Imagine a country with the proudest democratic traditions, where freedom is apparently accepted almost as a law of nature. Imagine that all has gone well for a century or two – more than well. Two world wars have been fought and won (with a little help from friends) and everything ought to be rosy.
So consider what happens when, quite unexpectedly, for twenty years in succession everything goes wrong. Rapid economic decline, massive loss of prestige in world politics, unemployment, inflation, the insoluble problems of Northern Ireland, riots in the inner cities and growing confusion are faced on every side. Such is Britain’s position today, every turn for the worse compounded by a very British disbelief that things could really have become so bad here of all places.
The same year’s Fodor’s Guide, written for older American visitors, was scarcely more reassuring. ‘For all its increasing air of shabbiness, its strikes, its unpredictable weather, its rapidly rising hotel and restaurant costs,’ began the foreword, ‘Britain is still a highly desirable destination to the visitor with a sense of tradition and a love of those things which matter in life.’ Chief among them were the countryside, the art galleries and the ‘lovely and luxuriant’ gardens. But in the 1982 edition, the authors had made a special effort to include as many stately homes as possible, because they were so clearly doomed by economic decline and crippling taxes. The last lines of the foreword struck an ominous note. ‘You would be wise, during your visit, to see as many of the great houses as you can,’ it warned, ‘while they are still cared for by those who have a close personal attachment to them. The chill winds of change can he heard rustling the leaves of their ancient oaks.’3
Both guidebooks agreed that American visitors would be foolish to expect the basic competence they were used to at home. Anyone with ‘a lot of urgent telephone calls to make, or domestic appliances needing installation or repair’, warned Fodor’s Guide, would soon weary of Britain’s endemic inefficiency. Even getting around, agreed Let’s Go, could be an ordeal. Rail fares had ‘skyrocketed, largely because of wage settlements won by the unions and the rising cost of fuel’, while bus fares were ‘exorbitant’, the vehicles ‘slow’ and night services ‘very limited’. As for driving, petrol was very expensive and few petrol stations opened late, ‘so if you travel by night, be sure to stock up on petrol before 6pm’. And because of Britain’s economic difficulties, even planning the holiday budget was fraught with difficulty. ‘Current monetary problems make it impossible to budget accurately long in advance,’ began a Fodor’s section carrying the ominous title ‘Devaluation – Inflation’. ‘We suggest that you keep a weather eye open for fluctuations in exchange rates, both while planning your trip – and while on it.’4
Then, of course, there were the hotels. In Fawlty Towers, Basil’s infamous establishment is a metaphor for the nation itself, its guests a cross-section of society, its owner a Frankenstein’s monster of middle-class anxieties. But if hotels really were windows into the national soul, then Britain was in trouble. In the spring of 1982, the American travel writer Paul Theroux, who had lived in London for the previous decade, set off around the British coastline. Every large hotel, he wrote afterwards, was ‘run down or badly managed, overpriced, understaffed and dirty, the staff overworked and slow’. The problem was that while the British were very friendly in personal relations, ‘anonymity made them lazy, dishonest and aggressive’. Even over the phone Theroux found them ‘unhelpful and frequently rude’. For all the talk of British collectivism, they were terrible team players, since ‘they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders’. As a result, their hotels were indistinguishable from ‘prisons or hospitals’, being ‘run with the same indifference or cruelty’.5
Whenever Americans wrote about travelling in Britain, the same two words came up. The first was ‘shabby’. The Fodor’s foreword talked of Britain’s ‘increasing air of shabbiness’, while Let’s Go warned that accommodation in London was ‘frequently impersonal, ill-equipped and shabby’. Indeed, the capital emerged remarkably badly from the two guidebooks. ‘London has changed,’ began the Fodor’s entry, deploring the ‘sad prevalence of garbage in the streets’, while Let’s Go thought visitors would find London ‘perplexed and saddened’, a study in ‘urban fatigue’. It was particularly unimpressed by Piccadilly Circus, where ‘after dark, the tone of the place is set by Boots the Chemist, where London’s registered heroin addicts can fill their prescriptions’. For Fodor’s, though, the real tragedy was Oxford Street, ‘nondescript and drab’, one of the ‘least appealing’ streets imaginable. All in all, most American observers agreed that the capital was sunk in a kind of terminal seediness, sliding inescapably towards dereliction. As Paul Theroux’s train pulled out of London that spring, he felt relieved to leave behind ‘the crowds and the scribbled-on walls, the dirty old buildings and the ugly new ones’.6
The second word was ‘rude’. Both Let’s Go and Fodor’s thought the British could be spectacularly unfriendly. Many hoteliers, warned Let’s Go, were ‘rather gruff’. Some were downright ‘surly’, and if they found out that prospective guests were foreign, ‘they won’t abuse you, they’ll just tell you that the house is full’. Fodor’s, meanwhile, was shocked by the ‘aggressive rudeness’ that had seeped into the nation’s service culture, ‘a mean-minded expectation of payment for services which the British once performed gratuitously, out of good nature’. The guidebook thought this had ‘something to do, perhaps, with Britain’s decline from top-nation status and a feeling that everyone who comes to London nowadays is a rich Arab’. Perhaps the authors were trying too hard to find a political explanation for what was sometimes just plain bad manners. Still, the travel writer Jonathan Raban, who had been brought up in Norfolk but now lived in Seattle, was similarly horrified by the Basil Fawlty-style surliness he encountered in the summer of 1982. On the South Coast people ‘carried rudeness to the point of open challenge’, taking ‘revenge on the tourists by marking up their bills and serving them with a dismissive I’m-as-good-as-you-are slamming down of plates on tables’. ‘Can I have the bill please?’ Raban would ask. ‘When I’m ready,’ came the inevitable reply.
That summer, Raban took a coach tour of London with a group of foreign tourists. All of them had a ‘fund of sad stories about their reception in England. Urgent messages for them had been casually mislaid by the staff of their hotels, they’d found inexplicable charges on their bills, “Service” had been rudely demanded on top of a 15 per cent standard service charge, their queries had been met with shrugging discourtesy.’ When Raban apologized for his former compatriots’ rudeness, the tourists insisted that everything was fine and that they had enjoyed themselves anyway. The coach crawled on towards St Paul’s. A few moments later, with exquisite timing, it got stuck in traffic outside a council tower block. The sign, Raban noticed, read ‘Camelot Tower’. Underneath, somebody with a spray can had added the words: ‘IS SHIT’. For the next few minutes, as the coach just sat there, they all stared silently at the damning message.7
Perhaps it was not surprising that outsiders took such a dim view of Britain at the turn of the 1980s. Seen from abroad, the British experience since the end of the Second World War often looked like a long nightmare of imperial retreat, economic indiscipline and industrial decline, played out against a surprisingly catchy soundtrack. The last illusions of Empire had been blown away at Suez, while the short-lived bubble of Swinging London had been punctured by recurrent sterling crises and terrible trade deficits. Having initially sneered at the fledgling European Community, the British had suffered the humiliation of seeing Charles de Gaulle blackball their first applications. And by the time their neighbours agreed to let them in, the United Kingdom itself seemed in danger of breaking up. In the course of the 1970s, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland had claimed more than 2,000 lives, the vast majority of them civilians. During the worst of the Troubles, bombs went off in Belfast every day, while in 1974 a general strike brought down North
ern Ireland’s power-sharing executive, forcing the government to impose direct rule from Westminster. Here, said some commentators, was a preview of the coming ideological showdown in Britain itself. Viewed from abroad, there could hardly have been a more damning reflection of a governing elite that had lost its authority and a disunited kingdom on the verge of disintegration.
And then there was the economy. On the face of it, the United Kingdom’s 56 million people were richer, healthier, better fed, better educated and better housed than ever. As recently as 1957 Harold Macmillan had boasted, with considerable justification, that most people had never had it so good. But even as homes filled with the fruits of affluence, commentators were fretting that, in everything from profits and productivity to investment and industrial relations, Britain was falling behind its European competitors. By the turn of the 1960s, they were already asking, ‘What’s wrong with Britain?’ and they never stopped. Nothing was right: the country was too old, too elitist, too complacent, too class-ridden; too slow to invest, too conservative to innovate, too lazy to compete.
So out went the tweedy Tory politicians of the Macmillan years, and in came the meritocratic modernizers. First was Labour’s Harold Wilson, promising a new Britain fired by the white heat of the technological revolution and the gleam from his Gannex raincoats. But strikes and sterling crises blew him off course, and in 1967 he was forced to devalue the pound. Next came the Conservatives’ Edward Heath, another thrusting technocrat with plans to reform everything from the trade union laws to the names of Britain’s counties. Although Heath managed to secure admission to the European Community, his premiership lasted less than four years, ending in the chaos of two miners’ strikes, rampant inflation, power cuts and a three-day week. So back came an increasingly hangdog Wilson, who bought off the unions with a series of pay deals that pushed inflation towards a record 26 per cent. Weary, demoralized and ill, Wilson hung up his raincoat after barely two years, but by then international confidence in Britain’s economy had reached rock bottom. With the pound under unrelenting pressure, the new Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, was immediately plunged into the worst sterling crisis yet, ending with the humiliation of a $3.9 billion (£2.3 billion) bailout from the International Monetary Fund. ‘Goodbye, Great Britain,’ concluded a famously scathing editorial in the Wall Street Journal, ‘it was nice knowing you.’8
For a time, Callaghan seemed to have steadied the ship. Then, at the end of 1978, the unions rebelled against his pay policy, which had been squeezing living standards to bring inflation down. So began the Winter of Discontent, immortalized by the images of rat-infested rubbish piled up in Leicester Square, picketing nurses outside hospitals, bodies unburied in Liverpool and the Sun’s mordant headline ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ After everything that had come before – the sterling crises, the strikes, the power cuts, the bombs – it felt like the final straw. Even the Guardian, one of the Labour government’s few defenders on Fleet Street, thought things had gone seriously wrong. The overflowing bin-bags and padlocked cemeteries, wrote its political columnist Peter Jenkins, were merely symptoms of a ‘chronic British condition’, rooted in ‘falling production, eroding competitiveness and deteriorated productivity’. It was all very well to argue that the press were blowing things out of proportion. But ‘wages in Britain are low, living standards are becoming inadequate … We are living in an expensive and increasingly poor country.’ What Britain needed, he thought, was ‘a bold government’ and a ‘psychological break’ from the ‘dreary cycle of failure’.9
At the end of March 1979, three weeks after Mr Hamilton’s disastrous expedition to the English Riviera, Callaghan lost a vote of confidence and was forced to call a general election. With the Winter of Discontent so fresh in voters’ minds, few Labour insiders seriously expected to win. By now the thirst for change was almost palpable, and as the party leaders addressed crowds across the country, the issue of national decline hung in the air. A week before polling day, a leader in the Daily Express captured the mood:
Underlying all the other issues in this General Election campaign is the need to do something to halt the economic decline of Britain.
Whoever takes office at the weekend will have this as the main, central task. For without a sustained improvement in our economic performance none of our collective and individual hopes will be realised.
After the war Britain was in the top five countries in the world in terms of living standards. By the early 1970s we were out of the top 10. Now we are at No. 22 in the world.
The American Hudson Institute has predicted that on current trends – if nothing is done – by the end of the century our world position will be much like that of Portugal now. What a prospect for our children!
Nobody hammered this home more relentlessly than the woman hoping to displace Callaghan as Prime Minister. ‘Unless we change our ways and our direction,’ the Conservative leader told supporters in Bolton, ‘our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books.’ Not everybody liked her, of course. But by now there was little doubt that millions agreed with her.10
In the meantime, Britain’s friends looked on in disbelieving horror. For the best part of a decade, foreign commentators had routinely presented Britain as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, trapped in headlong and irreversible decline. Even in the corridors of power, among people who liked and did business with their British counterparts, such views were very common. In January 1975 the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, told President Gerald Ford that Britain was a ‘tragedy … begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in … That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.’ Eight months later, West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat, told the Guardian that although ‘a very anglophile person’, he thought Britain’s ‘social set-up’, ‘industrial set-up’ and even ‘political set-up’ had fallen behind, and that the British people ‘for too long a number of years [have] taken too many things for granted’. And on the first page of his book Britain Against Itself (1982), the Harvard political scientist Samuel Beer recounted a recent conversation with one of his students. When Beer asked why she had chosen his class, she explained that her father had suggested it. ‘Study England, a country on its knees,’ he told her. ‘That is where America is going.’11
To see just how deeply the idea of Britain’s irreversible decline had taken root, you need only turn to the most influential of all overseas papers, the New York Times. As it explained in 1976, Britain was ‘an admirable country: the mother of modern democracy and modern industry, a peaceful country of backyard rose gardeners and unarmed cops that has produced more than its fair share of scientists, statesmen, poets and even eminent economists’. (That ‘even’ was a gratuitously cruel touch.) Then came the sting. Unfortunately, ‘Britain swirls in economic chaos. As inflation persists and the pound falls, Britons have been getting poorer for two years straight, and they are likely to keep getting poorer for years to come.’ The author listed the usual culprits: complacent politicians, inept managers, stroppy trade unionists and, of course, the British class system. Above all, he identified a specifically ‘British disease’, characterized by ‘boredom, lethargy and a good-humored I’m-all-right-Jack acceptance of irredeemable decline’. Professor Ralf Dahrendorf, head of the London School of Economics, told him that British people were instinctively opposed to ‘individual effort’. Another expert, disinterred from the conservative Hudson Institute, claimed that Britain’s ‘habits of mind and outlook’ were ‘mired in the medieval and agrarian habits of preindustrial society’. ‘Britain is fundamentally less able to develop than other countries,’ explained a Dutch EEC official, perhaps a little too gleefully. ‘It is a country that simply doesn’t work very well.’12
To American observers, Britain at the turn of the 1980s was a country in terminal decline. In this damning cartoon by the Washington Star’s Pat Oliphant (6 July 1981), it is not clear whether the lion is merely exhausted or already d
ead.
Every few months the New York Times published some fresh diagnosis of Britain’s backwardness, dilapidation and general incompetence. In December 1977 the paper ran a piece about Savile Row tailors exasperated by their countrymen’s ‘shabby, old-fashioned clothes’. ‘You see these shabby men everywhere,’ one tailor said. ‘I saw a party of them getting off a plane at Hamburg and I was embarrassed to be British.’ The following July, the paper returned to the much-loved subject of ‘Britain’s economic malaise’, blaming ‘sluggish domestic entrepreneurship’, ‘top-heavy elitist structures’ and ‘peculiarly intractable labor relations’. And in December 1978, the books section ran a long essay by Paul Theroux, who was already turning his experiences in London into a cottage industry. It was an ‘indisputable fact’, wrote Theroux, ‘that Britain has a relatively low standard of living, a poor choice of consumer goods, bungling and slowness at all levels and a mañana attitude that infuriates even Spaniards’. Ambition was ‘seen to be a vice’, muddling through had become a ‘way of life’ and rudeness was a national pastime. True, the British were good at some things: running schools and libraries, maintaining parks, brewing beer and – ironically, given the coming Winter of Discontent – emptying bins. But none of them made any money. The typical Briton, Theroux claimed, set out to ‘make amateurism and uncompetitiveness the goals of nearly every endeavor’.13
Surely this was an exaggeration? Not according to Theroux’s compatriot, the historian Martin J. Wiener. ‘The leading problem of modern British history is the explanation of economic decline,’ read the first sentence of his book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, published in 1981. In Wiener’s view, the fundamental problem was that the British elite had never reconciled themselves to industrial life. To put it simply, they thought themselves above making money and looked down on people who did. Even people who did make money had reinvented themselves as country gentlemen, losing touch with the entrepreneurial values that had once made them successful. Instead of celebrating the factory, they made a fetish of the country house; instead of prizing professional expertise, they idolized the gentleman amateur. Even now, said Wiener, the British shrank from the modern world. While their cities crumbled around them, they consoled themselves with their Betjeman poems and Morris wallpaper. For a government hoping to change course, overturning this anti-entrepreneurial frame of mind would be by far the ‘most fundamental challenge’.14
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