Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Meanwhile, he was busy editing his background in the pages of Who’s Who. His entry in the 1970 edition of the directory dropped the previous reference to his education at Westminster School, while the 1974 edition still included his Presidency of the Oxford Union, but deleted the fact of his MA, instead noting of his education: ‘still in progress.’ By 1976 the whole entry had been reduced to just two lines, simply pointing out that he was an MP and the secretary of state for energy. The following year, his entry disappeared entirely and for six years he was absent from the book altogether. When he did return, in 1983, he was finally listed as Tony Benn, rather than Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and there was no indication at all of his education, whether at public school or at Oxford; furthermore, his service record, which once had read ‘Pilot Officer RAFVR 1943–45; Sub-Lieutenant (A) RNVR 1945–46’, now dropped any mention of his rank. What is odd about this entire process is merely the fact that he cared sufficiently to engage in such a procedure; the pages of Who’s Who have often been used to proclaim eccentricity, even to pursue the occasional vendetta, but Benn’s recreation of himself was, and remains, unique.

  The rebranding was not universally acknowledged. Just as those with an agenda to pursue still called Muhammad Ali by his original name, Cassius Clay, long after his conversion to Islam, so most newspapers continued to refer to Tony Benn as Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie in the case of the tabloids, for years to come (some older Tories were still doing so three decades later). In the short term at least, it simply became another weapon with which his enemies could attack him.

  And enemies he certainly had. In 1974 the novelist Kingsley Amis referred to him as ‘the most dangerous figure in British politics today,’ and even earlier he had himself been shocked by the tone of the Thames TV programme Today: ‘I was asked by Llew Gardner how it felt to be the most hated man in Britain,’ he noted, ‘to which the answer was, of course, that I was only hated by Fleet Street. I didn’t think it was true that I was universally loathed, and I said that nothing would ever change in Britain if people weren’t prepared to disregard pressure and criticism.’ He was right on both counts, but even so it was quite a reputation for him to have acquired, particularly in so brief a time, having been the golden boy of Labour politics just a few years before.

  Benn’s great crime in the eyes of the press and of the establishment was to take up the cause of the unions at the precise moment when they were in the ascendancy. He rapidly became the public face of the new militancy, the representative of what was seen by many commentators as an extra-parliamentary threat to democracy. Typical of these critics was Times columnist David Wood, who wrote in millennial terms of ‘a resort to anarchy in the name of democracy or so-called participation. The national identity is coming increasingly under threat.’ And chief amongst the examples that he cited of this trend – alongside the defiance of the Industrial Relations Court by the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the IRA’s creation of no-go areas in Londonderry – was Benn’s support of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in. The demonization was such that he was sometimes seen as being personally responsible for all the nation’s ills, an attitude widespread enough to be satirized in the sitcom George and Mildred; Jeffrey Fourmile, a stalwart of his local Conservative Association, reads in his paper that unemployment has reached one and a half million, and comments: ‘I blame Anthony Wedgwood Benn.’ ‘Oh, Jeffrey,’ his indulgent wife replies, ‘you blame him when you get dandruff.’

  As the hostility towards him increased, and as he began to attract the unfriendly attention of the unelected sections of the state, so Benn became aware of the power of the forces ranged against him, with the consequence that his position of democratic socialism became more and more radical; having started down a leftward path, he found, by an inexorable logic, that his pace was hastening at every turn.

  ‘The more I think about this, the more I see that if you are going to have socialism, you have to have a secondary power structure in which ministers sit in but are not the dominant figures,’ he wrote in 1974. ‘This concept of a working-class power structure, democratic and organized in parallel with the Government structure – in effect joint government of the country by the Labour Party and the trade unions – makes an awful lot of sense.’ Unfortunately, to an awful lot of people whose grasp on power was inevitably threatened by such a concept, it made no sense at all. They did not share his conclusions (‘I think it is wholly compatible with all that is best in parliamentary democracy’), nor did they see the justice of his comparisons: ‘we should govern in conjunction with the trade unions just as the Tories have always governed in conjunction with the City and big business.’

  Even within the leadership of the Labour Party, such thinking was viewed at best with a barely tolerant contempt, summed up by Harold Wilson’s famous put-down, that he ‘immatures with age’. But the Labour leadership was itself only a minor, junior player in the establishment. Elsewhere, among those who were capable of believing that even Wilson himself was a dangerous socialist, Benn had wandered so far beyond the pale that he had to be fought tooth-and-claw: he was, it was regularly claimed, bent on revolution and on turning Britain into an Eastern Bloc nation. ‘The tasteless self-parody of Mr Benn ceases to be funny and becomes frightening,’ claimed Dick Taverne who, although he was now sitting as a Democratic Labour MP, was voicing the thoughts of many still in the Labour Party. Such was the growing fear of union power that the charge began to stick, and had Benn’s diaries been published at the time, there is little doubt that not only Fleet Street, but the wider public, would have found him guilty on at least some counts: ‘I also have to confront the genuine fear that state socialism, run by the shop stewards, will destroy individual liberty,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t think there is anything in it, but people are afraid of it and I have to ensure that my socialism is lubricated with the old democratic ideals.’

  But these were the private thoughts of a man looking to his future (‘If I want to do anything other than frolic around on the margins of British politics,’ read the same entry, ‘I must be leader of the Labour Party and prime minister’), and of a man setting himself perhaps the biggest task ever undertaken by a senior peacetime politician: nothing less than a democratic revolution that would bring accountability to education, to the media, to the machinery of the state and, above all, to the workplace. By the mid-1970s Benn’s programme for change embraced virtually every institution that made up public life in Britain; had it ever been implemented, it would have transformed the nation for ever. There was no other political figure of such seniority who came even close to the challenge he presented, to his demand that the very principles of the parliamentary system as currently constituted should be remade and remodelled. Nor has there been since.

  Unique though his position was, Benn’s real significance lay not so much in his own arguments, but in his role as the man who articulated an existing trend in society. He was no Leninist figure placing himself in the vanguard of the masses (there were plenty of Mao manqués in the country already), but rather a mouthpiece for a section of the working-class already engaged in struggle, a delegate rather than a leader. His endorsement gave a legitimacy to left activists, perhaps, as well as a presence at the cabinet table: his strength, however, the reason he was feared, came from below. Arthur Wise’s novel had described Enoch Powell as ‘a man whom thousands felt had spoken up for them when they were unable to speak for themselves,’ and the same could have been said of Benn. He too was ‘someone they felt had answered the question: What does it mean to be a Briton in the middle of the twentieth century?’

  The solutions the two men offered to the malaise of British society were radically different. Powell’s appeal was primarily to those who felt that the country had been somehow more secure, more at ease with itself in the 1950s, while Benn called out to those who felt that capitalism had failed to deliver on its promises and looked forward to a promised land run by and for workers. But both were responding to an inci
pient crisis of national self-confidence, an underlying loss of certainty, a sometimes inchoate belief that things could not continue on the same path and that consensus was not the answer. And both had their own band of devoted followers, who shared their sense of destiny.

  These two diametrically opposed visions of Britain’s possible future came to dominate much of the underlying political discourse of the 1970s. While centrist politicians of both parties engaged in fire-fighting, seeking day-to-day to manage the recurrent economic crises into which the country was plunged, Powell and Benn took up positions to right and left of the fray, offering instead purer, ideological answers. Sometimes it was their interventions that shaped the debates; on other occasions they resembled nothing so much as Statler and Waldorf, the ageing cynics in The Muppet Show, throwing disparaging comments from their private box at Kermit and Fozzie Bear, the performers on the main stage.

  Harold Wilson and Edward Heath spent a total of ten years squaring up to each other over the dispatch box in the Commons, but the real battle for the soul of the nation was being fought between the forces represented by their dissident rivals.

  3

  Environment

  ‘All I need is the air that I breathe’

  All other elil do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

  Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972)

  VICAR: It came to me the other day, about pollution. It’s the modern rediscovery of sin. Well, it’s the only form it can take in a materialist world. All the rubbish, the mess – now, that’s the new wickedness.

  Nigel Kneale, The Stone Tape (1972)

  TERRY COLLIER: We’ve always had pollution. We invented pollution long before it was fashionable.

  Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973)

  The refuse collectors’ strike of autumn 1970 was an early indication of the inability of the Heath government to manage industrial relations, but it also provoked other, more atavistic fears, as Graham Don, a lecturer in environmental health at London University, pointed out: ‘If the failure to collect rubbish goes on for any length of time there will be a build-up in the rat population. At the moment, we are retreating and the rats are advancing . . .’

  This reminder of the struggle for coexistence between humanity and its oldest urban enemy, the rat, was guaranteed to send a shiver through society. It was also the main reason for the government taking the unusual step of using soldiers to deal with the effects of a strike, when the Army was sent into Tower Hamlets to clear the rubbish that had become a health hazard. Similar measures were called for in 1975 when an unofficial strike in Glasgow resulted in even worse conditions: ‘In some places the piles of rotting garbage rise as high as 20ft,’ reported the press. ‘More than 50,000 tons of uncollected refuse are now polluting Glasgow.’ When the troops were eventually called upon, it took them over a month to clear the streets, working in terrible conditions: ‘The biggest hazard the soldiers face is the swarms of rats at every temporary rubbish dump.’

  In between these two strikes, the animal in question had made a sensational reappearance in popular culture with James Herbert’s first book, The Rats, in 1974. For some years British horror fiction, which had once driven the evolution of the novel, had been in danger of dying through neglect, reduced to little more than Dennis Wheatley’s effete tales of Satanism among the upper classes. Herbert reversed that decline with a proletarian prose style that combined episodic narrative with an unflinching eye for visceral violence. The first chapter set out his stall, introducing us to a middle-aged salesman named Henry Guilfoyle who falls in love with a younger colleague and is hounded out of his job by homophobic bullying. Six years, and six pages, later he has become an alcoholic vagrant in the East End of London, which is where he finds himself attacked by a pack of huge rats: ‘The dim shadows seemed to float before him, then a redness ran across his vision. It was the redness of unbelievable pain. He couldn’t see any more – the rats had already eaten his eyes.’ The unfortunate Guilfoyle was the first of many characters to make such brief appearances in the work of Herbert and his imitators, introduced as narrative cannon fodder and destined to be dead by the chapter end.

  The success of The Rats – and it was hugely successful, particularly among secondary schoolchildren, who passed it on from hand to hand with salivating enthusiasm, so that its readership massively outnumbered even its sales figures – inspired publishers to take horror fiction seriously again. It also inspired a host of lesser writers to take up the causes of other animals that could turn against humanity, from slugs and maggots to pigs and pike, with Guy N. Smith’s series of killer crab novels proving the most durable entry in the field. None, however, could match the original, partly because Herbert was a much better writer than his successors, and partly because rats have more resonance than jellyfish could ever achieve.

  At the time of the novel’s publication, Herbert was working in advertising as an art director, but he had grown up in the East End (next to Petticoat Lane market, where the troops had been sent to clear refuse in 1970) and knew well the bomb-sites and wastelands that were ‘invisible to the authorities’. The story was, he said, set in ‘the London I lived in’ and it brought to British horror a distinctively urban dimension. Mutated animals had been a staple of the movies for decades, but Herbert’s creatures were of a different order altogether. These rats came clawing out of the pages of Dickens and Dracula, dragging with them folk memories of Pied Pipers and plagues; reeking of urban decay, they descended on a recidivist society that had lied with its promises of a better life. Harris, the schoolteacher hero of the book, has no hesitation in apportioning blame, as he rages against ‘the councils that took the working-class from their slums and put them into tall, remote concrete towers, telling them they’d never been better off, but never realizing that forty homes in a block of flats became forty separate cells’. And as if the dehumanizing tower blocks were not enough, ‘these same councils could allow the filth that could produce vermin such as the black rats’.

  This was the back-street horror that the slum clearances had supposedly eradicated, now reborn as grotesque nightmare, and it coincided with the city described by David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, where ‘fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats’. The rat soon became a common shorthand for social decline, particularly in rock & roll, from the Stranglers’ debut album Rattus Norvegicus (1977) to the Woody Guthrie-derived name of the Boomtown Rats, though none reached the histrionic magnificence of the Doctors of Madness, whose 1976 song ‘Mainlines’ had the opening line: ‘This is the place the rats come to die.’

  On television too the animal became a familiar presence, giant versions appearing – in somewhat unconvincing form – in the New Avengers episode ‘Gnaws’ (1976) and the Doctor Who story ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ (1977). As in ‘Tomorrow, The Rat’, a 1970 episode of the series Doomwatch, though, these were still echoing a pre-Herbert theme of science gone wrong, a theme derived ultimately from the Frankenstein legend (and lampooned in the 1972 Goodies show ‘Kitten Kong’, which ended with an attack by oversized mice). Combining the two was the 1976 TV play During Barty’s Party, which saw a middle-class couple, Roger and Angie Truscott, move into the country, only to find a hostile world, symbolized by the marauding terror of a tribe of super-rats with a taste for human flesh. ‘They’ve always been afraid of people; we’ve always poisoned them and killed them and they knew we could,’ argues Angie, in the throes of a near-breakdown. ‘Now our most deadly poison doesn’t work on them any more, so won’t they know that too? So now we’re the enemy that doesn’t always win, so they don’t have to be afraid of us. And if that happens, if they stop being afraid . . .’ Even when trying to escape the city, its dwellers found themselves trapped in its entrails. Written by Nigel Kneale, who had scripted the classic 1954 BBC production of 1
984 with its controversial rat sequences in Room 101, During Barty’s Party had the most creative approach to rodents on TV: it simply didn’t show them, leaving the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps.

  The recurrence of the rat in the mid-1970s thus came to represent two aspects of the crisis of modern society: on the one hand the disaster of social planning, and on the other the inability of science to deliver a brave new world.

  Even so, the allure of science and technology, which had been so hopeful in the 1960s, took some time to lose its sheen. This was an era that cherished the marvels of human ingenuity almost without question, a feeling that reached its finest expression in the enthusiasm for the 1969 Moon landings (the TV broadcast of which even co-opted David Bowie’s dissenting fable ‘Space Oddity’), and survived well into the early ’70s. The media-endorsed memory of the time conjures up images of shops full of synthetic products, all available in a range of colours seldom seen in nature. It’s a vision enshrined in the TV adverts for Cadbury’s Smash, in which a group of friendly, if metallic, Martians fell about laughing at the way in which primitive Earthlings cooked their own potatoes, rather than simply pouring boiling water onto a packet of chemicals. In 1999 that Smash series was named commercial of the century by Campaign magazine, and to celebrate the award, the 1974 original was rescreened on Channel 4 in the final advert break of the twentieth century.

  Less successful, and much less cherished, however, was Cadbury’s other major venture into nutritional substitutes with its Soya Choice range of tinned foods, including imitation mince and stewed steak. The appearance on the British market of soya products like TVP (textured vegetable protein), Protena and Kesp (both brand names) was initially aimed at the catering industry – an estimated 20 million school dinners were made using Kesp in 1977 – where the appeal was straightforward: the substitutes were simply cheaper than the meat equivalent. Similarly, when TV scientist Dr Magnus Pyke suggested in 1975 that pet food would become more dependent on TVP in the future, it seemed a logical idea, particularly as he pointed out that ‘Three times as many puppies as babies were born in Britain last year.’ But when supermarkets tried to sell such delights as tinned Kesp & Kidney Pudding or Kesp Curry to individual consumers, they found far fewer takers. The campaign wasn’t helped by the fact that the products were so lacking in flavour that they had to be augmented: 6 per cent of the weight of the Cadbury’s mince was animal fat, while the Kesp version of a roast joint was similarly covered in a layer of succulent beef fat. Any potential vegetarian market, as well as those with religious dietary requirements, was thus excluded from the outset. Nor was the environmental argument – that soya produced around twenty times as much protein per acre as meat – sufficiently promoted to consumers. Instead the selling point was purely budgetary and, although such products ‘became fashionable in the mid-1970s when meat prices rose sharply’, they had no longevity. By 1977 soya beans had become so associated with cheap imitations that Morecambe and Wise could joke about them being used to make a new currency for Britain in an attempt to salvage the devalued economy (to be promoted under the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it – so what!’).