The Wake-Up Call — The New Dawn and Local Radio’s Place in the New Duopoly

Abstract

Edward Heath was the United Kingdom’s Conservative Prime Minister from 1970 until 1974, in which politically turbulent year he lost the next two general elections to the Labour Party. In 1975 he lost the leadership of his political party to his Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher, who in turn became Prime Minister in 1979. Heath kept his promise to the British people and the commercial radio lobby with the passing of the Sound Broadcasting Act 1972, but it was the political seesawing of the 1970s that meant the introduction of commercial radio was rather faltering in nature. The relative political stability of the inter war years with a succession of coalition governments in power had been followed by a post war consensus around the middle ground of politics. The Wilson Heath era was, by contrast, one of binary opposites, as we have already seen through Wilson’s implacable opposition to the pirates and the whole principle of commercially funded, privately owned radio stations. In a tit for tat exchange, vaguely reminiscent of the spying scandals of foreign policy in the Cold War era, in which the East and the West would ratchet up international tension through retaliatory expulsions of spies and diplomats alike, local radio —became a political football.