Like many of the controversial initiatives sponsored by left-wing councils in the early 1980s, the nuclear-free zone policy was as much a roar of defiance at Whitehall as a serious attempt to change government policy. It was especially strong in Wales, where it became a totem of resistance to London, uniting the old Labour working classes and middle-class nationalists. When, on 23 February 1982, Clwyd followed seven other councils in declaring itself a nuclear-free zone, campaigners declared Wales the first ‘nuclear-free country in Europe’. As the council deliberated, some 400 daffodil-waving demonstrators, including the poet R. S. Thomas and Plaid Cymru’s figurehead Gwynfor Evans, were waiting outside. When the news came, they released a thousand daffodil-coloured balloons into the heavens. The former Archdruid of Wales read a proclamation to the crowd, while a team of runners set off with a ‘peace torch’ to RAF Sealand in the north. On the hilltops that night, giant CND emblems blazed in the darkness. It might have been an empty gesture, but it was terrific theatre.32
Were nuclear-free zones more than just a gimmick? As the Guardian admitted, there was nothing councils could do to stop the government moving nuclear materials through their areas, or from basing nuclear weapons wherever it liked. British Rail took no notice of nuclear-free zones whatsoever. Even Tyne and Wear’s plan to put up signs telling motorists ‘You are now entering a nuclear-free zone’ was blocked by the Department for Transport. To the zones’ supporters, this was beside the point: for the historian Dorothy Thompson, ‘the nuclear-free movement is a ray of hope in a darkening situation because it signals a change of attitude’. And the nuclear-free zones did record one significant achievement. When the government arranged a civil defence exercise in the autumn of 1982, more than a hundred local authorities refused to take part, which meant it had to be cancelled. CND celebrated a great victory, but a year later the government introduced regulations compelling councils to update their civil defence plans and comply with any exercises ordered by Whitehall. There would be no repeat of the last fiasco.33
By this stage, with Labour having lost ground in May 1982’s local elections, the rush to declare nuclear-free zones had abated. In December 1982, Bury’s Conservative-controlled borough council became the first local authority in the country to declare itself a nuclear zone, because the council was so cross at being identified with Manchester’s unilateralism. And the following April, Bradford, previously the first local authority to form a ‘peace action group’, became the first to reverse its nuclear-free status. A very close vote had been expected, with the Conservatives and Labour deadlocked and the Liberals likely to back the latter. But then a Labour councillor launched into what his own leader described as an ‘appalling’ attack on the British Army’s record in Northern Ireland. The Liberals promptly changed their minds and voted with the Tories, and Bradford’s nuclear-free zone was consigned to history.
Where the left held sway, however, the nuclear-free dream survived. In the capital, barely a month went by without some fresh row about the Greater London Council’s refusal to support civil defence planning. And in David Blunkett’s self-styled Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, the city council advertised for an administrative officer to ‘co-ordinate and develop the council’s nuclear free zone policy’, with a salary of £9,000 a year (roughly £40,000 today). The winning candidate was 32-year-old Jim Coleman, a former sociology teacher who was working at a centre for unemployed youngsters. By an astonishing coincidence, he was also the voluntary secretary of Sheffield CND and had been a member of the local Communist Party since 1975. To the Conservatives, it was a gift. The leader of the council’s Conservative group, Irvine Patnick, claimed that Sheffield was practically a Soviet satellite, while one woman sarcastically told the local Star that ‘she could sleep soundly now she knew that if missiles were targeted on the city, the council had a man with a big net to catch them’.
But when the press tracked down the man himself, he seemed disappointingly unthreatening. Coleman had spent his first months encouraging local schools to teach peace studies, setting up peace sections in local libraries and organizing a rent-free Peace Shop for an ‘18-member collective representing local peace groups’. To his evident unease, he had also been looking into the city’s civil defence plans, as required under the government’s new regulations. Yes, he admitted, there was a council bunker in the basement of the Town Hall. But in the event of a nuclear war, it was unlikely to hold out for long. ‘It’s a sort of broom cupboard with two Telex machines,’ he explained. ‘They keep the key over the door.’34
There were always people who laughed at CND. The conservative historian John Vincent claimed that with its ‘mild religiosity, its belief in the end of the world, its sense of moral monopoly, its zeal in portraying the torments of the damned’, the peace movement was basically a cult. It was telling, he thought, that its rallies were billed as ‘carnivals’, such as a forthcoming Bristol ‘beano’ that was advertising ‘E. P. Thompson, floats, bands, exhibitions, food, discussions, theatre, films, videos, “and much much more”’. Another conservative columnist, Bernard Levin, agreed that CND campaigners seemed to be ‘having the most marvellous time’. Whenever Bruce Kent came on screen (‘sleek, plump, wonderfully self-satisfied’), Levin could almost hear him purring. As for E. P. Thompson, he had ‘made an entire new life, clearly stimulating and enjoyable, out of urging military weakness upon the West’. If nuclear weapons vanished overnight, how would he fill his spare time?35
For some critics, however, CND was no laughing matter. For the Express’s George Gale, its supporters wanted to ‘make war inevitable by making Soviet victory certain’. ‘Each of those who wear the CND badge’, he wrote, ‘might as well put on the uniform of a soldier in the Red Army.’ The CND emblem was a ‘cross of shame’, agreed the Conservative MP George Gardiner, for whom the campaign’s rallies were an ‘orgy of anti-Americanism’ orchestrated by the ‘tyrants and terrorists’ in the Kremlin. ‘A sick charade, masterminded from Moscow’, agreed his colleague Winston Churchill, whose grandfather would surely have said much the same. Even The Times accused CND of being suffused with the ‘spirit of appeasement of Soviet power and propitiation of any Marxist policy’. It was not some harmless association of well-meaning weirdos. It was a ‘left-wing front … sprinkled with Communists and ex-Communists in key positions’.36
On the face of it, all this might sound paranoid. Yet when Bruce Kent described the Communist Party of Great Britain as CND’s ‘partners in peace’, he was asking for trouble. And the official history of MI5 shows that the security service took allegations of Communist infiltration very seriously. A few years earlier, Communist Party members had occupied more than half of the seats on CND’s national executive, and MI5 believed that plenty of Communists and Trotskyists had flooded into the organization in the early 1980s. Indeed, peace campaigners often complained that CND committees were ‘packed with pro-Soviet members of the Communist Party’, as one woman from the Greenham Common peace camp put it. But the Communists never had things all their own way. The Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky reported that, although the KGB regarded the peace movement as ‘natural allies’, it never secured the influence it wanted. In particular, the KGB was very suspicious of Thompson and Ruddock, who were far too independent-minded for Moscow’s taste, and they were frankly baffled by the women who camped outside the American base on Greenham Common.37
The East German secret police, though, had at least one agent on CND’s national committee. Professor Vic Allen, a sociologist at Leeds and the official historian of the National Union of Mineworkers, was also an informant for the Stasi. Since he was an outspoken Communist, few of his colleagues were very surprised. What did surprise them, though, was the revelation many years later that his CND comrade Harry Newton, a lecturer in trade union law and former treasurer of the Institute for Workers’ Control, was actually an agent for MI5. According to the whistle-blower Cathy Massiter, Newton had been working for the security service for decades. While appe
aring to be somewhere to the left of Pol Pot, he was secretly reporting on CND meetings and even warned his handlers that Bruce Kent was a ‘crypto-communist’. But since Newton had seemed so devoted to the proletarian revolution, most of his friends refused to believe it. There could have been no greater tribute to his professional skill.38
For her part, Mrs Thatcher always suspected that the peace movement was a front for the Kremlin. After one seminar with a group of experts on the Communist bloc, she scribbled that the Soviet Union was ‘genuinely concerned’ about the deployment of Cruise and had launched a ‘massive propaganda campaign’ to stop it. The obvious problem was that ‘peace’ sounded much more attractive than ‘deterrence’, especially to younger audiences. In the summer of 1982, Conservative Central Office asked local activists to report on the state of public opinion. Many thought the government was losing the battle for hearts and minds, warning that ‘membership of CND now included professionals, teachers and church activists as well as the more usual “long haired brigade”’. Local Tories were particularly worried that CND was infiltrating schools, complaining that in some areas ‘teachers had been giving out badges to the children and discussions had been held on the subject during class’. In some schools, ‘the “brainwashing” was so effective that when debates had been arranged, difficulty had been found in getting children to speak on behalf of multilateral disarmament’. And on top of that, every area reported that clergymen were very active in the local peace movement. The Church of England, they complained, was turning into CND at prayer.39
Yet CND never won over the silent majority. Many people were worried about a nuclear war, but they also wanted to be well defended. They were wary of individual weapons projects: a poll in November 1982 found that six out of ten people were opposed to both Cruise and Trident. Yet they were sceptical about unilateral disarmament and downright hostile to cutting defence spending. That autumn another poll found that just one in five people supported defence cuts, while almost a third thought defence spending should be higher. Only 31 per cent thought Britain should scrap all its nuclear weapons; by contrast, 78 per cent of Conservatives, 55 per cent of Labour voters and 64 per cent of SDP–Liberal Alliance voters thought Britain’s deterrent should be maintained or even improved. And as time went on and the Third World War failed to materialize, the air leaked out of CND’s balloon. As early as May 1983, another survey found that support for unilateral disarmament had collapsed to just 16 per cent, down by half since 1981. By now nine out of ten Tories, six out of ten Labour voters and eight out of ten Alliance voters were opposed to scrapping the deterrent.40
From CND’s perspective, all this made for a very disappointing picture. Its cause could hardly have been more fashionable. Yet after all the rallies and the concerts, it had conspicuously failed to persuade the great majority of the British public. Perhaps it should have spent less time singing and more time trying to win over the conservative voters of Middle England, many of whom were sympathetic to the message but suspicious of the messenger. ‘I believe that disarmament will never happen,’ said Duran Duran’s lead singer Simon Le Bon. ‘I think there’s a lot of other facets of CND which I wouldn’t like to associate myself with. They’re not just involved in getting rid of nuclear weapons, they bring party politics into the issues which they shouldn’t do.’ The former Carry On stalwart Kenneth Williams agreed completely. He was no fan of ‘Atomic Bombs’, which were ‘useless’. But he had absolutely no time for the ‘chanting weirdies of CND’. A successful social movement might have got away with losing one of Simon Le Bon and Kenneth Williams. But surely not both.41
What, then, did most people really think about the prospect of war? Did they lie awake at night, tormented by thoughts of life in a nuclear winter? Were they busy digging shelters and stockpiling bandages?
Although generalizations are risky, all the polls show that fears of nuclear war, particularly among people in their teens and early twenties, were far higher than they had been ten years earlier. Their parents, who had seen the world survive the crises over Berlin and Cuba, were more likely to be sanguine. But a survey of youngsters in Croydon and Newcastle in the autumn of 1981 found that anxieties about nuclear war had risen considerably. Two years earlier, only 8 per cent of under-25s had thought a nuclear war in their lifetime was ‘very likely’, and 21 per cent ‘fairly likely’. Now those figures were 19 per cent and 32 per cent, which suggests that one in two British youngsters expected to see a nuclear exchange. Two years later, another survey of more than 400 teenagers for the TV Times found that at least half expected to see a Third World War before they died. And even if Doomsday did not come tomorrow, few doubted that it would come eventually: seven out of ten agreed that nuclear war was ‘inevitable one day’.42
For one industry the prospect of Armageddon was very good news. By the summer of 1980, reported the New Scientist, there were already 300 small businesses selling fallout-shelter kits, radiation suits and Geiger counters. Customers could expect to pay £200 for a made-to-measure PVC suit and £50 for a child’s version, as well as another £120 for a ‘nuclear cot for babies’. CND’s official historians saw their popularity as a sign that ‘widespread apprehension’ was much greater than it had been twenty years earlier. But perhaps preparing for Armageddon was just another kind of consumerism. In 1981 the Daily Mail even reported on the Ideal Nuclear Shelter Exhibition, held in North Yorkshire. The ‘mini-prefabs’ on display fell sadly short of the futuristic visions on show in the same paper’s Ideal Home Exhibition; still, for people with £8,000 to burn, there were worse ways to spend your money. ‘YOU CAN SURVIVE and it will be worth surviving,’ read one brochure. ‘Remember Hiroshima? It’s now a bustling city.’43
In Balcombe, Sussex, one anxious homeowner built a seventy-man shelter in his back garden, complete with escape hatches, a decontamination chamber, two diesel engines, two toilets, a kitchen and a quadrophonic sound system. John Emin had thought of everything, even widening the stairs so that stretcher-bearers could pass. Initially he advertised places at £3,000 a head, but after 240 applications in the first few days he doubled the price. He picked candidates carefully: one advert in the British Medical Journal attracted two anaesthetists, several surgeons and a neurologist, and he also wanted people with ‘mechanical, agricultural and horticultural skills’. The problem, though, was his neighbours, for whom Mr Emin had reserved only six places. One man openly told him that if war broke out, ‘he would be prepared to get a gun and kill to gain entrance to the shelter’. There is perhaps a case that Mr Emin should have spent less time building up his defences against the Red Army and more time pursuing détente with the people of Balcombe. But he had no regrets. A reporter asked if he really thought he would need his shelter. ‘Yes, no argument,’ he said.44
But since most people showed no interest in building their own shelters, how much did they really care about a Third World War? Clearly some cared a lot, and genuinely lay awake at night thinking about it. But there is no getting away from the fact that, when Gallup’s monthly survey asked people to name the most urgent problem facing the country, the total choosing ‘defence’ or ‘international affairs’ was usually between 1 and 2 per cent. Writing in The Times, Bernard Levin had a lot of fun with the idea that Britain was ‘drowning in terror and despair’. If the peace campaigners were to be believed, he wrote:
The shadow cast by the bomb is so dark and sinister that it disturbs the mind, paralyses the will, deadens the feelings and leads inevitably to aimlessness, social unrest and a constant increase in the incidence of crime, divorce, unemployment and herpes. The nation, obsessed by its impending fate, is mindful every time it puts its Sunday leg of lamb in the oven that it may shortly be badly overcooked itself. Conversation deals with nothing else, and the unbroken silence of an evening in every pub in the land, as unhappy patrons stare into their glasses and think upon their end, bears eloquent witness to the way in which thoughts of nuclear annihilation now occupy attention to the excl
usion of all other subjects, from the ballet to the football pools.
In reality, Levin said, ‘nobody actually spends time worrying, or even thinking about it’. Having discussed the prospect of nuclear war with people of ‘every persuasion’, he had never met anybody who showed any sign that ‘his or her life is actually affected by it, that any sleep is lost or meal pushed away untouched’.
The women who had been camping outside the base at Greenham Common since September 1981 might have had something to say about that. Yet Levin was surely right to suggest that most people regarded a Third World War as they regarded the possibility of a car accident: horrible, certainly, and best avoided, but not something that should distract you from putting out the bins. Even the teenagers who claimed to be worried sick about nuclear war clearly had no problem getting on with the rest of their lives. In this respect, as so often, Adrian Mole was typical. ‘I keep having nightmares about the bomb,’ Sue Townsend’s teenage diarist writes on 6 January 1982. ‘I hope it isn’t dropped before I get my GCE results … I wouldn’t like to die an unqualified virgin.’ The next day, however, his mind turns to more urgent issues: ‘Nigel came round to look at my racing bike …’ There, surely, spoke the voice of the nation.45
Part Three
* * *
ONWARD! ONWARD!
17
The Gang’s on Its Way!
It may seem ludicrous to imagine that hundreds of thousands – even millions – of Conservative voters will flock to the drab little banner offered by four tipsy-looking claret-guzzlers as they stand giggling in the sun outside Dr Owen’s irritating little house in Limehouse, but I can see it happening.
Who Dares Wins Page 59
