A sense of disaffection

John P. Mackintosh

The Decade of Disillusion: British Politics in the '60s. Edited by David McKee and Chris Cook (Macmillan £3.95) The idea behind this book was a good one. The decade of disillusionment is an ippropriate summary of the 1960s in Brittin. Perhaps the central disappointment for most people was that the improved standard of life which they had begun to anticipate in the 1950s was not adequately realised. As a consequence of this failure, disullusionment spread to the Conservative Party — Butler had promised a doubling of living standards in the 1955 general

election — and then to the Labour Party. As Peter Sinclair says in his chapter on the economy:

The impression brilliantly conveyed to the electorate in 1964 was that some undefined negative attitude implicit in ' stop-go ' and some unspecified kind of governmental amateurism were all that had deprived Britain of rapid growth in the 50s and early 60s. Purposive and dynamic government would suddenly restore her rightful rate of growth.

Yet the Labour Government, in its turn, failed to produce the expected and promised expansion. So disillusionment encompassed the politicians who seemed to be responsible, the parties to which they belonged and the institutions through which they operated, in particular the House of Commons.

At the same time, there was some lack of confidence in the capacity of British business. The businessmen, in turn, blamed the trade unions. The civil service, which had been criticised in the late 1950s and eaty 1960s, fare a little better by the end of the decade but it, and the Establishment in general, was depressed by de Gaulle's two vetos of the British application to join the Common Market. This gloom was deepened by Britain's evidently waning influence in world affairs (one example being the inability to impose our will on Rhodesia) against the background of a constant and apparently tractable balance of payments problem.

So it was an admirable idea to attempt a chronicle and an analysis of the decade examining the theme of disillusionment. Nations do suffer periods of introversion and poor performance. But why? France was in the doldrums from the First World War till the 1950s, though her objective strength in world terms was far greater in the 1920s than it is in the 1960s. Yet now her GNP is higher than Britain's, there is no "brain drain," her growth rate is faster and her establishment exudes selfconfidence. How is the contrast to be explained? And why has Britain, a victor in the war with much international goodwill and a big reservoir of trained talent, done so badly when her European equivalents pulled themselves together in the 1950s and shot ahead in the 1960s?

It must be said that, given such an admirable theme, this book is disappointing. In the first place, its structure is wrong. The first essay is an able potted history of the decade by John Barnes, but in 68 pages, he can tell us nothing new while his remit, to record the facts, prevents any analysis or attempt to draw together and comment on the points raised in the rest of the book by the various essayists.

In the second half, there are ten chapters by various authors, some of which are very well done though the topics chosen are curious and the contributors appear to have been told, like John Barnes, to concentrate on a factual account rather than on an analysis. The result is somewhat unsatisfactory. Why, for example, begin with a chapter on the Liberal and Nationalist Parties? The author, Chris Cook, never asks the question " What did their experience contribute to the disillusionment of the

decade?"

These parties failed, but that certainly cheered up the stalwarts in the older political organisations. Nor did the bulk of the informed sections of the community ever pin much hope on these parties. It could be argued that the persistence of the Liberals and the sudden rise of the Nationalists showed that voters were disillusioned with the main parties but then the real cause for gloom is that neither the Conservative nor the Labour Party made any serious effort to understanc. or meet this wave of disaffection. The Conservatives appointed a Party Study Group (under Sir Alec Douglas-Home) and Labour appointed a Royal Commission (under Lord Crowther) which enabled both parties to wait till traditional loyalties aroused by a general election swamped these secondary discontents. But nothing was done to meet and solve the root problems which led to their brief burst of popularity.

Another surprising omission in the book is that there is no detailed treatment of the major parties themselves, yet public Oisillusionment with these organisations, particularly among the young, is marked. Labour, at the end of the decade, seemed to have run out of all creative ideas and to have settled for a backward-looking conservatism. The Conservatives, though led by a determined radical, have been unable to infuse their programme with the slightest tinge of idealism, while most of the fire on the right (also essentially negative) has been kindled by Mr Enoch Powell.

It is also a pity that there is no treatment of the disillusion that has overtaken the campaign for institutional reform. There was a real chance in the mid-1960s that, eschewing the more crackpot (and sometimes hypocritical) calls for total popular participation, the declining effectiveness of Britain's representative institutions might have been arrested. A coherent and effective reform of the House of Commons was a possibility, as was a reconstruction of local government on a regional or provincial basis which would have allowed some real decentralisation and local self-government. But Whitehall and both front benches at Westminster were opposed and there was little public understanding or support, so that the chance was lost.

There is an essay by Victor Keegan on 'Industry and Technology' but it concentrates on the Government's relations with industry and concludes that the present mix of public and private enterprise is here to stay. But the interesting problem, and one which relates directly to the theme of disillusionment in the 1960s, is why the private sector has not been more successful. Why do so many take it for granted that foreign cars are more reliable and better finished than those made in Britain? It has been pointed out that anyone wanting to man a civil service, staff a university or officer an army could hire the talent he needed in London with little difficulty. The only area in which there is not only no surplus but a clear inability to meet current UK demand is in business. Conversely, if the dozen most successful businessmen of the 1960s are listed, a large majority are not from old English (or Scottish) families but are immigrants. Why should this be?

The two central and very good essays are on the economy (by Peter Sinclair) and on Britain's place in the world (by Leslie Stone). The first points out that the major policy failure was clinging to an overvalued currency till 1967 and that the major institutional failure was the acceptance of a higher than world average rate of inflation, though not enough space is devoted to analysing why this should have happened. There is, in fact, no proper examination of the role of the trade unions, which is strange in view of the part Michael Shanks's book The Stagnant Society played in pointing to defects in labour relations at the outset of the decade. Yet by 1970 the unions had demonstrated that, though badly led and badly organised, they could veto a Labour Government's efforts at reform and by 1972 that they could virtually do the same to the Tory Industrial Relations Act.

There are admirable essays by other contributors though again they tend to concentrate• on issues where there was little or no cause for disillusionment. This was certainly the case in education where expenditure was doubled, passing the proportion of the GNP spent on defence for the first time in our history. Anne Lapping's chapter on the social services is useful but does not pick out the causes for disillusionment. Are there any? Among those who think about and deal with the problem of poverty, perhaps. the most worrying aspect is that it is easy to see how to relieve the two million poor — and to do so would not be a great burden on the rest of the community. But the difficulty is the real opposition from those just above the poverty level who would get no aid, from those who resent ' scroungers ' and from those who would have to pay a little more in tax.

Perhaps this worry about the lack of adequate motivation is, in a sense, the root cause of the sense of disillusionment. Nobody really wants Britain to be a superpower again and this in not a source of disappointment. But many want to be better off, to provide reasonable housing for everyone, to have satisfactory industrial relations and for British industry to be tolerably successful. The disillusionment has come from a decade of fighting bogus bogies — de Gaulle, a cumbersome bureaucracy, Tory traditionalists, the gnomes of Zurich — only to find that the fault lies in ourselves. There is a genuine ambivalence in Britain. We want the growth, and all that goes with it, but are reluctant to make the effort needed to get rid of old-fashioned methods and attitudes and it is the difficulty of getting up the emotional steam needed to resolve this dilemma that has depressed everyone.

John Mackintosh is Labour MP for Berwick and East Lothian.