Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Symbolic of the hollowness at the core of the country was the performance of British athletics’ great white hope, David Jenkins. An ex-public schoolboy who had studied chemical engineering at Edinburgh University, Jenkins was the very epitome of sporting amateurism. He won the European 400 metres title in 1971 at the age of just nineteen, took silver as part of the 4 × 400 m relay team at the 1972 Olympics and went into the 1976 Olympics as the world’s number one at the distance. A nation’s hopes were dashed, however, when he not only failed to win the gold medal in Montreal, but could manage only a meagre seventh place, leaving his many fans deeply disappointed. (Brendan Foster’s bronze in the 10,000 metres turned out to be Britain’s only track and field medal that year.) The disillusion would have been greater still had those fans realized that Jenkins’s underperformance was drug-assisted. ‘I started taking steroids at the end of 1975,’ he confessed later. ‘It was all about the insecurity of going to the 1976 Olympics with such expectation on me. I wasn’t caught. But it changes you. From the moment you take the first pill, it starts to change you – and I don’t mean chemically. You become a liar.’ A decade after that Olympic appearance, he was arrested smuggling steroids into the US from Mexico and given a seven-year jail sentence.

  Even more characteristic of the times was the chronic underperformance of the country’s largest car manufacturer, British Leyland. Formed in 1968 by the merger of British Motor Corporation and Leyland Motors, with all the blessings and goodwill that the Wilson government could bestow, British Leyland brought together a number of major brand names under its umbrella: the Mini, Jaguar, Rover and Triumph. The very size of the company, however, carried its own dangers and it soon acquired a reputation for industrial action, particularly at its largest plant in Longbridge, Birmingham, where the chief convener of the shop stewards was the communist Dick Etheridge. On his retirement in 1974, he was followed by the most famous shop steward of them all, Derek Robinson, rapidly known to the tabloids as ‘Red Robbo’. He too was a communist – he had unsuccessfully stood as a parliamentary candidate for the party on four occasions – and he came to symbolize for the right-wing media all that they loathed about the trade unions. ‘Between 1978 and 1979,’ according to one account, he ‘was credited with causing 523 walk-outs at Longbridge, costing an estimated £200m in lost production.’

  In 1975 the firm found itself in such severe financial difficulty that the government, desperate to save the hundreds of thousands of jobs involved, felt obliged to step in and to nationalize British Leyland. Robinson was clear where the blame lay – ‘Sheer mismanagement is responsible for the mess we are in’ – though even Benn could see that there was an alternative explanation: ‘If there were no industrial disputes, you would be making hundreds of millions of pounds a year and wouldn’t have any financial troubles at all,’ he told the Leyland board, arguing that this meant there should be greater union involvement in the new state-run company. But despite its reincarnation, and the billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money consumed, the problems remained, and 1977 proved to be particularly disastrous for the industry, with production of 400,000 cars lost through industrial disputes, a quarter of the expected output for the year; of that total, Leyland accounted for 250,000 lost vehicles. To complete the annus horribilis, in October 1977 Tariq Ali, editor of the newspaper Socialist Challenge, obtained and published a tape of the company’s chairman, Sir Richard Dobson, making a speech at a private dinner, in which he said that those who accused BL of holding a slush fund were doing no more than to point to the ‘perfectly respectable fact that it was bribing wogs’. He also expressed his view that ‘trade unions are bastards’, but complained that there was such a level of hypocrisy in public discourse that ‘I cannot say anything like that.’ He was correct in this latter assumption and he was obliged to resign, to be replaced by Michael Edwardes, who had two years earlier been named Young Businessman of the Year by the Guardian.

  There was, though, one hopeful sign for the ailing firm in September of 1977 when the workforce rejected yet another strike proposed by Robinson and his fellow shop stewards in pursuance of a 47 per cent pay rise. ‘I’m old-fashioned. I believe in home, in Britain, in work,’ one worker, Ron Hill, was quoted as saying. ‘Strikes are nothing more than bloody stupid. Nobody wins. Well, I’m not allowing someone who lacks my values to run my life.’ It may have seemed desperate to see this as a straw in the wind, but so it proved to be: in 1979 Robinson was sacked and there was little support amongst Leyland’s employees for a strike call intended to have him reinstated.

  Behind the industrial strife was the stark commercial reality that British Leyland was simply unable to match the products of its competitors, particularly at Ford, whose Escort and Cortina models were setting new standards and which remain icons of the era. By way of contrast, a 2004 study named two of Leyland’s models from the 1970s – the much ridiculed Austin Allegro and Morris Marina – in the top five worst cars of all time, ahead of their nearest Lada rival. Sadly, they were not isolated examples: the Leyland Princess and the Triumph Stag also failed to win much of an enthusiastic following. And even beyond the design faults, there was a singular lack of build quality with which to contend; frustrated motorists became accustomed to the expression ‘Friday afternoon car’, referring to those vehicles produced hurriedly on the last shift of the week at Longbridge and elsewhere. In 1979 the company was officially renamed BL, and many were convinced that the dropping of the national reference was out of embarrassment at the standards of British workmanship.

  Against this background of simmering disenchantment came a week of respite with the Silver Jubilee in 1977. In the twenty-five years since Queen Elizabeth II had inherited the crown from her father, the nation had undergone some drastic adjustments, both to its everyday life and to its psychology, but there were still constants, and the nuclear royal family was very definitely among them: the Queen remained a unifying figure, Prince Philip was then mostly considered a man of blunt common sense, and their children had only one marriage and no divorces between them, Princess Anne being, as far as anyone could judge, blissfully happy with her equally horsey husband.

  The jubilee was marked with enormous enthusiasm, both official and spontaneous, starting with a hymn from the poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, that was described by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn as ‘poetic plonk’:

  In days of disillusion,

  However low we’ve been,

  To fire us and inspire us

  God gave to us our Queen.

  Elsewhere, the London buses on the 25 route – which fortuitously went past Buckingham Palace – were painted silver in celebration, a new London Underground line was renamed the Jubilee Line from the originally proposed Fleet Line (though it didn’t actually open for another two years), the Queen embarked upon a three-month tour of the country, beacons were lit and thousands of street parties and other festivities were staged throughout the country. At Wimbledon, which was itself celebrating the centenary of its tennis championships, the Queen made a rare appearance to watch Virginia Wade win the singles title, the last time a British player of either gender would do so in the twentieth century. It was, however briefly, a time of rejoicing, of celebrating the monarchy as the symbol of a British identity that rose above the impoverished political standards of the day. And it was, against all the pessimistic predictions, a huge success.

  It was also, though, a time of taking stock, of measuring the decline of the nation. The most watched TV programme in jubilee week itself was an episode of Coronation Street in which the Rovers Return prepared a float on the theme of Britain Thro’ the Ages for the Weatherfield parade, with the regulars dressed as historical and mythical characters: Ena Sharples as Queen Victoria, and Bet Lynch as Britannia, amongst others. Unfortunately, Stan Ogden left the lorry’s headlights on overnight and ran the battery flat, so that it didn’t start on the day, and the project had to be abandoned. And as a crestfallen Annie Walker sits in her parlour, still incongruously
wearing her costume as Elizabeth I, she berates Ken Barlow, the Street’s resident liberal, when he suggests that the float probably wasn’t missed: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t see it in that easygoing, don’t-care attitude. I’m surprised to hear it from you. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with the country today.’ He attempts to defend his position, and she dismisses his arguments with yet more despair: ‘Nobody tries hard enough any more, and when things go wrong, nobody seems to care any more.’ The pathetic spectacle of this stately figure, the closest thing that television had to an embodiment of Old England, stranded out of context, sunk in the depths of regal hopelessness, was reminiscent of William Hogarth’s Election engraving ‘The Polling’, some two centuries earlier, with its depiction of Britannia trapped in a broken-down coach.

  The clash between ancient and modern was reflective of the times. Despite the genuine enthusiasm generated by the jubilee, and its massive endorsement by the media, the coverage of cheering crowds at the Queen’s walkabouts could not conceal the continuing unrest in the country. ‘The place gets more schizophrenic every day,’ wrote film director Lindsay Anderson in his diary, ‘with this example of unruffled and smiling traditionalism on one page, and on the other, generally facing, strikes and inflation of prices, and corruption in the police, and violent conflict on the picket lines. Which is the real Britain? I wish I knew!’

  For the summer of 1977 was far from peaceful. The week of the jubilee was also the forty-fourth week of the increasingly bitter and violent dispute at the Grunwick film processing plant in North London, perhaps the most controversial employment struggle of the Callaghan years and a key factor in strengthening anti-union feeling. The conflict was initially between Grunwick’s boss, George Ward, and some of his employees – mainly British Asian women – who wished to join the union APEX and whom he promptly sacked. None of this endeared Ward to many people, but he was entirely within the law, even as constituted under a Labour government, and he saw no reason to compromise, even less so when the dispute broadened. Several cabinet ministers made an appearance on the picket lines (including Shirley Williams), the far left became involved, and other unions sent down members to try to close down the plant, so that at times there were upwards of ten thousand present. And the policing got much heavier, and the conflicts much more violent: ‘I was at Saltley Gate,’ commented one shaken miner, ‘and it was a children’s Sunday picnic by the side of this.’ The length of the struggle, and the fact that it was played out on the streets of London ensured that it was a huge media event. When, that is, the media were able to report it – there were, on occasion, blank pages in the newspapers that summer, when the print unions decided not to print pieces that were supportive of management. ‘The country gets more and more like Germany in the twenties,’ bemoaned Peter Hall. ‘And there’s clearly a jolly band of extremist brothers on picket outings at Grunwick to see that it does.’

  Two months after the jubilee celebrations, as Grunwick continued to rumble on, the battle of Lewisham saw the biggest street confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists since Cable Street in 1936, while punks and Teddy boys were busy fighting in the King’s Road over the spoils of youth culture. And a few weeks later the Notting Hill Carnival again saw clashes between police and black youths, even if not on the same scale as in the previous year. When TV producer Brian Clemens was challenged about the level of violence in his new series, The Professionals, he shrugged: ‘You can’t portray 1977 realistically without violence being somewhere.’

  The soundtrack to this summer of discontent was likewise a disturbing juxtaposition. 1977 was supposed to be the year of punk, and certainly the music industry believed it to be so, dropping entire rosters of semi-established acts and signing every guitar group who had the foresight to get a short haircut on their way to the Oxfam shop for a second-hand suit. Despite fevered media coverage, however, and the appropriate expressions of concern at the decline of Western civilization (the Daily Telegraph sternly pointed out that ‘capitalism, to survive, must have respect for values not its own’), there were few financial returns to be made from the movement: only the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers could truly be said to have looked like a serious investment at this stage, though the Jam and the Clash went on to greater success. Instead the charts continued to be dominated by British bands from the early years of the decade – the likes of 10cc, the Electric Light Orchestra, Hot Chocolate – and by the other new sound on the block, disco. In November a milestone of sorts was reached when Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols replaced Cliff Richard’s 40 Golden Greats at #1 in the album charts, but in truth the record-buying public was not noticeably receptive to innovation; this was, after all, the year that started with clean-cut actor David Soul, from the US cop show Starsky & Hutch, at #1 in the singles charts with ‘Don’t Give Up on Us’, and that ended with the country’s first 2-million-selling single, ‘Mull of Kintyre’ by Paul McCartney’s band, Wings. Meanwhile David Bowie’s Berlin romance ‘Heroes’ – which became one of his best-known and most celebrated songs – couldn’t even make the top 20.

  The conservative tastes of the public were largely shaped by the BBC, whose two pop radio stations were then obliged to share airtime, so that the David Hamilton Show occupied three hours every weekday afternoon on both Radio One and Radio Two; it was seldom noted for its adventurous choice of music, nor for an enthusiastic espousal of punk. The BBC’s television shows – Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test – were similarly disinclined to take risks, and even when in 1977 the BBC launched a new series, Sight & Sound in Concert, broadcast on BBC2 and in simultaneous stereo on Radio One, it opened with a performance by Renaissance, a band whose blend of progressive rock and folk was hardly on the cutting edge of modern culture. Subsequent programmes were devoted to the worthy, if conventional, sounds of the Jess Roden Band, Santana and Rory Gallagher.

  In both music and politics there was a dislocation between what was happening on the streets and what was acceptable in the centres of power. It was a tendency noted by Liberal MP Cyril Smith, who was increasingly frustrated by his own party. ‘We were a bit too respectable, a trifle too smooth,’ he wrote in 1977. ‘The image went down well in the suburbs among the young-marrieds, but had made no inroads on the council estates and the terraced streets of the great industrial areas. We needed, I thought, to be more abrasive.’ Nonetheless this was the year in which the Liberals took their first serious stride towards power since the days of Lloyd George, by forming a parliamentary alliance with the Labour Party.

  The Lib–Lab pact was the lawful union of two parliamentary parties to the exclusion of all others. It was, however, something of a shotgun wedding. Its primary, indeed its only, cause was the parlous state of the Labour Party, whose three-seat majority in the Commons, established in October 1974, was soon whittled away in by-election defeats, meaning that additional lobby fodder was desperately needed in order to remain in office. And the catalyst for the agreement was the vote in March 1977 on the spending cuts that had been demanded by the IMF; fearful that backbench rebels would side with the Tories, the government chose to abstain in the vote and was immediately faced with a no-confidence motion from the opposition. It was in order to defeat this motion that Callaghan came to an understanding with the Liberal leader, David Steel, that the latter would henceforth ensure his MPs voted with Labour in exchange for consultations over future legislation.

  As an example of coalition government, the pact offered few tangible benefits to the junior partner, but Steel was an ambitious young leader who took a long-term view that the Liberals would never make serious progress until they were seen to be active at the highest level; this was their best chance to establish some credibility and maybe thereby break through the restrictions of the electoral system. Even if proportional representation, or even a cabinet seat, were not on offer, he believed there was still mileage to be got out of the arrangement. Come the start of the new parliamentary term, Steel was already
claiming that under the pact ‘we have removed the extremist sting from Labour; it has governed under our influence in the national interest as opposed to party interest’. And, he suggested, the Liberals were ‘the militants for the reasonable man’. This fear of extremism – epitomized, as ever, by Benn – was also at the heart of Smith’s endorsement of the coalition, which he saw as a chance ‘to wound the sectional interest which, to me, represents the greatest single threat to the future stability of this country, the Labour left wing’.

  In the short term, though, the pact was an electoral disaster for the Liberals, particularly since it didn’t allow for electoral candidates from either party to stand down in favour of the other. The May 1977 local election results made dreadful reading for Steel, with only 8 per cent in the GLC elections (compared to 5 per cent for the National Front), and there was a string of poor by-elections, including being beaten by the NF in two Birmingham constituencies that year. ‘So far it has done us more harm than good,’ admitted Liberal MP David Penhaligon after the local elections, adding hopefully: ‘But I believe it will start to pay off in six to nine months.’ A year later the party was still being beaten into fourth place by the NF in the parliamentary by-election for Lambeth Central. Tainted by association with an unpopular government, the Liberals were no match for a Conservative Party that was beginning to find some confidence and which could at least claim to be in opposition.

  For these were days of steady, if unspectacular, achievement by the Tories, and a concomitant decline for Labour. Some of Labour’s lost seats were unavoidable – the departure of Jenkins for Europe, for example, led to a resounding Conservative victory in the Birmingham Stechford constituency – but there were also some elementary political errors on Callaghan’s part. In November 1976 three by-elections were called by the government on the same day, when Callaghan decided to promote longstanding MPs Fred Peart and Ted Short to the Lords, resulting in the loss of two safe Labour seats to the Tories. The third seat contested that day, the only one outside the government’s control, was formerly occupied by John Stonehouse, and had been left vacant when he was convicted on various charges of fraud.