From Suez to the Falklands - Part 4

"The British love of Queens does not seem to be based merely on the historical commonplace that 'Britain is never so properous as when a Queen is on the Throne': it reflects, rather, a stubborn conviction that this is a Mother Country, not a Father Land - a peculiarity that the Classical Greeks also noted about Crete - and that the King's prime function is to be the Queen's consort. Such national apprehensions or convictions or obsessions are the ultimate source of all religion, myth and poetry, and cannot be eradicated either by conquest or education."

- Robert Graves, "The White Goddess"

The long hot summer of 1976 was notable for two particular events, the first being yet another currency crisis, with a dip in the value of Sterling and an incipient budget shortfall precipitating the Labour Govenrment, now under the unsteady stewardship of James Callaghan, to ask the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Although in itself a relatively prudent measure, this was perceived by the public and press as a further national humiliation, as the United Kingdom plied the global financial circit for alms. The parade of fumbling that had characterised the leadership of a series of almost identikit leaders in Heath, Wilson and now Callaghan had led to a general impression of a confederacy of grey men, all equally lacking in vision, ability and nous. The second noteworthy occurrence of that summer was the stealthy but irrepressible emergence of the latest model on Hebrew trickster Malcolm McLaren's Golem production line, the Sex Pistols. This extraordinary group specialised in a kind of incendiary vapidity, its singer and lyricist Johnny Rotten (née Lydon) having an uncanny ability to find exactly the right national taboo to point and shriek at, without saying anything profound or useful in consequence. However, this very incoherence was the source of their brief but efflorescent power, as it ensured that their grievances could barely be comprehended, let alone reconciled or resolved. Whatever the Sex Pistols may or may not have wanted, it was non-negotiable. Equally impossible to assuage was their music, which was the most conventional riff rock possible, but so insistently single minded that it adventitiously sounded explosive.

As the year progressed, the band gradually built up accolytes and notoriety by word of mouth, and racked up their first television appearances, while their debut single, "Anarchy In The UK" grazed the Top 40 at the end of the year. This record would be the template for their subsequent output, being both shocking and invigorating as long as you didn't look at it too closely, and realise how silly it was. Despite the tremendous effort that went into this recording to shock, the Sex Pistols would burst into the public consciousness accidentally, and in the most quotidian format possible. A cancellation by EMI labelmates Queen led to their invitation onto the Today show, a normally staid teatime television programme hosted by Bill Grundy, who was the kind of mildly dissolute but avuncular host that was typical of the era. Apparently inebriated, and obviously not briefed on his substitute guests, his attempted inteview with the band and their cohorts quickly degenerated into puerile name calling, which appalled the show's more delicate viewers, as well as the wilting violets of the tabloid press. The result would be sensational, with the band being catapulted into a maelstrom of media controversy that wouldn't fully abate until years after they had split up. In truth, the scenario was one that most younger viewers would have recognised instantly; that of the out-of-depth supply teacher employing increasingly desperate bonhomie as they lost control of the class.

The controversy around "Anarchy" and Grundy would be eclipsed in the spring of 1977 by the release of their second single, "God Save The Queen", which their latest record company, Virgin, decided to release on the eve of the Silver Jubilee that marked the monarch's 25th year on the throne. The release would be accompanied by a characteristic McLaren stunt, when a boat was chartered on the Jubilee weekend to cruise down the Thames so that the band could play the song in front of the Houses of Parliament. This intiative was duly intercepted by the police, producing another avalanche of publicity. Nonetheless, in impugning the current Queen, the Sex Pistols had, advertently or inadvertently, identified the epicentre of Britain's post-war malaise, and that was the failure of the monarch herself, Elizabeth II. As Robert Graves had noted, the Queens who had preceeded Elizabeth Windsor had been extraordinarily powerful matriarchs who had inspired their subjects to exploration and expansion. In particular Elizabeth I, Anne and Victoria had been icons, the former and latter even being instantly recognisable to this very day. Elizabeth II, however, was a mousy, modest figure who dressed like a suburban housewife and who had presided over an era of retreat and retrenchment. As a result, the current Queen was a present absence, the void at the heart of the British establishment. The Pistols' "God Save The Queen" is usually misunderstood as a modernist excoriation of a deluded Ruritanian idyll, of the refusal of a nation to recognise its true station in the modern world. In fact, it is a personal attack on the vacant occupant of the throne, and on the notion that such a vast celebration could be accorded to such a non-entity.

There is an unthinking prejudiuce held among atheist, secular humanists that the monarchy is an outdated remnant from a bygone era, an inconvenient anachronism that has somehow, temporarily, escaped the inevitable fate of being swept away by progress. Nothing could be further from the truth of course; monarchism is one of the most durable human institutions, and the world will be full of monarchs long after our scrappy, decaying liberal democracy has been forgotten. There can also be no doubt that despite their separation from the levers of government, the current British monarch holds enormous moral, spiritual and political power. If Elizabeth II had voiced any public doubts about the intervention at Suez, say, how could the government of the day have done anything except stay their hand? Elizabeth's reign was marked by excessive political caution, as it was her belief that the monarchy rested on such fragile foundations that it could not afford to embroil itself in the slightest political controversy. She was so fixated on the long term survival of both herself and her family, that absolutely no political policy or social trend, no matter how disastrous, could draw from her the slightest public comment, let alone disapproval. If the Government had mandated the compulsory eating of babies, Elizabeth Windsor would not have piped up. All her subjects could expect was a few bromides once a year at Christmas. She had even failed the most basic prerequisite of being Queen, which was the capacity to look formidable, to inspire fear and devotion by her very appearance.

The result was that John Lydon would now accuse her of being an imposter ("Our figurehead/is not what she seems") whose timidity had turned her family and nation into a voyeuristic tourist attraction ("'cause tourists are money"). However, Lydon was not the only person who had noticed the gaping void that Elizabeth II had opened up with her diffidence. The new leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, had become increasingly regal as she consolidated her position as leader of the opposition. She had begun to style her hair in an extravagant bouffant that emulated, and indeed mocked, the style of Elizabeth herself. Thatcher's voice had also become increasingly lofty and regal; she no longer spoke but declaimed, as though like a true monarch she was receiving her instructions directly from God. It was clear that if Elizabeth Windsor could not be an imposing Queen, then Margaret Thatcher would be. This granted the Conservative leader access to an almost bottomless reserve of power, because the archetype of the female monarch not only encompassed Elizabeth II's none-more-illustrious predecessors, but also the very deepest national archetypes of Britain, notably the chariot-riding warrior queen Boadicea, and the very protector of the nation herself, Britannia. What Thatcher's political opponents failed to realise was that when they attempted to refute her, or point out the harmfulness of her policies, they were not debating with a mere person; they were confronting a 2000 year old archetype. In turn, this meant that she was to all intents and purposes unbeatable.

And so, when Margaret Thatcher inevitably came to power in the spring of 1979 after a Shakespearean Winter of Discontent, the British public had not elected a Prime Minister, but annointed a Warrior Queen: icy, formidable, decisive, divisive, and destructive. If "God Save The Queen" had been the symbolic execution of the monarch, then the election of Thatcher was a symbolic rebirth. And in the elevation of Thatcher, the movement inspired by the Sex Pistols had played no small part. In many ways Punk had been conceived by Malcolm McLaren, and accomplices such as Bernie Rhodes, as the consummation of the counter-culture, as "one last heave" to unseat the old order and produce the conditions for a new society to flourish. However, in trashing the monarchy and amplifying the sense of decay, they had merely paved the way for a new and unprecedented revolution that would be unleashed by Margaret Thatcher and her advisors, for she was not like the hapless Butskellite leaders of old. As such Punk, far from being the voice of the street, and the clarion call of liberation that its proselytisers liked to depict it as, was merely the birth pangs of Neoliberalism. Punk was ultimately a total social, cultural and political disaster, and its protagonists would witness the full scale of the resulting devastation in the decade ahead.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 3

The controversy and media swirl that surrounded "Mad Mitch" and the withdrawal from Aden was in many ways deceptive, as it helped to obscure a far more important and consequential conflict further to the east; one that was being prosecuted by a character who was very different in temperament and style to Colin Mitchell. This was the secret war against Indonesia that was colloquially known as the Konfrontasi, after the strategy of brinkmanship implemented by the Indonesian leader President Sukarno to destabilise Malaysia, which itself was an amalagamation of former British colonies, and which Sukarno viewed as a British puppet state. Major-General Walter Walker had commanded the Brigade of Gurkhas in the long, grim campaign to eradicate the communist insurgency in Malaya, and his response to the Indonesian infiltrations into Malaysian territory from the beginning of 1963 was charaterised by both its unobtrusiveness and its restraint. Like Mitchell, Walker understood that the Western media were as much of an enemy as the people he was fighting, but whereas Mitchell had attempted to overcome this by sacrificially offering himself up as the charismatic focus of attention, Walker instead kept a low profile and shrouded his operations in a cloak of secrecy.

The most notable example of this was the two year long Operation Claret, in which Walker turned the tables and authorised the British Army to cross into Indonesia and break up enemy troop concentrations by ambush before they could penetrate into Malaysia. The anti-Western character of the mass media, although pervasive, had many forms. In some, albeit relatively rare instances, journalists and reporters were overt or covert Marxists whose deliberate agenda was to expose and therefore implicitly condemn what they saw as imperialist or colonialist depredations. Somewhat more commonly, journalists simply embodied or reflected the antinomianism and rejection of deference and duty that pervaded the wider popular culture, this being expressed in a general sympathy for what was popularly known as the Third World. However, the most prevalent case was that the very structure of the media tended to generate a passively condemnatory account of Western actions, even when journalists attempted to be sympathetic towards them. The sight of bristling, well-armed Western soldiers brushing through villages marked by abject poverty brought home to the nation's living rooms the uncomfortable reality of a harsh and brutal world that existed beyond the horizons of Western affluence.

Nonetheless, Walker's strategy would pay off, and by the middle of 1966 the Indonesians had agreed to end the confrontation at the negotiating table, this in itself being facilitated by the removal from power of Sukarno by the right-wing Suharto, after an extraordinarily bloody purge that had in part been facilitated by the British. From the domestic point of view, the most important lesson of the Konfrontasi was that it demonstrated, for all the apparent evidence of terminal decline, that there were still elements within the ruling class and the British state that were capable of acting effectively and decisively. Indeed, it supported the view held by more sceptical observers on the Left that the British Empire, rather than disappearing, had merely transmuted, its form having changed from one of territorial governance to one of networked influence; a "skeletal" empire for the communications age. This was, coincidentally, one in which the "soft power" of its delinquent popular culture might even prove to be useful.

However, by the time the last substantial British forces had withdrawn from Malaysia, this popular culture had effectively imploded. After the giddy optimism of 1967's Summer of Love, the counter culture had been subsumed in a deluge of violence and paranoia, most famously iterated in the twin horrors of Altamont and the murders conducted by the Manson family. The dream of a new world was further eroded by the deaths of such luminaries as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and by the arrival of essentially cynical conservative governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas the most daring and visionary music of the Sixties had been imbued with an almost spiritual sense of new possibilities, the emergent music of the new decade of the Seventies would be marked by three characteristics - bombast, glamour, and nihilism.

The bombast was most apparent in the music that had directly evolved from the beat music of the first wave of British rock bands. This was the hard rock of groups such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Free, which was ultimately an over-amplified and frenzied version of the Blues that was marked by its technical accomplishment and high standard of musicianship. Although this music would give birth to perhaps the most durable of all popular music genres, Heavy Metal, it was incapable of embodying or transmitting the intertwined utopian and antinomian sentiments of the Sixties counter culture. Led Zeppelin were particularly characteristic of this predicament; their music was vast and yet remote, gargantuan yet hollow; devoid of any yearning except perhaps for individual self indulgence. The characteristic that would erupt most evidently within the public sphere would be glamour, as evidenced in the emergence of Glam Rock. In many ways this was a retrograde movement, as it looked back to the "heart throbs" of the late 1950's, and indeed in the form of Alvin Stardust it literally facilitated their return. However, the more sophisticated proponents of Glam also drew energy from the sexual revolution, with gay liberation and feminism being subsumed within a miasma of double entendre and gender confusion. Glam was also partially a response to the introduction in Britain of colour television, which warranted the gaudy, glittery clothing and pancake make-up that were so essential to its disorientating shock effect. Nonetheless Glam, with its artificial teenage rampage, suffered from the same drawback as bombast in its lack of sincerity and spiritual content, in its inability to give political voice to the tumult of the times.

This was because the vertiginous sense of national decline had, if anything, accelerated as the Seventies had progressed. The Conservative government of Edward Heath was engulfed in economic turmoil which culminated in 1973 with an oil crisis, as the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargoed those countries, including Britain, that had supported Israel during its victorious Yom Kippur campaign. The resulting surge in an already perilous inflation rate spurred calls for industrial action from workers who were experiencing an effective cut in their purchasing power. Most critical of all were the miners, and at the end of 1973 Heath implemented a disastrous "three day week" policy in order to conserve coal stocks ahead of an anticipated strike, and to ensure that any available oil was diverted to transport stocks rather than power generation. The ensuing Miners' strike duly commenced at the beginning of February the following year, this being the third major episode of industrial action that the increasingly powerful and successful National Union of Mineworkers had undertaken in five years. In turn, Edward Heath called a General Election in order to obtain what he could declare as a public verdict against the strike, but the result was inconclusive and allowed Labour's Harold Wilson to instead form a weak minority government.

The sense among some elements of the ruling class was that the accumulating power of organised labour represented only one tendril of a nebulous "enemy within", which was being organised and directed by professional Soviet agitators. The intimation of impending collapse was only intensified by the increasingly violent and chaotic campaign of the Provisional IRA, whose Balcombe Street Gang would cause mayhem in central London. As a result, a number of disquieting right-wing pressure groups began to come to prominence, these having an explicit anti-communist and anti-trades union stance and nebulous links to the military. Such groups included the Freedom Association, the Economic League, and Civil Assistance, the latter of which was founded by none other than Walter Walker. Ostensibly conceived as a strike-breaking organisation, Walker's idle boast of it having 100,000 members sparked one of the more notable anxieties of the era, in the rumours of the mobilisation of private armies. As British politics appeared to be heading inexorably to a febrile climax, so the third major characteristic of Seventies popular music would come to the fore. The nihilistic response to the collapse of the counter-culture had hitherto been confined to a handful of cult American bands such as the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and to the most proletarian and unfashionable strand of British heavy rock in the form of Black Sabbath. However, by the mid-Seventies some of the sharper minds in the British music industry had started to conceive of the possibility of packaging nihilism for the mass market. Most prominent of these was the agitator and entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, who had attempted a trial run with the prematurely clapped-out New York Dolls.

The Conservative Party was also in the mood for experimentation. Walter Walker had formed Civil Assistance as a substitute for what he saw as the gaping absence of leadership within Britain's political class. This chasm would be filled to his great satisfaction in February 1975 by the accession to the leadership of the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher. Carefully nurtured by the party's most fervent economic ideologues, the icily determined Thatcher would prove to be a marked contrast to any of her predecessors. The stage was therefore set for the denouement of the post-war era.