A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  But the defeat of 1974 had shaken Joseph. With other monetarists he began a thorough rethink of the Heath years, culminating in a shadow cabinet post-mortem, when they argued that the early radicalism of 1970-1 had been right, and the subsequent U-turn a disaster. Heath blankly refused to listen, or at any rate to heed, the attack. Heath’s haughty assessment in his autobiography was that Joseph ‘had resumed a friendship with a person called Alfred Sherman, a former communist, and undergone what he liked to call “a conversion” as a result…[this] failed to cut any ice with the great majority of his colleagues, though we did them the courtesy of listening.’ In fact, many Tories were beginning to listen. With Joseph were Geoffrey Howe and the quiet, watchful figure of Margaret Thatcher. Early on, Howe warned, ‘I am not at all sure about Margaret. Many of her economic prejudices are certainly sound. But she is inclined to be rather too dogmatic for my liking on sensitive matters like education and might actually retard the case by simplification.’ There were other new radicals, such as the Powellite Tory MP John Biffen, the young economics writer Nigel Lawson and a crowd of journalists and academics.

  Here was an intellectual analysis, hard and uncompromising, which excited a generation of new recruits to the party, while it repelled Tories of the comfortable Macmillan persuasion. Macmillan himself said of Joseph that he was ‘the only boring Jew I’ve ever known’ and later there would be much snide muttering about the men Thatcher learned from and worked with – Hayek, Sherman, Joseph, Lawson and Friedman. The truth was that Jews were prominent in intellectual thinking on the right, as on the left, bringing opposite lessons to Britain from the disasters of continental Europe. A serious commitment to ideas and old-fashioned attitudes to education gave them their unique influence in politics. Thatcher was open to the ideas, ready to listen, unprejudiced; many traditional Tories were not.

  In the winter of 1974-5 after Heath had lost his second successive election, there was no such thing as ‘Thatcherism’. She was expressing her public support for the policies of consensus, whatever her developing inner feelings. She backed intervention in the housing market and had queried council house sales. There was no sign that she would become leader. Heath was anyway stubbornly determined to stay on. He insisted his supporters, who included most of the well-known Tories of the day, back him. Polls suggested 70 per cent of Conservative voters wanted him to stay. Yet there was deep dissatisfaction on the Tory benches in Parliament. A City slicker, Sir Edward du Cann, who chaired the backbenchers’ 1922 Committee, began to take soundings about challenging Heath. He was backed by the war hero, Tory MP and arch-intriguer, Airey Neave, but Neave soon pulled out. Joseph stepped up to the plate before making a catastrophically ill-judged and offensive speech in which he seemed to suggest that working-class women were having too many babies and should be stopped because they were degrading the gene pool. This finished the man Private Eye was already calling the ‘mad monk’. So who could the right find as a candidate?

  If Heath had realized that two successive election defeats meant he really had to go, and had he allowed other Tory moderates to prepare campaigns to replace him, Mrs Thatcher would have had no chance. Had Joseph not made a disaster of a speech, she would have been committed to backing him, and so would not have stood herself. Had du Cann stood, the brilliant campaign manager Neave would not have worked for her. Many Tory MPs were persuaded by him to vote for her because she had no chance, as a way of easing out Heath. Then more ‘serious’ candidates could stand. It was a brilliant ruse. On 4 February 1975, she shocked everyone by defeating Heath in the first ballot by 130 votes to 119. She then went on to beat the also-rans easily. A current of right-wing free-market thinking that had been gurgling almost unnoticed underground since the fifties would break ground in spectacular fashion, changing Britain for ever. ‘Josephism’ became ‘Thatcherism’. Few of the Tory MPs in what was called ‘the peasants’ revolt’ realized quite where their new leader would take them. For the next few years, supercilious smirks and patronizing remarks from Wilson and then the new Prime Minister, James Callaghan, would be her lot. And then she would show them.

  79

  Beyond Pop

  The seventies was an extreme decade; the extreme left and extreme right were reflected even in its music. Drawing neat lines between popular culture and the wider world of politics and economics is a dangerous game. Any art follows its own internal logic and much of what happened to British music and fashion during the seventies was driven by the straightforward need to adopt then outpace what had happened the day before. Clipped, hard-edged styles appear on the street to mock floppy, romantic ones, and then it happens in reverse. The high-gloss extravagance of the late Teds is answered by the neat, fresh, cool look of the Mods, which will be met by the psychedelic extravagance and hairiness of the Hippies. They are answered by the super-Mod working-class cool of the first skinheads, though in due course wannabe Ziggy Stardusts will bring androgyny and excess back to the pavement and playing ground. Leather-bound punks find a new trump card to offend the older rockers; New Romantics with eyeliner and quiffs challenge Goths. Huge baggy trousers are suddenly in then disappear as quickly. Shoes, shirts, haircuts, mutate and compete. For much of the time, this game doesn’t mean anything outside its own rhetoric, it simply is – and then isn’t.

  Exactly the same can be said about musical fads, the way Soul is picked up in Northern clubs from Wigan to Blackpool to Manchester; the struggle between the concept albums of the art-house bands and the arrival of punkier noises from New York in the mid-seventies; the dance crazes that come and go. Often the motivation for change is boredom. We have heard enough of that three-minute noise and it’s time for something shorter and louder, or longer and quieter. Nothing lasts long. Like fashion, musical styles begin to break up and head in many directions in this period, coexisting as rival subcultures across the country. Rock and roll is not dead, nor is Motown, when reggae and ska arrive. The Rolling Stones and Yes carry on oblivious to the arrival of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Every individual who drank in popular culture feels a sudden rush of remembrance of days past when a particular band, song or look is revived. But we should not fool ourselves that emotion equals meaning. The life lived and its soundtrack are not quite the same.

  Yet in this musical and stylistic chaos, which runs from the early seventies to modern times, there are moments and themes which stick out. Perhaps the most important statistic to hold in mind is that between the early fifties and the mid-seventies, real disposable income – what people had in their hand to spend, taking inflation into account – exactly doubled. Between Lonnie Donegan and Led Zeppelin, as it were, people became twice as well off. Yet from 1974 until the end of 1978, living standards actually went into decline. The long working-class boom had ended. Broadly speaking, British pop was invented during the optimism of 1958-68, when the economy was most of the time still booming and was evolving in its fastest and most creative spirit. Then the mood turned in the later sixties and seventies towards fantasy and escapism in wider and wilder varieties, as unemployment arrived and the world seemed bleaker and more confusing. This second phase involved the sci-fi ambiguities and glamour of Bowie, the gothic, mystical hokum of the heavy bad-boy bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and the druggy obscurities of Yes. The second half of the seventies were the years of deep political disillusion, strains which seemed to tear at the unity of the UK: Irish terrorism on the mainland, a rise in racial tension and widespread industrial mayhem. The optimism which had helped fuel popular culture suddenly gurgled dry. So it is not perhaps a coincidence that this period is a darker time in music and fashion, a nightmare inversion of the sixties dream. After the innocent raptures of England’s 1966 World Cup victory and Manchester United’s European Cup triumph two years later, the mid-seventies invent the modern football hooligan and by the eighties, English clubs were being banned from European competitions because of their followers. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren turn from creating cod-fifties
drape coats and beatnik jumpers to the ripped T-shirts and bondage gear of punk; the Sex Pistols portray themselves as a kind of anti-Beatles; older musical heroes flirt with fascism.

  Westwood was in many ways a perfect inheritor of Quant’s role a dozen years earlier. Like Quant, she was brought up to make clothes herself and came through art college. Like Quant she had a male partner who had a touch of business genius. Like Quant she was interested in the liberating power of clothes. Like Quant she set herself up in the Kings Road in a shop which first of all had to be braved rather than simply patronized. Her clothes would shock passers-by just as Quant’s had horrified Michael Caine’s mother. Like Quant she was sardonic and fearless and later on, she out-Quanted Quant as the grand dame of British fashion. Westwood received a Damehood from the Queen whose face she had famously impaled with a safety-pin earlier on, and was honoured with a huge retrospective show at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  Yet this daughter of a Derbyshire mill-weaver and a shoe-making family was also startlingly different from Quant, the Welsh teachers’ child. Westwood had first mixed and matched to create a style of her own at the Manchester branch of C&A and said with only a twinge of irony, ‘my work is rooted in English tailoring.’ Her vision of fashion was anything but uncluttered. It was a magpie, rip-it-up and make-it-new assault on the history of couture, postmodern to Quant’s straightforward modern. And in the mid-seventies, working from a shop recently renamed simply Sex, Westwood’s vision was a fetishistic, rubbery, vaguely sado-masochistic assault on mainstream decencies. Chains, zips in odd places, rips, obscene slogans and provocative images, referring for instance to a notorious serial rapist, all featured. She once declared that she had ‘an in-built perversity, a kind of in-built clock which reacts against anything orthodox’. Her helper and model Jordan (aka Pamela Rooke) used to set off on a commuter train to the shop, wearing rubber clothes, fishnet stockings and a beehive hairdo and attracted so much attention British Rail put her in a first class compartment for her own protection. Quant’s vision had been essentially optimistic – easy to wear, clean-looking clothes for free and liberated women. Westwood’s vision was darker. Her clothes were to be worn like armour in the street battle with authority and repression, in the England of flashers and perverts.

  Nor was her then partner Malcolm McLaren in any way like Plunkett Alexander-Greene, the aristocratic businessman husband of Quant. McLaren was also an art college product and, as we saw earlier, had been influenced by the radical anger of the ‘Situationists’ and the raw typography of King Mob. The son of a dysfunctional Jewish and Scottish family he had drifted through the worlds of fringe politics, music and film-making but was now remaking himself as a kind of wideboy entrepreneur of street culture, a latter-day Svengali modelled on ‘Flash Larry’ Parnes. He had already offered style advice to the New York Dolls and was on the lookout for his anti-Beatles, duly forming the Sex Pistols in December 1975. Steve Jones, Paul Cook, John Lydon and Glen Matlock – who much admired the Beatles – were another working-class quartet in their late teens. But they expressed the self-loathing spirit of the times as the Beatles had expressed the geeky optimism of an earlier Britain. Pockmarked, sneering, spiky-haired, exuding violence and playing with a wild and simple thrash of a sound, they dutifully performed the essential duty of shocking a still easily shocked nation. Their handful of good songs have a leaping energy which really did take the ageing, lumbering rock establishment by storm, but their juvenile side quickly became embarrassing.

  Compared to the most self-important assertions of John Lennon, their notorious performance on the London television show Thames Today with Bill Grundy, was desperate stuff. (Grundy: ‘Go on, you’ve got another ten seconds. Say something outrageous’. Steve: ‘You dirty bastard.’ Grundy: ‘Go on, again.’ Steve: ‘You dirty fucker!’ Grundy: ‘What a clever boy!’ Steve: ‘You fucking rotter!’ It leaves later satirical attempts to depict punk rockers as in the television comedy The Young Ones floundering.) But the tabloid papers and stupider backbench MPs duly played their allotted role and helped fan the Sex Pistols’ publicity engine. McLaren thrived on outrage and played up to the role of cynical charlatan for all he was worth. The Pistols played a series of increasingly wild gigs, including in the broken-up set of the bankrupt Biba shop (everything connects) and made juvenile political attacks in songs such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and, in the year of the Silver Jubilee, ‘God Save the Queen’. (Jim Callaghan can be accused of many things, but presiding over a ‘fascist regime’ is not one of them.) Yet punk was the first revival of fast, belligerent popular music to concern itself with the politics of the country, and this was the first time since the brief ‘street fighting man’ posturing of the late sixties when mainstream society needed to notice rock.

  On the other side of the political divide was an eruption of racist, skinhead rock, and an interest in the far right. Among the rock stars who seemed to flirt with these ideas were Eric Clapton, who said in 1976 that ‘Powell is the only bloke who’s telling the truth, for the good of the country’ and David Bowie, who spoke of Hitler as being the first superstar, musing that perhaps he would make a good Hitler himself. Though the Sex Pistols liked to see themselves as vaguely on the anarchist left, their enthusiasm for shocking, particularly after the nihilistic and amoral Sid Vicious joined them, at least left room for ambiguity. McLaren and Westwood had produced clothing with swastikas and other Nazi emblems, if only to outrage people (it worked) while Vicious’s contribution to political thought can be summed up by his lyric ‘Belsen was a gas / I read the other day / About the open graves / Where the Jews all lay…’

  Reacting to the surrounding mood, Rock Against Racism was formed in August 1976, helping create the wider Anti-Nazi League a year later. Punk bands were at the forefront of the RAR movement, above all the Clash whose lead singer Joe Strummer became more influential and admired than Johnny Rotten or the rest of the Sex Pistols, and bands such as the Jam. Black music – reggae, ska and soul – was popular enough among white youths for it to have had a real influence in turning the fashion in street culture decisively against racism. Ska revival bands such as the Specials and the reggae-influenced Police and UB40 (the latter from the West Midlands, home of Powellism) had an effect which went beyond the odd memorable song. Hard-left politics had often been a joyless business but the seventies produced, in the middle of visions of social breakdown, a musical revival which cheered up the lost generation. The racist skinhead ‘Oi’ bands found themselves in a violent and uncomfortable ghetto. As one cultural critic of the time put it, ‘A lifestyle – urban, mixed, music-loving, modern and creative – had survived, despite being under threat from the NF.’ The streets might be dirty and living standards falling, but it was not all bad news.

  80

  Sunny Jim, Stormy Winter: the Callaghan Years

  Jim Callaghan has featured already, both as hero in Northern Ireland and as rather a villain when he stabbed Wilson and Castle in the front over trade union reform. In the spring of 1976 he finally entered Number Ten after a series of votes by Labour MPs shaved off his rivals – Denis Healey, Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins on the right, and Michael Foot and Tony Benn on the left. After three ballots, he beat Foot by 176 votes to 137 and replaced Wilson as Prime Minister. For three turbulent years he would run a government with no overall majority in Parliament, kept going by deals and pacts, and in an atmosphere of repeated, though not quite constant crisis. Callaghan was by now a familiar and reassuring figure in Britain, tall, ruddy, no-nonsense, robust and, by comparison with Wilson, straightforward. He had had all the top jobs in politics, though had not distinguished himself either as Chancellor or as Home Secretary. Latterly he had been Foreign Secretary, deeply involved in the early stages of détente, bringing an end to the Cold War, and forging close personal relations with Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, America’s Henry Kissinger and the amiable but derided President Ford. At sixty-five he was one of the most experienced politicians to become Pr
ime Minister. After Wilson and Heath he was the third and last of the centrist seekers after consensus, the wartime avoiders of national confrontation. Yet behind the genial, occasionally stubborn-looking face with its protuberant lower lip and owlish glasses there was a man who, in the growing contest between hard left and right, was a Labour leader now instinctively looking to the right.

  Churchill apart, all of his post-war predecessors had been Oxbridge men. Callaghan had not been to university at all. The son of a Royal Navy chief petty officer who had died young, and a devout Baptist mother from Portsmouth, he had known real poverty and had clawed his way up as a young clerk working for the Inland Revenue, and then as a union official, before wartime naval service. One of the 1945 generation of MPs, he was a young rebel who drifted right, though always keeping his strong pro-trade union instincts. His wounding experiences as Chancellor during the dark days of 1966-7 had nearly broken him but he had found, as the best politicians do, that what did not kill him made him stronger. He was a social conservative, uneasy about divorce, homosexuality and vehemently pro-police, pro-monarchy, pro-armed forces, though he was anti-hanging and strongly anti-racialist too. As Home Secretary he had announced that the permissive society had gone too far. As Prime Minister, he would try to initiate a ‘great debate’ against trendy teaching in schools, calling for an inquiry into teaching methods, standards, discipline and the case for a national curriculum. On the economy, he would become steadily more impressed by the case for monetarism, then raging on the right. Famously, he told a stunned 1976 Labour conference used to the Keynesian doctrines about governments spending their way out of recession, cutting taxes and boosting investment: ‘I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists and that insofar as it ever did exist, it worked by injecting inflation into the economy…Higher inflation, followed by higher unemployment. That is the history of the last twenty years.’