THE PANZERS of Pembroke were an early sign that the 1960s would be a decade of radical progress, but not necessarily what the people wanted. With crass insensitivity for a populace that had just emerged from wartime rationing, the British government allowed German tanks to conduct exercises in the Welsh countryside. Coachloads of protestors, however, were not welcomed by local folk, who found the tank crews very charming. According to news reports, the visiting bigots were sent packing (we know by now that the media are used to convey the right message).
In Modernity Britain 1959-62, part of a series by our finest social historian, David Kynaston, British society is taking its first steps in the uncharted territory of modernisation. My other source for this article is a bound set of Observer magazine supplements from 1964. This Sunday newspaper was not yet linked to the Guardian, and the Times advertised on its pages, but it was certainly progressive.
The first half of the Sixties was just before my time, and it is fascinating to see that, while the country has changed dramatically since, the attitude of our ruling class is fundamentally the same. I would summarise it as deceitful paternalism: pretending that policies were for the benefit of the people, when they were merely window-dressing for ulterior motives. This is a phenomenon of which we are more aware today, although that doesn’t mean we are able to stop it.
The prime minister at the time of Kynaston’s book was Harold Macmillan; the Observer series covered the honeymoon of Harold Wilson’s Labour administration. Let’s look at what the Conservative government (and Labour councils) did to our towns and cities, at the big lies on immigration, and at how our elected leaders were preparing to sell the country down the river (actually, across the English Channel). This was no golden age.
The wrecking balls and bulldozers were busy in the early Sixties. ‘Slum clearance’ was the propaganda. Certainly, many homes were inadequate, lacking an inside toilet, but it would have been possible to rectify that with a small extension. Vast swaths of terraced housing were eradicated in industrial cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool. The corner shops and pubs, hubs of community life, also succumbed. Nothing was sacrosanct, and the title of Kynaston’s chapter on the rehousing frenzy is an apt quote: ‘we’ll all be uprooted’.
Philistines in council chambers gave free rein to radical architects to demolish fine Victorian civic buildings and to redesign town centres for optimal traffic flow. Every town had a project for transforming the urban landscape. I’m old enough to remember in Chelmsford, where I lived from 1968 to 1971, a council office displaying white balsa wood models of a redesigned town centre. Exciting perhaps, but by that time there was rising discontent with town planners.
Concretopolis was not built in a day, but cranes proliferated on the skyline of every city, and the pace of construction was accelerated by prefabricated flat units. The megaliths may have initially looked clean and modern, but residents soon learned the adversities of high-rise living, with lifts that broke down, teenagers running amok on the walkways and a sense of alienation. But criticism was ignored. Newcastle MP Edward Short, on opening three high-rise blocks, declared:
‘This surely is the dawn of a new epoch in the forward march of mankind, and it perhaps appropriate and symbolic that these great, towering blocks of homes should be opened in the first few days of the space age.’
Newcastle, indeed, had the most comprehensive rebuilding programme in the country. T. Dan Smith promised to create the ‘Brasilia of the North’. A corrupt megalomaniac in the style of the American city boss, Smith told the Observer that ‘the democratic vote is no way to get the changes we need’. He had immense power, as Newcastle Corporation owned 34,000 of the 86,000 houses, and 6800 of its 10600 acres. The grand stone parades were to be levelled, the Tyneside dictator warning that ‘if I hear anyone saying things detrimental to the future of my city, I go for him and deal ruthlessly with him and make him nervous for the future.’
Immigration was another unwanted interference in the social fabric. It was the Conservative government that opened the floodgates, beginning the seemingly irreversible process of changing Britain to a white-Afro-Asian mix. Initially, the Labour Party and trade unions defended the white working class from the obvious pressures on jobs and services. Soon, the left realised the value of immigrants to its political cause. In 1961, when the government was belatedly acting to stem the tide, Tory MP Cyril Osborne remarked:
‘It is strange the Labour Party, which claims especially to represent the working man, has totally ignored the unfortunate English family which has had to bear the social stresses which unlimited immigration has brought. Has the Englishman no rights in his own country?’
The answer was clear seven years later. when Enoch Powell was sacked by Ted Heath for speaking out on the impact of immigration, many of his predictions grossly underestimating the numerical and cultural changes imposed on our country.
Meanwhile, our ruling class was preparing the ground for the European project. In the Sixties, Britain still stood proud, with many new achievements to build on legacies of the past. The Suez Crisis of the previous decade and the gradual loss of colonies to independence were less important than the future promised by Concorde, motorways, North Sea oil and the explosion of pop music heralded by The Beatles. Patriotism was renewed by James Bond films. Everything was a fashionable contrast from the mundane Fifties: Formica furniture, Mediterranean holidays, ‘Z Cars’, the Hillman Imp.
However, there were troubling signs of economic decline. The Pound was falling steadily, and industry was plagued by strikes. While at the vanguard of popular culture, Britain was in long-term decline, and this was the rationale of politicians urging entry to the Common Market. Ted Heath was a pioneer of European federalism in the Tory ranks, upsetting colleagues with his quest to hand our sovereignty to a foreign bureaucracy. Perhaps Heath was always earmarked for this role, like Starmer was groomed for the current task of leading Britain into global technocracy.
Out with the old, in with the new. A predominantly conservative society reacted in the early 1960s but did not effectively resist. Its elected representatives, mostly male and a few female MPs who lived in their constituencies, failed to ask why major changes such as mass rehousing and immigration were happening, and in whose interest. The early Sixties, therefore, set the scene for coming decades, for Tony Blair’s modernising zeal, and for the unrecognisable Britain that is evolving. Our leaders – the people who really pull the strings – hated us then, as they do now.
