Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Tom Robinson, meanwhile, had an alternative perspective:

  Pictures of naked young women are fun

  In Titbits and Playboy, page three of the Sun.

  There are no nudes in Gay News, our one magazine,

  But they still find excuses to call it obscene.

  15

  Crisis

  ‘Sending out an S.O.S.’

  Rape and murder throughout the land, and they tell me that you’re still a free man. Well, if this is freedom I don’t understand cause it seems like madness to me.

  The Jam, ‘“A” Bomb in Wardour Street’ (1978)

  By all accounts, the working class is busy creating a sort of hell on earth for itself: rubbish lies uncollected in the street, old-age pensioners are mercilessly raped whenever they venture out after dark, dying like flies in any case and their corpses left unburied, everybody in work is on strike and the rest are unemployed.

  Auberon Waugh (1979)

  We’ll beat the bastards yet.

  Margaret Thatcher (1978)

  By 1978 it appeared as though perhaps the worst had passed for James Callaghan’s minority administration. The rate of inflation, while not exactly impressive, was down sufficiently for the government to claim that it was coming under control, industrial disputes were nowhere near the levels of the Heath years, and the opinion polls were looking more favourable. The early enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher was falling away a little, and it was widely assumed that an election that year could produce another Labour victory.

  Underneath, however, there were still disturbing indications of instability. Structurally British industry remained fragile. In the period 1968–73, British productivity had grown at 3 per cent per year, much slower than its competitors; following the international oil crisis, both France and West Germany fell below that level in 1973–79, but Britain fell still further and averaged just 1.3 per cent, less than half the growth rate of those countries. For the Labour Party, an even more damaging fact was that the underlying unemployment levels were rising, largely because of the government’s own policies. And then there was the certain knowledge that the pay restraint deals agreed between the TUC and the government were losing support among ordinary trade unionists. The first unmistakable warning of this trend had come at the TGWU conference in July 1977 when Jack Jones, soon to retire as general secretary, lost a vote for the first time; despite his passionate speech urging delegates to accept a further round of a wages policy in order to sustain the Labour Party in office, the conference voted instead for ‘a return to unfettered collective bargaining’. A new, much looser, agreement was cobbled together, but the ‘humiliating snub’ to Jones was a shot across the government’s bows. As Denis Healey pointed out, ‘The union leaders are completely out of touch with the rank and file.’

  Labour’s lead in the polls could not, therefore, be relied upon. ‘Jim’s good news basket is a very small one and all the signs are that the present drop in inflation (now down to 7.8 per cent) and unemployment figures cannot be maintained,’ noted Michael Palin in 1978. ‘Still,’ he added, ‘I’m better disposed to letting the present Labour government run my country for me than any other group – apart, perhaps, from Pan’s People.’ It was a lovely image, but sadly one from a fast-vanishing age. For the five-woman dance troupe Pan’s People had recently retired, after ten years of providing visual relief for dads obliged by their children to watch Top of the Pops. They were replaced by the short-lived and barely remembered Ruby Flipper, whose mixed-gender line-up failed to console a bereaved audience.

  And still the major source of discontent in the nation remained. A poll by MORI in September 1978 showed that 82 per cent of the electorate thought that the unions were ‘too powerful’. Nearly three-quarters of trade unionists themselves agreed with the proposition. For a Labour Party that was seen, and that saw itself, as the political wing of the unions, these were worrying figures. And it had nothing in its policy locker that might address the issue.

  Over half the working population were members of unions, putting Britain somewhere around the middle of the league table of industrialized nations in terms of unionization, but that still left many millions outside, resenting the fall in living standards caused by the wages policies, yet fearful of a free-for-all that would surely benefit others at their expense. Symptomatic of their plight was the tragic story of Ernest Bishop, as enacted by Stephen Hancock in Coronation Street.

  For its first decade or more, the soap’s most articulate spokesman for the upwardly mobile working class had been Ken Barlow (William Roach), a college graduate who had been briefly jailed in the militant student days of the 1960s, but who had settled down to become a repository of reason and liberalism. When, for example, a gang of skinheads rampaged down Rosamund Street in 1971 and put a brick through the window of Ernie Bishop’s shop, it was Ken who tried to understand, comparing their motivation to that of George Mallory’s famous comment on climbing Mount Everest: ‘You ask these skinheads, they’ll probably give you the same sort of reason why they destroyed a tree or carved up a train: because it’s there. To the chap who climbed Everest, it was big and it was frightening so he had to show who was boss. The kids today find the world big and incomprehensible and they want to show who’s boss.’

  But as the decade wore on, and the gloss came off the radical dream, Ernie – a grammar school boy who had studied photography at the local polytechnic – emerged as a counterbalancing voice of lower-middle-class morality and respectability, unwilling any longer to play second fiddle to Ken’s rosy optimism. ‘Does the victim of a mugging care about democracy?’ he stormed on one occasion. ‘Or a child blown up by a terrorist bomb? Or the soldier with a bullet in his back? Any one of those things happening to a single person, and democracy has failed in my book.’

  By 1976 his photographic business was struggling, as were those of many of the self-employed, and his generalized complaints about society were becoming intensely personal. ‘Why, if you’re ordinary and honest and you slave away, why does life just become more and more impossible every day? And don’t tell me it’s not the government. They don’t care. If the TUC barks, they throw them a bone. And where does the bone come from? From the skeletons of all the rest of us. Labour, Conservative, they’re all the same, they’ve all got their nests nicely feathered. And I defy Jim Callaghan to come in here and tell me any different. Sometimes, it just feels like a great conspiracy.’ The shop duly collapsed, and the forty-six-year-old Ernie had to endure what he – and many others of his generation – perceived as the ultimate humiliation of being out of work and dependent on his wife’s income. And then things took a turn for the better. He found a new job as the wages clerk in Mike Baldwin’s denim factory, and by January 1978 he was able to feel some hope for the future for the first time in years. ‘It’s a funny thing, you know,’ he reflected, ‘if you asked me to choose the best time of my life, I think I’d say now.’

  Those were among his last words. Later in the same episode he was shot during a bungled wages raid on the factory, and he subsequently died of his wounds in hospital. The nation was horrified – ‘It mustn’t happen,’ gasped Sir John Betjeman on learning that Ernie was to be killed off – but the sacrifice of this decent man, a lay preacher who played the piano in a Congregationalist chapel, seemed somehow appropriate for the era.

  The theme of the middle classes being squeezed between the rival power blocks of big business and the unions was becoming increasingly common, with the latter being the target of most attacks. In Fawlty Towers, Basil is never happier than when ranting about the state of the working class. ‘Another car strike. Marvellous, isn’t it? Taxpayers pay millions each year, they get the money, go on strike. It’s called socialism,’ he spits, before launching into a fantasy about ‘the British Leyland Concerto in four movements, all of them slow with a four-hour tea-break in between’. Similarly Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party, which transferred from stage to screen in 1977, focused on an arriviste co
uple, existing in a state of jittery desperation, who stage a small drinks party. The early discussion – when conversation is still tolerably social – centres on whether the men present have got ‘a good job’, not in any spirit of solidarity but rather of a suspicion that will later break into overt hostility. The play leavened its melodrama by ridiculing the cultural pretensions of those it clearly felt should have resisted the call to social mobility, and who were destined always to be looking over their shoulder. And the cultural snobbery made the piece a huge success amongst those who could claim to be at least second-generation bourgeois: ‘The audience was frightful,’ wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary, after attending the original production. ‘Hampstead sophisticates knowingly laughing at all the bad taste lines “Oh! A bottle of Beaujolais! How lovely! I’ll just pop it in the fridge . . .” and they fell about, loving their superiority.’

  Such was the pinch being felt by the middle classes that in 1977 Surrey County Council announced that it was re-examining its supply of free school meals to those in need, now taking into consideration not simply income but the income that was left after essentials including mortgage, rates, insurance and travel costs. And the belief spread that such concerns were simply not understood by the government. That year Thatcher used her speech to the Conservative Party conference to make great play of being a product of a grammar school, as compared to Tony Benn’s privileged public school background. It was, as the News of the World pointed out, a somewhat disingenuous comparison, since Labour MPs from grammar schools outnumbered those in the Tory ranks by three to one, while there was only one public school Labour MP to every seven amongst Conservatives, but nonetheless the attack struck home: ‘It was a very subtle argument,’ conceded Benn. She continued to push hard on the theme: ‘The only difference between the Marxists and the social democrats in the Labour Party,’ she mocked in 1978, ‘is that the Marxists want to see the socialist millennium tomorrow whereas the social democrats wish it to be deferred until their children have completed their private education.’

  Much of this chimed with Ernie Bishop’s talk about politicians feathering their own nests. Another Coronation Street character, the mild-mannered Mavis Riley, had a similar feeling, suggesting that come the next election she wanted to speak to the local Labour candidate: ‘I shall ask him why, if he believes in everybody being equal, he’s got two homes.’ In real life, the same question about ministers purchasing country houses was being asked by Jack Jones: it ‘did not endear me to everyone’, he reflected, ‘but the lesson had to be driven home’. It was a reputation that did the party’s leadership no good, and that swiftly affected public perceptions. When the fictional private eye James Hazell finds himself in a Chelsea mews where you couldn’t buy a house ‘for much less than fifty thou’, he comments cynically: ‘Be a strong Labour ward then.’ Again parallels could be found in the ancient Rome of I, Claudius. His nephew Caligula having been murdered, Claudius is chosen by the Praetorian Guard to become the new emperor. He insists that he doesn’t want the job, that – like his late brother Germanicus – he doesn’t believe in emperors and wants to see a republic. And a centurion has to put him straight: ‘It’s all very well for you, sir. Being members of the imperial family, you can afford the luxury of republican sentiments. I can’t. I rose through the ranks.’

  All of this was grist to Thatcher’s mill, as she increasingly portrayed herself as the humble grocer’s daughter, untainted by such implied venality. Even though such an image was not entirely candid – her marriage to a millionaire businessman was seldom emphasized – she had found a vulnerable point in Labour’s class armour and, like a professional wrestler discovering that his opponent had a weak right shoulder, she worked on it, particularly in terms of what was seen as a lack of opportunity in comprehensive schooling. As a former education secretary, albeit one who oversaw the closure of large numbers of grammar schools, she was here on familiar territory where she could claim some expertise.

  And education was becoming a key battleground, with London being singled out as the prime example of what would one day become known in the right-wing press as the ‘loony left’ and then as ‘political correctness’. ‘A mother in North London,’ reported the News of the World, ‘complains that on sports day at her daughter’s primary school, pupils were told they were only allowed to win one race.’ Meanwhile the Daily Mail was denouncing ILEA, who ‘want to encourage teachers to ditch textbooks that show boys in too dominant a role. They want to prod schools into wooing more girls into taking up mathematics.’ And Robert Mark claimed that there was a drain of police officers from the capital to other parts of the country ‘where the grass is greener, where living conditions were pleasanter and, in particular, where their children would not have to attend the schools of Inner London’. The spirit of non-competitive education was part of the new orthodoxy, as shown when Charles Curran, the director-general of the BBC, had decreed that success in the eleven-plus should not be mentioned as a reason for requests being played on Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart’s Junior Choice programme on Radio One, for fear that it might upset those who had failed. ‘We should be sorry if mention of the examination caused distress to some of the children,’ explained the ex-grammar school boy.

  Most powerful of all was the critique offered by Rhodes Boyson, himself a headmaster, attacking teachers who ‘do not aim to teach but to “liberate” their pupils, which means leaving them trapped in their ignorance so they grow up illiterate and anti-social as unemployed and unemployable juveniles with a genuine grievance against society’. He cited the extraordinary case of one who ‘actually refused to teach decimals because it was used in the form of accounting which accompanied the capitalist system’.

  Partially in response to this barrage against what were seen as leftist attitudes to teaching, Callaghan launched his one great policy initiative, a debate on the future of education, in a 1976 speech at Ruskin College, Oxford: ‘The essential tools are basic literacy and numeracy; the understanding of how to live and work together; respect for others; and respect for the individual.’ The goal of education is ‘to equip children to the best of their ability for a lively constructive place in society and also to fit them to do a job of work’, he argued, ‘not one or the other, but both’. It was an intelligent and honourable venture, but not one – given the economic crises he was facing – that he was able to follow through satisfactorily. It was to take another decade, and another government, to implement the national curriculum and the parental choice for which he called, and to challenge the ‘informal methods of teaching’ that he criticized. He was destined to receive little of the credit.

  The education system, alongside taxation and a general feeling that there was a lack of opportunity in Britain, was one of the key reasons cited by those who were emigrating from the country. And there were plenty who did so. The peak year was 1974, when it seemed as though the trade unions had acquired the power to make or break governments, and when 269,000 left the country (compared to 184,000 coming in), but it was hardly a new phenomenon, with the expression ‘the brain drain’ having been coined in the 1960s. Nor was it short-lived. In 1970 Boyson had warned that state interference in everyday life had reached intolerable proportions: ‘Little wonder that tens of thousands of our most enterprising vigorous people now emigrate every year to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia where they have more chance of fulfilling themselves and shaping their lives to their own choice.’ By the mid-’70s South Africa had overtaken even Australia as the destination of choice, with the press reporting that 29,000 men from the managerial class had chosen to relocate there in 1975, with numbers rising still further in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising.

  Most newsworthy of the émigrés were the rock musicians, including the Rolling Stones, who fled to the south of France and whose 1972 album Exile on Main Street had a title indicating their status as refugees from taxation. ‘I owed the Inland Revenue a fortune,’ admitted Bill Wyman, before dis
missing his homeland: ‘All the ambitious people leave.’ Under Callaghan – the man who, as chancellor of the exchequer, had inspired George Harrison’s song ‘Taxman’ for the Beatles – the situation grew worse, in quantity if not quality. Amongst those who left later, less celebrated than the Stones, was the Australian-born producer Mike Chapman, who had given us acts such as the Sweet, Mud and Suzi Quatro, and who departed Britain for LA: ‘Los Angeles is a more receptive city for music than London is,’ he explained. ‘And the tax system in Britain is pretty bad.’ He went on to produce a series of #1 hits in America for the likes of Blondie, Exile and the Knack.

  Even record-producer Biddu, who had hitchhiked from India in order to move to Britain and who had gone on to help invent disco, with #1 hits for Carl Douglas (‘Kung Fu Fighting’ in 1974) and Tina Charles (‘I Love to Love’ in 1976), was losing faith in his adopted country. ‘I was getting very disillusioned with the scene over here, because punk had come in and I can’t stand people swearing and cussing,’ he remembered. ‘My wife and I even thought about emigrating, we just thought the country was going downhill, morally and in everything else. I was very disillusioned at that time.’

  And then, in 1977, came the most spectacular departure of all when the England football manager, Don Revie, flew out of the country, leaving behind a letter of resignation addressed to the FA. He had secretly accepted a post as coach to the United Arab Emirates, a job whose remuneration – allowing for the absence of tax – equated to a salary of £2 million a year in Britain, compared to the £25,000 he was getting as England manager. Given those figures, it might be thought that few could blame him, but pretty much everybody did, for rats who choose to leave sinking ships are seldom honoured by the passengers obliged to remain, and Revie had precious little in the way of reputation to win over his detractors. He had already ensured England’s failure to qualify for the 1978 World Cup, and had seen the nation’s team comprehensively destroyed at Wembley by Johann Cruyff’s Holland. ‘There is no point in kidding ourselves,’ Revie admitted after that defeat, as though commenting on Britain’s economic position relative to its rivals. ‘We just couldn’t cope.’