UK: Back to the dark ages

Reckless government spending, the economy in meltdown, a floundering prime minister … in 1974 this all led to the infamous three-day week, when emergency electricity restrictions forced people to work by lamp or candlelight, if they worked at all. In an extract from his new book, Andy Beckett tracks down some of the winners and losers from those months of extraordinary crisis

…The three-day week began at midnight on New Year’s Eve in 1973, a Monday. The Heath administration decreed that until further notice all businesses except shops and those deemed essential to the life of the country would receive electricity only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, or on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Non-essential shops would get power only in the morning or the afternoon. When the electricity was off, affected businesses would have to make do with candles, gas lamps, private generators or moving their workers next to windows to make the most of the brief winter daylight. Employees would have to wear extra clothes to keep warm.

Four days before the restrictions started, the archbishops of Canterbury and York suggested every British congregation should pray that, “God may guide us in facing the present crisis with wisdom, justice and self-sacrifice.” Two days before, the Daily Mail said “industry minister Tom Boardman has said that a two-day week could not be ruled out.” The national emergency that followed would last for just over two months. Yet its roots went back much further than the winter of 1973-4. One of them was Heath’s economic policy.

From its election in 1970, his government had impatiently sought to boost the performance of the British economy. But from 1971, frustrated by a general lack of progress and spooked by a sudden surge in unemployment, the Heath administration had sought this transformation by increasingly bold – you could say reckless – means. During late 1971 and early 1972, the government cut interest rates, greatly loosened the rules that governed lending by banks, increased public spending and cut taxes. “No government has ever before taken so much action in the space of one year to expand demand,” declared the chancellor Anthony Barber on New Year’s Day in 1972.

For a time the results were spectacular: the gross national product, which had grown by a feeble 1.4% in 1971, grew by 3.5% in 1972, and by an almost precedented 5.4% in 1973 – the kind of rate usually achieved by Britain’s economic superiors at the time, Germany and Japan. Between mid-1971 and mid-1973, house prices rose by almost three-quarters.

Guardian