer, the sectional interest of workers against the national interest, the housewife and family against the trade unionist, because the housewife, dependant on her husbands income, suffered most during strikes and inflation.
By the 1980's it was clear that communism had failed to deliver better living standards for the masses than capitalism, and it caused stagnation of the economy. Despite Gorbochovs attempt to save communism with Glasnost and Perestroika, it did not recover. The international political move to the right with Reagan in the USA, Mitterand in France, Gorbochov in the soviet union and Thatcher in Britain, all saw a need to restart the economy. .
With Thatcherism, the new hegemonic voice in Britain persuaded the people that unemployment, reduced welfare benefits, privatisation of public services, deregulation, and centralisation, which led to greater governmental control, was in their interests.
