When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  He listed signs of national well-being: increasing life expectancy, growing meat consumption, more universities, shrinking poverty, cleaner air, the return of fish to the Thames, the oil riches in the North Sea. But then his argument took a less predictable turn. Looking at London, he saw ‘the last inhabitable great city. Productivity is higher in New York, Düsseldorf, Paris and Stockholm. There is a nervous intensity in these towns; crowds hustle along … heads down … People in London streets tend to amble, look around … This hurts the growth rate but it may ease the psyche.’ Critics of Britain’s economic performance were right when it came to some of the raw statistics, Nossiter conceded, but they were missing the bigger picture: ‘Britons … appear to be the first citizens of the post-industrial age … [They] are choosing leisure over goods.’

  Some of A Future that Works felt too Anglophile to be rigorous, and some of its observations – that there was a unique sense of ‘kinship’ and ‘decency’ among Britons; that ‘union members see their well-being now requires a measure of restraint’ – would look rather misjudged in a few years. Yet Nossiter’s ‘leisure over goods’ thesis did pick up something about Britain and its surprising level of contentment in the late seventies. In 1977, an international survey by Gallup showed that Britons considered themselves among the happiest people in the world. The same year, New Society published a more scientific assessment of British attitudes to material goods and other forms of fulfilment.

  ‘Do the British Sincerely Want to Be Rich?’ drew its conclusions from two comprehensive surveys conducted in 1973 and 1977. ‘The British seem to have lowered their sights since 1973,’ the magazine found. ‘The British are remarkably unambitious in a material sense. Very few sincerely want to be rich … Even if they could … the vast majority do not seem prepared to work harder for it … Most people in Britain neither want nor expect a great deal more money.’ The 1977 survey asked its subjects a long-winded but interesting question: ‘Do you think that it is best for people to work as hard as they can for as much money as they can get, or for people to work only as much as they need in order to live a pleasant life?’ By a consistent two to one margin, across all social classes, genders and party political groupings, people considered ‘a pleasant life’ the better option. The fact that citizens of comparable countries appeared to be doing better materially – nine tenths of those surveyed felt that West Germany had a superior standard of living to Britain – did not seem to bother many of the respondents. Less than a sixth of those surveyed said they were ‘very worried’ about falling behind other nations, and approaching half said they were ‘not worried’ at all. Britons, New Society concluded, ‘seemed to be saying that the country is going to the dogs, but they themselves aren’t doing too badly’.

  In Britain in 1960, almost all full-time manual workers got two weeks paid holiday. By 1970, between two and three weeks was the norm. By 1975, it was three to four. By 1980, four to five. The length of the British working day underwent a similar change: in 1961, a man in full-time employment spent an average of 460 minutes a day at work, and a woman 420 minutes; in 1975, the respective figures were 420 and 380 minutes. A steady shortening of the working week had been under way in Britain since Victorian times, and during the sixties and seventies a growing literature announced the imminent arrival of a ‘leisure society’. Diverse causes were identified: labour-saving technology, higher unemployment, the diffusion of hippy anti-work ideas and the dominance of union power – after all, what was the TGWU Centre in Eastbourne, with all its sea views and sun terraces, if not a monument to the unions’ ability to win an easier life for the working man?

  In the seventies, less overtly political leisure facilities became a normal state-run amenity for the first time. In 1970, there were twenty-seven sports centres in England. In 1974, there were 167, with plans for another 612 by 1981. At a 1975 conference for architects and construction companies called ‘Building for Leisure’, one participant suggested that sports centres were the ‘fourth wave’ in the modern development of Britain after industrial towns, railways and suburbs. In a 1976 book called The Sociology of Leisure, Stanley Parker, a British academic specializing in ‘leisure studies’, predicted that ‘the long weekend will probably grow in popularity’ and treated ‘the 30-hour week’ as an inevitability. Even the senior British politicians of the seventies, despite all the emergencies they faced, seemed in tune with what Parker speculated might become ‘a golden age of leisure’: Heath with his sailing, Callaghan with his farm, Healey with his famed ‘hinterland’ of opera and poetry. The workaholic Margaret Thatcher, with no appealing leisure habits to publicize, seemed at a disadvantage.

  Yet there were other aspects of life in late-seventies Britain that better fitted Thatcher’s politics. Not all observers agreed with Nossiter and New Society that Britons were becoming more contented and less materialistic. In 1978, the year that Nossiter’s book came out, the British left-wing journalist and social explorer Jeremy Seabrook published an account of a journey he had recently undertaken through working-class parts of Britain.

  What Went Wrong? Working People and the Ideals of the Labour Movement was a disillusioned book. In Wigan, following in George Orwell’s footsteps, he found ‘a place of ruined Victorian splendour’. It had ‘a new denim bazaar and delicatessen’, and ‘shopping arcades full of consolations for the convulsive changes that [had] occurred’ in the local economy. Over the last few decades, he wrote, a whole side of Wigan based on coal mining and textile manufacturing had simply ‘vanished’. There had been all-pervasive political consequences:

  Few young people visit the Labour clubs. There has been a dramatic break in the transmission of the working-class tradition … The young are products of a given world, just as their parents were, when mine, mill and neighbourhood determined their lives; only now it is image and fashion, the endless spool of excitement and novelty that has been unwound before their eyes since they were born … The young feel passive and purposeless … They are anchored in a culture of commodities.

  Seabrook described an atomized, depoliticized Britain, where close-knit working-class streets had been demolished in the name of slum clearance, where glassy new shopping centres towered over disused mine workings, where elderly Labour activists despaired about the party’s compromises with capitalism under Healey and Callaghan, and where ‘the stridency of the market-place is the most significant influence’ on working-class attitudes. Seabrook even questioned whether the unions wanted a less materialistic Britain: ‘The growth of the trades unions, the anger and militancy of recent years, are not necessarily the radical phenomenon which the Left makes them out to be.’ He quoted an unnamed union leader: ‘The most beautiful four letter word in the English language is MORE.’

  What Went Wrong? was a brave and prophetic book. It began to suggest a truth about modern Britain that many people on the left and the right are uncomfortable with to this day: that much of the social, economic and political landscape which would come to be associated with ‘the eighties’ – either perjoratively or triumphantly – was already visible in the second half of the seventies, if you cared to look. ‘It was all there, waiting,’ Peter York, a less disapproving authority on the two decades than Seabrook, told me. ‘There was less wealth. Less upper-middle-class wealth. The whole of London wasn’t done up or for sale. But all of those things were there in embryo. All of those [eighties] people were there, waiting – for the economy to change, for taxes to change.’

  In his ostentatious memoir The Way We Wore, the writer, broadcaster, intimate of eighties pop stars and ubiquitous eighties man-about-town Robert Elms describes walking through Soho, the streets piled with uncollected rubbish, to a nightclub with a new gang of friends in early 1979:

  You’d see us, if you knew where and when to look … Tuxedos and wing collars, padded shoulders and cummerbunds … silk scarves … diamante brooches, taffeta gowns … There were maybe only thirty or forty elaborate souls at most, gathered up by the bush t
elegraph … The nucleus of what would become known as new romantic, which would go on to define the 1980s stylistically … was weaving its way through the wreckage of the winter of discontent to get to Billy’s on Tuesday nights …

  The consumerism of the late seventies was not just for trendies. The recovery in average disposable income from 1977 onwards released new appetites. That year, Freddie Laker began his Skytrain service to the US, offering flights at a third of the price of his rivals. Demand for tickets so outstripped supply that an encampment of youthful would-be customers, complete with sleeping bags and ‘We Love You Freddie’ placards, built up on the pavements outside the Skytrain offices in London. It was almost as if the free-festival movement had finally come to the capital, but this was a festival offering transcendence of the everyday wholly through consumption. In 1978, Callaghan gave Laker a knighthood. The same year, a new record was set for the total number of foreign holidays taken by Britons.

  In 1976, the unprecedentedly vast Brent Cross shopping centre opened in north London, with a cathedral-shaped floor plan, commentators noted, and innovative evening opening hours so people could come after work. In 1979, the final phase of the equally large Arndale centre opened in Manchester, giving the city two dozen acres of shops, flats and offices combined in a single structure. Across the country in these years, the big retailers rolled out their chain stores.

  In east London, a decade before the regeneration of the rest of the capital’s docklands, the developer Peter Drew turned St Katharine’s dock next to Tower Bridge, defunct and sparsely inhabited by artists, into a proto-yuppie paradise of expensive warehouse flats, hotel bars and moorings for yachts. Between 1975 and 1980, the average British house price increased by more than half.

  Some Labour figures felt the party should do more to adjust to this new world. In ‘a comprehensive school in a northern city’, Seabrook memorably encountered Dave Ransome, a young teacher and would-be councillor from an active Labour family. Ransome told Seabrook that his middle-aged parents – a weaver and an engineer – were ‘rather defeated and apathetic’ now, but he wanted to carry on their crusade by new means, means that sound eerily Blairite to twentyfirst-century ears:

  We’ve got to change the image of the Labour Party. It’s too much identified with the cloth cap, the industrial worker. We’ve got to get out and reach people in some of the up-market posher areas, or we shall just become a party

  of the ghetto, the enclaves of poverty. A lot of things we worked for have been achieved. We’ve got to show we can cope with the problems of the end of the twentieth century. Otherwise, there is a danger people will think we’re irrelevant.

  In the Downing Street Policy Unit, Bernard Donoughue and Gavyn Davies were having similar thoughts. ‘I went to the right-wing think tanks,’ Donoughue remembered. ‘They treated me very well. I went to the opening of the Centre for Policy Studies. I was interested in the monetarists. I wouldn’t call myself’ – he gave a characteristically sly look – ‘a convert. I’d call myself intrigued. I felt that what Thatcher was saying about needing to give people more incentives, liberalize the economy, control the public bureaucracy, was correct. What the Callaghan government offered tided Britain over difficult times. But we didn’t have the answer to Britain’s long-term decline.’

  Davies was more optimistic about Labour’s ability to reinvent itself in office. He was younger and slightly newer to government than Donoughue, a Welshman with a soft manner that disguised a political durability and a love of hard numbers. When he finished working for Callaghan in 1979, he took his feel for economics into the City and made vastly more money than any other former member of the seventies Labour governments. Since the seventies, he has stayed loyal to the party, becoming a living embodiment of the adaptability to capitalism of a certain kind of worldly left-of-centre figure, more common in continental Europe than Britain, and of the talent and potential sometimes hidden from view in the Callaghan government.

  We met in Mayfair in 2006. Davies had an office on the top floor of a huge, gutted terrace in which unspecified but highly successful financial operations were performed. It was a weekday morning, but he was in chinos and a check shirt, his body language floppy and unmacho, his voice unshowy and flat. Sitting slouched across an armchair, he described how he came to work for Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. ‘Bernard phoned me at Balliol and said, “Come and join.” I thought, “One year at Downing Street, then come back and be an academic. No one’s going to offer a twenty-three-year-old the chance to see this again.”’ In both governments Davies was an influential economic adviser – ‘a bit like Ed Balls’ under Gordon Brown in the nineties – and like Donoughue and Peter Jay, Davies was at least a partial convert to the economic ideas of Milton Friedman.

  He also sensed that the new free-market thinking had implications for how the Labour government should behave in other areas. An unexpected hint of emotion entered his voice: ‘I spent a humungous amount of time – 50 per cent of my time, even during the 1974 crisis – working out what would happen if we sold off council houses. The public-accounts advantages of selling council houses. The political liberation for urban working people – our people. We had schemes absolutely fully developed, ready to launch. The schemes helped the buyers with their mortgages, through subsidies. The schemes put the proceeds back into [council] house-building.’ The rationale was still socialist, he felt: ‘In housing, state provision was going wrong. Bernard and I thought council housing didn’t bring equality between people in public housing and people in private housing.’

  Joe Haines, Wilson’s powerful press secretary, was another advocate of widening property ownership in this way. But his argument for the policy shift was more obviously party political. Since the fifties, both local and national Conservative politicians had intermittently supported selling off council houses, and, where the policy had been implemented – notably in London, where properties had been sold to their tenants at a small discount in the late sixties and early seventies – it had proved quite popular. In 1972, under the Heath government, 60,000 council homes had been effectively privatized across Britain, a forgotten but suggestive piece of Heathite radicalism. In 1975, Haines warned Wilson that if Labour did not match the Conservatives in responding to the growing working-class desire for property, ‘Our very substantial block vote’ – a revealing choice of words – ‘among council tenants might be significantly eaten into.’ In 1978, Margaret Thatcher was photographed having tea in a sunlit front garden with the 2,000th person to buy their home from the Conservative-controlled Greater London Council.

  Yet selling off municipal housing had its critics. Whatever the discounts and mortgage subsidies offered to buyers, the fact remained that many council tenants – generally the poorer ones – would be unable or unwilling to take advantage of them. And the bigger the discounts and subsidies, the less worthwhile the exercise would be, at least financially, for local authorities and the government. ‘Labour local authorities thought the idea was inegalitarian,’ said Davies, irritation suddenly creasing his mild face. ‘A lot of their arguments were self-serving. Crosland supported the local Labour authorities. He didn’t want the row. Bernard got Wilson to almost launch the policy. But from the moment Jim [Callaghan] came in, council-house sales just didn’t happen.’

  Behind Davies, through the glass wall of his office, colleagues at immaculate desks grappled with the abstractions of early-twenty-first-century financial capitalism. But his mind was still in the seventies. Between 1974 and 1979, he went on, council-house sales were discouraged by the government; while not completely forbidden, they were allowed to dwindle. ‘It was an own goal. A monumental own goal. Bernard and I are still somewhat obsessed by it. There is still bitterness over it, on both sides. Sure as hell, it was frustrating when we saw the Tories do council-house sales [in the early eighties]. It gave me a sinking feeling.’ He paused, and then gave a look halfway between disbelief and admiration. ‘Thatcher priced the council houses’, he s
aid, ‘in a way that meant you were insane if you didn’t buy.’

  There was one place in Britain where the great subterranean seventies shift from public to private, and the struggles and determination of forward-thinking left-wingers to adapt to it, was demonstrated to perfection. It happened in the damp low hills of north Buckinghamshire, in an invented city with a mouthful of a name that seemed, entirely appropriately, to suggest both the old economic order and the new.

  In fact, the name Milton Keynes had nothing to do with Milton Friedman or Maynard Keynes. It came from a small village that was effectively abolished in the mid-sixties, when the Wilson government announced the development of the surrounding thirty-four square miles for a new settlement. Yet from the start this second Milton Keynes involved two competing visions of Britain. On the one hand, it was a New Town, the latest in a series established from East Kilbride to Basildon for redistributing the population and improving the social and economic life of Britain. The New Town programme had been set in motion by the Attlee administration. It involved state planning and funding, and the construction of a great deal of state-owned housing, and was regarded with scepticism by many British right-wingers, Alfred Sherman prominent among them.

  At first, Milton Keynes seemed set to follow the same template. The settlement was envisaged as a long rectangle of public housing and industrial and retail developments, ‘a linear city’ held together by a loop of public-transport routes. This being the sixties, the public-transport system selected was a futuristic monorail, which would glide between the tower blocks and the north Buckinghamshire treetops and would be free to use, with funding coming from local ratepayers. The 250,000 residents envisaged for this new ‘monorail city’, as it quickly became known, would all live within five minutes’ walk of a monorail stop, and the longest journey from there to the city centre would take fifteen minutes. People would rent flats, or houses built close together with small walled gardens. Private space would be limited; public amenities would come first.