The unmentionable issue
Christopher Booker
Is the last year of the drab, drifting Seventies really about to mark a historic turning point in our national affairs, as a number of commentators (e.g. Peregrine Worsthorne and Paul Johnson) would have us believe? Have we arrived at the most significant watershed in British politics since 1945? Or are we faced by yet another false dawn, merely another short-lived attempt to stem a tide which has been carrying us too long and too strongly in one direction to be reversed? Such is the central question underlying this election campaign, the low-energy, lacklustre nature of which may seem itself to give the answer we all fear. Nevertheless it may be worth trying to see this election in some kind of broader historical perspective, if only to emphasise again just how hard it is to imagine ourselves outside the frame of reference in which British politics has been conducted in the past thirty years, and which has brought us to this dispiriting pass.
The most obvious single thing about British life since 1 945 is that, in common with all other industrialised countries, we have lived through the greatest explosion in material expectations the world has ever known. Initially this revolution in expectations was created by the war. The sense of egalitarian idealism, the hope of a better, fairer post-war world, in complete contrast to the miseries and inequalities of the Thirties, was of course concentrated above all through the Labour Party. The new world was to be won, as the war had been won, through a massive increase in the benevolent power of the State. The State was to provide welfare benefits and education, it was to plan better towns and cities, it was to take a massive stake in the running of industry and the economy. It was to take at least a giant step towards becoming the Universal Provider, the Great Mother who would provide fair shares for all her children. For a heady year or two the fair face of the Great Mother (with Mr Attlee as her dutiful, respectable little paterfamilias) survived — until by the late Forties. the dark underside of Socialist idealism had become altogether too intrusive, and we came instead to see the Terrible Mother, ensnaring her children in red tape, bureaucracy and restrictions, keeping them half-starved on a diet of snoek which, despite all Nanny Summerskill's admonitions, no longer seemed enough.
Thus came the first great shift of post-war British politics, when we summoned back Churchill as the Father of his People to 'set us free' — to return to sturdy independence, to the self-respecting old values, and at least to that kind of modest prosperity which was referred to as being 'just like pre-war'. Nevertheless, in the late Fifties, we unexpectedly came to discover a new Universal Provider — Consumer Capitalism, transformed almost out of recognition by postwar technological advances, dishing out television sets, detergents, washing machines, cars, continental holidays, and all kinds of goodies scarcely dreamed of. Expectations once again began to rise in an entirely new way, and as the supermarkets and tower blocks began to proliferate in Britain's cities, Supermac was briefly transformed into the most genial kind of Fatherfigure of all, everybody's favourite uncle.
Then, in the early Sixties, things began to go subtly wrong. Expectations continued to rise, but we were not working hard enough to justify them. We began to make up the gap simply by printing more money, to keep the goodies flowing in. The family was once again becoming restive, in a strangely schizophrenic way. On the one hand, there was much talk about the dark underside of Consumer Capitalism — that it was selfish, that it was the world of 'I'm all right Jack', producing nothing but 'a candy floss society' in which the 'spivs and speculators' thrived. What.was needed was a return to the more compassionate values of Mother State, to reduce the imbalance between `private affluence and public squalor' — more homes, schools, universities, hospitals. On the other hand, we had really become hooked on the delights of our new Technological Consumer-ism. A general slide into infantile wish-fulfilment was taking place, reflected in the sudden new importance of 'Youth'. The children wanted more freedom to enjoy their new 'swinging' prosperity, without interference from a boring old Father-figure like Macmillan, who suddenly seemed thoroughly 'square' and old-fashioned.
Thus came the second great shift of post-war politics. In 1962 and 1963, the old world collapsed in a frenzy of satire and scandal, and a new, much more alarming phase began — the age of the middle-aged Boy Hero, 'dynamic' Harold and 'abrasive' Ted. The keynote of the next twelve years of their reign over the British political scene was to be an illusionary mixture of the values of 'Father' and 'Mother', occasionally 'talking tough' with 'safe' targets, like 'racists' such as Ian Smith, but generally allowing a steady slide into that shadowy, inchoate world of dependence on an everswelling State, to make up for the increasing failure of the Consumer Capitalist machine to satisfy undiminished expectations.
Disaster slipped by into disaster. At least, after the collapse of Harold's first two years of 'dynamic' fantasy-talk into the great crisis of 1966, we had four years of dreary slog to keep some kind of restraint on the children's demands through increasingly conservative, orthodox 'Treasury policies' which by 1970 had produced a balanced budget and a surplus on international trade. But all this was only bought at the price of keeping production down while expectations remained undiminished — with the consequent steady rise of a new, much more surly and resentful mood among the unions. In fact as the Seventies began, events could scarcely have conspired to produce a more disastrous scenario. First there was Ted who, for all the initial parade of tough talk about 'lame ducks' and `Selsdon Man', was a Mother's boy at heart — comforting himself by huge new jellies of bureaucracy in local government, the health service and Europe. In a typical fantasy-gesture, he hoped to get industry moving again by telling the children that they could have enormous piles of non-existent money to spend on new machines — but they spent It instead on houses and office blocks. Inflation grew worse than ever, the resentment of the unions boiled up to become the most important and central factor in British political life — and then, as if pat on cue, came Harold at his very weakest, to allow wages, public spending and bureaucracy to let rip for eighteen foolish, terrible months.
The shock waves of those catastrophic Heath-Wilson years in the mid-Seventies, when the unions appeared to run the country, when public sector borrowing rose to more than £10,000 million (having been at zero in 1971), when inflation reached 27 per cent, have been echoing through our politics ever since. In 1975 and 1976, we were only pulled back from the brink of final disaster by the Labour Government (like Wilson's in the late Sixties before it) by recovering at least some measure of a more disciplined conservative attitude to money. The ageing Boy Heroes Heath and Wilson, have departed — to be succeeded by those two very different figures, Uncle Jim, with his weak, avuncular smile, and prim Aunt Margaret, who takes such a totally dim view of everything that has been going on in the past two decades. There is no doubt that since the mid-Seventies there has been a profound shift in public opinion against much of the dreadful legacy of that period — against bureaucracy and VAT and Europe, against huge redevelopment schemes, against arrogant trade union leaders. The revulsion against the dark underside Of Socialism (whether practised by Labour or Conservative governments) runs deeper than in 1970, deeper even than in 1951.
Everything in short points to a considerable Thatcher victory on 3 May. The question is — how deep does her understanding of what has gone wrong with our society In the past 35 years really run? It is one thing to recognise how self-destructive our dependence on one Universal Provider, the Mummy State, has become. But the real problem lies in the way our whole society has become dependent, through the revolution of rising expectations, on a kind of amalgam of State and Consumer Capitalism —to provide an inflated material standard of living which almost certainly cannot survive the rest of this century, and should probably begin reducing long before that, if anything is to be saved from the wreck at all. The real spectre that haunts the future of Britain as we go into the Eighties is that, in the past thirty years, we have summoned up a Frankenstein's monster in our own expectations which has already begun to show its ugly, unseeing face in many of the horrors of the last few years, and is likely only to become even more violent and uncontrollable so long as those expectations are allowed to run on unchecked against silently mounting pressures which will make them more and more unrealisable. Until any of our politicians begin to talk actively in these terms, instead of continuing to lull, to soothe and to placate us all into thinking that we can go on clinging to the udders of the Universal Providers forever, we shall still be living in the cloud-cuckoo land that has been created by the very exceptional, short-lived phase in our history which is already painfully beginning to modulate into another, quite different. On that count, Mrs Thatcher, the champion of Consumer Capitalism and growth is no more realistic than Uncle Jim — as we may all discover to our cost in the five years that lie ahead.
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