State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  That the country could be lurching towards another confrontation between the state and the miners, so soon after the government’s humiliation in 1972, seemed almost beyond belief. Yet in the face of the miners’ intransigence, Heath seemed close to powerless. Having put his faith in Gormley’s ability to hold his men back from the brink, the embattled Prime Minister now had no answer to their demands for special treatment. And when the overtime ban came into effect on Monday, 12 November, the situation seemed bleaker than ever. Although the government had stockpiled a record 18 million tons of coal at power stations across the country, the Arab oil cutbacks meant that there were real fears of shortages over the winter. By an extraordinarily unlucky coincidence, not only were the power workers on strike too, but the weather forecasters were predicting a sudden cold snap. In Monday evening’s papers the Electricity Board warned that two-hour power cuts were likely over the next few nights. And when the Cabinet met the next morning, Peter Walker grimly told his colleagues that coal production was expected to fall by as much as 40 per cent during the first week of the overtime ban.5

  On Tuesday afternoon, Robert Carr announced in the Commons that the government had no choice but to declare its fifth state of emergency in three years. Electric advertising and floodlighting were banned, while public offices were directed to cut their power consumption by one-tenth. In the next day’s papers, there were reports that the government was ready to introduce petrol rationing. ‘The ration cards’, reported The Times, ‘are already in post offices.’ But the bad news did not end there. For even as the government was preparing to unveil the state of emergency, the Department of Trade and Industry announced a set of trade figures that, as Peter Jay put it, were simply ‘epithet-defying’. Exports had fallen, but thanks to the Barber boom imports had reached a record high, sending Britain’s monthly trade deficit to a record £298 million. That afternoon, in a desperate bid to reassure the world markets that Britain’s economy was still a going concern, the Bank of England announced the biggest credit squeeze in living memory. Minimum lending rate went up to a record 13 per cent, banks were ordered to hand over a further 2 per cent in special deposits, and overdraft interest rates were forecast to rise to an excruciating 18 per cent.6

  The next day was a national holiday, proclaimed to mark the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips. But in Westminster and Whitehall, few people felt in the mood to celebrate. Douglas Hurd, never far from his master’s side during this latest crisis, nipped out to the Horse Guards to watch the royal carriages rattling towards Westminster Abbey. ‘Leaves and breastplates and a smiling Queen,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘After all the carping the magic works.’ But then it was back to Downing Street, where he was drafting a new prime ministerial address to the nation. And Hurd was not the only observer to note the incongruity of so much pageantry at a moment of supreme national crisis. Amid the faded grandeur of his St James’s club, James Lees-Milne watched the wedding on a television that staff had installed in the members’ bar. Yet he could not forget the newspaper hoardings outside, which contained ‘the gloomiest portents in their headings, fuel crises, more strikes, Bank Rate rising to unprecedented heights’. As Auberon Waugh put it, ‘the show goes on, but now it is played as farce’.7

  Heath never gave up trying to find a compromise that would end the crisis. But since there was no question of him abandoning Stage Three, a deal never seemed likely. When the miners’ leaders returned to Downing Street on 28 November, Heath’s entreaties that they remember the national interest fell on deaf ears. ‘Prime Minister, what I can’t understand is this,’ said a little man perched at ‘the very back, almost out of the window’. ‘You have told us that we have no option but to pay the Arabs the price they’re demanding for the oil. Now, as far as I know, the Arabs never helped us in World War I, and in World War II, and we flogged our guts out in all of that. Why can’t you pay us for coal what you are willing to pay the Arabs for oil?’ A cannier, less scrupulous politician, more interested in personal self-preservation than in economic discipline, might have taken the hint. Certainly Harold Wilson – and probably Margaret Thatcher – would have used the same argument to the nation to justify giving the miners a raise and scrapping Stage Three. But that was never Heath’s style; determined to stick to his pay policy, he ‘had no answer’, recalled William Armstrong, to the miner’s question. And by the end of the meeting, his patience had run out. ‘What is it that you want, Mr McGahey?’ Heath asked, almost in desperation. McGahey stared back at him. ‘I want to see the end of your government,’ he said finally, in his distinctive gravelly voice. There was a long silence. ‘Come on lads,’ said Joe Gormley finally, ‘let’s go.’8

  By the end of November, the news seemed almost unremittingly depressing. The combination of the oil shock and the miners’ dispute, Heath grimly told a public meeting in Nelson, Lancashire, was ‘now threatening to create serious difficulty for every factory, for every office, for every farm, and for every family in this country’. In London, schools were reportedly sending children home because of heating problems; in Lincolnshire, policemen were abandoning their cars and returning to the beat to cut their petrol consumption; in West Sussex, 10,000 street lights had been turned off to save power. ‘FUEL AND POWER EMERGENCY: LEAVE YOUR CAR AT HOME THIS WEEKEND’ read stark government advertisements in the national papers, begging drivers to cut out ‘weekend motoring’, to organize rotas and car pools, and to keep below 50 mph at all times. ‘The choice is stark,’ the deputy chairman of the Electricity Council explained to the American magazine Time. ‘Either the public cooperates or complete cities could lose their supply of electricity at a stroke. It could even happen before Christmas.’9

  Since there seemed no respite from the bad news, Heath’s advisers made no attempt to lighten the mood. When, on the last weekend of the month, Douglas Hurd drove up to Oxfordshire to address the rather early Christmas dinner of one little Conservative branch, he gave them a ‘short speech of unexampled gloom. Everything was going wrong. The prospect had never been darker. Great sacrifice would be required by all.’ Oddly, he recorded, ‘this went extremely well, and seemed to cheer them immensely’. And as Hurd drove back to London, he began to wonder whether, instead of trying to play down the threat to the nation, Heath should instead do just the opposite. ‘The Government should seek to emphasize the gravity of the crisis,’ he wrote to Heath on the night of 6 December, introducing a paper he had drafted with his young colleague William Waldegrave. Settling with the miners, they argued, would be a mistake: ‘it would destroy [your] authority and break the morale of the Conservative Party beyond hope of restoration.’ Instead, Heath should hold firm. Indeed, he should consider an early general election, ‘soon after the immediate crisis had passed’, inviting the public to rally behind the government at a time of supreme economic danger. It would be ‘a highly charged and violent Election’, they conceded. But they thought he would win it.10

  But while Heath’s young advisers appeared almost gung-ho in their enthusiasm for the battle, many older observers thought, like Falstaff, that the better part of valour was discretion. Perhaps the outstanding example was Ronald McIntosh, who had become the director general of the National Economic Development Council (the NEDC, or ‘Neddy’, a forum for ministers, trade unionists and businessmen) in the middle of 1973. McIntosh was a classic pillar of the old establishment, a sympathetic, thoughtful man, whose diaries not only provide an illuminatingly detailed view of the crisis, but are steeped in the civilized, consensual and faintly ineffectual values of a generation of Whitehall mandarins.* On 4 December, for example, he recorded that it was ‘imperative to work again for a consensus between the government, the employers and the unions’. Confronting the unions struck him as madness: when one of the directors of the Pearson media group suggested that the only solution was a ‘right-wing regime with “tanks in the streets” ’, McIntosh argued for ‘recognising where industrial power lay and coming to terms with it rather than
confronting it – even if this meant big changes in our ideas about relative rewards etc., which many of the better off would find distasteful and hard to accept’. In a similar argument with a Tory MP in December, McIntosh was even more explicit, insisting that ‘the best way to protect democracy was to recognise the willingness of those who had industrial power to use it and to avoid outright conflict’. His old Balliol friend Roy Jenkins, already drifting apart from the Labour Party, tried to persuade him that the government simply could not ‘give way’ to the miners, for ‘if we did we would soon have domestic inflation of 25 per cent or more’ (an uncannily accurate prediction, as it turned out). But McIntosh thought ‘we needed to stop using terms like “give way”. I understood the dangers of inflation but I was convinced that the disruption we were going to suffer was too high a price to pay.’11

  For McIntosh, giving in to the miners’ economic power was simply being ‘sensible and balanced’ – a way of thinking that would later strike Mrs Thatcher and her admirers as spineless appeasement. He was certainly not alone: at least two members of Heath’s Think Tank, Dick Ross and Adam Ridley, thought that the Prime Minister should play the ‘Arab card’, tell the public that the oil crisis had created a set of exceptional circumstances, and make the miners a special case. But even at the time there were plenty of people, like Roy Jenkins, who thought that Heath had no choice but to stand up to such an inflationary pay demand, not least because the government could not afford to be seen appeasing sheer industrial muscle. Later in December, McIntosh’s next-door neighbour, the Conservative MP Piers Dixon, told him that ‘the threat to democracy posed by the miners outweighs the dislocation which the three-day week will cause’, and said that if Heath surrendered, ‘the Tory Party would disintegrate and Enoch Powell will take over’. The editor of the Financial Times, Fredy Fisher, agreed that there was a ‘real risk of a right-wing authoritarian government next year’. Yet he, too, told McIntosh that he was ‘against giving in to the miners because it would result in an inflation rate of anywhere between 20 and 25 per cent’. Crucially, the general public seemed to share Fisher’s views: in early December, a survey for ITN found that most disapproved of the miners’ action, and a majority thought that the government should hold firm to its pay policy. Indeed, the crisis actually seemed to have done Heath some good. Although a staggering 82 per cent said they were ‘not happy with the way things are going in Britain’, Heath now held a narrow 3 per cent lead over Wilson, and more than 53 per cent thought he was doing a good job as Prime Minister. ‘The Government must on no account give in to the NUM,’ reported the Tory party chairman Lord Carrington; ‘this time the Conservative party expected to see the miners smashed’.12

  Yet Heath himself seemed oddly cautious, passive, even hesitant. It was not just, as his biographer suggests, that he felt trapped between the need to stick to his pay policy and his fear of losing a second round with the miners. After three years rushing from one problem to another like a firemen surrounded by arsonists, he was physically, morally and intellectually exhausted. It was little wonder he was so tired: not only did he have to deal with the miners’ dispute, but he also had to handle the oil crisis, the trade deficit and the emergency economic measures that were clearly necessary, as well as the desperately tricky Sunningdale talks on power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Senior colleagues, too, were moving through what Hurd called ‘a fog of tiredness’. Barber appeared physically overwhelmed by the economic blizzard, Carr seemed about to keel over from exhaustion, and Victor Rothschild suffered a serious heart attack in the middle of December. In the past, the Prime Minister, unflagging and indomitable, had been the rock on whom they all depended. But now even he seemed to have lost his way. Ronald McIntosh, who saw a fair bit of Heath that winter, recorded on 12 December that ‘overwork and fatigue were sapping the Prime Minister’s energies’. A few days later Vic Feather confided that he ‘thought Ted was suffering from overwork and strain’. It later transpired that Heath’s increasingly glacial silences, his apparent indecision, his intellectual ponderousness and even his alarming recent weight gain were all linked to a thyroid disorder, which was not diagnosed until two years later. But at the time the word in the Commons was that the Prime Minister had been broken by fatigue. Enoch Powell told a businessmen’s lunch at the end of November that he could not ‘but entertain fears for [Heath’s] mental and emotional stability’. Even hardbitten journalists thought that was below the belt, and nothing did more to distance Powell from ordinary Tories in his Wolverhampton constituency, horrified by what the Telegraph called ‘a premeditated insult, carefully calculated to cause maximum offence’.13

  Unfortunately for Heath, the worsening energy situation offered no pause for breath. On 3 December, a secret report by the DTI not only forecast an oil shortfall of up to 20 per cent over the next month, but advised ministers that coal production had fallen by 24, 28 and 30 per cent over the last three weeks. If the overtime ban continued into January, Peter Walker wrote, the weekly shortfall might reach 40 per cent, and if the miners called a full-scale strike, stocks would probably run out in February. By that point, there would only be enough power for ‘essential services and domestic lighting, and very little for non-essential industry, shops and offices, or for domestic space and water heating’. Unpalatable as this might sound, the government might ‘very soon’ have to put industry on a three-day or even two-day week, merely ‘to scrape through the winter without major disruption’. Not surprisingly, the following morning’s Cabinet was a distinctly gloomy affair, dominated by discussions of oil shortages, the possibility of fuel rationing over Christmas and the devastating news that ASLEF, the railwaymen’s union, had voted to join the miners in an overtime ban for higher pay. As yet the Cabinet shrank from the prospect of a three-day week. But when the Central Electricity Generating Board reported three days later that supplies were now in ‘grave danger’, with power stations likely to run out of fuel before the end of the winter, the options narrowed. Ominously, the Cabinet Office’s Civil Contingencies Unit was already working on a worst-case scenario, including drastic plans for regional government if energy supplies broke down completely. There was even talk of the army stepping in to safeguard hospitals and to forestall the possible riots and anarchy if the lights went out for good.14

  By Wednesday, 12 December, the situation had reached breaking point. At five that afternoon the Cabinet met in a mood of funereal gloom. Night was drawing in, literally and metaphorically. The only solution, the minutes recorded, was to ‘shock’ the unions ‘by stressing the risk of reduced employment, while at the same time increasing our capacity for endurance to the maximum possible extent’. As Walker explained, the railwaymen’s dispute meant that it was increasingly difficult to move even the dwindling supplies of coal that remained. Just to maintain ‘essential services’ and to ‘get through the winter without major disruption’, he said, the government would have to cut power demand by as much as 20 per cent. They had to face facts: industry must be put onto a three-day week. The next morning, they met again to confirm the details. Already, offices had been ordered to keep their temperatures below 63 ºF, and street lighting had been cut by 50 per cent. Now the use of floodlights for sport was outlawed (prompting the Football League to defy one of its oldest taboos by giving reluctant approval to games on Sunday afternoons), while both the BBC and ITV were ordered to cut off television broadcasts at 10.30 on weekdays. There was even talk of banning the use of electricity to heat more than one room in each house, but as Jim Prior pointed out, this would be both ‘harsh’ and ‘unenforceable’. On the broad outlines, however, there was general agreement. A few hours later Heath rose ponderously from his seat in the Commons and grimly announced that from New Year’s Eve, Britain would be on a three-day week.15

  That night Heath addressed the nation on television. Thanks to a schedule of almost unparalleled intensity, whisking him from the delicate Sunningdale negotiations to a succession of formal banquets for visiting statesmen
, briefings on the oil crisis, meetings on the miners’ dispute and preparations for the forthcoming EEC summit, he was physically and mentally shattered. He had barely slept for four days, and the pressure of events was such that there was no time even to go through the script his advisers had drafted for him. Even as the camera light blinked on and the words ‘The Rt. Hon. Edward Heath, MP. The Prime Minister’ appeared on millions of television screens across the country, he still looked exhausted, his heavy features ashen with tiredness, his eyes narrowed almost to slits, his dark blue suit and tie appropriately funereal. Yet this was arguably the most momentous ministerial broadcast since the Second World War, and Heath made no effort to disguise the severity of the moment.

  ‘As Prime Minister,’ he began simply, ‘I want to talk to you about the grave emergency facing our country.’ He explained the background: the oil crisis, the miners’ dispute, the appalling balance of payments situation, the looming shortages at the power stations. But where some of his younger advisers would have preferred him to mobilize public opinion against the miners, most of the speech was devoted to a wooden explanation of the government’s emergency measures. ‘We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war,’ Heath said gloomily. ‘We shall have to postpone some of the hopes and aims we have set ourselves for expansion and for our standard of living.’ And in his final lines, where many Tories would have liked a blistering denunciation of the miners’ cynical self-aggrandizement at a time of national crisis, he fell back on the One Nation rhetoric he had learned as a young man. ‘At times like these,’ he said with desperate earnestness, ‘there is deep in all of us an instinct which tells us we must abandon disputes among ourselves. We must close our ranks so that we can deal together with the difficulties which come to us whether from within or from beyond our own shores. That has been our way in the past, and it is a good way.’ It was meant to sound like Winston Churchill. But to many Tories it sounded more like Neville Chamberlain.16