The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (105 page)

The 1950s saw real growth in the British economy. With much of the rest of Europe still in ruins, for the present Britain had few competitors, and the retreat from empire and overseas responsibilities greatly reduced her costs. Like Disraeli, Macmillan never underestimated the importance of the nation’s comfort; his government built hundreds of new houses with the end-of-empire dividends. By 1959 Harold Macmillan’s boast that the British people ‘have never had it so good’ was evidently felt to be accurate. The Conservatives increased their majority by a hundred seats in the general election of that year.

Macmillan also addressed himself to defence options for Britain herself in a post-imperial age. Now that the atomic bomb had been invented, nuclear missiles offered a far cheaper way of defending Britain than conventional forces. Not having to support men and their families on military bases would save a great deal of money. It would end the unpopular and un British conscript ‘national service’ which had been in operation since the Second World War. But, although there was some experimentation in Britain with nuclear warheads, it became clear that America had perfected nuclear weapons to a higher degree than Britain could afford.

Britain’s abandonment of her own nuclear-weapon research and the Nassau Agreement of 1962, which signalled her dependence on America for such weapons, alarmed France. When Britain decided to apply for membership of the EEC in 1963, President Charles de Gaulle felt that Britain–and through Britain, America–would try to dominate the organization. The proudly nationalist de Gaulle did not accept France’s reduced role in the world and feared British power at the centre of Europe. He had no wish to encourage America as a superpower. Britain’s application was accordingly vetoed by France.

The humiliation inflicted by the EEC’s rejection as well as the mockery made by Labour of the much vaunted ‘independent British deterrent’, which was ‘neither independent, British nor a deterrent’, was the beginning of the end of thirteen years of Conservative rule. At the height of the Cold War there was one spying scandal after another. Britain’s security seemed deeply compromised in the early 1960s: there was the Portland spy ring, the Admiralty clerk William Vassal, as well as the intelligence officer George Blake who got forty-two years in prison for spying for the Russians. Questions were still being asked about the identity of the third man involved in the defection to Moscow of the high-ranking British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. Then the Profumo affair in 1963, when the secretary of state for war John Profumo was accused of sharing a call-girl mistress Christine Keeler with a Russian naval attaché, confirmed a growing suspicion that there was a careless decadence at the heart of the upper-crust government.

Although Profumo initially denied the relationship in a statement to the House of Commons, he eventually was forced to admit it and resigned. The senior judge Lord Denning’s official report into the affair exonerated Profumo of espionage, but confirmed the sensational press stories surrounding Lord Astor’s country home Cliveden. The affair sounded the death knell for an increasingly unpopular government. The trial for living off immoral earnings of Stephen Ward, a society osteopath who had introduced Profumo to Keeler and seemed to have provided mistresses for many Tory politicians, provided an unfavourable contrast with the situation in the country, where sterling crises prevented pay increases in the public sector. Since 1959 the Conservatives had put through little domestic legislation. Four new universities had been founded in 1961 and six more were planned in the wake of the 1963 Robbins Report, as were a number of new hospitals. Nevertheless the government gave the impression of being unwilling to put money into the maintenance of Britain’s public buildings, not least her schools. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which restricted immigration from Commonwealth countries, looked racist. Hugh Gaitskell denounced it in the House of Commons as ‘a plain anti-colour measure’. The Rent Act, which allowed far more competitive pricing, produced ruthless landlords like London’s Peter Rachman, who terrorized innocent bedsit-dwellers in the then run-down area of Notting Hill.

Thanks to Macmillan’s good relationship with President Kennedy, Britain became closely allied with America. Yet during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 it was quite obvious that, however special the ‘special relationship’, so often said to exist between the two countries, Britain was not accorded the status of a partner by the United States. When an American spy satellite orbiting over Cuba spotted Russian missiles apparently pointing at the United States, a world crisis of terrifying proportions threatened. Though America belonged to NATO, John F. Kennedy, the youthful and charismatic American president, opted to play a lone hand against the Russian threat.

He put a blockade round Cuba and brought the world to the brink of a third world war without telling his allies, not even Britain. British civil servants and politicians began to see that an alliance with America did not really offer a solution for post-imperial Britain, for evidently there was to be no discussion among equals. Therefore, in spite of de Gaulle’s rebuff, Britain began to revive her interest in the organization of European states. In terms of combined populations and of industrial and economic power, they made up as large a unit as America.

As a result of his theatrical abilities and his gift for presentation, Macmillan had become known to cartoonists as Supermac. But by the end of 1963 even his ability to convince the public was wearing thin. Although employment was high during the 1950s, the government’s economic policy had never been very smooth. In order to prevent inflation, the Conservatives had resorted to ‘stop-go’ policies: if prices rose too sharply, tax was suddenly increased; if they fell, interest rates were reduced. All in all, Macmillan’s administration was looking increasingly tawdry. At last, in 1963 illness forced him to resign dramatically in the middle of the Conservative party conference.

From his hospital bed Supermac made sure that it was a compromise candidate, the effete-looking fourteenth Earl of Home, who succeeded him as party leader and prime minister. Home gave up his peerage and became an MP as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Had his principal rival, the multi-talented progressive R. A. Butler become prime minister in his stead, as many in the party wished, the 1964 election might have had a different outcome.

Unfortunately Sir Alex was a completely unreconstructed aristocrat, more interested in shooting on his grouse moor than in managing the House of Commons, which as a member of the Lords he scarcely knew anyway. Macmillan in a lordly way might pretend that the grouse moors were his natural habitat, but in reality he was a furiously energetic party politician beneath the apparently effortless superiority.

As the 1964 election approached the world was dominated increasingly by new scientific discoveries, symbolized by America’s plans to put a man on the moon. The old certainties about Britain’s role were vanishing. Who was more fitted to lead Britain into an ever more competitive future where new industries must take the place of the old and obsolete? A cadaverous and faint-voiced lord who said that he used matchsticks to count with, or an energetic young economics don who promised to introduce Britain to ‘the white heat of technology’? Although it was a close-run thing there was not too much trouble deciding. Harold Wilson led Labour to victory by five votes in October 1964.

The Sick Man of Europe (1964-1979)

With the arrival of Labour in power in October 1964, the Swinging Sixties, as this progressive period is popularly known, really began. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was determined to modernize Britain. Her historic stability meant that the weight of tradition had a tendency to stifle change. The Ministry of Technology was created to thrust Britain forward into the modern age. By the late 1960s British and French engineers in happy collaboration trounced their American rivals by producing the Concorde aeroplane, which flew faster than the speed of sound. Consideration was even given to the amazing feat of submarine engineering to link the two countries which was finally achieved thirty years later, the Channel Tunnel.

Wilson’s government coincided with a seismic shifting of the historical templates, with revolutions in thought in both Britain and abroad. In July 1964 Winston Churchill retired from Parliament after almost sixty years as an MP; the previous year the last young men had emerged from doing national service, marking a full stop to the era of wartime austerity and to the habit of clean-cut conformity among the nation’s youth that the army required.

Youth’s rejection of the older generation had been announced by John Osborne’s play
Look Back in Anger
in 1956. By the mid-1960s ‘angry young men’ with long hair and outrageous clothing fresh out of university were not only the gadflies of the state, they set the tone for Britain. They became known for being ‘anti-establishment’, but in fact they were a new establishment whose allies were pop stars like the Liverpool group the Beatles, actors, photographers and models. With satirical TV shows such as
That Was the Week that Was
, and the satirical magazine
Private Eye
, which all made jokes not only about politicians but about the royal family, people in public life could no longer expect to escape criticism. The proliferating new universities–Sussex opened in 1961, Kent and Warwick in 1965, then eight more in 1966–gave Britain a far larger undergraduate population. Since many students were the first in their family to experience tertiary education, the universities became hotbeds of radical thought.

The impresario and anarchic director Joan Littlewood had already challenged the notion that all plays should take place in drawing rooms with her championing of working-class dramas and actors in her Theatre Royal in the East End. One kitchen-sink drama,
A Taste of Honey
in 1963, unblinkingly showed the trials of an unmarried mother. Littlewood’s 1963 musical
Oh What a Lovely War!
encapsulated the mood of the time in the scorn it poured on the officer class, an image from which they subsequently found it hard to escape.

The 1960s were the heyday of ideas and idealism and, paradoxically, of affluence. The young bought tellies, modern-looking furniture and bizarre fashionable clothes whose skirts were so short that only their generation could wear them. In 1966 young Britons began a consumer spree which has still not ended, and which their parents could never have enjoyed. Britain’s first credit card, the Barclaycard, transformed the notion of credit, which hitherto had hardly been taken further than paying in instalments for a three-piece suite bought on hire purchase. It paved the way to what has today become a leisure explosion of clothes, household appliances and the package holiday, all of which could be put on the credit card. By August 2002, some 49 per cent of all Britons had credit cards and were using them to spend £540,000 a minute–a total of £285 billion in 2001 alone.

The 1960s opened with the trial of Penguin Books for publishing an obscene book, D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. They were acquitted, a verdict which brought the notion of literary censorship to an end. The jury’s decision heralded an era of experimentation in all areas of life, with sexual permissiveness now made easier by the invention of the contraception pill. Under a great reforming home secretary, Roy Jenkins, the brilliant son of a miner MP, Labour moved Britain forward into a gentler, more humane society. Abortion was made legal in 1967 and thus safe for the poor (it had always been safe, though illegal, for the rich). This was part of an increasing sense that women were taking control of their destinies, the movement known as women’s liberation, which flourished from the late 1960s onwards and reflected the growing number of young women being educated. In 1951 only one-quarter of the student population were women; by the end of the century it would be over half.

Prodded by the popular new disciplines of psychiatry and psychology at the more modern universities, the old British private educational system of repressive boarding schools began to seem barbaric. Public schools were now laughed at for producing an unimaginative kind of imperial administrator who was made to seem redundant with the end of the empire. Indeed, education was undergoing huge changes at all levels. Labour, with their commitment to social reform, were determined to break a vicious circle of a tiny number of the population being creamed off at eleven by the eleven-plus exams, which separated the gifted few and packed them off to grammar schools. The rest mainly sank in the secondary moderns laid down by the Butler Education Act of 1944. Labour embarked on a programme of building comprehensive schools so that children of all abilities would be educated together, in the belief that this would take care of the problem of late developers or children from disadvantaged backgrounds who were eternally condemned by the eleven-plus to the outer darkness of the despised secondary moderns.

After the 1967 Plowden Report, teaching at primary level entered an experimental and imaginative phase in which understanding the child took precedence over the rigorous discipline with which British schooling had previously been associated. A whole generation of schoolchildren grew up of whom it was said that they were very happy and superb at creating things out of yogurt pots but could scarcely read. Nevertheless, initially it seemed that a new heaven on earth was being created by enlightened people which had done away with the problems, mainly class-ridden, of the past. The bowler hat vanished, and young Etonians spoke mockney (mock cockney) to imitate the argot of young working-class photographers. It was a romantic age: hairdressers were working-class heroes and ran off with heiresses, pop stars ran off with countesses. Stiff British society swung; the idea of class was turned on its head. Money was uncool; upper-middle-class people gave up sending their sons to their old prep schools and sent them to the local primary school. The Labour MP Tony Benn, who had been educated at Westminster public school and had renounced a viscountcy, made Holland Park Comprehensive famous when he sent all of his children there.