State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  And if, as the royal carriages rolled past, he had broken away from the crowds and turned towards the West End, he would surely have rubbed his eyes in wonder at the high-street fashion stores overflowing with new designs, the bookshops groaning under their weight of stock, the Italian pizzerias, the Indian curry houses, the Chinese takeaways. If he had opened a newspaper, he would have been taken aback by the complacent assumptions of abundance – the classified offers of second-hand cars and old appliances, the endless promises of bargain-bonanza sales, the features on gardening, motoring and DIY, the glossy advertisements for cigars, liqueurs and foreign holidays. But if he had looked at a map, he would have been stunned to see so many new countries, and probably horrified by the apparent extinction of the British Empire. And if he had plucked up the courage to go into a pub, to buy a drink – perhaps lager or keg beer, not the bitter or mild he usually drank – he would have recognized some of his neighbours’ conversation, but not all of it. He might remember the name of Harold Wilson, a youthful President of the Board of Trade back in Mr Attlee’s day, but the names of Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, Jeremy Thorpe and Jim Callaghan, would be entirely unfamiliar to him. He would never have heard of Torremolinos or Benidorm, of Bruce Forsyth or Michael Parkinson, of David Bowie or James Bond. What was a comprehensive school? What on earth was the sexual revolution? And why was everything so expensive?

  But while our time traveller would have spent his first hours in the future rubbing his eyes in disbelief at the affluence of the early 1970s, if he had stayed a little longer he would have found a very different side to life on 14 November 1973. That morning, as the upper-class diarist James Lees-Milne caustically observed, ‘the public were determined to enjoy the Princess, who is ugly, marrying a handsome boy who is barely a gentleman’. But as Lees-Milne also noted, ‘the newspaper posters on the other hand contained the gloomiest portents in their headings, fuel crises, more strikes, Bank Rate rising to unprecedented heights, the stock market falling to the plumbiest depths’. Another acerbic observer, Private Eye’s Auberon Waugh, told Time magazine that Britain had become ‘something between Nkrumah’s Ghana and Anthony Hope’s Ruritania’. ‘Many of us here are more or less permanently on strike,’ Waugh explained. ‘We are all paid far too much and expect to be paid much more. It is true that the public services in London are breaking down even while Mr Heath pursues his grandiose schemes to build supersonic airliners and dig railway tunnels under the Channel to France. It is true that electricity supplies are more or less permanently threatened by industrial action, and urban violence is just beginning.’ And yet it seemed that most people were far more interested in ‘the spectacle of two totally absurd young people being driven around London in a glass coach’. The obvious conclusion, Waugh admitted, was that Britain was suffering from a ‘mild attack of schizophrenia’. Yet he thought that Britain was ‘as united as any nation can be – in a gigantic effort to be entertained. That is the essence of the new Britain: the show goes on, but now it is played as farce. We are citizens of the world’s first satirical Ruritania.’5

  The truth was that the royal wedding could hardly have unfolded against a more depressing backdrop. Just over a month before, Egypt and Syria had launched a stunning surprise attack on Israel, prompting the Arab-dominated OPEC cartel to impose a devastating 70 per cent increase in the cost of oil. Almost overnight, the Western economy had lurched into a nightmarish combination of recession and inflation: ‘stagflation’. And with oil prices soaring, the Conservative government’s opponents in the National Union of Mineworkers had seen their chance, quite literally, to strike. On Monday, 12 November, just two days before the royal wedding, Britain’s 260,000 miners had begun an overtime ban in pursuit of higher pay, in clear defiance of the nationwide wage limits that Edward Heath had imposed only weeks before. By that evening, the Electricity Board was already warning that snap power cuts were likely to affect much of the country, plunging homes and offices, schools and hospitals into darkness. And on Tuesday afternoon, even as Princess Anne was making the final preparations for her big day, the government took drastic action, announcing an immediate state of emergency, outlawing electric advertising and floodlighting, and ordering public buildings to cut fuel consumption by a tenth. The looming energy crisis, the Home Secretary told the Commons, was ‘a threat to the essentials of life in the community’, leaving the government no choice but to assume ‘immediate emergency powers’. It spoke volumes about Britain’s political and economic situation in the early 1970s that this was the fifth State of Emergency in three years.6

  On Wednesday morning, the front page of The Times featured a photograph of the Queen being driven back from the wedding rehearsal at Westminster Abbey, her face pale with the nerves of any bride’s mother before the big day. By her side, the Duke of Edinburgh was grinning broadly for the photographers. But the headlines made for cheerless reading. ‘Lights Go Out As Emergency Powers Bite’, declared the title of the paper’s main story. ‘Urgent Action To Meet Energy Crisis: Triple Threat To The Nation’. Along the left-hand side of the page ran a series of equally depressing subheadings: ‘Bank Lending Rate Soars / Bank Curbs / Equities Down / Wall Street Losses / Dearer Overdrafts / Sterling Unsteady / Power Plea Rejected / Floodlights Off / Fuel Cut Order / Ambulance Ban / Hospitals Face Threat’. And that was not all. The previous day, the government had announced a monthly trade deficit of what the paper’s economics editor Peter Jay called ‘epithet-defying’ proportions. In a desperate attempt to preserve international confidence in the British economy, the Bank of England had been forced into the tightest credit squeeze imaginable, raising its lending rate to a record 13 per cent and urging banks to raise their overdraft interest rates to 18 per cent. Inside, the paper’s lead editorial made no mention of the royal wedding. Instead, it bluntly warned that ‘a fight to the death between the Government and the miners’ would have brutal consequences. ‘The nation knows very well’, it concluded, ‘that this is a critical winter.’ The stark title said it all: ‘A State of Emergency’.7

  In this book’s predecessors, Never Had It So Good and White Heat, I told the story of the British experience from 1956 to 1970 – the period often loosely described as ‘the Sixties’ – showing how the onset of mass affluence, the dismemberment of the colonial empire, the arrival of thousands of Asian and Caribbean immigrants, the rise of television and youth culture, and the revolution in the expectations of women affected the lives of Britain’s 50 million people. State of Emergency takes the story from the summer of 1970, when the Conservative leader Edward Heath unexpectedly unseated Harold Wilson in one of the biggest election surprises of the century, to the spring of 1974, when Heath’s modernizing ambitions collapsed in ruins amid the most terrifying economic crisis since the Second World War. It re-creates perhaps the most maligned moment in our recent experience, a period marked not just by outlandish fashions, cosy sitcoms, long-haired footballers and women in dungarees, but by a pervasive sense of crisis and discontent with few parallels in our modern history. It traces Heath’s political journey from triumph to disaster, but it also explores the birth of the women’s liberation movement, the explosion of pornography, the rise of package holidays and the spread of football hooliganism. It is a story with more than its fair share of strikes, car bombs and men in donkey jackets. But it is also a book about Cosmopolitan and Men Only, the Campaign for Real Ale and Friends of the Earth, George Best’s sacking from Manchester United and Slade’s quest for the Christmas number one, reflecting both the grim calamities and the gaudy pleasures of life in Britain at the dawn of the 1970s.

  The 1970s have not had a good press. In the first account of the decade, published in 1980, the columnist Christopher Booker wrote that they had been ‘a kind of long, rather dispiriting interlude: a time when, in politics, in the arts or in almost any other field one considers, the prevailing mood was one of a somewhat weary, increasingly conservative, increasingly apprehensive disenchantment’. And within just a few y
ears, the image of the 1970s as a uniquely drab, depressing period in modern British history had become deeply embedded in the popular imagination. Conservatives were particularly keen on bashing the 1970s, often conveniently forgetting that they themselves had presided over some of the worst episodes of monetary incontinence and industrial unrest. And by the end of the century, the leadership of the Labour Party, too, had found in the 1970s a convenient rhetorical target and a way of proclaiming their own reasonableness and moderation. It was during the Heath years that Gordon Brown cut his teeth in Scottish student politics; but when, as Prime Minister, he held talks with the unions to discuss new labour legislation, he took care to assure reporters that there would be ‘no return to the 1970s’. And so it is little wonder that during the financial crisis of 2007–10, it was to the 1970s that commentators turned for parallels. ‘The defining characteristics of the Seventies were economic disaster, terrorist threats, corruption in high places, prophecies of ecological doom and fear of the surveillance state’s suffocating embrace,’ Francis Wheen told the readers of the Daily Mail. The 1970s had never really gone away, he added. ‘They have merely been lurking, like a madwoman in the attic, waiting for a suitable moment when they can re-emerge and scare us out of our wits all over again.’8

  Of course this view of the 1970s is a bit of a caricature, just like the common vision of Britain in the 1960s as a country of dope-smoking, Beatles-loving free-love addicts. And although television producers love to slice modern history into precise ten-year units, each with its own flavour and personality, there was much more continuity between the 1960s and 1970s – and between the 1970s and 1980s – than we commonly remember. We often think of the Heath years as the inevitable hangover after the wild party of the 1960s, a ‘prolonged “morning after” ’, in Booker’s words. Yet many of the things we associate with the 1960s only gathered momentum in the first half of the following decade. It was in the early 1970s, not the 1960s, that young single women began taking the Pill, the feminist movement really got off the ground, gay liberation first made the headlines and progressive education took hold in many schools. And to complicate matters further, many of the things we habitually associate with the 1970s actually had much deeper roots. Strikes had been a major political issue since the late 1950s, while inflation was already running out of control in the late 1960s. The conflict in Northern Ireland, which dominated the headlines in the Heath years, actually claimed its first victim in 1966, while the environmentalist movement, apparently steeped in the values of the early 1970s, drew inspiration from books published by Rachel Carson and Barbara Ward in 1962 and 1966. Even Thatcherism, supposedly such a radical response to the traumas of the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent, built on a long prehistory of Conservative antipathy to the welfare state and the post-war consensus.

  Not surprisingly, historians have often been quick to challenge the exaggerated arch-Thatcherite vision of the 1970s as a period of unprecedented gloom and decline. It is certainly true that for many people living standards stagnated, and middle-class families in particular felt trapped between high taxes and soaring inflation. But we often forget that most Britons, whether young or old, were not very interested in politics and continued to lead happy, prosperous lives indifferent to the great public affairs of the day. Even the writer Richard Clutterbuck, whose book Britain in Agony (1978) was a classic example of the doom-laden introspection of the day, admitted that most people wanted ‘stability and confidence in the future more than they want radical political change’. So on Thursday, 28 February 1974, a day that marked the end of one of the most tumultuous election campaigns in modern history, an Essex teenager noted in her diary that it was ‘voting day today’, predicting that ‘Labour will be the party to get in’. But she devoted far more space to recording the guest artists on that evening’s Top of the Pops, who included Ringo Starr, David Bowie, Suzi Quatro and the Wombles. And when, after several days of unprecedented stalemate and agonizing negotiations, Labour eventually regained power, she did not even bother to record it. Instead she devoted her attention to Colin, ‘the greatest boy ever’, who had asked to borrow her biro in class.9

  What this teenager’s diary reminds us is that, for most people, daily life never approached the extremes often commemorated in histories of the 1970s. Even though the language of British politics was becoming increasingly aggressive, most voters were much more interested in the new series of On the Buses, the supermarket opening down the road and their forthcoming holiday on the Costa del Sol. And even during the dreadful economic crisis of 1973–4, most still led relatively comfortable, affluent lives. Despite all the fuss about rising unemployment under Edward Heath, it was actually much lower in the early 1970s than it ever would be again. As a Labour activist reminded Clutterbuck during the final months of 1974, Britain was ‘more prosperous in real terms than ever before in our history’, and most people ‘had the highest standard of living we had ever had’. And what is more, it is worth remembering that for every loser there was often a winner. While working-class teenagers struggled to get jobs and felt abandoned by society, their parents, if they were in steady employment, enjoyed living standards they could hardly have imagined a few decades before. And while middle-class homeowners felt threatened by strikes and squeezed by inflation, their university-educated children had few such worries. ‘With higher wages for the working classes, access to affordable housing, free health care, free higher education and low levels of crime, all in a much less unequal society, life then was superior to life as experienced by most of us today,’ one Ayrshire man wrote to the New Statesman in April 2009. ‘In 1976, I was a fully funded sociology undergraduate on a new parkland campus. I had a lovely girlfriend, a motorbike, hair down to my armpits, Neil Young on the stereo. And it was a glorious summer. Bleak? It was bloody marvellous!’10

  To call the 1970s ‘bloody marvellous’, though, is going much too far. The Heath years were indeed a period of extraordinary cultural and social flux, when immigrants were transforming the cultural landscape of Britain’s cities, feminists and homosexuals were testing the boundaries of conventional morality, teenagers were growing their hair and defying their parents, and environmental campaigners were questioning the assumptions behind the great post-war boom. But they also represented something of a reckoning for a country and a consensus that had been living on borrowed time – a reckoning reflected in the fact that the Heath government was forced to declare five states of emergency in barely four years. And at a very basic level, the power cuts and strikes of the 1970s, the hysterical headlines and predictions of disaster, were rooted in profound international challenges, from the collapse of the old colonial empires to the surging tide of globalization. For more than a decade, as Britain’s imperial possessions disappeared, its economic lead evaporated and its manufacturers struggled to compete with foreign rivals, politicians of both parties had talked of sweeping modernization and structural reform, from decimalization to European integration. In general, however, they had shrunk from radical economic change, frightened that it would undermine full employment and alienate the voters, content merely to keep muddling through. Perhaps this was not surprising: for twenty years, thanks to its soft Commonwealth markets and the weakness of its rivals, Britain had been protected from the harsh winds of global competition. But by the early 1970s, as Edward Heath was to discover, the kaleidoscope was shifting. Not only were foreign consumers less inclined to buy expensive British goods, but international investors were much less disposed to prop up an economy that had become slack and self-indulgent. And when war broke out in the Middle East in 1973, prompting the Arab oil nations to hike up their prices to unprecedented levels, Britain found itself facing the worst economic crisis since the war, its pretensions to greatness exposed as hollow fantasies, its complacent assumptions scattered to the winds.

  In many ways the period from 1970 to 1974 is reminiscent of another turbulent four-year episode in modern British history, described most colou
rfully by the journalist George Dangerfield in his classic book The Strange Death of Liberal England. Between 1910 and 1914, Dangerfield argued, H. H. Asquith’s Liberal order was radically undermined by four challenges: the Conservative Party’s revolt against the People’s Budget; the threat of armed rebellion in Ulster; the protests of the suffragettes; and a crippling wave of strikes orchestrated by militant trade unionists. Dangerfield’s story was one of political ferment and economic turmoil, of challenges to the moral order and rebellions against traditional gender roles, of utopian socialism and Irish sectarianism – all rooted, like the challenges of the early 1970s, in profound historical trends that no government could possibly control. And although historians have taken issue with his thesis, the parallels with the 1970s are irresistible, from the Balliol-educated technocratic reformer in Number 10 to the contending nationalist passions in Northern Ireland. Heath’s Britain, like Asquith’s, stood on the brink of a profound transformation, caught between past and present: its political consensus fragmenting under the pressure of social change, its economy struggling to cope with overseas competitors, its culture torn between the comforts of nostalgia and the excitement of change, its leaders groping to understand a landscape transformed by consumerism and social mobility. An old world was dying; a new was struggling to be born.