Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  All this was presented, and for the most part accepted, as harmless escapism, though it would be naive to assume that it had no ideological content. In late 1975, for example, television viewers were presented with two sharply different visions of the General Strike, on the eve of the 50th anniversary: on BBC1 there was Days of Hope, written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, while over on ITV Upstairs, Downstairs tackled the same subject in the episode ‘The Nine Days Wonder’. Days of Hope was a four-part series that covered the period 1916–26 via the experience of a working-class family, and came with an unashamedly left-wing agenda: ‘I’ve never seen a more truly subversive work for TV,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan. Parallels were made, and immediately recognized, between the current situation and the political compromises made by reformist Labour politicians in the 1920s, both centring on industrial action by the miners. A storm of protest ensued at what some saw as a prima facie case of BBC socialist bias, culminating in Margaret Thatcher’s first conference speech as Tory leader, where she denounced ‘those who gnaw away at our national self-respect’ and, in case her target wasn’t entirely clear, accused them of depicting ‘days of hopelessness, not days of hope’.

  Unsurprisingly, such outrage was much less visible, in fact nonexistent, when James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs made points that were equally intended to draw comparisons between the two periods: ‘A small group of people are directly challenging the authority of the government,’ he fumed. ‘They are deliberately trying to cripple our economy and drive us to the point of surrender.’ Despite the token presence of the maid Ruby and a brief appearance by her miner uncle, the only real counterbalancing voice here was that of Lord Richard Bellamy, who shared the King’s distaste at imprisoning the strike leaders: ‘His own subjects thrown into prison for their beliefs! That would be the end of this country.’ Together with his endorsement, in principle at least, of the concept of unionism (‘You must have strong unions for the future good of this country’), he made a strong case for moderation, but these were sentiments coming from a fictional Tory MP at a time when moderate Toryism was already looking out of fashion.

  Much of this yearning for yesterday reached back to a long-lost and semi-mythologized society of harmony, deference and stability, to a time before the war to end all wars ended all prospects of peace. When E.M. Forster looked back on his novel of homosexuality Maurice, written in 1914 but not published until 1971, he wrote that the story was set in ‘the last moment of the greenwood’ and he dedicated the book ‘to a Happier Year’. It was a sentiment that was perfectly in keeping with the Britain into which it finally – posthumously – emerged, where the Edwardian era was increasingly seen in idealized form. For those who sought something more achievable, the 1950s (sans rock & roll) were acquiring something of the same status, a touchstone for many who felt that Enoch Powell and Mary Whitehouse had the answers to the country’s woes. Ironically, it was Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the last years of that decade, who objected most strongly to Thatcher when she was leader of the opposition because of her supposed lack of forward thinking, accusing her of wanting ‘to put the clock back to the 1950s’.

  It took one of the best British horror movies of the era to challenge the cosy perception of the ’50s. Pete Walker’s Frightmare (1974) tells the story of a psychopathic cannibal, played by Sheila Keith, who was incarcerated in a psychiatric institution in 1957 for a series of murders, along with her complicit husband (Rupert ‘Maigret’ Davies, in his last movie role). On their release fifteen years later, supposedly now cured, she suffers what he euphemistically calls ‘a very serious relapse’ and reverts to her antisocial practices, her murderous style now impressively augmented by the easy availability of power tools. As their daughter – played by the appropriately named Kim Butcher – begins to show signs of having inherited the same tendencies, the film presents a terrible and disturbing portrait of family values gone very wrong indeed. This was a vision of the ’50s that was sufficiently out of touch with the public mood that it failed to chime with a mass audience.

  Despite the warm glow of affection felt for other eras, however, there was never any real doubt about the nation’s finest hour. The Second World War was still very much within living memory for the majority of the population, and its presence loomed large throughout the decade. In a 1973 episode of the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?, the staff of Grace Brothers’ department store are caught up in a transport strike and decide to stay the night in the shop, where they set up tents and spend the evening gathered round an ersatz campfire, singing old songs and reminiscing about the war. ‘Some people seem to forget,’ laments Mr Rumbold (Nicholas Smith), ‘that men like Captain Peacock and myself were instrumental in making this a country fit for heroes to live in.’ And Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden) can only agree: ‘These youngsters seem to forget what we went through.’ A couple of years later in Coronation Street, Albert Tatlock (Jack Howarth) and Stan Ogden (Bernard Youens) manage to get themselves locked into the cellar of the Rovers Return overnight, and celebrate by getting riotously drunk and rivalling each other with songs from the First and Second World Wars respectively. So ubiquitous did this basic situation become as a dramatic shorthand that it even turned up in an episode of the ITV sitcom Mind Your Language, where an evening class of mature foreign students, supposedly being taught English, find themselves locked in the classroom and settle in for the weekend; again they respond with a singsong, starting with Vera Lynn’s wartime classic ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Given that the characters here included a German and an Italian, it’s not entirely clear how relevant this supposedly shared culture might really be.

  Elsewhere the wartime sitcom Dad’s Army, which had debuted in 1968, ran for a further six series in the ’70s, while even the middle-brow quiz show Mastermind originated in creator Bill Wright’s experience of being interrogated by the Gestapo during the war: a single, isolating light was trained pitilessly on the contestant as Magnus Magnusson demanded not name, rank and serial number, but name, occupation and specialist subject. And the final show in the original series of Howard Schuman’s music drama Rock Follies (1976) took the theme to a new height. Arguing that ‘the English have been nostalgic for World War II ever since it ended’, the episode titled ‘The Blitz’ sees the launching of a club designed to resemble an air-raid shelter, complete with a ration-book menu, while the Little Ladies (the band whose lack of fortunes we have been following) dress in Andrews Sisters outfits and sing songs like ‘Glenn Miller Is Missing’ and ‘War Brides’.

  ‘World War II has turned from history into myth,’ commented Gerald Glaister, the producer of TV series Colditz and Secret Army. ‘It is our last frontier, the English equivalent of the western.’ At a time of national unease, with social conflict everywhere in evidence, the appeal of a period when the whole country seemed to be pulling in a single direction was obvious, though such national self-indulgence was also, of course, an invitation to mock. There were sporadic parodies of the obsession with the Second World War, from the Fawlty Towers episode ‘The Germans’ to the down-at-heel detective series Hazell, which featured in one storyline Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, veteran of the wartime hit Band Waggon, as a character named Dornford casting a sad eye over modern society: ‘Corruption, laziness, cynicism – I often ask myself: if we had to fight the Battle of Britain all over again . . .’ he sighs. ‘Oh, these long-haired layabouts! When I think of all the top-class chaps dying round me in the desert, a great nation spilling its blood.’ The kick is that Dornford is a seedy insurance salesman trying to wheedle his way out of a legitimate debt, a thoroughly unheroic figure who one suspects managed to resist his country’s call to arms in 1940.

  The most devastating assault on the mythology of the Blitz spirit came in Jack Rosenthal’s 1974 TV play There’ll Almost Always Be an England. Here the inhabitants of a typical suburban road, Quigley Street, are evacuated for the night because of a gas leak, and those who can’t get into hotels end up bedding down
in the village hall. As jealousies, rivalries and passions are magnified by the enforced proximity, one man rises to the occasion. Bernard Hepton plays Mr Joyce (a name, we are reminded, which he shares with Lord Haw Haw), who sees this as an opportunity to display his natural leadership qualities, and to bring together the community in a recreation of the old days. But he’s fighting an uphill battle; no one else cares about such wallowing in the past, this microcosmic society having long since fractured. When he proposes a spot of community singing in the approved manner (‘Bless ’Em All’, ‘There’ll Always Be an England’), Alec Shankly, played by Norman Rossington, finally cracks: ‘You’re in your bloody element, aren’t you?’ he explodes. ‘The dark days of 1940 were in 1940, Mr Joyce. Oppo, TTFN, grin and bear it, stiff upper lip, island sodding race, careless talk costs lives, is your journey really necessary – yours was, wasn’t it, eh? You wouldn’t have missed this for anything. You’re loving it, it’s the greatest night of your life. It’s better than a George Formby picture at the Regal and a spam sandwich when you got home.’

  The ubiquity of wartime imagery was such that when Alec Guinness staged a photo shoot in a West London street, dressed in full uniform and make-up for his title role in Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a passing policeman was entirely unfazed, and simply pointed out that Guinness had parked his car on a double yellow line. ‘I won’t give you a ticket this time,’ the officer added wearily. ‘I have no desire to spend the rest of my life in a concentration camp.’

  The memory of the war impacted too on political discourse. Indeed it could scarcely have failed so to do, since so many of the leading politicians in both major parties had themselves served in uniform, including the likes of Major Whitelaw, Captain Joseph, Captain Jenkins and Pilot Officer Benn. And as the sense of crisis worsened, the war was inevitably the image that sprang most readily to mind. Here, for example, is Ronald McIntosh, director-general of the National Economic Development Council, talking of James Callaghan in September 1976: ‘one has the feeling that he would be quite a good “peacetime” prime minister but that we are really in a wartime situation now’. And when the left-wing Labour MP Neil Kinnock wanted to denounce the budget that year of Major Healey, he made explicit reference to this tendency: ‘In the nostalgic vocabulary so fashionable now, that is not the spirit of Dunkirk, it is the tragedy of Munich.’

  Such language was fine for public consumption, but behind the scenes at Whitehall, there was a different mood, a feeling that this constant harping on about the war was not really the done thing in a world where we were supposed to be partners with our former enemies in Europe. In 1975 Sir Arthur Peterson, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office, suggested that, ‘as the wars become increasingly distant’, it might now be time to abolish the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph; a meeting of officials concluded that this was a step too far, but did decide to amend the ceremony to include less contentious civilian services such as the fire brigade and the police.

  The hangover from the past that most preoccupied political minds, however, was not the war so much as the years immediately before hostilities. The U-turns of the Heath government had been occasioned by the rapid rise in unemployment, raising the spectre of a return to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a mindset acknowledged and rejected by Keith Joseph in one of his 1974 speeches: ‘We talked ourselves into believing that these gaunt, tight-lipped men in caps and mufflers were round the corner, and we tailored our policy to match these imaginary conditions. For imaginary they were.’

  No one in the Labour Party could afford be so blasé, for the Depression had impacted so directly on the party itself, halting its forward march and destroying its fragile balance of extra-parliamentary activity and governmental aspirations, that it could never be forgotten. There was no greater hate figure on the left than Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, who, had Dante been a British socialist, would surely have been found in the ninth circle of hell, trapped for all eternity alongside Judas Iscariot in the jaws of Satan. MacDonald’s great crime was that, confronted with the economic catastrophe following the stock market crash of 1929, he had abandoned Labour policies and allowed himself to be talked into heading a National Government in collaboration with Tory and Liberal politicians. He and two of his ministerial colleagues – Philip Snowden and Jimmy Thomas – were promptly expelled from the Labour Party, but by then the damage was done, and in the 1931 election that saw the National Government returned to office, Labour was reduced to a parliamentary rump, crashing from 267 seats to just 52; MacDonald remained prime minister.

  The horrors of the ensuing period, when Labour found itself locked out of power and influence during the Depression years and the rise of European fascism, served as a warning to the Labour left and dominated its attitude towards the crises of the 1970s. ‘In the ’30s, when we last had a slump, the Labour Government broke up and the left disaffiliated and Mosley, the fascist leader, came from the Labour Party,’ Tony Benn lectured the Soviet ambassador in 1976. ‘The people are determined that it shouldn’t happen again. You must understand that is our background, our history, and that is shaping our thinking at this particular moment.’ The distrust, even hatred, of Roy Jenkins and other figures on the right of the party, those who flirted with thoughts of coalition, stemmed from the same source: ‘The MacDonalds, the Snowdens, the Jimmy Thomases are lurking around,’ Jack Jones warned his union conference in 1975, ‘their names do not need to be spelt out.’ In short, the bogeyman figure of MacDonald was the single most powerful image in Labour demonology right through to the emergence of Tony Blair (during Neil Kinnock’s early years as party leader, he was nicknamed ‘Ramsay MacKinnock’ by the far left). When Joe Haines said that Wilson’s only ideology was ‘keeping the party together’, it was a recognition that he feared being seen as the new MacDonald.

  In that ambition, Wilson was largely successful. There were a handful of high-profile departures from the party, but they were isolated cases and the media attention they attracted seemed more concerned with making mischief for Labour than with any serious political analysis. Behind the scenes, however, and away from Westminster, there were signs that splits were developing in the historic alliance that made up the Labour Party. Ever since the threat of fascism in the ’30s, and even more since the expansion of the university system in the ’60s, intellectual life in Britain had, broadly speaking, been inclined towards left-leaning politics, and this fact had been of increasing significance for Labour, helping to set the terms of the national debate and to shape future developments. Now, prompted by a sense of crisis, there appeared to be the stirrings of a new mood, as Tony Crosland identified in 1974: ‘The intelligentsia, always prone to the liberal rhetoric of catastrophe, has adopted an apocalyptic mood, denying (against the facts) that reformist progress can be made and believing in any case that ecological disaster is just over the horizon.’ By 1977 Benn was even more convinced that a wing of the party was slipping away. ‘I have come to the conclusion that middle-class intellectuals are not attaching themselves to Labour at all,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Raymond Williams said to me at Cambridge that the older intellectuals, even those who used to be Labour, were now frightened of the power of the trade unions.’

  Two of the most celebrated polemical journalists of the 1960s – Bernard Levin and Paul Johnson – exemplified the trend. Both had initially been seen as radical figures, but espoused increasingly right-wing views as the ’70s progressed. Levin was a regular columnist for The Times until the industrial dispute that closed the paper for nearly a year from December 1978, pursuing a line dominated by anti-Soviet sentiments; while Johnson, formerly the editor of New Statesman magazine, became a high-profile convert to the cause of Margaret Thatcher, who he saw as the only politician prepared to take on the unions. And his distaste for the unions, he argued, stemmed from the fact that for them ‘the individual human spirit is a social enemy, to be terrified into subordination to the mass or crushed out of existence’.
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