Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  We’re living on time we’re having to borrow –

  No one knows if we will live to see tomorrow.

  People will say, when they look back at today,

  Those were the good old, bad old days.

  Anthony Newley, ‘The Good Old Bad Old Days’ (1972)

  Howard turns and looks at Barbara, inspecting this heresy. He says: ‘There may be a fashion for failure and negation now. But we don’t have to go along with it.’ ‘Why not?’ asks Barbara, ‘after all, you’ve gone along with every other fashion, Howard.’

  Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (1975)

  RIGSBY: This country gets more like the boiler room on the Titanic every day: confused orders from the bridge, water swirling round our ankles. The only difference is they had a band.

  Eric Chappell, Rising Damp (1977)

  Contents

  Note on the 2013 Edition

  Intro: Seventies: ‘This is the modern world’

  Part One: HANG ON TO YOURSELF 1970-74

  1 The Heath Years: ‘The party on the left is now the party on the right’

  2 Rivals: ‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us’

  3 Environment: ‘All I need is the air that I breathe’

  4 Violence: ‘It’s the only thing that’ll make you see sense’

  5 Unions: ‘I can ruin the government’s plan’

  Part Two: GOLDEN YEARS 1974-76

  6 The Wilson Years: ‘Did you miss me?’

  7 Opposition: ‘I think I got something to say to you’

  8 Obscenity: ‘I wanna take dirty pictures of you’

  9 Nostalgia: ‘Driving me backwards’

  10 Europe: ‘This year we’re off to sunny Spain’

  Part Three: SENSE OF DOUBT 1976-79

  11 The Callaghan Years: ‘Falling apart at the seams’

  12 Race: ‘I was born here just like you’

  13 Fringes: ‘It’s coming some time, so maybe . . .’

  14 Sexualities: ‘The buggers are legal now’

  15 Crisis: ‘Sending out an S.O.S.’

  Outro: Farewell: ‘It’s cold outside’

  References

  Bibliography

  Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  A Classless Society

  About the author

  Copyright

  Note on the 2013 Edition

  When originally conceived, this book was not intended to be the first volume in a series. But that’s how it turned out. It has been followed by Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s and A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s, which continue the story of how the post-war consensus in British politics and society was finally destroyed, to be replaced by a new settlement, based on economic and social liberalism.

  Running alongside that political narrative is another: the emergence of a cultural movement which was largely formed in the 1950s and 1960s. Manifest in film and television, fashion and music, this was initially seen as being primarily the preserve of the working class and of youth and therefore of little serious interest. Over the period described in these books, the phenomenon matured, revealing itself to be sustainable and capable of crossing age and class lines: youth culture became national identity. In doing so it intersected at crucial points with the world of politics, pre-empting, prompting and reflecting wider changes in the country.

  When preparing this edition of the first volume in the trilogy, I have resisted the temptation to go back to the beginning and start again. The one exception is the final chapter. Since this was intended as a stand-alone book, I originally attempted to sketch in, very briefly, subsequent developments up to and including the Falklands War of 1982. Everything described in that chapter has now been treated more fully in Rejoice! Rejoice!, so I have cut much of the detail from here, and added instead a short note concluding on the decade.

  Because the 1970s remain the subject of some dispute. Since the original publication of this book, there have been several other accounts of the period, and as the decade slips deeper into history, there will be further such works, through which a more settled version of the times will become established. It is to be hoped that what emerges will judge the era on its own merits, rather than seeing it only as an appendix to the 1960s or a precursor of the 1980s. In the meantime, the aim of this book, and its sequels, is to tell the story, insofar as it is possible, as it appeared at the time.

  Alwyn W. Turner

  June 2013

  Intro

  Seventies

  ‘This is the modern world’

  The lights were going out all over Britain, and no one was quite sure if we’d see them lit again in our lifetime.

  That, at least, was one version of the period between Edward Heath’s election victory in 1970 and that of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the watershed years that saw the end of one Britain and the first tentative steps towards a new nation. As the amphetamine rush of the ’60s wore off, the country was confronted by a series of crises that set the tone for the remainder of the century and beyond: crises about natural resources, about race and immigration, about terrorism and environmental abuse, about Britain’s position within Europe and that of nationalisms within Britain, crises in fact about everything from street violence to class war and even to paedophile porn. It was a time when the certainties of the post-war political consensus were destroyed and it was unclear what would emerge to replace them.

  For years afterwards, it was a decade that could scarcely be mentioned without condemnation, conjuring up images of social breakdown, power cuts, the three-day week, rampant bureaucracy and all-powerful trade unions. And then came the inevitable correction. In 2004 the New Economics Foundation constructed an analysis of national performance, based not on the traditional criterion of gross domestic product, but on what it called the measure of domestic progress, incorporating such factors as crime, family stability, pollution and inequality of income. And it concluded that Britain was a happier country in 1976 than it had been in the thirty years since.

  For at least one generation, this was already common knowledge. To be young in that dawn might not have been very heaven, but sometimes it didn’t seem too far off, despite the privations. The writer Philip Cato, who grew up in Rugeley in the West Midlands, commented that ‘try as I might, I really cannot remember any truly bad times’. Even when his father, a postman, became involved in a bitter and unsuccessful seven-week-long strike in 1971, it was far from a disaster as seen through a child’s eyes. ‘I was well chuffed,’ remembered Cato, ‘because I was entitled to free school dinners which meant I was at the head of the queue in the canteen, clutching my little purple ticket with all the other kids whose dads were on the dole.’ Similarly, the record-breaking long, hot summer of 1976 may have caused all manner of problems for the country’s farmers, but for schoolchildren it was cherished as the time when head teachers were forced to admit publicly, in the first assemblies of the autumn term, that smoking actually existed, issuing warnings to be careful when disposing of cigarette butts.

  By the time of that NEF research, the 1970s had also undergone a cultural reappraisal. No longer ‘the decade that taste forgot’, it was now seen as a golden age of British television, of popular fiction, of low-tech toys and of club football. The British film industry might have been in decline, but it was still capable of scaling new peaks with Get Carter, Performance, The Wicker Man. Even punk rock, which seemed at the time to be as limited in its commercial impact as skiffle had been twenty years earlier, had emerged as the only global rival to hip hop. Who would have predicted that in the twenty-first century, the legacy of the Sex Pistols would be more influential on new bands than that of the Beatles? Or that the prime minister would one
day walk into his party’s conference to the sounds of Sham 69 singing ‘If the Kids Are United’, as Tony Blair did in 2005? These things have become as significant in perceptions of the period as are the memories of political crises.

  To some extent this is less a re-evaluation than a recognition of how significant they had been even at the time. In 1978 London Weekend Television launched a new series, The South Bank Show, to replace its existing arts programme, Aquarius. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the new show announced that it was to cover ‘the consumed arts’, a term that embraced ‘cinema, rock, paperbacks and even television’. It was an acknowledgement of how far the revolution in popular culture had come, and the extent to which it now permeated everyday life.

  The greatest impact was made by television itself. The first Social Trends survey showed that in 1971 the average Briton watched 18.6 hours of television a week; by 1978 that figure had risen to 22 hours. And this was a shared culture, reaching the whole of society, so that over 95 per cent of all social classes acknowledged that they spent a considerable amount of their leisure time as viewers. There were still only three channels available, but between them they produced that decade both Britain’s best-loved comedy act in Morecambe and Wise and its most revered sitcoms – Rising Damp, Fawlty Towers, The Good Life – as well as the great years of Coronation Street and Doctor Who and classic drama series from I, Claudius to The Sweeney. The growing strength of television was allied to the rise of colour broadcasting, still a novelty at the beginning of the decade, though the Ogdens did own a colour set in Coronation Street; sadly, it was repossessed because they failed to keep up the payments, leaving Hilda to testify how it had revolutionized her viewing: ‘I loved that set, Stan. Everybody looked so bright and happy in colour. Even Sandy Gall.’ It was not until 1977 that the number of colour sets exceeded that of black and white, and they remained something of a status symbol. ‘I’m the proud owner of a colour television,’ declared Rigsby in Rising Damp, refusing to turn on for a test match against the West Indies. ‘I’m not watching something that looks the same in black and white.’

  The messages carried by television were of central importance, even if they were not always explicit. A BBC survey in 1970 showed that less than half its audience regarded the Corporation as being ‘always impartial’, with some younger respondents pointing to coverage of Vietnam and Northern Ireland as the cause of their disillusion, while others saw excessive liberalism at work. But when it came to the really popular shows, the ones that were consumed by the huge audiences that BBC1 and ITV could then command, there was no doubt about their distortions. The broadcasters could still claim to offer a window on the world, and yet, when the biggest political issue of the day was the role of the trade unions, it is extraordinary how few union members – let alone officials – were depicted in the popular dramas and comedies of the ’70s. While politicians of both left and right were quick to point to instances of perceived bias in news and current affairs, the real impact came elsewhere, in programmes that were not then deemed to be truly worthy of notice, but which have survived longer in the national consciousness than an edition of World in Action could ever achieve.

  In terms of overt political reporting, the decade’s major development came with the rise of the Sun newspaper, bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1969 and initially seen as a downmarket version of the Daily Mirror. As its sales rose to eclipse those of its elder rival, and its tone became increasingly aggressive, so it changed the nature of the popular press; its switch from supporting the Labour Party to backing the Conservatives proved to be a significant indicator of social change.

  Less remarked upon, but also crucial to the period, was the phone-in radio show, which became the first interactive media format, allowing ordinary members of the public to participate directly in broadcasting. Although it was pioneered by BBC Radio Nottingham in 1968, the phone-in was to be exploited most heavily by the new independent stations. In 1971 the Conservative government introduced legislation to permit the launch of commercial radio and found the proposal attacked by the Labour Party, whose commitment to state broadcasting had resulted in opposition to commercial television in the 1950s and the crushing of pirate radio in the ’60s. Now the Labour spokesman Ivor Richard warned that this new development would lead to the ‘trivialization of broadcasting’, and proceedings in the Commons were temporarily brought to a halt by protests led by Eric Heffer. Nonetheless the legislation was duly passed, and in 1973 London’s LBC became the first legally approved commercial station in the country, with a schedule that relied heavily upon phone-ins. Informed by the newspapers they consumed, the listeners could now, to some extent at least, set the news agenda, establishing a circuit of feedback that has continued to develop. The result was not to everyone’s taste: ‘The more I hear commercial radio the more repellent I find it,’ shuddered the comedian Kenneth Williams. ‘The din created by the half-baked talking to the half-educated is horrible.’

  Even so, the advent of the phone-in was a critical step towards the democratization of the airwaves. Its catchphrase was ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’ and it changed the nature of political debate. Revealing more sharply than ever before the divided nature of the country, it provided a voice for those who considered themselves to be part of the hitherto silent majority. There was some doubt how accurate that appellation really was – the numbers of those signing Mary Whitehouse’s petitions against the degradation of television, for example, were massively outweighed by those who watched the shows of which she so heartily disapproved – but it nonetheless became part of the political vocabulary of the times. At the end of the ’60s Enoch Powell had responded to the controversy caused by his speeches on immigration by talking about ‘the staggering and dangerous gap between what is known by personal experience to a few millions of people and what it seems possible to bring home to the small minority – of course it’s bound to be a small minority – who speak and write’. The phone-in went some way towards bridging that gap.

  And, to a large extent, that gap was the story of the decade, for this was the era in which politicians lost the confidence of the public. Dismayed that their elected representatives did not seem to be responding to their experience, the people sought other means of articulating their discontent so that, to take the vexed issue of race, the National Front began to look as though it might rival the Liberal Party as the third force in politics, while at the same time the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were capable of staging the largest political rallies that the century had yet seen. And the clashes on the streets between these two forces, and between them and the police, added to the sense of impending social collapse.

  Indeed it sometimes seemed as though Britain was effectively talking itself into having a crisis, as though it somehow felt more comfortable with its back to the wall, imbibing the spirit of the Blitz. Having spent the whole decade making its own flesh creep by telling horror stories about how bad things were, steeping itself in a popular culture that frequently verged on the apocalyptic, the nation finally found its nightmares coming true with the winter of discontent in early 1979. A T-junction seemed to have been reached, where continuing in the same direction was no longer an option, and the only issue that really had to be resolved was whether the country would take a sharp turn to the left or to the right, following the prospectus either of Tony Benn or of Enoch Powell. Conventional political wisdom at the time saw the former as being the more likely; all the indicators from popular culture suggested the latter.

  This book is an attempt to depict both the high politics and the low culture of those times. The stories of the tabloid press, of soaps and sitcoms and of Radio One are represented alongside those of Westminster and Whitehall, because that was how the new world of the mass media reflected the nation’s own experience to itself. Harold and Margaret were important, but so too were George and Mildred; the state of the national football teams was as much a cause of controversy as the state of the national economy; pop music
ians had an influence upon the public just as politicians did. This is not therefore an insider’s account, but rather one which – to use that phrase from The South Bank Show – considers politics as one of the consumed arts. And it is largely seen from the partial, subjective positions of the consumers.

  The book is structured in three sections, broadly corresponding to the three prime ministers of the era: Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. Each section starts with an overview of the period, followed by a series of chapters addressing contemporary issues. These latter are not entirely chronological but, it is hoped, will explore thematically a decade when it sometimes appeared that the nation was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  PART ONE

  HANG ON TO YOURSELF

  1970–1974

  Looking ahead, I said I thought one of our difficulties was that the Tories seemed to be thinking of the Seventies whereas the Labour Party looked as if it was just at the end of its period of office and didn’t have much to say beyond that.

  Tony Benn (1970)

  Affluence is essential to Western societies, not an optional extra: without it, or the hope of it, they no longer possess any basis for social harmony.

  Martin Pawley, The Private Future (1973)

  JACK REGAN: ‘There’s an old Tory saying: switch off something now.’

  Tony Marsh, The Sweeney (1974)

  1

  The Heath Years

  ‘The party on the left is now the party on the right’

  SHIRLEY: According to your master plan, you should have swept to power in 1967.

  WOLFIE: I couldn’t reckon on England winning the World Cup, could I? That sort of victory gives the proletariat morale.

  John Sullivan, Citizen Smith (1979)

  The swinging London of the ’60s has given way to a London as gloomy as the city described by Charles Dickens, with the once imperial streets of the capital of a vast Empire now sparsely lighted like the slummy streets of a former British colonial township.