Although Profumo initially denied the relationship in a statement to the House of Commons, he eventually was forced to admit it and resigned. The senior judge Lord Denning’s official report into the affair exonerated Profumo of espionage, but confirmed the sensational press stories surrounding Lord Astor’s country home Cliveden. The affair sounded the death knell for an increasingly unpopular government. The trial for living off immoral earnings of Stephen Ward, a society osteopath who had introduced Profumo to Keeler and seemed to have provided mistresses for many Tory politicians, provided an unfavourable contrast with the situation in the country, where sterling crises prevented pay increases in the public sector. Since 1959 the Conservatives had put through little domestic legislation. Four new universities had been founded in 1961 and six more were planned in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report, as were a number of new hospitals. Nevertheless the government gave the impression of being unwilling to put money into the maintenance of Britain’s public buildings, not least her schools. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which restricted immigration from Commonwealth countries, looked racist. Hugh Gaitskell denounced it in the House of Commons as ‘a plain anti-colour measure’. The Rent Act, which allowed far more competitive pricing, produced ruthless landlords like London’s Peter Rachman, who terrorized innocent bedsit-dwellers in the then run-down area of Notting Hill.
Thanks to Macmillan’s good relationship with President Kennedy, Britain became closely allied with America. Yet during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 it was quite obvious that, however special the ‘special relationship’, so often said to exist between the two countries, Britain was not accorded the status of a partner by the United States. When an American spy satellite orbiting over Cuba spotted Russian missiles apparently pointing at the United States, a world crisis of terrifying proportions threatened. Though America belonged to NATO, John F. Kennedy, the youthful and charismatic American president, opted to play a lone hand against the Russian threat.
He put a blockade round Cuba and brought the world to the brink of a third world war without telling his allies, not even Britain. British civil servants and politicians began to see that an alliance with America did not really offer a solution for post-imperial Britain, for evidently there was to be no discussion among equals. Therefore, in spite of de Gaulle’s rebuff, Britain began to revive her interest in the organization of European states. In terms of combined populations and of industrial and economic power, they made up as large a unit as America.
As a result of his theatrical abilities and his gift for presentation, Macmillan had become known to cartoonists as Supermac. But by the end of 1963 even his ability to convince the public was wearing thin. Although employment was high during the 1950s, the government’s economic policy had never been very smooth. In order to prevent inflation, the Conservatives had resorted to ‘stop-go’ policies: if prices rose too sharply, tax was suddenly increased; if they fell, interest rates were reduced. All in all, Macmillan’s administration was looking increasingly tawdry. At last, in 1963 illness forced him to resign dramatically in the middle of the Conservative party conference.
From his hospital bed Supermac made sure that it was a compromise candidate, the effete-looking fourteenth Earl of Home, who succeeded him as party leader and prime minister. Home gave up his peerage and became an MP as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Had his principal rival, the multi-talented progressive R. A. Butler become prime minister in his stead, as many in the party wished, the 1964 election might have had a different outcome.
Unfortunately Sir Alex was a completely unreconstructed aristocrat, more interested in shooting on his grouse moor than in managing the House of Commons, which as a member of the Lords he scarcely knew anyway. Macmillan in a lordly way might pretend that the grouse moors were his natural habitat, but in reality he was a furiously energetic party politician beneath the apparently effortless superiority.
As the 1964 election approached the world was dominated increasingly by new scientific discoveries, symbolized by America’s plans to put a man on the moon. The old certainties about Britain’s role were vanishing. Who was more fitted to lead Britain into an ever more competitive future where new industries must take the place of the old and obsolete? A cadaverous and faint-voiced lord who said that he used matchsticks to count with, or an energetic young economics don who promised to introduce Britain to ‘the white heat of technology’? Although it was a close-run thing there was not too much trouble deciding. Harold Wilson led Labour to victory by five votes in October 1964.
The Sick Man of Europe (1964-1979)
With the arrival of Labour in power in October 1964, the Swinging Sixties, as this progressive period is popularly known, really began. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was determined to modernize Britain. Her historic stability meant that the weight of tradition had a tendency to stifle change. The Ministry of Technology was created to thrust Britain forward into the modern age. By the late 1960s British and French engineers in happy collaboration trounced their American rivals by producing the Concorde aeroplane, which flew faster than the speed of sound. Consideration was even given to the amazing feat of submarine engineering to link the two countries which was finally achieved thirty years later, the Channel Tunnel.
Wilson’s government coincided with a seismic shifting of the historical templates, with revolutions in thought in both Britain and abroad. In July 1964 Winston Churchill retired from Parliament after almost sixty years as an MP; the previous year the last young men had emerged from doing national service, marking a full stop to the era of wartime austerity and to the habit of clean-cut conformity among the nation’s youth that the army required.
Youth’s rejection of the older generation had been announced by John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger in 1956. By the mid-1960s ‘angry young men’ with long hair and outrageous clothing fresh out of university were not only the gadflies of the state, they set the tone for Britain. They became known for being ‘anti-establishment’, but in fact they were a new establishment whose allies were pop stars like the Liverpool group the Beatles, actors, photographers and models. With satirical TV shows such as That Was the Week that Was, and the satirical magazine Private Eye, which all made jokes not only about politicians but about the royal family, people in public life could no longer expect to escape criticism. The proliferating new universities–Sussex opened in 1961, Kent and Warwick in 1965, then eight more in 1966–gave Britain a far larger undergraduate population. Since many students were the first in their family to experience tertiary education, the universities became hotbeds of radical thought.
The impresario and anarchic director Joan Littlewood had already challenged the notion that all plays should take place in drawing rooms with her championing of working-class dramas and actors in her Theatre Royal in the East End. One kitchen-sink drama, A Taste of Honey in 1963, unblinkingly showed the trials of an unmarried mother. Littlewood’s 1963 musical Oh What a Lovely War! encapsulated the mood of the time in the scorn it poured on the officer class, an image from which they subsequently found it hard to escape.
The 1960s were the heyday of ideas and idealism and, paradoxically, of affluence. The young bought tellies, modern-looking furniture and bizarre fashionable clothes whose skirts were so short that only their generation could wear them. In 1966 young Britons began a consumer spree which has still not ended, and which their parents could never have enjoyed. Britain’s first credit card, the Barclaycard, transformed the notion of credit, which hitherto had hardly been taken further than paying in instalments for a three-piece suite bought on hire purchase. It paved the way to what has today become a leisure explosion of clothes, household appliances and the package holiday, all of which could be put on the credit card. By August 2002, some 49 per cent of all Britons had credit cards and were using them to spend £540,000 a minute–a total of £285 billion in 2001 alone.
The 1960s opened with the trial of Penguin Books for publishing an obscene book, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’
s Lover. They were acquitted, a verdict which brought the notion of literary censorship to an end. The jury’s decision heralded an era of experimentation in all areas of life, with sexual permissiveness now made easier by the invention of the contraception pill. Under a great reforming home secretary, Roy Jenkins, the brilliant son of a miner MP, Labour moved Britain forward into a gentler, more humane society. Abortion was made legal in 1967 and thus safe for the poor (it had always been safe, though illegal, for the rich). This was part of an increasing sense that women were taking control of their destinies, the movement known as women’s liberation, which flourished from the late 1960s onwards and reflected the growing number of young women being educated. In 1951 only one-quarter of the student population were women; by the end of the century it would be over half.
Prodded by the popular new disciplines of psychiatry and psychology at the more modern universities, the old British private educational system of repressive boarding schools began to seem barbaric. Public schools were now laughed at for producing an unimaginative kind of imperial administrator who was made to seem redundant with the end of the empire. Indeed, education was undergoing huge changes at all levels. Labour, with their commitment to social reform, were determined to break a vicious circle of a tiny number of the population being creamed off at eleven by the eleven-plus exams, which separated the gifted few and packed them off to grammar schools. The rest mainly sank in the secondary moderns laid down by the Butler Education Act of 1944. Labour embarked on a programme of building comprehensive schools so that children of all abilities would be educated together, in the belief that this would take care of the problem of late developers or children from disadvantaged backgrounds who were eternally condemned by the eleven-plus to the outer darkness of the despised secondary moderns.
After the 1967 Plowden Report, teaching at primary level entered an experimental and imaginative phase in which understanding the child took precedence over the rigorous discipline with which British schooling had previously been associated. A whole generation of schoolchildren grew up of whom it was said that they were very happy and superb at creating things out of yogurt pots but could scarcely read. Nevertheless, initially it seemed that a new heaven on earth was being created by enlightened people which had done away with the problems, mainly class-ridden, of the past. The bowler hat vanished, and young Etonians spoke mockney (mock cockney) to imitate the argot of young working-class photographers. It was a romantic age: hairdressers were working-class heroes and ran off with heiresses, pop stars ran off with countesses. Stiff British society swung; the idea of class was turned on its head. Money was uncool; upper-middle-class people gave up sending their sons to their old prep schools and sent them to the local primary school. The Labour MP Tony Benn, who had been educated at Westminster public school and had renounced a viscountcy, made Holland Park Comprehensive famous when he sent all of his children there.
In 1967 homosexuality between consenting adults was made legal, ending years of misery for men (homosexuality among women had never been a criminal offence) who had previously been liable to imprisonment. The painful procedure of divorce was made less cruel by removing the question of guilt and providing that after two years of separation a marriage could be ended on grounds of irretrievable breakdown. Perhaps most important of all, in 1965 Britain abolished the death penalty, though it was too late for many innocent victims of prejudiced trials such as Derek Bentley.
That same year Labour, by the Race Relations Act, set up the Race Relations Board to tackle racism. A growing number of Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants from the old empire had been encouraged since 1945 by successive governments to fill employment gaps in factories, hospitals and on the railways. In the mill towns of the north they were forming sizeable communities and cultural differences were being exploited by those who feared that immigrants would not adapt to the British lifestyle. The act made the incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence. In 1968 a second Race Relations Act rendered racial discrimination in employment, advertising and housing illegal, created new immigration-appeal procedures and gave the Race Relations Board power to act directly in the courts.
By now America was not only conquering space ahead of Russia by sending men to the moon and back, she was heavily involved in the former French Indo-China fighting communism in the shape of the North Vietnamese, who, backed by communist China, had invaded South Vietnam.
The Labour government supported the American presence in Vietnam, though it declined a US request to send British troops. But as the war dragged on it became extremely brutal in its methods. Not only the left of the Labour party–which hitherto Wilson had been regarded as part of–violently disapproved of what they regarded as neo-colonialism, but millions of young Americans were outraged by it. One of the most important effects of the American anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was that protest movements became mainstream. By 1968 all over the world the young had gathered for revolution.
In Paris a student protest against poor teaching under the conservative Gaullist government turned into a massive strike, while in Prague behind the Iron Curtain there were the first attempts to break up the monolithic communist system. In what is known as the Prague Spring the Czech Communist party leader Alexander Dubček attempted to introduce ‘socialism with a human face’ by abolishing censorship and introducing multi-party elections. But it ended in August 1968 with Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into Prague to restore what was effectively Soviet domination. There were photos in all the world’s newspapers of a despairing young Czech student named Jan Palach who burned himself alive in 1969, five months after the Prague Spring had failed to make it into summer.
Though British society was undergoing revolutionary change at all levels, Britain escaped revolutionary violence. Her problems were financial. Harold Wilson’s TV persona–he liked to be seen pipe in hand wearing a raincoat–was intended to reassure the viewer of his down-to-earth British credentials, but he seemed always to be fighting a losing battle against economic instability, having found himself in the middle of a balance of payments crisis when he took office, set off by Tory fiscal irresponsibility. He and his chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan staved off a devaluation crisis for long enough to win another election in 1966, massively increasing Labour’s majority to ninety-seven. But the British economy was failing. Industry was threatened externally by the rapidly reviving post-war economies of Germany, France and Japan and internally by the damage done by industrial action and strikes and soaring wage claims. The 1965 Trade Disputes Act made the strike weapon easier as it gave union leaders full legal protection to use it where there had been a threat of redundancy.
Wilson established the Prices and Incomes Board to investigate prices and wage demands with representatives from business and the trade unions, but when rising inflation necessitated giving the board legal powers to suppress soaring wage claims this angered the left in the Labour party as well as the trade unions themselves. Many felt that a Labour government with its roots in the trade union movement should not be in the business of preventing claims for higher wages. But Wilson had seen the figures: Britain could not afford the sort of claims which the unions were putting in. When he announced a statutory wage freeze to be put through Parliament to avoid devaluing the pound, there was uproar on the Labour backbenches. It would only get louder as the decade progressed.
Wilson’s novel weapons of wage freeze and wage restraint did not stop Britain arriving at another sterling crisis by the autumn of 1967, precipitated by her renewed desire to enter the Common Market. Strikes threatened, and confidence in the pound fell to a new low, with gold reserves rapidly diminishing. In November the government was forced to devalue the pound, having been unable to raise any further foreign loans to prop up its value. This was a traumatic moment for Labour, who had been desperate to avoid further association with this drastic remedy after its deployment by the Attlee government in 1949. Although Wilson, the cunning communicator, insisted the next
day that this did not mean ‘the pound in your pocket’ was worth less, no one believed him.
The new $1 billion loan arranged for Britain by the International Monetary Fund had the usual conditions of curbing government spending for what was becoming a cap-in-hand nation. Harold Wilson in the late 1940s had himself resigned from government when charges for spectacles were introduced by the Attlee administration. Twenty years later he was presiding over prescription charges on the NHS, building fewer council houses and putting off (until 1973) that key improver of children’s lives, raising the school leaving age to sixteen.
Labour did not want to abandon all reforms, but they had to rely on emergency budgets to raise money. Worldwide, markets were in turmoil. Under Roy Jenkins, who replaced Callaghan as chancellor after the devaluation, there were price hikes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes intended to control inflation. Austerity ruled at the gloomy Treasury. Once again, as in the late 1940s, Britons were allowed to take only £50 out of the country on holiday. It was not until the autumn of 1969 that economic recovery and a trade surplus put an end to a financial regime which Britons today would find unacceptable.
Meanwhile industrial action and the millions of days lost to industry were destroying the economy. Laws were needed to prevent wildcat unofficial strikes by left-wing shop stewards. Wilson and Barbara Castle, the secretary of state for employment and productivity, tried to use legislation to bring the trade union movement to heel, and in a famous White Paper entitled In Place of Strife they proposed that all strikes should first be approved by a ballot of the members. But MPs such as Jim Callaghan, who in a job-swap with Jenkins was now home secretary, were extremely unhappy at the idea of introducing laws of which the Conservative party might have been the author. A backbench revolt combined with the TUC’s refusal to accept fines or legislation against strikes ensured that by 1969 Wilson and Castle had to accept that the government had no chance of putting anti-strike legislation through Parliament, despite its enormous majority. They were forced to rely solely on the TUC’s word that it would use its influence to prevent unofficial strikes.
The Story of Britain Page 94
