ABSTRACT
Twenty years on little of that optimism remains. For much of the last decade economic growth has been sluggish, or stagnant, especially when viewed against the performance of some other industrialized countries. Mass unemployment, which we had thought never to see again, reappeared in the 1970s, the figure climbing slowly from 1.5 per cent in 1957 to 2.5 per cent in 1968,3.4 per cent in 1971, then, dramatically, to 5.9 per cent in 1976 and 12 per cent in 1983: by then, over 3 million people were out of work, the highest number since the 1930s. Also exceptional and puzzling was the coincidence of high unemployment with high levels of inflation, the effects of which left no one untouched. Some degree of inflation had been with us ever since the end of the war, retail prices increasing on average by 5 per cent a year between 1945 and 1950, and by 2.6 per cent a year between 1954 and 1964. The 'take-off' towards double-figure inflation began in 1971 with a retail price increase of 9.4 per cent which, six years later and exacerbated by the oil crisis of 1973-4, had almost doubled to 17.9 per cent. In 1976 it required £1.82 to buy what £1 had bought in 1972, and New Society was reporting 'a revolution of falling expectations'. Not very long before, in 1962, the Daily Express had written of 'the rollicking revolution of merrie England'. Professor A.H. Halsey has recently argued that 'a post-war period can be identified as having come to an end in the mid-1970s, followed by a decade exhibiting a new form of polarization in British society'. 1
In fact, until recent years the failings in the economy were disguised by a
continued advance in the standard of living for most English people - almost certainly a greater increase in the years 1945-70 than in any previous quarter-century. Until incomes restraint began to bite hard in 1974, price rises were more than balanced by wage and salary increases, which through the 1950s and earlier 1960s often ran at double the annual rate of inflation: in particular, powerful trade unions were able to take advantage of conditions of nearly full employment to narrow the gaps between semi-skilled and skilled earnings and between manual and professional earnings. Among the chief beneficiaries of rising standards were therefore some formerly low-paid groups of industrial, clerical, and women workers, while many professional and managerial salaries were squeezed by the combined effects of taxation and incomes policies. In the most recent years, with inflation under control and reduced to annual rates of 4 or 5 per cent, and with bargaining power reduced by weakened trade unions, the advance in standards of living has slowed, but over the whole period from 1951 to 1983 the average real weekly earnings (Le. the purchasing power) of adult male manual workers almost doubled from £60 to £111.2
Until the economy moved into serious depression in 1974, rising real earnings meant that more people than ever before were able to afford a nutritionally adequate diet. The evidence of increasing prosperity has also been seen in the increase of home-ownership to 62 per cent in 1986, a similar growth of car-ownership (also to 62 per cent of households in 19,86), and a spectacular increase in the ownership of domestic appliances, many of which would have been regarded as luxuries a few years earlier. In 1986 nine out of ten households had a television and a refrigerator, eight out of ten a washing-machine, seven out of ten central heating, and two out of three a freezer. The latest innovation in cookery technology, the microwave oven, introduced from the United States only in 1959, is already found in 26 per cent of households.3
