Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  1974–1976

  While everything, all forms of social organization, broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives, as if nothing fundamental was happening. It was amazing how determined, how stubborn, how self-renewing, were the attempts to lead an ordinary life.

  Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

  FLETCHER: Do you know this country is on the verge of economic ruin? This once-great nation of ours is teetering on the brink of an abyss.

  Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, Porridge (1975)

  Goodbye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you.

  Wall Street Journal (1975)

  6

  The Wilson Years

  ‘Did you miss me?’

  Do you think a Labour government these days can have a member who’s rumoured to be a Red? Not any more it can’t. You know what the Party’s like these days – it’s more conservative than the bloody Tories.

  Graham Lord, The Spider and the Fly (1974)

  Kramer had grown tired of London which was no longer the swinging city of the sixties. All the best people had gone. Heading for the next fashionable hot spot. London, and indeed the whole of England, was on the scrapheap. It reminded him of Eastern Europe. Creeping socialism, high taxes, austerity, cold porridge and power cuts.

  Paul Bryers, Hollow Target (1976)

  Democracy is dead. Take what you need.

  graffito in Kentish Town, London (1974)

  A Sunday Times cartoon by Calman on the weekend after the February 1974 general election sarcastically showed a man celebrating the results: ‘Hurrah! Everyone’s won!’ The rest of the world was even less impressed. ‘The Sick Man of Europe seems to have become even sicker overnight,’ noted the Austrian newspaper Kurier, and it had a point. After all, the great virtue of having a first-past-the-post electoral system, rather than one of the various forms of proportional representation favoured by most democratic nations, was supposed to be that it produced a decisive result. Yet here was an election, fought in the most dire circumstances since the Second World War, and the result was the very definition of indecision.

  The response from the electorate had reflected the gravity of the situation, setting a new record for the number of votes cast, and registering the highest percentage turn-out since the 1950s, but the outcome was a hung parliament, with no party commanding a majority of seats. The Conservatives had 297 MPs, while the Labour Party had 301, even though the Tories actually achieved a slightly higher proportion of the votes. Elsewhere, the Liberals turned in their highest post-war level of support (nearly 20 per cent of those who voted) and in the south of England, excluding London, they even managed to outpoll Labour; their reward was an increase from six to a plainly unfair fourteen seats. For four days, as Edward Heath attempted in vain to stitch together a deal with one of the minor parties, Westminster hung in limbo. And on the fifth day, Harold Wilson rose again.

  One thing was certain: Heath had gambled and lost. For all the talk of the miners bringing down the government, it was he who had chosen to call an election, and he who had failed, his negotiating hand forced by his own rhetoric and by a fear that, as Conservative MP Piers Dixon calculated: ‘If the government gave way, the Tory Party would disintegrate and Enoch Powell would take over.’ From the miners’ side, Joe Gormley was emphatic: ‘it was not a political dispute but an industrial one’, he insisted. ‘It was not the miners, but Ted Heath who brought himself down.’ In 1972 it had clearly been the union that had won; now it was Heath who surrendered almost before battle was joined. ‘The fact that Britain seemed almost ungovernable at the time,’ reflected erstwhile Liberal Peter Hain, ‘had more to do with the Tories’ policies than any desire by the unions to overthrow a constitutionally elected government.’

  As in 1970, however, the incumbent prime minister had had some cause for optimism, for it was the government that had been odds-on favourites to win. Bookmakers William Hill were offering 4–7 on a Conservative victory in mid-January, with Labour out on 5–4; three weeks later, after the election had been called, Joe Coral were still quoting exactly the same odds. But, again as in 1970, there was a shift in voting intentions during the course of the campaign, with Wilson apparently convincing sufficient numbers that he represented a slightly safer pair of hands. He was not, though, endorsed with much enthusiasm by the press. The Daily Mirror did its duty with an election-day headline that had vague echoes of wartime – FOR ALL OUR TOMORROWS VOTE LABOUR TODAY – but the Sun, which, under its new owner and jockey (Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb respectively), had recently galloped ahead of the chasing pack to rival the Mirror as Fleet Street’s front-runner, broke with tradition and said that it was reluctantly going to support Heath. Significantly, it added a caveat that if Labour had James Callaghan as leader, and even more so had it been Roy Jenkins, then the position might well have been different.

  Amongst the electorate, there was scarcely more passion for Wilson, despite some appearances to the contrary. At one of his final rallies, it was reported, he had to fight his way through a massive crowd of well-wishers even to get into the Fairfield Halls, Croydon. It wasn’t until after the election that a letter corrected what might have been a misleading impression: ‘I must point out,’ wrote Jeffrey McKenzie of the London County Council Tramways Trust, ‘that the “hundreds of people outside” were not waiting for the political meeting but for the film programme Trams, Trams, Trams in the main concert hall.’ Wilson, it transpired, had attracted an audience of just 450 people, while some 1,700 others – seemingly unimpressed by this life-or-death struggle over Britain’s future – were blithely gathering to celebrate the transport of the past. As W.H. Auden once pointed out, even the most momentous event ‘takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’.

  Of the two supporting players who had upstaged their principals in 1970, one at least was absent from centre stage. In November 1973 Tony Benn had gone to a Labour Party fête in Ilkeston, Derbyshire where a constituency worker, appearing in the guise of a fortune-teller named Madame Eva, had looked into her crystal ball for him. ‘You are going to have a great shock in February,’ she predicted. ‘You are going to get the blame for something you haven’t done. Then in September, it will be all right again.’ Displaying that vein of superstition that so often accompanies a man’s love of gadgets and technology, Benn couldn’t rid his mind of her warning. ‘This woman’s wretched words preyed on me all winter,’ he wrote later, ‘and then as the election got nearer and nearer, I became convinced we were going to lose, and I was going to get the blame.’ As it happened, despite a prominent role during the early days of the miners’ dispute, Benn was not a very visible figure in the national media coverage, save in the Tories’ rhetoric, where he remained a bogeyman. The Labour campaign chose not to focus upon him.

  Enoch Powell, on the other hand, set new standards by which to judge those who wish to be considered a political maverick. His long-nurtured hatred of Heath now reached fruition, as he derided the very calling of the election, and sensationally announced that he himself would not be standing as a candidate. I QUIT SAYS ENOCH, proclaimed the front page of the Sun, overshadowing the announcement of the election itself. The paper made the now customary comparison with de Gaulle, but also pointed out that, even at sixty-one, he was younger than Churchill, Attlee and Macmillan were when they became prime minister; a comeback was still possible. The fact that he was not even contesting the election did nothing to prevent him from making speeches, or from providing the one dramatic moment of the campaign. Back in 1966, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, the most famous heckle in rock & roll history – a solitary cry of ‘Judas!’ – had greeted Bob Dylan’s appearance with an electric band. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Dylan had exclaimed, after a shocked pause. ‘You’re a liar!’ Now, just over the border in Shipley, Yorkshire, the same insult (‘Judas!’) was flung at Powell as he denounced the Tory government for having taken Britain into membership of the EEC. His
response was even more withering than Dylan’s had been; with arm outstretched, his finger pointing out the offender, he hissed: ‘Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice.’

  Despite the authoritative put-down, the heckler spoke the truth. For Powell had followed his retirement as an MP with heavy hints in public that he might break entirely with the Conservatives, while in private he was secretly keeping Wilson’s inner circle fully informed of his movements, urging them to dovetail their own campaigning with his own. Indeed he later claimed that he had been discussing his strategy with the leader of the opposition since the previous June, chatting over the urinals in a House of Commons lavatory: ‘There were half a dozen meetings with Wilson in the loo,’ he said. And then, in the final week of the campaign, he detonated his ultimate weapon, revealing that he had already cast his vote by postal ballot, and that he had voted for the Labour Party. He stopped just short of calling on his followers to do the same, but that was the clear implication of his words and actions.

  Tories were thus entitled to feel betrayed, and all the more so when the election results were pored over: while there was a national swing from Conservative to Labour of around 1 per cent, that in the West Midlands was 4 per cent, rising to 10 per cent in the immediate vicinity of Powell’s old constituency. The authority that he wielded regionally was truly extraordinary. Even more so, however, was a subsequent in-depth analysis of voting patterns, which suggested that the huge vote for the Liberals was also attributable in part to his intervention, with many Tories unable to follow him all the way across the political spectrum and instead stopping off halfway: ‘There seems little doubt,’ wrote the authors of the study, ‘that many of the six million Liberal voters of February 1974 might have preferred to cast a vote for Enoch Powell but, faute de mieux, “compromised” by voting for Jeremy Thorpe.’

  There was some irony in such electoral behaviour. For the issue on which Powell broke with the Tories was Europe – so intense was his objection to EEC membership that he was seduced by the Labour promise of holding a referendum on the question – and yet the Liberals, who benefited from his apostasy, were the most Europhiliac of the major parties. In the event, Britain’s position in Europe was entirely unaffected by his actions, but he could, and did, claim to have destroyed Heath’s premiership: ‘I put him in and I took him out,’ he boasted. And of the Labour governments that resulted from the two 1974 elections, he said that he viewed them ‘as one might look on one’s children. You may not admire them, or even like them very much, but you cannot escape the fact that without you they would not be there.’

  Within that Liberal vote there were also many making a positive decision in support of what appeared to be an intriguing new development in British politics. The party’s assembly in 1966 had seen the emergence of the Young Liberals as a radical force, submitting motions that called for workers’ control in industry, for a US withdrawal from Vietnam, for Britain to leave NATO and for an expanded EEC to take in the communist states of Eastern Europe. This was the voice of the ’60s student generation, outflanking Labour on the left, and although the leadership never fell under its spell, an alliance was forged in the new decade between the Young Liberals and grass-roots activists in the urban North, united by attitudes that were a long way removed from the slightly rakish style of the Old Etonian party leader, Jeremy Thorpe. This contradiction seemed of little concern to the public, who instead responded enthusiastically to the sight of a reinvigorated party; in 1972 Cyril Smith overturned a Labour majority in Rochdale to record the first of five Liberal by-election gains in little more than a year. Smith, by virtue of his enormous size and his blunt manner, rapidly became one of the most recognizable MPs in Westminster and a useful, if sometimes infuriating, foil to Thorpe. He was the closest thing that the Liberals had to a Benn or a Powell, a man who spoke his mind heedless of consequences; as the country’s problems mounted during the winter of 1973–74, Smith issued an open letter demanding that Thorpe ‘come down off the fence’, and asking: ‘When the hell are we going to do something?’

  The split personality of the Liberal Party became crucial in the immediate aftermath of the February election, as Heath tried to woo them into a coalition government. Thorpe was keen to accept an invitation that would probably have seen him installed as home secretary, but the party was disinclined to act as a life-support system for his ambition, and insisted that the price of any deal must be the introduction of proportional representation for Westminster elections. Unable to provide such a pledge, Heath turned next to the Ulster Unionists, who had traditionally taken the Tory whip but whom he had alienated, first with direct rule and then with the power-sharing agreement struck at Sunningdale. Their price too – the abandonment of Sunningdale – proved beyond him, and he finally accepted defeat, making way for the return of a slightly surprised Wilson to Downing Street at the beginning of March. ‘It is,’ snorted the actor Kenneth Williams, ‘an unsatisfactory and muddled result of a stupid election fought on unsatisfactory and muddled issues.’

  Much had changed in the ten years since Wilson had first won power. The optimism of 1964 was but a distant memory, long replaced by a grim fatalism. The three-day week and the miners’ strike were still in place (though television had been given special dispensation to resume normal broadcasting, so that politicians be not deprived of the oxygen of publicity), and the old triumphalist, presidential style, derived from John F. Kennedy, would clearly be inappropriate in this bleak new world. This time therefore, Wilson resolved, he would occupy a different role in government. Reaching for his book of football metaphors, he decided that while in the ’60s he ‘had to occupy almost every position on the field, goalkeeper, defence, attack’, he would now play at centre-back, ‘letting his ministers score the goals’.

  Coincidentally, in the real world of football, the English FA was also staging a momentous changing of the guard at exactly the same moment, the state of the national game having declined steadily since that 1970 defeat to West Germany. In 1973 England were obliged to play in a qualifying competition for the World Cup for the first time in twelve years (previously they had been excused, first as hosts and then as champions), but, at least on paper, it didn’t look like too difficult a proposition. Drawn in a group of three nations with Wales and Poland, however, England underperformed, achieving a win and a draw against Wales and losing away to Poland. That left the final fixture, against Poland at Wembley, to decide who topped the group and thereby progressed to the tournament proper.

  Played in October 1973, as the first implications of the fallout from the Yom Kippur War were becoming evident, the match has gone down in English footballing folklore as a disaster to be mentioned in almost the same breath as the defeats by the USA in 1950 and by Hungary in 1953. England needed a win, but despite having thirty-five shots at goal, compared to Poland’s two, emerged with just a 1–1 draw; not unreasonably, the man of the match was the Polish keeper, Jan Tomaszewski (referred to in advance as ‘a clown’ by Brian Clough, a man not known for bottling up his opinions and who had earlier that week sensationally resigned as manager of Derby County). For the first time since England had deigned to recognize the World Cup in 1950, they had failed to qualify for the tournament. And in March 1974 the FA sacked Sir Alf Ramsey as the national manager and installed Joe Mercer in a caretaker capacity; his first words to the squad suggested that his was a poisoned chalice to rank with becoming prime minister at a time of economic crisis: ‘I didn’t want this bloody job in the first place.’

  The man chosen as Ramsey’s permanent replacement was Don Revie, an appointment that seemed somehow symbolic of a coarsening of public life in Britain. Ramsey had been criticized for being overly defensive and for not giving sufficient opportunities for flair players. Revie, however, had an entirely different reputation: he had coached the Leeds United side that dominated the English League in the early ’70s with what many considered deliberate brutality, turning gamesmanship into a martial art. Clough, who briefly succee
ded Revie as the club’s manager, called them ‘the dirtiest and most cynical team in the country’, a judgement that was more accurate than his description of Tomaszewski. In later years Revie was to reflect that his biggest mistake with England was not to instil the same values in the national side: ‘I should have forgotten all about trying to play more controlled attractive football and settled for a real bastard of a team.’ Given that he was also accused of trying to bribe opposing clubs to throw matches, it is perhaps just as well that he didn’t entirely succeed in remaking the team in his own image, though his stewardship was to prove controversial enough.

  With Ramsey’s departure, a key cultural link with the glory days of Wilson’s first premiership was broken. Wilson himself, however, remained and, amidst the upheavals of 1974, that in itself was some achievement. By the end of the year, America, West Germany, France and Israel all had new leaders, following the exits of Richard Nixon, Willy Brandt, Georges Pompidou and Golda Meir respectively, while the Carnation Revolution in Portugal had seen a dictatorship overthrown in a bloodless coup, timed to start when the first notes of the Portuguese entry were heard in the always political Eurovision Song Contest.

  Just as important as his own remarkable talent for survival, Wilson brought with him perhaps the most experienced and impressive team of any newly elected prime minister since the war. An opinion poll on the eve of the election had asked who should succeed him as Labour leader if he were to lose: the front-runners were (in order of preference) Roy Jenkins, James Callaghan, Denis Healey, Tony Benn and Anthony Crosland. If one adds Michael Foot, now given his first front-bench job as employment secretary, it shows a field of six potential leaders for the future, who would form the nucleus of the new cabinet. Confident in his colleagues’ capabilities, and calculating correctly that the Tories would not be prepared to risk another election by rocking the boat too soon, Wilson spurned any possible coalitions and formed a minority administration.