Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  However grateful Heath may have been for the courtesy, it made no difference to the outcome of the dispute. The united front of the employers soon began to crumble, with first Barking Council and then Tower Hamlets reaching their own agreements, even before an independent committee, led by Sir Jack Scamp, concluded that ‘a non-inflationary settlement was never in prospect’, and accepted virtually all the unions’ demands. That verdict brought a close to a six-week strike that offered little enough optimism for the immediate future, but the year was not yet over. Electricians began a work-to-rule that led to the first power cuts of Heath’s government (and another state of emergency), and the parliamentary term ended with the House of Commons sitting in near-darkness, its proceedings illuminated by candles and paraffin lamps. ‘Driving home through the darkened streets, which only weeks before had been littered with rubbish,’ reflected the newly elected Tory MP Norman Tebbit, ‘I wondered for how long this succession of strikes would continue.’

  The answer was not very encouraging. Strikes, which had for some years been dominated by wildcat stoppages (in the mid-’60s 95 per cent of strikes were unofficial), became ever larger, ever more disruptive during Heath’s period as prime minister. In 1970 the number of working days lost in industrial action was 11 million, the highest total since 1926, the year of the General Strike, and it was set to get worse; in 1972 the figure reached nearly 24 million days, ten times the level of the first year of Wilson’s government back in 1964, with more than 10 million days accounted for by the first-ever national strike by the National Union of Mineworkers.

  The NUM had been formed in 1945, when the mining industry was nationalized, and its quarter-century of relative industrial peace was primarily the result of its constitution, which called for a two-thirds majority in a poll of the members before a strike could be called. In 1970 this rule was amended so that a 55 per cent majority was sufficient, and the following year a 59 per cent vote was recorded in favour of action. The principal argument was over pay, which had slipped substantially relative to other groups of workers, but working conditions were also a factor: much of the industry was still unmechanized, whilst the annual holiday entitlement was just two weeks, at a time when the standard was three, and the TUC was pushing for four. Evidence was also given of pits that were so hot that the face workers were forced to work naked. ‘It’ll be a crime if you allow this strike to happen, because we shall win it, you know,’ Heath was told by the newly elected NUM president, Joe Gormley. ‘And when we have won, this will become the pattern for industrial relations for the next decade.’

  The strike itself started in January 1972, with a warning by the government that it could last for up to a month. In fact it lasted seven weeks, though it did take Heath a month before he declared the now customary state of emergency. In the interim, floodlights on national monuments – including Big Ben, Marble Arch and the National Gallery – were turned off, along with the neon signs at Piccadilly Circus, and a rolling programme of power cuts was established.

  The loss of electricity produced some unexpected consequences, with television series such as Coronation Street and Doctor Who being obliged to give a précis of the last episode before each new one, so that viewers who had been blacked out could catch up with the storylines. Elsewhere, Steve Jones, later to become a successful broadcaster, but at the time a working musician fresh from playing with skiffle king Lonnie Donegan, was the bassist in a band with a residency in a South London pub: ‘We’d start at seven-thirty and play all this heavy stuff through to nine o’clock,’ he remembered, ‘and then bang, the lights would go out. So we’d put up Davy lamps, I’d take out the acoustic bass, the drummer would play with brushes, the guitarists would play acoustically and the singer sang through a megaphone. And you weren’t getting that anywhere else in town, so the place was swinging from the bloody rafters.’ More formal music was less successful in adapting to the new conditions, with concerts at the South Bank being cancelled.

  When the state of emergency did materialize, it was the most severe yet. Thousands of factories were forced to close for up to four days a week, electric heating in shops, restaurants and places of entertainment was banned and people were urged to use electricity in just one room in their homes. Full-page adverts in the press outlined the extent of the restrictions and warned would-be offenders that ‘conviction could mean three months in prison or a £100 fine or both’. The notices added a tug at the heartstrings: ‘But even these penalties are small when compared to the hardships, possibly even tragedies, that could be brought about if thoughtless users were to overload the supply system.’ More than a million workers in other industries were laid off as a consequence of the emergency regulations, and the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, was obliged to admit in the Commons that ‘although the potential gravity of the situation was foreseen, no one could have been expected to know that the picketing would be quite as effective’.

  The picketing was indeed the key to the success of the strike. Working on the (correct) assumption that the membership would be solidly behind the action, the NUM decided not to bother placing pickets at pits, but instead to concentrate on restricting the movement of coal around the country, preventing it from being unloaded at ports, leaving depots and reaching power stations. A new tactic emerged, the flying picket, whereby large numbers of miners would descend on an area, close the critical pressure points and depart for new territories, leaving a skeleton staff behind to ensure that facilities that had been closed remained so. And with the new approach came a new trade union hero in the form of Arthur Scargill, who led the Barnsley strike committee and whose name became synonymous with flying pickets: it was his men that closed down the transportation of coal by sea and rail in East Anglia, and who then moved on to fight the decisive action of the dispute, at the Saltley coke depot in Warwickshire. On 7 February some 500 pickets arrived at Saltley, to be confronted by 300 police. The following day the figures had grown to 1,000 and 400 respectively, and then on 10 February – with numbers swelled by car workers from Birmingham – 10,000 pickets turned up and the police admitted defeat, closing the gates to the depot and thereby shutting down what the papers called ‘the only remaining source of coke in Britain’.

  Television pictures of these massed ranks of workers confronting, and defeating, the police to bring yet another workplace into the strike gave a new image to British industrial disputes. Though it was entirely legal, the tactic amounted effectively to intimidation by sheer numbers and it provoked in some the suspicion that Britain was getting close to a pre-revolutionary situation. From one perspective, it was a key moment in the history of organized labour in Britain: ‘Here was living proof,’ reflected Scargill, ‘that the working class had only to flex its muscles and it could bring governments, employers, society to a complete standstill.’ On the other side, the government’s mood was one of depression. Douglas Hurd, then Heath’s secretary, noted tersely in his diary the enormity of the defeat: ‘The government now wandering over battlefield looking for someone to surrender to – and being massacred all the time.’ And his future leader was even more despondent: ‘There was no disguising that this was a victory for violence,’ wrote Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs. ‘From now on many senior policemen put greater emphasis on maintaining “order” than on upholding the law. In practice, that meant failing to uphold the rights of individuals against the rule of the mob.’

  In the wake of Saltley, the government capitulated (one of the crucial cabinet meetings was held in candlelight, ‘because of a power cut’) and set up an inquiry under Lord Wilberforce to resolve the dispute. That committee promptly produced a report that conceded virtually all the miners’ demands, a decision which the union equally promptly rejected, arguing for more; the result was a wage rise three times as large as the ‘final offer’ tabled by the National Coal Board before the strike began, and a clear demonstration of the power of the unions.

  ‘A national strike which doesn’t enjoy similar support
among the population in general,’ said Gormley, ‘is likely to be an unsuccessful strike.’ And there is no doubt that the miners were then held in high public esteem, in recognition both of the dangers of the job and the moderation of their union (the following year they voted against their own executive in a call for further industrial action). Even the pictures of mass pickets could not erode popular sympathy for the justness of their claims.

  So strong was the support that the dispute even turned up in the unlikely context of ‘The Monster of Peladon’, a 1974 Doctor Who serial. ‘It was at the time of the great strikes,’ reflected writer Brian Hayles, ‘and I wanted to draw attention to the way the miners were being treated by the authorities.’ In his earlier story ‘The Curse of Peladon’ in 1972, Hayles had depicted a remote planet that was emerging from a feudal structure and was trying to adapt to new technology as it joined the Galactic Federation, a storyline that reflected Britain’s entry into Europe. In the sequel, set some fifty years later, the Doctor returns to Peladon to find that the working class is in a state of deep unrest: membership of the Federation has brought wealth and power to the ruling class, but has resulted only in an increased workload for the miners responsible for extracting trisilicate, the chief natural resource of the planet. The miners are, however, split between two leaders, clearly intended to evoke Gormley and Scargill: there is the venerated elder statesman, Gebek, who argues for strike action, and there is the younger, more extreme Ettis, ‘one of the leaders of a resistance movement, sworn to drive the aliens from Peladon’, who advocates armed revolution. The Doctor, in his thoroughly reasonable Jon Pertwee incarnation, sees his role as peace-loving honest broker, and urges Queen Thalira to look for compromise: ‘Send for Gebek at once, your majesty, promise him a better way of life for his miners and see that they get it. That will cut the ground from under Ettis’ feet,’ he argues. ‘You’ve got to convince your people that the Federation means a better way of life for everybody, not just for a few nobles at court.’ By the time the series was broadcast, however, Heath had already fallen, having failed to follow the good Doctor’s orders.

  Perhaps the most significant aspect of the miners’ strike was the way in which it ensured that the struggle against Heath’s government was to be fought outside the confines of Parliament. ‘I believe it is possible,’ said Lawrence Daly, general secretary of the NUM, before the strike started, ‘to create a broad unity in the trade union movement that will smash Conservative economic policy and help to pave the way for the defeat of the Tory government and return a Labour government.’ And his words proved prophetic: one of the main features of the early years of the decade was the way that the leadership of the working class shifted from the Labour Party to the unions.

  In fact, the Labour Party itself was in no condition to offer such leadership. In 1951, the last time it had left office, the party had been able to look back on the Attlee government and its achievements with feelings of pride and accomplishment; in 1970 there was only disillusion and a suspicion of betrayal. And at the highest levels there was confusion about how to respond to the unexpected defeat.

  On the left there was Tony Benn, who, even before the election, was becoming disenchanted with the government in which he served: ‘I am absolutely sick,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘of the views of Harold Wilson, for whom I have in some respects the greatest contempt.’ From his perspective, opposition was a time for serious rethinking, free from accusations that plain speech might rock the boat; as he pointed out in a shadow cabinet meeting in July 1970: ‘When the boat is sunk, you can’t exactly rock it.’ He looked for inspiration to the increasingly militant unions and to the growth of new political groups centred on black rights, nationalism and students.

  The leading figure on the right wing of the party, Roy Jenkins, was also clear about the need for developing new strategies, but found that the mood of Labour was firmly set against him. The 1973 party conference approved a programme that called for ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’, and Benn encapsulated the aspirations of the delegates with a speech that declared: ‘We shall use the crisis we inherit as an occasion for making the fundamental changes and not as an excuse for postponing them.’ It was left to Jenkins to suggest that the opinion polls didn’t exactly encourage such lofty aspirations. ‘It is not much good talking about fundamental and irreversible changes in our society and being content with a 38 per cent Labour voting intention,’ he pointed out, to a noticeably more frosty response than that enjoyed by Benn. ‘Democracy means that you need a substantially stronger moral position than this to govern effectively at all, let alone effect a peaceful social revolution.’

  Above the squabbling princes, Wilson was demonstrating little of the populist flair that had made him such a formidable figure in the previous decade. In the immediate aftermath of the 1970 defeat he was virtually absent from centre stage as he wrote up his account of the 1960s government, and he then found himself embroiled in trying to keep the party together as rival factions fought each other over the future of socialism and – more pressing – the correct position to take on Europe. Unexpectedly it was his wife, Mary, the very epitome of the reluctant political spouse, who captured the public attention at this point, when her volume of Collected Poems made her the biggest-selling poet in the country (though Marc Bolan was soon to overtake her).

  By the spring of 1972 there were rumours of a leadership challenge to Wilson, with the names of backbench MPs Willie Hamilton and Christopher Mayhew being touted around Westminster. ‘One estimate,’ reported The Times, ‘was that Mr Mayhew, if he accepted the role of standard-bearer for the critics, would get more than 100 votes.’ No such contest materialized, but the position failed to improve, and a series of poor showings in by-elections later that year prompted the disrespected elder statesman George Brown to join the fray: ‘The nation,’ he thundered, ‘simply will not have the Labour Party, my party, with its present policies, present associations, present leadership.’ At a time when the government was struggling, the opposition was uncertain how to oppose.

  The fraying of the fabric of the Labour Party was replicated in the country, where for many people change seemed to be coming both too thick and too fast. Membership of the EEC was linked in the popular consciousness with what seemed like an assault on traditional images of Britain, in particular the introduction of decimal coinage in February 1971. Dismay at the disappearance of the familiar, if implausible, system of twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound was compounded by a not irrational suspicion that the change had been used as an excuse to raise prices. Inflation was – along with the trade unions – becoming the dominant story of the decade, and the government’s figures were treated with some scepticism, as they failed to match the daily experience of life; according to The Grocer magazine, 1971 saw fresh food prices rise by an average of over 12 per cent with particularly steep rises in butter (48 per cent), fish (43 per cent), cheese (38 per cent) and fruit (32 per cent). A discrepancy between the retail prices index (RPI), the official measure of inflation, and the high-street reality was to become common: in October 1973, for example, food prices rose by 3.3 per cent, considerably faster than the already worrying RPI increase of 2 per cent. (‘I must dash,’ says a housewife in the sitcom George and Mildred. ‘Get my shopping in before the pound slides again.’)

  Alongside this steady erosion of certainty about tomorrow’s shopping basket was a sense of loss as Heath’s restructuring of local government erased historic counties – including Huntingdonshire and, most famously, Rutland – and removed the autonomy of towns such as Plymouth and Bristol that had long prided themselves on their civic identities. And the belief that things were getting out of hand received further support from press reports that in Dudley a new system of metric street numbering was being given a trial: the first house in a street was given the number one, with the next being numbered according to how far
away it was – if it was 12 metres from door to door, then it would be number thirteen, and so on. There were further historical losses as yet another wave of regimental amalgamations in the British Army saw the departure, in particular, of the senior Scottish cavalry regiment, the Scots Greys, who dated back to the seventeenth century, and who now disappeared into the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. The band and pipes of the new regiment recorded an elegiac album, Farewell to the Greys, from which came a version of ‘Amazing Grace’ that topped the singles charts for five weeks in 1972.

  Amongst Heath’s other changes was the Housing Finance Act of 1972 which sought to address the system of council housing. The provision of low-cost rented accommodation by local authorities had been a key plank in the building of the post-war welfare state, but there had always been a gap between promise and delivery. The novelist James Herbert grew up in London’s East End in the 1950s in a house that had been condemned by the council: ‘We expected to be moved in six weeks; we ended up living there for fourteen years.’ Such problems did not fade and by the 1970s, as the pace of new-build failed to meet demand, the allocation of homes was causing considerable disquiet. In a 1974 episode of the TV series Special Branch, Dennis Waterman played Frank Gosling, a character who steals a rocket launcher from an Army base and announces to the press that he did it in protest at the appalling housing conditions he and his family are being forced to live in; their street had been condemned by the council eight years previously and they’d been promised flats on a new estate, but nothing had ever materialized. His father explains what drove Frank to such a desperate act: ‘Look, I fought in a war, all through. My lad did five years in Malaya, Kenya, Aden. We never asked for no favours, never been on the assistance or the welfare. Then what happens? They give council houses to any old scroungers that cons them with a hard-luck story and leave us, the real British, in the slums.’