History of England 1-6

The Stones had been in no real sense ‘rivals’ to the Beatles. Under the leadership of Brian Jones, they were undoubtedly talented and distinctive, but they were also derivative, and seemed content to rework the forgotten classics of the Mississippi Delta. Their new manager Andrew Loog Oldham had other plans for them. They must become the ‘anti-Beatles’. ‘The Beatles want to hold your hand; the Stones want to burn your town!’ and ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ were among the slogans he coined. Above all, he had plans for Mick Jagger. It was the frontman, not the leader, who caught his attention. Brian Jones would or could not write songs in the new style, which he despised as chintzy and commercial. Loog Oldham saw that his protégés would disappear if they didn’t follow the Beatles in songwriting. By the mid-Sixties, most of the major bands were writing their own material – there was simply no choice. The Beatles had not only opened the gate for others, but inadvertently chivvied them through. Neither Jagger nor Richards was an instinctive or natural songwriter. But with ‘Satisfaction’ this was to change. It had its origins, so legend has it, in a dream. The opening guitar instrumental, or ‘lick’, is ominous, funereal, even threatening. In its harsh rise and fall it seems to growl that ‘I’ll be waiting for you!’

40

This sporting life

It is most unlikely that Harold Wilson sympathized with this new musical aesthetic, for all his extolling of youth. But he felt some allegiance to his fellow northerners. This led him to propose that the Beatles be awarded MBEs for services to export. The queen approved, and in 1965 John, Paul, George and Ringo received their small gold crosses. Of Her Majesty herself, they said: ‘She was great, just like a mum to us.’ One disgruntled old soldier sent back his own MBE, protesting that the honour had been awarded to ‘vulgar nincompoops’. And even those who were more sympathetic must have agreed with Geoffrey Moorhouse: ‘One day it will all be over,’ he wrote. ‘We shall have worn out our records of “She Loves You”’.

In politics, as in music, nothing is ever certain. Given his five-seat majority, Wilson could not embark on the restructuring of Britain to the extent that he desired. His wishes, however, were Olympian. The rush of provision between 1964 and 1965 for the most vulnerable now seems uncanny in its beneficence. In 1965, redundancy payments were introduced. Council homes increased from 119,000 in 1964 to 142,000 in 1966. The Protection from Eviction Act ensured that tenants need never fear a rap on the door in the early hours. The Industrial Training Board provided for generations of workers to come. The Trade Disputes Act of 1965 restored the legal immunity of union officials. And the Race Relations Act made it an offence to discriminate against any on the basis of race. Most revealingly, widows’ pensions trebled in 1966. It was as if a sacred well had overflowed into a river of gold. The government’s majority needed all the support it could muster, yet the goodwill of Wilson and his colleagues was beyond question; it was their deep intent to unfurl the canopy of the welfare state far wider than Beveridge and even Bevan could have conceived. By 1965, the sociologist T. H. Marshall could speak of a new consensus in the belief that it was the business of the state to look after the people.

It was education that had brought Wilson from Huddersfield to Downing Street, and he wished that advantage for all. Under his aegis, the percentage of GNP spent on education outstripped that on defence. Thirty new polytechnics were built. There were free school meals for children. The number of teachers in training vastly increased and the student population grew by 10 per cent each year. Every citizen, Wilson hoped, would soon be assured of some form of tertiary education. In 1969 the Open University was inaugurated; if you still could not go on to higher education, it would come to you. The dream of universal education was not as radical as it appeared, yet it was not to be. Instead, Wilson was to be credited for a step over which educators, politicians and parents have been at war ever since.