by Andy Beckett
In some less direct, less tangible ways, too, British popular culture was becoming more hospitable again to right-wing conservatism. In 1971, Mary Whitehouse, the founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and campaigner since the sixties against ‘moral collapse’, revived her profile by helping to organize a large evangelical rally, the ‘Festival of Light’, at Westminster Central Hall in London. The illiberal nature of the event – homosexuality was among the ‘sins’ condemned from the stage – provoked a typically ingenious counter-demonstration by the GLF, including the infiltration of the hall by activists dressed as nuns, who kissed and released mice in the aisles. But Whitehouse was not deterred and, as the decade went on, and ‘the permissive society’ became a steadily more common term of abuse, it grew harder to say whether she represented the last of an old sensibility or the beginning of a new one. With her starchy appearance, Midlands origins and utter relentlessness, Whitehouse was even a little like an older, primmer Margaret Thatcher. In 1977, after Gay News published a poem about a Roman centurion’s love for Jesus, Whitehouse became the first person for over fifty years to successfully sue for blasphemous libel. The jury split ten to two in her favour, and she won again in the House of Lords when Gay News appealed. The carefree iconoclasm of the early days of gay liberation suddenly seemed from another age.
There were other straws in the wind. In 1976, two non-traditional art exhibits at state-owned galleries attracted hostility on a scale that felt significant and political. At the Tate, a low, rectangular arrangement of 120 bricks by the American sculptor Carl Andre, ten years old and quietly titled Equivalent VIII, was vandalized and condemned by the tabloids as a decadent waste of taxpayers’ money. At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the more obviously provocative Prostitution by the artists’ collective COUM Transmissions, which included used sanitary towels and pictures of a member of COUM in porn magazines, became an overheated metaphor in newspaper editorials about Britain’s economic and spiritual decline. The Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn denounced COUM as ‘Wreckers of Civilization’. And, as with ‘the Tate bricks’, the fact that a challenging artwork had obtained government assistance received particular condemnation. Since the early sixties, the British state had steadily become more liberal in many ways. Now, limits to that permissiveness seemed to be being set by the media and the broader culture.
A disenchantment with liberalism and a fascination with something fiercer began to show up everywhere, from comics – 2000 AD’s strip about a lantern-jawed, semi-fascist lawman of the future, Judge Dredd, which started in 1977 – to prime-time television dramas. In the hugely popular cop series The Sweeney, first broadcast between 1975 and 1978, the central theme, always there amid the screech of brakes and beery backchat, was the need for the police to get round the rules imposed on them by decades of soft-hearted bureaucrats: to put the fear of God into criminals again, take part in gun battles, behave like a gang themselves. And there was often time as well for a little bleak comment on other issues. As one of the detectives put it in the third series, like Hayek in a laddish brown leather jacket, ‘What’s inflation going to do to your cut by 2001?’
But the most promising evidence of all for a political sea change was the number of prominent converts to the Tory cause. By 1978, there were enough defectors from the Left for their stories to fill a book, Right Turn, edited by the Conservative MP Patrick Cormack. They included Reg Prentice, a Labour Cabinet minister only two years earlier; Lord Chalfont, a Labour minister in the sixties and, until 1974, a Labour peer; the ubiquitous journalist Paul Johnson, who had been editor of the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970; Kingsley Amis; and the historian Hugh Thomas, a famous authority on the Spanish Civil War and a former Labour Party member and prospective parliamentary candidate.
They gave diverse reasons for moving rightwards. Prentice cited Margaret Thatcher’s ‘courage and integrity’: ‘She is making no attempt to offer false comfort and easy options … She is challenging the British people to choose the bumpy ride to a free society.’ More often, he and the others emphasized their dissatisfactions: at the trade union ‘mob’ they saw at work in recent industrial disputes; at the whiff of class warfare in Labour’s recent general-election manifestos; at the rise of Tony Benn; at the whole recent expansion of the British state – in Johnson’s words, ‘… The burgeoning bureaucrats of local and central government; the new breed of “administrators” who control schools, hospitals and even the arts; sociology lecturers … so-called social workers with their glib pseudo-solutions to non-problems …’ Unifying all these arguments, which were not always individually convincing, was the allegation that the British post-war consensus was evolving into a kind of socialist one-party state, the sort of monolith Hayek had warned about in The Road to Serfdom. ‘The authors of these essays have turned right,’ Cormack wrote in his introduction, ‘because they believe there is a real risk that our society will be replaced by the sort of … tyranny that so many millions suffer under, and seek to escape from, in Eastern Europe.’
Johnson, characteristically, went further. One element of this ‘tyranny’, he wrote, had already arrived: ‘the manifest preference’ of the Labour government for ‘determining policy not in the arena of Parliament … but in secret and unrecorded talks with union leaders’. Johnson was correct that such meetings took place, and that they were central to the workings of the Labour government in the mid-and late seventies. This arrangement between Labour and the unions even had an official name: the social contract. But it was not the impregnable alliance he imagined.
12
A Relationship of Forces
In the south-east corner of Smith Square in Westminster stand a pair of ponderous twenties buildings. Seven storeys of dull brick, rows of narrow windows, fussy little columns at the entrances: the offices of the Local Government Association are uninspiring even by the standards of the area’s bureaucratic anthills. On a wet February lunchtime, a determinedly enthusiastic press officer gave me a tour. There was not much to detain us. We passed glass partitions, new pale wood, aubergine walls – the bland esperanto of modern office decor. ‘This place was in a really, really poor state when we took it over in ’98,’ the press officer said briskly. ‘Derelict. Lots of tiny offices. No furniture. Mess on the floor. We went round with torches.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘It used to be a real warren when the T&G and Labour had it.’
Between 1928 and 1981, Transport House, as the interlinked complex was then known, was the headquarters of both the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the Labour Party. The TGWU acquired the land for the offices and had them built. It then invited the party to be its tenant. Over the decades the arrangement grew so familiar that ‘Transport House’ became political correspondents’ shorthand for the Labour movement in the same way that Downing Street was shorthand for the government. And for anyone who wondered about the balance of power between the unions and the party, the landlord–tenant relationship in Smith Square gave pause for thought.
During the Labour administrations of the seventies, however, the political interconnections within Transport House became more significant still. At 10.30 a.m. on the third Monday of every month, the top-floor Board Room hosted the meetings of the TUC–Labour Party Liaison Committee. It was a new body, and it oversaw a new and unprecedented collaboration between the unions and government. The arrangement covered everything from workers’ pay to state pensions, from food prices to rent. It was known as the social contract.
I asked the press officer if I could see the room, but she said it was in use. Instead, she gave me a photograph. It showed a long, slightly claustrophobic penthouse with panelled walls, high windows and a vast C-shaped conference table. What went on in this space between the Liaison Committee’s half-dozen union leaders and half-dozen Labour ministers has not had a good press. This entry for 22 April 1974 from the diary of Barbara Castle, then the social services secretary, is typical:
Up to London early for a
meeting of the Liaison Committee … The two sides faced each other across that rather bleak boardroom at Transport House which makes it so difficult to engender enthusiastic intimacy. The TUC anyway are hardly noted for forthcoming enthusiasm at the best of times …
Shirley Williams, another member of Harold Wilson’s seventies Cabinet with reservations about the unions, was also on the committee. ‘I thought the whole idea of the Liaison Committee was a big mistake,’ she told me. ‘On constitutional grounds – that union leaders, people with outside interests, should be able to veto things that the government wanted. The meetings were very dull most of the time. I found the TUC conservative, self-interested, fairly sexist, not all that interested in poverty or those not in full-time work. I came away with a slightly stale feeling in my mouth. This was not what I thought democratic socialism was going to be.’ Denis Healey just made a face when I asked him about his time on the committee. ‘The meetings were a chore,’ he said. ‘They were often quite difficult.’ How did he get on with the union leaders generally at the time? Healey gave a world-weary laugh. ‘When I had them to No. 11 Downing Street we used to have beer and sandwiches. But [the TGWU leader] Jack Jones asked for goujons de sole.’
The idea of a ‘social contract’ between a Labour administration and the unions was first raised by Tony Benn in a pamphlet he published shortly after the party’s defeat in the 1970 general election. Relations between the 1964–70 Wilson government and the unions had gone from cool to near-catastrophic, culminating in the public battle over ‘In Place of Strife’ and the unions’ successful rejection of the government’s proposals for calming Britain’s increasingly volatile industrial relations. ‘What is required’, concluded Benn in response in 1970, ‘is a much closer link … so that there is a two-way flow of information about policy all the time. This information flow is an essential ingredient of all systems … and it has the merit of avoiding the much-publicised eyeball-to-eyeball crunches and confrontations.’
Benn’s vision of a smoothly efficient collaborative socialism – he had been minister for technology before the election – was highly optimistic, and his influence on Labour Party policy was limited. But Wilson’s union difficulties in the sixties and Ted Heath’s even greater ones in the early seventies persuaded Labour that a new approach was needed. At the same time, the fact that the Conservatives were in office and passing anti-union legislation such as the Industrial Relations Act concentrated minds at the TUC. In 1972, the TUC–Labour Party Liaison Committee was set up and the social contract began to solidify. Its precise terms were vague at first. Up to and during the 1974 general elections, the social contract’s main purpose was to suggest to voters that Wilson, unlike Heath, could get on with the unions. Yet once Labour were back in office the nature of the party’s deal with the TUC became much clearer. In essence, the social contract committed the government to policies the unions wanted – the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act, increased spending on welfare benefits, state-imposed restrictions on the prices of essentials – in return for an undertaking from the unions to accept modest pay rises, agreed with the government, which would not worsen the inflation rate and the already perilous economic situation.
There was from the start an element of wishful thinking about the social contract. Wilson was weakening as a political figure and had a tiny majority, and many union leaders were hard-nosed and pragmatic. Those same trade unionists were having increasing difficulties with militant shop stewards, and with the pay demands of their members in general. Finally, employers and other business interests were excluded from the whole balancing act. ‘The social contract was a godsend device at the ’74 elections for beating the Tories,’ Bernard Donoughue told me. ‘But deep down I didn’t believe in it.’ Yet in the Britain of the mid-seventies, with a government recently deposed by the miners, with the oil-price rise biting, with near-panic infecting parts of Whitehall and the City of London, the social contract seemed to offer a way out of the crisis. Besides, similar alliances between groups of unions and left-wing governments had existed for years and had worked effectively elsewhere in northern Europe. ‘The Social Contract’, wrote the trade union historian Robert Taylor in 2004, ‘looked [at first] to many observers like a far-sighted and practical arrangement.’
That it did owed much to a dry little man from Liverpool with an unyielding murmur of a voice and an instinctive dislike of disorder. Jack Jones had been elected General Secretary of the TGWU in 1968. By the mid-seventies, his union’s growing membership, Britain’s largest, was approaching 2 million. One trade unionist in six was a member. The TGWU had long been known for its assertive recruiting – it was, after all, a union for ‘General Workers’ – and its particularly close connections to the Labour Party, but under Jones these characteristics grew much stronger. As Britain’s rising unemployment and inflation made life harder for small unions, which lacked the political and shop-floor clout reliably to protect their members, so the TGWU attracted defectors. At the same time, the TGWU’s internal political culture – increasingly left-wing, with a strong leader but few other checks on the activities of its shop stewards – was in tune with the mood of British trade unionism from the late sixties to the late seventies.
In February 1973, the Strawbs, a so far modestly successful folk-turned-rock band who had been around in Britain since the early sixties, released a single called ‘Part of the Union’. A raucous, ambiguous singalong that was either a satire or a celebration or a condemnation of union power – and quite possibly all of these – it spent three weeks at Number 2 in the charts. Its chorus and best verses went:
Oh you don’t get me I’m part of the union
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
till the day I die, till the day I die
…. And I always get my way
If I strike for higher pay
When I show my card
To the Scotland Yard
This is what I say:
Oh you don’t get me I’m part of the union
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
till the day I die, till the day I die
…. So though I’m a working man
I can ruin the government’s plan
Though I’m not too hard
The sight of my card
Makes me some kind of superman.
Oh you don’t get me I’m part of the union
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
till the day I die, till the day I die.
When I met Jones in 2004, he was ninety-one, but as he talked about the status of unions in the mid-seventies he raised and clenched both fists. ‘The unions were growing stronger and stronger,’ he said in his soft insistent voice. ‘They thought they could grasp the world.’ A few minutes later, he described the British workforce at the time as a ‘huge solid phalanx of industrial workers’. And his hands swept the air as if he was a general gesturing towards his troops from a hilltop.
Jones’s authority was personal and moral as well as crudely political. He had grown up in a slum next to the Mersey, in a house that was condemned as unfit for habitation the year he was born. His mother took in lodgers: one ended up as a dead gangster in Chicago. His father drank, worked in the docks and was a low-ranking but committed TGWU activist. Jones himself had ‘no more than average educational ability’, as he put it in his autobiography Union Man, and followed his father into trade unionism and heavy industry. He spent the Depression years of the twenties and thirties finding and losing jobs, drawing the dole and leading unofficial strikes in the Mersey docks. As a shop steward, he quickly developed a contempt for what he saw as the excessive deference shown to employers by many of the TGWU’s more senior officials. But the General Secretary Ernest Bevin earned his approval: ‘He did not take a narrow view of trade union
ism or his duties as General Secretary … [During] the abdication crisis Bevin considered that Edward VIII was letting down the country … He suggested that Edward was profligate and implied that he was an alcoholic.’
A similar combination of puritanism, patriotism and political expansionism would mark Jones’s time as General Secretary. But that was decades away. In 1936, still in his early twenties, he became a Labour city councillor in Liverpool. Then he went to fight in Spain, where he met Ted Heath. He was wounded in his right arm and shoulder, and had to crawl to safety after waiting for nightfall on the battlefield among the dead and dying. Back in England, he resumed his career as a councillor and TGWU official, first in the Mersey docks and then in the Midlands. In Coventry, he found thriving car and aircraft factories and weak union branches, and steadily transformed the TGWU’s position: between 1939 and 1955, its membership in the city rose more than tenfold. During the Second World War, with Bevin now minister of labour, Jones also had his first experience of cooperating with the government to further his left-wing goals, winning better wages for local toolmakers in return for recruiting skilled workers for the war effort.
Occasionally, he returned to the rabble-rousing methods of his youth. During one dispute at a car factory in the fifties, he ‘lay down in the road and encouraged others to do the same’ to stop delivery trucks from entering. But mostly he advanced by conscientiousness and a keen appreciation of the geometries of power. He worked eighteen hours a day. He spoke in an unhurried, level voice as if he expected people to pay attention. He listened carefully, blinking slowly and with his thin lips set in a straight line. There was nothing obviously macho about him: his face was round and owlish, and he dressed reassuringly like a trade unionist from the forties, the labour movement’s heroic era. ‘Mr Jones must be the last major trade union leader to wear a cloth cap regularly,’ noted the Guardian in a 1968 profile. By then, already well into his fifties, he was like a very composed elderly uncle. As an unnamed union leader told Stephen Milligan for his 1976 book The New Barons, ‘Jones has a smile like the sunlight glinting on the brass plate of a coffin.’
