by Alwyn Turner
Indeed, what is perhaps most surprising in 1970s politics is the lack of progress made by parties on the fringes, despite their proliferation. The nationalists only became genuinely popular to the extent that they began to look like orthodox parties (Plaid Cymru blamed their temporary setback in 1970, losing their one parliamentary seat, on the violent activities of the Free Wales Army and the Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru), while in England neither the far right nor the far left managed to win a seat on a local council, let alone in the Commons. However impressive the SWP’s organizing skills proved to be in the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, however real the achievements of those organizations, the party itself never looked like being a rival to Labour in the political world, nor to the CPGB in the unions. And however much noise Militant made, it had no chance of becoming the dominant force within Labour, still less of staging the revolution about which it dared to dream.
The same was true of the WRP, which was for a while the largest and best known of the Trotskyist groups, partly because of the membership of Corin and, particularly, Vanessa Redgrave. Frances de la Tour, famous as Miss Jones in Rising Damp, was also a supporter. ‘The proportion of our members involved in ultra-left activities is greater than in most unions,’ Peter Plouviez, general secretary of Equity, commented wryly. ‘I think it appeals psychologically to some of them. There is an air of drama to a life based on a belief in imminent revolution.’ As the decade progressed, however, the numbers in the WRP began to fall, some members unable to cope with the workload demanded by the party, others splitting to form their own groups (both of which were common conditions on the far left), but it still felt able to field more than fifty candidates in the 1979 election. Their performance was even less impressive than that of the National Front. In fact the best result by a non-nationalist fringe party that year, measured in terms of votes per candidate, was that of the Ecology Party, forerunners of the Greens.
The contribution of these groups to the future shape of society came primarily in the heightening of the sense of crisis. A belief that a collapse of capitalism was on the cards was not unreasonable at a time of stagflation – the new term coined to describe the unthinkable combination of rising unemployment and inflation – and Marxists had been predicting such a catastrophe for over a century. Now that the reality was believed to be almost upon us, the rhetoric became positively millennial in some quarters: ‘The stage is set in Britain for a general strike and a civil war, whoever wins the coming general election,’ declared the WRP’s newspaper in April 1979, wrongly. The apocalyptic imagery was a regular feature of industrial disputes, which became occasions for frenzied attempts at recruitment, with every sign of militancy cheered to the rafters and every step towards compromise denounced as a sell-out of the working class (or ‘the class’ as it was known more simply). No strike could any longer be seen simply as a fight for better pay and conditions; now it was a proto-revolutionary struggle that would raise the class consciousness of the workers involved, building for the glorious day that was just around the corner. And, paradoxically, it was often the unsuccessful campaigns that brought the greatest benefits – as when Militant supporter, Joe Marino, became general secretary of the Bakers’ Union in 1979, following a failed strike – since they allowed revolutionaries the opportunity to scourge the failings of moderation. And, as Stan Ogden once observed, ‘Moderation’s another word for misery.’
Perhaps because few save the far left themselves actually believed that a revolution was really very likely, there were some prepared to argue that the fringe parties were inadvertently beneficial to liberal democracy. ‘I do not think they present a serious threat to this country,’ wrote Robert Mark of both the National Front and the Trotskyists. ‘In fact, in a curious way, their very existence offers a reasonable assurance of continued moderation because each offers a frightening glimpse of the possible.’ Others, particularly those whose authority had previously been paramount within the Labour Party, were less forgiving. ‘They are as bad as the Nazis in Germany during the ’30s. There is nothing to choose between them and the National Front,’ declared a shaken Joe Gormley, after an unpleasant encounter at the TUC Congress with SWP-inspired demonstrators, who had jostled him and even spat in his face. ‘This is democracy gone mad. The time has come to clamp down on the freedom allowed to this kind of people to abuse our society.’ Or, in the words of Inspector Regan of The Sweeney: ‘When one bunch of people tries to force its opinions on another, I don’t give a damn whether they’re commies against the rest, anarchists, Irish, they’re all in the wrong as far as I’m concerned. We may not think much of the present modern system – and I don’t, for a start – but it’s all we’ve got.’
Political extremism was not, however, the only facet of the ’70s fondness for fringe movements. Reginald Hill’s novel An Advancement of Learning, the second volume to feature the detectives Dalziel and Pascoe, is set in a college of higher education and much of the story revolves around two key students. One is Stuart Cockshut, a member of the fictional International Action Group, who sees a bright future for himself: ‘There was a career in protest these days for the dedicated true-believer, which is what he was.’ The other is the equally archetypal Franny Roote, an amused dabbler in what Cockshut calls a ‘mumbo-jumbo of séances and magic rituals’, a charismatic figure with a desire to break on through to the other side, aided by sex and drugs and ouija boards. Dalziel, magnificently grumpy as ever, is not impressed by either. ‘My generation, most of ’em, worked bloody hard, and accepted deprivation, and fought a bloody war, and put our trust in politicians, so our kids could have the right to come to places like this,’ he grumbles. ‘And after a few days here, I wonder if it was bloody worth it.’
Despite his complaints, the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ found fertile ground, flowering into a thousand blooms. First to show themselves were the alternative theories that had been hawked around for decades, normally involving the Pyramids, the lost civilization of Atlantis, and the possibility that the planet might actually be hollow at its core. Given a new impetus by the mystically inclined end of the hippy era, each found a willing body of new disciples. So too did newcomers like Erich von Däniken, who sold millions of copies of his pseudo-scientific books, starting with Chariots of the Gods, which explained how extra-terrestrial beings had genetically engineered humanity in prehistoric times, and had run up Stonehenge, the Easter Island statues and – of course – the Pyramids while they were here. Strangely, even the fact that the second of these books, Gods from Outer Space, was written while he was in a Swiss jail, convicted of forgery, did nothing to dent his popularity. But then this was a strange decade, a time when a young Israeli conjurer named Uri Geller could convince TV audiences that his spoon-bending tricks were proof of the paranormal powers latent in each one of us, when every rock star worth his salt name-checked the sex magic guru Aleister Crowley, and when biorhythms could become an overnight craze.
One of the few fringe theories that was apparently unacceptable was fundamentalist Christianity, as religious education teacher David Watson found when he was sacked by Hertfordshire County Council for refusing to accept the truth of evolution, and for teaching instead the Genesis creation myth. A former missionary in India, Watson was a man of some conviction and he stuck to his guns, later becoming the director of the Midwest Center of the Institute for Creation Research, based in Chicago, an indication that America was even more receptive to minority faith than was Britain. Indeed many of the more peculiar religious manifestations had their origins in the States and were imported to the UK, including cults such as the Church of Scientology, the Children of God and the Unification Church (commonly known as the Moonies), all of which were regular subjects of scare stories about converts allegedly being brainwashed. Whether or not the tales were true, recruits to these and other cults often had the same experience as some members of the far-left sects, finding a social, almost a familial, network that was essentially inward-looking, that allowed no room for doubt
and that was psychologically difficult to leave. ‘The danger of seeing only members of your own group,’ pointed out Tony Crosland, ‘is you begin to think more people are likeminded than is the case, think your convictions are the only authentic convictions.’ He was actually referring to the disciples of Roy Jenkins, but his analysis had a wider application.
From America too came the sensationalist, though theologically orthodox, movie The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel, which resuscitated a ritual normally associated with the middle ages, and dragged it blinking and cursing into the modern world. Although this was the first that many had heard of exorcism, the normally staid Church of England had already started the process of rehabilitating the practice, with a commission under the Bishop of Exeter recommending that every diocese should have its own exorcist; demand rose substantially for their services in the aftermath of the movie. And in the wake of exorcism, other New Testament traditions began to receive a more favourable press than might have been anticipated, so that, for example, the Anglican clergyman Reginald East enjoyed considerable success with his book Heal the Sick, calling on Christians to take up faith healing.
But Christianity remained very much on the back foot, besieged by a host of rival challengers seeking to satisfy the nation’s spiritual needs. Some of these, such as Satanism or the prophecies of Nostradamus, were familiar follies from centuries past; others were of more recent origin, including the Rastafari movement and the UFO obsession; and others still were simply cults built around charismatic leaders, from the Rolls-Royce-driving Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to the Afro-haired Sathya Sai Baba. What they had in common was the boost they received as the idealism of the 1960s dissipated in the face of a right-wing revival, turning many away from social and political goals to purely personal concerns. And as the long period of economic growth in the West went into reverse, and post-war consumerism began to look ever more fragile, so too the desire to find meaning elsewhere increased.
For those not committed to a single group or guru, the ’70s offered a finger buffet of faith, from which any combination of magi and messages could be taken. Frequently this produced little more than garbled confusion, a pantheistic mishmash that looked as though it was designed to validate G.K. Chesterton’s (misquoted) epigram: ‘When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.’ But at its best it allowed for a work such as Colin Wilson’s The Occult, a massive volume that proved to be his most influential book since his 1956 debut, The Outsider, and that rounded up everyone from William Blake to Madame Blavatsky, from Casanova to Crowley, and from Dostoevsky to Dr John Dee (as played by Richard O’Brien in Jubilee). All were brought together, along with evidence from contemporary science, to produce a coherent attempt at restoring significance to human life in the modern world, even if the boast on the cover of the paperback – ‘The ultimate book for those who would walk with the Gods’ – did seem a trifle ambitious.
The relationship between the traditional churches and the new approach to religion was played out in the 1973 film The Wicker Man. Here a God-fearing police officer, Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police (Edward Woodward), follows a trail to a remote Scottish island in pursuit of a missing girl, and encounters a pagan community in complete opposition to what he insists ‘is still in theory a law-abiding, Christian country, however unfashionable that may seem’. Presiding over this world is his charming but sinister host, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), who tells him: ‘Here, the old gods aren’t dead.’ Deeply shocked, Howie demands, ‘What of the true God, to whose glory churches and monasteries have been built on these islands for generations past?’ And Summerisle shrugs: ‘He’s dead. He can’t complain. He had his chance and, in modern parlance, He blew it.’
As it turns out, this is a trifle disingenuous, for the old gods certainly had been dead until they were resurrected by Summerisle’s grandfather. Attracted by the combination of the Gulf Stream and a fertile volcanic soil, this ‘distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, freethinker’ had chosen the island as the site of his experimental fruit-growing business, and added the religious element simply as a means of motivating the local workforce; he sought ‘to rouse the people from their apathy by giving them back their joyous old gods’. This is not then, as first it seems, the blissful survival of a pre-Christian religion, but a cynical exploitation of credulous folk by capitalism. As such, it was perhaps an apt metaphor for the new religious movements that sometimes seemed like nothing more than disreputable traders in half-truths, fleecing customers by flogging them second-hand furniture as though it were antique, whilst charging them modern prices.
In common with the political sects of the left, much of the new spirituality spoke in millennial imagery, prophesying the imminent collapse of the world that we knew. Even so, no one expected the shock of the Jonestown massacre in 1978. Established in Guyana by Rev. Jim Jones, founder and leader of the People’s Temple, Jonestown was a settlement of around a thousand people, predominantly black Americans from California, who had fallen for what Jones called his message of ‘apostolic socialism’. When a delegation led by a US congressman visited the community to investigate claims of abuse, it came under small-arms fire as it tried to leave, and the entire membership of the cult then proceeded – perhaps under duress – to kill themselves, most of them by consuming a soft drink laced with cyanide, in an act that was intended to be seen as revolutionary suicide. Over nine hundred died that day, including Jones, and the incident cast something of a shadow over newly founded religious groups.
Nothing of even vaguely comparable impact occurred in Britain, nor was it conceivable that it might, for somehow the British versions of fervour and disciplined organization in spiritual matters never quite convinced. A congregation at an evangelical church in England was a very different proposition from its equivalent in the southern states of America: more reserved, less inclined to indulge in overt displays of possession by the Holy Spirit, reluctant to tithe what was left of their wages after taxation to the glory of their pastor. Nor was Britain blessed with any great preachers to rival their American counterparts in terms of charisma, chutzpah or political influence. Indeed churches in Britain – even an avowedly anti-communist group like the Moonies – tended not to engage in politics to any great extent. Certainly there was nothing to match the great anti-communist crusade of Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, who had been jailed for his faith for many years in Romania, and relocated to America when he was exiled from his own country. His revelations about the treatment of Christians in Eastern Europe were amongst the most important witnesses of the late twentieth century, though they were sometimes undermined by wild flights of fancy, as in his book Was Karl Marx a Satanist? ‘I do not claim to have provided undisputed proof that Marx was a member of a sect of devil-worshippers,’ admitted Wurmbrand reluctantly, ‘but I believe that there are sufficient leads to imply this.’
For such hardcore fringe thinking, Britain had to look abroad, as it did to find the authentic voice of blue-skies socialism. Juan Posadas was an Argentinian revolutionary who had split with the Fourth International, the mainstream of world Trotskyism, over the issue of nuclear war (the majority disapproved, while he welcomed the prospect as a step towards the dictatorship of the proletariat), and who had subsequently founded his own, slightly self-aggrandizing, organization: the Fourth International (Posadist). By the ’70s he was to be found arguing for UFOs to be accepted as a socialist presence in the world, with a logic based on a straightforward socialist syllogism. First, communism was, following established Marxist theory, the inevitable final stage of an advanced society; second, any alien race that had achieved interplanetary travel was by definition an advanced society; thirdly, therefore, the crew of a UFO must be communists. A small band of his followers, never more than a few dozen, kept the faith alive in Britain under the banner of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist). Where Leon Trotsky had argued that Stalin was wrong to advoca
te socialism in one country, Posadas refused even to accept socialism on one planet.
Largely eschewing devil-worshipping revolutionaries and communists from outer space, the British fringe produced instead Roger Protz. The first editor of Militant and later the editor of Socialist Worker, Protz could thus claim to have been a leading member of the two most significant Trotskyist groups in Britain, as well as helping to launch a rival faction, the Workers League. More influentially, however, he also became a leading light in the Campaign for Real Ale, founded in 1971. He edited that organization’s annual publication Good Beer Guide, and was the recipient of the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Guild of Beer. His contribution wasn’t as spectacular as the imported ideologies, but it did, one suspects, have a more lasting impact on British society than ever they managed.
14
Sexualities
‘The buggers are legal now’
BOB: Another well known fact: anybody who’s always putting queer people down and being aggressively masculine like you, is only masking their own latent tendencies.
Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais,
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973)