Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In Britain, some historians considered Wiener’s thesis wildly exaggerated. But it won plenty of influential admirers: the new Secretary of State for Industry, Sir Keith Joseph, found it so persuasive that he sent copies to his Cabinet colleagues. And his enthusiasm told its own story. For all the clichés about the bulldog spirit, visitors were often struck by the unflagging pessimism with which the British talked about their own country. A different people might have been infuriated to hear the relentless abuse of their hotels, their trains, their towns and their factories. Yet, far from being mortally offended, the British were only too keen to put the boot in themselves. Even Theroux, who made a good living from being rude about Britain’s shabby seafronts and dilapidated hotels, was amazed that people could be such ‘wet blankets’ about their own country. ‘We’re awful,’ they would tell him. ‘This country is hopeless. We’re never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly.’ This was not just comic self-mockery, he thought, but a ‘tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.’15

  Talk of national failure was nothing new. It had been an obsession for Britain’s elites since the late nineteenth century, when the shock of German and American economic competition and the army’s poor performance in the Boer War had inaugurated a national fondness for morbid self-flagellation. And even though a supposedly failing nation had somehow contrived to win two world wars, weather the Great Depression, build the welfare state and survive the loss of Empire, the idea that Britain was doomed to decline was more entrenched than ever. ‘In the last ten years Britain has had no companion in failure. She stands alone,’ wrote the Cambridge economist John Eatwell in Whatever Happened to Britain? (1982), which accompanied an eight-part series on BBC2. That might have sounded harsh – but not to the economic historian Sidney Pollard, whose book The Wasting of the British Economy was published in the same year. Looking at recent figures for gross domestic product (GDP) per head, Pollard found that since the Second World War Britain had been overtaken by, in turn, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, France, Luxembourg, Austria, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Only Italy was keeping Britain off the bottom of the table of the world’s industrialized nations. This, said Pollard, was a ‘staggering relative decline, such as would have been considered utterly unbelievable only a little over thirty years ago … After having led the world for two hundred years, Britain is no longer counted among the economically most advanced nations of the world.’ Indeed, the gap between Britain and West Germany was ‘now as wide as the difference between Britain and the continent of Africa. One short generation has squandered the inheritance of centuries.’16

  On the right, talk of national decline was sometimes coloured with nostalgia for Empire. After dinner one night in May 1980, the maverick Conservative MP Alan Clark and his son James pored over an old atlas of Britain’s colonial possessions. ‘All gone, in 40 years, all of it,’ Clark lamented. But this sort of talk came from all sides, not just from the reactionary right. It is, in fact, almost impossible to think of any major political figure at the turn of the 1980s who seriously disputed that the last few decades had been characterized by precipitous national decline. Even Tony Benn, the irrepressibly cheerful evangelist of the left, thought so. Catching a train from Bristol in February 1981, he found himself sharing a first-class compartment with his ideological arch-enemy, Sir Keith Joseph. They got on famously, chatting about ‘crippled capitalism’, the likely ‘breakdown of the social fabric’, the problem of unemployment and even the prospect of a Soviet invasion. And although they disagreed about almost everything, there was one moment of perfect harmony. ‘At least we agree on this, Keith,’ Benn said happily, ‘that the last thirty-five years have been a disaster!’17

  In the dying weeks of the Callaghan government, the deputy editor of The Times, Louis Heren, began writing a book about the state of the nation, with the cheery title Alas, Alas for England. Britain, he believed, had palpably ‘failed to adjust to a changing world … We are not a society at peace with ourselves. Most of us are no longer proud of being British.’ Whenever Heren talked to the great and the good, they all sounded the same notes: regret at wasted opportunities, laments for lost ambitions, gloom about the prospects ahead. In Whitehall, one Permanent Secretary told him that ‘the spirit and pride as well as the power and influence of Britain had been diminished … He did not believe that Britain would go down the drain, but it would if we did not pull ourselves together within the next ten years.’ Even Labour’s veteran general secretary Ron Hayward, who had served in the RAF, agreed that the country had lost its self-belief. Forty years earlier, he said sadly, people had had a ‘sense of companionship’. But now that had gone. ‘Britain had lost its sense of direction. It seemed that nobody thought of Jerusalem, or wanted to make a contribution; but of course many remembered and wanted to do something but there was no real leadership. Labour was as bad as the Tories.’

  Later, Heren went to see Lord Carrington, a hereditary peer, Old Etonian and former Guardsman who had won the Military Cross in the battle for Nijmegen in 1944. In almost every particular, Carrington was the embodiment of the old order, stamped by his experiences during the Second World War. But he could hardly have been more fatalistic about Britain’s fortunes. ‘We had had it easy too long,’ he explained. ‘We had been basically sheltered from economic reality by the captive markets of empire, and we had not yet learned to live in a harsh world.’ What Carrington said next, however, was even bleaker:

  This was why he supported Maggie Thatcher. Every other course had been tried, and if hers failed we could expect some sharp crises. If she had got it wrong we would get to the bottom quicker than by other means, but it was worth a try. The alternatives would only hasten our genteel decline, and it would become progressively less genteel, more shabby and eventually rather nasty.

  ‘Sharp crises … get to the bottom … genteel decline … shabby … nasty.’ Such were the words of a man respected across the political spectrum for his experience and judgement, the embodiment of patrician wisdom, the personification of the post-war consensus.18

  Talk of national decline seemed to be everywhere that summer. On 2 June 1979, a few weeks after the general election, The Economist published a leaked diplomatic despatch from Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain’s outgoing ambassador to France. Henderson had meant it as a parting shot: at 60, he had assumed that Paris would be his last posting, and wanted to use his traditional valedictory despatch to deliver some home truths about Britain’s fall from grace. But after the election, Carrington, an old friend, had asked him to serve as ambassador to the United States. That, said The Economist, made his leaked despatch ‘unusually forthright and timely’. For instead of being a parting shot from our last man in Paris, these were now the unvarnished thoughts of our new man in Washington.19

  Henderson’s despatch bore the stark title ‘Britain’s Decline: Its Causes and Consequences’. In the mid-1950s, he wrote, Britain had been the ‘strongest European power’. Since then, it had been downhill all the way.

  Today we are not only no longer a world power, but we are not in the first rank even as a European one. Income per head in Britain is now, for the first time for over 300 years, below that in France. We are scarcely in the same economic league as the Germans or French. We talk of ourselves without shame as being one of the less prosperous countries of Europe …

  You only have to move about Western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours. It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.

  In foreign policy, Henderson thought, this had dire consequences. Britain was so weak economically that ‘we can no longer play our historic role’ and ‘are unable to influence events in the way we want because we do not have the power or will to do so’. Most painfully of all, his French friends now talked about Britain ‘as a model not
to follow if economic disaster is to be avoided’.

  What had gone wrong? Like many commentators, Henderson blamed the ‘lack of professionalism in British management’, as well as the fragmentation and short-sightedness of the unions. But as was also common, he thought the deeper problems were psychological, rooted in a combination of arrogance, complacency and sheer ignorance. Viewed from abroad, he wrote, ‘the British people do not give the impression that they are fully aware of how far Britain’s economy has fallen behind that of our European neighbours’. They needed a government with the courage to ‘enlighten’ them about the extent of their decline, as well as the humility to copy the Germans and the French. ‘It may be our turn to learn from others,’ he thought, ‘having been teachers for so long.’20

  The irony, barely remarked on at the time, was that a less plausible critic of Britain’s patrician complacency could scarcely have been imagined. The son of the Warden of All Souls, ‘Nico’ Henderson had been educated at Stowe, was a former president of the Oxford Union and had spent almost his entire career in the Diplomatic Service. Despite his strictures about Britain’s economic weaknesses, he himself had no direct experience of business or industry. Even an admiring profile in the Guardian conceded that his time in Paris had been notable for his ‘knack of staging marvellous parties’. Indeed, since Henderson was just about the last person anybody could picture on the British Leyland shop floor, readers might have been forgiven for dismissing his despatch as a cry for help from a demoralized upper-class elite, itself embattled by social and political change.21

  Yet after an election campaign in which the issue of national decline had featured so prominently, The Economist’s coup was perfectly timed. ‘Envoy Hits at “Poor” Britain’, read the Mirror’s headline, above a summary of Henderson’s ‘shock verdict’ that ‘Britain is all washed up’. Even the Guardian thought his analysis was spot on, though it doubted whether Britain would ever be able to emulate France and Germany. ‘They started from a position of defeat and humiliation. There was every goad to restore greatness. There were ruins to repair. That psychological imperative does not make itself felt in Britain. We have not been defeated, only overtaken.’ And many ordinary readers thought Henderson was right. Two weeks later, one Economist reader wrote to offer ‘congratulations on your courage and devotion to England’. It had been a ‘masterly’ diagnosis, agreed a reader from South Africa, though he feared its effect would be to ‘demoralise John Bull’ rather than to ‘make Britain great again’. The only solution, wrote an American reader, was for Britain to be kicked out of the G7fn1 until it got its act together: ‘Britain is not worthy of admission into “the club”, nor can it afford the price either economically or politically.’22

  Much of what Henderson wrote was fair enough. Although the image of the 1970s as a decade of unparalleled misery is a bit of a caricature, there is no doubt that Britain had some very serious problems. Other countries might have had more strikes, but nowhere else had industrial relations become such a bitter trial of strength between government ministers and local union representatives, the much-mythologized shop stewards. As for the economic woes diagnosed by foreign commentators, they were all too real. The flight from the pound in the summer of 1976, which forced Britain to take its begging bowl to the IMF, was not the result of some perverted malice on the part of the world’s investors: it was a withering verdict on Britain’s inability to keep inflation down. Indeed, almost every indicator showed Britain performing much worse than its European rivals, let alone the industrial behemoths of the United States and Japan. Britain’s inflation rate for the 1970s had been 13 per cent. West Germany’s was just 5 per cent. Britain’s unemployment rate was 4 per cent; Germany’s was 2 per cent. Britain’s productivity growth rate was barely 1 per cent; the German rate was more than 3 per cent.

  As a result, British manufacturing was in headlong retreat. In fifteen years since the mid-1960s, its share of the world car market had fallen from 11 per cent to 5 per cent. In shipbuilding its share had fallen from 8 per cent to 4 per cent, in steel from 6 per cent to 3 per cent, in electrical machinery from 14 per cent to 8 per cent, in transport equipment from 16 per cent to 6 per cent. These might look like tediously dry figures. But falling sales meant closing factories, disappearing jobs, empty cupboards and broken communities. As the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins melodramatically wrote in the autumn of 1978, ‘no country has yet made the journey from developed to underdeveloped. Britain could become the first to embark on that route.’23

  What underlay much of this was something that was only gradually becoming apparent: the colossal, very painful transformation from an industrial economy to one based largely on services. Today it is often thought, quite wrongly, that this began in the 1980s, as a result of something called ‘neoliberalism’. In reality, it had already been going on for a quarter of a century. Industrial employment had peaked in the mid-1950s, at the high point of the post-war consensus. Then it began to fall, slowly at first but with steadily gathering speed. By 1979 the coal and steel industries had been haemorrhaging jobs for decades. The docks had fallen silent; shipbuilding was already almost extinct. In part this explains the growing militancy of so many trade unionists: not only were their living standards being squeezed by inflation, but foreign competition and technological change were remorselessly eroding the industrial landscape they took for granted. We know now that this was not just a British phenomenon. But because it happened earlier in Britain than anywhere else – industrial employment in West Germany, France and Italy did not peak until the 1970s – people at the time assumed that Britain had gone uniquely and spectacularly wrong. Hence all the talk of national decline; hence the ‘British disease’; hence the ‘Sick Man of Europe’.24

  But ‘decline’ was not the whole story. Not all Economist readers agreed with everything Henderson had said; indeed, some thought him hysterically pessimistic. One American reader suggested that Britain’s problems were very similar to those of major nations everywhere, adding that it should be proud of its ‘open and free society, its sense of justice and decency, its calm outlook and even its complacency’. Another reader, G. G. Anthony of Cambridge, struck a rousingly patriotic note. ‘We have salmon breeding again in the Thames, our real ale is the best in the world and we continue to change governments with good humour and dignity,’ he wrote. ‘When the chips are down, we will still stand up to be counted. Success is more than stodgy figures and shining airports.’ And for the academic and essayist Lincoln Allison, all this business about national decline was the kind of thing you heard from ‘retired, middle-class people who live in nice suburbs and hold dinner parties for nice people’. Over their Elizabeth David meals, they liked to tell each other that ‘the country is in a state of moral and material collapse, that no work is done in English factories and that urban areas are a seething and perpetually revolutionary riot organized by social workers’. But this, Allison thought, was rubbish. As he saw it, pessimistic diagnoses such as Henderson’s despatch had become a kind of national tic, ‘formal, ritualized’, but bearing little relation to reality.25

  As Allison pointed out, talk of irreversible decline completely missed the simple, inarguable fact that most people’s lives were longer, healthier, more comfortable and more colourful than ever before. One of the common misconceptions about the state of the nation, for example, was that Britain was getting poorer. It was not just foreigners who said so. People often said so themselves. ‘We’re not a rich country any more. We’re poor,’ they told Paul Theroux when he travelled the country in 1982. On the South Coast, Theroux asked a retired wing commander why Britain had not yet followed through on its long-discussed plans for a Channel Tunnel. ‘No money,’ the man said curtly. ‘This isn’t a rich country. We can’t do things like that any more. The Japanese have all the money now, and the Germans, and these Arabs … We’ve got to learn how to tighten our belts.’26

  In what meaningful sense, though, was Britain poor? By historical standa
rds, the United Kingdom in 1979 was a very rich country indeed. In terms of its GDP, it was the sixth richest country in the world, a position it maintained for at least the next four decades. And although people loved to grumble about the woes of the nation’s manufacturing industries, the state of the pound and the alleged laziness of the British worker, the reality was that, in their own day-to-day lives, most had never been better off. Allison reported a typical conversation in a Midlands pub:

  ‘I see the country’s in a diabolical state, economically speaking.’

  ‘Dead right, mate. They should all be shot.’

  ‘Who should?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. All of ’em. How’s the new Capri going?’

  ‘I like it. We was even thinking of taking it to Spain this year, but’s it not worth it by the time you get there, with the price of petrol in France. Where are you going?’