State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  As I left the court I knew that the shadow of those evil things had been lifted, and their perpetrators now faced justice. But at what a cost. Europe had once more torn itself apart. This must never be allowed to happen again. My generation did not have the option of living in the past; we had to work for the future. We were surrounded by destruction, homelessness, hunger and despair. Only by working together right across our continent had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation. Reconciliation and reconstruction must be our tasks. I did not realise then that this would be my preoccupation for the next fifty years.3

  Whatever one thinks of Heath’s European commitment, there is no doubt that it was thoroughly genuine. His maiden speech as an MP in 1950 was devoted to the Schuman Plan for a European Coal and Steel Community, which became the nucleus of the modern European Union. At a time when many British politicians insisted on staying aloof from schemes of European collaboration, Heath was all for it, insisting that ‘we may be taking a very great risk with our economy’ by staying out. Characteristically, he had just returned from a fact-finding trip to West Germany; trips to the Continent were to be a constant feature of Heath’s parliamentary career, and he often seemed more comfortable with French and German contacts than with his own party comrades. When Macmillan picked him to handle Britain’s first application to join the six members of the Common Market in 1961, it soon become clear that there could be no better candidate. At the very beginning, Heath told the European negotiators that the application was ‘a great decision, a turning point in our history’, and his enthusiasm made a profound impression both on his own civil servants and on the representatives of the Six. And when President de Gaulle, in a stunning exhibition of diplomatic cunning, self-interest and spite, vetoed the British application in January 1963, Heath gave what was probably the speech of his life. Rejecting the view that Britain was ‘not European enough’, he told the assembled foreign ministers that there were ‘many millions in Europe who know perfectly well how European Britain has been in the past and are grateful for it’. They should ‘have no fear’, he said. ‘We in Britain are not going to turn our backs on the mainland of Europe or on the countries of the Community. We are a part of Europe: by geography, tradition, history, culture and civilisation. We shall continue to work with all our friends in Europe for the true unity and strength of this continent.’ It was the only time in his life that this most wooden of speakers managed to move an audience to tears: when he had finished, even the female interpreters were discreetly dabbing their eyes.4

  By the time Heath became Prime Minister, Britain had suffered the humiliation of yet another veto from de Gaulle, this time after a self-deluding and characteristically semi-ridiculous application (technically called ‘the Probe’) by Harold Wilson and George Brown in 1967. Revealingly, neither of the failed bids was especially popular with the public, and, even more revealingly, both were the products of desperation rather than conviction, born out of political and economic weakness. Macmillan only decided to apply to join the Common Market once his government had run into trouble and commentators were attacking him as backward and reactionary, while Wilson only applied once his ambitions to revive Britain as a white-hot technological powerhouse had been destroyed by the 1966 sterling crisis. The irony was that if Britain had joined the Common Market in the mid-1950s, as its European neighbours had hoped, then it would have done so as a military and economic superpower, still unquestionably Western Europe’s pre-eminent nation. But by 1970 no serious observer could pretend that Britain still set the standards for the rest of the Continent. In productivity growth, for example, it had fallen behind not only the astonishingly industrious West Germans but the supposedly lazy French and Italians, while its GDP growth rate was just half that of the five major EEC countries (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands). On top of that, while Britain’s share of world exports had collapsed from 26 per cent in 1950 to less than 11 per cent in 1970 and barely 10 per cent in 1980, West Germany’s share soared from 7 per cent in 1950 to 20 per cent in 1970 and 30 per cent by 1980. From the mid-1960s onwards, in fact, Britain cut a very miserable and unimpressive figure beside the buoyant French and West Germans. It was true that the French had their problems with student unrest and the Germans with domestic terrorism; but then Britain had plenty on its plate in Northern Ireland. And not only was unemployment much higher than in France and West Germany, but Britain’s inflation record was truly abysmal. The Germans might be unhappy with an inflation rate of 6 per cent in 1975; but they had only to look across the Channel, where it had reached almost 25 per cent, to remind themselves that they must be doing something right.5

  When Heath won the election in 1970, it was common knowledge that he planned to apply for Common Market membership as soon as possible. This was not merely a personal project, though; it was a vision shared by almost all senior Conservatives. The party’s detailed report recommending European entry, for example, had actually been prepared under Heath’s predecessor, the strongly pro-American Sir Alec Douglas-Home. But as with other emotive issues of the late 1960s such as immigration and the abolition of capital punishment, there was a strong whiff of elitism about pro-Europeanism. Not only were most Tory associations dead set against entering the Market, but most Tory voters were very sceptical, too. Throughout the 1960s, in fact, public opinion had been a mixture of indifference, confusion and outright hostility, with support rallying only whenever the British economy seemed particularly dire. In April 1970, just weeks before the election, Gallup found that just 19 per cent of voters supported British entry, with more than 50 per cent rejecting even the idea of holding talks. On the other hand, most business leaders strongly backed the idea of entering a bigger European market, and the CBI was particularly enthusiastic: a year later, a survey of 1,000 firms found that 95 per cent backed joining the Common Market. The civil service was broadly enthusiastic, too, with the notable exception of the Treasury. And although Heath’s drive to win British membership is often seen as one man’s lonely crusade, the truth is that his successes were built on foundations laid by others. He actually inherited much of the team that organized the bid from Harold Wilson; all the files were prepared, all the planning was in place, and a lot of work was already out of the way. Indeed, one of the little secrets of British politics in the early 1970s was that Wilson had been planning a new bid once he won re-election. The Labour government had even fixed a date for negotiations to begin, which makes Wilson’s decision to turn against Europe immediately after his defeat look even more cynical and unprincipled.6

  What distinguished Heath from his contemporaries, therefore, was not the commitment itself but its unusually personal nature, rooted not just in his travels on the Continent but also in his deep love for its musical heritage, his contacts with European politicians and his experiences during the Second World War. Harold Wilson might have applied to join the Common Market in 1967, but he said himself that he had ‘never been emotionally a Europe man’, while his policy adviser Bernard Donoughue observed that Wilson was ‘basically a north of England, non-conformist puritan … continental Europeans, especially from France and southern Europe, were to him alien. He disliked their rich food, genuinely preferring meat and two veg with HP sauce.’ This even extended to holidays, which Wilson famously spent on the Scilly Isles, as well as to cheese. After one Downing Street lunch, Donoughue recorded that Wilson had been delighted to have English cheese, because he much preferred it to French.7

  But then Wilson was also a fan of the Commonwealth, in which Heath took no interest whatsoever. And Wilson was strongly pro-American to the extent of modelling himself on first John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson, whereas Heath was unusual among modern British prime ministers in his total indifference to all things American. The irony was that although Johnson treated Wilson as an inconvenient but obsequious nuisance, the next President, Richard Nixon, was hugely excited by Heath’s victory and hoped t
hat they would become great friends. Like Heath, Nixon was a conservative modernizer from a humble provincial background, a self-made man distinguished by his lofty vision, brooding intellect, grumpy demeanour and permanent social unease. In some ways they should have been natural soulmates – they could have bonded, for instance, over their shared interest in classical music, their mutual disregard for women, or their fondness for wildly overcomplicated incomes policies. To Nixon’s bewilderment, however, Heath rebuffed his attempts to strike up a special relationship. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s supremely cynical Secretary of State, wrote later that they were shocked by Heath’s ‘unsentimentality’ and ‘reserve’, which left Nixon feeling like a ‘jilted lover’. But Heath had no time for misty-eyed visions of Anglo-American partnership. All the special relationship achieved, he said later, was ‘to estrange us from our European colleagues … Now there are some people who always nestle on the shoulder of an American president. That’s no future for Britain.’8

  In his profound affection for European culture and complete lack of interest in anything American, Heath cut an unusual figure among contemporary British politicians. And yet although there had been plenty of anguished commentary about the supposed ‘Americanization’ of British life in the 1950s and 1960s, from supermarkets and advertising to fast food and television, what was much more striking was the extent to which Britain was becoming ‘European’. The pop act that recorded most number one hit singles in the 1970s, for example, was not Rod Stewart, Elton John, the Bay City Rollers, the Sex Pistols or any other emblematic British singer or group of the day; it was a Swedish group, Abba, who sang in heavily accented and occasionally slightly strange English. Admittedly they made their great breakthrough in the unmistakably English surroundings of the Brighton Dome, built in 1805 for the Prince Regent and connected to the famous Pavilion, but the occasion was distinctly European: the nineteenth Eurovision Song Contest, held in April 1974. In many ways the contest was a typical product of the 1950s, conceived as a well-meaning effort to bring old enemies together, although more often than not it merely exposed the depths of Continental depravity – for example in 1968, when Cliff Richard was disgracefully cheated of victory by Franco’s vote-rigging. By the early 1970s, however, it was a serious business, commanding international viewing figures unequalled by anything other than major sporting events. The BBC took it so seriously that in 1971, when the contest was held in Dublin, they deliberately chose a Northern Irish singer, Clodagh Rogers, to minimize Anglo-Irish tensions (although she still got death threats from the IRA). Indeed, terrorism was a constant concern: when the contest was held in Stockholm in 1975, the authorities took massive precautions against a rumoured attack by the Baader–Meinhof Group, and at the eighteenth edition, held in Luxembourg and the first to feature an Israeli entry, the audience were memorably advised not to stand up while applauding in case they were shot by the security forces. Mercifully, the Brighton event was free of any such horrors, although it did feature a half-time performance by the Wombles.9

  Although Abba’s success obviously depended on their talent for writing irresistibly catchy songs, they were not the only example of European infiltration into the British charts. When the abominable ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ topped the charts for five weeks in the summer of 1971, for example, the most common explanation was that people were trying to recapture the spirit of their holidays in Spain, where it had been everywhere that summer. In fact, it had been recorded for the Italian market by Middle of the Road, a Scottish pop group who specialized in Anglo-Latin crossovers, and even they thought it was awful. Their drummer later remarked that they needed two bottles of bourbon before they could start work, for ‘we were as disgusted with the thought of recording it as most people were at the thought of buying it’. But three years later, the curse of the Armada struck again, this time in the form of the Swedish singer Sylvie Vrethammar, whose hit ‘Y Viva España’ – ‘This year I’m off to sunny Spain …’ – captured the excitement, the hedonism and the sheer awfulness of package tourism in its early years.10

  As a Broadstairs boy, Heath was well placed to appreciate the seismic changes that had overtaken British holiday habits. Like so many seaside resorts, the little Kentish town had long relied on a flood of big-city holidaymakers in the summer months; Charles Dickens, for example, was a great fan, visiting almost every year from 1837 to 1859. By the early 1970s, however, resorts like Broadstairs were losing their lustre, outshone by the new craze for touring caravans, the newfound popularity of more distant stretches of rural England such as Devon, Cornwall and the Lakes, and above all, the sun-bleached concrete monoliths of Torremolinos and Benidorm. Heath himself chose to take pride in the changing patterns of tourism: in the official programme for the ‘Fanfare for Europe’ celebrations in January 1973, he expressed his delight that ‘many more of us in Britain, in particular young people, travel to other European countries than a decade ago’, with holidaymakers becoming ‘steadily more “European” in terms of our knowledge and contacts’. But it was resorts like Broadstairs that paid the price in boarded-up shop-fronts, abandoned amusement arcades and crumbling hotels. Already Northern resorts like Skegness and Cleethorpes, with their wet and windy reputations, were struggling for custom. On the Wirral, the resort of New Brighton fell into total disrepair, with its ballroom ravaged by fire in 1969, ferries across the Mersey discontinued in 1971, and the promenade pier torn down six years later. Even the fictional seaside town of Fircombe in Carry On Girls (1973) is a miserable place of slate-grey skies, driving rain and empty hotels: in the film’s opening shots, we see a family sheltering from the rain in the shelter of a derelict pier, while a sign behind them reads ‘Come to Fabulous Fircombe’, with graffiti adding ‘What the hell for?’11

  The sentiment would have appealed to the acerbic Tory politician Alan Clark, who was not impressed by the venue for their party conference in October 1973. ‘Isn’t Blackpool appalling, loathsome?’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Impossible to get even a piece of bread and cheese, or a decent cup of tea; dirt, squalor, shanty-town broken pavements with pools of water lying in them – on the Promenade – vulgar common “primitives” drifting about in groups or standing, loitering, prominently.’ It was no wonder that as soon as the conference was over, hundreds of Blackpool hoteliers decamped en masse to Spain, heading for the very resorts that were destroying their livelihoods. ‘It was like being in Blackpool except we had this wonderful sunshine,’ one later recalled. ‘It was November and the main topic of conversation was, “Amazing sun, isn’t it? We couldn’t do this in England.” ’12

  The father of package tourism is often identified as the former Reuters journalist Vladimir Raitz, who flew thirty-two students and teachers in an old American Dakota to Corsica in 1950, with the intrepid pioneers staying in a makeshift camp of army surplus tents. By the end of the 1960s, his company, Horizon, was one of Britain’s biggest package operators, with tours to Majorca, Minorca and Ibiza, the Costa Brava, Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol, the Algarve, Bulgaria and Crete. At this stage, though, package holidays abroad accounted for barely 8 per cent of the total holidays taken by British families, partly because travellers were only allowed to take £50 a year out of the country. In January 1970, however, the rules were amended to allow individuals to take £25 each per trip, and from then on the boom seemed unstoppable. By 1971, British tourists were taking more than 4 million holidays abroad; by 1973, some 9 million; by 1981, more than 13 million. The two-week trip to Spain with Horizon, Cosmos or Thomson became a great status symbol of the mid-1970s: children who might once have been delighted by a few days in Bognor now pestered their parents to take them to Benidorm, desperate to keep up with their more affluent classmates.

  For people who had grown up with the limited horizons of working-class life in the 1950s and 1960s, that first trip abroad was often an unforgettable experience, all the way from the endless, harried queues at the airport to the atmosphere on the plane itself, thick with anticipation a
nd cigarette smoke, and then the shock of the heat, the light and the unfinished hotel. ‘Stepping off the plane at Ibiza airport was incredible,’ a clerk from Burnley recalled of her first trip abroad. ‘The doors opened, the heat flooded in and the smell of musk and pine mixed with cigar smoke … Unbelievable. Coming from a grey northern mill town, you can imagine when we saw all the lovely white painted houses with geraniums growing from the balconies, we felt we were in another world.’ And some holidaymakers reported that the experience made them look on their native land in an entirely new light. In June 1970, a reader who had recently visited the Spanish coast wrote to the Mirror noting that ‘there were no aggro boys, no vandalism, all the telephone boxes were clean and all the phones worked. It was hardly necessary to lock up cars and little children could go anywhere unmolested.’ Four days later, another reader wrote in. ‘I appreciate that he did not see any aggro boys,’he commented wryly, ‘but did he notice the armed police, the censored press, the jails crowded with people who merely expressed their dislike of the Franco regime?’13

  Holidays on the Spanish coast were becoming the norm as early as 9 August 1970, when Michael Cummings drew this Daily Express cartoon mocking the selfishness of the unions.