A History of Britain in Thirty-six Postage Stamps by Chris West

Author:Chris West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PRODUCTIVITY

NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY YEAR 3D COMMEMORATIVE, 1962

THIS MODERN-LOOKING stamp sweeps us into the 1960s. The first of many by one of the country’s finest designers, David Gentleman, it celebrates an attempt to propel Britain into a new age of prosperity, driven by excellence in all the arts of industrial wealth creation. How successful that attempt would be was another matter …

The new decade began quietly. The old guard seemed to have shaken off the disaster of Suez. Harold Macmillan, an Old Etonian with a restrained, lugubrious manner, was Prime Minister; Sir Anthony Eden, the man responsible for Suez, had been ditched shortly afterwards. Rock’n’roll, in its pure, finest form, hadn’t lasted much longer than Sir Anthony – after one last classic, ‘Jailhouse Rock’, Elvis had been drafted into the US Army and was never quite the same again: more anodyne entertainment seeped back into the charts (in one late-fifties classic Doris Day told listeners to accept whatever would be, would be). In 1959, an election had been held, where the now usual pre-poll pumping of money into the economy had created a mood of optimism – Macmillan gave his famous ‘You’ve never had it so good’ speech – and the Conservatives kept power with a huge majority. (Inflation was cranked up another notch, but who cared about that?)

The next year, ‘Supermac’ made another famous speech, about winds of change blowing through Africa – but the winds he had in mind were gentle zephyrs not hurricanes. Having finally woken up to the true cost of Empire, Britain divested itself of its African possessions as decorously as possible. By and large, it was done without bloodshed, Kenya being an exception. Most people knew it was inevitable.

Still, the discontent hadn’t gone away. Even without the burden of Empire, and despite the consumer goods available on hire purchase now filling the shops, if you peeked across the Channel, you’d get a shock: mainland Europe’s economy was now clearly performing better than Britain’s. Britain’s soul-searching became ever more intense. Why was the country doing so badly?

One explanation was ‘poor productivity’: an hour of British work produced less than an hour of work elsewhere. Looking back, that sounds more like a symptom than a cause, but it was decided that something needed to be done. So 1963 was to be National Productivity Year. Plans were announced in the House of Lords on 12 July 1962:

First, to strengthen the determination of all organisations concerned with industry to take an active part in improving the country’s efficiency and in maintaining its place among the leading industrial nations of the world; secondly, to foster a more favourable climate of opinion to better methods and their proper use; thirdly, to bring clearly before everyone the nature and value of services that exist to help him; fourthly, to promote discussion and research into the needs of industry; fifthly, to encourage mutually agreed co-ordination among bodies, to secure an even more concentrated and purposeful contribution to the problems of industry; and, finally,

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