50 years on, could 2023 really be as bad as 1973?
And militant union bosses crippling the country...
while the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury predicted ‘a siege economy with rationing on the wartime model’.
And the humiliations kept on coming.
At the end of December, the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, formerly a British Army officer, told Heath that he had set up a ‘Save Britain Fund’ and was planning to donate 10,000 Ugandan shillings from his personal savings.
Not surprisingly, Heath ignored him. So, a few weeks later, Amin wrote again.
Rural Ugandans, he claimed, had donated a ‘lorry load of vegetables and wheat’ to help their British friends.
‘I am now requesting you to send an aircraft to collect this donation urgently before it goes bad.’ Once again, however, Heath declined to reply.
The three-day week came into effect on New Year’s Eve. Factories and businesses were limited to just three days of electricity — either Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday and Saturday — while shops were limited to either mornings or afternoons.
By now life had a pronounced flavour of the last days of Pompeii, with long queues for bread, candles, paraffin, toilet paper and soup.
An Essex vicar even told his flock that the union militants might have to be shot if they ‘persist in fomenting strikes’, a view that earned him a long interview on the BBC news. Somehow I can’t imagine the BBC airing a similar opinion today.
Yet the three-day week turned out to be much less apocalyptic than the doomsters had imagined. Many people responded with tremendous ingenuity, wrapped in duvets by candlelight, working with battered old screwdrivers and spanners when the power was turned off.
In Sheffield, a snuff-making firm reverted to using a water wheel that had last seen action in 1737.
In West London, meanwhile, a furrier’s shop displayed the sign: ‘Open Six Days a Week — By Candle Power, Battery Power and Will Power.’
So even though many firms lost more than a third of their working hours, Britain’s businesses still maintained production at almost 80 per cent. And there were compensations. The Mail’s columnist Jane Gaskell suggested that the energy crisis might even be ‘good for us’, recommending re-reading an old book or digging a garden.
She even found a psychiatrist who thought, in very 1970s style, that the three-day week was a chance for couples ‘to be more spontaneous, to experiment more in their sex lives while the children are doing a five-day week at school’. As it happens, those words were written almost exactly nine months before I was born. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
For Heath and his ministers, however, there was no happy ending. Among the general public, irritation soon turned into fury.
Very unfairly, however, many blamed the supposed stubbornness of the government rather than the cynical opportunism of the union bosses.
(There’s a warning there, of course, for Rishi Sunak.)
So when Heath called a snap General Election at the end of February 1974, asking ‘Who governs?’ the answer was not what he wanted.
The Tory vote plummeted, the result was a hung parliament and Labour’s Harold Wilson took over at the head of a minority government.
Wilson’s answer to the energy crisis was to throw money at it, borrowing and spending as if the bill would never come.
He began by handing the miners a huge 32 per cent increase, which merely invited even bigger demands from other unions.
As inflation soared, everybody sought similar deals. And Wilson merrily carried on signing the cheques: 31 per cent for the
Ted Heath’s decision to ‘dash for growth’ was a total disaster
Voters blamed the government for the chaos
power workers, 32 per cent for the civil servants, 30 per cent for the dockers, 35 per cent for the doctors . . .
Older readers will remember the result. Inflation peaked at a horrendous 26 per cent in the summer of 1975.
Living standards fell two years in a row, and eventually Wilson’s successor, Jim Callaghan, was forced to beg the International Monetary Fund for the biggest bailout in history.
On top of all that, interest rates went up, and up, and up, peaking at a horrific 17 per cent at the end of 1979.
A pretty depressing story then. And as I say, history never repeats itself exactly.
Still, the parallels are uncanny: a buttoned-up Conservative Prime Minister in Downing Street, a distant war triggering a worldwide energy crisis, grim-faced union militants leading their workers out on strike, an economy hurtling into headlong recession . . .
So will 2023 be an action replay of 1973? Will the lights stay on this time?
Or will it end, yet again, with a weak Labour government handing out double-digit pay rises and plunging our finances ever deeper into the red?
Let’s hope not. I like Slade as much as anybody, but once was more than enough. Time, surely, to change the record.