In the years following the defiance of John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, the economic and social conditions that inspired their plays did not improve. Unemployment rates continued their steady increase, and increased immigration infected the nation with a dangerous undercurrent of bigotry. Meanwhile, the voices of dissent completely vanished. By 1965 the gloomy streets of Manchester that compelled A Taste of Honey were better known for the cheerful harmonies and smiling pop of The Hollies and Herman's Hermits. The late 60s/early 70s rise of a youth counterculture conditioned by drugs and free love created an escape from monotony for many individuals, but any hopes of widespread change for the poor were obliterated with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Thatcher had been leader of the Conservative Party since 1975, at which point she was best known as the Secretary of Education who cut free milk for schoolchildren, earning herself the nickname "Thatcher Thatcher, Milk Snatcher". In the years that led up to her election as Prime Minister, Thatcher made clear her intentions for the country: she aligned herself closely with American anti-Soviet rhetoric; sympathized with British xenophobia ("We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened."); and, in direct opposition to the ruling Labour party, favored an economic platform that raised taxes, opposed trade unions and welfare, and cut any "unnecessary" spending, including funding for higher education and social services. But throughout the 1970s, the Labour party was unable to abate the downward economic spiral of the nation, andin 1979, with over one million unemployed and the country crippled by months of strike and discontent, English voters elected the Conservative party and Thatcher took charge of the nation.
Effects were felt immediately. In her attempts to combat inflation, Thatcher raised taxes, striking a fatal blow to the struggling manufacturing sector. By the end of Thatcher's first year in office, unemployment had doubled to two million, and by the end of her second year, had risen even more dramatically to 3.6 million. In Manchester alone, 50,000 jobs were lost over a 25-year period, a full third of the employment base. This time, however, the city's artists and musicians had a response.
Now recognized as the three most influential Manchester bands of the 1970s, The Buzzcocks, The Fall and Joy Division all formed during the turmoil that brought Thatcher to power. The Buzzcocks' first single, Spiral Scratch (1977), featured the song "Boredom" ("my future ain't what it was") while The Fall offered: "This is your situation/Continue a blank generation" on their debut, Bingo Master's Breakout (1978). But it was Joy Division who "somehow managed to grimly define what exactly it was to be a Mancunian as the 70s drew to an end." Their music was dark, sparse and not quite secretly melodic, while the lyrics stand among the most mournful and haunted ever sang ("I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through/I'm ashamed of the person I am"). Joy Division's pallid horror infected the city, and gave birth to a genre of expression that thrives and grows even today. Their influence on the city was so acute that it led the singer of a subsequent Manchester band, The Smiths, to describe the local scene only in terms of Joy Division's sway: "When we first began, there was a horrendous sterile cloud over the whole music scene in Manchester. Everybody was anti-human and it was so very cold."