by Andy Beckett
Yet in many ways it was a pyrrhic victory, as Wilson’s tended to be in those days. Benn was still in the Cabinet, in a job that would turn out to be rather more important than Kinnock imagined. As a senior minister he could continue to speak for a growing proportion of an increasingly left-wing and hard-to-control party membership. And, characteristically, Benn’s demotion left him all the more certain that his sort of Labour politics would ultimately prevail. His public profile had been decisively raised, and so had that of his softly spoken but confrontational socialism. Both would terrify British businessmen, conservatives and floating voters for the rest of the decade and beyond, creating the impression that however compromising and unideological Labour might actually be in office, a very different party of class warfare and leftist dogma might seize power at any moment.
Finally, Wilson’s defeat of Benn did not change the mood of the government. In the winter of 1974, the then foreign secretary Jim Callaghan attended an informal meeting of Cabinet ministers at Chequers. ‘Everyone was free to express his views on the medium term outlook,’ he records in his memoirs. ‘I was feeling particularly gloomy: “Our place in the world is shrinking: our economic comparisons grow worse … The country expects both full employment and an end to inflation. We cannot have both unless people restrain their demands. If the [government-backed pay] guidelines are not observed, we shall end up with wage controls … even a breakdown of democracy.”’ Callaghan, like Healey one of the government’s central figures, concluded his remarks with ‘a joke’ which had the air of a barely disguised truth. ‘Sometimes when I go to bed at night,’ said the foreign secretary, ‘I think that if I were a young man I would emigrate.’
In 1974, the number of UK residents doing just that, which had been static or falling since the beginning of the decade, rose sharply. In each of the next three years, for the first time since annual statistics had been collected, the national population fell. The main cause was a decline in the birth rate. Other barometers of confidence in the country and its prospects also gave grim readings. The proportion of shares in British businesses owned by foreigners almost halved between 1969 and 1981. The main FTSE index plunged, from 544 in May 1972 to 146 in December 1974.
As the mid-seventies progressed, this pessimism about the economy spread far beyond the City of London. In 1977, New Society compared the results of two large-scale professional surveys of Britons’ financial situations and expectations, one recent and one from four years earlier. The magazine found that the percentage of people expecting their standard of living to ‘fall sharply’ in the next ten years had more than doubled, overtaking the proportion of Britons expecting things to improve or stay the same. It also found that most people’s sense of their current ‘material position’ had dramatically worsened. In 1973, 18 per cent of those surveyed had considered their position very strong. In 1977, the figure was 5 per cent. In 1973, only 13 per cent had regarded their position as very weak. In 1977, it was 26 per cent.
These perceptions were broadly accurate. During the mid-seventies, the median monthly disposable income of British households, allowing for inflation, which had been growing robustly in the early years of the decade, began to wilt: from £202 in 1974 to £198 in 1975, to £190 in 1976, to £187 in 1977. ‘Living standards, for the first time in 40 years, are falling,’ observed the New Society writer Tom Forester in a commentary on the 1973 and 1977 surveys. ‘Age, class and party [allegiance] didn’t seem to make much difference to how people rated Britain. They all tended to rate Britain … lower than their own position … [They] seemed to be saying that the country is going to the dogs …’
Yet in reality, and very significantly for the direction of British politics during the rest of the seventies and beyond, some Britons were affected by the bad times more quickly, and with more of a sense of shock, than others. Between 1974 and 1976, it was the comfortably-off who suffered. High inflation ate their savings. The low pound spoiled their holidays. A property crash – house prices fell 13 per cent in 1974, 16 per cent in 1975 and 8 per cent in 1976 – devalued their homes. The stock-market slump did the same for their share-holdings. Share dividends shrank or were not paid at all. During these years, disposable income fell considerably faster for the richest tenth of British households than for everyone else, and by larger and larger amounts the further you were up the financial scale. Even in a severe recession, this was not a familiar situation. ‘For the first time since 1931,’ writes Middlemas, ‘London pawnbrokers … began to receive assets of the former new rich.’
This sense of a world being turned upside down was sharpened by the fact that other categories of Britons, traditionally not as well-off or secure, were, at least at first, less affected by the crisis. Trade unionists’ wages were protected from inflation by their readiness to strike and by the political leverage of their leaders. The jobs of public-sector workers were protected by the continuing increases in government spending. The political party that broadly represented these groups, Labour, had won four of the last five general elections, while the party that broadly represented the unsettled middle and upper classes, the Conservatives, was still lumbered with the defeated Heath as leader for the whole of 1974 and into 1975. The following year, the City editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Patrick Hutber, published a polemical paperback, the title of which perfectly caught Tory Britain’s air of beleaguerment: The Decline and Fall of the Middle Class – And How It Can Fight Back.
Declinism was an established British state of mind, but during the mid-seventies it truly began to pervade the national consciousness. It filled doomy books aimed at the general reader. It became a melodramatic staple for newspapers, magazines and television programmes. It darkened the work of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop musicians. It soured foreign commentary on Britain. It spoke ominously to audiences beyond its traditional constituencies of the elderly, the conservative and the instinctively pessimistic. And it shifted in tone: from the anxious to the apocalyptic.
‘The two main headlines in the Times this morning,’ wrote Ronald McIntosh in his diary on 15 March 1975, ‘are, “Militant consultants threaten to close NHS hospitals” and “Troops to move into Glasgow tomorrow”. This really does look like a collapsing society.’ On 6 May, the American political sage Eric Savareid announced on CBS television news, ‘Britain is drifting slowly towards a condition of ungovernability.’ He went on to compare Wilson’s government to that of the Chilean socialist Salvador Allende in its final, chaotic days before its overthrow by General Pinochet. On 4 December, The Times’ influential economics editor Peter Jay forecast that Britain would endure ‘a remaining two or three years of phoney crisis, while our present Prime Minister continues to … paper over the cracks … before the breakdown of our present political economy’. In 1977, the respected political academic Tom Nairn wrote in his book The Break-Up of Britain, ‘There is no doubt that the old British state is going down.’ He went on to compare Britain to Prussia in its declining years, to the decaying Habsburg Empire, and to Tsarist Russia.
The credibility of the seventies declinists was enhanced by their political diversity: Nairn was an independent-minded Marxist, Jay was a well-connected social democrat, and Hutber was a tribal but forward-thinking conservative. They could not simply be dismissed as reactionary old nostalgics. Their analysis also fitted – and influenced, and was influenced by – an unmistakable cultural mood. ‘The real keynotes of the seventies’, wrote the astute social critic Peter York in Harpers & Queen magazine in January 1978, ‘are fragmentation … and paranoia – impossible new situations like stagflation, the Arabs, [their] oil money and political power.’
In Britain, the most famous cultural consequence of this mid-seventies unease and volatility was punk. The Sex Pistols formed in 1975 in a rundown part of Chelsea, known appropriately as World’s End, just as the Wilson government was drifting onto the rocks. But many British and British-consumed pop musicians who were not part of punk’s roaring millenarian rev
olt also expressed a cosmic discontent: Pink Floyd, with their gloomy, plodding concept albums; and the keening prophets of mid-seventies Jamaican reggae. On 4 October 1975, David Bowie, another star whose albums during the decade were full of a half-fearful, half-delighted foreboding, infamously told the New Musical Express:
There will be a political figure in the not too distant future who’ll sweep this part of the world … You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up … It’ll do something positive, at least, to cause a commotion in people and they’ll either accept dictatorship or get rid of it.
Many novels published in Britain in the mid-seventies were also full of impatience with the present and with reckless political yearnings. ‘There was a … reversion’, wrote the literary critic Malcolm Bradbury in his editor’s contribution to the 1977 volume The Novel Today, ‘to a concern with the onerous pressure of history and the real.’ In The Family Arsenal, published the previous year, Paul Theroux set amateur terrorists loose on a present-day London of ‘ghostly rotting warehouses’ and ‘decay pushing towards ruin’. Theroux wrote of one of his protagonists:
The summer’s disorder … made him wish for a cleansing holocaust … It was certainly coming … Hardship was a great sorter. He rather enjoyed the thought of deprivation, candlelight, shortages, paying with official vouchers and coupons.
The same year, in The Takeover, set in Italy but subtitled in some editions ‘a parable of the pagan seventies’, Muriel Spark imagined the panicking rich selling their paintings and letting their gardens go to ruin. ‘1973’, she wrote, ‘was in fact the beginning of something new … not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system … but such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud.’ In The Summer Before the Dark, published in 1973, Doris Lessing had her central character abandon a Britain plagued by strikes and power cuts and by a vigilante group called the British League of Action (‘We need standards now … We will get things done.’) Four years later, in The Ice Age, Margaret Drabble explicitly addressed ‘the state of the nation’ in the mid-seventies: ‘Over the country depression lay like fog … [It was] a land passing through some strange metamorphosis … What next? The roping, the selling, the plundering?’ A character comments: ‘I think that the English are changing. I don’t think they’re going to go on finding life so funny. Because they’ve lost their superiority.’
Also in 1977, John Fowles published his own, more elliptical novelist’s survey of contemporary Britain, Daniel Martin. His narrator, an English expatriate in California, says of his homeland, ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Fowles prefaced the book with a celebrated quotation from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, the pre-war Italian Marxist thinker who was enjoying a sudden British vogue: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.’
In the mid-seventies, there was a fashion, too, for the inventively dystopian but not always subtle novels of J. G. Ballard, such as High-Rise (1975), about a tower block collapsing into anarchy, and Concrete Island (1974), about a man marooned after a crash on an overgrown motorway roundabout. Both books were set in a recognizable contemporary London: in the unsettled Britain of the mid-seventies, Ballard’s bleak science-fiction-tinged parables increasingly seemed more about the present than the future. The rising younger writers Martin Amis and Ian McEwan offered their own queasy novels, Dead Babies (1975) and The Cement Garden (1978), full of cruelty, fin de siècle decadence and social breakdown. Such themes always have an appeal, especially perhaps for young men like the seventies Amis and McEwan, with their desire to stir things up and make a name for themselves, but the sheer quantity and cross-generational quality of British ‘crisis’ fiction in the mid-seventies was striking. Novelists are not social scientists, or even necessarily good journalists – the long gestation periods of fiction and the need to consider character, place and plot, as well as topicality, see to that. But when so many novelists are saying the same thing they are usually on to something.
Dramatists were also preoccupied with Britain’s decline and its consequences. Stephen Poliakoff’s Strawberry Fields (1977) revolved around a road trip taken by two disillusioned political activists. With its scenes in abandoned buildings and its delphic, ominous dialogue, the play depicted the mid-seventies as ‘a kind of turning point … the end of an era’. Like David Edgar in Destiny (1976), which dealt with the politics of race, and Howard Brenton in The Churchill Play (1974), set in the near future in an internment camp for political undesirables, Poliakoff saw right-wing authoritarianism as a likely response to the British crisis. Trevor Griffiths, another of the era’s unusual number of high-profile, overtly political, usually left-inclined playwrights – itself a sign of the importance and compelling volatility of mid-seventies politics – focused instead on the internal tensions and philosophical dilemmas of a Labour Party very like Wilson’s. The television series Bill Brand (1976) featured a Labour prime minister worn out by ill-health, and a Labour government with a tiny majority struggling to reconcile socialism with realism. Impossible to imagine now, its eleven episodes were broadcast by ITV in evening peak time.
Other cultural responses to the times were less earnest and party political. During the three-day week, the Scottish artist Jamie Reid made stickers to put in shops which read, ‘Last Days … This store will be closing soon owing to the pending collapse of monopoly capitalism’. For their mid-seventies Dead Boards pictures, Gilbert and George took dusty black-and-white photographs of entropic, empty rooms: ‘We were trying to do something that was absolutely hopeless, dead, grey, lost.’ Meanwhile, films like Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973), Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1977) and Chris Petit’s Radio On (1979) sent their protagonists on bleak, heavily symbolic tours of a poisoned Britain. There were lowering skies and boarded-up bomb sites; there was corruption and casual violence. And for viewers who liked their declinism with more laughs, there was always Fawlty Towers and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Both hugely popular television series were first broadcast in the mid-seventies, and both featured middle-aged men trapped in a decrepit England and filled with rage or dreams of escape. Neither ought to have made comfortable viewing for Harold Wilson.
However, perhaps the most telling of all the dystopian Britains portrayed or predicted in the mid-seventies came from a less likely source. In July 1976, the sober, sometimes dry television current-affairs show The Money Programme devoted a special edition to exploring what sort of place Britain might be by the end of the decade.
The programme offered two scenarios. The first, relatively optimistic one was the ‘do-it-yourself’ society. ‘Sooner or later, the spending had to stop,’ the voice-over began. In an imagined 1980, one of the show’s reporters drove an Austin Maxi, dumpy and dullcoloured like most British-made cars of the seventies, down a crumbling road past a long pile of rubbish. He stopped the car and started hauling bin bags out of the boot. Since the seventies, he explained, public spending had been radically cut: ‘wealth creation’ had become the government’s main priority. There were no bin men any more, and little was spent on maintaining roads. He gestured towards the Maxi; it had been ‘specially strengthened’, he went on, so that like other Britons he could take his own rubbish to the dump over the pitted roads. ‘Middle management now enjoys a more gracious lifestyle,’ the voice-over interjected – there was a fleeting shot of white villas behind pampas grass and deep lawns – but for the less prosperous the times were more demanding. Modernization of the economy through automation and computers had left 2 million jobless for good. Overtime was close to compulsory for those in employment, and there had been ‘a gradual erosion in the power of the trade union movement’. There were few strikes any more. In place of such communal struggles was the striving of the individual: little by l
ittle, the new Britain was ‘making capitalists of us all’.
Especially for those on the left, this was an unsettling set of prophecies. But the programme’s alternative forecast was much bleaker. This time, there was no reporter stoically unloading bin bags from his car; just footage of weeds and abandoned factories. In this 1980, the voice-over explained, Britain was enduring its ‘worst ever economic crisis’. An incompetent left-wing government had nationalized the banks and allowed union pay demands to get out of control. Now there were 4 million unemployed and inflation was at 35 per cent. The pound was worth less than the dollar, and strikes had driven off foreign buyers of British goods. The stock market had almost ceased to exist: investors had taken their money abroad. Those people still in work owed their jobs to protective subsidies from the government. In much of the country, the voice-over continued, ‘Capitalism is but a fond memory.’ All that remained was a threadbare, isolated society: classes of sixty in schools, old city slums left half-demolished. ‘We’ll keep going, of course,’ the voice-over concluded, a little unconvincingly, over a final shot of the shell of a factory, ‘but the question is: “In what manner?”’
PART THREE
New Possibilities
8
The Great Black Hope
In the trough of the Wilson years, and during the rest of the British seventies, there remained one major source of optimism for anyone pondering the country’s prospects. It was an economic opportunity, closely related to the economic calamity that had finally sunk Heath and which threatened to sink his successors. It involved oil. This time the fossil fuel was not buried under distant Middle Eastern deserts and available to Britain only on terms dictated by increasingly unfriendly Arab politicians; it was beneath a cold sea much closer to home, some of which was under Britain’s direct control. Any government able to take full advantage of this great geological good fortune had a chance of surviving the seventies and, perhaps, even thriving in the decades beyond. But taking advantage of North Sea oil would not prove straightforward.
