Back to the Decade of Discontent
FOrTy-SOMe-ODD years ago, i’d have been writing this column by candlelight, on a sit-up-and-beg typewriter. That was my first thought when i read yesterday’s ‘Back to the 1970s’ headlines. Labour has published a 20-point plan which critics say would mean a return to the decade when Britain was rightly labelled ‘the sick man of europe’.
if implemented, it would usher in a new era of trades union militancy and economic ruin.
Nothing much surprises me these days, but the hero worship of Jeremy Corbyn by so- called ‘ millennials’ and barely pubescent ‘ commentators’ on radio, TV and in deluded Left-wing newspapers never fails to amaze.
it’s their bovine lack of curiosity about the past that appals me.
The quote about those who don’t read history being condemned to repeat it is variously attributed to everyone from the 18th- century parliamentarian edmund Burke to the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who died in 1952.
i’m not sure universities bother to teach Burke any more. Not enough time in the syllabus, probably, what with compulsory transgender studies and tearing down statues of long-dead white males taking priority.
But even those of us who thought Santayana was the Latin/ rock-fusion guitarist who starred at the Woodstock pop festival recognise the eternal truth in that expression. There was more to the Seventies than spacehoppers, Party Sevens and racist Northern comedians. Not that you’d know it from the trite TV nostalgia shows featuring gormless ‘celebrities’ and schoolboy historians reminiscing ignorantly about stuff which happened before they were born.
The reason i was bashing out stories by candlelight back then was because of power cuts caused by frequent strikes by coal miners and electricity workers.
Grocer Heath went to the country on a ‘who governs Britain?’ ticket and lost. These are the days the Corbynistas idealise as a workers’ paradise.
The politics of the time were captured brilliantly in a TV series called Bill Brand, about a university lecturer, played by Jack Shepherd, who becomes a Labour MP.
you can find it on DVD box set, but iTV would be doing the nation
ENJOYED The Godfather reunion feature in yesterday’s paper. I was intrigued to read that Robert De Niro’s first wife was called Diahnne Abbott. Presumably, that was before she dropped the ‘h’ and hooked up with Jeremy Corbyn.
a favour if they repeated it. Written by the playwright Trevor Griffiths, it oozed shabby Seventies mediocrity and the mindset of the dominant Labour movement.
Shepherd is superb. So is his young, activist mistress, played by a luscious Cherie Lunghi, complete with the statutory hirsute armpits which symbolised all selfrespecting Seventies feminists.
i wonder if she was the role model for that other famous Cherie, aka the Wicked Witch.
Alan Badel gives a magnificent performance as a duplicitous Left-wing eminence, obviously based on Tony Benn.
Arthur Lowe, fresh from playing Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, is a thinly disguised Harold Wilson.
it’s not just the political dialogue and policies which seem to belong to the stone age, the sets and location reek of the run- down, clapped-out country Britain had become — a nation where militant union leaders wielded more power than the Prime Minister and the Cabinet put together.
Nothing worked, seemingly endless strikes crippled industry, wrecked the export drive and caused not just power cuts but shortages in the shops.
Nationalised train ‘services’ were filthy and unreliable, a sadly forgotten rebuke to today’s misplaced hankering for the pre-privatised railways.
restrictive practices and enterprise-stifling bureaucracy meant it could take months to get a gas boiler or cooker installed.
How many of the dopey millennials tweeting their allegiance to Left- wing causes on their allsinging, all-dancing, pay-as-you-go mobile phones have the remotest idea that in living memory you had to join a long waiting list just to get a telephone landline put in? AS They cradle their available- everywhere skinny lattes and consume their quinoa ciabatta sandwiches, how can you possibly convince them that there were times when we had to queue round the block for a loaf of bread?
They worry about the polar bears and ‘ climate change’ and defend the absurdity of scrapping weekly rubbish collections in the name of ‘global warming’.
Almost four decades ago, during the strike- scarred Winter of Discontent, the dustbins weren’t emptied for weeks on end, as a result of industrial action.
rubbish piled up in the streets, creating a fertile breeding ground for rats and disease. Oh, and the dead went unburied.
Most of you reading this will need no reminding of pre-Thatcher Britain. i was there, as a young labour correspondent, and witnessed it first-hand.
So was Jeremy Corbyn, a far-Left North London trades union official, up to his neck in fomenting unrest and causing industrial anarchy.
This is the golden age to which he would now like to transport us back, by removing all democratic curbs on strikes and putting union leaders such as Len McCluskey, of Unite, back in charge.
Labour’s crush-the-rich (anyone on more than £70,000 a year) crusade, pay caps and confiscatory tax rates would destroy economic growth and lead to bankruptcy and mass unemployment.
Corbyn seriously seems to think he can bribe us into supporting him by promising a raft of new bank holidays. Just what we need, particularly at this time of year.
Most people have just had their second long weekend in a fortnight, whether they wanted it or not. Under Corbyn, you wouldn’t be able to work out where the strikes ended and the holidays began.
Coincidentally, yesterday’s bank holiday is a fairly recent invention. it was introduced in 1978 by the Labour government to mark international Workers’ Day, already being celebrated elsewhere in the world — especially in repressive, socialist dictatorships.
The holiday was originally dreamed up in 1891 by the congress of the Second international, which would eventually mutate into a worldwide Marxist conspiracy, including the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
it’s difficult to think of a more appropriate Seventies holiday. Workers of the world unite, and all that guff, was the order of the day.
Moscow gold was bankrolling British trades unions determined to bring down any elected government. Fortunately, there are still enough sensible people around who remember the bad old days, which makes a Corbyn victory a pretty remote possibility.
Do we really want a return to mass picketing, power cuts and unsightly female underarm hair?
Still, best not to take any chances. i’m stocking up on candles and dusting off my old remington typewriter. Just in case.