Thursday 21 October 2010

A tale unfolds


I’ve entered into a room in the middle of a conversation. I missed the opening, so it has taken a little time for things to assemble in proper order. This is a conversation that’s far from finished, one that’s destined to go on, one that I intend not to miss. What’s being talked about, what’s the subject? Why, we are the subject, the British are the subject, a large part of our post-war political, social and cultural history is the subject. You see I’ve been reading State of Emergency-the Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook!

This is the first of his books I’ve ever tackled though it is the third part in what is clearly shaping up to be a classic of narrative history, a story told in a simple, discursive style, scholarly without being weighed down by scholarship, accessible in the best sense of the term. I missed the early parts of the ‘conversation’, his account of the Macmillan years – Never Had it so Good, and the first ministry of Harold Wilson- White Heat. I intend to catch up with these just as soon as I am able, just as I intend to follow the author’s future meanderings through the mid and late seventies.

The four years he describes in State of Emergency, so called because Edward Heath, then prime minister, called no less than five states of emergency, are full of incident, high politics and low drama. Drama, yes, that’s the word, in politics certainly, though tragedy might serve better. It’s the tragedy of Edward Heath, conceivably the unluckiest prime minster in all of British history, a man overwhelmed by events.

As I said previously, I acquired a greater understanding of the Heath years in a few pages of Sandbrook than I did from several hundred of Edward Heath, the official biography by Philip Ziegler. Heath had the reputation of being a new kind of Conservative, so his friends thought, so his enemies assumed, one who was believed to have embraced a free-market oriented policy, adopted at a conference held at Selsdon, allowing Harold Wilson to dub him Selsdon Man, after Piltdown Man, the famous anthropological fraud.

It was a myth: Heath was not a monetarist, not a prototype for Margaret Thatcher. No, he was the last of the ‘one nation’ Tories, the last of a pre-war generation who believed that unemployment was the greatest evil. Rather than cutting back on public expenditure, his government presided over a major expansion in the welfare state. The simple fact is that this philosophy was untenable, that the economic progress that had upheld the political consensus pursued since 1945 was over never to return. Inflation and stagflation, its new cousin, were set to replace unemployment as the great evil.

The storms that beset Heath, this elusive, cold, slightly ridiculous man with his overblown ‘upper class’ accent, would have destroyed even the strongest, and he was far from that. I alluded previously to George Dangerfield’s classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, a study of the four years leading up to the First World War when England was in danger of being torn apart by union militancy, by the Irish problem, by feminist radicals. Between 1970 and 1974 the spectres returned: England was once again being torn apart by union militancy, the Irish problem and all sorts of radicals! It seems to me that these are the key years, a bridge between the past of Macmillan and the future of Thatcher. Heath was not the wave of the future; he was the last surge of the past.

There is so much more in this book than politics. Sandbrook has an incredible mastery of his brief, with wonderful attention to detail. It’s almost as if he had lived through the period himself, although he was only born in 1974. There are dark passages, the account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the IRA atrocities are particularly grim. But there is much on the details of ordinary life, of a time which actually saw an increase in living standards and expectations.

Some snippets caused me to laugh out loud, including a comment by one Dave Hill of a band called Slade, dressed outrageously in silks and satins favoured by performers at the time, a dreadful gay caricature, saying that he could not be camp if he tried “coz I’m working-class.” This was a time, up until 1971, that Wimpey burger restaurants did not allow unaccompanied women in after midnight because they were assumed to be prostitutes; a time when the wholly naff avocado with prawns emerged as the sophisticated and favoured starter at pretentious middle-class dinner parties!

The details go on and on in a hugely entertaining way. Sandbrook quotes an article by a certain firebrand Labour Member of Parliament, something that might very well have been penned by Karl Marx, on improving the condition of the working class – “…few people could have imagined that Robert Kilroy-Silk would end up smothering himself with cockroaches to amuse the viewers of ITV.”

Some enthusiasms were rendered absurd by future developments, including The Ecologist magazine’s welcome to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a movement which “deserves our best wishes, our sympathy and our attention. We might learn something”. The Daily Telegraph fared no better, predicting that a certain new African leader would be a contrast to all the others and a “staunch friend to Britain.” What was his name, you ask? He was Major General Idi Amin.

This is a splendid book, a conversation that really is worth listening to, a drama worth watching, by far the best account I have come across of our passage from one state of social and political evolution to another.

32 comments:

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  5. But that’s exactly what he was, a one nation Tory, a protégé of Macmillan, a man with a deep belief that consensus was possible, which only added to his tragedy. Gosh, have you heard him speak? The accent is laughable, a terrible, fruity parody of RP!

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  6. His famous rudeness I believe can be accounted for by the fact that he was a grammar school boy made good, one bedevilled by an abiding sense of social inferiority, never quite one of us. :-)

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  9. I'm not sure I could bear to revisit those years, Ana, but for me, at least, they were eventful and enlightening - politics notwithstanding. From my perspective, Heath was a closet International Socialist whose actions and inactions did a great deal of damage to Britain, and who did nothing at all to repair the damage caused by Wilson's Marxist traitors.

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  12. Adam - I had the dubious privilege of attending Roxy Music's first public performance. They were dreadful. Two years later they were much improved.

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  15. Adam, his politics was one nation Toryism for the twentieth century, an extension of the path taken by Macmillan. Your concept of one nation Toryism hardly survived the First World War. These years are define by union troubles, ironic considering how much time and effort Heath took to weld them to his ideas of consensus and gradual reform. I have not the least idea what William Hague has to do with this. His Yorkshire brogue grates on me, but at least it’s more authentic than Heath as it is spoken.

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  16. Irish problem? Bonny Portmore?

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  18. Calvin, alas in many ways, though it does not please me to say so, Heath was more sinned against than sinning. His road to hell was indeed paved with the best of intentions.

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  20. That definition could very well fit in with what Heath aimed for. I can see little difference. MacMillan and Heath were the source of problems that the Thatcher ministry battled to put right, the awful state socialism we now know as Butskellism.

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  22. Heath's accent was a joke in the Party, those terrible vowels. People still laught at it. And that's my last word on that particular point!

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  25. He completed a route mapped out by Macmillan. If there is sin here the one is as guilty as the other.

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  29. Adam, one can, because I can and I do; they were very much from the same mould and I have no reason to doubt at all that Macmillan would have made the same application as Heath if he had been in power in the 70s. So, I believe that prawns were a 'sign of a declining nation', do I? Well, if you say so. :-))

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