When I first began working on Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s it was the autumn of 2005. Tony Blair had recently won his third election victory, the economy had been growing for thirteen consecutive years, and England had just been beaten 1–0 by Northern Ireland in a World Cup qualifying match. Now, as I come towards the end of A Classless Society, the third – and last – book in this series, Britain has its first coalition government since the Second World War, the talk is of a triple-dip recession, and England have been held to a 1–1 draw by the mighty Macedonia. It would be hard to see all these things as steps forward.
This was never intended as a trilogy. It started as an attempt to reclaim the memory of the 1970s, the decade in which I spent most of my teenage years and which was not then as well chronicled as it has been since. The project has been extended, into Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s and then into the present volume, because the story refused to reach a satisfactory conclusion. The crises that racked this country during the 1970s remained unresolved. By the time some episodes had been wrapped up – with the defeat of the trade union movement in 1984, for example – others were already under way.
To some extent, of course, this is simply because the division of history by dates is a necessarily arbitrary affair. Decades and centuries are artificial, crude concepts that seldom fit the objective facts. They do, however, have an impact on the subjective experience of time, the turning of the years affecting how people see the evolution of their societies. And the current book approaches its conclusion with the biggest of all such markers: the end of the second Christian millennium. Except that even that isn’t quite the right place to stop. It was not until the re-election of the Labour Party in 2001, and the second decisive defeat of the Conservatives, that things seem to have been settled in Britain.
And there is, I think, a settlement to be recorded. The social upheavals of the 1960s, when a cultural revolution began to challenge the legitimacy of the established order, were followed by the economic and industrial travails of the 1970s. Between them, they destroyed the post-war consensus, which had always been a typically British muddled compromise of a mixed economy and a shared Christian heritage, held together by the fantasy of growing prosperity. That came to an end in September 1976, with James Callaghan’s speech to the Labour Party conference. ‘The cosy world we were told would go on for ever, where full employment would be guaranteed by a stroke of the chancellor’s pen,’ he said; ‘that cosy world is gone.’
The story of these three volumes is essentially the tale of the building of a new consensus. It’s not as cosy. A sizeable minority of the population has been effectively excluded from mainstream society, historically terrifying levels of unemployment – however the figures are disguised – have become entrenched, and the concept of a job for life has long since vanished. On the other hand, sizeable minorities who were previously excluded are now welcomed. The economic fantasy remains, this time built on a massive increase in personal debt.
The new consensus may not be sustainable. All things change, and this may not last as long as the previous settlement – at the time of writing, it is still unclear what impact the financial crisis that began in 2008 will have. But it is at least the end of a cycle that began with the right-wing backlash against the 1960s and culminated with the victory of liberalism, in all its economic, social and cultural forms.
Alwyn W. Turner
May 2013