socialism uk edgerton

Social Democracy, Nationalism and Declinism

There is no more dangerous illusion than the comfortable doctrine that the world owes us a living. One of the dangers of the old-boy network approach to life is … that it is international, that whatever we do, whenever we run into trouble, we can always rely on a special relationship with someone or other to bail us out. From now on Britain will have just as much influence in the world as we can earn, as we can deserve. We have no accumulated reserves on which to live.
Harold Wilson, speech at Scarborough, 1963
the old idols of gentlemanly sloth and corpse-like ‘stability’ had to give way to the over-riding demands of one new, hard god: production. British capitalism, which had dominated the world without severing itself from a semi-feudal past, had now to come nakedly of age.
Tom Nairn, 19641
Our island is one of the very few provinces of Europe which has not in this century suffered from civil or international war upon its own soil; and which has escaped the consequences – gas chambers, ‘quisling’ regimes, partisan movements, terror and counter-terror – which have coloured the outlook of whole nations, East and West. It is very easy for us to fall into insular, parochial attitudes …
E. P. Thompson, 19572
Our jobs, our living standards, and the role of Britain in the World all depend on our ability to earn our living as a nation. That is why Britain has to pay her way in trade and transactions with the outside world. In the last financial year, 1969/70, our national surplus was £550 million – the largest we have ever had.
Now Britain’s Strong – Let’s Make It Great to Live In, Labour Party manifesto, 19703
It is telling that efforts to anatomize British power still evoke the cliché the ‘Establishment’. The term appeared, though perhaps not for the first time, in the Spectator in 1955 and became famous because of the furious reaction the article elicited. What was meant, and not meant, by the ‘Establishment’ provides a rich illustration of the limits of the concept. Anyone, wrote Henry Fairlie,
who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.
But this was about civic, public power; power over what was said, not what was done. The focus was on religion (an indicator that it was still important), royalty, the arts and letters. The cases he gave were the rallying around the Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, and a story of how Clement Attlee stopped a very mildly critical article by an MP about Princess Margaret.4 No doubt ideological power lay in such interconnected places, but in this account of the ‘Establishment’ there is no City, no military, no business, no United States, no science, no technology. It was hardly an analysis of who ran the United Kingdom, a question rarely addressed well, nor even who did the influential thinking. We are left with neither an account of the elite nor elite thought.
Histories of the ideas which animated political action in the United Kingdom after 1945 seem to imply that social democracy and/or liberalism dominated. Social democracy essentially means the policies of the Labour Party, understood as the creation of a welfare state, and an accommodation with capitalism. Historians of the left tend to favour liberalism, and make the point that British social democracy was but weakly developed. They might speak indeed of the myth of social democracy.5 This argument is essentially a liberal continuity thesis supported by references to the post-war ideas of two liberals, Keynes and Beveridge, the importance of Edwardian liberal innovations in welfare and of the supposed failure to transform the nature of the state and state intervention in the post-Second World War years. Both stories, as has already been suggested, are not only misleading in different ways, but also insufficient. This is not to say there were no liberal ideas in play – there certainly were – for example in the powerful arguments which seemed to explain why liberal conservatives and right social democrats sought the bracing competition and rational transnationalism of the Common Market. But these were far from the only ideas in play – we cannot usefully characterize British ideas as liberal and/or social democratic only.

Illustration 15.1: ‘The New Cabinet’, by Vicky. In the centre is Lord Hailsham. L to R, John Boyd-Orr, nutritionist, A. J. P. Taylor, historian, John Osborne, playwright, T. S. Eliot, poet, Edith Sitwell, poet, Malcolm Muggeridge, journalist, Bertrand Russell, philosopher, Victor Gollancz, publisher, Basil Liddell Hart, military intellectual, Kingsley Martin, journalist, and Vicky, cartoonist. (British Cartoon Archive VY1066 published 1958)
What is notable, or rather should be, is the post-war importance of critiques, often implicit, but deep and strong, of liberalism. These were certainly not only social democratic. In the years after 1950 especially the argument would repeatedly be made that the United Kingdom had not been Prussian enough, not continental enough, in terms of both the economy and military practice. These criticisms came from left and right. But we need to take note of the importance, subterranean as it often was, of British nationalism, and especially of its manifestation in history, policy and political economy.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
If liberalism and social democracy, like Keynesianism and the welfare state, won’t do as place holders for the key ideas and assumptions which shaped state and society, what, then, were they? Political economy is indeed central, but what kind of political economy? Was there, for example, a distinctive social democratic political economy?6 Or sociology? It is difficult indeed to find an economics which was distinctly social democratic, committed to the Labour Party, with a distinctive analysis of capitalism. There were powerful economists who advised prime ministers such as Sir Donald MacDougall, Sir Alec Cairncross, and Lords Roberthall, Balogh and Kaldor, but few if any had a distinctly social democratic outlook.7 Only the last two were brought in as political appointees, to Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson was himself an economist, but we have no study of what was distinctive about his economic thought beyond his commitment to planning, and his rejection of a policy of devaluation of sterling in 1964 (though he was forced to devalue in 1967). Wilson did, however, show a marked understanding of the need of government control over firms so that they would follow the national interest rather than their own interest.
Labour’s analysis of capitalism and that of Labour-sympathizing intellectuals was weak. Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism (1956) in essence argued that the class of capitalists that had ruled the world no longer existed. Individual capitalists had lost the power to control large enterprises, which were now in the hands of managers, not shareholders, and they were not concerned just with the pursuit of profit. As far as control of industry was concerned, the state had all the power it needed, and, furthermore, it was suggested, the new managerial controllers were not as averse as the old capitalists to working with the state. The problem was that this was supposition – the actual nature of the policies and programmes of enterprises was not discussed.8 Critics of Crosland did not get very far either. For the new left that emerged after 1956 analyses of the capitalists in particular was an urgent task in the light of Crosland’s revisionism. ‘Analysis of the power structure of British society … is thus the greatest present research need.’9 The aim was to show individual capitalist control, control over many firms by interlocking directorships and the links between finance and industry.
One looks in vain (until the 1970s) for an elaborated set of arguments from the left for alternative ways of running the economy to that practised by the Conservatives in the 1950s, except for making general arguments about planning and putting the interests of the nation first. What is harder still to find is anyone setting out a general case, and methods, for a new national calculus which would work out what was best for the nation in terms of both equity and efficiency. There were no distinctive criteria for nationalized industries, though they were nationalized on the basis that they should indeed be run on principles concerning their national importance. The government produced criteria which merely aped the profit criteria for private firms, which often made nationalized industries unprofitable when they did what they were supposed to do – behave differently from a private enterprise.10 This is not to say that nationalized industries and other state enterprises did not in fact operate to distinctly national and other criteria – they did, most notably in buying British and ignoring the costs of doing so – the point here is that these crucial issues were not the subject of sustained analysis on the left. To put it another way, the Labour Party generally relied on state experts rather than on its own, not just in matters of war, or research, but even in its own area of special concern, the nationalized industries. It did not have, as the much more politically marginal communist parties of France and Italy did, a cadre of intellectuals of renown developing party-specific positions. Indeed, the levels of political education within the Labour Party were notoriously low.
The exception that proves the rule is the economics and sociology of the welfare state. Here, there was a left tradition of investigation and policy prescription operating on assumptions as to what was best for the nation. For example, in criticizing the notion of the NHS as a cost to the individual through taxation, and private medicine as a saving to the taxpayer, one found the response that both private and public medicine cost the nation money, the issue was which system was more equitable and more efficient. The NHS could convincingly come out best on both grounds. Thus the National Health Service, it was argued, was a cheap as well as equitable way of providing the nation with the health care it might provide itself by less equitable and more expensive private means. Similarly, a national state pension scheme of a generous kind might well be the most efficient from a national point of view. The issue is whether one system of giving money to particular people was more efficient and equitable than another. Similarly, one finds objections to the idea that benefits were a cost and tax allowances a saving. After all, they are both transfers from a public pot to private individuals. The argument for child benefits was made on this basis. This was the sort of argument indeed put forward by the applied economists of the welfare state, who served on Royal Commissions and advised the Labour Party on the NHS and on pensions.11 It is crucial to note that, far from arguing from a Beveridgean consensus, they generally rejected Beveridge’s central policy, the flat-rate contribution and benefit.
This is not to say these were the only views on these matters, or that the only policies were those of the left. An assumption of uniformity of view, of experts in favour of the actually existing welfare state, is belied by a group of doctors and others who continued to oppose the NHS, including health economists, through the 1950s into the 1960s and 1970s.12 Much of the application of efficiency thinking to the NHS was the sort of work study and operational research already in use in government and industry to reduce costs.13
The extent to which professionals concerned with the state represented or pushed policy in a progressive direction remains open. The assumption that the state-connected professionals were of the left is based on the prior assumption that the state was overwhelmingly a welfare state.14 There were small numbers of lawyers, architects and sociologists concerned with welfare, from health, to labour law, to race relations, but whether the welfare state professionals were generally progressive has not been established. Taking a broader look at the experts connected to the state, not least the warfare state, suggests that this is far from a safe generalization.
The thesis of the left that British social democracy was weak is thus surely right. Where I think the argument goes wrong is in assuming that therefore liberalism triumphed or at least continued to have the dominant influence. There were alternatives to liberalism in the past, and in the present. In the past the dominant one was imperialism; after 1950 it was nationalism, which liberals had always regarded as a powerful anti-liberal view.
BRITISH NATIONALISM
Because British nationalism did not label itself as such, it has barely been noticed by historians, who might see in it only a residual imperialism and racism. It is recognized in the forms of anti-British nationalism such that nationalism in British history usually means Scottish and Welsh and Irish nationalism. British nationalism barely seems to exist at all, nor indeed does English nationalism. This tends to be associated with a very few figures – often no more than Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher.15 They were, however, not economic nationalists.
Yet British nationalism of the left did exist. As we have seen, it was manifest in many aspects of British life after 1945. It was a post-imperial nationalism, similar to the post-imperial nationalism of other parts of the British empire. It was not derivative from these other imperial nationalisms, as has been suggested.16 Indeed, on the left especially, but not exclusively, the failure to be national enough was seen as the central problem with the United Kingdom in the past, and into the present. As we have seen, during the war many communists and others on the left promoted a nationalist critique of British liberalism and imperialism. As I suggested in Part I, Labour could be seen as a nationalist party after 1945, indeed as the nationalist party. It put nation before class, it invoked national victories from the past, and not class victories (or defeats).17 It is not accidental that Labour prime ministers invoked the national interest again and again, nor was it a mere cliché.
As in the past and elsewhere, nationalism was important in the writing of history. The 1950s to the 1970s saw the writing of very national, though certainly not necessarily celebratory, accounts of recent British or English history. Histories typically ignored or downplayed the empire and abroad, telling a story of the coming-together of the British people. Just as Australian nationalists, long after the event, created national stories around ANZAC and Singapore, so post-war British nationalists chose 1940 as the moment in which the island nation discovered itself. Histories began to tell a national story in which ‘Britain stood alone’ in 1940, that is, the island nation stood alone. The war was given a national framing and was fought by a mobilization of the left and the people. The war was a good war, in its aims, and in that it was good for the people who fought it. What was to be regretted was that its progressive logic did not endure longer, that its promise was betrayed. The complex politics of history and memory projected a hoped-for national future onto the past (and especially 1940). Then it took that invented past for the actual past, so the future looks nostalgic.
A. J. P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945, has as a key theme of the story of the Second World War that of a nation coming of age by looking to itself, by fighting a ‘people’s war’ in which the left was prominent. Success came from mobilizing the British people. Angus Calder in his People’s War also told a story of a nation, not an empire, which found its strength by turning inwards and binding together to create a successful national effort, led by the left. He celebrated national effort and exaggerated the extent to which the United Kingdom was cut off from the world. Calder and many other historians of the left take 1940 not 1945 as the key moment in which the new nation is born, making it clear that, although the nation is to be interpreted in terms of class, what was important was nation trumping class. That has proven a powerful historical argument, whatever its grasp on reality.18
The war came to be seen as the one moment in which the nation or perhaps just the elite could be raised from its lethargy, in a way post-war Labour governments, for example, could not. Where, say, the white heat of the 1960s failed, the wartime spirit had succeeded. A. J. P. Taylor insisted that it was the war which brought the British economy into the twentieth century. The communist historian Eric Hobsbawm saw it as the moment of national renewal and of technical advance, and the empire as hindrance. After 1940, the United Kingdom was turned ‘in the interests of survival, into the most state-planned and state-managed economy ever introduced outside a frankly socialist country’ in part because of ‘implicit political pressure of the working classes’.19 He also celebrated national agricultural production. That image of the war as the national and industrial moment of exception recurs in many more instances.20 He and others developed the genuinely national critique in which internationalist British capitalism failed, except in the moment it was national, taken to be the Second World War.
It is notable that the right did not write histories of the nation at war. Winston Churchill wrote a semi-official history of the war in its entirety, not just the role of the United Kingdom, or even that of the British empire. If anything, its focus was on the Anglo-American alliance. Historians of the right have followed him in telling stories of the Second World War as a whole rather than specifically writing about the British experience. Histories of the fighting British empire did not appear until the twenty-first century.21 It is indeed worth noting the absence of imperialist (rather than imperial) histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom, and the few that are supportive of the British empire write from a liberal point of view portraying the empire as diffuser of trade and enlightenment, rather than as a trading bloc or the basis of military power.22 The reason is perhaps obvious – there were bigger fish to fry in the Cold War – and the US alliance was central. Imperialism was a fringe activity confined to private spaces. One of the spaces it can be found hinted at is in the suggestions by some historians that it would have been better to do a deal with Hitler in 1940, and thus have preserved a powerful empire. Churchill discovered the reality of British weakness and made it worse by fighting the war. By 1945 the empire was finished, the UK depended on the USA, a Labour government was in power, and the USSR dominated half of Europe: 1945 was ‘the end of glory’.23
The left’s critical nationalism had a core weakness. It had no analysis of the local British elite, relying as it did on the idea of a non-national British elite. The nationalism of the left in particular helps explain the failure to actively criticize the actual policies and practices of the British elite, except where they are seen as the stooges of foreigners: Americans, the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’ (that is, Swiss bankers) or later the bureaucrats of Brussels. In nationalist left fantasies the United Kingdom was militaristic because it sold out to the USA, capitalist because it was in hock to American business, or the high authorities of the Common Market. It also helps explain the lack of an alternative theory of society, the constant invocation of the nation, the admiration for British forms and the explanation of weakness in national terms. It was also weak in that it could not beat the Conservatives when it came to claiming the imagery of the nation. Thus nationalism remained, as Tom Nairn suggested, focused on the symbolism of monarchy, armed forces, parliament – on mystificatory forms rather than on possibilities of popular mobilization.24
DECLINISM
There was, however, one very important nationalist critique of the British elite. The failure of the national elite was central to the failure of national will, the failure that led to what was seen as ‘decline’. Declinism may be defined as the explanation of relative decline, by what is taken to be national failings. The most notable exponent of this sort of analysis was Correlli Barnett, writing from the 1960s. He argued that the British nation was not nationalist enough, too militarily weak, too geared to abroad. Empire was a drain on national power. The United Kingdom should have been more like Germany – more national, more militarist, more scientific, less imperial, naval and liberal. Correlli Barnett created a negative, inverted story in which in the Second World War the United Kingdom did not mobilize nationally but became dependent on the USA.25 Weakened and distracted by empire, it was saved in 1940 by the United States and became its pensioner during the war. Such theses later found strong echoes on the left. In 1991 Angus Calder was to argue that the whole myth of the Blitz was designed to cover up that momentous transfer of power to the US in 1940.26
For the nationalist left the empire and British internationalist capitalism were also a central cause of decline. Empire (allegedly) gave the United Kingdom protected markets for low-quality manufacturers, provided prestigious careers which drew the elite away from industry and led to wasteful warlike expenditure of the wrong sort. Empire cushioned the United Kingdom from the realities of the cruel real world for too long and gave an old ruling class prestige and power they would otherwise have lost. Investments overseas, a distinctive feature of British capitalism, required a payback, which came in the form of imports, undermining the national economy.27 These were central arguments of post-war nationalist histories, as they were of nationalist political economy earlier. Declinism, a central feature of intellectual discourse from the 1950s into the 1990s, was a very important expression of anti-imperialist, anti-liberal nationalism.28
Declinism arose from a sense that the nation was weakening relative to other nations, expressed, for example, in the number of national comparative statistics which emerged in the 1950s. The central observation was that the British nation was not growing as fast as others. The new league tables of rates of growth of GDP had the United Kingdom as a straggler. As a result of low relative (but high absolute) rates of growth the British economy was shrinking relative to the world economy as a whole, and others were thus grabbing larger shares of world production and indeed trade. Low relative rates of growth got confused with low efficiency. Within the nationalist frame this was interpreted as national failure due to national failings. The key failure according to declinist analyses was that the United Kingdom was, and had not been, national enough in its capitalism, in its elite. Fix those national failings, the implication went, and the United Kingdom would once again be a top dog.
An internationalist framing would note that the United Kingdom was bound to weaken relative to other powers, as they became more successful. That was to be expected and welcomed in any internationalist calculus of well-being, in which everyone was getting richer, and the poor faster than the richer. It would also have led to the conclusion that even if the UK had the most efficient workers, the most ruthless entrepreneurs, the most inventive engineers, it would still have declined relatively. It could only have been avoided if, say, places like Germany and Japan had been turned into poor agricultural countries and the Soviet Union bombed out of existence.
Declinism has to be seen as the unwitting last refuge of great power delusions. Indeed, the very centrality of declinism, while it insisted on decline, was evidence of unwillingness to come to terms with its reality, taking solace in the idea that it might be reversed. Declinism was, paradoxically, a reason why the UK has not been able to adjust to inevitable, and welcome, relative decline. It is useful to think of it partly as a response to an elite that was shamed by Suez, as part also of the anti-deferential mood of the 1960s; and also something which affected policy by undermining the confidence of the elite, not least with respect to the Common Market.29 It was a common declinist theme that empire had been and continued to be too important in the political imagination, that too much attention was granted to the maintenance of sterling, and defence expenditure.30 Yet it was also a form of jingoism, a delusion about inherent superiority, dressed up as critique.
Declinism was at the core of the early 1960s attack on the elite, understood as a political class, an economic class, a social elite. This went right across the political spectrum. These criticisms took a particularly rich form among left intellectuals, though it needs to be recognized that it came in many ideological varieties. Thus Eric Hobsbawm in his widely read Industry and Empire (1968) claimed that British industry, formed in the ‘archaic phase of industrialization’, had not needed much in the way of science, and as a result the new sciences and technologies of the late nineteenth century, these ‘winds of change … grew sluggish’ as they crossed the Channel.31 British scientific and technical education was in this and so many other accounts, negligible. Hobsbawm saw economic decline as a palpable fact in the interwar years. There was a move to larger firms, but merely a defensive anti-competitive one which did not improve the basic condition of the economy.32 Only the state promoted new techniques, for example, the jet and radar. Declinism was also central to the analysis of the British condition by the new left. In the early 1960s Tom Nairn could write: ‘As is well-known, every major index of economic development shows the inferiority of British capitalism to its main competitors.’33 The key idea was that the British elite was aristocratic, old-fashioned and inefficient; the industrial middle class had succumbed to the aristocracy; elite culture became fixated on the countryside and aristocratic rather than bourgeois virtues.34 This led to immobility, archaism, rigidity, crystallization, petrification, indeed ‘stale constipation and sedimentary ancestor-worship’.35 Perry Anderson dismissed the British intellectuals and technocrats as useless. He discounted the importance of British intellectual Marxism of the 1930s, which was, in his view, dominated by ‘poets and natural scientists – the two vocations most unsuited to effect any lasting transformation of British culture’. He went on: ‘where there was a bid to “apply” their formal beliefs, the outcome was frequently bad art and false science: at its worst the rhymes of Spender and the fantasies of Bernal’.36 For all this dismissal of British intellectual traditions, Anderson was a very British analyst of his time, reproducing in his own distinctive language the key theses of the declinists: ‘Today Britain stands revealed as a sclerosed, archaic society, trapped and burdened by its past successes.’ He claimed the causes were old: ‘under-investment at home, lagging technological innovation since the end of the last century’; the Treasury, after the City of London (the financial centre), was ‘the second great albatross round the neck of British economic growth’. The British state needed to be interventionist, technocratic, but all it offered was ‘universal dilettantism and anachronistic economic liberalism’, while the British educational system was only belatedly scientific. And so on and so forth.37 The key underlying point was that the elite was stuck in its Edwardian globalist liberal imperialism.
On the left the critique of British capitalism’s internationalism echoed left nationalist critiques in post-colonial contexts, where the lack of a national bourgeoisie, rather than a cosmopolitan one connected more to global capital than the nation, was the central element of ‘dependista’ political economy. The United Kingdom came to be written about as if it were Argentina. This sort of argument was to have especial prominence in the work of Scottish left-nationalists.38 The Scottish elite was by implication more industrial, more scientific, more democratic than the English, or at least had been.
Just as Anderson and Nairn’s arguments are not known for their declinism, not least because it was a commonplace, E. P. Thompson’s famous response, similarly, is not known for its anti-declinism, its invocation of the importance of science and political economy, or its hints at the significance of the warfare state.39 Thompson noted the ‘uncomfortable affinity of tone’ between the pronouncements of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn on the one hand and ‘the journalistic diagnosticians of the British malaise whom they profess to despise … Mr David Frost, Mr Shanks, and Comrade Anderson are saying different things but there is the same edge to the voice.’ Thompson worried that they all overlooked ‘certain strengths and humane traditions’ in Britain, but more importantly, in attacking what they saw as left-overs from Old Corruption, they were blind to the reality that a ‘new, and entirely different, predatory complex occupies the state’. He asked whether it was not to this new Thing of vast power and influence, ‘rather than to the hunting of an aristocratic Snark, that an analysis of the political formations of our time should be addressed?’40 Interestingly he did not give the Thing a more specifically modern name – nor indeed did he complain of a British military-industrial complex or a British warfare state; he had a wide and rather vague concept in mind. But there was an inkling here of something the rest of the left implicitly denied existed, except as yet another archaic remnant.
By framing decline in the way it did, declinism took to explaining what never happened with explanations which didn’t work. It sought to explain a supposed catastrophic failure, by invoking the power of finance, or the aristocracy or imperial thought, or literature, or the classics. All these explanations were blown up to monstrous proportions. The supposed lack of entrepreneurs, large corporations, research laboratories and technocrats that these explanations supposedly accounted for became deeply entrenched as authoritatively established historical reality. Thus, what should have been the most obvious features of twentieth-century British history were consigned to near non-existence. This itself may be seen as an exaggeration. But even an authoritative voice, Margaret Gowing, an official historian of the war economy and the British nuclear programme, could state in the 1970s that ‘My own research in atomic energy shows that at the end of the Second World War, which had strengthened British industry, the industrial base of scientific technology in Britain was extremely thin.’41 She was hardly alone in this kind of distorted account. Yet at most what any index of strength showed was that British capitalism was behind US capital and perhaps German capitalism, but that it was by most indicators one of the top three capitalisms in the world, with, one might add, a base of industrial scientific technology not much thinner than that of Germany or of the USA either.
Declinists managed the extraordinary feat of not seeing what one might have thought was in plain sight. But of course declinism was never merely descriptive, it was primarily prescriptive. To judge from its explanations of British failure and what it appeared to take to be the reasons for the success of the nations it compared the United Kingdom unfavourably with (Wilhelmine Germany was a favourite), its prescription was a strong technocratic state and economic nationalism. It is telling in this context that the early critics of declinism were typically economic liberals such as Lord Hailsham and Enoch Powell, and free-market-supporting US economic historians examining the British case.42
Historians, mostly still believing in decline, disputed particular explanations for it into the early 1990s. Thereafter, while declinism was discredited and assumed to have dissipated, its deep assumptions still lingered on, deeply embedded in the historical literature.
THE TECHNOCRATIC CRITIQUE
National declinism peddled the fanciful doctrine of the anti-technocratic British elite. In the British post-war case the discourse on experts was a very strange one (quite different from that in the USA). It insisted on the lack of significance of the expert in the United Kingdom, consequential low investment in innovation and all the rest. This was a very peculiar attempt to write out of history the actual experts who were in fact so central to British history. The denunciation was essentially that the elite was old-fashioned, trained in the wrong subjects, had the wrong attitudes – these criticisms applied particularly to the business, political and civil service elite, and it usually came from those with the background they themselves were criticizing – public school boys who studied arts subjects at Oxbridge. There was little original in the critique, but it was general from the 1960s onwards. It came from experts themselves, and their dismal failure to tell empirically coherent stories about themselves has seriously misled historians as to their significance.
One of the prime culprits was C. P. Snow, the scientist-novelist, in his Two Cultures lecture of 1959. Sir Charles Snow was a living refutation of his own thesis, as he was a major cultural figure of the 1950s and 1960s, who was a company director, was elevated to the peerage and had a position in government. He inherited the mantle of H. G. Wells as diagnostician, prophet, critic, politico and all-round sage.
His idea was simple, indeed simplistic. It was that British elite culture was peculiar in that it was particularly divided between the cultures of ‘science’ and of ‘literature’, and that these divisions were increasing. The scientists (academic physicists he meant) had the future in their bones, while the literary men, novelists and poets were ‘natural Luddites’, indeed proto-fascists. The former were to the left, and of more humble origin, than the literary types whose culture dominated the state. Questions of class, power and knowledge were mixed up with ignorant gusto. Snow’s thesis was taken as reportage from a man who was famed for understanding the elite, but it is laughably wrong.
The literary scholar F. R. Leavis attacked Snow’s childish fictions, from the perspective not of literature, but of the engaged and enraged intellectual. That such an intellectual nullity as Snow, wrong on literature, and on science, could be taken seriously in the modern metropolitan world of culture (he was the lead book reviewer for The Sunday Times) was for Leavis a sign of the corruption of that world. The significance of Snow was not what he said, but that he was granted enormous significance by the knowers and shakers of the modern United Kingdom, showing them up for what they were. Leavis’ potent attack has been disparaged for a lack of politesse, and as the predictable riposte from literature. But they were arguing about very different things. Snow was making a crass, historically ignorant plea for ‘science’, while Leavis was outraged that such tat could be taken seriously. Snow’s thesis would have been much more plausible had Leavis won the ideological battle, had we remembered Snow as the unfortunate victim of Leavis’s demolition, a minor Ludwig Feuerbach or Eugen Dühring (of whom we know only because they were the butt of theoretical abuse by Marx and Engels) of the British literary or perhaps scientific scene. But the point is that Leavis lost and knew he was losing. As a result we cannot escape repeated invocations of Snow’s thesis as if it described reality, or at least a serious basis for discussion, not just in the past but in the present.
Two Cultures, or rather the tradition it exemplified and sustained, is centrally about making the case for science, for action, for modernity. It does so by systematically downplaying the significance of what it supports. It sucks science, technology, modernity out of British history, leaving it over-populated with caricatures of literary intellectuals, anti-scientific mandarins and the like. While celebrating science it removes it from history except as the odd exception which proves the rule. It is what I have called an anti-history, forced to take out of history that which is central to it for the history to make sense. Alas Snow’s argument, though certainly not originally his, is found implicitly and explicitly in much writing about the United Kingdom, manifest in studies of the civil service which deal only with the administrative class and not the scientists and engineers, which treat universities as if they consist only of arts faculties, books as if they were all novels and science as if it were all academic physics. It is impossible to understand British knowing, the history of the universities and the history of education if one believes Snow to have been right, or simply shares his assumptions. Equally, it is impossible to understand the world of British ideas if one does not appreciate why such empirically dubious accounts could hold such sway in the world of ideas, and even affairs of state.
The Fulton Report of the 1960s provides an example. The philosopher John Fulton, vice-chancellor of the University of Sussex, chaired an inquiry into the civil service. It was set up in 1966, in the technocratic moment, and reported in 1968. It took up the classic long-standing technocratic critique of the civil service and made it official. Its structures were made, it claimed, in the nineteenth century, making it unfit for the twentieth; the key administrative class were ‘amateurs’ or ‘generalists’; they were too concerned with policy and incapable as ‘managers’; the divisions between classes, that is the separate hierarchies of administrators, scientists, engineers, lawyers, economists, prevented the professionals influencing policy, the domain of the administrators.
It was all very convincing within the intellectual frameworks of the time, and the civil service was interpreted as resisting the proposed reforms – not least the unified grading structure at the top, and the opening of all top jobs, in principle, to all professionals. The problem was that the report, and subsequent analysis, remained fixated on the administrative class and refused to recognize the enormous power and authority of the professionals. For it was they who were critical in pushing the grands projets of the post-war state, from nuclear weapons, to nuclear reactors, to Concorde, and all the other cases we have looked at. Many of these projects, especially in the 1960s, were run by joint teams of professionals and administrators, with the professionals very much in charge. It can be put this way – the standard account of the civil service focuses on the assistant, under-deputy and permanent secretaries – the administrators – and ignored the power and influence of the directors, directors-general and controllers – the professionals. There was a position called director-general Concorde, for example, filled by an engineer.43 There were controllers of guided weapons and the like. Indeed, in many ministries unified hierarchies long pre-dated Fulton, and this was especially true of the Ministry of Technology.44 Fulton suggested reforms which as far as the warfare state were concerned were redundant.
John Fulton was an example of an important new phenomenon, the academic taking on state roles and political roles. To be sure, some academics had been prominent as intellectuals before the war – men such as G. D. H. Cole, a reader in economics in Oxford from 1925 and the first Chichele professor of social and political theory (1944), and Professor Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. In Oxford Gilbert Murray, a liberal classicist, was a major public intellectual prominent in the League of Nations Union, as was, from Cambridge, the liberal conservative historian G. M. Trevelyan, author of the bestselling English Social History (1944). There were also a few academics who took on important advisory roles for government: for example, Sir William Beveridge, the LSE director in the 1930s, Sir Henry Tizard, the rector of Imperial College (1929–42), and John Maynard Keynes of Cambridge, though he was only a part-time don, best thought of as a London figure, a man who made himself independently very wealthy in order to enjoy metropolitan life to the full. During the Second World War many young and ambitious dons from across the system (though typically Oxbridge graduates) went into state service. The worlds of thought and action were peculiarly conjoined, which helped shape a future of close interconnection of state and university in the aid of a national project of reconstruction. Many of these men were to become great academic and state panjandrums. Oliver Franks, professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, joined the ministry of supply as a principal, rising to become permanent secretary just after the war. Among his government work was an inquiry into the Falklands War of 1982. P. M. S. Blackett and Solly Zuckerman were academic scientists in and out of government. Senior academics chaired Royal Commissions: for example, the economist Lord Robbins looked into higher education and recommended its expansion in 1963. Academics, most of them scientists, chaired Royal Commissions on the press (1949), the civil service (1952–3), environmental pollution (1971–2011) and the National Health Service (1975–9). Thus it was that the chairman of the Royal Commission on broadcasting (1977), a historian of the British intellectual elite, could call the post-Second World War years ‘Our Age’.45
Where we find British technocrats is not in arguments celebrating them, extolling their achievements or even analysing their importance in business and the state. We find them complaining that they are not taken seriously, that they have no power, expressing Snow-like arguments. We find them everywhere. In his first speech as leader of the Labour Party in 1963 Harold Wilson claimed that ‘Those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and to speak in the language or our scientific age.’ However, the standard declinist point was central. He said, indeed, that ‘for commanding heights of British industry today to be controlled by men whose only claim is their aristocratic connections or the power of inherited wealth or speculative finance’ was as irrelevant to the twentieth century as the purchase of commissions in the nineteenth. In ‘science and industry we are content to remain a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players’. That is one reason the speech is important – it is a powerful instance of Wilson’s technocratic critique of the British business elite.
Yet it can be read another way. Wilson was one of the most technical of prime ministers, an economic historian and statistician, who had been a civil service professional, not an administrator. His father was an industrial chemist. His most famous speech has one of the most famous misquoted phrases in British political history – the white heat of the technological revolution. That speech was a celebration of the machine, of science. Wilson claimed that:
In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution … the Britain to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry.
He went on about the scientific revolution, machine tools, computers, fertilizer, steam engines and plant breeding. He talked about automation and computers and he claimed that ‘the essence of modern automation is that it replaces the hitherto unique human functions of memory and of judgement’; computers now commanded ‘facilities of memory and of judgement far beyond the capacity of any human being or groups of human beings who have ever lived’. The ‘programme-controlled machine tool line’ could ‘without the intervention of any human agency’ produce a ‘new set of machine tools in its own image’; machine tools had acquired ‘the faculty of unassisted reproduction’. He called for the production of more scientists (mentioning large-scale Russian production), he called for 10 per cent of young people to go into higher education, and for a university of the air. It could be taken as a measure of the commitment of the audience, as well as the speaker, to such a technocratic vision of the country.
One consequence of the relative fame of the speech has been the belief that British technocracy was only of the left, and that the failure of technocracy was also the failure of the left. Indeed, the war and the Wilsonian 1960s are seen as the two left technocratic moments in British history. There is a big problem with the thesis, and that is that, as we have seen, state, industry and military were all committed to technical means, too much so perhaps. British technocracy was far from being exclusively of the left. Wilson was hardly the only occupant of No 10 Downing Street to be enthralled by science and machines.
There were technocrats of the right, and in many ways the 1950s and 1960s was their moment rather than Wilson’s. Sir Roy Fedden, the aero-engine designer who had been with Bristol until 1942, was one. He decried the lack of leadership in government and industry which led to the loss of British air power in the 1950s. Complaining about the ‘Welfare State’, he noted that ‘A “something-for-nothing” philosophy will never build a virile new Britain, capable of expanding and advancing in the age of supersonics and atomics which is now dawning.’46 After the war the country had been ‘fired by well-meaning new building and reconstruction generally in order to lay the foundations of the Welfare State, all of which was outlined in over-optimistic promises of a better world to live in’.47 The problem was that ‘our present culture is basically antipathetic to engineering and science’.48 Barnes Wallis and Frank Whittle too were clearly aligned with the right; they were voluble, especially Wallis, in condemning lack of support for their machines. Although this right was less vocal than the left, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the bulk of state-backed aviation and its industry was in tone and demeanour of the right.
There was a technocratic moment in British ideology in the early 1960s which had its obverse in the decline of religion as a public force. Technocrats railed against aristocrats, bankers and civil servants but hardly needed to bother with priests. British official religion had hardly been averse to capitalism or science, though this was not of course its primary terrain. Even so, there was a sudden secularization of the higher public sphere. Religious observance, essentially steady into the 1950s, saw some increase in that decade, but a dramatic and sustained fall from the early 1960s, whether in attendance, membership or the use of churches for rites of passage. Furthermore, the influence of religion weakened in the higher reaches of public life and the educational system. The Lords spiritual were hardly as important as the Lords scientific and industrial, or indeed political.49 Of course, religion did not disappear. In Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, it did matter, as the expression and cause of a profound discrimination between the dominant Protestant churches of many types and the Catholic and nationalist minority. That was a division which, far from going away, intensified. Nor did religion go away on the mainland: it was a feature of certain revivals and political movements, for example the anti-pornography campaigns of Mary Whitehouse. Furthermore, immigrants from outside Europe brought religion – Caribbean immigrants revived Christianity in the inner cities, while Hinduism and Islam put down roots across the whole country.
However, from the late 1960s and 1970s disenchantments with modernity of many different kinds became stronger. There was a greater degree of contestation of ideas, or the power of elites, and authority more generally, than at any time since the 1930s, and this was expressed in stronger terms. Technocrats, in fact, celebrated in the 1950s and 1960s, would meet some serious questioning only in the 1970s, from both the left and the right. Middle-class morality and its bastions in the churches would not be ignored but flouted. Nationalism would be challenged by new internationalisms, of both left and right.

Possibilities

It was on a motion of the Labour Party that the House of Commons threw out the Chamberlain Government in 1940. It was thanks to the Labour Party that Churchill had the chance to serve the country in the war years. Two-thirds of the Conservative Party at that time voted for the same reactionary policies as they will vote for tonight. It is sometimes in the most difficult and painful moments of our history that the country has turned to the Labour Party for salvation, and it has never turned in vain. We saved the country in 1940, and we did it again in 1945. We set out to rescue the country – or what was left of it – in 1974. Here again in 1979 we shall do the same.
Michael Foot, closing the confidence debate, 28 March 19791
What we face today is not a crisis of capitalism, but of Socialism.
Margaret Thatcher’s first speech as Conservative leader, 19752
It was not so long ago that the shop stewards at Elswick invited management to their annual dinner and united with them in a toast to the monarch.
The Workers’ Report on Vickers (1979)3
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin it
Inglan is a bitch
is whey wi a goh dhu ’bout it?
‘Inglan Is a Bitch’ (1980), lyrics by Linton Kwesi Johnson
The British Police are the best in the world
I don’t believe one of these stories I’ve heard
‘Bout them raiding our pubs for no reason at all
Lining the customers up by the wall
Picking out people and knocking them down
Resisting arrest as they’re kicked on the ground
Searching their houses and calling them queer
I don’t believe that sort of thing happens here
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
‘Glad to Be Gay’ (1978), lyrics by Tom Robinson
I don’t much go for a ‘siege economy’ and import controls, which I regard as a lot of nationalist claptrap.
Paul Foot, Three Letters to a Bennite (1982)
The 1970s are usually treated as a moment of crisis, of an old system crashing into reality. They represent the end, the collapse, of the post-war settlement, the consensus and economic growth. In fact, far from expiring, British social democracy and the welfare state were to be at their peak. It was also the moment in which the modernizing state investments were bearing fruit and were indeed still underway. Oil promised the possibility of national regeneration (though the Dutch disease – an overvalued currency as a result of having gas – was a live worry). It was a moment, too, when the state did actively and powerfully intervene in industry. It was a moment of transformation that did not end up as expected.
It was also a moment of revolt, and of possibility, one too often pushed back into the 1960s.4 In part it was also a moment of the restarting of old battles harking back to another moment of contention. Unfinished business, old grievances, were plain to see. Four issues re-emerged, having last been significant in the early 1920s. The first was the legitimacy of Northern Ireland, with the result of new armed struggle between nationalists and unionists (see the following chapter). Second, British workers were organizing, and taking strike action, at a level not seen since the early 1920s, in the face of the worry caused by rising prices. Unemployment returned, at the level of the 1920s, though not yet that of the 1930s. Third, there was a great debate about protection and free trade around the EEC referendum of 1975 and subsequent debate about the EEC, an echo of 1906 and 1931. Fourth, these were the years of challenge to intellectual, cultural and political authority – there was a resurgent feminism, now stronger than ever before – of intellectual revolt and of a more general crisis of legitimacy in the state and nation. New movements and new parties were born as perhaps had not been seen since the Edwardian years.
In hardly any of this was the United Kingdom unique. The 1970s saw changes everywhere in the world economy. The long global boom, in the capitalist and socialist countries, came to an end. Growth was lower and more intermittent. Everywhere low growth, even falls in output, were associated not with falling prices, but with high inflation. Economists called this new global phenomenon ‘stagflation’. The quadrupling of the oil price by the cartel of oil-producing countries in 1973 and their flexing of political and economic muscle was a new phenomenon in world history, and it led to huge transfers of wealth to them. There was industrial unrest all over the world and in many places revolution too. New ideas were everywhere.
EXPECTATIONS DASHED
In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was talk of an emerging post-industrial society. It was to be a society with high and increasing industrial output, greater levels of research and development and, because of higher productivity, much more leisure. It was post-industrial not because there would be less industry, but because industry would not need so many people. Indeed, British planners, like their counterparts elsewhere, were looking forward to higher levels of production of all sorts. Thus it was, as we have seen, that new power stations and motorways were being built in the late 1960s and 1970s, and expansion plans for steel and cars assumed much greater demand in the future. In this it was similar to the 1940s and 1950s, when investing for a richer future was the order of the day. Some, however, called for a new kind of post-industrial society – a radically less industrialized society which would be in better relationship with nature.5
Neither was to be the sort of post-industrial society that would be talked about in the 1980s and neither predicted what happened. Far from continuing to grow apace, British industrial production would stagnate, and employment in industry would fall drastically as imports surged. Demand for energy tailed off. The most obvious feature of the development of the British economy since the 1970s is perhaps the rise of the service economy. The economy essentially grew from the 1970s by adding new activities over and above a roughly stable level of agricultural, industrial and manufacturing production (see figure 19.4). Showing these changes as shares, the usual way, misses the key dynamic of expansions and cumulation. It is the case that the share of manufacturing workers in the workforce declined very fast, as other sectors crudely labelled as ‘services’ grew very much faster, but this was all primarily due to the growth of other sectors, not the decline of industry, except in employment terms. The direct connection between growth of the economy and growth in energy supplied would end – growth and energy input were uncoupled as growth took place with small energy input increases. By the 1980s ‘post-industrial’ did not mean high-tech leisure and abundance of resources, but rather a move to harder, longer, less-well-paid work. Furthermore, rather than being planned and organized, the future turned out to be one of violent swings in economic activity, with major recessions in 1974–5 and a very great one indeed in 1979–83 (which was comparable to 1929–33 in depth and extent). Unemployment at levels not seen from the 1930s returned, after 1979 especially. The future was not as the technocrats had so confidently and authoritatively claimed.
By the 1970s British was no longer best. No one wanted the products British technocrats had argued would be essential to a successful economy. British R&D spending fell. The products of British genius went unsold. Whether it was cars, TV sets, nuclear reactors, or capitalism or socialism, foreigners did it better. It was clear that by the measure of GDP per head, or GDP per hour worked, the nation was no longer the richest or most efficient in Europe. Germany had overtaken it in the 1960s, and France in the 1970s. As the result of a re-estimation of the black economy, Italy overtook it in the 1980s – il sorpasso. Declinism got such a grip on the elite imagination that grotesquely exaggerated accounts of relative economic failure proliferated. For example, the valedictory despatch by the ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Henderson, leaked and published in the Economist in June 1979, claimed French and German GDP per capita were 41 and 46 per cent higher than that of the UK in 1977.6 That could be justified statistically, but it was not a sound comparison.
1940S REDUX?
There are parallels to be drawn between the first moment of British social democracy in the late 1940s and that of the 1970s. The first is that both periods saw exceptional problems with the balance of payments. By the 1970s the British economy, like that of every country in Europe, depended for a majority of its energy on what had been cheap imported oil. The decision of the main oil-exporting countries, now organized in a cartel, to increase prices in 1973 meant the balance of payments went into deep and long-term deficit, reaching over 4 per cent of GDP in 1974. Both balance of payments crises forced the British government to take out loans, from the USA in 1945 and from the International Monetary Fund, dominated by the USA, in 1976. In both cases the loans served purposes that were not advertised – in 1945 to maintain expenditure abroad and in 1976 to legitimate the policy of holding back reform and welfare. Furthermore, both sets of loans met a temporary problem. Indeed, just as the economy was in better shape in 1950 than 1945, so it would be by 1979, by quite a margin.7
As in the 1940s the crisis of 1976 was met by further promoting of national production (for example, in coal and in food). There were subsidies to hold down food prices, in both cases, as a counter-inflationary strategy and as a means of assisting the poorest. In the 1940s and early 1950s many foods were subsidized; in the 1970s the Tories started with milk and butter subsidies, and Labour added cheese, butter, bread and flour. There was much discussion about the imposition of import controls, as existed in the 1940s, but these were now ruled out by British membership of the EEC. There were also export drives, now not so much for dollars but the so-called petrodollars of the Middle East: the United Kingdom offered Concorde, nuclear reactors and arms to the new oil potentates of the Orient – they only bought arms.
There was another similarity. There was a strong sense of a shift in power in society towards the workers, and in both periods there were important moves to extend the welfare state, to democratize society, schooling, even industry. Far from representing the end of the welfare state, the 1970s saw, as we have seen, its radicalization, with the end of the regressive National Insurance stamp, the new State Earnings Related Pension, universal child benefit, the comprehensivization of education. This was the highest point social democracy reached in the United Kingdom: bringing social partners into a discussion as to how and for what purpose elements of the national cake should be distributed – between wages and profits, between wages and benefits. It was in this period that inequality in income and wealth was at its lowest in the twentieth century.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
The idea of the backward British worker whose organizations had to be broken, whose culture of solidarity had to be despised, became powerful in the 1970s. It was implied in many such arguments that unions lived embedded in a society of equals where other than trade unionism there were no sectional interests. Of course, the rationale of trade unions was precisely that workers were weak in the face of the private interests of particular employers and the sectional interests of all employers. Yet the very limited power of workers and unions could be presented as much greater than it actually was because this could only express itself in visible ways – in trade union organization, in trade union elections, in strikes.
There is no doubt about the relative strength of organized labour in the 1970s compared to earlier periods. Through the 1970s the number of trade unionists rose, peaking in 1979. The proportion of unionized workers was higher than ever before, reaching to more than half the workforce. Trade unionism expanded into new areas – into white-collar work and the public sector. The relations between the Labour Party and the trade unions changed also. Some large trade unions elected leaders who were on the left of the Labour Party, which created, for the first time, a trade union left block in the labour movement. The two key figures were Jack Jones of the TGWU and Hugh Scanlon of the engineers. Compared to the 1940s, the trade unions were less inclined to accept the entreaties of government, even a Labour government. The 1970s were a high point in workerism.8 Yet this trade unionism did not necessarily imply greater collectivism or real trade union organizational strength.
Although historical memory implies otherwise, there was more strike activity under the Conservative governments of 1970–74 and 1979 onwards than during the Labour governments of 1974–9. There were for the first time, in 1970, national strikes of municipal workers, and in 1971 of postal workers. The case of the miners is instructive. They were relatively low-paid workers before a strike in 1972, their first national action since 1926. They were briefly well paid, but then lost out quickly, so that in 1973–4 they were asking for more than the average increase. They worked to rule and struck again. The Heath government made standing up to the miners an election issue, asking whether the miners or the government ruled. It was a silly question, and the response of the electorate was: you don’t. The point was not that the miners wanted to bring down the government, it was that all workers were potentially in conflict with the government in that directly or indirectly it was involved in all pay disputes. This was because it sought to keep wage growth down as a central part of its strategy to deal with inflation – wage increases increased inflation, which cut the value of wages, which made for pressure for higher wages.
The period 1971–82 was one of notably high price inflation. The peak was in 1975, when the average rate reached nearly 25 per cent per annum, stoked by the huge oil-price rises of 1973. Why prices rose – and they did nearly everywhere in the world – was difficult to work out because of the interlinking of causes and effects. For example, did wage rates follow prices, or vice-versa? But efforts to bring down the rate of price increase was a central concern of the state. One important reason was that it had a differential effect on people. Because real interests were negative, savings lost their value (see figure 19.5). On the other hand, organized labour could ensure it got pay rises matching or perhaps outstripping price increases. Governments went to great lengths to attempt to control inflation by controlling pay rises through what was called ‘incomes policy’ and also through attempts to control price increases. The Labour government was able to drive down inflation to around 8 per cent in 1979, but the Conservatives allowed it back up to nearly 20 per cent before forcing it down.
The Labour government and the unions established what was called the ‘social contract’, under which the unions agreed to limit pay claims in return for action in favour of all workers and the poor – in the form of benefits, control of prices of necessities through food subsidies and rent freezes. Unions got repeal of industrial relations legislation and important new legislation on health and safety, equal pay and more. This was the context in which an inquiry was set up into ‘industrial democracy’ which recommended worker representation on boards of companies, where management and workers would be equally represented, with a smaller number of independents acceptable to both (the famous formula was 2x + y, where x was the number of employer and workers’ representatives and y the number of independents). This is not to say that unions were always gaining, far from it. For example, a film-processing factory (photographic films were sent by post to such factories, and the prints returned by post) in northwest London called Grunwick refused to recognize a trade union, leading to a strike by its workforce of around 400 mostly Asian women. The dispute, involving picketing and large police action, went on for two years from 1976, and pitted the trade unions and the left against an emergent anti-union right. The workers lost.
In the Tory mythology which was to dominate from the 1980s, the Thatcher government was elected as a result of the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–9, in which unions showed they had too much power over government. The reality was different. There was a strike wave in early 1979, but that was because the unions did not have power over the government. The strikes happened because the Labour government was not prepared to give in to the unions, not because the unions wanted to strike. What had happened was that under the fourth phase of inflation control, the government limited pay settlements to 5 per cent. Yet Ford workers, with official union support, went on strike and broke the barrier, as did others. The public sector workers tried to do the same, and it was they who were faced down by government, which thus brought on strikes.9
The new Conservative government elected in May 1979 also provoked large-scale strikes. Indeed, most of the strike activity of the year 1979 took place in the Conservative-ruled half of the year. Thus, while the 29.5 million working days lost in 1979, the highest since 1926, are usually unthinkingly allocated to the Labour years, and indeed specifically to the ‘winter of discontent’ strikes of January and February, the real picture is that fully 20.7 million of these working days were lost between July and December 1979. This was itself only just under the total for the previous whole year record since 1926, 1972 under Heath. September 1979, with 11.7 million working days lost is the most strike-intensive month since monthly records began in 1931 and remains a record. Much of the loss came from the engineering strike for shorter hours, which the unions won, which involved rolling short strikes by 1.5 million workers, leading to the loss of 16 million working days. This now unknown strike was larger than the miners’ strikes of the 1970s and may well have been larger than the general strike of 1926 (excepting the massive lockout of miners).10 By contrast, the winter of discontent months, January and February 1979, had 3.0 and 2.4 million working days lost respectively. This was lower than the time of the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, and comparable to the early months of 1980, with 2.8, 3.2 and 3.3 million days lost.11 The first major strike of 1980 was that of the steel workers, who had hardly gone on strike at all in the whole century. They were on strike for three months, over pay and a closure programme. They won some pay, but by the end of the year closures of plants had left an industry of half the size it had been in 1967. The support they got from other unions was weak, and the survivors reciprocated this later. One large strike which did not happen was a potential miners’ strike over pit closures in 1981. Thatcher’s government backed down and started to prepare for a likely strike of miners in the future. When it came, it was the greatest strike since 1926 and dwarfed anything else in the 1970s or 1980s. It was a spring, summer, autumn and winter of discontent, lasting from March 1984 to March 1985.
INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING
As we have seen there was major industrial restructuring in the 1950s and 1960s, with workers leaving the mines, the railways and the land, often shifting into manufacturing. The 1970s, too, were an era of restructuring, but with differences. As we have seen, coal stopped contracting, and agriculture expanded especially strongly. Yet the most important difference was that the lower overall rate of economic growth gave less room for change, and as a result unemployment increased. Manufacturing in particular ceased to be a source of new jobs and indeed was the main sector of the economy from which jobs were lost. One of the most spectacular cases was the motor car industry, which had been growing rapidly until 1972. Thereafter output and employment collapsed, not because car purchasing fell, but because exports fell and imports increased. Another was steel, where both output and employment also both fell. For example, the once gigantic Ebbw Vale steel works was closed down and demolished in stages from 1972. The local MP, Michael Foot, was secretary of state for employment 1974–9.
In the face of job cuts in many manufacturing industries a new kind of industrial action arose. Workers’ cooperatives were formed to keep businesses going, as in the earlier case of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. Workers and unions made plans for alternative products to keep old arms factories in production. As never before, trade unions were researching, thinking about and discussing the import of new machines, new ways of working. The most famous case was that of Lucas Aerospace, where engineers hoped to no longer design weapons, but socially useful products. ‘Defence conversion’, a concern of the left since the early 1960s, entered a new phase where workers themselves would redirect work to make the munitions of peace. These possibilities for the future came to nothing, but they were part and parcel of a whole new way of thinking about the social shaping of invention for better purposes. The 1970s was a period when all sorts of alternative technologies popped up, from electricity from waves and wind to new forms of human-powered transport. At the same time a new scientific left – much less elite and much more critical of science – emerged notably around the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Their key concerns were the abuse of science in war, of biology (for example in IQ testing), industrial hazards, environmental degradation and state use of new repressive technologies.12
The main thrust of Labour policy was not nationalization, but rather intervention and support of private enterprises as part of an attempt at a comprehensive industrial strategy based on a hoped-for partnership in industry. Labour developed proposals for a state holding company which would take control of twenty-five top manufacturing enterprises, proposals which turned into the National Enterprise Board, the BNOC and the nationalization of shipbuilding and aircraft.13 The National Enterprise Board took over government companies such as Rolls-Royce and added to them as more and more went into crisis. Among the acquisitions were British Leyland, Ferranti and the machine tool maker Alfred Herbert. The upshot was that in the 1970s, for the first time, there were large portions of manufacturing industry in public ownership, including by accident and design some of the greatest names in British manufacturing. Previously the main exception was steel, in public ownership briefly in the early 1950s, and again from 1967.
In the 1970s there was concern that the UK was being left behind in many areas of computing, other than software, but there was also much enthusiasm and investment.14 Sinclair Research and ACORN computers were among the pioneers of the table-top computer, the latter getting a lot of support through the BBC, which gave it the contract for a BBC Micro. The National Enterprise Board supported and took over Clive Sinclair’s Sinclair Radionics and launched the semiconductor company INMOS, established in 1978.15 In the early 1980s their computers were everywhere: the Sinclair ZX series, much cheaper than the first Apples and Commodores from the USA, and the BBC ACORN computers. Sir Clive Sinclair, as he became in 1982, was a symbol of British entrepreneurial activity in this area.16 The 1970s were hardly lacking in entrepreneurship or innovation. In illegal drugs also British entrepreneurs did well. Operation Julie in 1977 busted the biggest LSD-producing operation in the world.17
LABOUR
On the left there was disappointment that the 1964–70 government did so little to change the United Kingdom. The new left saw existing Labour as a mere electoral machine, a party which was part of a system which managed a stultifying consensus in the ‘national interest’, really the interests of the new capitalism, not the poor.18 That sense of disillusionment with Labour was expressed in the new student movement that emerged in the late 1960s, in the growing militancy of trade unions and in revolutionary parties of the left.
In opposition from 1970, the Labour Party moved to the left. It was returned to office as a minority government in February 1974, and as a government with a tiny majority in October 1974. It stood on a much more left-wing manifesto than ever before, one centred on serious intervention in the economy. It was committed to nationalizing land for development, and introducing a wealth tax. The left, which pushed for the EEC referendum in 1975, and the leader of the left, Tony Benn, made a serious attempt to get public involvement and proper taxation, and to develop the industries which might supply the very capital-intensive off-shore oil industry. Benn found that attempts to subsidize these industries met determined opposition from the EEC, which added to his sense and that of others that the EEC stood in the way of state-led national regeneration.19 There was now a split in Labour between the pro- and anti-marketeers, which would intensify and become one of the central dividers between the right and the left of the party. The defeat of the anti-market side in the EEC referendum of 1975 was a major defeat for the left.
The 1974–9 government, in the view of the left, was an even greater failure than the 1964–70 government, pursuing policies they believed no Labour government should have. That the decisions of the party conference, and plans in manifestos, were manifestly not implemented led to the campaign to make the party structures, rather than MPs, dominant. After 1979 moves were made to allow local parties to deselect MPs and the election by the party of the party leader. The aim was to hold the party to democratically decided-on policies. For the Liberals and Conservatives the power of the parliamentary party was no problem, for party machines were there to get parliamentarians elected. In the case of Labour it had been different. Things changed, and the Labour Party too became a machine for parliamentarians. The fight between the two conceptions of the party became aligned with clear left–right division.
After 1979 the left of the party won. In 1980 even the parliamentary party elected a leader from the soft left, Michael Foot, an anti-nuclear, anti-EEC campaigner. Labour as a party was hostile to atomic weapons, especially US ones, and the EEC. One important consequence was that the party lost the support of a significant section of its parliamentary leadership. A group of senior politicians with elite intellectual backgrounds broke away in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party. For Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, the so-called Gang of Four, the Labour Party now challenged the established social and economic order in unacceptable ways. There was indeed a notable shift in sentiment among those who thought of themselves as meritocrats from association with Labour in the early 1960s to Conservativism and Social Democracy in the 1970s and 1980s.20 They were right to note that Labour had changed. But that is not to say it was not in line with contemporary European socialism, which itself moved to the left in the 1970s and achieved electoral success. Most important of all was the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency of France in 1981 with a mandate for nationalization and expansion. The Greek socialist party, PASOK, formed a government in Greece in 1981, and the Spanish socialists, PSOE, in 1982. Indeed, the left was advancing across the world in the 1970s.
The 1983 manifesto, long caricatured as the ‘longest suicide note in history’, committed Labour to deal with the mass unemployment of the moment, and it offered a non-nuclear defence policy, which meant getting rid of US nuclear bases but staying in NATO, though reducing defence expenditure to the European average and not ordering Trident. It struck many nationalist notes, including a promise to abandon the ‘Tory PWR’ (the US-designed nuclear reactor) and rethink the ‘British AGR’. ‘We intend,’ said the manifesto, ‘to create new companies and new science-based industries – using new public enterprise to lead the way’; they would renationalize what the Tories had so far privatized, but for the future, ‘We will establish a significant public stake in electronics, pharmaceuticals, health equipment and building materials; and also in other important sectors, as required in the national interest’. This was no more than was in the manifestos Harold Wilson and James Callaghan had presented. A key difference was that the manifesto now argued explicitly against EEC membership. The next Labour government, ‘committed to radical, socialist policies for reviving the British economy’ was bound to find membership ‘a most serious obstacle’ to, among other things, industrial policy and increasing trade, ‘and our need to restore exchange controls and to regulate direct overseas investment’. Moreover, by preventing ‘us from buying food from the best sources of world supply’, it ‘would run counter to our plans to control prices and inflation’.21 The Alternative Economic Strategy, as it was called, once rejected by the Labour government, was now Labour’s programme.
This Alternative Economic Strategy, while presented as novel, was the last gasp of the logic of post-1945 Labourism. Its key advocate, Tony Benn, was indeed not primarily a socialist but a ‘radical patriot’ and economic nationalist.22 As we have seen, Labour had been all about a modernizing, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme. What the Labour left was now wanting to bring into being were the means to make it workable. Yet there was little if any awareness that Labour had made serious attempts at such a policy in the recent past. Labour’s left was nostalgic for a past they had forgotten and looked forward to bringing into existence.23 This is not to say the past was ignored. Economists of the left probed the history of economic planning in the 1940s for the first time; new historical accounts of British capitalism as financial and global flourished and were at the core of a powerful left historical declinism. In this frame the Thatcher revolution was seen as the latest version of the untrammelled power of internationalist finance making itself felt. Thatcherism was seen as a radical version of the policies which had led to decline in the first place.
The 1970s and 1980s were the only time one can speak of a thought-through attempt by a British social democratic party to plan in advance of taking office what the policies it ought to pursue might be. There was investigative and critical energy in coming up with alternative policies for the Labour Party, on every aspect from defence to the economy and social policy.24 The policies sought to effect a transformation in society in the face of opposition to make the United Kingdom both more efficient and more equitable. Yet one thing they did not do was reflect critically enough on what had been attempted and achieved since the 1950s.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND NEW LEFT
One important feature of the left that came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s was its particular concern with what happened abroad. For the far left of the 1960s events in the poor world had been seen as critical for the future. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was a mobilizer. In the 1970s the left was active in support for the victims of the repression in Chile after 1973, and for the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. The Anti-Apartheid Campaign had long been important and continued to be. Close to home, the issues were trickier. It is telling that there was no 1968 moment against the British state. While in Northern Ireland there was an armed insurrection, the Angry Brigade were a very pale imitation of the German Red Army Faction or the Italian Red Brigades, who were in conflict with their states on a significant scale. The Troops Out (of Northern Ireland) movement was relatively weak. Generally speaking, the far left was weaker in the United Kingdom than on the continent. There was nothing like the communist parties of France or Italy in terms of electoral strength or intellectual influence.
Yet the Communist Party remained a strong presence in the trade unions, where its knowledgeable, disciplined and cautious approach appealed particularly to skilled workers. The autodidact communist trade unionist (especially in the high engineering industries, including armaments) was a recognizable figure with Labour Party equivalents.25 The Communist Party was never merely workerist and had a continuous intellectual tradition, which developed many interesting currents of analysis of the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s, when Marxism Today, of all publications, became the prime site for discussions of, among other things, ‘Thatcherism’. The 1970s was the moment of various Trotskyist parties, that is, revolutionary left parties hostile to the USSR. All survived longer than the Communist Party but were finished by the 1990s. The three main groupings were led by three figures from outside the United Kingdom but within the empire and had been active from the 1940s.26 Ted Grant’s Militant Tendency pursued a policy of entryism into the Labour Party and peaked in the 1980s, when there were two Militant MPs elected in 1983, and a further one in 1987.27 They had about fifty councillors, and 250 full-time employees (more than the Labour Party itself).28 Tony Cliff was the leader of the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers’ Party, notable in the 1970s for their work with the Anti-Nazi League, a powerful cultural counter to the National Front, and in the trade unions. Gerry Healy’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party was the only one to have celebrity endorsement and a daily newspaper, the Newsline. They put forward sixty parliamentary candidates in 1979; the only other Trotskyite party to put forward candidates under its name was the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party.
Although they attracted intellectuals and publicists of talent, such as the economist Andrew Glyn (Militant) and the journalist Paul Foot (Socialist Workers’ Party), their ideas for the future were in many ways limited and traditional. They were very keen on new technology. The Workers’ Revolutionary Party was proud of its advanced printing presses in the 1970s. Militant were keen on the microchip: as they claimed, ‘A free democratic society under the control and management of the working class could carry through the new microchip transformation of industry, which would clear the way for the complete transition to socialism.’ The problem was that ‘The microchip and the capitalist system are in complete contradiction,’ with socialism ‘bringing the working class to a six-hour, four-day week on the basis of micro-technology and science’ and onto ‘a two-hour day, two-day week, and even a one-day week in the future, as mankind, beginning with a socialist Britain and Europe, moves in the direction of socialism’.29
The London Labour left was to be of particular importance. The Labour left took control of the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981, under Ken Livingstone, the most intelligent and interesting politician of the left, a man from the lower middle class without university education. The ‘loony left’ as it was called in the right-wing press, and in much of the Labour Party, was the inheritor of much of the counter-cultural work of the 1970s. The GLC supported new rainbow coalitions, social forms, municipal entertainments, commitments to an inclusive public sphere and industrial possibilities. Sheffield became the ‘Socialist republic of South Yorkshire’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s.30 These centres of left power were seen as a threat. Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC and radically restricted the powers of local authorities, not only through rate-capping, but also by forcing them to sell housing, and also to do such things as get rid of their direct works organizations – through which councils employed builders and other workers for public projects. In effect council political and economic functions as well as assets were privatized.
A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES
The 1970s were a time of political engagement but of what seemed to many very threatening cultural and social change. Structural change in the economy, the shift to white-collar work of various kinds, was the main cause of what was called social mobility. Social mobility, as measured, did not result from an increased openness of the small elite occupations, nor from any downward mobility of the existing elite. Social mobility was a statistical concept, which would have been better called ‘the expansion of higher occupational categories’. Social mobility was another way of saying that the nature of work had changed. There was movement indoors, into offices and out of factories, into clean and quiet jobs. The great losses of employment were highly concentrated in the heavy, male-dominated industries.
Perhaps the greatest change of all not well captured by occupational categories was the growing number of women who worked outside the home. Of course, many had long worked – the novelty was that now many married women were working outside the home, especially married women with children. In 1931 80 per cent of single women 25–34 were in work; for married women of the same age it was 13 per cent, and 24 per cent by 1951. By 1966 the figure was 34 per cent, but significantly higher for older married women (around 50 per cent).31 Smaller families, families started younger and a partially refashioned world of domestic work and production came about with readily acquired new machines of domestic production, which were around in the interwar years, but had been restricted to the wealthy and the electrified.
Women who worked outside the home typically still did so working with other women, in jobs reserved for women, for which women were paid less than men. However, a gap emerged between the public and private sectors, between white-blouse and blue-blouse work. In the early 1950s female teachers, civil servants and local government officers got equal pay with men (measures a Royal Commission had proposed during the Second World War). In these cases the jobs men and women did were the same. But for industrial jobs the position was different, and unequal pay remained standard. By the late 1960s there was pressure to equalize pay and jobs. In 1968 female sewing machinists in Ford, the only female production workers in what was a male-dominated industry, wanted to be regraded from the second-lowest skill level to a higher one. They went on strike, and in order to end the strike the women were granted equal pay for the same job (the actual regrading would happen many years later, after a six-week strike in 1984). That is to say in this case, as in many others, the women had been doubly discriminated against – the skill of their jobs was underrated, and on top of that they were paid less than men on the skill grade they were put on. The results of the strike, and the need to comply with EEC regulations, was the Equal Pay Act, 1970 (in force 1975), which stipulated the same wage for the same job. That was a major advance in that a real and longstanding discrimination was removed, but the crucial issue of comparability between different jobs into which men and women were still segregated was not addressed.32
These were just signs of a revolution in the position of women which would take decades. Women entered the workforce in new ways, the public sphere and the professions. One important way in which things changed subtly but importantly was in the breakdown, by earlier standards, of gender segregation at work. This was very evident in the world of graduates. The proportion of female students was increasing from the 1960s but accelerated in the 1970s, reversing the masculinization of the 1930s to the 1950s. With the outlawing of gender discrimination, the exclusively male colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were eventually opened to women (in the late 1970s). Women started entering into medicine and pharmacy in large numbers.
The nature of domestic relations changed too – the average age of marriage for both men and women increased, from the historic lows of the 1950s and 1960s; the extent of marriage decreased too – co-habitation began to appear as a legitimate option, before, and even instead of, marriage. This would have been unthinkable except for a tiny minority in earlier decades. Spreading use of the contraceptive pill, and other contraceptive devices, separated the trinity of sex, marriage and children into different issues. There was free NHS contraception from 1974, and indeed a marked increase in contraceptive use by the married and not-married in the early 1970s. More and more children were born ‘outside wedlock’, a condition no longer categorized as ‘bastardy’ or ‘illegitimacy’. Divorce rates increased strongly too, made easier and more humane by the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, which made marriage breakdown (which might be evidenced by separation), rather than matrimonial offences, the grounds for divorce. Sex outside marriage was no longer ‘pre-marital sex’, which assumed it would be generally followed by marriage, but a normal phenomenon. The net effect was that practices which the respectable and the churches abhorred and stigmatized became much more common and lost their exclusionary potency. All this was underway in the 1970s – the full changes would take time to become very large; just as educational opportunities in the 1970s only manifested themselves in greater numbers of senior medical women, politicians and so on at the end of the twentieth century.
PERMISSIVENESS AND LIBERATION
Harold Wilson promised to create a New Britain, pulsating with the energies of the white heat of the new scientific revolution. Although it is often thought that Wilson’s government signally failed to do this, it is more commonly accepted that he presided over an era of permissiveness, a social and cultural revolution, doing away with capital punishment and decriminalizing abortion and homosexual relations. This account relies too much on an assumption that the law had come down hard, and that the weight of repression was lifted by liberalizing legislation in the 1960s. In fact, laws were much less harshly imposed than assumed, and change in the law had less effect than might have been thought. Although the death penalty was mandatory for all murder, and so-called capital murder after 1957, about half of all male murderers and nearly all female murderers were reprieved by the home secretary. Hanging was a political act. In any case the number of murder convictions was very low, around thirty per annum in 1950s England, when homicides ran at about 300 per annum. Killers were overwhelmingly either not caught or declared insane or convicted of manslaughter. Thus, although in theory murder was punished with death, capital punishment was rare – the average was about one hanging in England and Wales per month before the Homicide Act of 1957, and fewer thereafter. Hangings were concentrated in a few large prisons; the tiny number of executioners were very part-time. Albert Pierrepoint (the son and nephew of executioners) was primarily a grocer and then a publican. Hanging was effectively abolished outside Northern Ireland in 1965, following a private member’s bill, although the last execution in Northern Ireland was in 1961, it was not abolished there until 1973. The death penalty was not abolished for all crimes until 1998, and the remaining set of gallows was taken out of commission. For years figures on the right wanted to reintroduce it under the mistaken belief both that it had been applied mercilessly and that it had been an effective deterrent.
A similar belief perhaps explained the opposition to the legalization of abortion (Abortion Act, 1967) and the partial legalisation of homosexual acts between men (the Sexual Offences Act, 1967), neither of which applied in Northern Ireland. Abortion and homosexuality were practised before the acts and were rarely convicted. This is not to say these measures were not important in, for example, bringing abortion into the public medical sphere and taking the law on homosexuality out of most bedrooms. What happened in the wider public sphere was a separate issue, raising different concerns. New obscenity legislation, for example, concerned mainly what could be public rather than what was private. Indeed, it is notable how much opposition there was not so much to particular private activities, but to the fact that they might take place in, or be reflected in, the legitimate public sphere. This was denounced as permissiveness, as were many other violations of previous rules governing the public sphere, like men wearing their hair long. What was in play was the boundary between public and private: what was permissible differed as to whether it was private or public. It was not just what went on that mattered, but whether activities could be discussed in the public sphere.
Liberalization, permissive legislation as to what might happen in private, was probably a minor element in what were significant changes. There were campaigns which emerged in the 1970s to change not so much the law as social practices, including the actions of police forces. Here the greatest influence was probably immediately previous developments in the USA. The Women’s Liberation Movement (hence ‘women’s lib’) was formed in 1970 and campaigned through many groups against violence against women (the first refuge for women who were victims of domestic violence was set up in London by Erin Pizzey in 1971), arguing for wages for housework, better support for single mothers and more. The Gay Liberation Front was set up in 1971, bringing the term ‘gay’ into general use and transforming the public and private lives of gay people.33 The use of the term ‘liberation’ was a conscious echo of its use in the names of many other liberation movements in the 1960s, not least the National Liberation Front of Vietnam. And a liberation it was, bringing into the public arena injustice and violence previously private and hidden, through direct action and through political activism and publications. This was the era of Spare Rib and Gay News.
The 1970s were also the era of continued repression. It would be decades before feminism and gay liberation would be features of mainstream politics. Within the world of parliamentary politics the most radical female politician was probably the independent Irish republican Bernadette Devlin, elected at the age of twenty-one in 1969 and soon to be an unmarried mother. There were no openly gay members of parliament. Indeed, the gay leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, was charged with attempting to have a blackmailing former lover killed rather than risk exposure. His party, and the establishment, rallied around him, denying he was gay, and he was found not guilty of attempted murder in 1979. His political career and reputation were destroyed, but the façade remained in place. By contrast, the Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun, elected in 1974, was outed by the press as a lesbian, making her the first openly gay or lesbian MP in the house. She was almost deselected by her local party as a result and lost her seat in the 1979 election. Lesbianism had never been illegal but was repressed nonetheless. In Northern Ireland the Reverend Ian Paisley led a campaign to ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ in a last-ditch attempt to stop decriminalization of homosexuality in the province, which did not happen until 1982. In 1983, in a by-election in South London caused by the Labour MP Bob Mellish resigning to run the London Docklands Development Corporation (the body which took over the closed London Docks), the Labour candidate and gay activist, Peter Tatchell, was subject to an openly homophobic campaign, not least by the Liberal Party, whose candidate, Simon Hughes, would win the seat. Behind the scenes the story was very different – the bisexual Mellish had repeatedly propositioned Tatchell; Simon Hughes was also a closet bisexual.
A third focus of activism, also with US roots, was focused on the plight of the Afro-Caribbean community, especially the extent to which it endured sustained police harassment. An early locus of contention was routine police intervention in the Mangrove Restaurant in Notting Hill. A protest led to mass arrests and the trial of the ‘Mangrove Nine’ in 1971, most acquitted of most charges. Their leader was Darcus Howe, who went on to edit Race Today. Police racism led to the systematic and excessive use of the ‘sus’ (suspicion) laws to arrest young black men when there was no evidence of criminal activity. The late 1970s saw the beginning of a much larger-scale annual Notting Hill carnival – sometimes marked by confrontations between black youth and the police. A second focus of political activity was in opposing the growing racist party the National Front. The National Front, founded in 1967 and very visible in the 1970s, was overtly racist – its aim was the ‘repatriation’ of specifically non-white immigrants. At the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ in 1977 activists stopped the NF marching, though they were faced with police using riot shields for the first time outside Northern Ireland. In a deliberate echo of the 1930s the racist politics was confronted on the streets by the Anti-Nazi League, set up by the Socialist Workers’ Party. It was involved in Rock against Racism, a march and concert at Victoria Park in the East End of London in 1978. The politics of rock music was not straightforward, yet broadly punk and reggae, novelties of the era, aligned with the left, and the latter obviously with anti-racism. Black political and cultural activism began to find a place on a wider political and cultural stage, as was the case for the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and for Bob Marley and the Wailers and other Rastamen. British reggae emerged too. Tellingly the term ‘black’ was used in an inclusive way to indicate non-white rather than only Afro-Caribbean. This was a political definition of blackness – one which united in the face of racism. It was itself transitory – arising in the 1970s, it was rare from the mid-1980s when politically and culturally and indeed economically there emerged marked differences between the children of different groups of what had once been immigrant communities.
However the explosion in what were being euphemistically called ‘the inner cities’ came in the early 1980s. Riots in 1980 in St Pauls in Bristol, and then in 1981 in Brixton in London and Toxteth in Liverpool, were on a scale not seen for decades. They were far from race riots, in that the white youths acted alongside black, but race discrimination, especially by the police, was a key factor.
The official line was rather different. Emphasis was placed on problems in what were called ‘race relations’, a term imported from post-war southern Africa, where it was used by white capitalists and experts. The issue was how to deal, in this scheme, with a series of issues generated by friction between communities. The answer was to recognize communities, and their ‘community leaders’, as if this was a problem of governing a colony with many such potentially warring tribes. What this also meant was a toleration of cultural particularity, as in the case of Sikhs, who were permitted to ignore the obligation to wear crash helmets on motorbikes so that they could sport their turbans.34
But that was not all. The 1970s saw a remarkable rise against authority and against many practices previously considered normal or desirable. There was anti-nuclear activism, and the green and ecological movements more generally. The hunting of foxes was disrupted by the hunt-saboteur movement. The 1970s saw a ferment of ideas and organizations perhaps unknown in earlier history.35 New histories unearthed unknown stories, such as Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984) about the long-standing presence and racial persecution of black people. In literature, and in the academy, too, it was a moment of experimentation, by older and new writers – the future Nobel Laureates Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul and Harold Pinter among them, and the likes of Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, Ian McEwen and Martin Amis. While there was little that matched the continental cinema, on either side of the Iron Curtain, state-controlled TV was another matter – its golden age started in the late 1960s and continued into the early 1980s, with everything from historical documentaries to dramas. A new critical awareness entered into the understanding of the UK, lasting into the 1980s, not least dramas like Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC, 1982, but written in the 1970s). The theatre, too, was transformed by small radical touring companies, and in the state-supported theatre at least, a move to more intelligent, more political plays. The age of Noel and Ratty seemed truly over.
These new ideas brought forth counter-movements. The 1970s saw other organizations of the right formed, including the National Association for Freedom, founded in 1975. It was a determinedly anti-trade union organization set up by Norris McWhirter after his brother Ross (they both created and ran the Guinness Book of Records) had been murdered by the IRA following his call for restrictions on the Irish in Great Britain. Among its founders was Viscount De L’Isle, a former Conservative cabinet minister. It was very active in the Grunwick dispute. Although past its peak by 1979, the National Front fielded 303 candidates in that general election. There was also a significant activist Christian right, exemplified by Mary Whitehouse and her National Listeners and Viewers Association. She was hostile to the point of obsession with swearing on television, and to pornography and sexually explicit material. She was especially hostile to homosexuality. She brought a case for blasphemous libel, the first since 1922, against Gay News, for publishing a poem by James Kirkup. The trial in 1977 led to defeat for Gay News, which was fined, and the editor sentenced to prison, later reversed at appeal. In 1980 Mary Whitehouse’s group contrived a private prosecution of Howard Brenton’s National Theatre play The Romans in Britain under the Sexual Offences Act, which collapsed in court. The play became notorious through this prosecution for its portrayal of homosexual rape, but its point was lost: it was a critique of imperialist violence, not just by the Romans in ancient Britain, but, quite explicitly, by the British state in Northern Ireland.36