Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The case was one of the more bizarre episodes in the politics of the time. As a Labour MP, Stonehouse had spent nearly two decades in Parliament without quite reaching the front rank of politics, though he had been postmaster general in Wilson’s 1960s government, and had displayed an especial interest in post-colonial Africa and Asia. In the early 1970s his various business interests began to go seriously wrong, and in November 1974 a pile of his clothes was found on a beach in Miami; it was assumed that he had committed suicide by swimming out to sea and drowning himself. But when he was subsequently discovered in Australia, living as Joseph Markham (a dead man from his own constituency, in whose name he had obtained a passport), that assumption changed and it was generally believed that he had faked his own death in order to evade his creditors. His own version of events, however, gave an alternative explanation, that he had suffered a breakdown and committed ‘psychiatric suicide’. This he attributed to the pressures of being a decent man in a corrupt world: ‘The collapse and destruction of the original man,’ he wrote (he had developed a tendency to refer to himself in the third person), ‘came about because his idealism in his political life had been utterly frustrated and finally destroyed by the pattern of events, beyond his control, which had finally overwhelmed him.’ He was, in short, a victim of Britain’s political crisis.

  At his trial, once he had finally been extradited back to Britain, he insisted – with some justification – that none of his actions were in and of themselves criminal; they only became so if one accepted that he had deliberately, consciously staged the supposed suicide: the acquisition of someone else’s birth certificate and thence a passport in their name was, for example, then perfectly legal. If one believed his version, then he had acted just about within the letter of the law. And he pointed to the fact that he had already been making appearances in London as Markham even before the disappearance: would a sane man do such a thing, given the risk of discovery? Whatever truth there might have been in his claims, however, he made the fundamental mistake of defending himself in court, and of doing so at colossal length; his opening statement took up six whole days, and the jury might reasonably have thought they had been trapped in a corner by the world’s greatest-ever pub bore, even though he himself seemed to find the experience something of a healing process: ‘It was marvellous to have that court as my captive audience – it was so attentive – and to know that my time was not limited as it would have been in any other forum.’ The therapy session ended when the jury returned guilty verdicts and he was sentenced to seven years in jail.

  Purely by coincidence, Stonehouse’s pseudo-suicide was mirrored in fiction. David Nobbs’s novel The Death of Reginald Perrin told the story of a man in middle management having a nervous breakdown, feeling that he ‘was going mad and sane at the same time’, and attempting to escape the rat race by faking his suicide in Lyme Bay in exactly the same manner, with discarded clothes left on the beach. Written before the moment of madness in Miami, though not published until 1975, it actually had no causal connection with Stonehouse in either direction (the only link with politics was Perrin’s first name, taken from Nobbs’s local MP, Reginald Maudling), but it undoubtedly benefited from the coincidence. Its continuing success, though, stemmed more from the way that it chimed with the national mood, particularly when televised as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin with Leonard Rossiter in the title role. Here was a decent man who loved his wife but felt that his life was utterly pointless, a middle-aged, middle-class rebel without any prospect of a cause and overwhelmed by a loss of self-confidence. ‘I believe in nihilism,’ he proclaims, ‘in the sense that I believe in the absence of ism. I know that I don’t know and I believe in not believing.’ However much he flounders in his absence of meaning, he instinctively recognizes that his doubt is more hopeful than the self-deluding certainties that the world venerates: ‘How many wars would be fought, how many men would have been tortured in this world, if nobody had believed in anything?’ And in a final rhetorical flourish, he encapsulates the anarchy, the insecurity and the warmth that lie at the heart of the best British comedy: ‘Would the sun shine less brightly if there was no purpose in life? Would the nightingale sing less sweetly? Would we love each other less deeply? Man’s the only species neurotic enough to need a purpose in life.’

  Reggie’s only son, Mark, is a struggling actor, the kind whose c.v. includes playing a hat-stand in a twelve-minute play, ‘Can Egbert Poltergeist Defeat the Great Plague of Walking Sticks and Reach True Maturity?’, in ‘a new experimental tea-time theatre in Kentish Town’. He is also prone to wearing, both in the novel and in the TV adaptation, a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Wedgwood Benn For King’. But Benn himself was also struggling in the Callaghan era. The Labour government, now locked into the partnership with Steel, was displaying a lack of vision that made Reggie Perrin look positively decisive, and Benn was drifting ever further from the centre of power. ‘The whole Labour leadership now is totally demoralised,’ he wrote, on returning from a depressing evening with Michael Foot, Peter Shore and the economist Lord Balogh in January 1978. ‘This is the death of the Labour Party. It believes in nothing any more, except staying in power.’

  Indeed it was becoming legitimate to ask what the purpose of the Labour Party now was. What was its point? In its previous periods of majority government, in the 1940s and ’60s, it had been driven by a reforming zeal. In the first instance it had created the modern welfare state, with groundbreaking reforms of social security, health and education, and had nationalized great swaths of British industry in pursuit of social justice and efficiency. Even in the ’60s, despite the distractions and difficulties of the economy, it had succeeded in profoundly changing the relationship between the state and the individual, creating what was intended to be a more tolerant and civilized society. And it had found, in comprehensive schooling, a new cause, as identified by Crosland in The Future of Socialism: ‘Education, not nationalization, was to be the main engine in the creation of a more just society.’ In the summer of 1974, however, Crosland reviewed his own performance in his first six months as environment secretary and concluded: ‘Perhaps main thing is having presided over vast and politically sensitive department and avoided cock-ups.’ By the standards of previous aspirations, it wasn’t much, but it was a fair summary of the entire government, at least in its early years.

  There were, of course, some achievements to be chalked up. Comprehensive schools might have had a bad press, but there was public support for the project, as seen in the 1977 local elections: Labour was trounced in the GLC, losing thirty of its fifty-eight seats, but still managed to retain control of the parallel administration of ILEA, suggesting that it continued to be trusted on education. Jenkins, in his second spell at the Home Office, continued the reforms of the previous decade with the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act and the 1976 Race Relations Act (the latter building on the 1968 Act, whose introduction had provoked Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech). And Foot was to claim a much wider range of successes: ‘industrial relations, public ownership, the rescue of many industries large and small, the extension of social services and the fulfilment of long-standing promises on such items as child benefit, comprehensive education, the abolition of the tied cottage’. Allowing for the scale of the crisis they took over in 1974, and for the precariousness of the government’s majority, he wrote, ‘here was a situation which a democratic socialist could honourably defend’.

  He was right to point to the extenuating circumstances. The situation left by the Tories was the worst inherited by any incoming government in the post-war years, and the erosion of the slim majority was a crucial factor in restricting the government’s freedom of manoeuvre. In the words of Austin Mitchell, who had followed Crosland as MP for Grimsby in a rare Labour by-election victory: ‘We were skating on thin ice. And we carried on skating long after the ice had melted.’ Even so, there were few prepared to join in Foot’s celebration of accomplishments. From a left perspective,
the ’70s Labour government was responsible for having saved capitalism from its own crisis; it had begun to get inflation under control, but only at the price of higher unemployment and of a doubling of the numbers living in poverty in the two years to 1976. ‘We don’t think of full employment now,’ bemoaned Benn. ‘We have actually dropped it as an objective.’ So bad was the situation becoming that Jan Hildreth, director-general of the Institute of Directors, was predicting a jobless total of 10 million within a few years.

  For many voters, the chief intention in electing a Labour government had been to restore some stability to the country; after Heath’s running battles with the unions had brought Britain to the brink of industrial civil war, Wilson and Callaghan were expected to adopt a less confrontational approach. For a while they succeeded in so doing, much to the annoyance of Arthur Scargill: ‘The one thing that annoys me about the trade union movement,’ he fumed, ‘is that we’ve got one set of standards when we’ve got a Tory government and a completely different set of standards when we’ve got a Labour government.’ Despite his distaste, pay deals were agreed and strike levels were reduced, but there were still rumblings from every quarter. In late 1975 the hospital doctors – not a group of workers normally associated with militant industrial action – staged an overtime ban, a dispute that had the unexpected consequence of reducing the death rate by 3 per cent. And by 1977 there were indications that industrial peace could not be depended upon, as power cuts made a brief return, blacking out TV coverage of the state opening of Parliament in jubilee year, and as the Grunwick dispute was followed by a firemen’s strike.

  This was the first time that the members of the Fire Brigades Union had staged a national strike, though there had been an unofficial stoppage in Glasgow in 1973, with troops being deployed to provide essential cover. That same year had also seen the first time that ambulance workers anywhere in Britain had gone on strike, with a dispute in Durham – despite calls from the union, however, the Army was not sent in on this occasion, with services instead being provided by 300 volunteers, including the likes of Arthur Winn, who had driven ambulances in Tunisia in the Second World War. The use of troops to do the work of strikers, even in the emergency services, was thus a matter of extreme political sensitivity, particularly within the Labour movement, but when the 32,000 FBU members walked out in November 1977, there was little choice, and a total of 18,000 soldiers were immediately deployed, manning a thousand Green Goddess fire engines.

  These vehicles had been built in the 1950s for civil defence purposes and, though they were not entirely safe (two soldiers were killed in Manchester when their engine overturned on the way to a fire), they briefly became a symbol of the nation’s grim determination when it felt it had its collective back to the wall. On the other side, the firemen themselves attracted a higher level of public support than had been evident for some time in a strike, largely because of their easily perceived value to the community, and because it was assumed that the provocation must have been great indeed to have precipitated a vote for industrial action, particularly since their own union executive had advised against it. The dispute even resulted in the resignation of Gordon Honeycombe – recently voted the sexiest newsreader on television – from ITN, after he publicly supported the action. Nonetheless the two-month strike was unsuccessful, resulting in a 10 per cent pay rise, well below the 30 per cent that had been demanded, and within the government’s wages policy. The price, however, had been high; despite the Army’s best efforts, the cost of fire damage to property that December was twice the level of the corresponding month in 1976 and, perhaps more importantly, the strike saw a Labour government in conflict with one of the most venerated sections of the working class. ‘A civilized democracy like Britain is finished,’ warned the Sun, ‘if groups of essential workers are prepared to risk the lives and limbs of ordinary citizens in pursuit of their claims.’ The entire episode added to an atmosphere of things going wrong.

  The same impression would have been gleaned from the television schedules in the period. In 1975 a new BBC series, Survivors, was launched, created by Terry Nation, who had previously written for Tony Hancock and was best known as the man who had given us the Daleks in Doctor Who. Here a virus escapes from a laboratory and wipes out virtually the entire human population, leaving behind only a scattered handful of survivors, some of whose fortunes were followed over the course of three series. Inspired by John Seymour’s books on self-sufficiency (as was The Good Life), the story began with a rumination on the fragility of modern civilization. ‘I never thought what happens to a city if it all breaks down, all at the same time,’ reflects Abby Grant (Carolyn Seymour), the heroine of the first series, as she cooks her husband’s supper in their stockbroker-belt home. ‘There’s no power, there’s no lighting or cooking. And food, even if you get it into the city, you can’t distribute it. Then there’s water, sewage, ugh! Things like that. The city’s like a great big pampered baby, with thousands of people feeding it and cleaning it and making sure it’s all right.’

  Once the virus had done its job, though, the focus turned to the proto-societies tentatively being founded by the remnants of humanity. The first such that Abby encounters, as she roams the home counties, is run by Arthur Wormley (George Baker), a dictator in the making, who sets up a rudimentary administration based on martial law. Revelling in the unfettered power he now enjoys and enforcing his decrees at the point of a gun, he was, we discover, the president of a trade union prior to the plague, in stark contrast to the white middle-class survivors who have gathered around Abby. The language of their encounters is highly charged; she accuses him of behaving like a feudal baron, using the familiar tabloid title for union leaders, while one of his henchmen brags, ‘We’re the authorities now,’ in a deliberate allusion to Hartley Shawcross’s 1946 misquote: ‘We are the masters now.’

  In the second season, the two themes of city vs nature and of nascent autocracy were brought together with a visit to London, where some 500 survivors have formed a community centred on the Oval cricket ground. They have electricity, radio and hot water, but life is far from idyllic: an electric fence is needed to keep out the rats that have taken over much of the city, and the group is afflicted with a new disease, known as the London Sickness. Manny (Sydney Tafler), the seemingly benevolent ruler of this fiefdom, ends his radio broadcasts with the catchphrase ‘TTFN’ from the wartime comedy show ITMA, a practice which, combined with the use of Tube tunnel locations and a virtual blackout, carries heavy echoes of Britain’s finest hour. But Manny too turns out to be a ruthless and violent power-hungry despot, and the regular characters soon flee back to the purer world outside the city.

  By this stage, Nation had abandoned the programme, unhappy at the way that his original post-apocalyptic vision was being corrupted by too sanguine a view of survival. He re-emerged in 1978 with a new series, Blake’s 7, that offered a much less rosy image of the future. Centred on a small group of characters on board an advanced spaceship, in a galaxy run by the Federation, it was to some extent a riposte to Star Trek; where that series had reflected American optimism in the confident days of the 1960s, Blake’s 7 was very definitely a product of late-’70s Britain. This Federation is a quasi-fascist state, which uses drugs in the water supply to control its population and which crushes all opposition without compunction, while the only opposition comes from the rebels brought together by Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), a collection of criminals engaged on a doomed campaign of terrorism. The key reference point is clearly the myth of Robin Hood, but this is a far bleaker proposition; there is no rightful king over the water here, no prospect of ultimate success, just the faint hope of doing some temporary damage to the Federation, a personal, Orwellian rebellion that achieves little beyond asserting that there are still those who choose life in a universe of brainwashed automata. And even that is a tenuous thread, for, unusually in a populist TV series, all the characters are ultimately expendable, killed off as required by the dictates of the p
lotlines. As critic Shaun Usher pointed out, it depicted ‘the future as being much the same as the present, Lord help us, only worse’.

  The fact that the key figure in the Federation was Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce), beautiful but utterly merciless, undoubtedly helped the popularity of Blake’s 7 as Britain edged towards its first-ever female prime minister, and it remains one of the most cherished science fiction series in British TV, rivalled only by Doctor Who and by Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass. This latter made a slightly unexpected return to the screen in 1979 for a fourth series, twenty years on from its last television appearance. This time John Mills took the title role, playing the now retired scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass, who travels from Scotland to London to try to find his lost granddaughter. The city he finds is in the grip of nigh on civil war, torn between the violent thugs of the Badder-Mindoff gangs and the Blue Brigades, made up of even more violent vigilantes; meanwhile the Pay Cops – the privatized police force recruited predominantly from the South African security forces – stand to one side, unless one slips them some money to keep the nightmare at bay. As Quatermass escapes to the country, he encounters a District Commissioner and comments that her title is reminiscent of the days of empire and of putting down the natives. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘That’s what we were for: putting down the natives. Our own.’ The authority she once represented has now failed utterly, leaving behind nothing but shadows of social structures. And beyond the warring factions are the Planet People, the missing link between hippies and new age travellers, who have turned their back on modern society and on the scientific faith that Quatermass represents. ‘Stop trying to know things,’ one of them tells him.