by A. N. Wilson
There are those who believe that this rump of the former empire will last forever, in an essentially unchanging evolution. Their number includes virtually all England, and a still formidable mass of allies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. On the other hand stands the growing opposition–within sight of being a majority in Scotland–which accepts the verdict a great part of the outside world passed on Britain long ago: that it is a matter of time before it founders. Its post-empire crisis is long overdue, and not even to be regretted.15
The paradox is that many of the keenest supporters of British membership of the European Community, as it would become, would probably have agreed with this analysis in its broad outline, even if they considered its stridency childish. Those who voted for Heath, and those who initially liked what he was doing, rejoiced at his apparent abolition of ‘Butskellism’ and his embrace of the modern. Reporting on his first speech as Prime Minister to the Party Conference at Blackpool in October 1971, Jean Campbell wrote for the Evening Standard, ‘It was aggressive Toryism at last. A far cry from the defensive Toryism of Rab Butler which had shared room and board with Socialism for the last 22 years. Heath was pulling down the Butler boarding house… Instead he plans to build a skyscraper with self-operating lifts. When the speech ended the crowd went wild, and being accustomed to American conventions, I know a happy crowd when I see one.’16
Very typical of Heath’s modernity, his skyscraper, was the decision to reorganise local government and to abolish many of the ancient counties of England. This was accomplished by a Heathite ‘whizzkid.17 named Peter Walker, who sought to rationalise what Heath’s faithful biographer John Campbell scornfully calls ‘the traditional patchwork of counties, county boroughs, on-county boroughs, rural and urban district councils and parish councils’…whose ‘boundaries no longer reflected realities and some smaller counties were clearly unviable’.18 So, away went Rutland and all the Welsh counties. Hereford was ‘merged’ with Worcestershire. Wales was carved up into districts, some with the names of ancient kingdoms which non-Welsh speakers have difficulty in pronouncing (Dyfed, Clwyd, Gwynedd). Away went the Assize Courts, and the judges’ lodgings. In came supposedly more efficient County Courts. The ancient drama of the judge arriving in the county town with his clerk and hearing the most serious cases was removed. ‘And where on earth is Avon?’ asked Betjeman. Another bit of old England was lost.
The government of Heath came unstuck because of the trades unions. The historian Robert Blake mercilessly stated in The Conservative Opportunity, ‘The Cabinet began with the intention of “getting government off people’s backs”, but, lacking any clear intellectual mandate to do so, somehow ended with an even larger number of public employees in the non-productive sector than ever before. It began with a determination to abandon lame ducks and avoid all forms of intervention in wage-fixing, but it ended by capitulating to the sit-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and by trying to impose the most complete statutory wage policy ever attempted.’19 This supposedly right-wing government had spent on average more than 30 percent each year than the previous Labour government.
The volte-face over wages came about because Heath was unable to bring in the necessary legislation to curb the power of trades unions. He tried to do so.
Then, in October 1973, came the Yom Kippur War, followed by an oil embargo, and a fourfold increase in oil prices. It was the last piece of misfortune to assail the beleaguered Heath. A month after the war, the National Union of Mineworkers voted for a large wage increase–understandably enough since inflation was soaring, and retail prices alone had risen 10 percent in the previous four weeks. The very men who might be able to help the country through the fuel crisis were set upon destroying it. On 13 December Colonel Heath declared that in order to save fuel, the country must be put upon a three-day week. In the weeks before Christmas, the country was cast into darkness, with electricity switched off and fuel supplies limited. It really felt as if the country, far from being in a state of temporary crisis, might have actually come to an end. Heath supposed that the miners were being influenced by their communist vice president Mick McGahey, rather than their rather right-wing President Joe Gormley. Sensing, probably wrongly, that the miners were attempting to make political capital out of the fuel crisis, and to bring down the elected government, Heath petulantly called an election in February 1972, with the single campaign slogan–‘Who governs?’ The electorate were not sure of the answer to this question, but they had already seen who wasn’t governing, or at least who wasn’t governing very well. In spite of opinion polls assuring the public that the Conservatives were in the lead, the votes were inconclusive. The result was that although the Tories won more votes than Labour (just), the Labour Party won four more seats–Labour 301 and Conservative 297. There followed a humiliating farce in which Heath refused to concede defeat in the election, and walled himself up in Downing Street. Adding to the air of absurdity on one of the news bulletins that day, a large van arrived at the door of Number 10 to deliver a gargantuan quantity of lavatory paper; clearly the delivery was coincidental, but it suggested a determination by the Prime Minister to dig in for the long siege, and the inescapable mental image of his bulky, pink form seated on the lavatory and making use of the infinite rolls of Andrex did not endear him to the electorate. He tried to persuade the leader of the Liberal Party to come into the government. The Liberals had won fourteen seats and if they threw their vote behind the Conservatives there would still have been a chance of defeating the Socialists. But although tempted, the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, could not persuade his party, and so the three and a half years of HeathCo came to a humiliating end. His bitterness never abated, nor did the determination of his party to distance themselves from his mistakes.
It was at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 that Pope Urban II first made his announcement that the Christian West should march to the rescue of the beleaguered Christian East and the First Crusade had begun. A comparable moment in the history of monetarism occurred when Sir Keith Joseph addressed the Conservatives of Preston on 5 September 1974 with the message which he had only lately discovered for himself. The title of the speech, which was a rallying cry to free marketeers everywhere, was ‘Inflation is caused by Governments’… ‘Inflation is threatening to destroy our society…The distress and unemployment that will follow unless the trend is stopped will be catastrophic.’20
The doctrine to which Sir Keith Joseph had been converted was that it was not enough for governments to try to abate inflation by incomes policy if they themselves were not bold enough to switch off the tap: to stop printing more and more money, as successive ‘consensus’ British governments since the Second World War had tried to do. J. Enoch Powell had been preaching this doctrine for years and he remarked somewhat sourly, ‘I have heard of death-bed repentance. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to post-mortem repentance.’21
The words of the speech in Preston were spoken by Joseph, but they had been written by an in some ways unlikely friend, Alfred Sherman. Whereas Keith Joseph, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, had been brought up in the height of luxury in the house formerly belonging to the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and educated at Harrow, Sherman came from the East End, was an alumnus of Hackney Downs County Secondary, and had followed the Red Brigades to Spain. Yet it was Sherman who convinced Joseph that ‘Keynes is dead. Dead.’ An associate of Sherman’s, who would play a vital role in the future of British Conservatism, was a businessman called John Hoskyns, one of the first to exploit the commercial potential of computers.
The monetarists took the view, which events would seem to have borne out in the late 1970s, that unless something were done to curb succeeding governments’ lust for printing money, Britain would be bankrupted. They had arrived, to use the immodest but accurate title of Hoskyns’s autobiography, Just in Time.
15
Women’s Liberation
In June and July 1971, Court Two of the Old Bailey was
thronged to witness the trial of Richard Neville, who had founded Oz magazine while a student at the University of New South Wales, and relaunched it in 1966, Jim Anderson, a former lawyer from Sydney, and Felix Dennis, an Englishma.1 The previous year the three had published Oz 28, the ‘School Kids’ Issue’. The cover showed four naked females entwined in lesbian embrace, and with rats’ tails dangling from their vaginas. The editorial content was largely written by appallingly self-important schoolchildren, and, as has been written, ‘their juvenilia sits uneasily among adverts for penis magnifiers, “massagers” [dildoes], leather posing-pouches and Swedish porn books, magazines and films’.2 At the end of a three-week trial, Neville was sentenced to fifteen months, with recommended deportation, Anderson to twelve months and Dennis to nine months. These sentences were squashed upon appeal, heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery.
Whereas the Chatterley trial had been about a book which was written with serious intentions, the Oz trial was a test of how far society had come to accept sexual liberation, and an abandonment of traditional restraints. The Oz defendants were charged with an offence which had not been used by prosecutors for 130 years: ‘conspiracy to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and young persons within the realm and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires’. This had, in one sense, been the intention of the magazine, with its childishly priapic depiction of Rupert Bear. But the trial was memorable because it reminded many newspaper readers, who had not hitherto heard of Oz and would have been displeased by it, that they no longer quite knew how to define good and evil. The three young scallywags were defended by John Mortimer QC, an Old Harrovian with a high, drawly camp voice, but of heterosexual disposition, whose successful career as a barrister paralleled one as a middlebrow playwright. During the trial, Mortimer, in the words of Noel Annan, ‘put forward three astonishing arguments. It was not possible, he said, to be a writer if you were prevented from exploring any area of human activity; obscenity could not be identified; and it was good for us all to be nauseated and outraged by what we saw and read–regardless apparently of the nature of the outrage.’3
Mortimer, whose pudgy expression and always dribbling lips, even in middle age seemed like an embodiment of moral as well as physical dilapidation, became one of those broadcasters who was everyone’s darling–largely because of a successful TV drama series about an idealised version of himself at the bar–Rumpole of the Bailey. It would be possible to see Mortimer, and the gallery of witnesses he assembled as witnesses for the defence of Oz–such as Kenneth Tynan and George Melly–as similar demonstrations of the collapse of Western morals. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine any other society, at any other period of history, being presented with the arguments which Mortimer advanced in defence of the School Kids’ Issue of Oz and taking them seriously. To that extent the trial was an emblem of ‘something rotten in the state’. The actual participants, however, are not worth dignifying with the charge that they actually, in their own persons, changed anything. They were symptoms, not causes. Melly, another figure like Mortimer, who was depressing not because he was immoral but because he was second-rate (his particular area of non-expertise being jazz), continued to make gallant efforts to show off and shock people until he died. In case you did not get the message that he was unconventional, he wore scarlet trilby hats, and suits which would have been garish if sported by circus clowns. His only real distinction had occurred early in life, at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire, when he had been briefly fancied by the future journalistic genius Peregrine Worsthorne. ‘The alternative society,’ droned Melly from the witness box, ‘is one that tries to invent or evolve its own lifestyle, which is usually in opposition to the official lifestyle.’4 Hindsight makes not only these figures seem like clowns, but so, alas, also those who opposed them. Whereas Mortimer and his would-be bohemian, largely public school educated friends had made fools of themselves in the eyes of the intelligent majority by their behaviour in the Old Bailey, so too had those who defended ‘the official lifestyle’. Lord Longford’s Christian faith led him to conduct an inquiry into pornography, in which, poor old donkey, he led his researchers into striptease joints and brothels in several European capitals. (What had he expected to find in the Copenhagen red-light district?) His campaign against filth linked him up with some strange companions, such as Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (founded 1965), a bustling, busy woman whose grin was rendered mirthless by too large false teeth, and whose obsession with rude words or suggestiveness in broadcasts were just as prurient, and no less offensive, than Neville’s in the School Kids’ Issue. She was dishonest, too, never fully admitting that all her lawsuits and campaigns were funded by Moral Rearmament. How else could the modest housewife and former schoolmarm, as she liked to present herself, have been able to bring expensive court cases, such as her ludicrous prosecution of Gay News for Blasphemous Libel in 1977? Moral Rearmament came back in 1971 under the new name of the Nationwide Festival of Light, and on the platform in Trafalgar Square was to be seen not only Whitehouse and Longford, but also that former Diogenes, the arch-mocker Muggeridge, who was, from now onwards, to the bewilderment of his old friends, seen as a sort of secular friar–Saint Mugg. His old friend Anthony Powell bemusedly examined a book published in 1987 called My Life in Pictures by Muggeridge. ‘There is nothing against publishing 138 representations of oneself (Malcolm pondering on his own bust counting as two) in the interests of publicity, nor spending some hours of one’s own time in prayer and meditation. What is hard on the reader is all the sanctimonious stuff about Christianity, RC conversion and Love of the Human Race, being exchanged by Malcolm for his former preoccupation with the world of Power, when a book of this self-promotional kind is purely an expression of one form of power: while should it really be necessary to be photographed praying and meditating, for the benefit of the public, especially if the material world has been forsworn?’5
The few show-offs on both sides of the argument about the Permissive Society were the sorts of people who would have been playing to the gallery at any era in history. At this particular moment, Melly and Mortimer were showing off that they had broader minds than anyone else (the slightly odious implication always being, especially in Mortimer’s case, that they were nicer, too), and the Muggeridge–Whitehouse–Longford brigade quite literally advertising that they were holier than others. But the background of all this was a set of circumstances which was bound to have caused a ‘sexual revolution’. That is: politics had quietened down and there was no longer any danger of a European war. There were more young men about whose primary concern could be chasing girls, not jobs, and being in no danger of having their amorous exploits interrupted by the recruiting sergeant. That hadn’t happened in England since the eighteenth century. In addition to leisure and prosperity had to be added the quite extraordinary revolution in the lives of women, caused by improvement in obstetric techniques and the invention of oral contraceptives.
The improvement in medical care, and in general prosperity, during our times was reflected in the infant mortality rates. In 1945–49 the average rate of infant mortality in England and Wales was 39.2 per thousand, compared with 156 per thousand for the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. By 1965–69, this had sunk to 18.5.6 Until the mid-1970s all social policies assumed the dependency of a woman upon a man, but this was to change, with a number of legislative measures changing the status of women. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 was brought into force on 1 January 1976. This did not mean an instantaneous equality in the workplace. In 1970, women’s pay was some 65.4 percent, rising to 75.7 percent in 1977, falling back again the following year, as male employers redefined women’s jobs and downgraded their women employees.7 Nevertheless, the Equal Pay Act was in place, and, gradually, women could regard themselves as the economic equals of males in society. The contraceptive pill had, at least theoretically, helped to make women more independent about their life choices. It was
under the Conservatives, and at the behest of Keith Joseph, that the Pill became available on the National Health Service after a major parliamentary row over ‘immorality at the taxpayers’ expense.8 In fact, Joseph introduced free contraception for the very poor, and levied a normal prescription charge for the rest. The cost of the measure was £13 million. He was not moved by the arguments of some Catholic MPs that free contraception would lead to greater immorality; ‘loose and casual people are not made loose and casual by the availability of contraceptives, whether free or for 20p’. For Joseph, the real problem was to ‘break the cycle of deprivation’ of which unwanted children were one manifestation.9