Forty-Five Years On

Peter Hitchens writes:

For those of us with very long memories, last Friday was the 45th anniversary of the day Harold Wilson scraped to victory with a majority of four seats, and I wonder more and more as the years go by what would have happened if he had lost. (Two days before was the 943rd anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which another Harold did lose). The education revolution and the permissive society both came about under Wilson, who also kept Britain out of the Vietnam War and failed to get us into the Common Market.

It was a momentous time, often under-rated by modern historians. Had he narrowly failed in 1964, would a feeble Tory government have lost soon afterwards, allowing Wilson a second chance? Or would a relieved nation have learned to love Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and never have got to know Edward Heath? Had the Tories won, would we be a completely different country? Would there still be hundreds of grammar schools, would divorce be difficult, welfare benefits restricted to those prepared to work, and hanging still be possible? Were those a few short years in which radical change was briefly possible, or would it have come about anyway? The Tories these days are always willing to lie down under left-wing offensives, and have now converted themselves into a wholly unembarrassed radical party. But was it quite the same then?

It was amazing how Mr Wilson converted a majority of four into one of 97 in the astonishing Labour triumph of March 1966, given that his initial period in government wasn't very impressive. Maybe it was because Ted Heath, rather than Alec Douglas-Home, was leading the Tories by then.

Wilson always referred to the previous period of Tory government as 'the Thirteen Wasted Years of Tory Rule', and I rather enjoyed the fact that I was born in October 1951, on the very first day of those 13 wasted years. The notice of my birth in 'The Times of Malta' appeared close to a report of Winston Churchill's new Cabinet, just being formed following his narrow victory over Clement Attlee (Labour got more votes, the Tories more seats, a result that may be reversed next year, if the polls are right). It also noted that he had been to see the King, as we still had one in 1951.

Things which are now receding into the haze of the past, such as the present Queen's Coronation, the Korean War, the Suez affair and the first Sputnik, were still very recent in 1964. Yet it still seemed to be a very modern era, in some ways more frantically modern than our own, which is a little less confident about chucking aside the past and a little less confident about the new always being better than the old. No wonder, given what the sixties brought about.

There was a Labour Government between 1964 and 1970. A proper one. Full of, and supported by, working-class patriots and social conscience toffs, temperance Methodists and traditional Catholics. Its economic policy was social democratic. It indulged social policies that were much less conservative than many of its members or most of its supporters wanted, but not in the form of Government Bills subject to whipped votes. Its foreign policy was ardently pro-Commonwealth, moderately pro-American, and almost completely Eurosceptical. It was fiercely Unionist.

And the Sixties Swingers hated it with a burning passion. The pirate radio stations were their revolt against its and the BBC’s deal with the Musicians’ Union to protect the livelihoods of that union’s members. Behind this union-busting criminality was Oliver Smedley, later a key figure behind the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs. Those Swingers used the lowering of the voting age to put what they thought were the Selsdon Tories into office in 1970. They then went on to entrench their own moral, social and cultural decadence and libertinism, first in the economic sphere during the Eighties, and then in the constitutional sphere under Tony Blair. David Cameron accepts uncritically the whole package: moral, social, cultural, economic, and constitutional. Indeed, he embodies it.

When is this country going to wake up to what has really been happening over the last fifty years?