Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  For the truth was that it was Thatcher’s moment. Callaghan and his colleagues looked tired and ineffectual, entirely lacking in ideas for the future, while the Tory leadership was reinvigorated and had the supreme value of looking new. Whatever else she might have been, Thatcher was very clearly a different proposition from Heath, Wilson or Callaghan, and to a nation wearily accustomed to settling for second-best, she at least talked of aspiration and achievement. And she bristled with challenges to the orthodoxy that had held the nation in its grasp for a quarter of a century, even if her own party did not realize it. ‘We do not pretend to be the repositories of doctrines or principles which are absolutely true and have to be carried to their logical conclusion,’ Conservative MP Julian Amery had written in the early days of Thatcher’s leadership, but he was wrong: her party was doctrinaire in a way that none had been since Labour in 1945.

  Whether that message was fully understood is doubtful, for this was primarily a case of a government losing an election rather than the opposition having to win one. But the Conservatives made the most of their brief, and their success came in the context of fighting Labour on its own ground. Just as the phraseology of ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ and ‘the winter of discontent’ had been appropriated from the Heath years, so the Tories borrowed the clothes of left-radical politics from a decade earlier, arguing for individual liberty and freedom from the state (though the state was here defined to include the TUC). Their poster campaign, prepared by the newly founded advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, focused on the key Labour issues of health, education and unemployment, with the slogans ‘Britain isn’t getting any better’, ‘Educashun isn’t working’ and – most famously – ‘Labour isn’t working’. The last of these featured a depiction of a dole queue snaking away into the distance, to reflect the fact that there were then 1.3 million unemployed in the country, though the people in the photograph were actually members of Hendon Young Conservatives. But the slogan that expressed the national mood most effectively was the more general ‘Cheer up, they can’t last for ever’.

  The chaos of January and February played heavily in the election, reviving all the fears of rampant trade unionism that had dominated popular perceptions of politics for the previous decade or more. In the words of Shirley Williams: ‘The crisis had changed from “Who governs?” to “Who can control the unions?”’ And the answer was: not Labour. Thatcher not only articulated anti-union sentiments (even winning over a substantial number of union members), but brought them together with a deeper underlying sense that things had been going wrong ever since the 1960s. Those who were uncomfortable with permissiveness, with pornography, with anti-police propaganda, with rising levels of violence, with immigration and with multiculturalism found in Thatcher a party leader in whom they could place their trust, a semi-domesticated Enoch Powell crossed with a less cranky Mary Whitehouse. The fact that she also shared with Powell a faith in the obscure doctrine of monetarism meant little one way or the other; what was important was that she seemed to have tapped into the nostalgia that permeated the ’70s, harking back to better, more peaceful times.

  In James Herbert’s 1978 novel The Spear, an MI5 agent who is part of a neo-Nazi plot to take over Britain had denied that he and his comrades were revolutionaries: ‘What we’re talking about is counter-revolution. The revolution is already taking place. We intend to oppose it.’ Benn was unconsciously to echo the thought, arguing that Thatcherism ‘was a counter-revolution against democracy’.

  The result of the election was unequivocal. The Conservatives won sixty-two more seats than did Labour, and became the first party to secure a comfortable government majority since Heath in 1970, while the Liberals and the nationalists suffered, just as Foot had predicted they would. As she stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street, Thatcher turned to the assembled media and shared with the nation a prayer by St Francis of Assisi: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ It was, snorted Jim Prior, ‘the most awful humbug’. Worse than that, it turned out that it wasn’t even a genuine work by St Francis at all, but rather a nineteenth-century imitation.

  Perhaps that fraudulent note is the appropriate place to leave the politics of the 1970s, as the nation entered its new, Thatcherite era. Or perhaps one should end with the last-ever episode of Fawlty Towers, which should have been broadcast during the election campaign but which, rather appropriately, was delayed for seven months by industrial action at the BBC. In ‘Basil the Rat’, Manuel’s pet rodent, which he’s convinced is a Siberian hamster, escapes and runs wild in the hotel. In what was virtually the final shot of the series we see a health inspector confronted by the sight of the rat in a tin of cheese biscuits, the great symbol of ’70s urban decay having finally broken into the most domestic of settings.

  Better still, leaving the decade where it began, one should look to the England football team. In November 1979 Don Revie, having returned from the Middle East, initiated a court case in an attempt to overturn the ten-year ban on management that had been handed down by the FA in retaliation for his moonlight flit. For eighteen days the bloated, decaying corpse of the English football administration was dissected and pored over in the high courts, bringing nothing but shame and embarrassment to all concerned. And at the end of it all, the judge found in favour of Revie, even though his sympathies clearly lay with the FA; he rescinded the ban, while denouncing Revie’s actions as ‘a sensational and notorious example of disloyalty, breach of duty, discourtesy and selfishness’.

  Despite the judgment, Revie never managed a club in Britain again. But on the field of play the England team ended the decade on something of a high, qualifying in style for their first major tournament since 1970. In their first game of the 1980 European Championship, staged in Italy, they played Belgium and drew 1–1, but the match was marred when English fans turned violent, attacking Italian spectators who had the audacity to cheer the Belgian equalizer. Play had to be suspended as the riot police waded into the crowd and as England’s goalkeeper, Ray Clemence, collapsed under the influence of the tear gas drifting out from the stands and onto the pitch. It was not an auspicious start for the return to international competition. And England, of course, failed to progress in the tournament. Some things, it seemed, had not changed.

  Outro

  Farewell

  ‘It’s cold outside’

  In Margaret Thatcher’s first major television interview after her election as prime minister, with Brian Walden on Weekend World, she offered her own, slightly unorthodox, interpretation of Jesus’ best-known parable. ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions,’ she remarked; ‘he had money as well.’ And this, she said, confirmed her vision of the society she wished to build, a society that eschewed the socialist dream of egalitarianism and offered instead the natural elitism of a meritocracy. ‘If opportunity and talent is unequally distributed, then allowing people to exercise that talent and opportunity means more inequality, but it also means you drag up the poor people, because there are the resources to do so.’

  She was not the only one to draw lessons from the parable. In his memoirs, the veteran left-winger Ian Mikardo celebrated the frequently derided figure of the political activist, as opposed to the much-vaunted silent majority. The latter he characterized as: ‘the people who stay silent, who don’t utter a word of protest against the fruits of social injustice and deprivation; or against the system which hoards mountains of food in cold stores in rich countries whilst millions starve in the waste-lands; or against the erosion for company profit of the world’s natural resources, and the pollution of its air and its rivers and its oceans; or against the slide towards nuclear war and nuclear winter and nuclear holocaust’. He concluded: ‘The Good Samaritan was an activist: those who passed by on the other side were members of the silent majority.’

  There was yet another int
erpretation of the Good Samaritan, this time from the one serious student of the New Testament in the House of Commons. Enoch Powell insisted the story had to be understood in the historical context of those who heard it first, an audience who would have understood the racial relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans: ‘If the parable has a “moral”, it is that Jews and Samaritans should remember that they are not merely neighbours (literally) but kinsmen.’

  As ever, Powell’s was something of a maverick position. But the gap between Thatcher and Mikardo – each claiming the Good Samaritan as, variously, a man of property or a radical activist – symbolised the split in British politics as it entered the new decade. And that split was about to grow ever wider.

  The divisions that resulted and were manifest in social and cultural, as well as political terms are chronicled in another book, Rejoice! Rejoice!, which covers the period of Thatcher’s premiership. So powerful a grip did she exert on the public consciousness of Britain during her time in office, both at home and abroad, that in retrospect perceptions of the 1970s have been changed. Where once the era was seen as a bitter comedown from the heady excitement of the Swinging Sixties, it has since been recast by some as being simply a prelude to the traumatic upheavals of the subsequent decade, a disruptive moment that created the conditions for the necessary changes to come. In either event, it emerges merely as a transition phase; if not quite a bridge, then perhaps an ill-lit, graffitied underpass between two bigger, brasher, more self-advertising eras. Some decades are louder than others, and the voice of the 1970s is frequently drowned out by its noisy neighbours. Elsewhere, depictions of the popular culture of the time have sometimes seemed rooted in an ironic celebration of Space Hoppers, Spangles and Smash.

  There is some truth in these perceptions, but they tell only a part of the story. Culturally, the 1970s was indeed seen at the time as amounting to little more than the leftovers from the previous decade. Many of the era’s rock stars, for example – most notably David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Rod Stewart – had been releasing records unsuccessfully for almost as long as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and were much the same age; each of those three singers had released four albums before finally breaking into the top ten. ‘The ones who got into glam were the losers of our generation,’ was pop producer Jonathan King’s perception; ‘they used to tag along.’ But the music that emerged has proved remarkably durable, not simply glam but also heavy metal and punk. Even if the sales of records were incomparable, nearly four decades later there were more bands in the world drawing from the work of Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols than from that of either the Beatles or the Stones. The pattern was repeated elsewhere. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the members of which had likewise failed to become household names in the 1960s, still exerts a powerful influence over sketch comedy in Britain. And stand-up comedy continues to build to the blueprint drawn by Billy Connolly and Jasper Carrott, veterans of the folk-club circuit, part of the same generation as the rock stars and both in their thirties by the time they became successful.

  A parallel process could be found in politics. The forward march of liberalism had been halted by the counter-revolution of 1968, manifest in such diverse events as the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Soviet Union, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the overwhelming electoral victory of the Gaullists in France and Richard Nixon in America, and the popular response to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Britain. As the self-proclaimed forces of progress splintered, the resultant pieces were generally considered to be marginal to the mainstream of political activity. The launch in 1972 of the magazines Spare Rib and Gay News didn’t make much of a stir at the time; the repercussions, however, were profound and transformed both the country and its politics, such that, forty years on, a Conservative-led coalition government announced legislation to permit same-sex marriages. From Britain’s perspective the biggest political event of the decade – the entry into the European Community, confirmed by the subsequent referendum – was also an issue left hanging from the 1960s. The effects of that decision too continued to reverberate.

  In short, much of what was then seen as being a postscript to the 1960s turned out to be the foundation of modern Britain. The 1970s was a period not of transition but of transformation.

  Nor was it the case that the decade was just a protracted setting of the scene for the advent of Margaret Thatcher, though that has become orthodoxy in some quarters. With the ending of Empire, the 1970s saw modern Britain’s fondness for bemoaning the state of the nation come to fruition, and a note of gloomy declinism became a familiar part of the national identity. There were plenty of commentators – then and subsequently – eager to echo the perspective of Airey Neave, the Conservative MP who helmed Thatcher’s challenge for the party leadership: ‘The country is on the verge of revolution,’ he wrote in his diary of October 1974. Thatcher herself was less apocalyptic but equally gloomy: ‘This is the twilight of the middle class,’ she observed around the same time.

  The truth was a little more prosaic and a little more positive. For most of the country, for most of the decade, times were really quite good. In retrospect, the 1970s can look like a period of comparative calm and stability. It was still possible for an average working-class family to live on a single wage, very few were required to work anti-social hours, and housing was affordable for most. Many of the problems that were identified – unemployment, the balance of trade, youth violence, unassimilated immigration, environmental degradation, pornography, drugs – appeared dramatic then, but were to become far worse in subsequent decades.

  There were two key exceptions to this in the public sphere. First, the widespread phenomenon of industrial conflict was never again to reach the same levels as it did in the 1970s, once the Thatcher government introduced the restrictions on trade union activity previously attempted by Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. This came, however, at a price; an active union movement had ensured that pay and conditions improved for most of the workforce during the 1970s, as well as helping to provide a level of job security that was soon to disappear entirely.

  And second, inflation had also peaked; the problem was not easily solved but by the mid-1990s, it had finally been brought under control. Even here, though, the picture had been painted too starkly. The conditions bequeathed by Edward Heath’s government had seen historically high levels of inflation, but the situation was nowhere near catastrophic enough to warrant the rhetoric employed by some. ‘Unchecked inflation could destroy the mature democracies in the contemporary world as it did the Weimar Republic between the wars,’ warned Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas in 1974, and the Liberal John Pardoe was one of many who shared the same fears, suggesting ‘the smell of the Weimar Republic is in the air’.

  Such comments were themselves absurdly inflated, and one can discern if not quite a note of scaremongering, then at least a relish in talking up what was seen as social disintegration. And perhaps this was only to be expected, for among those who felt most threatened by the unions were the two groups who specialized in generating comment and opinion: politicians, who feared a rival power-base, and journalists, who worked in an industry plagued by restrictive practices and union militancy. The two groups had a mutual interest in seeing the worst. Herein lay the roots of the belief that drastic action needed to be taken if Britain was to survive as a democracy, that the country was sliding into anarchy until the intervention of Margaret Thatcher, and that she thus became – to use a phrase much bandied about after her death in 2013 – ‘the woman who saved Britain’.

  But the Thatcherite revolution was neither obvious nor inevitable. Had James Callaghan called a general election in the autumn of 1978, as was widely expected, he would probably have been returned to power. And the Conservative Party would have been extremely unlikely to have given Thatcher the kind of leeway accorded to Edward Heath when he lost elections in 1966 and 1974; the chances are that she would have been removed and r
eplaced by a more emollient figure such as William Whitelaw or Peter Walker, her leadership to be remembered as a bizarre, dead-end episode in Tory history.

  In terms of economic performance, the consequences would have turned out much the same: Britain, despite following the monetarist path embarked upon by Callaghan in 1976, would still have continued its slow slide down the international league tables, just as it actually did under the long Tory government. And even in the short-term, although there might have been a difference in degree, the early years of the 1980s would still have seen a major recession and a rapid growth in unemployment, since these were largely the product of a global slump and the arrival in the workforce of a huge wave of school-leavers. But without Thatcher’s constant railing against the reality of national decline, the tone and culture of the country would have been very different.

  In a celebrated sketch on the BBC’s Not the Nine O’Clock News in 1979, Rowan Atkinson parodied the Thatcherite approach: ‘If it doesn’t work, then we’ll be more than prepared to revert to the old, liberal, wishy-washy, nigger-loving, red, left-wing, homosexual commie ways of the recent past. But please, let’s have a chance . . .’ That the chance existed was primarily due to Callaghan’s miscalculation the previous year. Without it, the polarization of politics and culture would have been far less marked.