The Arts in the 1970s

Cultural Closure

Dr Bart Moore-Gilbert, Bart Moore-Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415099066
• eBook ISBN: 9781134858378
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Were the 1970s really `the devils decade'? Images of strikes, galloping inflation, rising unemployment and bitter social divisions evoke a period of unparalleled economic decline, political confrontation and social fragmentation. But how significant were the pessimism and self-doubt of the 1970s, and what was the legacy of its cultural conflicts?
Covering the entire spectrum of the arts - drama, television, film, poetry, the novel, popular music, dance, cinema and the visual arts - The Arts in the 1970s challenges received perceptions of the decade as one of cultural decline. The collection breaks new ground in providing the first detailed analysis of the cultural production of the decade as a whole, providing an invaluable resource for all those involved in cultural, media and communications studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Cultural closure or post-avantgardism?

Bart Moore-Gilbert

‘THE DEVIL’S DECADE’?

Whatever their cultural or political affiliations, contemporary commentators tended to see the 1970s as a watershed. Christopher Booker, the Daily Telegraph and Spectator columnist, saw them as ‘the beginning of one of the most profound shifts in psychological, intellectual and spiritual perspectives to have taken place in Western civilisation’ (1980: preface). From the New Left, Tom Nairn argued that:

the years that witnessed the end of the great struggle in Indo-China, the oil-producers’ revolt and the revolution in Portugal will appear in retrospect to mark a turning-point in the history of ideas, as well as in American foreign policy or international relations.

(1977:361–2)

Such views were echoed in much of the decade’s cultural production. Muriel Sparks’s The Takeover (1976) is fairly representative, seeing the 1970s as ‘a complete mutation, not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system, or a global recession, but such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud’ (p. 127).

Britain’s predicament was only relatively bad in comparison with some other countries, but its steady deterioration in a number of key areas as the decade progressed gave much contemporary analysis an apocalyptic tone. Nairn talks of a ‘rapidly accelerating backwardness, economic stagnation, social decay, and cultural despair’ (1977:51) as indicative of a society ‘decayed to the point of disintegration’ (p.67). Booker describes the decade as ‘a time when, in politics, in the arts or in almost any other field one considers, the prevailing mood was one of a somewhat weary, increasingly conservative, increasingly apprehensive disenchantment’ (1980:5). While acknowledging Kermode’s argument (1966) that every era is liable to exaggerate its sense of being a critical moment of cultural transition, there is some reason not to dismiss such analysis as simply melodramatic.

Contemporary observers were right to stress that the problems which plagued Britain in the decade were linked to broader international transformations. First, the stasis in the global political system established by the first Cold War was undermined by America’s defeat in Vietnam, followed by a further decline in American prestige as a result of Watergate. This in turn (despite détente in the form of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the Helsinki declaration of 1976) led to a rapid expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence in the Third World (Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Afghanistan). At the same time, however, increasing dissidence within the eastern bloc (Solzhenitsyn, Charter 77) began to undermine the hegemony of Soviet communism and paved the way for the reform programmes of the 1980s. Equally, there was growing dissatisfaction within Western European countries with the status quo provided by the post-war settlement, with effects as disparate as the collapse of quasi-fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal, the rise of urban terrorism (Baader-Meinhof in Germany, ETA in Spain, Red Brigades in Italy, the Angry Brigade in Britain) and the acceleration of political separatism in areas as diverse as Northern Ireland, Corsica and the Basque country.

As was the case elsewhere in a world struggling to come to terms with historically high rates of inflation (in which the costs of the Vietnam war and two sharp rises in oil prices played a prominent role), many of Britain’s problems were exacerbated by deterioration in the economic sphere. The middle years of the decade brought the most intractable economic recession since the war (though its impact was to prove considerably less severe than those of the early 1980s and 1990s). Prices trebled between 1970 and 1980 (with house prices, despite the 1973–4 crash in the market, increasing tenfold). Government debt went from zero in 1970 to £9 billion by 1976. The 1973 stock market slump was the steepest since 1929. A series of major industrial failures in the mid-1970s, including Leyland, Ferranti, Rolls-Royce, ICL and Alfred Herbert, illustrated the vulnerability of an economy which for decades had been declining in competitiveness. By 1975 Britain had sunk to twentieth in the table measuring per capita national product. Economic nemesis seemed imminent. The Labour government increased public spending by 9 per cent in 1974–5 while the rest of Europe was deflating. Despite a 400,000 increase in public sector personnel in the decade—in 1975 administrative staff outnumbered medical personnel by three to one in the National Health Service (NHS) —there was a perceived steady decline in the provision and quality of public services. The year 1975 brought 30 per cent pay increases for power workers, miners and railwaymen—and hyperinflation. Foreign confidence collapsed, leading to the sterling crises of 1976. Humiliatingly, the Labour government was forced to seek an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, the price of which was savage pruning of the public expenditure programmes of the previous eighteen months. Burk and Cairncross see the IMF debacle as ‘a watershed in postwar economic policy in which full employment ceased to be the overriding object of policy, and control of inflation became the abiding preoccupation of government’ (1992:xi).

Thus the IMF crisis not only lent credibility to the monetarist philosophy of the emerging Tory New Right, but also seriously undermined Labour confidence in Keynesian models of economic management. Callaghan’s 1976 speech to the Labour Party conference expressed a defensiveness which was to become the hallmark of the remaining term of the last Labour government:

For too long this country, all of us—yes, this conference too—has been ready to settle for borrowing money abroad to maintain our standards of life, instead of grappling with the fundamental problems of British industry…. Higher inflation followed by higher unemployment—that is the history of the last twenty years.

(cited in Whitehead 1985:188)

According to Williamson, unemployment grew overall from 3 per cent in 1971 to 5 per cent in 1979 (to 12.3 per cent in 1983), while amongst under-25s it mushroomed from 27.3 per cent in 1970 to 44 per cent in 1979 (1990:202–4). As the threat to living standards mounted, there was industrial conflict on a scale unprecedented since the 1920s. Most significant were the two miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1973–4, which brought down the Heath government, and the 1978–9 ‘winter of discontent’ which undermined Callaghan and was instrumental in the triumph of Thatcher at the 1979 election. The success of the unions in frustrating both Labour and Tory attempts to regulate economic behaviour pointed to the relative weakness of central government during the decade. Both parties were hampered by an inability to win clear electoral mandates. Heath’s narrow and unexpected win in 1970 established the pattern. In February 1974, Wilson failed to get an overall majority and won a majority of only four seats in the October election. From 1975 Labour became increasingly dependent on minority parties (most notably the Liberals), forging pacts which, characterized more by expediency than any genuine shared vision, just enabled Callaghan to cling to power.

That this pact seemed to offer the Liberal Party its only real chance of political influence after the Thorpe scandal indicates the degree to which the middle ground in British politics shrank during the decade. The 1970s saw a distinct radicalization in British politics. In the Labour Party this process began in the late 1960s with disaffection at Labour’s failure to effect ‘any large-scale structural change’. The authors of the 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto (re-issued in expanded form in 1968) interpreted the goal of Wilson’s administration thus: ‘It is to muffle real conflict, to dissolve it into a false political consensus; to build, not a genuine and radical community of life and interest, but a bogus conviviality between every social group’ (pp. 7–8). Such disillusion intensified in the 1970s; for the Labour Left, in Whitehead’s view, Callaghan’s government marked ‘the death of Keynesian welfare socialism and the birth of monetarism, the external dictatorship of the markets and the American bankers’ (1985:200). Particularly irritating to the radical Left was the failure to fulfil manifesto pledges on wealth tax, reform of private education and official secrets. Policies to encourage pay restraint were seen as further evidence of a return to the Wilsonian strategy of managing capitalism. New networks such as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Labour Coordinating Committee articulated these frustrations with a vigour which allowed the Left to triumph in policy making during the period 1980–3 (for instance, securing the party’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament).

A similar disengagement from ‘consensus’ politics was evident in the Tory party after the appointment of Margaret Thatcher as leader in 1975. (She was later to describe supporters of ‘consensus’ within her first cabinet as ‘quislings’.) The ascendancy of the New Right was enabled by the crisis within the Conservative Party after the failure of Heath’s corporatist version of Toryism at three out of the four elections since 1964, together with the emergence of a number of factors which could be linked together as perceived threats to authority and the social fabric. Of paramount concern was civil order, perceived to be at risk from sources as diverse as urban terrorism (whether the short-lived and ineffectual Angry Brigade or, much more alarmingly, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which killed forty-four people in mainland Britain in 1974 alone); industrial militancy, symbolized most graphically by the flying picket; and rising crime, particularly involving violence.

The often crudely drawn links between crime and young people played an important role in the New Right’s construction of the youth culture of the 1960s ‘as deliberately pushing society into anarchy’ (Hall and Jefferson 1975:73). Accordingly, attempts to contain it were directed at some of the characteristic manifestations of the ‘counter-culture’. The Festival of Light (1971) and a variety of ‘pro-Life’ organizations emerged to contest the liberalization of abortion and censorship laws in the previous decade. As the agitation for prosecution of Gay News for an allegedly blasphemous poem in 1977 indicated, cultural production was seen by the New Right as a central source of the perceived moral degeneration of 1970s Britain. The IT trial of 1970 and the Oz trial of 1971 disabled the underground press. In education, the Black Papers and the furore over ‘progressive’ methods of teaching (for instance at the William Tyndale primary school in 1975) indicated the growing confidence of the New Right, which also reacted with increasing vigour to vestiges of student radicalism, such as harrassment of right-wing speakers in universities.

Above all, the New Right benefited from exploiting fears of a drift towards totalitarian socialism. The apparently unstoppable growth of union power and the ‘hard’ Left both within and outside parliament (witness the Trades Union Congress’s (TUC’s) invitation to the head of the KGB to its 1976 conference, the emergence of Militant Tendency and the fourfold growth in membership of the International Socialists between 1970 and 1974) provoked spectacular defections from Left to Right in the decade—most notoriously Paul Johnson, Bernard Levin and ex-Labour Minister Lord Chalfont. This facilitated the defection of four Labour ex-Ministers to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981. Networks of resistance to the perceived threat of collectivism proliferated, including John Gorst’s Middle-Class Association and the National Federation of the Self-Employed. The authoritarian agenda of the New Right was most plainly visible in its own ‘lunatic fringe’, the sinister and extremist para-military organizations like General Walker’s Civil Assistance or Colonel Stirling’s GB75. Norris McWhirter’s National Association for Freedom intervened decisively in the Grunwick dispute of 1976–7 in defence of the proprietor’s right to sack women workers of Asian origin seeking union recognition; and, with equal success, to break postal workers’ ban on processing mail to South Africa.

The image of Britain as a fragmenting society was further heightened in the 1970s by highly visible racial divisions. The 1971 Immigration Act, introducing the overtly racist notion of patriality, did little to reassure the non-white communities (3 per cent of the total population by 1976). Despite legislation like the 1976 Race Relations Act, discrimination persisted. In the mid-1970s, 8 per cent of black Britons had non-manual jobs, compared with 40 per cent of whites. Much friction was caused in inner cities by the ‘sus’ laws (adapted from the 1824 Vagrancy Act). As sections of the media stoked hysteria over muggings (see Hall et al. 1978: 53–165 on the construction of the public discourse relating to this), blacks were fourteen times as likely to be arrested under ‘sus’ as whites. Racial violence became endemic, ranging from assaults on individuals to mass confrontations such as those at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, Lewisham (1977) and Southall (1979). The National Front profited from this atmosphere. In May 1973 it achieved 16 per cent of the vote at the West Bromwich by-election, and 18.5 per cent at Leicester in 1976. In 1977 it came third ahead of the Liberals at both Stechford and Ladywood. The increasing frustration and disaffection of the black British population (especially its youth) at the often blatant hostility shown towards them through the decade were to come to issue in the rash of inner-city riots of the early 1980s.

The tendency towards polarization (and fragmentation) was also reflected in the rise of separatism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—movements which were in ironic contrast to the integrationist and supra-nationalist implications of Britain’s entry into the European Community in 1973. Modern Scottish nationalism took off in the mid-1960s, fired by disillusionment with Labour and an increasing sense of economic backwardness relative to England. The Kilbrandon Commission, set up by Wilson to explore the possibilities of limited devolution, recommended a separate Scottish (and Welsh) assembly in 1973. But the discovery of oil (1969 brought the first strike with the Forties field on stream the following year) at last made the idea of economic independence feasible, particularly after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) increased the price of oil fourfold in 1973. That year Margot MacDonald won Govan for the Scottish National Party (SNP); in February 1974 it had seven Members of Parliament (MPs) returned, and in the October election a further three, by which time the party had captured 30 per cent of the total vote in Scotland. The year 1978 brought three further by-election victories. But by this time it was obvious that the separatist movement was fatally split between devolutionists and those favouring outright independence. Labour successfully exploited this division; but when the devolution referendum disappointed its expectations, the SNP took revenge, voting against the government in the motion of no confidence which led to the election of 1979—in which, ironically, it lost all but two of its seats.

But if Scottish (and Welsh) aspirations for independence had been temporarily contained by 1979, the challenge to the Union from Northern Ireland was much more serious. After the arrival of British troops in August 1969, IRA membership grew fivefold in 1970. Politically motivated killings rose from twenty in 1970 to 467 two years later, leading to the suspension of Stormont and the imposition of direct rule from Westminster. As Catholic confidence in British rule was increasingly undermined by events like ‘Bloody Sunday’, when the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen civil rights marchers, internment and trial without jury (and more dubious methods of containing the IRA which led to condemnation from both the European Court of Human Rights and Amnesty International) —the separatist momentum remained undiminished as the decade drew to a close.

Such fragmenting tendencies were, in Nairn’s view, the inevitable consequence both of Britain’s failure to modernize its economic and social institutions and of the long process of withdrawal from empire. His argument that ‘neo-nationalism has become the grave-digger of the old state in Britain and as such the principal factor making for a potential revolution’ (1977:89) has not as yet been vindicated (though the tensions he analysed remain unresolved). But he was probably right that the class struggle was being superseded, if only temporarily, as the main agency for the transformation of British society, at the very moment of its apparent triumph. As Hobsbawm (1978) argues, this was partly because of both the long-term achievements and the contradictions of the Labour movement. But it was also due to the emergence of distinctively new socio-cultural configurations (taking shape outside traditional class and political contours), which were articulated round questions of gender, race, sexuality, r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: cultural closure or post-avantgardism?
• 2 The politics of culture: institutional change in the 1970s
• 3 The impact of radical theory on Britain in the 1970s
• 4 Cultural devolution?: representing Scotland in the 1970s
• 5 Finding a voice: feminism and theatre in the 1970s
• 6 Artifice and the everyday world: poetry in the 1970s
• 7 Apocalypse now?: the novel in the 1970s
• 8 Boxed in: television in the 1970s
• 9 Stepping out of line: British ‘New Dance’ in the 1970s
• 10 A diversity of film practices: renewing British cinema in the 1970s
• 11 Blood on the tracks: popular music in the 1970s
• 12 ‘Is it possible for me to do nothing as my contribution?’: visual art in the 1970s
• 13 Up against the wall: drama in the 1970s
• Index