Yesterday marked fifty years since Edward Heath asked voters “Who governs Britain?” and received the polite but firm reply of “Not you, mate”.
The election of February 1974 was the grimmest since the war. Held during the Three-Day Week and overhung by IRA violence, it was one of several crisis points in a decade commonly regarded as uniquely dismal. Even for those of us born so recently to have studied it at university, the 1970s still looms as a beige bogeyman, the “mad woman in the attic” of our national imagination. Now is the winter…
With the recent return of inflation, strikes, energy crises, Israel at war, and ABBA, it has been almost too easy for time-poor commentators to deploy that benighted decade as a parallel for our current plight. Lurid headlines suggesting Britain is heading back to the 1970s are accompanied by the usual greatest hits package: blackouts, the dead going unburied, rubbish piling up in Leicester Square. No future, and England’s dreaming.
Some of these parallels are genuine, as Niall Ferguson recently laid out. State spending as a share of GDP has ticked up to mid-70s levels. Our recent bout of inflation not only stemmed from another post-war energy shock, but from a growth in the money supply of a speed of which Anthony Barber would have been proud. Most familiar is a palpable sense of gloomy resignation. “Mustn’t grumble”, as potholes go unfilled, and Britain sinks into the sea.
Even though the number of days lost to strikes is nowhere close to 1970s levels, 2022 and 2023 saw the most in four decades. An uninspiring Tory technocrat, overwhelmed by events, squares up for Number 10 with a self-declared fan of Harold Wilson. Neither engenders much voter enthusiasm, nor offers a radically different solution to the nation’s problems.
Similarity spotting can only go so far. IRA terror will not overhang this year’s election. The state no longer owns and runs everything from coal mines to travel agents. Trade unions may be irritating, but their membership is a shadow of what it once was. They can no longer bring the country to a standstill, or threaten elected governments. Our energy supply is a mess, but electricity isn’t being rationed. Britain is becoming miserable, not ungovernable.
Right-wingers raise the spectre of the 70s both to frighten the kids and as a source of vindication. The collapse of Heath’s government and the decade’s numerous humiliations – surrender to the miners, going “cap in hand” to the IMF, the Winter of Discontent, not qualifying for the World Cup – showed the inadequacy of the post-war consensus. The centre could not hold. St Margaret of Grantham was waiting in the wings, to swap our discord for harmony.
The worse the 1970s seem, the greater Thatcher’s miracle work appears. That inflation and strikes have become so politically alien stems from her success in taming both. Long afterward, the right could point to corporatist Keynesianism’s failure as justification for punishing interest rates, three million unemployed, and a few upset miners. Having lost four elections, Labour conceded and swallowed the lot: privatisations, union curbs, council house sales.
Challenging that narrative is the Thatcherite narrative is therefore of interest to those left-wingers wanting to overturn what they perceive as Thatcher’s continuing stranglehold on our economy. The New Economic Foundation declared 1976 Britain’s happiest year since the war, based on the metrics of income equality and ‘public sector investment’. IMF? What IMF?
Mandy Rice-Davies rules apply to explain why a left-wing think-tank might think an 83 per cent top rate of income tax might make up for double-digit inflation and international disgrace. But critics of the Thatcherite retelling are at least right to suggest that the 70s weren’t all bad. Opportunities for women and the working class were greater than ever before.
If you were a trade unionist whose pay kept pace with inflation, your standard of living would have been higher than ever before. Britain still led the world in music and fashion. More could afford to holiday abroad, since real incomes rose by an average of 2.8 per cent. But can space hoppers, the Sex Pistols, and the Costa del Sol ever justify 25 per cent inflation and 30 million days lost to strikes?
The memory doesn’t cheat: the 1970s really were post-war Britain’s darkest hour. One can say that our challenges – the oil shock, deindustrialisation, globalisation – confronted all of the Western world. But we handled the challenges particularly badly. Growth was lower and prices rose faster in Britain than in other major European countries. The British disease required Thatcher’s tough medicine.
That radical change was required was made clear by the fact the first efforts to impose monetary discipline began under Jim “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession” Callaghan and Denis Healey. Those still aiming to defend Tony Benn’s Alternative Economic Strategy and its modern successors are unwilling to accept that they were on the wrong side of history. Then again, they might still have the last laugh.
In a sense, Thatcherism was a victory from which the Conservatives have never quite recovered. Her governments were the only ones since the war to pass Evelyn Waugh’s threshold of putting the clock back: leaving Britain more conservative – or at least a little less socialist – than they found it. Today’s Tories can only dream of being similarly reactionary, whilst putting their faith in poseurs and charlatans.
Tedious cosplaying should be swapped for a willingness to apply Thatcher’s lessons to present circumstances. Today’s challenges are just as profound as those of the 1970s. Our problems may not seem as pressing as those that overwhelmed Heath, Wilson, and Callaghan. But they are just as existential, and are set to become far worse, Our prospects for recovery look much dimmer. We cannot simply close our eyes and wish for another Thatcher.
We may not yet have blackouts. But between our unwillingness to invest in our energy security – leaving us more reliant on imports than ever in five decades – and Labour’s wing and a prayer plans to decarbonise our electricity grid by 2030, they cannot be far off. Debt as a percentage of GDP is double its share in the 1970s. The tax take is higher than under Healey. Growth between 1970 and 1979 averaged 2.5 per cent. Rishi Sunak would kill for that today. Our long-term outlook is even bleaker.
If the welfare state is to survive in anything like its current form we will need growth of 2.9 per cent over the next half century according to the Centre for Policy Studies. That’s more than double the OBR’s projected rate. Looking abroad, China is a far more effective competitor than the Soviet Union ever was, and climate change is a great unknown. At home, managing multiculturalism poses a more profound challenge to Britain’s governability than obstreperous unions. It’s almost enough to have you reaching for the Aeneid.
The prospect of Keir Starmer surmounting these with Thatcheresque resolve is an absurdity. The change Britain needs must come from the right. But even after Heath’s second 1974 rejection by the voters, the Conservatives still held 277 seats. I’d be shocked if they even had half that number after this autumn. Tory civil war beckons. The party’s long-term future looks dire. Even a last-ditch conversion YIMBYism will not convince my generation to stop hating the Tories.
The country Thatcher inherited in 1979 may have been brought low by inflation, strikes, and socialism. But at least still possessed a cohesive identity. With memories of the Second World War ever present, patriotism wasn’t a dirty word. Scottish and Welsh nationalisms were in retreat. Emigration was more of a problem than immigration. Enough of us still believed that decline could be fought and that Britain should go forward. Can we say the same today?
Today’s Tory membership is more powerful than when Thatcher came to power, yet smaller and less representative of the average voter. They share responsibility for our current mess with MPs. Cosmic arrogance and petty short-sightedness have made for a good impression of Heath but have wasted an 80-seat majority. The Conservatives are in no fit state to be the vehicle of our salvation. Who governs Britain? Not us, mate.
A mindset shift is required, elsewhere described as Tory Leninism. To quote the 1970s’ leading intellectual: “Let me make it plain. You’ve gotta make way for the Homo Superior.”