Britain: The chaos of '66 (and '76)

The 'bad old days' for Labour really were pretty crap. Larry Elliott writes in today's Guardian that Blair's 2006 is nothing like the chaos of 1966: Those who think it's all over for Labour have forgotten what a real crisis is like

It is possible that in the 14 years since Black Wednesday we have forgotten what a real crisis is like.

If so, it's worth taking a stroll down memory lane. Let's first go back to July 1966, when England had a football team worthy of the name and Bobby Moore clambered up the 39 steps at Wembley to lift the Jules Rimet trophy.

One phrase has stuck in the public consciousness ever since: Kenneth Wolstenholme's "They think it's all over, it is now" as Geoff Hurst's left-foot shot sealed England's victory. In truth, the words could equally have applied to Wilson's government, which had just introduced a savagely deflationary package - the so-called July measures - in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to defend the pound.

There was a six-month freeze on pay and dividends to be followed by severe restraint in the six months after that, cuts in public expenditure and higher taxes. It is worth speculating on how the millions heading for Spain and France this weekend would have responded to one of the other steps: a £50 limit on currency that could be taken overseas for holidays.

Effectively, this marked the beginning of the end for the 1964-70 Labour government. It had come into power confident that its National Plan could deliver growth rates of 3.5-4% a year and put Britain on a par with its better performing European rivals. The National Plan was killed off in July 1966, as was the idea that the ministry responsible for it, the Department for Economic Affairs, could be a Whitehall counterpoint to the bean counters at the Treasury.

Little more than a year later, the pound was devalued anyway, resulting in further austerity measures and Labour's eventual defeat in June 1970.

Now that's what I call a real crisis. A decade later, another Labour government faced yet another dire set of circumstances:

If anything, things were even worse a decade later. The summer of 1976 was, in terms of the weather, much like 2006. The thermometer soared, the skies were cloudless, the fields were parched and there were drought orders in force. There was no football to get het up about (England having failed to qualify for the European championship finals) but the cricket team was receiving a thumping by the West Indies.

In Downing Street there were seven Cabinet meetings held between July 6 and July 21 to discuss a package of spending cuts and tax increases proposed by the chancellor, Denis Healey, to restore confidence in sterling, which by 1976 was floating and in free fall. The previous summer, inflation had reached 27%, growth was weak and unemployment was rising. Tony Benn's diaries capture Labour's bunker mentality as it grappled with the financial crisis. In the end, Healey saw off those who, like Benn, wanted import controls, in favour of public spending cuts and increases in employers' national insurance contributions.

Again, it did little more than buy time. The pressure on the pound became even more serious in the autumn, culminating in the arrival of the International Monetary Fund, and still further cuts, in December 1976. Benn calls this period "the death of consensus' in his diaries, as indeed it was.

Nothing remotely similar has happened to Labour since 1997.

So less moaning, and more governing please.

crisis what crisis

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