Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The new Act attempted to address such concerns by introducing a system of fair rents to both council housing and private tenants. It was argued that the existing system forced tenants in privately rented accommodation, however great their need, to pay for those in council homes, regardless of their economic conditions, and that this was manifestly unfair, since it directed subsidies to buildings rather than human beings. Logical though the assertion might be, however, it was undermined by a perception that the Tories didn’t actually believe in social housing at all, as demonstrated by their 1970 initiative to sell council homes to tenants, and by Norman Tebbit’s declaration in the same year: ‘Ideally I would like to see councils out of the business of housing completely. After all, if you can rent a TV set or a car, what is immoral about renting a house?’

  Heath had undoubtedly entered Downing Street with every intention of turning around the ship of state. ‘God knows we needed a captain,’ novelist Peter Van Greenaway had recently written. ‘We tacked from left to right under a succession of first mates drunk and incapable on conference wine bottled in Brighton and Blackpool. The ship was adrift and most of the crew didn’t give a damn – there were some who’d watch it sink rather than cross a demarcation line to plug the hole.’ But the events of the first half of his stewardship demonstrated beyond argument that Heath was not going to be that captain. Industrial disruption was increasing, inflation was rising, the nation was ill at ease and then, in January 1972, the unemployment figures topped 1 million, the worst seasonal figure since the war. For the first time in the century, Prime Minister’s Questions had to be suspended, amidst scenes of parliamentary pandemonium. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ shouted Dennis Skinner as he shook his fist in Heath’s face. ‘You’re better fitted to cross the Channel and suck President Pompidou’s backside.’

  Confronted with a return to mass unemployment (the great fear of Heath’s generation, who had lived through the 1930s), with a work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, where the workforce were attracting widespread support for their refusal to accept the bankruptcy of the company, and with the bitter taste of defeat at Saltley still in its mouth, the government scrambled to abandon its previous positions. In March 1972 Tony Benn noted in his diary that John Davies, the trade and industry secretary, ‘made a great U-turn speech on the budget in which he totally withdrew everything he had ever said about lame ducks, and the House just roared with laughter’. In November the final breach was made with the announcement of a ninety-day statutory freeze on pay and prices, a policy that had hitherto been explicitly ruled out. Enoch Powell, Heath’s greatest enemy on his own backbenches, adopted the role of the small boy pointing out the Emperor’s intellectual nakedness; had the prime minister, he asked, ‘taken leave of his senses?’

  It was, even by Powell’s standards, a ferocious attack, couched in barely parliamentary language, but he was unrepentant: ‘It is fatal for any government, party or person to seek to govern in direct opposition to the principles with which they were entrusted with the right to govern.’ And while, as Norman Tebbit recalled, Tory MPs ‘rallied reluctantly to the government flag’, Powell’s intervention struck a chord; these were ‘the words that were in the mind of many of us’. Margaret Thatcher was to echo the sentiment: ‘He was publicly cold-shouldered, but many privately agreed with him.’ The seeds of future discontent were sown here.

  And then things got worse. In October 1973 Syria and Egypt launched a coordinated invasion of Israel in what became known as the Yom Kippur War, that being the Jewish holy day on which the attack started. The conflict lasted for under three weeks, but its ramifications were to be felt into the next century.

  Britain’s immediate response, set by the foreign secretary Alec Douglas-Home, was to suspend arms sales to all the nations involved, seeking a position of neutrality. It wasn’t a policy that enjoyed all-party support: Harold Wilson urged solidarity with Israel (‘a democratic socialist country’), whilst there were even a few in his party who supported the cause of the Arab peoples, with Labour MP Andrew Faulds arguing that ‘it is Israel’s intransigence which has made the fourth round of the Arab–Israeli conflict inevitable’.

  It was indeed yet another phase in a long-running dispute but, unusually in modern times, the UK had this time played its cards correctly. The Arab nations, perceiving yet again a pro-Israeli bias in the West, determined that they would use their economic muscle to redress historical grievances. ‘All Arab Oil Exporting Countries,’ announced notices in the newspapers, ‘shall forthwith cut their production respectively by no less than 5 per cent of the September production, and maintain the same rate of reduction each month thereafter until the Israeli forces are fully withdrawn from all Arab territories occupied during the June 1967 war, and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people are restored.’ The statement singled out the USA and the Netherlands as being especially pro-Israel, but Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi oil minister who suddenly found himself the most powerful man in the world, took care to exempt Britain from the worst effects of the new restrictions, citing it as having been a friendly nation ever since Douglas-Home had called in 1970 for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it illegally occupied.

  There were a few politicians prepared to celebrate the Arabs’ action (‘the world underdog has at last risen’, exulted the Labour foreign spokesperson, Lord Kennet, before being obliged to apologize), but mostly the attitude was a sudden, shocked sobriety as the country snapped out of its hangover from the ’60s. Because, although oil supplies were still reaching Britain, the price for crude oil rose steeply from $2 a barrel in January to $7 in December, adding massively to the inflationary pressures already present in the British economy. And, to exacerbate matters, the miners began another overtime ban on 12 November 1973, pursuing a pay claim in defiance of the government’s wages policy, and squeezing energy supplies still further.

  Two days later, even as the country took a holiday to celebrate the wedding of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips, and as the worst trade deficit to date was announced and the lending rate rose to a record high of 13 per cent, there dawned Ted Heath’s fifth and final state of emergency. This time it was deadly serious, the longest-running such emergency since 1926. Street lighting was ordered to be cut by half, electric heating was forbidden in workplaces, a 50 mph speed limit was imposed on motorways, and floodlighting was banned at sports events; the latter prompted the football league to break a taboo by introducing Sunday matches to replace those on weekday evenings: ‘We are still against the principle,’ said league secretary Alan Hardaker. ‘But it is obvious that clubs are losing spectators and this is one way to help them.’

  As the crisis dragged on over the winter, further restrictions were announced, including a 10.30 p.m. curfew on television broadcasts that generated a great deal of hostility. (In practice, it worked out that BBC and ITV alternated between 10.20 and 10.30 closedowns, in an attempt to limit the power surge as the entire nation switched on its kettles.) And when the TV was on, there was no escaping the despondency. ‘Keep your fingers crossed against a power cut tonight,’ advised the Times television listings, with a note of heavy sarcasm. ‘You can then watch an extensive, exhaustive, investigative and no doubt authoritative Energy Crisis Special.’ The two-and-a-half-hour show didn’t set many pulses racing. Even the most remote context offered little relief; a January 1974 episode of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, a sitcom set in India in 1945, depicted a British Army camp blacked out as electricity and telephone workers go on strike in protest at punkawallahs being made redundant.

  Britain, of course, was not uniquely hit by the oil crisis. West Germany outlawed Sunday driving, while Holland, having all oil supplies from the Middle East cut off, appealed for help to the other members of the EEC in the vain hope that they might share their allowances; with no such solidarity having been received, the country introduced petrol rationing, a move that proved too far even for Heath, though ration books were distributed just in case.
(The first to arrive in the hands of the general public were those stolen by a gang of thieves, who broke into an Eltham sub-post office for the purpose of being first on their block with the coupons). Despite such measures by other countries, though, nowhere were the difficulties seen in such traumatic terms as they were in Britain. Partly this was the result of the industrial action by the miners, soon to be compounded by an overtime ban by power engineers and a rail workers’ strike; partly it was because of the state of unease induced by the spread of the Irish civil war to the mainland – bombs were going off at the rate of one a night in London over Christmas 1973; but mostly it was due to the loss of nerve by a government so used to living in a state of panic that it now seemed determined to enlist the whole nation in its struggles, perhaps in the hope that the spirit of the Blitz might yet be rekindled. (The French magazine Paris Match echoed the thought by talking of the mood of the nation as ‘the three-day spirit’.)

  During the 1972 miners’ strike, the government had urged the nation to restrict energy use at home with the slogan ‘Think before you switch on’; now it was sounding even more desperate: ‘SOS – Switch Off Something now,’ it pleaded in full-page newspaper adverts. ‘Please heat only one room,’ it added. ‘If you don’t, power cuts could soon be blacking out whole areas for hours on end.’ Energy minister Patrick Jenkin even suggested that everyone should brush their teeth in the dark, until the resultant outcry made it clear that there were limits beyond which even the British people could not be pushed, and he was forced to climb down: ‘The suggestion I made on radio the other day was not a practical one,’ he was heard to mumble, as he tucked into his humble pie. The obsession with controlling consumption at the most trivial level extended as far as telling people not to iron underwear and to use a clothesline to dry clothes ‘when the weather’s fine’. This was, in short, a government in crisis, an administration that – uniquely in the industrialized world – felt the necessity to put its country’s industry on a three-day working week, starting on 2 January 1974 (New Year’s Day had newly been designated as a bank holiday in England and Wales).

  The effect on the population was mixed. In Clay Cross, Derbyshire, the council responded by defying Heath and keeping street lights on full power: ‘Why should we help the government?’ asked council leader David Skinner. ‘Why bother saving electricity? It only saves the government talking to the men who deserve a better deal.’ A similar attitude was evident in a February 1974 episode of the TV sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, written and recorded as near to transmission as possible. ‘We’re helping the miners,’ cried Alf Garnett’s daughter, Rita, as she and her socialist husband Mike rushed around the house, turning on every electrical appliance they could find, and launching a counter-slogan to the government’s SOS: ‘Don’t save fuel – use it up!’

  In general, however, the attitude seemed to be a determination to eat, drink and be as merry as possible, in the face of adversity. ‘Bad news all the time,’ noted the National Theatre director, Peter Hall, in his diary. ‘An economic slump threatens. The bomb scares go on. The miners continue their go-slow. The trains are in chaos. Meantime the nation is on a prodigal pre-Christmas spending spree.’ There were reports that sales of wines and spirits were hitting an all-time high for early December, while bicycle shops were also experiencing a huge increase in business, and chef Jennifer Paterson was discovering that nothing rounded off a blacked-out dinner party quite so well as setting light to a crêpe Suzette. And for those too young to worry about being laid off from work, Christmas 1973 was actually a very happy time. The use of candles, albeit arising from necessity, simply meant fun if you were a child, and there was even the possibility that the start of the next school term might be delayed due to the crisis (sadly, it was not to be). It was also the high point of glitter pop, with the top five singles including records by Wizzard, Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust and, at #1, Slade with what was to become the best-loved song of the era, ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’. ‘We were right in the middle of a disastrous period politically. There were power cuts every day and half the work force seemed to be on strike,’ remembered the band’s singer and lyricist, Noddy Holder. ‘“Merry Xmas” was a happy uplifting record. I’m sure that’s part of the reason why so many people liked it.’ His contemporaries too were busy producing foot-stomping singalongs delivered in ever more extraordinary costumes, as though they wished to be the antidote to the gathering gloom.

  But the music industry was itself hit hard by the crisis. Californian-born Russell Mael was the singer with the band Sparks, who – after two unsuccessful albums in America – had finally got their big break, signing with a British company, to their great joy: ‘We’d moved to England and this was our dream. We were always Anglophiles.’ But when the group came to record Kimono My House, their first album for Island Records, they were surprised to find that sessions in the studio were severely curtailed by the power cuts. ‘We thought, okay so you just work around that,’ Mael recalled, but as the recording schedule dragged on, they were told that worse might yet come: ‘Well lads, even if the record does get finished, there may not be enough vinyl to go around.’ Since vinyl was an oil product, there were fears of shortages, and some of the leading record companies announced that they would issue no new releases in January 1974. (It was from this time that records became noticeably thinner.) The Sparks album did emerge in due course, but even then the problems continued; as the single ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’ entered the charts, the band turned up to record their appearance on Top of the Pops and were promptly thrown off the show for not having Musicians’ Union clearance. With blackouts, a vinyl famine and union disputes to contend with, and remembering too the experience of shopping by candlelight during a power cut, Mael was left somewhat bemused: ‘It wasn’t part of our dream of coming to Britain.’

  Having already seen its economy become something of a laughing stock in Western Europe, Britain now found in the winter of 1973–74 that its reputation had fallen so low that it could be patronized by its former colonies. Idi Amin, who had seized power in Uganda in 1971, was still at this stage regarded more as a comic buffoon than as the brutal dictator he actually was, but he had become for the British public the best-known ruler of an African nation, thanks to his expulsion of Asians from the country and to his headline-grabbing publicity coups. In December 1973 he wrote privately to Heath, regretting ‘the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’, but reassuring him that: ‘I have decided to contribute 10,000 Ugandan shillings from my savings, and I am convinced that many Ugandans will donate generously to rescue their innocent friends who are becoming victims of sharp tax increases, tighter credit squeeze and a possible pay squeeze.’ The British government declined to respond, so Amin upped the ante by publicly initiating a Save Britain Fund to ‘save and assist our former colonial masters from economic catastrophe’. The place chosen for the fund’s launch was deliberately symbolic: in 1893 Kampala Hill had seen the Union Flag raised for the first time in Uganda; now it witnessed an auction that raised £2,400 for the old country. Dean Acheson’s old comment about Britain having lost an empire but having yet to find a role seemed ever more apposite. Or perhaps, suggested despairing commentators, Britain had indeed found a role, this time as ‘the sick man of Europe’.

  In this context, there were many who saw ahead only an ever greater crisis, and who reached for the most terrifying historical parallel they could find: Germany in the pre-dawn of the Nazis. Environment secretary Geoffrey Rippon commented in December that Britain was ‘on the same course as the Weimar government, with runaway inflation and ultra-high employment at the end’. Sadly, it was not even an original observation, with Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman having made the same comparison in 1970: ‘the situation was like the early days of the Weimar Republic, he could see democracy coming to an end’. And the image was to recur throughout the decade; in 1977 the revolutionary communist Tariq Ali, responding to an ad hominem attack by a colum
nist in The Times, invoked it yet again: ‘If Bernard Levin were to visit some of the more deprived areas of the midlands, the north-east or London, he would be able to get a smell of Weimar in the air.’

  No mere politician, however, captured the sense of decadence and decline that descended on Britain in the latter part of Heath’s premiership quite as comprehensively as did David Bowie, the most significant figure to emerge in the artistic world during that period. Having spent eight years desperately trying to become a star by any means at his disposal, but with only the novelty hit of ‘Space Oddity’ in 1969 to sustain him, Bowie went for broke in 1972, relaunching himself as the latest and last rock messiah in his alter ego of Ziggy Stardust. His first appearance on Top of the Pops with his new backing band, the Spiders From Mars, was to become enshrined in music mythology as the high point of that programme’s long history. Clad in a sequinned jumpsuit and platform boots, with his arm draped lovingly around his beautiful guitarist, Mick Ronson, the frighteningly thin and self-proclaimed bisexual Bowie told his tale of salvation in the shape of a ‘Starman’ who’d ‘like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds’. There wasn’t a member of his instantly acquired following who didn’t recognize that he was the subject of the song as well as its narrator: he looked and sounded like nothing else on Earth.