Harold, Ted and Jim: When the Modern Failed
The thirteen years of Tory rule, wasted according to Harold Wilson, were followed by fifteen years when modern Britain rose and failed. ‘Modern’ does not simply mean the look and shape of the country formed during 1964-79, most of which is still here around us, essentially unaltered – the motorways and mass car economy, the concrete architecture, the rock music, the high street chains. It also means a belief in planning and management. This was the time of practical men, educated in grammar schools, sure of their intelligence, rolling up their sleeves and taking no nonsense. They were going to scrap the old and fusty, whether that meant the huge Victorian railway network, the grand Edwardian government palazzos in Whitehall, the historic regiments, terraced housing, hanging, theatre censorship, the prohibitions on homosexual behaviour and abortion, the ancient coinage and the quaint county names. Bigger in general would be better. Huge comprehensive schools would be more efficient than the maze of selective and rubbish-dump academies. The many hundreds of trade unions would resolve themselves into a few leviathans, known only by their initials. Small companies would wither and combine and ever-larger corporations would arise in their place, ruthless and managed on the latest scientific, American lines. Britain herself would cease to be a small independent trader and would merge into the largest corporation then available, the European Community. This was managerial self-confidence which would be smashed to pieces during the seventies and never recover.
Just seven men dominate the politics of these thirteen years. They are the three prime ministers, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan; two other Labour politicians so important they stand alongside the premiers, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey; and two men who stood increasingly outside the management consensus, leading attacks on it from right and left – Enoch Powell, and Anthony Wedgwood Benn. All have appeared briefly in this history already but these were the years when they truly mattered. Of the five insiders none was born into remotely rich or powerful families. Four of them, Wilson, Heath, Jenkins and Healey, were grammar school boys, who had elbowed their way to an elite university education. The fifth, Jim Callaghan, had a rougher start. All of them had served in the armed forces during the war, except for Wilson who had been a civil servant. All were exceptionally clever men of wide experience brimming with the energetic certainty of those trained to hold power, not merely born to the role. Though they had many differences of outlook, in broad terms they could agree that Marxism destroyed freedom, and that the discredited liberal free market brought chaos and unfairness. For them, enlightened state management was the last big idea left standing.
So these were men more abrasive and less interested in pleasing the media than later, more nervous politicians. They were hurrying men, prepared to be rude, particularly to each other. Their language was blunt in private, sometimes in public. Heath would denounce ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ and Healey would promise to make the richest in the land ‘howl with anguish’. In one important way these men did represent the Britain of their time. These were years of increased social mobility. The country was full of little Harolds and lesser Teds, bright men and women from lower-middle-class or working-class families who were rising fast through business, universities and the professions, who hugely admired such leaders. When Wilson talked of the scientific revolution that would transform Britain, his audience included tens of thousands of managers and engineers, in their off-the-peg tweed jackets and flannel trousers. When Heath promised that Europe would open up great new vistas for British industry, boardrooms and offices contained impatient self-made people ready to get cracking. Callaghan’s beefy working-class patriotism and conservative instincts were shared by millions of Labour voters, pro-trade union but staunchly monarchical.
But in other ways, they were already out of date. In the sixties and seventies, Britain was becoming a more feminized, sexualized, rebellious and consumption-addicted society. The political class was cut off from this by their age. They would rely on their children to keep them a little in touch. They might manage eventually, a brownish kipper tie or daringly wider lapels on their suits but they looked and sounded what they were, people from a more conservative and formal time.
For the vast majority the early sixties were experienced as a continuation of the fifties. Britain remained an industrial society and apparently a world power, whose future was believed to depend on factories churning out cars, engines, washing machines and electrical goods for export, and whose major cities were relics of the industrial revolution. Authority figures, police, teachers, judges and above all parents, were still clothed in the semi-military sense of order that derived from wartime experience. They were the butt of widespread mockery, in Alan Bennett’s early plays, in newspaper cartoons by Giles of the Daily Express, in television sketches by John Cleese and David Frost or in film comedies about bus-drivers and diplomats. The cross-looking men with moustaches and short back and sides were losing ground. But they were visibly still in power. Little islands of change were all around. Immigration was changing small patches of the country, the textile towns of Yorkshire and parts of west London, though it had barely impinged on most people’s lives. There was a growing snappiness and lightness of design, in everything from clothes to the shape of cars, an aesthetic escape from the seriousness of the immediate post-war period, which took different form year by year, but was experienced as a continuum not a revolution.
For some the country was just becoming more childish and less dignified. The refined, highbrow, purist modernism born among Europe’s intellectuals before the war, had had its last throw. Benjamin Britten’s musical austerities, Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic seriousness and the formal stillness of the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth were falling from fashion. Classical music was receding before ear-splitting tidal advance of rock and pop, driven by radio. In poetry, politics and incantation were returning. In painting, pop art and the pleasure principle were on the attack. Though it is a huge generalization, it can fairly be argued that simpler and more digestible art forms, suitable for mass market consumption, were replacing elite art which assumed an educated and concentrated viewer, listener or reader. Throughout these years there would be self-conscious moves to create new elites, to keep the masses out. There always are. They might come from the portentous theories of modern art or the avowedly difficult atonal music arriving from France and America, but these would be eddies against the stream, tiny whirlpools in the metropolis or at universities. The general move was for easier, brighter, sweeter stuff.
The two great rebels mentioned earlier, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, were neither easier nor sweeter. They had shared much with the five insiders and, indeed, would remain insiders through part of this era, Powell until he was finally expelled from the Tory shadow cabinet for his anti-immigration speech of 1968 and Benn until his increasing radicalism made him the silly socialist Satan of the later seventies. They both rejected the consumer society growing around them in favour of a higher vision. Powell’s was a romantic dream of an older, tougher, swashbuckling England, freed of continental and imperial entanglements, populated by spiky, ingenious, hard-working (and white) people rather like himself. Benn’s was of a socialist commonwealth, equal, republican, dominated by scientifically minded people thinking everything through from first principles, rather as he saw himself.
Both visions required British independence, a self-sufficient island, which ran entirely against the great forces of the time. Both were fundamentally nostalgic. If Powell harked back to the energetic Victorians, Benn dreamed of Puritan revolutionaries. Both drew sustenance from people around them who seemed to be excluded from mainstream politics. For Powell, it was the Wolverhampton constituents who had immigration imposed on them, and the small shopkeepers drowning under red tape and taxes. For Benn it was the radical shop stewards’ committees on the Clyde or in Midlands factories, and his children’s generation, protesting against Vietnam. In return, viewed from Fleet Street or the pulpits of broadcasting, each man was seen as an irrelevance, marching off to nowhere. Yet Powell was the prophet after whom Margaret Thatcher would stride into power while Benn represented a militant leftism which very nearly seized control of the Labour Party itself.