26-07-2025
There's still one way that Britain can awaken from this nightmare
Sorry to keep banging on about how much worse things were in Britain in the 1970s. This must be like being lectured by your grandmother on how their generation survived the Blitz. But for those who lived through that pre-modern era when ordinary people were held hostage by titanic monopoly powers against which elected governments appeared to be helpless, it is difficult to see today's problems as the end of the world. It wasn't just the daily power outages which brought darkness and the shut down of all electrical equipment for hours at a time. There were as well the horrendous economic pressures which put today's difficulties into a sobering perspective.
It may be true – as the young point out with some bitterness – that property was unbelievably cheap. At the end of the 1960s, it was possible to buy a suburban house in London for under £10,000. (TEN THOUSAND POUNDS.) The first great property boom soon quadrupled those prices but even in 1979 you could buy a four bedroomed semi-detached house in a good neighbourhood for around £50,000. But that home owning idyll is deceptive. What followed was a staggering, scarcely credible by today's standards, rise in inflation. At its height in 1975, the inflation rate was 26.9 per cent – which makes the obsessive concern over today's inflation increases look rather silly. What did that mean for all those people who had bought their homes at what we would now consider absurdly low prices? Their mortgages which had originally been linked realistically to their incomes – and all their household bills which were also being hit by the inflationary spiral – became terrifyingly unaffordable.
This was a personal, familial crisis for countless households who suddenly discovered that they could not go on living as they had reasonably expected to do. The cost of their homes was suddenly way beyond the reach of their pay levels. The quality of life and the purchasing power of even well paid people, crashed with a suddenness that was deranging. It was now almost impossible for a mortgaged household to survive on one income so women had no choice but to go out to work. (Even though most mortgage lenders at the time would not take a wife's income into account which made practical planning problematic.)
But it was not only the economics that was going badly wrong. The later 60s and the 70s produced some ugly social dynamics that are scarcely recalled now, perhaps because they are so shaming. There were menacing mobs of skinheads whose racism and anti-social delinquency were blatantly violent. My husband and I once stood over a pair of Asian boys on the tube to shield them from a pack of shaven headed thugs who were threatening to pull them off the train. Somehow London had gone from its world-conquering moment in the Swinging Sixties to this: rubbish piling up in the streets, endless transport strikes and a great many people deciding that it was time to leave the country forever. Those who lament today that 'nothing works' can scarcely imagine the havoc of unreliability that was everyday life in that chaotic decade.
The antagonism toward the trade unions and the closed shop nationalised industries famously dominated the historic account of this awful period but what may be forgotten is the political despair that accompanied it. A succession of governments and party leaders had revealed themselves, to the disgust of the electorate, to be utterly useless. The 60s as we remember them had got under way with Harold Wilson who seemed to have achieved a fairly jolly accommodation with the most powerful trades unions. The 'beer and sandwiches at Number 10' technique of conciliation and kinship – which actually involved caving in to most union demands to avert strike action – seemed to offer some kind of sustainable mode of operation. Until it didn't. The unions would not be bought off indefinitely and their growing militancy was undermining major British industries like car manufacturing.
The country then turned, more in desperation than hope, to the Conservatives under Edward Heath who promised legislation to curb the spread of disruptive union activism. When that proved an ineffectual disaster Harold Wilson was returned to power. He then retired from office (due sadly to the onset of dementia) and was followed by James Callaghan who had the misfortune to preside over the 1979 Winter of Discontent. The deterioration of confidence in the political leadership of the country, by this time, seemed irreversible.
It was genuinely believed by a great many responsible people that national decline was not just inevitable but was already fully under way, and that this was attributable to the low standard of government performance: lack of conviction, failure of nerve and the poverty of ideas for dealing with the modern, post-imperial world. And what is more, this low standard was believed to be incurable. British politics was exhausted intellectually and morally.
You know what happened next. The Callaghan government lost a vote of confidence in the House (dramatically by one vote). A general election followed which was won by Margaret Thatcher's new model Conservative party and – not overnight but over a period of several years – confidence was restored not just in the economic future but in the possibility of effective government. British politics was not dead after all: it had simply sunk into a defeatist depression. The Left which had been broken and demoralised first by its experience in government and then by the public renunciation of its trades union wing which had propelled the Thatcher Tories into power, now had to reinvent itself.
First came the Social Democrats with their extreme Centrism, who were determined to 'break the mould' of party politics – which is to say, replace Labour and challenge the Tories' all out commitment to free markets. A lot of initial excitement was generated by this development, but it subsided into a footnote as the Thatcherite spirit of the 1980s swept it aside. Finally, Tony Blair's plagiarism of the Tory philosophy brought Labour back into the game. And so, confidence in recognisable party politics returned. What it took was nerve and fresh ideas. There must be a lesson there.
