by Andy Beckett
In 1978, a promising young Liverpool playwright started work on a series of black, bitterly funny television plays about a gang of unemployed tarmac-layers in his home city and their battles with the dole office and their own demons. Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff was not completed and broadcast until 1982, when it was taken to be a commentary on a different political world altogether, but the origins of the series showed, to the contrary, that there were grim continuities between the Callaghan era and what came afterwards.
Another powerful condemnation of unemployment in the late seventies did make it into public view while Labour was still in government. In March 1978, while the Conservatives were in one of their low periods for morale, popularity and energy – and Callaghan, partly for this reason, was widely thought to be planning to call a general election in the near future – Margaret Thatcher’s presentation expert Gordon Reece hired the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi to refresh the Tories’ image. Saatchi’s was a cocky, ingenious, relatively new agency, set up in London in 1970. It was one of several in the city which had established Britain during the decade as the world centre for clever ad men and talked-about campaigns – another sign of the gaudy rise of British consumerism beneath the bleak headlines. Saatchi’s specialized in stark, memorable images: for example, a rueful pregnant man for a famous 1970 ad suggesting men should think more about contraception. Labour were quickly warned about the agency’s political potential by Edward Booth-Clibborn, an authority on British advertising whom the party had recruited in 1977, along with a few other ad men, to do publicity work on a more ad hoc basis. But the poster campaign Saatchi’s mounted for the Tories in August 1978 was still a shock.
‘Labour Isn’t Working’ was one of a dozen ideas developed for the Conservatives by the agency that summer. Maurice Saatchi and the agency’s then managing director Tim Bell considered it merely a ‘possible’, and it only became part of their presentation to Margaret Thatcher because the copywriter who had come up with the theme, Andrew Rutherford, found out that it had been downgraded in importance and covertly slipped a summary of his concept back in among Saatchi and Bell’s presentation notes. Bell’s biographer Mark Hollingsworth records that when the rough poster was shown to Thatcher,
She stared at it for a long time; the convention in party propaganda was not to mention the opponent directly. ‘Why is the biggest thing on the poster the name of the opposition? We’re advertising Labour,’ she said. Bell and Maurice replied, almost in unison, ‘No, we’re demolishing Labour.’
Thatcher agreed to the poster. Then Saatchi’s hired a large group of Young Conservatives from South Hendon and photographed them standing in a snaking, despondent, seemingly endless line, the dole queue of every insecure worker’s worst imaginings. With ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ printed in huge, heavy capitals hanging over the queue, and ‘Britain’s Better Off with the Conservatives’ in smaller, lighter letters underneath, the poster was ready. Senior Tories apart from Thatcher still had misgivings, and the party had not budgeted for an advertising blitz before the actual election campaign, so Saatchi’s had to be persuaded to accept delayed payment, and only twenty posters were put up across the entire country. But the tone and timing were perfect. Denis Healey – possibly stung by the attack on one of the weaker points of his record as chancellor – called the posters a ‘fraud’ because they did not show a real dole queue, and claimed that the line was made up of Saatchi employees. The agency, which had indeed filmed some of its workers for another Conservative ad, gleefully entered a war of words with the chancellor. Since it was August, the silly season, the media covered the row, and the political effect of the posters was magnified far beyond even the best hopes of Saatchi’s and the Tories.
Unemployment, like Britain’s racial tensions, like Northern Ireland, was damaging to the Callaghan administration but unlikely to be fatal. All three problems would be as bad, and often much worse, in the next decade without bringing down the government. But the Saatchi campaign unsettled Labour at a crucial moment.
For most of August, Callaghan was at his farm in Sussex, going for walks, looking after his animals and weighing up whether to call a general election in the autumn. There were strong arguments in favour: the difficulty of carrying on as a minority government; the divisions among the Conservatives; the dramatic improvement in the economy, which might not last into 1979; the absence for once of any big ongoing political crises; and, above all perhaps, the fact that the unions’ annual pay negotiations started in November, and were unlikely to be comfortable. During the spring and summer of 1978, McNally remembered, ‘Jim let me start putting preparations in place. Recruiting people. There was an advisory group that met. October 5th was the popular choice for the election. We had a poster ready. It was just a picture of a candle, with words saying, “Remember the last time the Tories said they could work with the unions.”’
But there were arguments, too, against a quick autumn poll. Firstly, an election did not have to be called until October 1979. Why risk a contest a year earlier? In 1978, Callaghan had been in office barely two years, and was enjoying the job more than most incumbents. ‘Jim liked being PM,’ Gavyn Davies recalled. More tangibly, if the government waited until 1979, it might benefit from the tax cuts it had made, which would take effect in late 1978, and from the introduction of a new electoral register, which tended significantly to favour Labour, in early 1979. Waiting could also demonstrate confidence: that the economic recovery was going to continue, that the government could keep the unions reasonable. ‘Jim said to me,’ McNally remembered, ‘“It’ll be easier to get another round [of pay restraint] from them with an election looming than with an election settled.”’
Finally, there was the evidence of the opinion polls. Callaghan spent much of his time in Sussex that August reading microscopically detailed surveys and analyses of British voting intentions, with a particular emphasis on marginal constituencies, provided by Robert Worcester of MORI, Labour’s favourite pollster. This material revealed that the government’s recovery in the polls since 1976 was not as impressive as it looked, thanks in part to the Saatchi poster campaign. Labour was at best level with the Tories, at worst still slightly behind. ‘I did my own amateur calculations [for an October 1978 election] and came up with 303 Labour seats and 304 Conservatives,’ Callaghan wrote afterwards.
The most probable result would be another ‘hung’ Parliament, a prospect I did not relish … I had no wish to undergo once again the frustration and uncertainty of having no Parliamentary majority … I made up my mind. The Government should aim to consolidate the progress we had made and then ask the country to confirm us in office … in the spring. I looked at the 1979 calendar … British Summer Time would begin on 18 March; Good Friday was on 13 April. I drew a ring around Thursday 5 April 1979, the last day of the income tax year. This seemed as auspicious as any other day. Having decided, I telephoned the Chancellor who was my near neighbour in Sussex and invited myself to tea … It was a lovely summer’s afternoon, and we sat in the garden while I told him what I had decided. We then reviewed the winter’s prospects.
Callaghan’s biographer Kenneth O. Morgan says that the chancellor responded evenly to the news from Callaghan: ‘Healey gave the opinion that the … economic argument was neutral … between having the election in the autumn and in the spring.’ But Healey told me, ‘I was worried, because I knew we were liable to have trouble with the unions again [over the winter].’ Either way, between this teatime meeting on 18 August and the first week of September, Callaghan said nothing definite about his decision to any of his other colleagues. Instead, he dropped hints. On 1 September, he held a dinner for union leaders in Sussex, and put the case against an October election to them – but not strongly enough for them to believe he meant it. For in the unions and the Cabinet, in the Labour Party and the other parties, in the media and among the public, there was a conviction that an election was coming.
It had been building for
months. In July, before the start of the parliamentary summer recess, the transport secretary Bill Rodgers ‘gave what was understood to be a farewell party for my own departmental staff’, he wrote later. Like many politicians and commentators, of all denominations, Rodgers assumed that the election would be soon after Parliament returned, and that Labour would win narrowly: ‘[I] discussed idly with my permanent secretary which office of state I might next occupy.’
On 5 September, a tanned and confident Callaghan spoke to the TUC conference in Brighton. After carefully summarizing the state of the economy and the arguments for keeping the pay rises of trade unionists to 5 per cent, arguments which were received without much excitement and a little heckling, he slowed his voice to a teasing half-murmur. ‘I understand’, he said, ‘the reasons for the present spec-u-lation about the prospect of a general election.’ In response to this speculation, he went on, he was going to sing a verse from an old music-hall song by Marie Lloyd. ‘As far as I remember, it went like this: “There. Was. I. Wait-ing at the church …”’ – the prime minister played the rhythm with an upturned finger – ‘“Wait-ing at the church, wait-ing at the church.”’ In the hall there was laughter and applause, then puzzled silence. Callaghan, poker-faced as the driest comedian, sang on: ‘“When I found he’d left me in the lurch, Lor’ how it did upset me.”’ Callaghan paused. ‘Perhaps you recall how it went on: “All at once he sent me round a note. Here’s the very note. This is what he wrote”’ – the Labour leader savoured the mockingly simple rhyme – ‘“Can’t get away to marry you today. My wife won’t let me!”’ As his words died away, there was a final bout of clapping and laughter, and Callaghan looked down. The television cameras just caught a smile.
‘Uncle Jim’ loved old songs, and so did the middle-aged delegates at the TUC conference. Yet his speech baffled many of them. Callaghan had meant to imply that Margaret Thatcher was going to be left ‘waiting at the church’ for an autumn election that would never come. But this message, conveyed so eccentrically and unexpectedly, was lost on most of the delegates – and on most of the journalists present. Their heads were already full of noise about an October election, so they did not hear him. The following day, 6 September, the conference voted to set up an election fund, and The Times reported that the Cabinet meeting on 7 September would see the announcement of an October election, on the 5th.
In his memoirs, Callaghan mentions the 1978 TUC conference only fleetingly, and his singing to it not at all. On the subject of the autumn election, he admits: ‘I made a mistake in allowing the speculation to build up… without uttering a word to cool it.’ Soon after the conference, the comedian Roy Hudd wrote to him pointing out that the song to the TUC was not by Marie Lloyd at all but by Vesta Victoria, another music-hall legend. Callaghan wrote back, telling Hudd that he had deliberately misattributed the song to Lloyd because she was better known. Through overconfidence or tiredness, or both, the great fox of sixties and seventies Labour politics had begun chasing his own tail.
On 7 September, the Cabinet met as scheduled. ‘After the holidays … Ministers were in a mood of good-humoured tension,’ wrote Rodgers. ‘The Secretary of the Cabinet … was teased about the further vacation he would shortly enjoy.’ When Callaghan briskly asserted that there was not going to be an autumn election, ‘We almost rose from our chairs in astonishment.’ There was disbelieving laughter. Later that day, a slightly fidgety Callaghan, in a dark suit and dark tie, broadcast to the nation. ‘Now I’d like to tell you, personally, how I see it,’ he began, trying for his best bedside manner. ‘Things have been going much better … These can be lasting, not temporary, improvements if we follow through … Would a general election now solve inflation? … No.’ Authoritatively, a little patronizingly, he sketched out the reasons for his decision. Then he quickly moved on. ‘We can see the way ahead. We will face our difficulties as we come to them. I can already see some looming on the horizon.’ A final resolute look came over his face, which had lost some its fullness over the last two years. ‘Let’s see it through together.’
Callaghan’s advisers immediately sensed the risk. ‘I said to him, “You’ll either be remembered now as a political genius,”’ McNally recalled later, ‘“or as the man who missed the boat.”’ The unions’ feelings were more clear-cut. David Basnett, head of the General and Municipal Workers and of the loyal union group Trade Unionists for a Labour Victory, had already given a press conference endorsing Callaghan’s ‘decision’ to hold an autumn election. He and other union leaders now felt humiliated. Callaghan’s song to the TUC now seemed like mockery – the unions, it was clear, had also been kept ‘wait-ing at the church’ – and the postponement of the election seemed like the prime minister’s secretiveness, political game-playing and disregard for the unions at its worst. Many trade unionists also thought Callaghan had made a catastrophic electoral misjudgement. Many of his Labour allies felt, or have come to feel, the same way. ‘To my dying day I believe we could have won an election on 5 October,’ McNally told me. Gavyn Davies and Bill Rodgers said much the same.
In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher comes close to supporting their analysis. ‘I shared the general sense of anti-climax which the Prime Minister’s [election] announcement caused … [Yet] would we have won a general election in the autumn of 1978? I believe that we might have scraped in… But it would only have needed one or two mistakes in our campaign to have lost.’ More interestingly still, she goes on: ‘Even if we had won, what would have happened next? … The TUC had voted against a renewal of the Social Contract – and the following month’s Labour Party Conference would vote to reject all pay restraint … If we had been faced with that [pay revolt] over the winter of 1978/79 it might have broken us, as it finally broke the Labour Government …’
18
The Peasants’ Revolt
On 21 September, exactly a fortnight after Jim Callaghan’s election announcement, workers at Ford rejected a 5 per cent pay offer, roughly half the rate of inflation, and went on unofficial strike. By 25 September, 57,000 of them were out, from Dagenham to Bridgend. ‘Stuff the 5%’, said their placards. In early October, their union, the TGWU, once so loyal to the government, declared the strike official. In mid-November, Ford, until now so close to Callaghan that they employed his son Michael as an executive and had recently opened a car plant next to his constituency, agreed to give the strikers 17 per cent to get them back to work. The strikers accepted. The government responded to Ford’s flouting of its 5 per cent pay guideline by withdrawing the subsidies it paid the company. On 13 December, the Commons voted on whether the government could impose penalties on employers in such situations. With the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Scottish Nationalists, the Ulster Unionists and Labour left-wingers all either voting against the government or abstaining, the government lost by six votes. The sanctions against Ford were withdrawn, and the government was left close to defenceless against any workers who followed the Ford strikers’ example. ‘We’ve acted as a spearhead,’ a triumphant TGWU official at Ford told the Communist Party journal Marxism Today. The Winter of Discontent was under way.
This simplification of Shakespeare’s phrase, which had been fleetingly used during the three-day week, first resurfaced in September 1978 in a series of speeches by trade union leaders warning about the consequences of any government attempt to restrain pay. ‘The unions’ scriptwriters are reduced to dusting off old clichés for the coming pay battle,’ sneered the Sun’s industrial correspondent Peter McHugh. But from the Ford strike onwards, the phrase rapidly became less of a joke. ‘In no time at all in November 1978, Jim’s pay target fell apart,’ Bernard Donoughue remembered. ‘In four or five weeks it just went.’
The Winter of Discontent lasted from November 1978 to March 1979. It was the biggest British labour stoppage since the General Strike of 1926, and in Britain there has not been a remotely comparable strike wave since. In 1979, which included the Winter of Discontent’s two most militant months, J
anuary and February, almost 30 million working days were lost, more than three times as many as the previous year and the equivalent of every employee in the country taking a day’s strike action. On 22 January 1979, the Winter of Discontent’s single most militant day, 1.5 million public-sector staff refused to work.
But the Winter of Discontent was not really about such carefully choreographed, centrally directed ‘days of action’. It was more shapeless and anarchic. Many of its strikes were unofficial, undertaken without the approval of the union hierarchies. The Winter of Discontent fed off its own energies, spreading suddenly and unpredictably. There were strikes by truckers and traffic wardens. There were strikes by ambulancemen and dinner ladies. There were strikes by binmen and local newspaper reporters. There were strikes by hospital cleaners and people who operated rubbish incinerators. There were strikes by nurses and Fleet Street printers. There were strikes by Heathrow pilots and civil servants. There were strikes by school caretakers, train drivers and gravediggers. There was an overtime ban by oil-tanker drivers. There were even strikes far out at sea, among the usually cowed workers on oil rigs.
Many of these industries had rarely experienced such stoppages, even in the seventies, while many of those who went on strike had never done so before. Some of the strikes were national and attrition-al, lasting several weeks or months. Some of them were local and short, almost comic in their contagiousness, their paper-thin rationales, their air of feverishness. ‘London’s traffic wardens disappeared from the streets this afternoon,’ the London Evening Standard reported on 15 January 1979, ‘because of a lightning strike … so that [they] can attend a mass meeting … to negotiate a pay deal.’
