Shattered hopes The seventies will probably be remembered as the decade when the decline of Britain, at home and abroad, accelerated at an alarming speed. For some, the decline was all the more dismaying after the high hopes and aspirations of the swinging sixties and the Wilsonian pro- mise of a national rebirth forged in the white heat of technology. The rebirth proved to be a miscarriage, and in retrospect the swinging sixties largely a media event. They were dis- covered if not invented-nature might well have copied art-by Time magazine, wNhich declared that Britain was in the midst of a bloodless revolution. A new group of people were taking over from the old establishment and creating a new kind of classlessness. Time got it about half right The old class system was crumbling, and Shavian middle class morality with it. The old earthiness of the English (I am not certain that this ever applied to the Scots and Welsh) reemerged, but the new group who were largely to dominate the politics of the seventies were not the cheerful, lusty Shakespearean characters the magazine- saw enlivening the streets of London. Instead, they declared a new kind of class war under the banners of equality and social justice. Butskellism and the old easy-going pragmatism gave way to an un-British ideological fervour, at least in Congress House and the national execu- tive committee of the Labour Party. The inevitable Tory reaction followed. Mr Paul Rose, the former Labour Member for Blackley, put it another way when he decided not to seek reelection in 1979. Parliament, he said, no longer reflected thle variety and sophistication of modern society but the ossification of institutions and attitudes responsible for Britain's decline. The concept of two mono- lithic classes represented by the two major parties was as simplistic as applying Adam Smith's or Karl Marx's analysis of Victorian capitalism to the EEC or Comecon. Neverthe- less, the direction of the country could and did swing between the two extremes. It did indeed, and with disastrous results. Not even the West German economy could have survived the changes of direction imposed by .' successive governments upofi poor old Britain. History cannot of course be neatly packaged in decades, and the danger signals were already flying in 1970. The shift to service industries had ignored the obvious- fact that they could ilot exist without the creation of wealth, and strikes were diminishing what was left. Efforts to restrain wages had failed to check inflation, and the then Mr Harold Wilson had failed to check inflation, and union reform. De-industrializa- tion was already under way before the dawn of the decade of decline. Mr Edward Heath came to power determined to "roll back the frontiers of government" and set free his Selsdon Man. He was no less determined to enact trade union reform, but did not seem to understand that the nature of the power of the unions was changing. A decisive shift in power was taking place as Mr Heathi was about to discover. The trade unions were no longer the Solid South of the Labour Party. Some union leaders were begin- ning to look like rebellious barons. The Queen's writ no longer necessarily nan to their headquarters keeps. The 1972 Industrial Relations Act and the government's prices and incomes policy provoked instant counter-attacks. The miners' strike of 1972 was more like guerrilla warfare than an industrial dispute. Flying pickets pr-oved to be Britain's Baader-Meinhoff Gang or Red Brigades, and were more successful. At the Saltley coke depot, 6,000 pickets defied the forces of law and order. That is, the elected government of the day submitted abjectly to unconstitutional forces. Mr Arthur Scargill, the York- shire mnuners' leader who organ- ized the flying pickets, did not bother to disguise his political motive-that he was fighting a class war and not a wage battle. "It wvas them or us. We were out to defeat the Heath Gov- ernment, and the only way to wage war was to attack vulner- able points. . . We wished to paralyse the nation's economy. It's as simple as that." Other union leaders were not so outspoken about their poli- tical ambitions, but by 1974 their quest for power had been given a new dimension. After demonstrating that they could bring down any government, Labour or Tory, they demanded a share in the control of the national economy with govern- ment and of industry vwith employers. The corporate state was their immediate goal. The new Labour Government was only too happy to oblige. The Social Contract established a unique relationship between the national government and only one section of the com- munity. Mr Wilson promised to repeal the Industrial Relations Act, subsidize food and freeze rents in return for a promise from the Trades Union Con- gress to restrain wage demands. The unions were granted Immunities which for most pur- poses placed them above the law, but the TUC was in no position to deliver. Average earnings rose by 25 per cent in the first year, and in the next some wage settlements reached 30 per cent. The value of sterling droopped as the infla- tion rate and public sector borrowing requirement threat- ened to get out of control. The question was again asked, who rules Britain ? The answer was certainly not the unions, although the TUC had largely dictated the government's industrial policy. The members of its General Council, who were deferentially treated as statesmen because they were assumed to represent organized labour, were as powerless as the government because most of them could not control their own shop stewards. As far as the economy was concerned, nobody ruled. Pos- terity might decide that it was mob rule. Financial collapse, and per- haps dangerous civil unrest, was avoided with the help of the International Monetary Fund, which demanded wage restraint and cuts in public spending, but little else was gained or learnt. Industrial guerrilla warfare broke out again after another wvinter of discontent in which the dead were left unburied. The newspaper files of tbe seventies make grim reading. Even British membership of the European Economic Community failed to meet the high hopes of those wvho expected a re- generation of industry, but we Al1 know that life was not that grim. The 1980 edition of SociaZ Trends, published by the Government Statistical Service, showed how living standards of the majority actually rose as the nation's fortunes declined. "Moving into the seventies we experienced inflation, rela- tively high unemployment and oil crises. But this last decade also sav a moderate increase in material wellbeing, a greater choice in personal consumption, the growth of the leisure indus- try, increases in company perks, a modest decline in the extent of inequalities in income and wealth, and a change in the bal- ance between privately and pub- licly provided services." For the majority, life wvas better in the swinging sixties despite the three-day week, anmual strikes and the decline of traditional industries. More than half were owner-occupiers, enjoyed central heating and had the use of a car. More than nine out of 10 had a television set, and six out of 10 a tele- phone. Two out of five spent their holidays abroad. About tvelve million adults were members cf trade unions, and as long as they paid their dues and went on strike w^hen directed they could hope to keep ahead of inflation and improve their living standards. This presumably explained -why most of them silently suffered strikes and disruptions ur,til 1979 when they decided that they had had enough and helped to return the Conservatives to power. The decade passed leaving behind tno more unanswered questions. Were the majority prepared to accept a lowering of living standards, growing unemployment and other painful adjustments * and wvould Mrs Thatchers policies, which called for these painful reme- dies, reverse the nation's decline ? I, for one, am unwilling to hazard a guess. Louis Heren i