On Wednesday last week, after the Budget, one particular spectre was invoked over and over again by pundits and opposition politicians, and made to dance for an appalled public. This noisome bag of bones was conjured by its various characteristics: the IMF crisis, the Winter of Discontent, the unburied dead, the promise to tax the rich so that the pips squeaked and occasionally it was called directly by name — the Seventies. Wasn’t it all, all this terrible economic stuff, a return to the Seventies?
There had been strange sightings already. A day earlier Jack Jones, Emperor Jack, flat-capped, bespectacled leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from 1969 to 1978, had died at the age of 96, his obituaries recalling the days of union power, “beer and sandwiches” and the Social Contract. And the various reminders had been there for months that this weekend is the 30th anniversary of the eclipse of Jim Callaghan by Margaret Thatcher, and the end of the Seventies, both as a decade and as a way of life.
In the old days, when TV dramas time-shifted, directors used a convention that the screen would become a series of vertical wavy lines, in which the present dissolved and was replaced by the past. If you can imagine those lines now, back to exactly 30 years ago, where a protester has just been killed in a confrontation with police in West London, Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes is at No 1, Liverpool top the First Division ahead of Nottingham Forest, and — two stone lighter — I am the National Secretary of the National Union of Students.
I wasn’t important, but I’m making this journey to show something that I think is significant, which is that at the time we had absolutely no idea of what was coming. None.
So it is election day and my colleague, the deputy president, has, ahead of time, been writing and signing letters of congratulations to friendly MPs whom he believes will retain their seats.
Some things were certain to us: the charts would be topped by populist dross, the ’Pool or the Forest would win the title, and Shirley Williams would retain her seat in Hertford and Stevenage, even if Labour didn’t get a majority at the election. She might go into opposition, but it didn’t occur to us that she could be discarded altogether — losing by 1,296 votes. So we sent off the letter of congratulation and perhaps she has it still.
A crude version of the Thatcherite Coming to Power has her as the fulfilment of some kind of prophecy. She was born and ascended to save us from the sins of the postwar settlement. This fall from grace culminated in the Seventies, with Britain being seen as the sick man of Europe, and suffering various British diseases: an over-mighty yet complacent and chronically inefficient state as exemplified by British Rail sandwiches and satirised by Yes Minister; class warfare between a passive, lazy management and an active and bloody-minded workforce; slow economic decline when compared with the dynamic Americans and the hard-working Germans.
For such a Britain, sclerotic, strike-ridden, divided and governed by expedience, the events of the winter of 1979 were (this version runs) largely inevitable. Deluded by their past defeats of both Conservative and Labour governments, the I’m All Right Jacks of the shop-steward movement were tempted to one great spasm of industrial action, refusing even to bury the dead — which exemplified the decade that was coming to an end, and produced the very person who was needed and desired, to lead the country in the opposite direction.
Some of this version is, naturally, true. The Seventies had indeed seen times of pessimism and conflict. In his forthcoming book, Strange Days Indeed, Francis Wheen shows the period also to have been a time of paranoia, not least among some of the leaders of the great nations. It was the real beginning of the IRA campaign of bombing and shooting in Northern Ireland and on the mainland, it included Bloody Sunday, the humiliation of Britain by the International Monetary Fund, and a continual and often arrogant assertion of political power by a large, well-organised trade union movement.
But the stats tell another story too. In 1974, the year I was thrown out of Oxford for exam failure, and moved to Manchester to start all over again, there was a record level of emigration from Britain. In December that year Wilson’s Energy Minister, Lord Balogh, sent the Prime Minister a note warning of the possibility of a “deep constitutional crisis” caused by accelerating inflation and a possible banking collapse. A year later inflation peaked at more than 24 per cent. Not long after that Denis Healey, the Chancellor, went “cap in hand”, as the myth has it, to the International Monetary Fund to ask for a £2.3 billion loan.
But that was as bad as things got. The inflationary growth in earnings had already started to decline, thanks in part to Jack Jones and the Social Contract. 1975 and 1976 gave Britain glorious hot summers (and droughts), 1977 brought the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and polls suggested increased optimism among ordinary Britons. In 1978 inflation was down to 8.3 per cent. In his new book about the Seventies, When the Lights Went Out, to be published this week, Andy Beckett quotes from a 1978 note sent from the Conservative research department to, among others, the party leader Margaret Thatcher. Commenting on the mood of the country, the author noted: “There was a surprising amount of euphoria about the country’s prospects and Labour under Callaghan seemed in calm control of events.”
In early 1978 Jones retired as TGWU leader after a huge farewell event at the Festival Hall attended by 2,500 guests. In late 1978 Callaghan decided to delay any election until the next year when polls might be slightly more favourable.
These two decisions helped to turn the winter of 1978-79 into the most disastrous in modern Labour history. With weak national leadership and a pent-up feeling among members of their wages having “fallen behind”, the unions created the greatest series of strikes and go-slows since the General Strike. Clipped into my mother’s diary for early 1979 are the pictures of the mounds of refuse and the stories of untreated cancer patients. Any notion of the much-vaunted “public sector ethos” disappeared as ambulancemen struck without emergency cover, nurses walked out and hospital porters picketed supplies. I was young and had no children sent home by teachers nor left unfed because the dinner ladies had downed ladles, so I thought it was exciting. In fact it was myopic, suicidal, unnecessary. Even so, even so, it didn’t tell you what would follow. Memories of the Heath Government suggested that the last thing a Tory administration needed was confrontation with the unions. It would be one thing to talk tough in an election campaign, another to provoke several years of labour unrest. When Callaghan’s Government fell in Weimarian fashion, brought down by an absent publican and a dying northern knight, we could see that Thatcher might win, but that was all we could see.
Actually, I remember, what I feared was not economic revolution, but social reaction. For Labour and for Tory the constraints of the postwar consensus were much the same: the “mixed economy” (whose border wars were fought over the question of nationalising the steel industry), the welfare state, the partnership of labour and capital, minimal constitutional change, and a set of assumptions about the British voters’ aversion to conflict. It was about bringing the dualities into balance; prices and incomes, management and unions, state and private, a postwar British Yin and Yang. If it were to be challenged, I imagined, it would be by the might of the organised working class, which would possibly be good, but probably wouldn’t happen.
And it seems as though the early Thatcherites saw things the same way. The historian Richard Vinen, in his new book, Thatcher’s Britain, reveals how in 1978, Angus Maude, in a document called Themes, warned against a mania for transformation. “We believe,” Maude wrote, “that people are fed up with change, and with new systems that don’t work. There is a deep nostalgia, in part for what is thought of as a comfortable past, but chiefly for a settled civilised life. Continuity is vital . . . Most people (we hope) want what we are seeking — a major change of trend and style in government — but not a radical upheaval, based on promises of a Brave New World.”
This feeling links to the otherwise incongruous choice of words Mrs Thatcher used on that day, 30 years ago, in Downing St, words culled from Francis of Assisi’s prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” As we now know, she came not to bring peace, but a sword.
Given the constraints that I thought prevented the new Prime Minister from being a radical, my fears were concentrated on a belief that she might turn out to be a proper reactionary. The Seventies had been the era of women’s liberation, of the Race Relations Act, of gay rights, of the dumping of old prejudices, shames and stigmas. To me the Conservative Right connoted Enoch Powell, Duncan Sandys (Sunken Glands as Private Eye called him), support for our kith and kin in Rhodesia and the League of Empire Loyalists. And in this, I could not have been more wrong and, paradoxically, nor could those of her supporters who longed for the old ways as much as I feared them. Under Thatcher the yearnings that characterised my generation were not just tolerated, but fulfilled. There would be no return to stultifying conformity, to “no coloureds”, bad coffee, tinned peas, predestined paths of existences governed by lifetime jobs and lifetime shackles to unloved partners. Thatcherism gave economic expression — sometimes brutally — to our desire for individualism, and far from turning the clock back, sent it whizzing forward.
So there was a continuity, but not the one we expected. Beckett argues that, looking back, this shouldn’t be so surprising. By 1977 Freddie Laker’s Skytrain was anticipating the mass budget flights of later years, the Brent Cross and Milton Keynes malls foreshadowed the growth of exciting hypermarkets and the slow death of the cobwebby, over-priced high street so that much of the social, economic and political landscape that would come to be associated with “the Eighties”, either pejoratively or triumphantly was visible in the second half of the Seventies, if you cared to look. But only a few (mostly constant pessimists) did.
Even the swearing, spitting punk movement turned out to represent, not a revolt against capitalism, but a precursor to Channel 4, BritArt and other products of cultural deregulation. Where once pirate radio was suppressed by Labour governments, now a Conservative Government let youth have exactly what it wanted (providing that what it wanted was not a guaranteed job) and could buy. Where had Saatchi found fame before his gallery? In creating the 1978 Tory poster “Labour Isn’t Working”. Those were the days when it was thought clever to have slick PR.
The greatest irony — and oh, that I’d known it at the time! — was that her own supporters, blue-rinse chanters of her name, serial standing ovators, were applauding the eventual loss of what they most cherished, the stay-still, comfortable and mildly bigoted society that Angus Maude had written about. Their cheers engendered the closed post office, the Polish plumbers, and Jade Goody.
But they didn’t see it and I didn’t see it. On reflection it was like examining the face of a baby for signs of what the adult will one day look like. Has it got its mother’s smile, its grandfather’s chin? There are myriad possibilities, but only some of them will actually happen and we don’t know which ones they are. The Thatcher of exactly 30 years ago could, to the person of 30 years ago, have turned out to be any number of things other than the Maggie T who, by 1985, was the first Prime Minister who could be regularly correctly named by dementia patients.
We saw through a glass darkly, and we probably see no more clearly now. Something will come of all this turmoil: the credit crunch, the upward sizzle of world temperature, the suggestions of new possibilities — but the most sensible remind themselves that they don’t know what the something is.
