"I have been hearing what was wrong with Britain and British politics in
the seventies all my adult life”, writes Andy Beckett, who was born in
December 1969, in the introduction to his exhaustive study of the era’s
politics. “The seventies were grim. The seventies were the hangover from the
sixties. The seventies were violent. The seventies were a dead end. Above
all: we don’t want to go back to the seventies.” Yet this general
grinding-down of spirits coincided with a peak in social mobility, so far
unmatched, and the greatest degree of equality in incomes. It has become
common to state that Britons were at their happiest in 1976 – a claim based
on a comparative study of quality of life by the New Economics Foundation in
2004 – in the knowledge that it runs counter to our sour collective memory
of the decade as a whole. Beckett, who writes about politics for the
Guardian, spent five years searching – whether on North Sea oil rigs or in
the front room of a former Hull trucker – for an explanation of this and
other paradoxes, which arose in his mind every time he heard the standard
line trotted out. “After all, it was not just Thatcherites who told it:
left-wing people would scorn or regret the Callaghan years; liberals would
condemn the brutality towards Irish republicans under Edward Heath; almost
no one had a good word for the Harold Wilson administration of 1974–6.”
There are good reasons why memories of the 1970s have a poisoned air about
them. A miners’ strike in the winter of 1972 led the presenters of Blue
Peter to suggest practical ways of preventing hypothermia in the home. The
three-day week, introduced in response to the Yom Kippur War and further
threats from the National Union of Mineworkers, prompted ministers to
recommend bathing in the dark. Dozens of civilians and soldiers died in
Northern Ireland in every year of the decade. Strikes in essential services
dominated the mid-to-late 70s, culminating in the 1978–9 Winter of
Discontent, with its own enduring imagery of litter mountains and unburied
dead.
In July 1976, the BBC’s The Money Programme broadcast a special edition which
explored two scenarios for Britain’s future, based on the previous few
years’ spiral of high inflation and high borrowing to prop up the pound.
That month, the Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, had secured a short-term
loan from the central banks of other wealthy countries to tide Britain over
until he could work his promised “economic miracle”. The first scenario
suggested that a new, radically right-wing government dedicated to scaling
back public spending and promoting “wealth creation” would make “capitalists
of us all”. The second simply drew out the ongoing crisis to its logical
conclusion: 4 million people would be unemployed by 1980, the pound would be
worth less than the dollar, and cities would crumble. Perhaps Margaret
Thatcher was right: there was no alternative but to attempt the former.
Or perhaps not. Beckett argues that a false consensus has developed over the
past thirty years which makes the election in 1979 of a Conservative Prime
Minister as unlikely and divisive as Mrs Thatcher seem inevitable. Using
primary evidence gathered through interviews with ministers, political
advisers, civil servants, strike participants and observers such as the
social commentator Peter York, he shows that, despite the often catastrophic
feel of politics in the 70s, the ascent of a small coterie of radical
Conservative thinkers towards the end of the decade was by no means assured.
As part of his approach, Beckett includes a lot of first-person,
historian-as-detective information, not all of it enlightening. He gives the
dates, names and details of his fieldwork, such as a visit he made in 2004
to the site of a proposed, but never built, coastal airport on Maplin Sands
in Essex. In some cases the updating is necessary: several of his elderly
interviewees, including Heath, died within months or even weeks of Beckett’s
speaking to them. At other points, however, the information is at best of
tangential relevance. The device works better when Beckett traces the
civilians – the non-professional political actors – involved in events which
are recalled, if at all, only as keywords amid the general fug of bad
memories.
Graham Bober, a Colchester printer interviewed by his local paper about the
three-day week in 1973, is found by Beckett thirty years later to be working
as a taxi driver, and less sanguine about the death of manufacturing in his
town than he had once been about the long weekends that accompanied his
short week of twelve-hour shifts:
"There’s not one manufacturing job in that part of Colchester now.” He
slaps his knee and spills some of his coffee on his armchair. He and Gillian
[Bober] still talk about the three-day week with a degree of fondness.
“People took sides on it”, she says. “We were living on a very rightwing
estate. You’d go into a shop and people would say, ‘Bloody miners!’ and
you’d say,” Graham breaks in: “At the time I thought Ted Heath was very
rightwing . . . . We thought, ‘This bloke, he’s dreadful.’” He pauses. “I
certainly never saw that they’d move as right as they did afterwards.”
Beckett’s interview with the Bobers reveals again a tension between the
received wisdom about the 70s – the “Bloody miners!” strand, which asserts
that Britain was doomed because labour had run amok, and the quieter, often
drowned-out voice which states that the decade represented serious movement
towards a more equal distribution of power among British people. The thesis
developed by Beckett suggests a deepening rift within the working class
itself, between the unionized and non-unionized, the collectivist and the
individualist, which reached a point of crisis at the May 1979 election.
Heath’s government had tested this tendency in 1972, successfully selling off
60,000 council houses for far smaller discounts than were introduced by his
Conservative successors in 1981. Gavyn Davies, then policy adviser to both
Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, tells Beckett that he “spent a humungous
amount of time – 50 per cent of my time, even during the 1974 crisis –
working out what would happen if we sold off council houses. The
public-accounts advantages of selling council houses. The political
liberation for urban working people – our people. We had schemes absolutely
fully developed, ready to launch”.
This raises the possibility that the privatization of council housing, with
its proceeds ploughed back into building more social housing, by a Labour
rather than a Conservative government would be seen very differently, and
perhaps less divisively, now. Davies regards Labour’s stalling on the policy
as “a monumental own goal” with which he is still “somewhat obsessed”.
Beckett upholds this view in his account of a visit to Milton Keynes, the
new town planned by socialists but inhabited by individualists who applauded
Mrs Thatcher, their new Prime Minister, on her visit there in September
1979.
If Graham Bober couldn’t see the true extent to which Labour and the unions
enraged his neighbours, let alone those thinkers at the Centre for Policy
Studies and the Institute of Economic Affairs who came to influence
Conservative policy so profoundly, he was by no means alone. It is clear
throughout Beckett’s almost queasily detailed account of the Labour
administrations of 1974–9 that neither the “furtive” Wilson nor the
variously “overconfident” and “disillusioned” Callaghan took Thatcher
seriously.
Labour’s failure to respond to many voters’ desires wasn’t so much a mark of
arrogance as of vacancy. Beckett layers up a memorable portrait of once
energetic leaders for whom the endless political and economic tumult of the
70s was simply too much to endure without lasting effects. Heath, shocked
into a “shark-like” grin by his surprise election win in 1970, was visibly
ailing by the time of the three-day week in 1973, giving a special
television broadcast on the crisis with “a bag under one eye” and “a long
drawing in of breath that caused his heavy chest and shoulders to rise
visibly”. Wilson, at the end of his political career, seemed troublingly
distracted during his final two years in power, holding his responsibilities
away from himself in the fear that he was no longer up to honouring them. He
was diagnosed with both Alzheimer’s disease and bowel cancer shortly after
leaving office. Callaghan’s entire Cabinet, it appeared to the civil servant
Sir Clive Rose, was worn out by the Winter of Discontent.
Life was less tired, more diffuse, outside Westminster and outside the
mainstream. The spirit of ’68 was directed into agitation for gay rights,
women’s liberation, the free festival movement and an outpouring of radical
literature, best represented by the Penguin Education and Sociology series
and Fontana Modern Masters – the groundbreaking series of primers on
significant thinkers which Beckett mistakenly attributes to Penguin.
(Fontana was an imprint of Collins.) Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History
Man (1975), he writes, “did not date quickly. For the rest of the decade,
for more British students and academics, almost certainly, than at any time
before or since, the one inevitability in political life was the victory of
world socialism”. The History Man’s protagonist, the philandering Marxist
sociologist Howard Kirk, is unequivocally a villain. In the version of real
life recorded by Beckett, there are both heroes and villains, but none is
twodimensional. The late leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union,
Jack Jones, chairman of the national pensioners’ convention in his nineties,
comes across as principled and untainted by egoism. Jayaben Desai, who led a
long strike at the Grunwick photo-processing plant in 1977, is at once
humble and steely. Alfred Sherman, on the other hand, a staunch monetarist
and Thatcher’s adviser in the late 70s, puts one in mind of Montgomery
Burns, the merciless plutocrat from The Simpsons.
Andy Beckett believes that we do not necessarily have “the long seventies” to
thank for the 80s, whatever our views on that decade. It is more the case
that Thatcher’s first administration, in particular, represented an
extension of the chaos and upheaval of the 1970s. Even after 576 pages,
another chapter on this theme would have been welcome – unless there is a
sequel in progress. On the evidence of this fine, thought-provoking history,
it is hard to think of a better match of writer to subject.
Andy Beckett
WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT
Britain in the seventies
576pp. Faber. £20.
978 0 571 22136 3
Lynsey Hanley is the author of Estates: An intimate history, 2007. She
has written an introduction to the forthcoming Penguin Classics edition of
Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and is working on her second book.
