The Rest Is History - 120. The Oil Weapon

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

1973: Major oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia quadruple the price of oil overnight, sending the West (particularly the United Kingdom) into crisis. The face of 20th century geopolitics is permanently altered. Slade are Christmas number 1. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. With 1973, an era died, an era of profligacy unprecedented in human experience, when most Americans embarked on an orgy of consumption following the lean years of the Depression and World War II. This New Year's Day, symbolized by dim lights, chilly rooms and empty gasoline tanks, ushers in a new era of enforced, if only relative, austerity. If the nation and its leadership react wisely,

1974 will also witness the rebirth of an ancient virtue, thrift, and the development of a new national ethic dedicated to the conservation of rapidly vanishing resources, including such elementary essentials as clean air and water, which generations of Americans have heedlessly taken for granted. That, Dominic Sandbrook, was an editorial in the New York Times published on New Year's Day 1974. And I know that you know that because you actually sent it to me. I didn't think I wouldn't have sent it to you if I'd known you would.

That was a magnificent display. And I'm sure American listeners will go, wow, I had no idea that he was American. But you seem to be doing that as Richard Nixon. That was very Nixonian, that accent, I thought. So he's president at the time, right? Yeah, so very appropriate. So that was very moving, actually.

I thought that was after the Alexander the Great peroration the other week. That was in the same league. Yeah, well, we're hitting homers, as they say stateside. Oh, God. So, Dominic, today's topic is the energy crisis of 1973. Very exciting topic. Yom Kippur War, seven days a week in Britain. Seven days a week, three day a week.

Three day a week, sorry, yes. I mean, we always have a seven day a week. That's true. Three day a week. But obviously, there's a kind of a context in the headlines of the moment that gives a particular saliency so there was a kind of there was a panic about um everyone in britain filling up their um petrol tanks uh then there's anxiety about whether the gas will run out over this winter yeah um there's a cop is going on at the moment as we're recording this it will

have finished by the time this goes out, but huge anxieties about energy conservation there. And then, of course, also, there's been the lockdowns with COVID, which, again, there are kind of certain parallels with the mood of crisis that the old crash of 1973 introduced. So I think it's a fascinating topic, but it's also fascinating not just as a kind of mirror held up to our present concerns, but in its own right, is it? It is. It feels like, looking back now, it's the year before I was born, but you were, of course, alive. But it feels like a massive, it feels like a genuine watershed, doesn't it, in modern

history? I think, you know one two three hundred years in the future it's conceivable that people will point to the oil crisis of 1973 and say that's a real turning point in the relationship between the west and the rest and in globalization and in the decline of american power and all these kinds of things i think also more broadly it it kind of pinpoints in a way that i hadn't really thought before really profound trends and changes in geopolitics in in the 20th century yeah the rise of the middle east and it's the first time the middle but also the decline of europe yes absolutely absolutely europe is really on the receiving end for the first time in centuries so i think we should we'll come to that

in in in due course. But to begin with, I mean, again, this is kind of very much a period that you're familiar with, you've written about it both in the American and the British context. But it is conventionally thought that the trigger for this doesn't happen in either Britain or America, but happens in the Middle East with the Yom Kippur War. Yeah. and I think there's, well, we'll sort of pull the camera back and go into the complexities behind it in a little bit. But you're right that there is a sort of sense of a trigger being on a particular day, and that's the 6th of October, 1973.

So as you say, it's the Day of Atonement in Israel. It is one of the holiest days, if not the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. So everyone is going to synagogues and meeting up. Everything has shut down. Yeah. Yeah, everything has shut down. And Israel's regional enemies, so countries like Egypt and Syria that were defeated in 1967, sees this as the opportunity for revenge.

Because Israel in 67 has seized Suez Peninsula, West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights, exactly. So it's unfinished business. And for the Egyptians, so that's President Sadat. And for the Syrians, that's President Assad, Assad Sr. Yeah, the dad of the current incumbent. Exactly.

They see this as the opportunity to strike back. Now, they don't necessarily think they're going to win a crushing victory. They don't think that by any means. But they think that they can change the realities on the ground and the minds of kind of Western policymakers by showing that they're not prepared to be pushed around, that they're still there, and that they can get a better deal at the end of it, I think.

So they strike, I think, after lunch at about two o'clock. And there had been warnings, but there had been sort of rumours rather, but they'd all been ignored. They strike with Pearl Harbour-esque element of surprise. So Israel is shut down for prayer and they strike and they make astonishing immediate gains, gains which the Israelis will subsequently push back a bit. But it's this sort of devastating moment. And as luck would have it, on the same day, the 6th of October, the oil ministers of the OPEC cartel, of the OPEC oil producing nations, are meeting in Vienna to talk about their latest deal with the big oil companies. And it's the confluence of those two things that is going to change the world. So OPEC is, when is it founded? 19 something. I've got it here somewhere and I can't remember it. 1960. There you go.

1960. So there's Venezuela, but the other ones are mostly Muslim. So Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran. Exactly. And they all obviously feel strongly about the Palestinian issue. They're hostile to Israel. Yes. And what is fascinating about this is that they had been talk of an oil weapon before. So we had lots of questions saying, does this come out of a kind of clear blue sky? And it doesn't, because there had been rumours of it for years, actually. They've been talk of using the oil weapon in 1967, but it didn't come to anything. But things have changed by 1973. So if you pull

right back, what's the context of this? The context is that the Western world, particularly America, but also Western Europe, is using more oil and importing more oil than ever before. So since the late 1940s, worldwide consumption of oil has basically doubled so the energy oil's place in the sort of energy ecosystem has has doubled but in america it's trebled so americans have gone from um consuming 5 million barrels of oil a day to consuming 16 million in the 1940s to so in 30 years they've gone from 5 million barrels of oil a day to 16 million and they've also started importing them so previously america had been an oil producer itself but it's reached saturation you know they've so you know in texas for example they

are now extracting all they can um so they're beginning to import and america now feels more vulnerable and the western world feels more vulnerable. So we had one question from Duncan Hibbard. Why hadn't the oil-producing countries used their oil power before? So there are two dimensions to it. One is that people are using more oil. And then, of course, the oil countries are no longer under the boot of colonial powers. Right. And so, I mean, this is the kind of when you really pull the camera back.

Actually, I mean, it takes us all the way back to our episode on the Industrial Revolution. And one of the key reasons perhaps why it happens in Britain is that we have coal. But the 20th century sees coal replaced by oil as the kind of a key lubricant of industrialization. And obviously, if you have oil, that then puts you in a tremendous position. If you don't, then it's more problematic. America does have loads of oil. And so it's unsurprising that its economy massively takes off in the 20th century. The colonial empires have oil by virtue of ruling empires. So the positions say of Britain and France, it's hugely important to them that they keep their supplies of oil. Right, exactly. And there's a sense, you know, also if you look at, I suppose, Germany in the Second World War, Germany's lack of oil becomes a kind of crucial factor in its ultimate defeat.

Why do they go to the Caucasus? Why do they go to Stalingrad? They're after the oil. Yeah. So you can kind of see the fight to secure oil supplies as being kind of one of the absolutely key motives of geopolitics in the transition. You absolutely can. And there's a brilliant book about this for listeners. I know listeners always rightly lecture us for our failure to put reading lists online. But if there's one book you should read about this, if you're interested, it's called The Prize by an American writer called Daniel Yergin. It's an absolutely brilliant book. It almost reads like a thriller. It's so interesting about the oil companies and about the geopolitical kind of the quest for oil, basically. And he says this was a prize beyond compare in human history. And um and actually tom you're talking about the

colonial stuff there are the big oil producing opec nations particularly saudi arabia iran iraq i mean they're the big players all of which are under british yes but then if you look at the so-called seven sisters so they're the oil companies and they are i have it written down to remind myself they're the ang Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. That's BP. There is Royal Dutch Shell, which is Shell, which is a majority Dutch but minority British. So the Dutch, obviously, because they had oil in Indonesia.

And then you have the five American, three standard oil companies, which were broken up in the progressive era from one to sort of break up the monopoly. And then you have, which were broken up, but in the progressive era, from Warn to sort of break up the monopoly. And then you have Gulf Oil and Texaco, and the name suggests they're basically Texas. And you've got Elf, the French company, Elf? French is Elf, yeah. That's kind of a compound of different

various companies. It is. Elf is the kind of mini-tale of the oil. It's like that French vaccine that they tried to produce for COVID, which was a complete shambles and a disaster. You know, that's how I regard Elf. Anyway, that's one for our French listeners. Do we have any?

No, I don't think we've ever had a French listener. And I think if we did, we'd drive them away within minutes. Well, Agnes, we had Agnes by you. Yeah, we did. Apart from her. She's very forgiving. Yes, okay.

So essentially the retreat of European colonialism from the Middle East, which is kind of turbocharged by America, really. I mean, so Suez plays a key role in that, actually is terrible for America in the long run. It is. And actually the Americans are really concerned throughout the 60s. They don't want... See, there's a common misconception

that the Americans wanted to push Britain out of the Middle East. And that's not really true. It's more complicated than that. The Americans were not fans of Britain's formal empire, but they wanted Britain to remain informally as a Cold War ally. Because the United States is basically subsidising Britain

to keep its kind of colonial possessions in the Gulf, right? Yeah. And throughout the 60s and throughout the 60s, Lyndon Johnson is saying to Harold Wilson, because one of Wilson's things is he wants to withdraw from east of Suez. So he wants to pull back from Aden, for example. And the Americans are very jittery about

this, because they say that will basically leave a vacuum that the Soviet Union and Arab nationalists will walk into. I mean, people aren't worried particularly about Islamism at this stage. They're more worried about kind of Nasserism, about nationalist Arab regimes that get into bed with the communist world. With the Russians, yeah.

Yeah, and that is the big fear because they know about the importance. I mean, it's a myth that people were unaware of the oil weapon. They knew about it. There had been reports from the late 60s onwards and warnings. And when you get to about 1971, the OPEC nations are already asking for more money from the oil companies. Okay, but that's still, we've still got this question from Duncan Hibbard. Why hadn't the oil producing countries used their oil power before?

I mean, they must know that this is an absolute jugular that they can squeeze. So why have they not tried it before? So there's pressure from some of the smaller countries like Algeria and Libya. They say, you have this power, because this is an age of kind of pan-Arabism, for example, and intense anti-Zionism. So they're saying in the late 1960s, why don't you use it?

And the key person is King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. So he's a moderniser. He's been trying to modernise the kingdom. He's doing things like outlawing slavery in the 1960s. And he's a big American and British. He's a Wook King. He's a Wook King. I hadn't thought of that.

But he's also very pro-American, right? He's very pro-American, very pro-American, very pro-British. He resists that and keeps resisting it. But the pressure on him is building. And I think you can see months before the Yom Kippur War that he's going to turn. In May 1973, he tells the meeting of American oil executives, you have to persuade your administration to change its policy because I can't hold out much longer. But also he believes it, doesn't he?

I mean, he's genuinely very, very hostile to Israel. He'd like to see the Zionist entity swept into the sea. Yes, he would. But he's by the standards of some of the people around him. He's a relative moderate. So in September 1973, so almost literally a month, I think a month and two days before the Yom Kippur War breaks out, he goes on American television, on NBC, and he says, you can't have both your support for Zionism, as he calls it, and all the oil at such cheap rates. You have to choose one or the other. And that interview creates quite a stir in the United States. So it's one of those stories, so common actually, one of those stories

where there's all this in the ether beforehand and then once it happens everybody forgets. Of course that was going to happen. Yeah. It's sort of looming there. So that's the that's the context for the for the Yom Kippur war let's go back to um the onset of the war it breaks out um Israel is buckling beneath the attack um America starts to seriously worry that that

Israel might be completely defeated yeah well I Well, I mean, yes, I suppose there's definitely concerns about it. But with reference to what you were describing about the Saudi king going on American television and saying you've got to choose between Israel and oil. In due course, is it not the case that Nixon, who is president at the time, friend of the show, of course. A great friend of the show. Great friend of the show, of course. A great friend of the show. Great friend of the show. That he gets a kind of message from Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, saying, you know, you've got to airlift stuff in to help us because otherwise we're going under. At the same time as he's also getting a message from the heads of all the American oil companies

saying, look, don't do anything to help Israel or we're going to have all the oil cut off. That's exactly what happens. I mean, he basically has the two letters in the same morning, I think. The letter from Golda Meir saying, send us aid. We need tanks, we need artillery, we need ammunition. And the letter from the heads of Exxon and Standard Oil and so on that says, whatever you do, don't give the Israelis any aid. And he has to decide.

And a really important factor here, and if we hadn't already done our epic watergate marathon which i commend to the listeners if they haven't listened to it already um then we could go into this in a big way nixon's in the absolute throes of watergate he's about to get rid of his special prosecutor archibald cox so he is a wreck of a man i mean he's an absolute wreck and so it's kissinger it's kissinger who's running this it's really Kissinger who's running this. It's really Kissinger who's running this. And Kissinger, of course, is the great kind of geopolitical, you know. Chess player.

Chess player, exactly, by his own estimation, if nobody else is. So Kissinger says, you know, Israel is our... But it is high stakes, isn't it? Because it's a proxy war between America and the Soviet Union. It is, absolutely. They put the American forces eventually on nuclear alert because they're worried about the Soviet Union intervening. So Kissinger says, we have to stand by Israel. Israel is our key ally in the Middle East.

We just have to do this. So they have what's called Operation Nickel Grass. They're going to send thousands, hundreds of thousands of tons of tanks and guns and all this stuff. Now, here's a really fascinating thing. The Europeans don't want to know. With the exception of one country, which is – well, two countries, actually, Tom, in that case. Two countries. Portugal, a Salazarist dictatorship, very, very right-wing, very anti-communist. They're well up for it. And, as you say, the Netherlands.

Now, I know you're a big fan of the Netherlands. A big fan of the Netherlands. Hence the name. so um but but yeah britain and france don't and britain i mean britain's because britain is historically a pro-israel country had been in the 60s but under heath which is kind of european unity is what matters to heath yeah he knows that the mood inside the common market which he has just joined in January of 73, is against this. Now, the Netherlands is different. Heath refuses to allow American planes to use the bases in Cyprus. So they use bases in Portugal.

So without the Portuguese help, it would have been much harder for the Americans. And the Portuguese end up being punished for this. And as for the Dutch, you know the story of the Dutch. The Dutch had had a special relationship with Israel based on arms sales. So the Dutch had been – Oh, I thought you were going to say – Based on what? Well, I don't know, the Holocaust or something.

Yeah, no, no, no. It's based on making money from guns. Right, okay. So the Dutch – And Frank or – See, I know you worship the dutch you have this very romantic vision of them as sort of they're hard-headed capitalists yeah they were behaving in a very 17th century way hard-headed they were they'd been selling weapons to israel so um so

they actually are one of the they're the sort of one country that really of the common market that doesn't want to you know that goes that goes against the general policy and actually wants to support Israel. So the Americans have been, they know that they have this kind of OPEC gun pointed at their head. Yeah, sort of Damocles. Presumably there is no attempt to disguise the fact that they're airlifting large quantities of tanks. There is an attempt to disguise it, but it's completely futile

because it's obvious that it's massive planes landing and tanks rolling off so so here's my question you said right at the beginning that um as luck would have it the yom kippur war starts on the same day that opec members are meeting yeah is it luck though yeah or is or is this coordinated no it's not coordinated it's not coordinated. It's not coordinated. It's not because it's quite a slow... What we think of as the oil bombshell actually happens over a series of days and indeed weeks. Because the key date then is the 16th of October, right? So that's six days after the outbreak of the war. What's happened?

So the 16th of October, there's a meeting in Kuwait City. Yeah. So they're no longer in Vienna. They've moved. They've moved to Kuwait. What's the state of play on the battlefield at this point? So on the battlefield, the Arab offensive has ground to a halt. The Israelis have pushed them back. It's sort of

getting back to... The Israelis have had a terrible shock, but they are clearly not going to be swept into the sea. They're not going to lose the war. And by this point, does it look like they're clawing everything back and and yes exactly yes yes um so so now it's it's down to opec to try and stop israel from kind of i don't know because because israeli armies are kind of moving in on cairo right and and they're shelling damascus and the israelis have made great progress but i don't think it's so much about winning the war, as it were, as it, don't forget the OPEC, they were already pressing for a better deal.

Suddenly, fate has almost delivered into their hands the obvious kind of pretext, if you like, for demanding a better deal. And just the political pressure is such that, you know, if you've got the, they know they have this weapon because the West is guzzling so much oil. Because obviously, one thing we didn't mention, by the way, was cars. They know they have this weapon because the West is guzzling so much oil. Because obviously, one thing we didn't mention, by the way, was cars. I mean, the development of the automobile economy in the 50s, 60s, 70s is such a huge part of this. So if they're not going to use that weapon now, when are they ever going to use it? So it's not so much because of realities on the ground. I just think it's a series of pressures so the 16th of october the the delicates um of opec six gulf states massively massively hike the the price of oil

70 70 in a day yeah wow and per barrel i mean incredible um and the saudi oil minister sheikh ahmed zaki yamani we are masters of our own commodity. Yeah, now he's a really interesting, he's the mastermind. He's actually the protagonist in some ways of Daniel Juergen's book, The Prize. He is the guy who is the great strategist of the sort of Saudi oil policy. And he absolutely sees this as a chance. You know, we had some questions saying, Dave Walters asked a question. He says, is it mainly about suppliers

seeking a fairer price for their product? I mean, you can see it that way, actually. You can say that basically they feel they've been exploited. The profits have gone to the Seven Sisters oil companies for too long. And Sheikh Yamani and others saying, this is our moment.

We are going to take back our own commodity and get a fair price for it. And this is kind of the point where they all start coming over and buying racehorses and exactly yeah they pay up mayfair and you know they basically immediately pitch up in park lane luxury hotels and stuff yes yes and the next day the 17th that's when they start to use the weapon in a more targeted way because that's when they announce big production cutbacks and embargoes and they say you're only going to get oil if you're a friendly country so if you're canada if you're japan if

you're the united kingdom if you're the netherlands or if you are portugal i.e those countries that are the most reliable allies of israel um you're not going to get any oil from us but britain does doesn't it well britain britain kind of got a got a pass because what they do is they start to cut back gradually so you get bigger and bigger cutbacks and and the embargoes become tighter and tighter so they basically don't it's not like all one monolithic thing right it's a series of measures but it's the united states is the real folk is the u.s is hit most severely and it and it's a the amazing thing is that it's exactly this moment that nixon is is sacking the watergate prosecutor i mean he's staying up all night sweating and worrying

about because kissinger goes to moscow yes negotiate and yeah and everything is falling to pieces all around absolutely so this moment that um kissinger there's this talk that uh kissinger and the generals in america are saying if Nixon gives you an order, don't obey it because he's gone mad and the world is collapsing and ruins and we could have World War III before we know it. I mean, there's this absolute sense of apocalyptic disaster at this moment because, you know, such a big production, all these production cuts. So on 5th of November, the opec countries are going to 25 production cuts it's this sense of a massive injection of inflation into the world economy

but also i thought particularly for america where the availability of gasoline yeah it's just kind of taken for granted isn't it 30 30 cents 30 cents a gallon i mean they're basically giving us away and so that's why all the cars are gas guzzling because you don't even think about it so that whenever you watch a film from the 60s and early 70s you know i don't diamonds are forever to pursue our bond theme the ginormous cars that they drive are predicated yeah are predicated on the fact that gas will basically never cost you anything. So it really is then the end of the American way if suddenly they have to queue up for gas. Yeah, I think it's an absolutely colossal psychological shock.

And there are all kinds of ways in which you can see it in America. So Nixon, when he finally drags himself to himself, he tells Congress that there has to be, the states have to impose different speed limits. He wants daylight saving time. He does things like he turns out all the lights in the White House and he takes a lot of the light bulbs off the White House Christmas tree. And there were these extraordinary stories.

So he appoints a guy called Bill Simon to be his kind of national energy czar. And Bill Simon tries to work out a system of allocating petrol state by state. And it's a complete and utter disaster. Didn't he compare himself to Albert Speer? He does. He says he hopes he's going to be Albert Speer

in the Third Reich, and it doesn't quite work out that way. Well, that's... Go to prison for life. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a story that his wife stopped using his credit cards because she was so embarrassed to be,

you know, people shouted to her in public. Because gas stations run dry all across the US. People are kind of shooting at each other. There's a shootout in Indiana. There's a man who blows himself up in Pennsylvania because he's been storing gasoline in the trunk of his car. I mean, just a real sense of sort of shambles and kind of breakdown. And so this, I mean, this kind of then generates a kind of particular tone of apocalyptic hysteria. Yeah. That we see in films of the kind of the time in science fiction, science fiction in,

in lots of kinds of books that project the future. Yeah. And I suppose in the long run, the, the kind of panic about the relationship between the environment and oil consumption that is still very much with us today, although it's obviously kind of evolved and been reconfigured. Nevertheless, that sense that our use of oil isn't just something innocent, that it might be, you know, that perhaps the only way we can save

ourselves is to row back on it. This is really when it begins. I think absolutely when it begins. I think it's the beginning of two things, Tom, actually. One is, you mentioned earlier that sense of the decline of the American dream, a dream which is based on the idea of ever expanding economic affluence. There's an amazing quote, actually, from an American oil executive, which you would enjoy. He says, it was the ebbing of American power by the Romans retreating from Hadrian's wall. I do like that.

But I also, I like this comment from John Ehrlichman, who is what, he's a kind of Nixon aid. Yeah, he's one of Nixon's Berlin wall. Yeah. He says, conservation is not the Republican ethic. Well, he wasn't wrong. But you're right about environmentalism. So 72, 73, to me, is a kind of hinge moment for environmentalism

because it's an earlier in 73, actually before the oil shock, that E.F. Shoemaker published his book, Small is Beautiful, which became a real Bible for the kind of 70s ecological movements. And you have all this talk of kind of the limits to growth, the costs of industrialisation. Well, we've got a question from Diego Mogado. Ah, friend of the show. Marxist friend of the show. Did the oil crisis highlighting the dependence on fossil fuels help the Greens in ecological movements to rise politically?

Yes, undoubtedly. I mean, yes, in the broader sense. Although there is a kind of further complication, isn't there, which again has a massive echo into the present, that in Germany, which historically has a look to Russia rather than to the Middle East for its gas in particular, there's an environmental movement that targets nuclear power. So the French particularly, obviously,

have massively invested in nuclear power. The Germans don't. And am I right that that is a particular focus of kind of Soviet agitation? Yes, it is. A desire to ensure that Germany doesn't invest in nuclear power so that Germany will be dependent on Soviet gas flows. And that's something that kind of runs into the present day. that Germany will be dependent on Soviet gas flows. Well, again, yeah.

And that's something that kind of runs into the present day. We talked about this in our Angela Merkel podcast, didn't we? About that German-Russian rapprochement about the availability of cheap gas is another of those themes of late 20th, 30th, 21st century politics that maybe we don't talk about very much, but our successors might say is terribly important in the long run so that's part of it actually even a very minor example of this ecologically in the netherlands obviously initially very badly hit um by the oil embargo that actually copes it right in the long run um in the netherlands they had car free sundays they

had car free sundays in other countries as well but in the netherlands it really takes off and obviously and you know it's a sort of urban myth. I don't know how true it is, but bicycles, the emphasis on public transport and bikes that you see in Denmark and in the Netherlands, that some of that derives from the impact of the oil crisis. I don't know how true that is. It sounds like a little bit too convenient,

but it's nice if it was. Silver linings and clouds um i think uh we should take a break at this point um yes so that we can advertise consumer durables require oil and gas to be brought to you um and when we come back let's zoom in on um on europe and perhaps specifically britain to find out how the European countries coped. Very good. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Now, we know that you particularly enjoy our promotional efforts and we have another one for you now,'t we tom a special offer for rest is history

listeners i think this may well be the third or fourth time we've mentioned this but uh we feel so strongly about it that we don't care we don't care and the offer is for um a magazine called unheard it's online um online magazine that aims to push back does it not dominic against herd mentality and promote independent thinkers. And among the independent thinkers that it has promoted are me. Top thinkers. Absolutely top thinkers. And you.

Yeah. And today's episode, we're looking at the 1970s. And you have recently, you've written about that, haven't you? Space Hopper, Don Revy, manager of England, inflation at 27%, Harold Wilson as prime minister. So it's basically the sequel. If you listen to this podcast and you want to find out what happens next, you have to go to UnHerd and read this article.

Are there any other articles, Tom? There is. Yes. And although they've prompted me to recommend this, it's an absolutely brilliant link because we've actually mentioned Suez and we've mentioned Britain's engagement in the Middle East, America's engagement, oil, all that kind of stuff. And there was a really fantastic piece by James Barr, who's a wonderful historian written about Anglo-French American involvement in the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century. And he's written one about the Suez crisis, arguing that it wasn't the self-inflicted error brought on by nostalgia that people think, but a rational response to financial pressure.

I genuinely read that article and thought it was very good. Very good. Of course, genuinely. I'm not lying when I say that I'm interested in these articles. They're fabulous. I agree. It was a really, really fascinating piece. And sticking up for British policy in Suez is exactly the kind of pushback against herd mentality that unheard UNHCRD goes in for. And if you want to find out for yourself, there is a special offer. It's three months free and massive saving because normally it's one pound a week. So you've saved lots of pounds. You go to unheard.com slash rest. And just a further last reminder, that is U-N-H-E-R-D. Dot com slash rest. Yes.

Thank you, Dominic. And now back to 1973. As Prime Minister, I want to speak to you simply and plainly about the grave emergency now facing the country. Jobs will be in danger and take home pay will be less. We shall have to postpone some of the hopes and aims we have set ourselves for expansion and for our standard of living. We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war. Edward Heath.

Who else, Dominic? I thought it was Mike Yarwood, actually. That was my impression of Edward Heath. Tom, you're on fire with your impersonations today. You are on fire. Yes. Why didn't you do... There are two great actors named Tom Holland in this world.

Why? And I'm one of them. When we had Ian Kershaw on, why didn't you do your impersonation then of the subject of that podcast? Because I would get myself banned from the Cambridge Union, wouldn't I? You would. You can't do that. Well, Prince Harry got away with it.

Anyway. Okay. So that was on the 13th of December, 1973. And if Prime Minister, Conservative Prime Minister saying warning that we're going to have a terrible Christmas sounds familiar. That's one of the reasons that we're doing this because there are certain kind of echoes. Dominic, so you've written a fabulous book about the Heath government, state of emergency, the way we were Britain 1970 to 1974. If I read from the end of that, will you laugh at that like you did Alexander the Great? Well, I mean, if it's got inspirational messages for young boys and girls out there, no.

So Britain basically goes into a kind of completely catastrophic meltdown as a result of this. Yes, more than anybody else. More than anyone else. We really shouldn't have done, really, because we weren't as hit as badly as, say, the United States or the Netherlands. No. But we have a shocker.

Well, Britain basically has a nervous breakdown as a result of the – because what the oil crisis does is it shines a very unsparing light on everything that's wrong with Britain's economic and political system. it's a bit like covid yeah i suppose so i mean the oil crisis and covid both kind of highlight the ways in which countries are not perhaps functioning as best they can yeah and ted heath has been prime minister since 1970 he's had this horrifically conflict sort of um contested confrontational three years um uh you know he's had one minor strike already he's had endless confrontations with the trade unions northern ireland has kind of descended into the abyss uh everything seems to have gone wrong for him and in the summer of 1973 he thinks that he's

possibly going to turn it around. He's got these incredibly grandiose anti-inflation policies that involve price and wage controls. And then basically the oil crisis hits and everything falls apart. And what makes it so resonant is that Britain had been, as you were saying, the chief, the great imperial power in the Middle East.

Yes, and had ruled Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran. Well, it had been the dominant power. The dominant power, yeah. And you give the example of... So these countries are all transformed too, by the way. The other country I think that's really transformed by the oil crisis actually is Iran, because it's in iran they make tons of money and the economy goes into overdrive inflation shoots through the roof and it's one of the big drivers actually the iranian revolution

the kind of rapid breakneck uncontrolled economic growth and urbanization and so on but anyway we can save that for a future podcast well i did i did like the the um the shah of iran um in the 1973 oil crisis lecturing the west um saying that uh you know um that they've all just been kind of scamming money off you know the the riches of the middle east and saying your young boys and young girls who receive so much money from their fathers will have to think that they must earn their living somehow shocking of all people so So the Shah of Iran apparently pocketed, is supposed to have pocketed $10 billion in oil revenues personally during the 1970s.

So he's not really terribly well placed to lecture others, I think, on living within their means. Anyway, back to Britain. So the real problem for Heath is he's lost one battle with the miners already and the miners basically have a knife to his throat they want a they want a 35 pay increase and they're asked for that even before the oil crisis starts i mean 35 sounds quite big so the well i'm going to um this isn't a position i'm i in, but I will defend the miners a little bit. No, I'm not saying it's wrong.

Their pay had fallen behind in the 1960s behind other workers. Inflation is quite high. So their leaders say, well, we are asking for a fairer wage to keep up with steel workers and car workers and so on. 35% is a very high opening gambit. And Heath's pay policy envisaged 7%. The Coal Board offered them 16.5% and the miners still said no

because they think they can get a better deal. Well, and they do get a better deal. Is this in 1970? No, this is in 1973. In 1972 they've already won one round. This is coming back for more. Now you could argue that in the long run, this does them terrible damage

because it destroys their public popularity, that they keep coming back for big pay deals. But at the time, they think, well, we have a loaded gun and we propose to use it. They go into these meetings with Heath. And it's incredibly dangerous. Well, one miner says to, yeah, it's incredibly dangerous, horrible job.

They've still got a lot of sentimentality among the public, a lot of sentimental support. And one miner says to Heathath at one point why can't you pay us for coal what you pay the arabs for oil and he has this big thing where he looks around he says you know you called for us in the first world war when we were there we dug out your coal for you and fought in the trenches i didn't see any arabs he says the same thing happened in the second world war now why won't you give us a deal? And Heath finds that question unanswerable. He's not going to give them,

he knows they don't want to hear a big lecture about geopolitical energy policy. So basically, the cabinet meets on the 12th of December and they agree on a three-day week. So shops, offices offices and so on are going to only have power for three days tv will have to go off at 10 30 floodlit sport obviously for an elite sportsman like yourself this would be devastating floodlit sport is and this is when heath so it's after that meeting that heath made that broadcast that you so spectacularly reproduced

yeah and you have this absolute sense reproduced. Yeah, eerie. And you have this absolute sense in Britain it was eerie. Well, it's the Wiltshire thing, isn't it? Salisbury. That's the connection that probably explains why. So you have this strange thing in Britain, because I always think Christmas 1973 is the kind of peak of apocalyptic pessimism in Britain. So people are talking about tanks in the streets, about coups, about a national government,

all this sort of stuff. And yet it's also, to my mind, the canonical Christmas. Because of Slade. Because of Slade. Because Slade are number one with Merry Christmas, everybody. And if you look at the TV schedules, it really is the canonical lineup. Morecambe and Wise, the two Ronnies,

the Generation Game, the two Ronnies, the Generation game, and Mike Yarwood, a.k.a. Tom Holland, doing his impersonations. Yeah. So for British, I mean, obviously at this point... So for Christmas,

it doesn't get cut off at 10.30 then, does it? No, that's a good question. I don't know what happened at Christmas. Presumably it didn't get cut off at 10.30. I'd have to check the schedules. Yeah, you've caught me out there. Oh, well, excellent.

That's fair enough. That makes up for Diogenes and the jar. For the pithos. Yes. I'll just have to go on and on and on about it. But you mentioned about anxieties about coups. Yeah. And, of course, a very, very significant star

at Top of the Pops in 1973 is very heated about this. He insists that there's a need for an extreme right front to come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. David Bowie.

David Bowie. David Bowie. Top, top, top fascist. Top fascist sympathiserist of the mid 1970s which you wouldn't necessarily expect and then he's seen doing fascist salutes at Victoria although he claims that he was waving he claims that he was waving to his fans

but I've seen I think I've seen an image of it, it does look very like a Nazi salute, yes so he was sort of flirting with these extreme personas in the mid 1970s I don't really want to beat up on David Bowie since he's not here to defend himself. But yeah, there is this sort of weird Weimar vibe in the... Alec Guinness, Alec Guinness as well, gives an interview to Time magazine in which he says,

you know, maybe Britain, a lot of people are saying Britain needs a strongman. And this sort of panic about... Yeah, well, a Jedi. This sort of panic about democracy and about can democracy... Is Britain... And the reason, you know, not just because we're a British podcast with lots of British listeners, but the reason it's important to talk about Britain

is Britain is seen as Exhibit A. Every country in the world, the press says, Britain is what happens when you get it wrong. You know, Britain is a country that has signally failed to cope with the... Is there also a sense, though, that Britain was first into the Industrial Revolution and is first out of it? Absolutely. That perhaps it's kind of like the life cycle of a butterfly,

an industrial nation, that where Britain leads, other countries are going to follow. Absolutely there is. But there's also a sense of it being kind of the boot on the other foot and the former colonial underdogs kicking the master. So the classic one of that is... Big Idi. Idi Amin, the leader of Uganda.

Yes. So he'd been in the Scottish Rifles or something, and they used to hit him on the head with a hammer to get him pumped up before rugby matches. So he's now the leader of Uganda. We talked about him with Tom Owolade, didn't we, in post-colonial Africa. So he offers some of his own savings

to help the British. He sends Heath all these telegrams that Heath keeps ignoring. Understandably. He starts the Save Britain Fund. And at one point, there's a fantastic moment where he sends a message to the Foreign Office, and he says, listen, I've got this lorry load of wheat and vegetables,

and they're rotting. Do you want them or not? Well, the Ugandan people have kindly donated them to help their British friends. And it is kind of, I mean, Idi Amin is quite a sort of monstrous man, but it is very comical that he's that he's sort of humiliating Britain

in this way and meanwhile January 1974 has come around and Britain has gone on to the three day week and it's not just Idi Amin

it's also Der Spiegel isn't it yeah the swinging London of the 60s has given way to a London as gloomy as the city

described by Charles Dickens with the once imperial streets of the capital sparsely lighted like the slummy streets of a former British imperial township oh yeah it's damning isn't it it's damning stuff um so do you but uh actually the three-day week's not that bad and a lot of so so that that was the pivot that's the classic Sandbrook pivot yeah so there's all kinds of you know humiliations disasters apocalypse and then you'll turn around and you'll talk about skateboards and space hoppers actually everybody loved and i thought that that reading your uh account of the three-day week in your excellent book state of emergency um there are quite a lot of echo

again echoes of of the current of which the the kind of panic buying of toilet paper is is one yeah which i gather also happened in japan i think that well the japanese of course are very the hygiene looms very large in japanese culture so yes once in a long time but there was panic buying of toilet paper um there was panic buying of petrol obviously right the way through but there was also people saying and here's the perhaps the lockdown echo that they quite enjoyed it yeah and the newspapers offering very wise advice about how to um use the time that you're not at work to spice up your sex life well the daily mail runs this column uh jane what's her name jane gaskell

she says um the kids are doing a five-day week at school, so why don't couples take the chance to be more spontaneous? And Dominic, going very, very meta. Yeah. I mean, is it not possible that if the three-day week had not happened and that advice not been given, we wouldn't be doing the podcast now because you wouldn't exist? You'd be doing it with somebody else. Who would you do it with?

You've got to explain. You've got to explain. So that advice was published nine months before i was born so i used to um when i used to when i was promoting that book i'd go around and i would say i literally may owe my existence to the daily mail but people thought that the daily mail were paying me to say that i think so well and to and to opec yeah to shake your to Sheikh Yamani and to the columnist of the Daily Mail. What does that tell you? Well, I think I might call you OPEC from now on.

Right. Okay, fair enough. So, yes. So, actually, yes, people are clearly not having too terrible a time. And Heath, Ted Heath. And isn't also, sorry, Dom on the on the parallels with the lockdown again also isn't it a fact that actually it's not as as bad economically as people had had expected so some people see this as evidence of britain's just utter shambolic laziness because they say

we don't lose we lost two days you might as well be three yeah well they say we don't lose. We lost two days. Might as well be three. Yeah, well, they say you lost two days. And firms are very ingenious about some, I mean, there are firms that use water wheels and things to kind of cope and candles. So they only lose, so their productivity is about 80%, despite the fact they've lost 40% of their working week. So people say, well, if you can somehow cope,

then that suggests you weren't working very hard to begin with. I mean, this is the sort of the foreign commentary about Britain, that we are very lazy and we're always having tea breaks and stuff. You see this all the time in the sort of discourse of the 1970s. So in a funny way, even our relative success at sort of escaping the worst consequences of the three day week turns into a stick to beat the British worker with. Yeah, OK, so stick to beat the British worker with with but i mean what what's the truth dominic are they um you know are they just coasting or are they actually reforming renovating um using the the pressures of of the uh of the three-day week to kind of generate new ways of running things a bit like has happened in the um in the covid yeah

i think a bit of both actually tom i think if you listen to a lot of foreign observers said of Britain in the 60s and 70s that they were quite shocked by the working practices in British factories and offices. So the classic example of that actually is Star Wars when George Lucas comes and he just can't get into his head that the crew are having at Elstree or wherever it is, they're having all these tea breaks. But at the same time, firms are very ingenious. They work extra long hours. They find ways of coping with the three-day week. So anyway, so it's not as bad as people think. And that's bad news for Ted Heath, because he needed a kind of crisis atmosphere. And he needed the sense of apocalyptic doom because he want he's going to

fight a snap general election on the issue of who governs the government or the miners and the more comfortable people are the more relaxed they are the more they will not feel motivated to go out and vote for the government they'll feel sorry for the miners instead yeah and so actually his big gamble is a is a disaster for him i say the the answer to the question of who governs Britain is not you. Yes, exactly. And he loses the premiership, goes into a massive sulk. Yes. Retreats to Salisbury. And so things are set up for the 80s. But I suppose also, I mean, much more importantly, perhaps even than that, looking at the present, is that in Britain, as in America, as in the rest of Europe, that the legacy of this is to make people question their energy use. Yeah, I think that's right. You would say that in a very, very long term. But actually, the interesting thing is that in the short to medium term,

that's quite an unpopular sort of political vision. So the person who really comes to incarnate that is the person who... So Nixon comes and goes. He obviously resigns. Gerald Ford has a brief spell. And then in comes Jimmy Carter. So Jimmy Carter is Mr. Energy. And Jimmy Carter says, you know, we have to learn the lessons from this.

We have to learn the lessons of our dependence on foreign oil. We have to conserve energy. We have to be more sensible. We have to be more respectful of the planet, all that kind of thing. And he is voted out in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980. And then actually in the 80s, oil prices, there's a glut of oil on the market. So oil is incredibly cheap. And it's as though the lessons are kind of forgotten for a time. But I mean, oil still is kind of relatively cheap. I mean, right the way up to now, but that's not

kind of... The anxiety about the use of oil gets divorced from the cost, doesn't it? I mean, essentially what the oil crisis does of 73 is to get people worrying about its use and where it may lead. And the anxieties that are consequent on that outlast the price spike. Yes, they do. The attempt of the cartel to... I think it's absolutely right to say

that there's a general anxiety about fossil fuels and about dependent it's about the idea of dependence isn't it it's not it's the idea of dependence on two things the idea of dependence on foreign actors that you no longer control as in these this is the anxiety of kind of former colonial powers who are now dependent on their their former subjects um but it's also the anxiety of being dependent on a finite commodity. And so this is the point at which I think you start getting people writing books and making predictions to say, one day we will run out. We'll run out quite soon. And what will we do then? So the question from Nathan Hogg, has OPEC power declined since the 70s? I mean, you could say

that perhaps one of the reasons why they didn't um use the embargo and and the old weapon as they might have done previously is that perhaps wiser heads among them realize that it might be a pyrrhic victory in the long run yeah i suppose it is a pyrrhic victory you're right because they can it's also a weapon you can only really use once i think yeah um it's sort of once you've used it then the people have wised up to it and they start from 1973 onwards people are making provision for what happens if

there's a war in the Middle East what happens if we have to there is the next great turbulence in the Middle East the Iranian revolution people are a little bit better prepared for it than they were back in 1973 and then again with the Gulf War in 1991 and so on but that habit of thinking about how do we wean ourselves off oil and off you know fossil fuels generally yeah whether it expresses itself through an interest in developing um nuclear energy

or wind energy or whatever that is a kind of habit that gets turbocharged in the 70s and it's one that it's a kind of a wave that we're still surfing now yeah absolutely the 2020s so for example shale gas the extraction of shale gas that that's given a huge boost in america so nixon yeah nixon so nixon has this idea for something called project independence he calls it he wants a united states that is entirely that is no longer dependent on imported energy at all. I mean, he never really gets it. I mean, it's a sort of pie-in-the-sky idea. But that sort of idea of ridding yourself from the crippling dependence,

that's there for the next 30 years or so. And then I suppose the next element is, which you don't see at all in the commentary in the 1970 1970s is we're destroying the planet by burning all this oil because people don't really talk about that particularly in the 70s it's more the economic costs rather than the sort of environmental costs but now you've got both i mean you've got you've got we've got to wean ourselves off oil because we've got to save the planet and we've got to wean ourselves off oil because the middle east is an absolute nightmare. It's a kind of Magi-mix. And every time we put our hand in it, it just chews and spits bits of finger.

Do people put their hands in Magi-mixes? I don't know. Maybe they do. I think if you're George Bush, they do. Yes. Or your friend Tony Blair. Well, whatever. He had his reason.

But, Tom, there's another element to this, which you mentioned in your fantastic impersonation of the New york times which is this question of thrift so it's this idea of the kind of getting back to a kind of roman republican virtues and that's not worked has it the dependence on oil has is luxury basically because you saw this even in 1973 74 and some of the commentary people would say you know we should live simpler lives we've we've become dissipated. Yeah, it's the good life. Exactly. It's that kind of, and it's not just about saving the planet and it's not just about, you know, not getting into Middle Eastern politics.

It's also about being a better person through, you know, a plainer, simpler lifestyle. And I think the oil crisis absolutely turbocharges that. And there, again, you have a parallel with COVID and the lockdowns, because sometimes you would hear people saying, you know, I've been baking sourdough bread for the last six weeks. I'm so happy I don't have to go to work anymore.

I can listen to the birds. Yeah, exactly. No, I think it's a great topic. And I think it's fascinating both as a mirror, but also because obviously, you know, it's clear that this is an absolutely crucial pivot in 20th century global history.

And in a sense where, you know, we're on, we're, we're on the one side of that. Yeah. So brilliant, Dominic.

Thanks so much. That was fascinating stuff. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. And we've, we've never, ever had better impersonations on the show.

I'm aware that I've been letting the side down up till now. I, my, my cowboy impersonation was, was a terrible one. I normally do a much better one than that um i just i don't know i didn't have enough self-confidence oddly um so what are we doing next that you can do more voices our next show is on australia it's on the early history of australia oh yeah what are you going to do I don't know oh my god is that Paul Hogan I can't Shane Warne

Warney oh this is this is so exciting you're really spoiling us it's the Ferrero Rocher of accents yes

so huge excitement brewing there so we'll see you back there we'll be going down under and that's my impression of a didgeridoo on that note We'll see you back there. We'll be going down under. That's my impression of a didgeridoo. On that note, I think it's time to end.

Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.