Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  In its first few days the Labour government settled the miners’ strike and ended the state of emergency, and then turned to the serious task of addressing two perhaps incompatible tasks: first, trying to rescue the economy and second, providing enough goodies for its supporters to ensure a decisive victory in a general election that could not be held off for very long. The first goal was compared by Healey, now chancellor of the exchequer, to cleaning the Augean stables, though not even he claimed he would be able to replicate Hercules’ feat in the same timescale of a single day. Every economic indicator was in the danger zone, and the legacy of his predecessor, Anthony Barber, ensured that inflationary pressures would be felt for a long time to come. Having warned at the previous year’s party conference that ‘there are going to be howls of anguish’ from the rich, Healey now set about his mission of redistributing wealth at a time of recession. Public spending was increased, council rents were frozen and sales of council houses ended, basic foodstuffs were subsidized by the state to the tune of £500 million (though VAT was added to ice cream, crisps and sweets), and unemployment payments and pensions were substantially increased. To help pay for such a package, the top rate of income tax was increased to 83 per cent. These changes, together with comprehensive wage rises, represented substantial socialist achievements by a minority government. Or, depending on one’s persuasion, they were nothing more than simple bribery in an attempt to get re-elected with a more convincing mandate.

  If the intention had been to buy off the electorate with its own money, then it was not a notable success. When the widely anticipated election came, in October 1974, it did manage to produce a Labour government with a majority, but a majority that amounted to just three seats over all other parties.

  The campaign, as well as the result, was lacklustre. There was no appetite for a return of Heath – memories of the three-day week were too fresh – while the Liberal turn-out also fell, for reasons best articulated by fashion designer Ossie Clark, who had previously supported the party: ‘I didn’t vote because I couldn’t be bothered and it all seems so pointless.’ There was a feeling that the Liberals stood no chance until either hell froze over, or a system of proportional representation was introduced, whichever came the sooner. Labour picked up a handful of constituencies in a desultory kind of way, but the only real beneficiaries were the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, who saw their share of the vote rise to 30 and 11 per cent respectively within their territories; the SNP actually outpolled the Tories in Scotland, though they won fewer seats.

  Tony Benn was virtually invisible during the campaign, kept firmly out of the spotlight in case he frightened the horses, while Enoch Powell, whose name had been touted as a possible Conservative candidate for various English seats, instead surprised many when he re-emerged as the Ulster Unionist MP for Down, South. In fact it was as logical as were most of his decisions. Passionately committed to the unity and independence of the United Kingdom, Powell saw Northern Ireland as ‘the test of Britain’s national will to live’ and he undertook his campaign as though it were his last crusade: ‘I am like Saint Paul,’ he declared to his prospective constituents (who included the Sunningdale-tainted Brian Faulkner). ‘I was born elsewhere, but I have come here to say what needs to be said.’ His return to the Commons meant that his threatening shadow would hover over the leadership issue for as long as Heath remained in situ; Lord Plowden, a veteran of the British establishment, predicted that 1975 would see ‘some kind of authoritarian government of the left or right’, adding that ‘the latter is more likely and that Enoch may well lead it’.

  The lack of appetite for the October election sprang perhaps from a feeling that really nothing much had changed. Strike levels were certainly down, but only at the cost of pay rises that were clearly no kind of long-term solution; in 1974 wages rose by 28.5 per cent, massively outstripping inflation, which itself stood at a worrying 19 per cent. Worse was to come, as the twelve months to July 1975 saw prices rise by a record 26 per cent, though still outstripped by wages.

  The beneficiaries were primarily those in unions, which now represented more than half the workforce, though their strength was concentrated in the nationalized industries and in the biggest companies: only 17 per cent of all union members were employed by private firms with fewer than 2,000 employees. For other sections of society – the 2 million self-employed, the elderly, those on a fixed income, even those in non-unionized workplaces – these were difficult days, with threats coming from all directions. ‘The electricity board caused great distress last year,’ wrote Tory MP Rhodes Boyson in 1975, ‘by raising the cost of electricity for night storage heaters which threatened to bankrupt pensioners who had sunk their retirement capital into such well-advertised forms of central heating.’ The same year the Greater London Council announced that it owed international bankers some two billion pounds and was therefore obliged to increase its rates demands by 80 per cent.

  The state of uncertainty was articulated in Coronation Street, always one of the nation’s key weather vanes: ‘I have one hundred pounds I want to save, invest for a rainy day, and I honestly don’t know what to do with it,’ worried Annie Walker, landlady of the Rovers Return (played by septuagenarian Doris Speed). ‘I don’t trust the government. Industry is either a playground or a battleground, according to the whim of the week. And inflation could make the whole question academic anyway.’ Annie had long struggled to reach just the genteel lower slopes of the middle class, but even at the remote summit of that amorphous social grouping, far beyond anything to which she could ever aspire, the top rate of tax ensured problems with any new financial commitment: ‘It’s going to cost £1,500 a year to send Christopher to Cambridge,’ reflected theatre director Peter Hall, ‘which I suppose means earning another £7,000 or £8,000 to have that clear after tax.’ A sobering illustration of the same calculation was offered by the proprietor of Wedgie’s nightclub on the King’s Road, Chelsea, who used to point out to his customers that every time they ordered his champagne at £17 a bottle, they needed to earn a hundred pounds to pay for it; his mark-up was high, but couldn’t rival Healey’s 83 per cent income tax.

  There was, in any event, little enough to celebrate, even for those with a taste for champagne. The most important exhibition of 1974 was ‘The Destruction of the Country House’, staged at the Victoria and Albert Museum by the gallery’s new director, Roy Strong. Overtly polemical in its attack on inheritance and wealth taxes, the show centred on a full-size model of a stately pile’s crumbling façade, adorned with photographs of a thousand such houses that had been demolished in the previous century; ‘in the background a tape conveyed the sound of burning timbers and crashing masonry, while a voice read the names of those houses like a litany’.

  Even as the stately homes of England were thus falling, a similar fate was descending on the Biba store. It had achieved unparalleled heights of popularity (up to a million visitors a week) by providing the public with romantic escapism in the same way that Hollywood had done during the depression of the 1930s. But, while the economic crisis might have created a need for such fantasy, it also spurred a crash in the property market, and in 1975 British Land, the property company that had bought Biba, with its shares now in freefall, closed the doors on what had been called ‘the hallowed Mecca of the near-decadent’. During its brief existence, the final incarnation of Biba had acquired a reputation as ‘the glam party centre’ and its passing was somehow emblematic of a new, less frenetic era in which glam and partying were no longer on the agenda. Indeed glam rock itself predeceased Biba; by the end of 1974 its chief practitioners, David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, had drifted away, lured by the mirror ball of disco, leaving behind a music scene that, for eighteen months or so, was very clearly bereft of inspiration. The celebration of decadence had lost its appeal.

  So too had glam rock’s kid brother, glitter pop. The acts that had brightened up Top of the Pops in the days of the Heathite power cuts were struggling to make
the charts at all, let alone the high placings to which they had become accustomed. Even those who wrote their own material – Marc Bolan, Slade, Gary Glitter – suffered from the shifting of fashion, their eccentric excesses looking ill at ease in a world of increasing uniformity and drabness. They had offered a short-term escapism, but weren’t built for the long haul that was clearly required.

  For these were dour, sullen times. Wilson’s government seemed somehow satisfied that it had, if only temporarily, averted the complete catastrophe implicit in Heath’s final months, and did little more than attempt to steady the ship a touch, while doing nothing to address the problems that had led to that predicament. Unemployment, which had gradually been falling, began to creep up again and would have officially hit three-quarters of a million in January 1975, save for the fact that the civil servants responsible for collating the figures were engaged in industrial action, so the numbers weren’t published. At the same time Chrysler reduced its workforce to a two-day week (by the end of the year, the government was providing massive hand-outs to prevent the UK division of the company from going bankrupt), and many other firms were also cutting down the working week ‘in the desperate hope that the economy will pick up’. The public, even more desperate, tried simpler forms of hope, with half the adult population turning to games of chance: ‘Betting on the pools has gone up by eighty per cent in the last four years,’ reported the press. ‘Gambling on horses, bingo and fruit machines has increased by nearly half.’ Six million Britons were now regular visitors to the bingo halls. Alcohol consumption had also increased, up from 6.7 per cent of household expenditure in 1966 to 8 per cent in 1976, even though the relative price had fallen in that period.

  It appeared that the nation had lost faith in itself. The events of the winter of 1973–74, and the background to them, were so traumatic that they had shaken confidence in the future of Britain, and there was a fear that disaster still lurked around the corner, a suspicion of crisis postponed. There was a danger too that the situation might deteriorate simply through lack of will to resist. The Daily Mail journalist Terry Coleman toured the country in early 1975 to gauge the national mood, and detected ‘not a sense of approaching cataclysm, but of increasing erosion’. Earlier Lord Longford had staged a conference in London titled ‘The Crisis Deepens: What Can I Do About It?’, to which the answer appeared to be ‘nothing much’ – despite an expected attendance of 3,000, only 400 actually turned up.

  It was an attitude identified by the Hungarian-born conductor Sir Georg Solti in 1975, when he ‘bewailed the collapse of all the democratic and liberal values of England; how we were letting 400 years of achievement slither down the drain through ineptitude and apathy’. Similar despondency was evident everywhere during Wilson’s second stint in Downing Street. The last episode of the ITV soap Crossroads for 1974 saw Hugh Mortimer (played by John Bentley) looking back on the year with some distaste: ‘Two elections, a disastrous summer, one crisis on top of another . . .’ Hughie Green, the host of TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, clearly agreed but took a broader political stance in his own final broadcast of the year, delivering a straight-to-camera state of the nation address. ‘Let us work with all our might to see that 1975, with the gathering storm of despair ahead, will not be the end of our country,’ he urged, in his most sincere tones. ‘Lest we perish, friends, let us all together say in 1975, both to the nation, to each other and to ourselves: For God’s sake, Britain, WAKE UP!’ At which the orchestra of Bob Sharples, which had been playing mood music behind his words, swelled, the timpani rolled and a choir broke into a rousing rendition of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

  The confused paralysis that seemed to have descended was depicted in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, in which a cast of middle-Englanders – a property developer who has been jailed, another recovering from a heart attack, a woman who has lost both her husband and her foot in an IRA bomb attack – attempt to understand the calamities that have befallen them. ‘All over the country, people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong – the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education.’ And as the storm clouds show no sign of dissipating, the tone becomes almost eschatological: ‘England, sliding, sinking, shabby, dirty, lazy, inefficient, dangerous, in its death throes, worn out, clapped out, occasionally lashing out.’

  Somewhat more cynically, in the first episode of the prison sitcom Porridge the old lag Fletcher (Ronnie Barker) attempts to cheer up Richard Beckinsale’s character Godber, who had just been sent to jail for the first time: ‘Cheer up, could be worse,’ he says. ‘State this country’s in, you could be free. Stuck outside, with no work and a crumbling economy. How horrible that’d be. Nothing to do but go to bed early and increase the population.’ (There had, predictably, been a rise in the birth rate in the autumn of 1974, some nine months after the TV curfew of the previous winter.) Indeed the power structure of the fictional Slade Prison demonstrated the contemporary conviction that leaders were of diminishing importance: ‘Officially, as we know, this hotel is run by a governor appointed by the Home Office,’ explains Fletcher. ‘In truth, we know that genial Harry Grout could bring this place to a standstill if he so wished.’ Grout was another of the prisoners, a ruthless but mostly amiable gangster, who was serving his time in a fully furnished and decorated cell, and whose word was seldom questioned by either screw or con. He was the real authority in the jail, just as much of the media believed that Tony Benn and the unions were the organ-grinder to Harold Wilson’s monkey.

  The problem was that virtually no one now believed Wilson was the solution to the nation’s ills. Politically, he was seen by most as a spent force whose sole attraction was that he wasn’t Heath, and would therefore not antagonize the unions too much, even if some critics claimed there was the whiff of Danegeld in his policies. ‘What is most damaging to your reputation and position in the country,’ Roy Jenkins had told him as far back as 1971, ‘is that you are believed, perhaps wrongly, to be devious, tricky, opportunistic.’ (That masterly dig, ‘perhaps wrongly’, was entirely characteristic.) Even in his own inner circle, defeatism was rampant. ‘Britain is a miserable sight. A society of failures, full of apathy, and aroused only by envy at the success of others,’ reflected Wilson’s policy adviser, Bernard Donoughue. ‘This is why we will continue to decline. Not because of our economic or industrial problems. They are soluble. But because the psychology of our people is in such an appalling – I fear irretrievable – state. Meanness has replaced generosity. Envy has replaced endeavour. Malice is the most common motivation.’

  In May 1975 came the sound of a door being firmly shut on an era when Tony Crosland announced bluntly: ‘We have to come to terms with the harsh reality of the situation which we inherited. The party’s over.’ Such an admission coming from the prophet of revisionist socialism, the great advocate of growth and spending, was the political equivalent of John Lennon bidding farewell to the ’60s counter-culture in his 1970 song ‘God’, an impression emphasized by the phrasing, redolent of Lennon’s own line: ‘The dream is over.’ And Donoughue concluded, in Voltairean terms: ‘It is time to go and cultivate our gardens, share love with our families, and leave the rest to fester.’

  The unsettled state of public life was reflected in the saga of the National Theatre, even if this was not exactly a new story. The campaign for a national theatre, intended at that point to promote the work of Shakespeare, had been initiated in 1848 (further back, the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick had made similar calls) and seemed to have made a breakthrough in 1913 when a private member’s bill was passed, authorizing the establishment of such a venture, with a proposed budget of a third of a million pounds. Then the First World War intervened. And then the Second World War. In 1949 a parliamentary bill was again passed, this time promising a million pounds, and the project got as fa
r as the Queen Mother laying a foundation stone two years later. It was not until 1962, however, that Laurence Olivier was appointed the first director of the National Theatre, and even then there was no physical building in which to house the company, with productions staged instead at the Old Vic in Waterloo. Finally, in 1969, construction began on the new home for the NT, designed by architect Denys Lasdun, on a South Bank site adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall, with the first cement shovelled in by arts minister Jennie Lee. (The following year, she lost her parliamentary seat in Staffordshire, and had no doubt who was responsible: ‘I blame my defeat on Powellism,’ she declared unequivocally.)

  The 1970s should therefore have been the coming of age for this long-dreamt-of showcase for the nation’s drama, with the new building scheduled to be occupied in spring 1974. But obstacles still remained; construction delays, rising costs (eventually reaching £16 million) and serious illness left Olivier in the position of a latter-day theatrical Moses, destined never to lead his people into the promised land. His successor was Peter Hall, who had founded the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, and under whose leadership the National Theatre did finally emerge, roughly as conceived, with the South Bank complex in full operation only three years behind schedule, though for some time a succession of strikes by technical staff meant that there was an element of pot luck when buying a ticket for a performance. Even before those disputes, though, the recurrent delays, the media sniping at Hall’s policies and the interminable debates about whether Britain really needed a national theatre, whether it could afford such a thing, and whether the post-war dramatic renaissance was finished anyway – all these revealed an unattractive and querulous spirit amongst the country’s artistic elite.