by A. N. Wilson
The Macmillan government knew this as clearly as anyone, just as they were aware that from its very first beginnings, when the French and Germans turned potential industrial rivalry into a partnership which easily outstripped British coal and steel (hampered by industrial disputes and all the disadvantages of state-owned industry). The French and German Coal and Steel agreement, the brainchild of French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann and Jean Monnet, was the basis of an economic idea which was ineluctable for the Europeans.
For some parts of British industry, the advantages of joining in such a Common Market were, would be, huge. In other areas, where Britain was in touch with a bigger world market, there was no advantage, or positive disadvantage, which is why both sides of the political debate in Britain, between pro- and anti-Europeans, can always be made to sound perfectly plausible. Equally, however, the political-cum-mythological arguments for the Island Race to allow itself to be subsumed into a European Federalist idea, with loss of sovereignty and ‘Britishness’, has always been understandably abhorrent to the majority of British voters.
These differences would run like a great seismic fault line through the whole political history of Britain for the next half-century, dividing parties and individual minds (for most of the prominent British politicians changed their minds at least once about whether they were or were not Europeans).
Macmillan, as ever Janus-like, looked back to a time when Britain had ‘influence in Europe’ (that is, the period when he himself was in Italy at the end of the war watching a little wistfully as the Americans swept slowly through France and Germany but too slowly to stop Stalin swallowing up all the countries of Eastern Europe). A natural Francophile who had fought at the Battle of the Somme, he wanted to check what he feared would be undue German influence in Europe, and, naturally, it was a blow to him that General de Gaulle vetoed the British application to join the Common Market in 1962. He attributed this, probably quite rightly, not to any economic arguments, but to the fact that de Gaulle could not quite forgive Britain for its personal kindness to himself during the Second World War (Churchill had not only allowed de Gaulle to set up his Free French organisation in London but had actually suggested the medieval arrangement that the governments of France and Britain should become one). Nor could de Gaulle tolerate a memory of France’s humiliations in 1940. ‘Things would have been easier,’ he opined, ‘if Southern England had been occupied by the Nazis–if we’d had Lloyd George for Pétain, then we would have been equal[i.e., with the French]…that’s why [de Gaulle] found Adenauer, who’d also been occupied, an easier ally than me…I may be cynical, but I fear it’s true–if Hitler had danced in London, we’d have had no trouble with de Gaulle.’31
Throughout Europe (though not, curiously enough, in the United States) societies in the last fifty years have followed a pattern: as prosperity increases, the conventions and rules of society have relaxed. Capital punishment was abolished; corporal punishment, whether of criminals or of children in schools or at home, came to be frowned upon; greater tolerance was shown towards sexual deviancy; abortion became more easily available; religious belief, or at any rate adherence to religious organisations, declined. R. A. Butler, thought by many to be the lost leader of the Conservative Party, or Macmillan’s obvious successor when the time came, became Home Secretary in 1957. When he did so he was not an abolitionist, but he became so. (His wife, Molly, had been an abolitionist ever since her first husband, High Sheriff of Essex, had borne responsibility for hangings.32
Butler was a canny if ultimately unsuccessful politician. He inherited the Homicide Act, 1957, from his predecessor, one which he described as ‘rather curious’ since it restricted the death penalty not to degrees of murder but to the imagined deterrent effect which any particular hanging would be deemed to have on the maintenance of law and order. He refused, for political reasons, to reopen the case of Timothy Evans, who had been hanged for the murder of his wife and child, and he refused to question, though he was deeply disturbed by, the case of Derek Bentley, who was hanged for a murder committed by his younger accomplice, Christopher Craig. Butler could see that to bring up the issue of capital punishment before an election was political folly. The majority of the public, in common with the right wing of the Conservative Party, loved hangings, and would not be impressed by a party which promised to abolish them. Therefore the whole matter was deferred throughout Macmillan’s term of office. Butler and Macmillan, progressivists at heart (though Macmillan favoured capital punishment, he knew its abolition was one day an inevitability), therefore allowed hangings to continue, a good example in miniature of the untroubled attitude which politicians have towards life and death, when weighing in the balance a fellow mortal’s existence and their own chance of re-election. Indeed, when Henry Brooke took over as Home Secretary there was no certainty at all that the death penalty would be abolished in the foreseeable future.
It was not until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 that law permitted homosexual acts between two males, in private, and over the age of twenty-one. Abortion was still in most cases very difficult to obtain and was the preserve of the back-street amateur, with her knitting needles and bottles of gin. Divorce was difficult to obtain. Harold Macmillan managed to pay lip service to the march of progress without, on home territory, having to do much to expedite its advance.
There were two areas, however, in which historians can see that Macmillan’s government definitely defined the future of Britain on the domestic front. The first was in the area of immigration, the second of transport.
Although the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was, as has been said, grossly hypocritical in regard to race, and although its aim was to limit the immigration into Britain by those who were called in those days ‘coloured’, the limits it imposed were slight and ineffectual. Harold Macmillan told his diary he had never seen the Commons ‘in so hysterical a mood’ since Suez when the Bill was debated. The Labour Party (who three years later, when themselves in power, brought in a much more restrictive Bill to curb immigration) claimed to be deeply shocked. Gaitskell called it a ‘cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation’. (‘Gaitskell is the kind of cad that only a gentleman can be,’ thought Macmillan.33) For J. Enoch Powell and the right-wing conservatives, the Bill did not go nearly far enough in preventing West Indians and Asians from entering Britain. (There were fewer Africans in those days.)
Short of unimaginable acts of transportation which would indeed have been ‘cruel and brutal’, it is impossible to see how the process of immigration could, in fact, have been reversed. Aeroplanes and comparatively cheap travel had been invented. They could not be uninvented. There was a general movement of peoples across the face of the globe, and not just a move from Commonwealth countries to Britain. The increase of prosperity at home meant an increase in the labour market. The National Health Service, London Transport, British Railways and other huge employers had already, by the Macmillan era, come to depend upon cheap immigrant labour. But a mighty change it was, poised to alter the character of all the big British cities.
The second change which took place in the Macmillan era was the conscious decision by the government for Britain to stop being a railway nation and to become a car nation.
Here there truly was a choice, and the politicians unquestionably made the wrong one.
One of the great achievements of the Victorians, and a key reason for their economic domination of the world, was the setting up of a railway network which linked every part of the United Kingdom. At the peak of railway travel in 1914 there were over 20,000 miles of railways in Britain.34 After the nationalisation of the railways by the Labour Party during the first Attlee government, there was obviously a fall in the profitability of the railways. Much of the stock was out of date. The British Transport Commission, chaired from 1953 to 1961 by General Sir Brian Robertson, proposed, surely sensibly, a wholesale modernisation of the railways.
Politicians, however, only see the short term. They were worrie
d by repeated labour disputes on the railways. They saw that more and more freight was now carried by road, and they thought that the answer to this was not to improve the rail service but to follow the inevitably calamitous route of building more roads. (They did not see the truth that the more roads you build, the more traffic clogs them, with all the environmental calamities which follow.) Macmillan’s Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, believed that the British Transport Commission was ‘incompetent’ and that General Sir Brian Robertson should be sacked, to be replaced by a man who had ‘one of the most able and fertile brains in the industrial and commercial world’–Dr Richard Beeching. Beeching was already in the pay of those who wished to make a huge killing by building a vast series of Autobahns all over Britain. Whether or not this was known to Macmillan, the Prime Minister met Beeching à deux on 10 May 1961.35 He asked Beeching about the possibility of selling off railway property ‘to finance modernisation’. Beeching was put in charge of modernising the railways. The trades unions were quite understandably and rightly immediately opposed to him. They were never consulted either by Macmillan or by Beeching about the proposals he had in mind. First, the closure of railway workshops where rolling stock and locomotives were made and repaired–the men who worked there never so much as warned in advance.
Beeching, who had now abolished the BTC and been declared Head of British Railways, told the Cabinet that they should be prepared to axe 70,000 jobs in the railways. ‘Most of this reduction would be effected by normal wastage and control of recruitment.’ On 27 March 1963, the Beeching Plan for the Railways was on sale at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and Ernest Marples was crowing to the Commons that his government would provide ‘an efficient, economic and well-balanced transport system for Great Britain’. The Beeching Plan, when put into effect, was to lead to the reduction of railway mileage from 17,500 in 1963 to 11,000 in 1975, only a little more than half the railway capacity enjoyed by Britain at the outbreak of the Great War.
Not only was rail travel comparatively cheap and environmentally friendly; not only were the fuels necessary to maintain it (coal in the 1950s and in the 1960s, diesel and electricity) all easily obtainable and limited within a government budget, but the railway network did link up Britain in a way which roads somehow do not, without destroying everything in their path. The journey by train from a city centre to a provincial town, changing to a branch line and emerging at the wooden, gas-lit platform of some remote ‘halt’ was, of course, the work of engineers and planners. But in spite of the deep hostility felt by some countrymen and old Tories to the development of the railways in the nineteenth century, the remarkable thing about the trains (which, of course, only passed through country districts every hour or so) was how tolerantly they left nature intact. To make comparable journeys by car requires roads, it requires garages built on by-passes, and it requires the noisy, ugly, polluting means of transport to be taken from the crowded city centre or town to the formerly unsullied bit of country. Beeching, and Macmillan with him, had made no corner of Britain entirely safe from the car. Railways could pass through hillside, fields and villages without, miraculously, destroying them and in most cases the coming of the railway (as evoked in the poetry of Edward Thomas or the crime novels of Michael Innes) actually seemed at home in the world of nature, as was witnessed by many a remote signal box or level crossing, heavy, in summer, with cow parsley and rose-bay willow herb, or swathed in autumn by cow-breathed fogs and river mist. After Macmillan, there were few parts of England where the noise of bird-song and insects chirruping is not drowned by the destructive hum of the distant Autobahn.
Commenting on his own preferred recreation, grouse-shooting, Macmillan commented, ‘I think one of the reasons why one loves a holiday on the moors is that, in a confused and changing world, the picture in one’s mind is not spoilt.
‘If you go to Venice or Florence or Assisi you might as well be at Victoria Station–masses of tourists, chiefly Germans in shorts. If you go to Yorkshire or Scotland, the hills, the keepers, the farmers, the farmers’ sons, the drivers are all the same; and (except for the coming of the Land Rover, etc) there is a sense of continuity.’36 It is probably still possible to find such tranquillity in the Highlands of Scotland, and in parts of Yorkshire. In Macmillan’s day, it was available to many British people in their own back gardens, and certainly in the landscapes of Devon, Gloucestershire, Suffolk, Lancashire, most of which have been irreparably ruined by roads–what he wistfully calls ‘the coming of the Land Rover, etc’.
In the end, Macmillan’s hypochondria, his sense of his own decay, allied to periods of self-doubt and black depression, became not merely a reason for his standing down, but also an emblem of what was happening to Britain itself. Macmillan was the ideal, the most expressive possibly, leader for Britain at this period, for a Britain which both had genuine links with the past, but links which were also fraudulent; a Britain which was genuinely cynical, yet wistfully holding on to faith; a Britain which was the sick man of Europe, but which was also a self-doubting hypochondriac who would make old bones.
Meanwhile, two duller, but equally devastating threads of destiny were being woven by the Norns to the Conservative Party’s undoing. Both had to do with the party of Opposition.
The first was the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, on 18 January 1963. He was fifty-six years old. The disease which killed him, lupus erythematosus, had come upon him quite unexpectedly. As the ‘right-wing’ Labour leader, witty, eloquent, passionate, he looked bound to win the next election from the Conservatives. But would he have done so (‘Gaitskell is the kind of cad that only a gentleman can be’)? Would he really have given the impression, as his successor so audibly and visibly was able to do when the time came, that a vote for Labour was a vote not merely for a different party in government but in effect for a completely different Britain? After Gaitskell’s death, the choice for the Labour leadership was between the right-wing candidate, a working-class man called George Brown, and a former Oxford don of lower-middle-class origins, James Harold Wilson. They chose Wilson, though both Wilson and Brown were well qualified to pick up Macmillan’s comic mantle.
There was now absolutely no danger of the public feeling that the Labour Party was led, like the Conservatives, by a ‘toff’, and since these class matters were coming more and more to the fore, this was a vital ingredient in the Conservatives’ downfall.
The Macmillan government, largely composed of uninspired old men, looked as if it was losing electoral support. At a by-election in March 1962, the Liberal candidate, Eric Lubbock, won the safe Tory seat of Orpington by 7,855. Another by-election loomed, this time in Leicester, and during the night when the poll was being counted, Macmillan panicked, deciding that there was a plot against him. (‘Butler,’ he told Selwyn Lloyd, with no evidence whatever, ‘had been plotting to divide the party on the Common Market and bring him [Macmillan] down.’) So Macmillan sacked Lloyd as Chancellor, and six other Cabinet ministers, bringing in some slightly younger blood–Keith Joseph, Edward Boyle and William Deedes among them. The ruthlessness of Macmillan’s gesture was immediately likened to Hitler’s suppression of the Rohm supporters in the SA in 1934 and dubbed the Night of the Long Knives. Gilbert Longden MP (Conservative) during a censure debate on 26 July congratulated the Prime Minister on keeping his head, when all around him were losing theirs. It was obvious that the Conservatives were ready for a spell in Opposition, and this would have been the case even if Macmillan’s government had not been assailed by the three phenomena usually blamed for his demise–the exposure of a cypher clerk in the British Embassy in Moscow, John Vassall, as a homosexual and a secret Soviet agent; the scandal of John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, being revealed to have had a brief affair with a young woman, Christine Keeler. Another key event occurred on 31 July, just before the summer recess of 1963. The Peerage Bill became law, as a result of the agitations of the former Viscount Stansgate. When Anthony Wedgwood Be
nn, MP for Bristol, inherited a viscountcy from his father, he was anxious to be rid of it to continue his political career in the Commons. This was the first step in the transformation of this moderate Social Democrat Anthony Wedgwood Benn to Tony Benn, Trotskyite firebrand, darling of radio audiences and People’s Friend. It also enabled other hereditary peers to nurse the undignified political aspirations which had hitherto been open only to commoners. Quintin Hogg, who had inherited the title bestowed on his father for founding the London Polytechnic (Viscount Hailsham), and the 14th Earl of Home, who was able to perform the office of Foreign Secretary from the House of Lords, were both now in a position to succeed Macmillan, since it was felt in these progressive times that, although such Prime Ministers as Lord Liverpool, Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery had all managed to exercise their duties from the Upper House, it was no longer appropriate in the age of the Beatles and What’s My Line?
When Macmillan developed very mild prostate troubles, he resigned immediately. The Conservatives had no processes for electing their leader but, if questioned, the majority would have supposed that, just as the choice last time had been between Wab or Hawold, so now it would be the turn of Wab with Quintin Hogg as a clownish alternative. They had not reckoned upon Macmillan from his hospital bed concocting the story for the Queen that the majority of people in the party wanted Lord Home, who would soon be transmogrified into Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Nor perhaps had anyone quite reckoned on Home’s charm and political astuteness, neither of which was lost upon the television-viewing electorate. The 1964 election was a close-run thing. If a mere nine hundred people in eight marginal constituencies had voted Conservative instead of Labour, then Douglas-Home’s government would have survived.37