Never Had it So Good/ White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook

I have now managed to come out of my post election gloom and have decided that the immense intelligence of the majority of British people will prevail and see Nazi scumbags back to the margins where they belong before too long. Anyway, lets talk about history books shall we? Yes that's much better. In the last two years of my bookselling career, I have noticed a trend towards revisionist readings of the '60s and 70's. If by revisionist one means the scrutinising a recieved truisms, then certainly Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good, and White Heat, histories of the Macmillan and Wilson Years both count. The 14 years from Suez to the first Heath government are fascinating for a number of reasons.
At a lecture last year by marxist historian Chris Harman, a very familiar view of 60s radicalism was recounted, albeit from someone who lived at the time and who was politically active at the time. The lecture was excellent, though it was very much preaching to the converted, and it gave the listener the impression that the radicalism of 1968 was one of the more dominant features of the 1960s. In this regard Arthur Marwick has also propagated a very traditional view of the decade as being all about LSD, peace banners and swinging Carnaby Street.
This is as fanciful as suggesting that in our time everyone lives next to a celebrity footballer or has been on Big Brother, it is a way of taking aspects of an era wildly out of context, important in small ways as they might have been, and inflating their historical impact and importnace. Student radicalism in the USA and Europe was a far larger phenomenon than in the UK, spawning the Yippie movement and the human potential movement in America and the Baader Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades in Europe. In Britain, no such radical transformations took place, and by 1969 the high tide of student radicalism had come to an end.
Dominic Sandbrook's main contention is that Britain struggled with two main issues in the period 1956-70, the new affluence that was part of a worldwide economic boom, a new affluence that changed how people dressed, ate, shopped, travelled, holidayed, where they lived, when they got married and how much leisure time they had. It was an affluence the sent gradually destabilising waves through Britain's social structure, largely unchanged since before World War One. The women's movement, gay rights and the peace movement, all seen as being products of the 1960s, were in fact, Sandbrook argues, the products of earlier decades, and in the case of the women's movement, the 19th Century.
He also concludes that on the whole, the British were a largely conservative lot throughout the 1960s, the shock of the Rolling Stones arrest and the Redlands trial shows, in Sandbrook's opinion, not that the Stones were particularly hard living and anti establishment at this point, certainly in the mid 60s they lived comparatively tame lifestlyes. Instead it demonstrates the deeply orthodox and conservative attitudes towards, sex, drugs and youth rebellion. Similarly, during the Profumo scandal, the actual details of the case were relatively trivial, John Profumo had had a relatively brief affair with Christine Keeler, he was a very junion minister in the War Office, had very litle intelligence to pass on to the Young Keeler, who in turn would have been most unlikely to have informed the Russian spy Ivanov of anything at all. The media furore and the public interest was symptomatic of a growing anxiety among British people that attitudes, beliefs and manners were changing at a speed that they were uncomfortable with.
The other main crisis of identity (And I do believe that ultimately these two books are about modern British identity) that has faced Britain in the post war era has been that of world role. Never Had It So Good Starts off with the Suez Crisis, Britain's last attempt to act as a world power, undermined by America, who threatened a run on the pound and the bankrupting of the country. After a humiliating withdrawal from Suez and the resignation of Eden, the stage was set for a gradual decline in Britain's world imperial power status. Macmillan was, oddly enough, a far more enthusiastic decoloniser than Wilson. The cost of Empire and its long term potential for conflict was uppermost in his thoughts, but, in a manner which is typical of muddled British priorities, we still mantained strategic bases in Aden, Hong Kong, Cyprus and Gibraltar, along with huge defence budgets. This meant that, along with the new and expensive welfare state and NHS, Britain was living for at least two decades far beyond her means. Dominic Sandbrook cites this as a pivotal reason for national economic decline nad a late decision to enter the EEC also added to our post war woes. When in 1949 Britain had the option of joining an embryonic European trading entity that would allow for a fixed price for coal and steel Herbert Morrison complained that 'the Durham miners will never wear it'. It was De Gaulle's great pleasure at the end of 1963 to veto the membership of Britain to the EEC that realley dealt the killing blow to Macmillan's faltering rule.
Partly the British Mandarin class's obsession with Atlanticism and the British public's imagined relationships with Empire left us out in the cold until the early 70s, but the reality was more to do with our inability to accept new world realities, combined with French intransigence.