Sarah Vine's Super Suspicious Sounds of the Seventies: Assassinations in Italy were better than a Britain without bin collections...
The columnist's contribution to yesterday's Mail on Sunday was a microcosm of her incredible all-encompassing mendacity.
The 1970s were another country; they did things differently there. If you believe the clip shows that dominated TV schedules in the late-90s, presenting Stuart Maconie as this country’s greatest historian, the seventies were a time when everyone was obsessed with Spangles1, Rubik’s Cubes were a kind of currency, and David Bowie ruled Britain as a kind of wonky god-emperor.
Subsequent revelations suggest that, in fact, seventies Britain was a deranged nonceocracy. It’s reduced most of the Top of the Pops archives to shots of audiences listening to presenters who have been Yewtreed out of existence before dancing in front of empty stages. The seventies was a time when men were men and everyone else was utterly terrified.
In Tory mythology though, the reign of the Jurassic pervs is a distraction from the idea that everything was in collapse until Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 and the land was suddenly green and pleasant again. Sarah Vine indulged in that kind of fan fiction history yesterday in her Mail on Sunday column.
Beneath the barkingly ludicrous headline Coal mines row shows the Left needs a lesson in 1970s history because Margaret Thatcher was well ahead of her time on climate change awareness, Vine used Boris Johnson’s comments from earlier in the week as a jumping-off point for a fact-light, ideology-heavy history lesson. She wrote:
Labour MPs and Left-wing commentators now apparently look back on mining as though it were the Holy Grail of working-class life – when in reality it was a brutal, backbreaking way to earn a living.
And they act as though Britain before Thatcher’s 1979 election was some kind of socialist utopia, when in fact it was utterly miserable.
Inflation was through the roof; taxation was punitive to the point of destruction; the entire country was in the grip of the unions who ruled with an iron fist, holding everyone to ransom with their endless, impossible demands.
The miners went on strike in both 1972 and 1974, inflicting intolerable misery on ordinary families, who had to endure the three-day week and power cuts.
… The final straw was 1978, the infamous Winter of Discontent, when widespread strikes paralysed vital infrastructure.
NHS workers, refuse collectors, road hauliers – even gravediggers – downed tools, making life intolerable. Rubbish and bodies piled up.
Born in 1967, Vine was a small child in the seventies and that may explain why her story of the decade is so cartoonish.
The “bodies piling up” image is a newspaper myth that has been repeated and reinforced for decades. Gravediggers in Liverpool and Tameside did go on strike in January 1979. They were seeking improved pay and conditions as they had to work in unsafe and unsanitary situations, denied even the right to enter the canteen on their breaks.
A Liverpool gravedigger quoted in Tara Martin López’s The Winter of Discontent: Myth, Memory and History explained:
When you dig a new grave, you are covered in mud and slime. I have lost count of the times when the earth around me has caved in while I’ve been digging. Just think when you’ve finished, you find yourself up to your neck again in mud. Every day of your life, you run the risk of being trapped and smothered.
The strike lasted a fortnight, at the end of which the gravediggers settled for a 14 per cent pay rise, but it was long enough for the national media to imply that the dead were being left unburied across Britain.
It was undoubtedly a grim situation for families affected by the strike, but the bodies could be safely stored for up to six weeks and they were. But stories of burial at sea soon became common after Liverpool’s Medical Officer of Health Dr Duncan Bolton was pressed about what would be done if the strike went on for months. He hypothesised that burial at sea might be considered and the papers were off to the races.
Similarly the images of rubbish piling up in the streets were confined to a brief period between January 22, 1979, when the waste collectors went out on strike and 21 February 1979, when the local authority workers’ dispute was settled.
Those 30 days are stamped into the collective consciousness because the British press, which was resolutely against the trade unions, ensured that it was and their successors like Vine have raised the spectre of “rubbish and bodies piling up” every few years since.
Boris Johnson weaponised the Tory myth of the 70s as guest speaker at the extremely cursed Margaret Thatcher Annual Lecture in 2013, harrumphing:
Our food was boiled and our teeth were awful and our cars wouldn’t work and our politicians were so hopeless that they couldn’t even keep the lights on because the coal miners were constantly out on strike, as were the train drivers and the gravediggers, and the man who was really in charge seemed to be called Jack Jones2.
I remember how deserted London seemed, as people fled to Essex or elsewhere, and the stringy grass and the spangles wrappers and the bleached white dog turds in the park, and the gust of Watneys pale ale from the scuzzy pubs… Red Robbo3 paralyzed what was left of our car industry and the country went into an ecstasy of uselessness called the winter of discontent: women were forced to give birth by candlelight, Prime Minister’s Questions was lit by paraffin lamp and Blue Peter was all about how to put newspaper in blankets for extra insulation . . .
Yes, there are the Spangles and white dog poo, so beloved of the I Love The… documentary talking heads. Perhaps Maconie did a spot of ghostwriting for Johnson? After all, his seventies was spent living in Brussels (1973 - 1974) where his father had a job with the European Commission, then returning to England in 1975 to attend Ashdown House prep school in East Sussex before going on to Eton in 1977. He was hardly hanging around on the streets of London.
In fact, Boris Johnson was just 15 years old during the ‘Winter of Discontent’.
Like Johnson, Vine had a rather cosmopolitan childhood, which she referenced in yesterday’s column, writing:
Britain was on her knees and it was then that my parents, aged 27, with very little money and two tiny children, took the decision to emigrate to Italy.
Neither knew anyone there, nor did they speak a word of Italian. But anything was better than the horrors of life in 1970s Britain.
Remember that passage the next time Vine or her newspaper write about immigration and “economic migrants”. Remember too that this is the same Vine who in 2016, in an email to Michael Gove which she accidentally leaked by typing in an incorrect email address, warned him not to back Boris Johnson for Tory leader without “specific reassurances on immigration controls”.
And let’s look a little more closely at the idea that “anything was better than the horrors of life in 1970s Britain”. Vine’s parents moved to Italy during a period known as there as the Anni di piombo (the years of lead).
The violence and civil unrest stretched back to 1969 and, on 16 March 1978, just months before Vine’s family moved to Italy, the former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades as he made his way to the talks about bringing the Italian Communist Party into a governing coalition. Less than two months later, on 9 May 1978, after a series of demands from the Red Brigades were not met Moro was murdered and his body was dumped in a car left on a street in central Rome.
In the year that Vine’s family moved to Italy, there were 659 assassinations. They included the murders of judges, trade unionists, students, journalists, police, barmen, soldiers, and the shooting of school teachers and children in their care. This was the “anything” that was better than “the horrors of life in 1970s Britain”.
Even then, if you dig just a little deeper, you discover that the Vine’s mother and father left Britain because he had a high flying job and they went before the ‘Winter of Discontent’ and the miners’ strikes that apparently horrified toddler Sarah so much. A Tatler profile of Vine from 2017 says:
Sarah's background was a little less impecunious [than Michael Gove’s] and a little more glamorous. Her parents met in Swansea; her father was at the university, and her mother was working the 'summer season'. They had Sarah when they were both only 20, and when Sarah was about five they moved to Italy, first to Rome and then to Frascati, for no real reason other than to have a more pleasant life: 'Dad worked for Deloitte, or some sort of accountancy place. We lived in a funny little villa at the top of a hill. It was just nice and sunny.' The Vines enjoyed the laidback atmosphere of Italy, the food and the wine, but their daughter pined for the ordered mundanity of England.
'I know it sounds ridiculous, but I remember coming off the ferry at Dover and seeing all these little houses, and just loving the neatness. Italy is all chaos. Everything's just so regular about Britain, it feels very safe.'
When she was 16 years old, Sarah left Frascati, her parents and her younger brother (who now lives in Madrid) and moved to Brighton to do her A-levels at Lewes Technical College. Her grandmother, a former Army wife who kept a very tidy house, looked after her.
Sarah says she doesn't know if her parents were sad that she left Italy so young: 'I never asked them, they are very private.'
But the experience of growing up in Italy, and leaving it, seems to have informed her politics to this day: 'One of the great things about Britain is that we don't have a corrupt government, we don't have a corrupt business sector, we don't have the Mafia. In Italy you can't do anything without paying someone money. People forget that. One of the reasons I came back to the UK is that I'm really attracted to that rigour and fairness. It's very meritocratic. The EU is not meritocratic, Brussels is not meritocratic.'
Odd how Sarah Vine (2017 variant) was so keen on Britain and down on “corrupt” Italy but Sarah Vine (2021 version) tells an entirely different story. It’s almost as if she shifts narrative to suit whatever line she’s peddling in that particular column.
In 2016, Vine — who was, along with her parents, precisely one of those “economic migrants” her paper so disdains — used her youth in Italy as a cosh to claim that people who come to the UK have it too easy. Under the headline Teach Polish in schools? No, migrants need to learn our language, she wrote:
… teaching Polish in British schools would be a terrible mistake because immigrant children thrive so much more if they are obliged to learn the language of their adoptive country. I should know, I used to be one.
When my parents upped sticks to Italy in the Seventies, I was five and they enrolled me in the local state school. I spoke not a world of Italian — not that anyone cared.
Vine used this anecdote to illustrate how she and her family had gone to Italy and made it work. But using Daily Mail-style bad faith tactics, you could as easily say that they rocked up in Italy as economic migrants and put pressure on the Italian education system by not already speaking the language. It would be unfair but since when has Vine ever been fair?
She ended her Mail on Sunday article yesterday by declaring that the left must “stop viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles.” Her own spectacles are very rose-tinted if she can paint a picture of Italy in the 70s with the Red Brigades and all that blood nowhere to be seen.
The rest of the items in Vine’s column were no better. She managed to squeeze in some scaremongering about porn — while writing for a newspaper group that has a long history of sexualising children and endlessly objectifies women — attacked Sophie Turner for providing a voice on a cartoon mocking the royals while defending her own child’s privacy (Vine uses her own children for content then flares up at the merest mention of them by anyone else4), and wrote some voyeurism filler about Britney Spears.
Is it really surprising that Vine distorts the past for her own purposes when she spends so much time doing the same with the present?
Terrible boiled sweets made by Mars. The only remaining offshoot of the Spangles brand are Tunes, the throat sweets you endure when you have a cold.
Jack Jones was General Secretary of the Transport Workers Union. He also fought Mosley’s fascists and was a Spanish Civil War veteran.
Derek Robinson, a trade unionist active within British Leyland who it later turned out was undermined by MI5 operatives. He was frequently smeared by the press who stuck him with the “Red Robbo” nickname.
My own legal case remains resolutely in the bureaucratic weeds, unfortunately. Zelo Street wrote up what happened well here.