A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  This anti-court gave easy material to Wilson’s snobbish and suspicious enemies in the press, ranging from Private Eye, which constantly taunted the insiders with foreign-sounding names, to the MI5-connected ‘red conspiracy’ merchants, and even scions of the Fleet Street purple. Many in that old Establishment – the top brass, the City grandees, the clubmen – struggled to accept that Wilson was a legitimate leader of the United Kingdom. Wilson was paranoid but plenty of powerful people were out to get him, or at least to get him out.

  64

  In Place of Beer

  Until the end of the decade the sixties had not been particularly strike-prone compared to the fifties. Strikes tended to be local, unofficial and quickly settled. Inflation was still below 4 per cent for most years and, being voluntary, incomes policies rarely caused national confrontation. But by 1968-9 inflation was rising sharply. Wilson had pioneered the matey ‘beer and sandwiches’ approach to dealing with union leaders (though he found on his first attempt the sandwiches were too thinly cut to satisfy union appetites). But he was becoming disillusioned. That seamen’s strike of 1966 had been a particularly bruising experience. So for once it was Wilson who took a stand. He was supported by an unlikely hammer of the unions, the veteran left-winger Barbara Castle, now made Secretary for Employment. In a homage to her early hero, Nye Bevan’s book In Place of Fear, she called her plan for industrial harmony ‘In Place of Strife’. It proposed new government powers to order pre-strike ballots, and a 28-day pause before strikes took place. The government would be able in the last resort to impose settlements for wildcat strikes. There would be fines if the rules were broken. This was a package of measures which looks gentle by the standards of the laws which would come later. The leading trade unionists of the day, once famous men like Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, saw it as an unacceptable return to legal curbs they had fought for decades to lift.

  The battle that followed nearly ended Wilson’s career, and Castle’s. Their defeat made the Thatcher revolution inevitable, though it would not come for a further decade. The failure of ‘In Place of Strife’ is one of the great lost opportunities of modern British politics. Why did it fail? The easy explanation is that the unions were too powerful and yet also still too popular, not least on the Labour backbenches. Barbara Castle was neither the most tactful negotiator nor the niftiest tactician. Her angry harangues put up the backs of male newspaper commentators and MPs, who compared her to a fishwife and a nag, just as they would Margaret Thatcher. She made silly mistakes, such as going away on holiday in the Mediterranean on the yacht owned by that arch capitalist Lord Forte during one of the most sensitive weeks, lying in the sun and talking of resignation. Later while Wilson sat up companionably with union leaders, quaffing brandies and puffing cigars, she would creep off exhausted to bed. Yet both Wilson and Castle were fully aware that this was a struggle for authority a serious government could not afford to lose.

  In a famous confrontation in the summer of 1969 when union leaders were given a private dinner at Chequers, Scanlon had warned the two ministers directly again, that he would not accept any legal penalties, or even any new legislation. Wilson replied that if he as Prime Minister accepted such a position he would be running a government that was not allowed to govern. If the unions mobilized their sponsored Labour MPs to vote against him, ‘it would clearly mean that the TUC, a state within a state, was putting itself above the government in deciding what a government could and could not do.’ Uttered privately this was just the language which would be heard publicly from Heath and later even more starkly from Thatcher. Scanlon retorted that Wilson was becoming that arch turncoat, a Ramsay MacDonald. Wilson hotly denied it and referred to the Czech reformist leader who had been crushed by the Red Army the previous year: ‘Nor do I intend to be another Dubček. Get your tanks off my lawn, Hughie!’

  But the tanks stayed resolutely parked under his nose, Scanlon and Jones unblinking, their gun-barrels pointing at Labour’s reputation. Wilson and Castle now contemplated a joint resignation. For the Prime Minister also had a weapon of last resort. If he walked away then the Tories would surely return, with tougher measures still. But as the stand-off continued, the unions merely suggested a series of voluntary agreements and letters of intent. They were toughing it out because they had excellent intelligence from inside the government and knew very well that Wilson and Castle were isolated. Not only were the usual forces of the left against reform of industrial relations – all those Tribune MPs attacking Castle for betraying her principles, the scores of pragmatic rebels on the Labour benches and the trade union sponsored MPs whose paymasters were jerking the reins – but also some key right-wing ministers too. As so often, below the great issue of the hour, personal vanity and ambition were writhing. Jim Callaghan, with his strong trade union links, was utterly against legal curbs on the unions. Now Home Secretary, a former trade union official himself, he voted against his own government’s plans at a meeting of Labour’s national executive. His enemies were convinced that he thought the failure of union reform would finish Wilson off. ‘In Place of Strife’ would become ‘In Place of Harold’.

  Callaghan’s objections to the package went beyond pure self-interest but his own ideas about how to deal with the unions were thin to the point of absurdity. As Prime Minister much later he would be richly and fairly repaid for what he did in 1969. At the time he was reviled by the pro-reform ministers. In a bitter cabinet meeting, Callaghan retorted to Crossman’s plea that they must all sink or swim together, with the words, ‘sink or sink’. Crossman spat back: ‘Why don’t you go? Get out!’ Callaghan’s fellow Cardiff MP, later the Speaker, George Thomas, described him as ‘our Judas Iscariot’. Other ministers had their own agendas too, of course, and began to peel away from Wilson and Castle. Tony Crosland, another key figure on the Labour right, hoped that if Callaghan succeeded Wilson, he would finally achieve his great ambition and become Chancellor. Jenkins, however, was not mainly motivated by the hope of toppling Wilson. For one thing, no one could tell whether Wilson’s fall would mean his success, or Callaghan’s. Furthermore, Jenkins knew that since his main criticism of the Prime Minister was lack of principle, to stab him in the back when he did make a stand would look absurd and discreditable. Yet late in the day Jenkins eventually ratted because he said he feared ‘a government smash’ if the plans were forced through. Tony Benn, who had been warmly backing Barbara Castle before, changed his mind too. After the crucial cabinet meeting, Wilson stormed out, saying to his staff, ‘I don’t mind running a green cabinet, but I’m buggered if I’m going to run a yellow one!’

  It is possible to argue that Castle’s plans were too hardline for 1969, though late in life Callaghan eventually recanted and admitted penal sanctions had been necessary. But had the Labour Government been united behind Wilson on this, then legislative reform of trade union practices might have been forced through even the Parliamentary Labour Party of the day, and much subsequent grief avoided. Wilson’s reputation, Labour’s reputation and the story of British politics would have been markedly different. But with the cabinet as well as the backbenches in rebellion, Wilson had no choice but to give way. His earlier threats to resign were swiftly forgotten. In a brutal aside about Castle which perhaps reflected the strain he was under, he said to an official: ‘Poor Barbara. She hangs around like someone with a still-born child. She can’t believe it’s dead.’ The two of them reached a toothless ‘solemn and binding’ agreement under which unions said they would accept TUC advice on unofficial strikes. Solomon Binding was meant to be a face-saver but instead became a national joke. Hypocritically, the cabinet applauded Wilson for his brilliant negotiating and, hypocritically, he accepted their praise – though Castle, on the edge of physical collapse, gave them a blast of honest contempt. The Tories and the press were rightly derisive. In his memoirs Jenkins admitted that Wilson, whom he generally did not admire, came out of it all with a touch of King Lear-like nobility. ‘He did not hedge and he did not whin
e…It was a sad story from which he and Barbara Castle emerged with more credit than the rest of us.’ The great background question about the Labour governments of the sixties is whether with a stronger leader they could have gripped the country’s big problems and dealt with them. How did it happen that a cabinet of such brilliant, such clever and self-confident people achieved so little? In part, it was the effect of the whirling court politics demonstrated by ‘In Place of Strife’.

  65

  Election Upset

  In the end, the Wilson government was felled not by wild-eyed plotters but entirely conventionally by the electorate. When Wilson called the election in 1970 he was feeling optimistic despite the failure of ‘In Place of Strife’. He knew his enemy. Heath had been the Leader of the Opposition since 1965, with Tory MPs voting in a secret ballot for the first time. Seen as a ruthless modernizer, he began to reshape the Tory front bench. Out went many of the cod-Edwardian grandees. In came people like Peter Walker, another grammar school boy who had made his money in the City, Geoffrey Rippon, the young former mayor of Surbiton, Tony Barber, the former RAF man and lawyer, and Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, none of them from rich families. Though a pre-1970 election policy conference at the Selsdon Park hotel outside London was much over-hyped as a lurch to the right (Wilson talked of ‘Selsdon Man’, as some kind of ape-like throwback), Heath was a staunchly pro-business politician. In the sixties and early seventies, after so many years of the more languid, aristocratic Tory Party, he seemed like a blast of fresh air.

  Wilson and Heath cordially detested one another. Perhaps it was because they had so much in common. They came from traditionalist, pious, lower-middle-class, provincial families. They were born in the same year, 1916, Heath four months after Wilson. His family was poorer than Wilson’s and his working-class origins stronger. Heath’s father was a carpenter who worked for a building contractor and his mother was a lady’s maid who later took in lodgers. Like Wilson, Heath rose through fierce academic ability and scholarships. Both seem to have been rather solitary and awkward as young men but benefited from the richness of pre-television community life, Wilson throwing himself into the world of Scouting and Methodist clubs, and Heath into music and choirs. Both arrived at Oxford at much the same time and were on the edge of the glamorous and passionate politics of the pre-war period there, though they never seem to have met. As we have seen, the two of them represented the triumph of the grammar school boy in politics, a class breakthrough comparable to what happened at the same time in business, the arts and the professions. Governing consecutively during 1964-76 they would oversee the near-total destruction of the grammar school in England and Wales. Both would represent moderation in their respective parties, harried by the hard left and the hard right, accused of weakness and appeasement. Each was essentially a believer in managerialism and compromise. Patriots and equally proud men, they would come to be reviled, identified with a time of national collapse and failure. They were certainly easy to caricature, Wilson’s pudgy face and pipe, against Heath’s vast manic grin and yacht-sailing.

  There were good reasons for Labour to think that they would see off the Tories yet again. Jenkins seemed to have pulled the economy around and was self-confident enough not to use his last budget for pre-election bribes. It was in fact quite popular. The opinion polls were onside and the press was generally predicting an easy Labour victory. Even right-wing commentators lavished praise on Wilson’s television performances and mastery of debate, though he pursued an avowedly presidential style and tried to avoid controversy.

  Heath was regarded as a dull dud by comparison and harried by Powell who had returned to the attack again and again before the 1970 election, provoking Heath to denounce him as inhumane and unchristian, and to make it clear that he would never be asked to serve in a Conservative government. At the height of their battle for the soul of the party, in summer 1969, a Gallup poll suggested 54 per cent agreed with Powell on grants to repatriate what it called coloured immigrant families. By early 1970, 66 per cent of those polled said they were either more favourable to Powell or felt the same about him and only 22 per cent said their view of him was less favourable. Powell was by now attacking Heath over a broad front of policy, over the need for tax cuts, privatization and freer markets in economics; over Northern Ireland, or Ulster; and over British membership of the EEC, which Powell opposed as strongly as Heath supported it. So Powell’s battle-cry for repatriation and an end to immigration was taken by the Tory leadership as part of his campaign to unseat Heath and then replace him.

  There were plenty in the party and the country who yearned for just that. Apart from the dockers and other marchers, wealthy backers wanted to fund a campaign for Powell’s leadership. Marcel Everton, a Worcestershire industrialist, raised money for a national federation of Powellite groups and talked of a march on Conservative headquarters to oust Heath. Wilson’s call for an election, however, created an obvious trap which Powell could see very clearly even if his supporters ignored it. His best chance by far would be if Heath lost the election. Then he could attack him openly and perhaps even seize control of the party. Everton, like others, openly said that it would be better for right-wingers to vote Labour so that the Tory party would ‘fall into Enoch’s lap like a ripe cherry’. Yet if Powell seemed to toy with this, he would be forever branded a traitor by tens of thousands of loyal Conservatives. Either Heath would win and Powell would be finished, or he would lose and Powell would be blamed by so many Tories the party might split.

  The campaign was characterized by huge coverage of Powell, in the case of some newspapers, engorging half their reporting of the Tories’ entire campaign. It has been described as the only general election campaign in British history in which immigration and race have played a significant part. Conservative meetings were full of home-made ‘Enoch’ signs. Heath and his colleagues were constantly irritated and embarrassed by being asked whether or not they supported their fallen angel in Wolverhampton. Unsurprisingly, Powell was portrayed by Labour and Liberal politicians as the right-wing ideologue behind whom Ted Heath anxiously waddled. Tony Benn went furthest in this, calling him ‘the real leader of the Conservative party. He is a far stronger character than Mr Heath. He speaks his mind…Heath dare not attack him publicly even when he says things that disgust decent Conservatives.’ Benn went on to assert that ‘the flag hoisted at Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered over Dachau and Belsen.’

  Late in the campaign Powell, who had been hounded by left-wing protesters, finally gave a clear and unequivocal endorsement to the official Tory campaign. Because there was indeed a late surge of support for Heath, it has been argued that Powell was responsible for his victory. But the evidence is thin to prove it and Powell himself fastidiously declined to claim such a thing. Just before the campaign had begun Jenkins learnt, too late, that yet more bad balance of payments figures were to be published along with bad inflation figures. This helped tip things away from Wilson. When the results were in the Tories had won an overall majority of thirty. Polls afterwards scotched the idea that Jenkins’s pre-election budget had lost Labour the election. In fact it was quite popular. Powell, according to his biographer, once he realized the consequences of Heath’s victory, ‘sat around on his own with his head in his hands, deep in gloom. He had realised immediately that, after Wilson, he had been the great loser of the election.’

  And Wilson was bitterly disappointed. He was also surprised. With no home of his own on the mainland, he had to take up Heath’s offer of a last weekend in Chequers while he desperately searched around for somewhere to live.

  66

  Blood and Shame: the Irish Tragedy Begins

  Of the great crises that link Wilson and Heath together, that of Northern Ireland had as much effect on the tenor of mainland British life as any. It brought surprise and embarrassment to millions watching the violence on the streets of the province. It brought bombings, murder and shame. The longer
origins of the conflict, from the settlement of Ulster by Scots Presbyterian farmers to the Partition of Ireland in 1921 and the civil war are outside the limits of this book. In the fifties and through most of the sixties, Northern Ireland barely appeared on the Westminster radar. There was a devolved Northern Ireland government, with its own prime minister and a distinct party system, along with the contingent of grey, reliable, conservative-minded Unionist MPs who rarely made ripples in London, never mind waves. The bigotry of the Protestant majority was the butt of jokes and official disapproval.

  Yet there was limited English or Scottish sympathy for the cause of Irish unification – hostility to Catholicism and memories of the inglorious role played by the Republic during the war against Hitler remained strong. If the Belfast shipyards of Harland & Wolff were barred to Catholics, then too were some well-known concerns on the mainland. If there was unfairness in the allocation of housing in Londonderry, so there was in Leicester or Nottingham. There was, admittedly, a blatant form of anti-Catholic constituency-rigging, the gerrymandered boundaries designed to maximize Unionist representation. As early as 1964, when Wilson first met the Stormont Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill, who had been elected the previous year on a programme of mild reform, he was pressing him to end gerrymandering. Mostly, though, this was a time of dozy neglect which turned out from 1969 to have been a terrible failure of imagination – malign neglect, whose effects would haunt Britain for the next thirty years.