In a usually stable country like Britain, how periods of crisis are portrayed and remembered is a very powerful political weapon. For nearly half a century, the turmoil of the 1970s and the sense that the decade’s governments couldn’t cope have been used by the Conservatives to argue that Labour is never truly fit for office. Despite the relative competence of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s premierships – a competence that Keir Starmer aspires to now – the association between Labour governments and chaos has never been completely broken.
This picture of the 1970s is highly selective. The decade also brought many Britons greater freedom and equality, and the Conservatives were in power for almost half of it. But these realities have not lessened the influence of the Tory narrative. Constantly presented by rightwing newspapers, politicians and historians, it has a powerful simplicity. For the many voters who have seen post-imperial Britain as a country in decline, Labour’s struggling 1970s prime ministers have been perfect scapegoats.
But now that problems supposedly unique to that decade, such as out-of-control inflation, panic buying by the public and other disruptions to everyday life, have recurred under Boris Johnson, a fundamental rethink of our political past and present has become possible. If the Conservatives are finally to be removed from power, this rethink may be essential.
Johnson’s failures as prime minister ought to cast his 1970s predecessors in a new light. If he, with a big majority, an often sycophantic press and a limited opposition, can still seem so out of his depth, then we should stop being so dismissive of the efforts of Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan to govern Britain in a much more hostile political environment, which had frequent hung parliaments, more independent political journalism and Margaret Thatcher waiting to pounce. The three men’s policies often failed, but never as disastrously as Johnson’s. Callaghan’s inability to maintain good relations with the unions ultimately led, in the winter of discontent, to some dead people being left unburied. That infamous episode looks trivial next to Johnson’s lethal complacency about Covid.
He and his defenders often argue that his impact as prime minister has been limited by disruptive global events. Yet so were the governments of the 1970s: that decade’s two energy crises, just like today’s, increased inflation and reduced economic growth. We need to acknowledge that any modern British government, in a middling country with limited influence, can be thrown off course by external events. If we accept this, the power of the 1970s as the great cautionary tale of British politics will significantly wane.
For Labour, the resemblance of the Johnson era to modern Britain’s supposed nadir presents a double opportunity. Not only to neutralise a political negative once and for all, but also to position the Conservatives rather than themselves in voters’ minds as the party of disorder. For months, Starmer and his shadow ministers have included references to “Conservative chaos” in their public statements. In the absence of compelling Labour policies – however welcome some of them are, for example on strengthening the rights of employees – Starmer’s main strategy is to play on voters’ growing exasperation and anxiety about Johnson’s inability to govern, and to promise that life under Labour would be safer and calmer.
In theory, this is a shrewd approach. In some ways, Britain is even more turbulent now than in the 1970s: more fragmented by nationalism, more polarised by wealth and poverty, more clamorous with discontent thanks to social media, and more disgusted at its ruling class. The Tories have been in power much longer than they or Labour were in the 1970s, and their sense of entitlement and their self-serving behaviour are much worse, as Partygate continues to expose. There was plenty of corruption in Britain in the 1970s, but compared with Johnson’s cosiness with the super-rich - the likes of Evgeny Lebedev – the lives of our 1970s prime ministers seem quite modest: Heath went sailing, Callaghan had a farm, Wilson owned a holiday bungalow in the Scilly Isles. The Conservatives’ current air of decadence and casual destructiveness may have no precedent in our modern history.
And yet they could easily win the next election. Labour’s poll lead is much smaller and less solid than those Blair and Thatcher achieved as opposition leaders. The difference is that today’s electorate has not definitely had enough of the status quo. Part of the problem for Labour is that, unlike Thatcher in the 1970s, it does not have a chorus of supportive newspapers constantly declaring that Britain is in crisis. Nor, unlike then, is there general and open discontent among the establishment about the state of the country. As with Brexit, there are mutterings and isolated outbursts, but most business leaders, for example, are quiet, despite the Conservatives’ dead-end economic policies, calculating that the Tories may yet win another term.
Even many left-of-centre Britons, pessimistic after multiple election defeats, can be reluctant to connect the mess Johnson has made of the country to his party’s electoral prospects. To adapt the famous line about capitalism attributed to the theorist Fredric Jameson, many leftists find it easier to imagine the end of Britain than the end of Tory rule.
It’s virtually a heresy to say now, but the closest Labour has come to a really effective critique of the Conservatives’ record in power since 2010 was at the 2017 election. Labour’s manifesto described the frayed and desperate condition of much of Britain in clear and resonant language, and that systemic condemnation, at least as much as Jeremy Corbyn’s actual policies, caused the surge in Labour support. When the party offered less critique and more policy at the 2019 election, its vote shrivelled.
Yet Starmer, in his determination to dissociate himself from “Mr Corbyn”, as he called him with theatrical distaste in the Commons this week, has disconnected Labour from the sort of broadbrush but morally and emotionally potent politics that Corbyn reawakened. Starmer is trying to condemn the whole Tory status quo while also presenting himself as a cautious figure. As Thatcher’s victory in 1979 showed, voters often prefer politicians offering to rescue the country to be radicals.
However, it’s not realistic to expect Starmer’s Labour, or the other opposition parties, to crystallise what is wrong with Johnson’s Britain on their own. If the chaos of these years is to be properly remembered, not just at the next election but for decades afterwards, then that work also needs to be done by journalists, historians, activists and voters. Unless enough of us decide these are the worst of times, the Conservatives will swagger on.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
