20 February – Two Pakistanis are shot dead by police in London after being found in the Indian High Commission carrying pistols, which are later established to have been fake.
26 February – Edward Heath's government publishes a Green Paper on prices and incomes policy.
27 February – Rail workers and civil servants go on strike.
Two IRA bombs explode in London, killing one person and injuring 250 others. Ten people are arrested hours later at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of being involved in the bombings.
Northern Ireland sovereignty referendum (the "Border Poll"): 98.9% of those voting in the province want Northern Ireland to remain within the UK. Turnout is 58.7%, although less than 1% for Catholics.[5] This is the first referendum on regional government in the UK.
Phase 2 of the Price and Pay Code comes into effect, restricting rises in pay and prices as a counter-inflation measure.
6 April – Peter Niesewand, a correspondent of The Guardian newspaper and the BBC, is jailed in Rhodesia for an alleged breach of the Official Secrets Act.
17 April – British Leyland launches its new Austin Allegro, a range of 2 and 4-door family saloons which will eventually replace the long-running 1100 and 1300 models, which are set to continue in production alongside the Allegro until 1974.
5 May – Sunderland A.F.C. achieve a shock 1–0 win over Leeds United in the FA Cup final at Wembley. Ian Porterfield scores the only goal of the game. It is the first time that an FA Cup winning team had not contained a single player to be capped at full international level, and the first postwar FA Cup won by a side outside the First Division.[14]
23 June – A fire at a house in Hull which kills a six-year-old boy is initially thought to be an accident but later emerged as the first of 26 fire deaths caused over the next seven years by arsonist Peter Dinsdale.
July
1 July – The British Library is established by merger of the British Museum Library in London and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology at Boston Spa in Yorkshire.
8 August – Gordon Banks, the Stoke City and England goalkeeper, announces his retirement from football having lost the sight in one eye in a car crash in October last year.[21]
21 August – The coroner in the Bloody Sunday inquest accuses the British army of "sheer unadulterated murder" after the jury returns an open verdict.[22]
Prime Minister Edward Heath announces government proposals for its counter-inflationary Price and Pay Code Stage Three (continuing to July 1974), including limiting pay rises to 7%, restricting price rises, and paying a £10 Christmas bonus to pensioners – a move which would cost around £80,000,000 funded by a 9p rise in National Insurance contributions.
16 October
The film Don't Look Now, containing one of the most graphic sex scenes hitherto shown in mainstream British cinema, is released in a double bill with The Wicker Man.[27]
20 October – The Dalai Lama makes his first visit to the UK.[28]
26 October – Firefighters in Glasgow stage a one-day strike as part of a pay dispute; troops are drafted in to cover the fire stations.
31 October – The sixth series of BBC television sitcom Dad's Army opens with the episode "The Deadly Attachment" containing the "Don't tell him, Pike!" exchange which will become rated as one of the top three greatest comedy moments of British television.[29]
Brian Josephson shares the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects".[34]
19 December – Ealing rail crash: The 17.18 Paddington to Oxford express train is derailed between Ealing Broadway and West Ealing due to a locomotive maintenance error resulting in 10 dead and 94 injured.[36]
31 December – Coal shortages caused by industrial action result in the implementation of the Three-Day Week electricity consumption reduction measure.[37]
Total fertility rate (average number of births per woman over her reproductive life) falls to 2.04, giving sub-replacement fertility for the UK.[39] The sex ratio (excess of male children born over females) reaches 106.7, the highest this century for the UK.[40]
^Davies, Glyn (1996). A History of Money from ancient times to the present day (rev. ed.). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. pp. 406–23. ISBN978-0-7083-1351-0.
^"Our history". Pizza Hut. 2010. Archived from the original on 7 February 2011. Retrieved 4 January 2011.
