Under The Bridge?

Gatwick Airport has no water. At all. Not a drop. Something similar happened four years ago to the month, but did it ever occur while water was in public ownership? Well, there you are, then. Even if it had, then privatisation would demonstrably have failed to improve the situation.

Peter Hitchens's column has brought out Pavlov's "sick man of Europe" dogs. That term was first used by Tsar Nicholas I to describe the Ottoman Empire, but no one can trace who first said it about Britain in the 1970s. From the subsequent decade onwards, it became a commonplace to say that this country had been so described before Margaret Thatcher. Yet no specific instance can be found, and Europe was keen enough to have us in what was really always its Union.

Well over half the population was born after "the Winter of Discontent", and many of us were too young to have had any political consciousness. But ask the rest about it. Specifically, ask them about anything horrible that happened, either to them personally, or to anyone whom they knew personally. Then wait, either for the pronounced evasiveness, or for the deafening silence. Insofar as it ever really happened, then it had its roots in the the Budget of 15 December 1976. That was delivered by Denis Healey on behalf of Jim Callaghan to the delight of Thatcher and of Geoffrey Howe, who considered that the fox of their backbench and indeed frontbench critics had been shot. The only notable thing about the 1979 General Election was the sex of the new Prime Minister. Everything else had changed two and a half years earlier, and has carried on under all three parties ever since.

"The Winter of Discontent" was supposedly the culmination of "post-War decline", but was the general population worse off on the eve of the 1979 Election than it had been 40 years earlier, on the eve of the Second World War? No, the problem was that the general population was no longer so much poorer than the people who set the terms of debate. To those people, things had been so much seemlier in the 1930s. Why, with the economic autonomy that is not sufficient, but is nevertheless necessary, for political participation, the common people were even starting to set some of the terms of debate. For themselves. Such "decline" could not be permitted to carry on. Nor was it.