2024 as the new 1974

How does a consensus fall? Slowly, then all at once

This is part three in a three-part series. Part one can be found here, part two here

Defeat left the Conservative Party divided and confused about their unpopularity. In the second general election of 1974 the Tory vote fell to just 36%, their lowest level in history – to date. Among voters in their twenties, they had half the Labour share.

As Dominic Sandbrook wrote in Seasons in the Sun: ‘Not only were Heath and his colleagues exhausted after four intensely gruelling years, but their unexpected repudiation seemed to have left them intellectually adrift, lost in the wilderness with no ideological compass.’

The Conservatives were at a loss to understand their failure, and caught between two competing explanations. Did they lose because they were too right-wing, or not right-wing enough?

A handful of mavericks felt that defeat was due to Heath abandoning his earlier free market rhetoric. The party’s private pollsters concluded in contrast that abrasiveness and ‘confrontation’ was the problem and they needed to win back millions of middle-class voters who had gone to the Liberals, and ‘to drop all talk of social or ideological conflict, and emphasise conciliation and consensus.’

Whether or not he was too confrontational or not enough, Edward Heath had certainly been inept and uninspiring. Asked during the campaign what his first move against inflation would be, he had replied ‘to see precisely what the situation is’: and then? ‘To take the appropriate action’.

Over the course of 1974, Heath’s approval ratings fell to 27%, and a friend remarked that Chairman Mao ‘was the first person he had seen in months who was actually pleased to see him’.

The one ‘star’ of the Conservative campaign, according to the Sun– not yet the rabidly Tory paper it would later become – was former education secretary Margaret Thatcher. Polls revealed deep public suspicion of one pledge she had made regarding mortgages, but ‘the fact that she was forceful, and clearly had the government rattled, naturally appealed to Tory activists exasperated by Heath’s moderation’.

The view of the country’s commentariat, however, was that Britain’s problems could be resolved by picking a government that was as close to the consensus as possible. The Guardian called for a ‘Grand coalition of all three parties, possibly with [Liberal leader] Mr Thorpe at its head’. Columnist Peter Jenkins wanted a ‘government of all talents’, a coalition of Labour and Liberals, while The Times wanted a similarly centrist alliance led by a Tory moderate.

The public had no enthusiasm for any parties, and one Birmingham housewife summed up the mood of the country when she told a pollster ‘The fight has been taken out of the people. You have Labour in. It’s like another cook taking over the stove and buggering the dinner. I don’t care who does it just as long as something is done.’

Already the seeds of change were there, though. Labour were victorious, but they won just 55% of working-class voters, the start of a realignment which would see traditional class divisions in voting break down, and would accelerate after Brexit: ‘In the excitement surrounding Wilson’s narrow majority, few people paid much attention to these figures,’ Sandbrook writes: ‘In the long run, though, they presaged a political earthquake.’

Although Labour were returned to power, it would be a pyrrhic victory, followed by defeat that would see them out of Downing Street for 18 years – and returning a very changed machine. The consensus had fallen.

It is a sign of how Margaret Thatcher would smash that consensus – not alone, and, as Sandbrook points out, many ‘Thatcherite’ policies were already in place by 1977 - that the amount of state control over the economy once seen as normal is now hard to fathom. Even young progressives have quite Thatcherite views on economic freedom.

When Sandbrook and Tom Holland described the economic policies of that age in their Rest is History series on 1974, it was impossible not to feel a sense of the absurd. This was a country where a national board doled out mortgages and the government sent every bank a letter each month telling them how much to lend. Even talk of ‘income policies’ strike us as bizarre, not to mention Tony Benn’s plans to have the state run Women’s Own magazine or Berni Inn. The economic orthodoxies of the period are almost as laughable as its social attitudes. This is testament to the victory of the Thatcherite revolution.

Yet few in the establishment at the time could foresee that the consensus could be swept away. As Sandbrook writes, in July 1976 the Money Programme presented two possible versions of the 1980s, one of which was the ‘do-it-yourself society’ in which public spending was slashed, two million had been thrown out of the work and there was a ‘gradual erosion in the power of the trade union movement’.

‘Ironically, though,’ he notes: ‘few contemporary observers seem to have found it convincing’.