Jeremy Corbyn’s loopy Labour manifesto would catapult us back to the 1970s – when UK ground to a halt with constant strikes, rubbish and empty shops
LABOUR’S leaked manifesto – with its plans to renationalise mail, rail and energy firms and restore more power and pay bargaining to the unions – would catapult Britain back to the 1970s.
Just like TV cop Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, Brits would find themselves returned to an era when hard-left Labour were last in charge, the country ground to a halt and prices went through the roof.
And unlike the trusty Ford Cortina driven by Sam’s Seventies boss Gene Hunt, our State-run car factories turned out some of the world’s worst motors, while large numbers of real cops were on the take.
But if Jeremy Corbyn and his cronies get in on June 8, it won’t be so much Life on Mars as Life on Marx.
Here we recall the last time Britain was sentenced to hard Labour.
Economy
IN 1976 Britain was the sick man of Europe, three years after we joined .
Our finances were so bad that Labour Chancellor Denis Healey shrugged off the shame of begging world bankers at the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan of £2billion — about £14billion in today’s money.
Our terrifyingly high cost of living was blamed, with inflation at a head-spinning 25 per cent — that’s around ten times the rate it is today.
Strikes that brought the country to a halt at the end of 1978 and into the following year — the Winter of Discontent — were the result of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s attempts to curb inflation by ordering pay rises for public sector workers to be limited to five per cent.
Education
THE Labour Party may want to scrap tuition fees but there are now millions of students in university, compared to the 1970s when just one per cent of pupils went on to higher education.
Until 1972, pupils could legally leave school at 15, while in 1978 most youngsters gave up full-time education at 16.
Just five per cent of pupils went on to study their A levels.
Today more than 400,000 students a year go on to university — that is 26 per cent of 18-year-olds and
12 per cent of 19-year-olds going on to further education.
Health Service
AMBULANCE drivers began to take strike action in mid-January 1979, and in London, the West Midlands, Cardiff, Glasgow and the west of Scotland they even refused to attend emergency calls.
The Army was drafted in to provide a skeleton service in areas affected by the strike, which also included ancillary hospital staff.
The Royal College of Nursing conference in 1 January 1979 decided to ask that nurses’ pay be increased to the same level in real terms as 1974, which would have meant a 25 per cent average rise.
Half of the nation’s 2,300 NHS hospitals were only treating emergencies, with ancillary health service workers left to decide which cases merited treatment.
Even cancer patients were denied essential treatment.
Cars
TODAY the UK car industry has a £70billion turnover and employs 970,000 people.
In the 1970s the strike-hit, state-owned firm British Leyland produced some of the worst cars ever made.
The Morris Marina, which was outclassed by arch rival the Ford Cortina, was produced from 1971 to 1980.
The car was so bad that it was symbolically dropped from a great height on TV’s Top Gear. Just 120 out of more than 800,000 made still survive.
In 1973 BL created the Austin Allegro — a car with a square steering wheel.
Nicknamed the Flying Pig, it was said to be more aerodynamic going backwards.
In October 1976 the first prototype of the gull-winged DeLorean DMC-12 was unveiled.
With £100million of government money, the firm built a factory near Belfast in 1978.
It made 900,000 cars — many with leaks and electronics problems.
British Rail
LABOUR want to renationalise Britain’s rail network.
But when rail unions ruled the roost in the 1970s, strikes were a regular fixture.
Ageing diesel trains and carriages were clapped out and dirty.
Stations were cold, dark, depressing places and British Rail food was a national laughing stock.
British Rail failed to make a profit for much of the period after nationalisation in 1948.
At one stage it was losing £300,000 a day, though InterCity — with the introduction of the 125 train in 1975 — became the network’s only profitable division.
Commuter lines were stuck with old carriages and ageing trains, whereas investment has increased nine-fold since privatisation in 1997, reaching £6.8billion in 2013/14.
Migration
THE UK population actually registered a fall between 1975 and 1978, although migration statistics in the 1970s were notoriously inaccurate.
Landing and embarkation cards were collected by hand until 1979, when the system was finally computerised, but the primitive database was a limited success.
Immigration officers working in 24-hour ports of entry only had access to the main immigration database via telephone during office hours from Mondays to Fridays.
The number of asylum seekers before 1979 is difficult to determine, as no separate statistics were collated.
In 1973, 34 people were granted refugee status. The total number of asylum applications in 1979 was 1,563.
Homes
DESPITE difficulties for young people getting on today’s property ladder, more than 28million people in the UK now own their own home.
But in the late 1970s fewer than ten million people owned property.
That was partly because it took months, or even years, to get a mortgage.
Building societies made young home- buyers save with them for a long period before they would grant a home loan.
Then, once you had your home, state-run gas, phone and electricity companies took ages to install equipment.
Average mortgage rates in November 1978 were 11.75 per cent, while the average house that year would cost you £15,594 — just as well that the average wage was a comparatively generous £201.33 a week.
Strikes and unions
POWER lay not with bosses but with militant shop stewards. Now Labour want to return that power to their union paymasters.
In 1974 a combination of sky-high oil prices and a miners’ strike led to the Three-Day Week, when firms could use electricity on only those days.
Millions of homes were regularly blacked out too — causing an unexpected baby boom.
The 1978 Winter of Discontent saw more days lost to industrial action — nine million — than at any time since the 1926 General Strike.
The next year it rose to nearly 30million. In 2016, even with the Southern Rail strike, just 269,000 days were lost to industrial action.
Petrol tanker drivers belonging to the Transport & General Workers’ Union went on strike, demanding a 60 per cent pay rise.
Miners and local authority workers put in for 40 per cent, teachers’ unions demanded 36 per cent. Bin men walked out, leaving rubbish piled on the streets throughout the UK.
When gravediggers walked out, the corpses of 150 people were stored in a factory.
Police
WATCHING Life on Mars character DCI Gene Hunt, played by Philip Glenister, led viewers to speculate that coppers were better in the 1970s.
But police corruption was rife. Whole squads of policemen were on the take, leading to a major crackdown.
A nation brought up on BBC series Dixon of Dock Green was so shocked to hear of the corruption, one lawyer said: “It was like catching the Archbishop of Canterbury in bed with a prostitute.”
Operation Countryman and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act were brought in to end corruption “on a scale that beggars description”.
Media
IN the 1970s world in which Life on Mars’s Sam Tyler suddenly found himself, there were only three TV channels and they all closed down around midnight.
The next morning there were no breakfast telly shows — they did not appear until 1983.
In 1978 Anna Ford became Britain’s first female newsreader, on ITN.
National newspapers were in the grip of print unions, who called wildcat strikes, with the result that papers were not printed, or appeared with large white spaces where the unions had objected to articles.