by Andy Beckett
IRA-linked Left-wing militants are planning a bomb war on English cities … British Trotskyists and Marxists have spent two months forging links with wildcat IRA bombers. They are believed to have offered help to the bombers in organising a blitz of shopping centres, railway stations …
None of these reports were true. Some of them came from army briefings. But such scare stories, and their regularity and prominence, did say something about how Northern Ireland affected British life and politics in the seventies. The Ulster crisis bored many people but it was in the air. In London, during the periods when bombs were going off, the shops in the West End were quieter than usual. Some people stopped travelling on the Tube because it seemed such an obvious target. Restaurants were emptier. Policemen were suddenly everywhere. Bomb scares brought hold-ups and evacuations; the real thing brought a new kind of legislation. Four days after the Birmingham pub bombings, the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, which proposed that suspects could be held without charge for seven days or permanently expelled from Britain, began a rapid passage through Parliament. By today’s standards, the Act was mild, but at the time the usually liberal home secretary Roy Jenkins considered it a highly regrettable necessity: ‘These powers are draconian,’ he told the Commons. ‘In combination they are unprecedented in peacetime.’
The Ulster crisis never fully arrived on the mainland. Liverpool was not Londonderry and Glasgow was not Belfast. Sectarianism came in different, not necessarily compatible forms, and the armed struggle, republican or loyalist, soon got too bloody and attritional for many Britons to want to join it. And when the IRA took the struggle to the mainland, its effect was limited. In London and other English cities, in relatively recent memory, people had endured much worse than the Balcombe Street bombers. Yet the unravelling of Northern Ireland did help fray the wider post-war consensus in the UK – ignoring Ulster had been part of that, after all – and did help make Britain a harsher, more fragmented country. While most Irish immigrants in Britain went about their lives unmolested for most of the seventies, there were spasms of hostility against them. After the Birmingham pub bombings (in which nine of the twenty-one dead were Irish), for several weeks Irish people were assaulted, anonymously threatened, thrown off buses, refused service in shops, suspected, arrested or wrongfully imprisoned. Nowadays, terrorism and its consequences are part of the everyday landscape in Britain; in the seventies, their arrival seemed part of a more general darkening.
6
Lights Out
The crisis that did for Ted Heath was both more prosaic and more all-pervading than events in Ulster. And, like all crises, it had its beneficiaries. One of them was a former electrician from London called David Constable.
During the early sixties, he had moved to Germany to avoid national service. While he was there, he had an idea for a business. In the shops he noticed ‘lovely coloured candles’ of a sort that were not for sale in Britain. He moved back to England, and several years slipped by: ‘We were hippy sort of types.’ Then, in 1969, he and his girlfriend opened a small basement shop in west London selling kits for making your own candles. ‘You got wicks, a couple of kilos of wax, a box of dye and a book on how to do it. You used yoghurt cartons, things around the house as moulds. We were the first to sell the kits,’ Constable remembered. It was a bit like the new fashion for home brewing and all the other self-sufficiency fads that were seeding little bohemian businesses across Britain in the late sixties and early seventies. ‘Our market was loonies, policemen, vicars, hippies.’
One morning during the 1972 miners’ strike, Constable and his girlfriend woke up at home and found their lights wouldn’t work. It was the first power cut of the Heath era in their part of London. But its significance was lost on them, so they drove to the shop as usual. ‘When we got there, there was a queue round the block. We sold everything by lunchtime. We had no wax left, no wicks, nothing. I kept saying, “What’s happening to our shop?”’
That morning was just the beginning. ‘We had queues for weeks and weeks afterwards. There was a bit of a wax shortage in the early seventies. The wax was a byproduct of oil refining at Burmah and Shell and BP, and the oil price was going up. There were spivs on Oxford Street selling wax in yoghurt cartons with not even a wick in them.’ By the time that the three-day week, with its accompanying blackouts and shoppers’ panics, was imposed by the Heath government in 1973, ‘We were having a ten-ton delivery of wax every morning,’ Constable recalled. ‘A lorry would wait outside, and we wouldn’t even unload it before selling it. We had a friend who was a bit of a hard nut on guard. But we did lose a bit. People nicked a bit.’
Constable shrugged. With his angular rimless glasses and choppy grey haircut, even in 2005 he still did not quite look like a conventional businessman. Behind him his current shop, which had clung on in one of Kensington’s few remaining tatty backstreets since 1976, was a great cavern of candles and seventies lettering. Then a sharper, deal-maker’s look came into his eyes. ‘We didn’t put our prices up during the power cuts,’ he said. ‘Should’ve done. Now it’s not anywhere near as busy as in those days. Chinese imports are hurting the industry here. There’s only a few companies left now.’ Then the look was gone, and he shrugged again. ‘But we were hippies then, of course.’
The three-day week began at midnight on New Year’s Eve in 1973, a Monday. The Heath administration decreed that until further notice all businesses except shops and those deemed essential to the life of the country would receive electricity only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, or on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Non-essential shops would only get power in the morning or the afternoon. Four days before the restrictions started, the archbishops of Canterbury and York suggested every British church congregation should pray that ‘God may guide us in facing the present crisis with wisdom, justice and self-sacrifice.’ Two days beforehand, the Daily Mail reported that ‘Industry Minister Tom Boardman has said that a two-day week could not be ruled out.’
The national emergency that followed would last for two months, January and February 1974. Yet its roots went back much further than that winter. One of them was Heath’s economic policy.
From the beginning, his government had impatiently sought to boost the performance of the British economy. But from 1971, frustrated by a general lack of progress and spooked by that year’s sudden surge in unemployment, the Heath administration had sought this transformation by increasingly bold – you could say reckless – means. During late 1971 and early 1972, the government cut interest rates, greatly loosened the rules that governed lending by banks, increased public spending and cut taxes. ‘No government has ever before taken so much action in the space of one year to expand demand,’ declared the chancellor Anthony Barber on New Year’s Day in 1972.
For a time the results were spectacular: the Gross National Product, which had grown by a feeble 1.4 per cent in 1971, grew by 3.5 per cent in 1972, and by a close to unprecedented 5.4 per cent in 1973 – the kind of rate usually achieved by Britain’s economic superiors, such as Germany and Japan. The main FTSE share index leapt from 339 in January 1971 to 544 in May 1972. Between mid-1971 and mid-1973, house prices rose by almost three quarters. Margaret Drabble caught the feeling of the boom in her 1977 novel The Ice Age:
Go for growth, had been the slogan, and everybody had gone for it … When the I. D. Property Company’s office block, Imperial House, had been completed … there had been champagne – for the foreman, the architect, the three partners in greed, and the borough planner, who had accepted his glass with a nervous laugh. The sun had beat down upon them, on the high roof. On top of their own building, on top of the world. It had been a curious thrill, an impious thrill. Whom had they celebrated up there? Themselves, or the mightier power which had permitted them to play for a while?
In fact, the boom was too reliant on speculation and one-off government initiatives, and too removed from the underlying realities of the British economy, to last long. Shortages of skilled
labour and of modern, flexible industrial premises, the legacy of decades of under-investment and poor training and management, meant that the increased appetite for goods and services awakened by the government soon could not be efficiently met. The result was higher inflation and a growing reliance on foreign goods, which were themselves inflationary, as the other rich countries were experiencing feverish booms and price spirals of their own. Britain’s trade balance worsened drastically and the pound, which in 1972 had been freed to rise and fall in value against other currencies, began to fall much more than the Heath government had allowed for.
In May 1973, Barber started to rein in its ‘dash for growth’ by cutting public spending. In July, he raised interest rates to their highest level since 1914. Boom had not quite yet turned to bust: ‘Britain is two-thirds of the way to an economic miracle,’ judged The Economist, reflecting a still quite common view, at the start of September. But the British economy entered the autumn in a delicate condition, even more vulnerable than usual to unforeseen problems. Then, on 6 October, came the biggest shock for Western economies of the entire decade, and the second catalyst for the three-day week. In a surprise attack, Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and invaded the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. The Yom Kippur War had started, and with it the 1973 oil crisis.
Cheap and plentiful oil from the Middle East had been one of the foundations of Western prosperity since before the Second World War. As early as 1914, the British government had recognized the commodity’s importance by investing in the pioneering Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) when it was still struggling to attract business backers. But it was after 1945 that the miracle of Middle Eastern oil began to change the world. Production doubled each decade. The oil price, allowing for inflation, steadily fell. For the first time most people in the West could acquire cars, plastic goods, electrical gadgets. A whole new world of mobility and consumerism opened up, directly or indirectly the product of this cheap fuel. In Highgate in north London during the late sixties and early seventies, the stepfather of a friend of mine, a City banker with a strong interest in architecture, helped design himself a Californian dream of a house, with a pool and infinities of windows. To heat it all against the un-Californian winds off Hampstead Heath, he chose what seemed the most modern solution: a great, elegantly concealed tank of oil.
Since 1973, the pool has gone unheated. Starting in the thirties, a reaction set in against the unequal oil relationship between the West and the Middle East. It began with a challenge by the Iranian government to the freedoms enjoyed in the Middle East by British oilmen, strengthened in 1960 with the formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and sharpened from 1970, with OPEC beginning to sense its power and securing the first significant oil-price increases of the post-war years. A few British and American observers spotted the trend and its implications before the oil crisis struck. Some of them worked for the Heath administration. Lord Rothschild, a free-thinking former oil executive, had been hired in 1970 to head the government’s pioneering in-house ‘Think Tank’ and to anticipate and ponder Britain’s long-term dilemmas. The Think Tank looked at oil and warned that the price of a barrel, which was under $2 in 1972, could rise to between $6 and $9 by the mid-eighties.
The Think Tank’s prediction was dismissed by ministers as too pessimistic. In the event, it proved too optimistic. With the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, OPEC’s increasing impatience to secure a better deal for its members acquired an additional, more overtly political edge: the Arab oil-producing countries who made up much of the OPEC membership now wished to isolate Israel from its allies in the West. The result was a volatile four months of selective oil boycotts of Western countries, cuts in oil production and, above all, oil-price increases. By January 1974, a barrel cost well over $11 – more than a five-fold increase on two years earlier.
For every oil-hungry rich country this presented huge difficulties. For the foreseeable future, their businesses and consumers would be paying much more for oil and oil-derived products and would be left with much less to spend on everything else. Overall inflation would rise sharply, while the general demand for goods and services would fall (the oil-producing countries did not yet have the populations or the traditions of mass consumerism to make up for the Western public’s sudden loss of spending power). The Western economies, therefore, would plunge together into a severe recession, while at the same time suffering the shortages and price hikes that usually came with an overripe boom. During the seventies an ugly new word, ‘stagflation’ – a crude welding of ‘stagnation’ and ‘inflation’ – would come into use to describe this grim new economic world. And of all the Western economies it was Britain’s, which before the oil crisis already had unusually bad inflation, a deflating property bubble and other unique economic frailties, that was worst equipped to cope with it. On 12 December 1973, the minutes of the Heath Cabinet record: ‘The Chancellor said that the country was now facing the gravest economic crisis since the second world war.’
To make matters even worse, the British crisis quickly acquired a potentially lethal political dimension. Four days after the start of the Yom Kippur War, the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers rejected a pay offer from the National Coal Board. Behind their decision lay a number of predictable factors: some clumsy negotiating by the Coal Board, the success of the miners’ confrontational tactics in 1971 and 1972, and the continuing rise of the NUM’s militant left as personified by Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey. But there was also a new aggression and confidence that derived directly from the oil crisis. In a BBC television interview on 13 December, the ever-pragmatic NUM president Joe Gormley gave voice to it.
‘The supplies of cheap oil are finished for ever,’ he began, slowly and gravely, his thin lips barely moving but expecting to be heard. ‘They [the government] are going to need more and more of our own indigenous energy sources to fill the gap. And they won’t have anybody to do that’ – here his voice quickened and became more impatient – ‘because men will not continue to work at the coalfaces of Britain for less than forty quid a week, which is what the [Coal Board] offer will bring them.’ Gormley looked unblinkingly at the camera: ‘If the country doesn’t see the sense of our argument, then it’s woe betide them for the future.’
The NUM’s stance did not come as a complete surprise to the government. After the 1972 strike, writes Douglas Hurd in his memoirs, ‘Most of us dreaded, beyond anything else, a further engagement with the miners.’ To avert another dispute, Heath had been pulling rank on the Coal Board and personally holding meetings with Gormley and the NUM’s other negotiators since the summer of 1973, well before the oil crisis. Yet, at best, these talks achieved nothing. The miners wanted an average pay increase of 31 per cent; Heath and the Coal Board, desperate to prevent British wages rocketing and sending inflation higher, were prepared to give them barely half that. At worst, the negotiations were counterproductive. The intimate, one-to-one nature of the meetings encouraged Heath to believe that, despite the NUM and the government’s divergent and essentially immovable positions, a deal could somehow be put together by the two leaders. At the same time, his involvement in the talks encouraged the NUM to see their argument as being with his administration rather than with the Coal Board.
In early November, with winter not far off now, the union launched a ban on overtime working that cut coal production by close to a third. On 28 November, another meeting took place between Heath and the NUM. The union justified its demands by an indelicate but hard-to-fault logic: ‘Why can’t you pay us for coal what you are willing to pay the Arabs for oil?’ one of the NUM executive asked Heath. ‘The Prime Minister really had no answer,’ recalled the head of the civil service Sir William Armstrong, who was also present, in an interview later. The other key moment of the meeting involved the Scottish miners’ leader and communist Mick McGahey. Accounts of exactly what was said vary, but it seems fairly clear that when Heath asked him what he wanted, h
e answered without ambiguity. He said he wanted to get rid of the government.
The encounter left a lasting impression on Heath. In Salisbury, he still talked with a hiss of bitterness about ‘the communist wing of the miners’ in the seventies. ‘They wanted to get control of the Labour Party, and everything else,’ he said, suddenly glaring up at the sitting-room bookshelves from his chair. ‘Gormley hadn’t got the strength to say no to them.’ During November and December 1973, as the second national coal strike of his government changed from a possibility into a probability, Heath’s conviction that the miners’ militancy was ideological – rather than, as it also was, opportunistic and materialistic – became entwined with his wish to avoid a repeat of the 1972 strike’s unpredictable social and economic consequences, with the oil crisis, with his tendency to dig his heels in under pressure, and with his proclivity for state initiatives and economic planning. The result was the three-day week.
Its official aim was to get the country through the winter. With oil expensive and in short supply, and coal stocks not especially high – partly because the oil crisis had increased consumption – a reduction in energy use was essential, the trade and industry secretary Peter Walker told the Cabinet on 12 December, to avoid ‘enforced electricity disconnections’, ‘essential services … in difficulty’ and ‘factories on the point of closing’ by ‘mid-January’.
But the three-day week was also the product of less openly voiced political calculations. Britain in the seventies was a country with potent recent memories of periods of national sacrifice and austerity, from the rationing of the Second World War and the Attlee era to the power cuts during the icy winter of 1963. Britons were thought to respond well to such emergencies, and to governments that dealt boldly with them. By 12 December, the Heath Cabinet was convinced that ‘Many people in the country were now in the mood where, above all, they wish to try and make a personal contribution to the solution of the present crisis.’ The government should therefore ‘appeal to moderate opinion by seeking to enlist help in the national interest’. As for the miners and the other unions that might influence them, ‘The best way to bring pressure to bear … was to shock them.’
