A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  76

  Referendum

  Wilson carried out his promised renegotiation of Britain’s terms of entry to the EEC and then put the result to the country in the Benn-inspired 1975 referendum. The renegotiation was largely a sham but the referendum was a rare political triumph for that bleak decade in the story of Westminster. On the continent, the reopened talks were understood to be more for Wilson’s benefit than anything else. Helmut Schmidt, the new German Chancellor, who travelled to London to help win round the Labour conference, regarded it all as a successful cosmetic operation. Wilson had needed to persuade people he was putting a different deal to the country than the one Heath had won. This he was able to do, though, when the referendum actually arrived, Wilson’s old evasiveness returned and he mumbled vaguely in support, rather than actively or enthusiastically making the European case.

  There were plenty of others to do it for him. To preserve longer-term party unity, he had allowed anti-Brussels cabinet ministers to speak from the ‘No’ platform and Barbara Castle, Benn, Peter Shore and Michael Foot were among those who did so, in alliance with Enoch Powell, the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Scottish Nationalists and others. But the ‘Yes’ campaign could boast most of the Labour cabinet, with Roy Jenkins at the front, plus most of the Heath team, and the popular Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. It seemed to many people a fight between wild-eyed ranters, the outlandish and the discontented, on the one hand and sound chaps on the other hand, men and women with that curious but apparently essential British quality ‘bottom’. More important, perhaps, was the bias of business and the press. A CBI survey of company chairmen found that out of 419 interviewed, just four were in favour of leaving the Community. Almost all the newspapers were in favour of staying in, including the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Daily Express. So was every Anglican bishop.

  A fight between the Establishment and its critics was funded accordingly. Britain in Europe, leading the ‘Yes’ campaign, outspent the ‘No’ camp by more than ten to one. In this grossly unequal struggle, both sides used scare stories. Britain in Europe constantly warned of a huge loss of jobs if the country left the Community. The ‘No’ camp warned of huge rises in food prices. Yet this was also an almost carnival-like participatory argument of a kind post-war Britain has rarely known. There were meetings, several thousand strong, night after night around the country – proper meetings with hecklers and humour. Despite miserable weather, including a showering of June snow, there were stunts of all kinds and the country seemed covered with posters. The spectacle of politicians from rival parties who normally attacked one another sitting down together agreeing was a tonic to those watching.

  There were good television arguments, notably between Jenkins and Benn. And on the Labour side there were awkward moments when rhetoric got too fierce, and Wilson had to intervene to rebuke warring ministers. Even Margaret Thatcher was out campaigning, for Brussels of course, in a spectacularly hideous jumper with the flags of the member states knitted across her breasts. In the end, to the simple question, ‘Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (The Common Market)?’, 68.3 per cent, or around 17 million people, said ‘Yes’ and 32.8 per cent, some 8.5 million, said ‘No’. Only Shetland and the Western Isles of Scotland voted ‘No’. Symbolically, Jenkins thought, the sun came out and there followed a baking, almost cloudless few weeks. Benn instantly conceded full defeat though privately considered the vote ‘some achievement considering we had absolutely no real organisation, no newspapers, nothing’. Powell, however, warned that the decision was only ‘provisional’ and might be reopened in the future. As so often, his was a lone voice.

  More than thirty years later, the biggest question both about Heath’s triumph in engineering British membership and then about the Labour referendum, is whether the British were told the full story and truly understood the supranational organization they were signing up to. Ever since, many of those among the 8.5 million who voted against, and younger people who share their view, have suggested that Heath and Jenkins and the rest lied to the country, at least by omission. Had it been properly explained that Europe’s law and institutions would sit above the ancient Westminster Parliament, it is said, they would never have agreed. What is the truth? The Britain in Europe campaigners can point to speeches and advertisements which directly mention loss of sovereignty. One of the latter read: ‘Forty million people died in two European wars this century. Better lose a little national sovereignty than a son or a daughter.’ Yet both in Parliament and in the referendum campaign, the full consequences for national independence were mumbled, not spoken clearly enough. Geoffrey Howe, as he then was, who drafted Heath’s European Communities Bill, later admitted that it could have been more explicit about lost sovereignty. Heath talked directly about the ‘ever closer union’ of the peoples of Europe but was never precise about the effect on British law, as compared, say, to Lord Denning who said the European treaty could be compared to ‘an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and rivers. It cannot be held back.’ Hugo Young, the journalist and historian who studied the campaign in great detail, wrote: ‘I traced no major document or speech that said in plain terms that national sovereignty would be lost, still less one that categorically promoted the European Community for its single most striking characteristic: that it was an institution positively designed to curb the full independence of the nation-state.’

  There were, of course, the explicit warnings about lost sovereignty delivered by the ‘No’ campaigners among the more populist arguments about food prices. They came above all from Enoch Powell, Michael Foot and Tony Benn. Powell’s language can be gauged from a speech he gave to political journalists in the Commons while the Bill was being debated. He lamented that the Commons was ‘perishing by its own hand. Week by week, month by month, the House of Commons votes to divest itself of what it had gained through a length of time not much shorter than the history of England itself.’ Foot, though recovering from an operation and so partly out of action, wrote in The Times that the British parliamentary system had been made farcical and unworkable. Historians, he said, would be amazed ‘that the British people were urged at such a time to tamper irreparably with their most precious institution; to see it circumscribed and contorted and elbowed off the centre of the stage.’ Benn, confiding to his diary his reaction on the possibility of a Europe-wide passport, showed how much the left’s instincts could chime with those of the right-wing opponents of European change: ‘That really hit me in the guts…Like metrication and decimalisation, this really strikes at our national identity.’ All these arguments were made in the press, despite its overall bias, and repeatedly in public meetings and broadcast debates.

  So it was not as if people were not told. The truth revealed by opinion polls is that sovereignty as an issue did not concern the public nearly as much as jobs and food prices. By later standards the position of Parliament was not taken terribly seriously in public debates. It may be that sovereignty is always of absorbing interest to a minority – the more history-minded, politically aware – and of less interest to the rest, except when a loss of sovereignty directly affects daily life and produces resented laws. In the seventies, Britain’s political class was not highly respected, and Europe seemed to offer a glossier, richer future. Though the pro-Community majority in business and politics did not strive to ram home the huge implications of membership, they did not deceitfully hide the political nature of what was happening, either. It was just that, when the referendum was held, people cared less. The argument would return, screaming, demanding to be heard, fifteen years later.

  77

  Power Ages

  As to the rest of Wilson’s short final government, much of his energy was spent on foreign affairs. Despite American disapproval the Labour government began the final withdrawal from east of Suez, giving up any pretensions of British influence in the Far East. The Empire was formally over. A scattering of individual outposts and impoverished island
s too weak to enjoy independence were all that was left, a few last governors in places like Hong Kong and Bermuda. In the Middle East, British pens in British fingers had drawn many of the lines on the map – Transjordan, the new state of Israel, Iraq – and all that uncertainty went. It went after guerrilla war and partition among the lemon groves of Cyprus, after gruesome murders of British soldiers in the Holy Land, a nasty little colonial war in Aden which left behind a Marxist and Soviet satellite. It left an unstable and unpopular king in Iraq, soon overthrown by military coup, leading to the regime of Saddam Hussein. In Iran, the British-backed Shah was many years later overturned by Ayatollah Khomeni’s Islamic revolution. The decades that followed have been awful ones for the region, marked by major and minor wars, the regular use of torture, assassination, repression, censorship and suicide bombings. The Middle East, rich in oil and history, has become the world’s most dangerous zone; and many of the decisions that made it so dangerous originated in Europe, including London, as well as in Washington.

  There remained that strange half-life empire called the British Commonwealth, an illogical world-straddling organization that embraced republics such as India, despotisms and democracies, slavish admirers of Britain and frank opponents of London, as well as all the former white dominions which retained their loyalty to the Crown. The Commonwealth was not a coherent policy-setting organization, particularly after Britain decided to join the European Economic Community. Her members often had diametrically opposed trading interests. When it came to defence, some were firmly non-aligned, even at times leaning to Moscow or Beijing, while others such as the Australians looked increasingly to the United States not Britain. Time and again, on issues such as apartheid South Africa, or Rhodesia, or the misbehaviour of newly independent rulers, or questions of migration, the Commonwealth would fracture, or embarrass London. Lacking an army, trade agreements or common views, it seemed to many a pointless organization, fit for nothing more than acrimonious summits and regular athletic Games which functioned as a low-rent version of the real ones, the Olympics. Was it kept going merely out of sentimentality or to give the Queen something to do? At least it has done no harm and kept different parts of the world in contact. Outside football, it is also the last English-speaking worldwide organization not dominated by the Americans.

  Wilson spent much of his domestic energy on resisting the attempt by Tony Benn (by now his bugbear) to introduce a socialist economy via the National Enterprise Board. Benn hoped that this would be a generously funded body which would take over a large range of companies, successful and unsuccessful, bringing state ownership and direction into the heart of the economy. Wilson, by now clearly to the right of his party, was equally determined that this should not happen. He had his way. When it eventually arrived, the NEB was a weak, ill-funded repository for lost causes, British Leyland in particular. Benn’s enthusiasm for workers’ control continued to amuse and infuriate most of the other ministers and civil servants he worked with and he confided in his diary that he felt as if he was ‘trying to swim up the Niagara Falls’. He was particularly keen about cooperatives and took up the cause of the Meriden motorcycle factory, struggling to survive under workers’ control. He was much excited by what he took to be its Chinese Communist atmosphere: ‘I described our industrial policy, and then they sang “For he’s a jolly good fellow” which was very touching.’

  It wasn’t only Wilson who thought Benn’s socialist affection for cooperatives and nationalization was out of time. Jack Jones pinned him down over lunch at the Westminster restaurant Locket’s to warn: ‘Nationalization is no good. People don’t want it. Management in nationalized industries is very bad.’ Benn explained that he wanted to take over other firms, including the Scottish Daily News and challenged Jones about British Leyland itself. The fiery trade unionist, to Benn’s astonishment, suggested selling it off to General Motors. The final phase of nationalization produced little except heartache, though the struggling Chrysler car factory at Linwood in Scotland was kept going for a while. These were truly the last days for planning and public control, which had been so widespread immediately after the war. We should see Benn as a traditionalist in this, as much as a radical. Later Healey would brutally sum up his contribution as a minister to British industry. There were only two monuments to Benn in power, he said: a uranium mine in Namibia he had authorized as energy secretary, which helped support apartheid; and Concorde, used by rich people on expense accounts and subsidized by poorer taxpayers. The only planning agreement actually existing when he left office was the old Farm Price Review ‘chaired in my time by the Duke of Northumberland’.

  Monuments for this last Wilson government were few. One was the radical refashioning of the failing pensions system by Barbara Castle and her team, with the State Earnings Related Pension, or Serps, which linked pension to rises in earnings or prices, whichever was higher. It was notably generous, particularly to women whose pension rights had been whittled away by years of caring for children or elderly relatives, and in allowing people to claim a pension based on their best twenty years of earnings, not necessarily their final earnings. Castle had won a reputation as a battler for feminism much earlier, in 1968 during the celebrated women’s strike at Ford’s plant in Dagenham. The women were operating sewing-machines to upholster car seats but were paid only 85 per cent of men’s wages for doing the same job. After Castle intervened directly, the company closed most of the gap, and other women took action round the country too. She had also intervened to stop the Commons voting male MPs better pensions than female ones. Though Castle always jibed at being called a feminist, and had underestimated the cost of Serps, so that the earnings link would eventually be broken again by the Conservatives to keep the price down, it was a rare civilizing reform which stuck, at least for a decade.

  Meanwhile Wilson, quietly preparing a scandalous resignation honours list for his cronies, and muttering about moles, plots and the possible activities of South African and British agents, left future British governments with one final gift. Working as secretively as Attlee he authorized a vastly expensive modernization and replacement of Britain’s nuclear deterrent Chevaline, the cost of which would rise from a planned £24m to more than £1,000m within a few years. He then retired as he had always said he would, at sixty, leaving much of his cabinet utterly astonished and London awash with rumours. Power ages, as well as corrupts and Roy Jenkins speculated that perhaps he had faked his birth certificate and had been ten years older than he admitted all along. It would certainly have explained his precocious rise and precocious retirement. But Wilson was still wily enough to give his preferred successor Callaghan (‘I’m making way for an older man’) a tip-off which helped him steal a march on the rest, including Healey, who only heard the news from Wilson in the gents toilet before the cabinet meeting when he formally announced it. Wilson would retire to see his reputation sink steadily downwards as his memory started to go. For such a pugnacious and fundamentally decent man, whatever his political failures, it was a sad way to subside.

  78

  Peasants Revolt: One, the Right

  The underlying political story of the middle and later seventies would not, however, be played out mainly in Parliament. It is the story of how, across the quivering body of a profoundly sick country, two new rival forces emerged to fight for the future. The first came from the right.

  In the middle of June 1974, something unusual had happened. A politician said sorry. He did not say sorry for something in his personal life, an error of judgement or even a failed policy. He said sorry for Everything. He said sorry for what had happened to Britain since 1945, and his party’s role in that, and his role in that party. The serial apologist was a haggard, anguished-looking man. The son of a rich London businessman, he had risen to become housing and then health minister, and had been until then a conventional-looking Tory. Under Macmillan he had ordered the smashing down of old terraces for new tower blocks. Under Heath he had spent heavily on a bigger
bureaucracy for the NHS and higher social security levels. Now Sir Keith Joseph was quite literally wringing his hands and rolling his eyes with mortification. There had been thirty years of interventions, good intentions and disappointments, thirty years of socialism under both Labour and the Tories: ‘I must take my blame for following too many of the fashions.’

  Joseph’s conversion to free-market, small-state economics had the force of a religious experience. Crucial to it would be controlling the amount of money in the economy to keep out inflation, which meant squeezing how much was borrowed and spent by the State. He had joined the Tories in the early fifties but had not been a Conservative, he said: ‘I had thought that I was a Conservative but now I see that I was not really one at all.’ This kind of thinking would lead within five years to the Thatcher revolution, and the wholesale rejection of the Heath years, taking the economic ideas of intellectuals who featured earlier in this history right into the centre of British public life. Other fellow travellers were professors, Americans or a few Powellite Tories outside the mainstream of the party. But Joseph was different, a former cabinet minister with close and direct experience of government. With his Centre for Policy Studies, he was the rain-maker, the storm-bringer, the Old Testament prophet denouncing his tribe.

  Joseph argued that Britain by the mid-seventies had a fundamental choice to make between a socialist siege economy or a breakaway into proper liberal capitalism – in effect, Benn or Joseph. He could not have formed his ideas without the libertarian and monetarist thinkers of the fifties and sixties, men we met earlier. During the Tories’ years in opposition from 1964 to 1970 he had educated himself in free-market economics and was soon using as his speechwriter the violently spoken, irrepressible Alfred Sherman, an East End boy from a left-wing family who had fought as a machine-gunner in the Spanish Civil War before swinging right round later and becoming an insistent right-wing critic of the British way. It was well said of Sherman that by the fifties his enthusiasm for the free market ‘put him as much on the fringes of Macmillan’s Britain as Communism had put him on the edge of politics in Neville Chamberlain’s Britain’. But to Sherman’s disappointment, when Joseph returned to office in 1970 as Secretary for Health and Social Security, his radicalism went into hiding again, he forgot his enthusiasm for introducing more private money into health, and Sherman took to describing him dismissively as ‘a good man fallen among civil servants’.