This is a great article and Dominic Sandbrook's book sounds great. But I read this with horror, all the same. I was born in 1970, so my 'coming to consciousness' years were lived under Heath's end/Wilson's debacle - I remember the candles (and dad playing the guitar and singing Beatles' songs in the barely-lit living room to keep us entertained; it's actually one of my fondest memories. But still.) The horror isn't because of those memories, or what the fools on the Left did to our country *back then*. The horror is because it's quite obviously starting again. If anything, the intellectual calibre of Starmer's regime is orders of magnitude smaller than Wilson's, and its class-hatred and toddler-level economic reasoning abilities orders of magnitude greater. We are doomed. Two other points occurred on reading: how did Marcia end up so wealthy? That can't just "happen". Has it ever been investigated? And Wilson's paranoia, which we all knew about but which we'd always assumed was paranoia, or at least that he may have indeed been the victim of 'shadowy forces' who were clearly in the wrong: were they? (In the wrong, that is.) Is there not a fairly decent case that since the government was being run by organised Communist labour trade unions, for the benefit of that agenda, then there was a duty on the British state to at least understand (through spying) the extent of the comrades' intentions?
Thanks for cheering us up. Can just about remember those days, and that life went on all the same. When you’re seven or eight, you assume the adults know what they are doing. Now you realise they are just as clueless and the same clowns are in charge again. The difference then was that there were still clever people in government, the Tories would get their act together and there was enough social cohesion to work with. People remembered the Blitz and thought things could be worse. And now?
Ah yes, Seventies Britain. It was the worst of times, it was the BEST of times! On the one hand, everything Ed just wrote, on the other hand - the telly programmes (Monty Python for one, The Sweeney for another) the music (Bob Marley, Slade, Led Zep, The Stranglers, Donna Summer, to name a few), gas central heating, colour TVs, modern washing machines and fridges, telephones for almost everyone, affordable summer holidays in places where the sun actually shone, affordable cars which were stylish and fairly reliable (if you bought a Cortina or an Escort) pretty girls who were feminine but weren’t caked in make-up, and most of all the absence of all the complete shizzle we have to pay lip service to these days on pain of penury or prison! Happy days 😁
At least in the US modern cars are far better engineered, and last longer, than the rust bucket clunkers available in the 70s. It used to be an event if your car turned over the odometer at 100K miles. Nowadays it would be appalling if your car didn't last at least that long. I remember the late 70s jokes: Ford stands for Found On Road Dead. GM means General Mafunction.
I'm a Thatcher fan boy and she did a great job in tackling the rot head on, but globalisation played an equal/greater role in the turn of fortunes, opening up far cheaper sources of manufacture and labour, allowing us to enjoy a higher standard of living while producing less and consuming more (often on cheap money), while, all the time, exporting the inflationary effects of this. This has been largely deleteriously living off the backs of others, ironic given how much corporates special plead their anti imperial credentials.
Anyway, we stand on the identical precipice to that of 1974, but higher now and the ground far less stable. I see no way back other than decline/collapse because the necessary resolve to sort things can only emerge after that and not before. As Starmer said, things can only get worse before they get worse.
My memory of 1974 is that it was edgy, but (apart from the IRA bombs) rather fun.
Despite political divisions, there was more social cohesion and a sense of nationhood. People still had hope, despite the problems.
No one in 2024 has hope, even keen Labour supporters. And the young least of all.
The nation and social cohesion have been destroyed by immigration - while under a global ( thus inescapable) Capitalist tyranny, there is no hope for anyone except the top 10%.
I was an early-ish teen at the time and I do remember power cuts and candles and my Dad (junior management, so not a fan of Labour) getting irate. But I'm slightly ashamed to say my most vivid memory was of the BBC scheduling 'Cleopatra' (the Taylor/Burton 1963 epic) over Christmas. Possibly the first time it had been shown on TV, certainly the first time I'd been old enough to watch it. But because of the curfew you mention it had to be shown in 2 parts over consecutive evenings.
One more thought on this article, I remember well the sense that Britain was the sick man of Europe, as rock bottom, as the song had it. Yet there was also a sort of stoic acceptance that this was inevitable. Thinking about this I cannot now imagine how this felt to a generation that grew up in a world where Britain had been a great power, with an empire, trading all over the world, with great industries and a military that had won a World War. Anyone in their 50s or over would have had vivid memories of the War. There were many who had lived through two world wars. And yet they had to keep going. Not sure how they did it.
I was 10 in 1974, so my memories are fragmented but vivid. My father was a handyman/builder so he was quite resourceful at attaching lights to car batteries for power cuts, but my brother and I took turns turning the pedals on a bike upside down on a table so the other could do some homework.
The constant strikes and shortages were a real strain, particularly for my father trying to stay afloat as self employed without a union supporting him. He had to bribe petrol pump attendants to give him more than his four gallon ration to keep his van on the road. Bank strikes and postal strikes meant no jobs coming in and payments delayed. As we lived near the Grunwick works, we went without post for months because all work stopped at our local sorting office (Grunwick developed photo films sent in by post, so this was part of the union siege campaign. Stopping work on everyone’s mail was an attempt to get round the first secondary picketing laws).
I don’t fear an immediate rerun because there isn’t so much pressure from the hard left, but mostly because macroeconomic management is more creative. No one panics about trade deficits or borrowing requirements, liquidity is always seeking an extra premium and it all gets added to the bill…until things finally turn Argentinian.
I was born in 1938 and was married with two young children at that time. I duly received the book of petrol coupons from the Heath government and with some friends registered them at the local post office. The worst part of the entire period, which ran from 1965 to 1995 was the decline in job security, the continuous failure of British heavy industry, especially the car industry. Whole company’s closed down overnight with thousands unemployed. It was a very difficult period to be hopeful that things would get better. Thatcher completely fulfilled Callaghan’s prophecy that she would lose down 40% of British heavy industry was made in response to a PMQ question from a Labour backbencher. By1981 she had closed down 40% of what had survived into her era and there were 3 million unemployed. The entire fortune available to the British State from North Sea Oil was wasted on unemployment pay. Norway used it to create a National Fund that has made the Norwegians one of wealthiest people in Europe.
Alternatively, Mrs Thatcher decided to stop subsidising vast swathes of loss making, internationally uncompetitive, industry; there were 3 million unemployed in economic reality long before they were acknowledged officially - they were just on the payrolls of these subsidised businesses which couldn’t justify their existence commercially. So the burgeoning unemployment pay on which you say the fruits of North Sea oil were wasted was just a more honest reclassification of what had been wasted on subsidising the likes of British Leyland. A necessary precondition to the economic renaissance of the 1980s was the ending of the massive misallocation of scarce resources.
These comparisons with Norway rarely point out that there are 5.5m Norwegians compared to 67m (at least) Britons. They didn’t have less than 10% of our resources.
I agree about North Sea Oil being spent on benefits for the newly unemployed - often Invalidity Benefit for ex-miners, etc who were made redundant in mid-career or later and who never worked again. The taxes from North Sea Oil - the government took a slice of the profits from the firms which did the drilling, rather than extracting it through a publicly-owned scheme - also went on offsetting income tax cuts for the better off. Personally, I don’t object too much - it was a choice made by the government of the day - but I note with disappointment that it rarely gets mentioned in the press or many books as the massive windfall that it was, from 1976 all the way to 2010 or so. When I was a nipper in the mid-70s, every third news item on the telly seemed to be about how NSO was going to turn us into Kuwait! Then it all went quiet…we did get natural gas though, which gave us cheap heating for decades, so not all bad.
In 1974 I was 14 and bought 'The Hall of the Mountain Grill' by Hawkwind. Fifty years later I still listen to this piece of genius, yet The Rest is History lads leave out any mention of D-Rider!
The other thing - and I remember this miserable period well - is that the press / media kept most of this stuff to itself. I understood the dire economic straits but knew next to nothing about Wilson’s mental decline and his subservience to Marcia Williams. Re the communist infiltration, well, the press covered up for its own infiltration.
I got a new job with the Electricity Board in January 1974 and not long after I got a 30% pay rise I hadn't anticipated. So I know how it must feel to be a public sector worker in 2024 getting a double-digit pay rise and watching Starmer and Reeves try to blame the Tories for the consequent hit to public finances.
Since there were no cell phones back then, did he have a landline installed in the loo? Or did he invite people into the bathroom with him as LBJ was said to do?
Dominic Sandbrook praises the Labour Government of 1976-79, when Jim Callaghan (aided by Michael Foot) rowed Britain back from the mess caused by Wilson.
The Big Mistake of the Wilson Government was the inflationary March 1974 Budget, which at a time of great inflationary pressure from the Oil Price hike, threw a lot of fuel on the fire.
Healey wasn't a fool, but Wilson was trying to bribe the electorate into supporting him in an Autumn Election.
The stratagem barely worked - though Wilson now had an overall majority, it was only 3 or 4, exactly the same size of his majority ten Octobers previously, in 1964.
Despite the devastation he wrought, Healey is now entirely rehabilitated; his BBC obituary describes him as having "piloted Britain through one of its worst financial crises" - "through" should really be "into". Most hilariously, the BBC rewrites history in telling the reader Healey "never bothered to court the Left": he didn't need to because he was of the hard Left!
Dennis Healey was a Major in the British Army during WW2 and a Beach Master during the Anzio Campaign in Italy. He had a problem mastering a portfolio so he spent the entire 1964 - 70 Wilson government as Defence Secretary and the entire 1974 - 1979 government as Chancellor. Not for him the 11 jobs that John Reid got from Tony Blair. He saw himself as a bulwark against the SDP in the 1980’s and remained Labour till the end.
His book 'My Secret Planet' is enjoyable. Not many politicians as well-read and cultured today. A grammar school lad, and it was an absolute travesty that the privately educated Crosland and Williams made it their mission to destroy them. (It's 'Denis', not 'Dennis'.)
"Sandbrook quotes another union leader who remarked that Jones had ‘a smile glinting like the sunlight on the brass plate of a coffin’"
it may interst some to know that this striking descriptive remark has fine and extended lineage in British Politics. Long erroneously described (but the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) as a description of Sir Robert Peel It was, in fact, first used politically by the Irish Nationalist Daniel O'Connell during a Commons debate on 26 February 1835 to describe the then leadet of the Conservative Party, Lord Stanley.
O'Connell (a long standing enemy of Lord Stanley) remarked during the debate at how ‘delightful it would be to see it walking in St. James’s-street tomorrow – to see the noble Lord strutting proudly, with his sequents behind him, and with a smile passing over his countenance – something like, as Curran said, “a silver plate on a coffin”’.
That versatile, untutored intelligence allied with an idiosyncratic syllabus of study, which belonged to the authentic working class autodidact of generations gone by, is something sorely missed today. It was always overturning obscure gems of this sort which have passed out of mainstream familiarity.
A trade unionist of Jack Jones's generation would have been familiar with the life and writings of O'Connell as he would have been with Herzen, Garibaldi and indeed John Lilburne.
Another remark of the period describes two trade unionist discussing their relative 'Radical' positions thus -
'Which side would you he have been on at Edgehill?' says one 'Aye, and which at Burford Church' replied the other.
This is a great article and Dominic Sandbrook's book sounds great. But I read this with horror, all the same. I was born in 1970, so my 'coming to consciousness' years were lived under Heath's end/Wilson's debacle - I remember the candles (and dad playing the guitar and singing Beatles' songs in the barely-lit living room to keep us entertained; it's actually one of my fondest memories. But still.) The horror isn't because of those memories, or what the fools on the Left did to our country *back then*. The horror is because it's quite obviously starting again. If anything, the intellectual calibre of Starmer's regime is orders of magnitude smaller than Wilson's, and its class-hatred and toddler-level economic reasoning abilities orders of magnitude greater. We are doomed. Two other points occurred on reading: how did Marcia end up so wealthy? That can't just "happen". Has it ever been investigated? And Wilson's paranoia, which we all knew about but which we'd always assumed was paranoia, or at least that he may have indeed been the victim of 'shadowy forces' who were clearly in the wrong: were they? (In the wrong, that is.) Is there not a fairly decent case that since the government was being run by organised Communist labour trade unions, for the benefit of that agenda, then there was a duty on the British state to at least understand (through spying) the extent of the comrades' intentions?
The Labour governments and trade unions of that time weren't Communist, though the unions contained fellow-travellers.
As for 2024, you talk as though everything was happy and hopeful before the Election. In fact, life under the Tories was dreadful.
Excellent comment. Unfortunately the system won’t let e ‘like’.
Thanks for cheering us up. Can just about remember those days, and that life went on all the same. When you’re seven or eight, you assume the adults know what they are doing. Now you realise they are just as clueless and the same clowns are in charge again. The difference then was that there were still clever people in government, the Tories would get their act together and there was enough social cohesion to work with. People remembered the Blitz and thought things could be worse. And now?
Ah yes, Seventies Britain. It was the worst of times, it was the BEST of times! On the one hand, everything Ed just wrote, on the other hand - the telly programmes (Monty Python for one, The Sweeney for another) the music (Bob Marley, Slade, Led Zep, The Stranglers, Donna Summer, to name a few), gas central heating, colour TVs, modern washing machines and fridges, telephones for almost everyone, affordable summer holidays in places where the sun actually shone, affordable cars which were stylish and fairly reliable (if you bought a Cortina or an Escort) pretty girls who were feminine but weren’t caked in make-up, and most of all the absence of all the complete shizzle we have to pay lip service to these days on pain of penury or prison! Happy days 😁
At least in the US modern cars are far better engineered, and last longer, than the rust bucket clunkers available in the 70s. It used to be an event if your car turned over the odometer at 100K miles. Nowadays it would be appalling if your car didn't last at least that long. I remember the late 70s jokes: Ford stands for Found On Road Dead. GM means General Mafunction.
Apparently there was a joke in the States: why do Brits drink warm beer? Because Morris/Lucas/British Leyland also make refrigerators!
Gloom:
I'm a Thatcher fan boy and she did a great job in tackling the rot head on, but globalisation played an equal/greater role in the turn of fortunes, opening up far cheaper sources of manufacture and labour, allowing us to enjoy a higher standard of living while producing less and consuming more (often on cheap money), while, all the time, exporting the inflationary effects of this. This has been largely deleteriously living off the backs of others, ironic given how much corporates special plead their anti imperial credentials.
Anyway, we stand on the identical precipice to that of 1974, but higher now and the ground far less stable. I see no way back other than decline/collapse because the necessary resolve to sort things can only emerge after that and not before. As Starmer said, things can only get worse before they get worse.
My memory of 1974 is that it was edgy, but (apart from the IRA bombs) rather fun.
Despite political divisions, there was more social cohesion and a sense of nationhood. People still had hope, despite the problems.
No one in 2024 has hope, even keen Labour supporters. And the young least of all.
The nation and social cohesion have been destroyed by immigration - while under a global ( thus inescapable) Capitalist tyranny, there is no hope for anyone except the top 10%.
I was an early-ish teen at the time and I do remember power cuts and candles and my Dad (junior management, so not a fan of Labour) getting irate. But I'm slightly ashamed to say my most vivid memory was of the BBC scheduling 'Cleopatra' (the Taylor/Burton 1963 epic) over Christmas. Possibly the first time it had been shown on TV, certainly the first time I'd been old enough to watch it. But because of the curfew you mention it had to be shown in 2 parts over consecutive evenings.
One more thought on this article, I remember well the sense that Britain was the sick man of Europe, as rock bottom, as the song had it. Yet there was also a sort of stoic acceptance that this was inevitable. Thinking about this I cannot now imagine how this felt to a generation that grew up in a world where Britain had been a great power, with an empire, trading all over the world, with great industries and a military that had won a World War. Anyone in their 50s or over would have had vivid memories of the War. There were many who had lived through two world wars. And yet they had to keep going. Not sure how they did it.
I was 10 in 1974, so my memories are fragmented but vivid. My father was a handyman/builder so he was quite resourceful at attaching lights to car batteries for power cuts, but my brother and I took turns turning the pedals on a bike upside down on a table so the other could do some homework.
The constant strikes and shortages were a real strain, particularly for my father trying to stay afloat as self employed without a union supporting him. He had to bribe petrol pump attendants to give him more than his four gallon ration to keep his van on the road. Bank strikes and postal strikes meant no jobs coming in and payments delayed. As we lived near the Grunwick works, we went without post for months because all work stopped at our local sorting office (Grunwick developed photo films sent in by post, so this was part of the union siege campaign. Stopping work on everyone’s mail was an attempt to get round the first secondary picketing laws).
I don’t fear an immediate rerun because there isn’t so much pressure from the hard left, but mostly because macroeconomic management is more creative. No one panics about trade deficits or borrowing requirements, liquidity is always seeking an extra premium and it all gets added to the bill…until things finally turn Argentinian.
I was born in 1938 and was married with two young children at that time. I duly received the book of petrol coupons from the Heath government and with some friends registered them at the local post office. The worst part of the entire period, which ran from 1965 to 1995 was the decline in job security, the continuous failure of British heavy industry, especially the car industry. Whole company’s closed down overnight with thousands unemployed. It was a very difficult period to be hopeful that things would get better. Thatcher completely fulfilled Callaghan’s prophecy that she would lose down 40% of British heavy industry was made in response to a PMQ question from a Labour backbencher. By1981 she had closed down 40% of what had survived into her era and there were 3 million unemployed. The entire fortune available to the British State from North Sea Oil was wasted on unemployment pay. Norway used it to create a National Fund that has made the Norwegians one of wealthiest people in Europe.
Alternatively, Mrs Thatcher decided to stop subsidising vast swathes of loss making, internationally uncompetitive, industry; there were 3 million unemployed in economic reality long before they were acknowledged officially - they were just on the payrolls of these subsidised businesses which couldn’t justify their existence commercially. So the burgeoning unemployment pay on which you say the fruits of North Sea oil were wasted was just a more honest reclassification of what had been wasted on subsidising the likes of British Leyland. A necessary precondition to the economic renaissance of the 1980s was the ending of the massive misallocation of scarce resources.
These comparisons with Norway rarely point out that there are 5.5m Norwegians compared to 67m (at least) Britons. They didn’t have less than 10% of our resources.
I agree about North Sea Oil being spent on benefits for the newly unemployed - often Invalidity Benefit for ex-miners, etc who were made redundant in mid-career or later and who never worked again. The taxes from North Sea Oil - the government took a slice of the profits from the firms which did the drilling, rather than extracting it through a publicly-owned scheme - also went on offsetting income tax cuts for the better off. Personally, I don’t object too much - it was a choice made by the government of the day - but I note with disappointment that it rarely gets mentioned in the press or many books as the massive windfall that it was, from 1976 all the way to 2010 or so. When I was a nipper in the mid-70s, every third news item on the telly seemed to be about how NSO was going to turn us into Kuwait! Then it all went quiet…we did get natural gas though, which gave us cheap heating for decades, so not all bad.
In 1974 I was 14 and bought 'The Hall of the Mountain Grill' by Hawkwind. Fifty years later I still listen to this piece of genius, yet The Rest is History lads leave out any mention of D-Rider!
The other thing - and I remember this miserable period well - is that the press / media kept most of this stuff to itself. I understood the dire economic straits but knew next to nothing about Wilson’s mental decline and his subservience to Marcia Williams. Re the communist infiltration, well, the press covered up for its own infiltration.
I got a new job with the Electricity Board in January 1974 and not long after I got a 30% pay rise I hadn't anticipated. So I know how it must feel to be a public sector worker in 2024 getting a double-digit pay rise and watching Starmer and Reeves try to blame the Tories for the consequent hit to public finances.
Re: When Wilson talked in the toilet
Since there were no cell phones back then, did he have a landline installed in the loo? Or did he invite people into the bathroom with him as LBJ was said to do?
Dominic Sandbrook praises the Labour Government of 1976-79, when Jim Callaghan (aided by Michael Foot) rowed Britain back from the mess caused by Wilson.
The Big Mistake of the Wilson Government was the inflationary March 1974 Budget, which at a time of great inflationary pressure from the Oil Price hike, threw a lot of fuel on the fire.
Healey wasn't a fool, but Wilson was trying to bribe the electorate into supporting him in an Autumn Election.
The stratagem barely worked - though Wilson now had an overall majority, it was only 3 or 4, exactly the same size of his majority ten Octobers previously, in 1964.
Despite the devastation he wrought, Healey is now entirely rehabilitated; his BBC obituary describes him as having "piloted Britain through one of its worst financial crises" - "through" should really be "into". Most hilariously, the BBC rewrites history in telling the reader Healey "never bothered to court the Left": he didn't need to because he was of the hard Left!
Dennis Healey was a Major in the British Army during WW2 and a Beach Master during the Anzio Campaign in Italy. He had a problem mastering a portfolio so he spent the entire 1964 - 70 Wilson government as Defence Secretary and the entire 1974 - 1979 government as Chancellor. Not for him the 11 jobs that John Reid got from Tony Blair. He saw himself as a bulwark against the SDP in the 1980’s and remained Labour till the end.
His book 'My Secret Planet' is enjoyable. Not many politicians as well-read and cultured today. A grammar school lad, and it was an absolute travesty that the privately educated Crosland and Williams made it their mission to destroy them. (It's 'Denis', not 'Dennis'.)
"Sandbrook quotes another union leader who remarked that Jones had ‘a smile glinting like the sunlight on the brass plate of a coffin’"
it may interst some to know that this striking descriptive remark has fine and extended lineage in British Politics. Long erroneously described (but the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) as a description of Sir Robert Peel It was, in fact, first used politically by the Irish Nationalist Daniel O'Connell during a Commons debate on 26 February 1835 to describe the then leadet of the Conservative Party, Lord Stanley.
O'Connell (a long standing enemy of Lord Stanley) remarked during the debate at how ‘delightful it would be to see it walking in St. James’s-street tomorrow – to see the noble Lord strutting proudly, with his sequents behind him, and with a smile passing over his countenance – something like, as Curran said, “a silver plate on a coffin”’.
That versatile, untutored intelligence allied with an idiosyncratic syllabus of study, which belonged to the authentic working class autodidact of generations gone by, is something sorely missed today. It was always overturning obscure gems of this sort which have passed out of mainstream familiarity.
A trade unionist of Jack Jones's generation would have been familiar with the life and writings of O'Connell as he would have been with Herzen, Garibaldi and indeed John Lilburne.
Another remark of the period describes two trade unionist discussing their relative 'Radical' positions thus -
'Which side would you he have been on at Edgehill?' says one 'Aye, and which at Burford Church' replied the other.
Who now would recognise the allusions there?