ABSTRACT
The Wilson-Callaghan era of 1974-9 is etched gloomily in the public memory – sleaze under Wilson, strikes under Callaghan. Much was made of this perception by Mrs Thatcher later on, drawing a contrast between her own liberation of Britain from the shackles of post-war socialism and the cultural despair of the Winter of Discontent: ‘Do you remember the Labour Britain of 1979? It was a Britain in which union leaders held their members and our country to ransom … the sick man of Europe.’1 It was the obvious role of the Tories to keep these folk memories warm. Perceptions of the Wilson years were largely of a failure of style – the paranoid mood of the Kitchen Cabinet, the humiliation of the Lloyd George-style final honours list of 1976 on the famous lavender-blue notepaper, of which volumes of reminiscence by Joe Haines and Bernard Donoughue as late as 2003 faithfully reminded the public. Perceptions of the Callaghan years were rather of failures of policy – a Labour Government swamped by trade union militants on the loose; anti-cancer drugs left on the Hull dockside uncollected; union leaders like Moss Evans or Alan Fisher oblivious to any dangers from inflation; hospital wards and primary schools closed down by public sector stoppages; refuse bins overflowing; the classic image of the Liverpool gravediggers in David Basnett’s union refusing even to bury the dead. The literature of the late 1970s is apocalyptic, written in terms of ‘collapse’ or ‘eclipse’, a land as ‘ungovernable as Chile’ conducting the last rites of Attlee’s social democratic post-war consensus. Americans were especially prominent in this kind of historical pathology. Isaac Kramnick’s book of 1979 captures the mood vividly – Is Britain Dying?
