Britain on the Brink

'I succumb to the uneasy feeling that it is becoming a Third World country'

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

In Margaret Drabble’s 1977 novel The Ice Age, Britain is described as ‘sliding, sinking, shabby, dirty, lazy, inefficient, dangerous, in its death throes, worn out, clapped out, occasionally lashing out’. That was the feeling among many in the mid-1970s, as Dominic Sandbrook describes in the wonderful Seasons in the Sun - a country that felt like it was falling apart. And 1974 was the nadir.

The Times reported in October of that year that London’s West End was in a ‘sorry state’, with parts of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road ‘in the sort of condition that, in Birmingham or Manchester, would qualify them for wholesale slum clearance.’

Journalist Clive Irving wrote that London had become ‘a semi-derelict slum’, a city blighted by ‘tacky porno shops, skin movies, pinball arcades, and toxic hamburger joints’ while ‘behind neon facades the buildings are flaking and unkempt’.

The capital had lost a million and a half people since its peak in 1939, and would continue its decline for another decade. Whitehall Mandarin Ronald McIntosh declared that ‘London is evidently losing population quite heavily [and] services are steadily deteriorating, and nobody seems to have the least idea of how to deal with it.’

The country as a whole was haemorrhaging people, and in 1975 its population fell for the first time since records began. In the spring of 1974 applications for emigration to Canada went up 65 per cent, while New Zealand even felt compelled to put restrictions on people fleeing the old country.

Doctors in particular were leaving in droves, and recruitment agency Robert Lee International estimated that the number of professionals wanting to move abroad rose by 35% in just six months, from January and July 1975. Interest was keenest among engineers, accountants, scientists and teachers.

Many high earners were fleeing excessive tax rates, so punitive that even the Bond producer Albert R Broccoli left to make the iconic British movies elsewhere, and Moonraker would be filmed in France.

Gone were the days of the Swinging Sixties; instead, the London of George Smiley was ‘the city of the Sex Pistols and The Sweeney, not the Beatles and the Avengers; a city of tramps and hooligans, hustlers and muggers, the downtrodden and the disappointed, haunted by the deadly figure of the IRA bomber.’

Britain’s second city was in an even worse state. During Wilson’s first term Birmingham had been hailed as ‘the most go-ahead city in Europe’. Now the Times admitted it looked like a ‘large and chaotic building site’.

Travel writer Jonathan Raban described Southampton’s Millbrook estate as ‘a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people’. The country’s increasing problem with crime, hooliganism, graffiti and drug addiction meant that residents wouldn’t even hang their clothes in communal areas, for fear of theft.

The great architectural feats of the post-war era were beginning to look like a miserable failure, and none more so than the utopian social housing schemes, which had often entailed destroying closely-knit and organic communities in overcrowded and run-down – but rescuable – terraced housing.

Christopher Brooker visited Keeling House in Bethnal Green and found ‘its concrete cracked and discolouring, the metal reinforcement rusting through the surface, every available inch covered with graffiti’. Here was the story of modern Britain, ‘the bright, anticipated dream followed by a seedy, nightmarish reality’.

The National Theatre’s Peter Hall visited the New York Juilliard School and upon return home ‘found it depressing to compare it with our own already run-down, ill-maintained South Bank building’.

‘The English apparently no longer care enough about material surroundings,’ he wrote: ‘They even seem to take a positive pleasure in defiling them.’

An Indian bus driver told journalist Jeremy Seabrook in a Blackburn café: ‘What is your country now, anyway? Look at its currency, it is worthless. You couldn’t keep your empire, you are in debt. You think that a few barrels of oil are your salvation. You are the laughing stock of the world. English people don’t want to work. What a mess you are in. Your whole world has crumbled. You need us, but you hate us because we still have a lot of things we believe in. We have our holy places still. What do yours mean to you?’

That was true enough, but worse than the loss of empire – which few people cared that much about, at the time or after – was the country’s declining economic status. In 1950 Britain had 25 per cent of the world trade in manufacturing; by 1970 it was barely 10%, half of West Germany’s. Britain was now the second poorest country in the European Economic Community, and Tony Benn remarked that it was ‘heading for development area status in the EEC… with Germany more than twice as rich as we are.’

Labour MP Philip Whitehead recalled that twenty years earlier ‘travellers had come back from France regretting what they had experienced in the way of shabby streets, late trains, graffiti in the subway and nauseous public lavatories’ but ‘it was now the French who went home from Britain with the same impression.’

Robert Moss of the Economist wrote in February 1977. ‘The more I compare Britain with the countries that it still regards as it peers, the more I succumb to the uneasy feeling that [it] is becoming a Third World country.’

Britain had even become a cautionary tale, so that President Gerald Ford warned Americans: ‘It would be tragic for this country if we went down the same path and ended up with the same problems Great Britain has.’

Shabby and ridden by social problems, it was a land of utilities that didn’t work and a dreadful service industry that didn’t provide service. At the end of the year the first episode of a new sit-com was filmed, inspired by the Monty Python team’s experience in a West Country hotel, epitomising the feeling of a country where you couldn’t get a meal after 9pm – Fawlty Towers.

The diary entry of future foreign secretary Douglas Hurd earlier in the decade summed up the frustration: ‘All the mechanics of life crumbling around us – heating, cars, telephones, etc... Telephone mended, light fuses blow. No progress on cars or heating… Demented by no progress at all on selling car or repairing heating… The bloody paper fails to insert my ad… Still getting nowhere on central heating… Finally we have two cars which work, and boilers, taps and radiators ditto. This has taken three months.’

Nothing worked, and no one seemed to care. When Turkey invaded northern Cyprus in July, defence secretary Roy Mason was astonished to find that ‘neither the permanent secretary nor the relevant private secretary [could be] bothered to come into the office’ since it was the weekend and the Turks had been inconsiderate enough to launch their invasion outside of normal office hours.

Mason tried entering the Foreign Office but, as his colleague Bernard Donoughue recalled, he ‘couldn’t get into his office, then couldn’t work his intelligence telephone because his civil servants were not there. A private secretary had the master keys – and apparently “does not like coming to work on Saturdays”’.

There was also an increasingly dark feeling overwhelming the national mood, and many observers feared a return to the era of hyperinflation, mass unemployment - and worse.

Historian A. J. P. Taylor, ‘who prided himself on his left-wing iconoclasm, predicted massive unemployment and a return to the riots, revolution and totalitarianism of Europe in the 1930s. “Pray for the recovery of capitalism,” Taylor urged his Hungarian lover. “You can’t realise how near we are to catastrophe: all our banks may close their doors in a few months’ time …  You are lucky to be living in a Communist country and safe from such things.”’ (I bet he felt incredibly lucky.)

Playwright David Hare later said that ‘We thought, wrongly, as it turned out, that England was in a state of apocalyptic crisis. We had lost faith in its institutions, we thought that Britain’s assumption of a non-existent world role was ludicrous, and we also thought that its economic vitality was so sapped that it wouldn’t last long.’

But this feeling was found even among ‘relatively sober commentators …. now becoming genuinely alarmed for the future of the nation.’ In a ‘Doomwatch report on the state of the economy’ on July 1, The Times’s Peter Jay predicted that historians would look at that summer as ‘the moment when the last chances of fending off political and economic disaster were forfeited’.

He wrote: ‘When, in 1980 or so, democracy as we know it has been suspended and people have accepted that the depression is established for a decade or so, the question may be asked: “Where did we go wrong?”’

Political scientist Anthony King lamented ‘the failure to achieve a higher rate of economic growth, the failure to bring inflation under control, the failure to put right the balance of payments, the failure to build enough houses, the failure to reduce the level of violent crime, the failure to reform the trade unions, the failure to make a commercial success of Concorde.’

Though he doubted that democracy would collapse, ‘the fact that people are talking about the possibility at all is in itself significant’. Britain, he wrote, was facing the kind of crisis it had ‘not known since 1832, possibly since the seventeenth century’.

In 1974 a student was killed in fighting with the National Front in central London, and Labour GLC member Stephen Haseler said that ‘Lawlessness is on the increase and “political” lawlessness even more so. Violent crime is increasing and football vandalism shames the British reputation at home and abroad. Bombing campaigns kill and maim innocent people.’

British society was ‘increasingly fractured’ and if current trends continued it would simply ‘degenerate into an anarchy of warring camps’.

In this atmosphere of dark despair, a genre of dystopian fiction about a fascist future proved popular. Arthur Wise’s thriller Who Killed Enoch Powell? has Britain taken over by a military strongman, General Monkton. He sees ‘a country losing its shape and coherence, a country in desperate need of discipline’, and whips up anger against ‘foreign bodies’. In George Shipway’s The Chilian Club, some retired servicemen decide to fight back against the ‘wildcat strikers, agitators, anarchic students and such allied vermin’.

Kingsley Amis believed that October 1974 would be Britain’s ‘last free election’, and wrote an alternative history novel, The Alteration, in which the country is a totalitarian state untouched by Reformation, with a thinly-veiled Harold Wilson figure as the Pope and an Inquisition in Britain led by dread-inducing officials with the unsubtle names Foot, Redgrave and Lord Stansgate.

Newspaper chairman and full-on fantasist Cecil King told the Foreign Office’s Denis Greenhill that Britain was ‘heading for a dictatorship, either of the Right or the Left, and much would turn on the attitude of the Army’. When he addressed a meeting of officers on the possibility of military rule, however, they simply laughed at him.

But some did really talk of a military coup, perhaps led by General Walter Walker, a curious figure who seems to resemble PG Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode or the Viz character Billy Britain.

Even at school, the future military leader was disappointed that his fellow boys were a ‘motley bunch of idle, unpatriotic, unkempt, and “couldn’t care less” type of youths’ and decided to ‘straighten them out’ by handing out ‘a straight left to the nose or an uppercut to the jaw’. Even his headmaster had to restrain his disciplinary excesses and to gently explain ‘the difference between leading and driving’.

Walker was a hero to his men, especially the Gurkhas, but was somewhat out of place in modern Britain. He was especially disgusted by homosexuals who ‘use the main sewer of the human body as a playground’.

Asked how he would deal with the crisis in Northern Ireland, Walker said ‘I have engaged in campaigns against blacks, yellows and slant-eyes. Why should we have one rule for the whites and one for the coloureds?’ Very progressive.

His solution: ‘We should cut off their petrol, gas, electricity and stop food going in, soften them up and then go in. Give warning so that they can get their women and children away before we go in, but go in.’

Walker wrote a letter in the Daily Telegraph, back in the days when that paper was a rich source of outraged correspondence from hilariously reactionary military men, complaining that ‘the Communist Trojan horse is in our midst with its fellow-travellers wriggling their maggoty way inside its belly’.

Afterwards, ‘he got floods of letters of support with donations, among them doctors, lawyers, estate agents and small businessmen, as well as Admiral of the Fleet Sir Varyl Begg, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, a number of British generals, ex-MPs, the popular Goons comedian Michael Bentine and the shipping magnate Lord Cayzer’.

But such talk was largely a fantasy, and even more absurd were rumours of a PFP - Prince Philip for President – movement, although Tony Benn believed it.

Equally fantastic were imaginary communist plots. Lord Chalfont, a former Labour minister who had ‘since shot off to the right’, in February 1975 gave the House of Lords a 50-minute talk on ‘subversive and extremists in our society’, claiming that major unions had been infiltrated by the community party and ‘the Government were preparing concentration camps in Britain and that the Army was being prepared to repress the workers in Great Britain as it had done in Northern Ireland.’

He presented an ITV documentary, Who Says It Could Never Happen Here?, in which he claimed that ‘the Communist Manifesto was being implemented bit by bit in Britain’. He argued that Marx had listed ten conditions for the triumph of communism and Harold Wilson’s Britain had managed seven, a mirror image of those bizarre ‘14 conditions for fascism’ lists that fly around social media today.

What made the fantasy of civil war and Army rule somewhat plausible was that it was already happening in one corner of the country. As much as the government would have preferred the violence to remain confined to Ulster, the IRA’s bombing campaign had hit England in 1974, with atrocities in Guilford and Birmingham (which would lead to further tragedies with innocent Irishmen and women jailed for the crimes). Back in May, Loyalists had spread the terror to the Irish Republic by murdering 34 civilians in Dublin and Monaghan.

Joe Haines told Bernard Donoughue that Ulster was ‘Britain’s Algeria, brutalising the whole community’, and Wilson talked of an ‘Algerian solution’ and ‘the unmentionable’ - total withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

Rumours of such a move caused panic in the Irish government and one official sent a message urging ‘the British [to] continue in Northern Ireland in the hope that a solution may be found in time’. The same official told the Irish premier that the ‘advantages’ of a continued British presence were ‘so great, that we should do everything possible to ensure it comes about’. Foreign minister Garret Fitzgerald secretly briefed journalists to harden British opinion against withdrawal and urged Henry Kissinger to help stiffen Britain’s resolve; as Sandbrook notes, a bizarre situation when the Republic technically claimed the Six Counties.

When the Loyalist Ulster Workers’ Council strike brought the province to a standstill in May, helped by paramilitary intimidation, TUC General-Secretary Len Murray flew to Belfast to urge people back to work, ‘a refreshing thing to hear from a union leader in the mid-1970s’, the author dryly adds.

Only 200 of 10,000 shipyard workers turned up and a second march attracted just 20: ‘it was obvious to everyone that the mild-mannered Midlander was painfully out of his depth: nothing had prepared him for the intensity of the hatreds on the streets of Belfast.’

Even Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, ‘taking a break from his busy schedule of murdering his own people,’ and always keen to humiliate the former colonial power, telegrammed Wilson suggesting that representatives from the two communities come to Uganda for a conference.

With the Guildford atrocity coming just days before the second vote, The Times wrote that no election since the war had ‘been held in such a mood of uncertainty and depression. The probable outlook for the next Parliament is of depression with continued inflation in the short term, and accelerated inflated in the medium term, and both the depression and the inflation will be worse than anything in post-war British experience.’

It added, with prescience, that ‘this could well be an election which will damage or even destroy the party which wins it’.

Wilson felt incredibly tired, and ‘his message boiled down to three words: a quiet life.’ But both the Labour and Tory parties had run out of ideas. Something had to give.

Part three will appear on Thursday