By the time of Lennon’s death, the excitement of the Beatles’ heyday felt like a very distant memory. When the essayist Lincoln Allison visited Liverpool, he found that the original Cavern Club had gone, demolished during building work a few years earlier. A new incarnation, just down the street, stood ‘closed and rather forlorn’. And when people rushed to buy the band’s old records in the wake of Lennon’s death, they did so out of sentimental nostalgia. This was the soundtrack from a lost golden age, not the sound of the 1980s. Guitars had given way to synthesizers, earnest optimism to knowing irony. Twenty years earlier, it had been possible to talk of British youth culture as a single phenomenon, millions of youngsters united by their enthusiasm for the Beatles. But now the audience had fractured beyond repair. ‘Pop isn’t IMPORTANT anymore,’ wrote Jon Savage in The Face in April 1981. ‘There’s no consensus – that ’60s ideal! – just markets: just good pop records that float to the surface and a few dedicated people doing what they can’t do anywhere else.’6
This was not just a story about music. In the public imagination, Britain in the 1960s had been the land of James Bond and the Beatles, the Mini and the mini-skirt. The Beatles had been disbanded for ten years, mini-skirts had fallen out of fashion and the Mini had given way to the Austin Metro. As for James Bond, he had long since lost his thrilling modernity. When the National Film Theatre mounted a Bond retrospective at the beginning of 1980, The Times thought it showed just how much the series had declined, from the ‘classless, liberated’ Sean Connery films to the ‘flabby and harmless’ Roger Moore films, with their ‘demented mechanic slapstick rendered impotent by its own lack of purpose and direction’. The sense of decline, of cynicism, of vanished optimism, was all too familiar. Even television comedy had turned its back on the impatient idealism of That Was the Week That Was (1962–3), preferring the scepticism of Yes Minister (1980–84) or Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979–82). As the latter’s producer, John Lloyd, explained, his team no longer believed in the old ‘optimistic assumptions’ of ‘satire as a force for change’. Instead, ‘sad and cynical’ as it might sound, their guiding assumption was that ‘the world cannot be changed so we might as well go down laughing’.7
On the day John Lennon was shot, the Guardian had published the first in a series of essays about ‘Punk, Pop and Politics’. The tone was unremittingly bleak. Twenty years earlier, wrote the journalist Martin Walker, Britain had been on the brink of ‘the major cultural shift we call the Sixties’. Now, with the headlines full of ‘dole queues and nuclear waste and racism on the terraces … another cultural shift seems to be underway’. ‘A Culture at the End of Its Psychic Tether’, read one headline. ‘Nihilism Is the Message in Words and Music’, declared another. ‘We are into the age of the political illiterates,’ explained the ubiquitous Peter York, warning that ‘the old rationalist liberalism is being crushed to death’. The new decade, said the science-fiction writer Ian Watson, would be one of ‘crusades … cults … a new wave of terrorism … a really angry brigade’. The 1980s, agreed the director Derek Jarman, would belong to ‘massed dancing cults, mass suicide cults, new religions’. As Walker mordantly put it, ‘the concept of Evil is back in our public life’.8
Some observers were glad to see the back of liberal utopianism. People had run ‘out of faith in grand ideas’, wrote Lincoln Allison, who felt relieved that concepts such as ‘the “city of the future” and the “white heat of technology”’ had ‘receded over the horizon’. But to many people who had come of age in the 1960s, an era of full employment, economic growth and apparently endless opportunity, the new era came as a terrible shock. At a neighbourhood centre in Sparkhill, Birmingham, Jeremy Seabrook met a woman called Lynn, who worked as a volunteer on the reception desk. Dressed in a black anorak and jeans, she was a keen CND activist and admitted that she had been inspired ‘by the 1960s’. Back then she had thought that work ‘would always be there’, allowing her to go travelling or to spend her time ‘reading philosophy and studying Marx’. ‘The whole feeling was different then,’ she said sadly. ‘It seemed as if life was going to become easier, more expansive.’9
This was a sadly familiar refrain. Life was harder; idealism had withered; dreams had turned to disappointments. Even the London listings magazine Time Out, launched in the summer of 1968, had abandoned its founding principles. For years it had been the last bastion of the alternative press, its articles blazing with radical passion. But in the spring of 1981 its founder, Tony Elliott, now 34, decided that its traditions of collective decision-making and equal pay for all, from the most senior journalist to the most junior secretary, could no longer be sustained. He wanted to introduce a trainee scheme, take on more senior executives and hire and fire like any other proprietor. In May dozens of journalists staged a sit-in; then they went on strike. Elliott was ‘playing at being a big-time capitalist’, one said. ‘He’s rich and very redundant.’ But he got his way. The strikers decamped to set up a rival magazine, City Limits, which prided itself on its co-operative principles, hard-left politics and refusal to accept ‘sexist’ advertising. Some of the new publication’s contributors went on to great things. But the mood in the office, recalled one of the editorial team, Deborah Orr, was one of ‘victimhood, resentment, factionalism, incompetence and silliness’. It collapsed after little more than a decade.10
‘It was easy to be a socialist when I was growin’ up in the sixties,’ says one character in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff. ‘Everyone was a friggin’ socialist then. It was fashionable. But it’s not now … Everythin’s gone sour, everyone’s lockin’ the door, turnin’ the other cheek, lookin’ after number one.’ Even in Britain’s schools, people said the same. Ten or fifteen years earlier, with commentators wringing their hands about the supposed generation gap, the assumption had been that young people were far more radical than their elders. In reality, not only had Mrs Thatcher done extremely well among first-time voters in 1979, but their younger siblings hardly looked like fire-breathing Trotskyists. Polls found that most teenagers backed the monarchy, supported the police, wanted to restore the death penalty and thought the trade unions were too powerful. After talking to Bristol sixth-formers in late 1982, Tony Benn lamented that ‘there are Thatcherites in every audience. She has armed a lot of bright young people with powerful right-wing arguments and, although I enjoy discussing them, I realise I am no longer dealing with the old consensus but with a new breed of right-wing concepts.’ But were Bristol’s teenagers really parroting Mrs Thatcher? Or was she merely saying what they already believed?11
Even at universities, stereotypically such radical hotbeds, the pendulum had swung away from protest. With youth unemployment so high, many 18-year-olds were relentlessly focused on their job prospects: hence the tremendous rise of business studies, offered by fewer than ten institutions a decade earlier, but now offered by almost seventy. Students were ‘tired of politics’, the new president of the National Union of Students (NUS), Trevor Phillips, admitted in 1979. A year later, the NUS announced that it would no longer devote so much attention to ‘racialism and women’s liberation’, in order to focus on students’ day-to-day concerns. ‘We should no longer be regarded’, it explained, ‘as an all-purpose rent-a-mob for every cause.’ In a sign of the times, Phillips’ successor, David Aaronovitch, a Communist, agreed that the NUS should focus on ‘bread and butter’ issues, and accused more radical students of having ‘science fiction attitudes’ that would alienate ordinary people. Even at the London School of Economics, once famous for its sit-ins, the mood was ‘remarkably quiet’. ‘There is’, said the Guardian, ‘very little at the LSE these days of which the Establishment need be fearful.’12
When, in January 1981, BBC2 broadcast an adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s campus novel The History Man, with Antony Sher putting in a splendidly horrible performance as the left-wing sociologist Howard Kirk, it already felt like a vision of the past – even though the novel was only 6 years old. The book was
‘very dated now’, admitted Bradbury, who taught English at the University of East Anglia. ‘The Kirk figures – he was a composite of various radical academics I have known – have disappeared from the campuses. Or rather they’ve changed. They probably voted for Mrs Thatcher in the last election and now, instead of Left-wing politics, they are into jogging and tap-dancing.’ What was more, ‘student rebellion is also in the past. I’m impressed by the changing mood of my students today – it’s a new mood of realism. They are much more motivated about their work and are working twice as hard.’ Most of them, he thought, were ‘conservatives with a small “c”’.13
Yet all this can be easily exaggerated. Not all students were small ‘c’ conservatives, not everybody had rejected the legacy of the 1960s, and not everybody was as apathetic as the students in The Young Ones. It is true that many universities had lively Tory enclaves, in which young men and women were free to put on their tweed jackets, indulge their hatred of Arthur Scargill and boast about their future in the City. But the general tone of student life was still pretty pinkish, from boycotting South African goods to marching against the bomb. When Sir Keith Joseph took the free-market message to universities, he was invariably bombarded with eggs. Most student unions were dominated by the left, and although the NUS was much less radical than in the 1970s, the presidency always went to a self-described socialist. ‘Conversations revolved around what was “ideologically sound or unsound”,’ recalled one Northern Irish woman who studied at Sunderland Polytechnic: ‘revolutionary communism, vegetarianism, feminism, ageism, racism, sexism. I was lost in all these “isms”.’14
Among most of Malcolm Bradbury’s colleagues, meanwhile, there was a real horror that Britain had shifted to the right. Even in the 1970s only about one in five academics had voted Conservative, the majority of them scientists. To make matters worse, Mrs Thatcher slashed the universities’ budgets by 18 per cent over three years, which meant the disappearance of some 10,000 jobs. Such retrenchment was a challenge to academics’ sense of status, even their sense of history. Most held the Prime Minister personally responsible: when the Royal Society elected her to a fellowship in 1983, no fewer than forty-four existing fellows, including six Nobel Prize winners, formally complained. And among literary intellectuals a passionate hatred of her alleged cruelty and philistinism was taken for granted, from Angela Carter (‘loathsome … a twopenny halfpenny demagogue … meanness and cruelty’) and Dennis Potter (‘repellent … arrogant, divisive and dangerous’) to Jonathan Miller (‘loathsome, repulsive in almost every way’) and Salman Rushdie (‘thin-lipped … jingoist … dark goddesses rule; brightness falls from the air’). No Prime Minister had ever inspired such hatred around the dining tables of Britain’s intellectuals. But when Mrs Thatcher talked of patriotism, private enterprise, aspiration and self-discipline, she was challenging everything they had believed for the last twenty years.15
The radical spirit was not dead, though. Indeed, the fact that Lennon’s survivors felt so beleaguered made them more determined to keep the mood of the 1960s alive. It was there whenever two or three people gathered to lament the viciousness and folly of the capitalist establishment. It was there in the arts centres, women’s groups, radical bookshops and vegetarian cafés that lined the leafy streets of Britain’s gentrifying urban villages. It was there in the pot plants and crockery, the dog-eared copies of Angela Carter and half-read issues of Marxism Today, that were such familiar props of the Radio Four-listening, Guardian-reading, Labour-voting classes. It was there in places like east Oxford, described by one guidebook as a ‘three-dimensional version of the Whole Earth Handbook, a fascinating clutter of alternative lifestyle places, Marxist bookstores, jumble shops, and scruffy natural restaurants’; it was there in Islington, where in early 1982 an impassioned young man called Jeremy Corbyn was selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for the next election.16
As the Observer’s John Naughton noted, this was a landscape of once-handsome Victorian and Edwardian streets, dilapidated after years of decline, now being reinvigorated by young professional couples attracted by the low house prices. The pattern was always the same. First the ‘For Sale’ sign went up. Then:
A Renault 4, complete with Mothercare kiddie-seats, appears, soon to be followed by a rubbish skip. The front door of the house, hitherto a hideous sea-green, suddenly gleams with fresh pastel gloss and brass fittings. A new blue-and-white numberplate proclaims the address. The wall dividing front and back ground-floor rooms is demolished … The formica-clad kitchen furniture is dumped unceremoniously in the skip, to be replaced with pine fittings. Tiny spotlights and huge paper globes abound, where previously centrally mounted bulbs battled unsuccessfully against the gloom. Bookshelves lined with Penguin books appear, accompanied by a hi-fi system. Floorboards are sanded, sealed with polyurethane, covered with straw matting. Large potted plants flourish where chrysanthemums once bloomed …
The place has been transformed, nay gentrified … First one house, then another.
Naughton called it the Muesli Belt, ‘after the staple breakfast diet of the inhabitants’.17
As this might suggest, the earnestness of the muesli-eating classes made them irresistible targets for the less enlightened. Attending a women’s rights festival in a school near London’s King’s Cross in 1981, The Times’s sketchwriter, Frank Johnson, struggled to keep a straight face, especially when offered a songbook that included such titles as ‘Class Struggle Widow’ and the ‘hauntingly entitled’ ‘There’s a Hole in the Condom’, to be sung to the tune of ‘There’s a Hole in the Bucket’. The seminars and workshops, he reported, covered ‘sexism in schools; El Salvador; nuclear weapons; rape; abortion; National Health Service cuts; rent strikes; South Africa; every conceivable form of racism and exploitation; more rape; a spot more abortion; women’s health hazards at work; nursery closures; the need for women not to be browbeaten by capitalism into using deodorants’; and so on. Meanwhile, on the bookstalls ‘all respectable political points of view were represented: Trotskyism, anarchism, Maoism, Sinn Fein, plus ordinary Communism for any passing moderates’.18
Since Johnson worked for The Times, he was obviously a fascist. But even non-fascists saw the potential for comedy in the high-minded left. There are few better portraits of the professional revolutionary than John Sullivan’s BBC1 series Citizen Smith (1977–80), in which ‘Wolfie’ Smith (Robert Lindsay), the beret-wearing, fist-clenching leader of the Tooting Popular Front, is consistently exposed as a self-deluding fantasist. In the diaries of Adrian Mole, meanwhile, the radical classes are constantly sent up, from Adrian’s adored Pandora, who lives in a handsome house with wooden blinds, house plants and towering piles of the Guardian and New Society, to the youth club leader Rick Lemon, who tells Adrian that choosing fruit is an ‘overtly political act’. Rick rejects ‘South African apples, French golden delicious apples, Israeli oranges, Tunisian dates and American grapefruits’, before settling on English rhubarb, even though ‘the shape is phallic, possibly sexist’. In a nice detail, Rick’s girlfriend, Tit, is ‘cramming the trolley with pulses and rice’, allowing Adrian to catch a ‘glimpse of her hairy ankles’.19
Yet for all their comedy value, there was something admirable about the real-life Tits’ commitment to social change. Whenever they moved into an inner-city neighbourhood, bringing with them their much-thumbed copies of The Female Eunuch, Watership Down and The Making of the English Working Class, they threw themselves into the life of the community. Not only did they typically work as teachers, lawyers, social workers and lecturers, they became involved with all kinds of local pressure groups, as ‘conservationists, environmentalists, squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, roads protesters, lobbyists for single mothers or playgroups, protesters against abortion or kerb-crawling’. No sooner had the muesli classes arrived, wrote John Naughton, than ‘the area takes on a new identity. Babysitting circles, residents’ associations, Encounter groups spring up. Sales of the Guardian improve. Local he
ad teachers find themselves coping with a new influx of kids, backed up by articulate parents … The local council is bombarded with petitions – for better street lighting, Pelican crossings, no-go areas for through traffic, and so on.’20
An excellent example came in Bristol, where a young woman called Dawn Primarolo moved with her husband in the last years of the 1970s. The daughter of an engineer at Gatwick Airport, Dawn had been brought up in Croydon, south London. After school she took a secretarial course, married a teacher and ended up working in a law centre in east London. Not-for-profit law centres were classic radical breeding grounds. Established at the beginning of the 1970s, they attracted bright young lawyers, often specializing in areas such as housing and welfare. Dawn was inspired. After moving to Bristol she became a passionate local activist, a member of CND and a school governor. Her long-term dream was to become a lawyer. In the meantime, still only in her mid-20s, she threw herself into a well-known local organization that had seen better days. Run-down, tired and haemorrhaging members, it was crying out for a radical overhaul, and its most celebrated local figure enthusiastically welcomed her youth, energy and crusading passion. His name was Tony Benn. The organization was the local Labour Party.21
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