A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  For under the surface, the unfairness and discrimination in jobs, in housing and in politics, had taken the temperature in the Catholic ghettos to simmering point. The changed international climate had something to do with this. Rebellion against injustice was in the air, or at least in the newspapers. Rising protests about apartheid in South Africa and the struggle for equal rights in the southern states of the US had focused attention on the squalid half-secret on Britain’s doorstep. O’Neill’s cautious moves towards reform had produced a hardline Protestant backlash, led by demagogues including a young and turbulent preacher called Ian Paisley. In 1967 a civil rights movement had been formed, using the language and tactics of the Deep South, and the following year, marches and demonstrations were being met with police violence. A largely Catholic and nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, was formed. Bernadette Devlin of the more radical Ulster Unity Party was elected in 1969 to the Commons, the youngest ever woman MP, on a civil rights ticket. She treated MPs to what one of her listeners described as ‘the authentic, bitter and resentful voice of Catholic Ulster’. Wilson told O’Neill he thought he should go further and faster, both on housing and on local government boundaries. O’Neill replied that this would require an election. During it, his Unionist Party split and he received a bloody nose, handing over to another, though less effective, moderate, James Chichester-Clarke. At this stage, apart from occasional raids on arms dumps, the ageing and sparsely manned Irish Republican Army was little heard of.

  Then, in the summer of 1969, the politics of Northern Ireland erupted. The Apprentice Boys of Derry, a Loyalist anti-Catholic organization, had planned their annual march at Londonderry on the same day and over the same route that a civil rights march was planned. There had been civil rights marches before, but they had been peaceful. This time, ordered not to march, they did so and were attacked by the police. Members of the so-called B-Specials, an unpaid and part-time but armed 12,000-strong wing of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were particularly brutal. Among the seventy-five marchers injured that day were leading political figures, such as Gerry Fitt who would become an MP and a peer, and a powerful anti-IRA voice for moderation. The bloodied heads and the vengeful use of batons horrified millions watching that evening’s television bulletins. In response the Stormont government promised reforms to local elections, housing lists and parliamentary boundaries. This sparked off Loyalist protests. More civil rights marches followed, and more attacks on them, until at the beginning of August, there was a serious pitched battle between Catholic residents, Loyalist extremists and police in the middle of Belfast. Hundreds of houses burned. Harold Wilson, who was on holiday on the Isles of Scilly, flew to Cornwall for a brief talk with his Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan. They agreed to send in the British Army if asked, in return for the abolition of the B-Specials and promises of further reforms. It was a momentous decision, taken without the involvement of the cabinet. As Crossman recorded in his diary: ‘Harold and Jim had really committed the cabinet to putting the troops in and once they were there, they couldn’t be taken out again, so we had to ratify what had been done.’ Tony Benn wrote: ‘It looks as though civil war in Ulster has almost begun.’

  One of the myths about the moment when Britain sent in the troops to Northern Ireland was that it was done with little understanding of the dangers, no thought about alternatives and no appreciation that, arriving to protect Catholic homes, the troops might find themselves a target for Irish nationalists. This is all untrue. Wilson and Callaghan were acutely aware of the dangers and had put maximum pressure on Chichester-Clarke and the Unionists to hurry through political change, and they got some of what they wanted over the B-Specials and housing. In casting around for alternatives, Wilson even apparently toyed with the idea of a reverse ‘plantation’, evacuating the entire Ulster Protestant community out of Ireland and giving them new homes in England and Scotland. When Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, suggested to him that the troops could be there for months, he grimly replied: ‘They’re going to be there for seven years at least.’ Callaghan, whose handling of the crisis was his finest hour, was under no illusion that the troops would soon be facing both communities, and would indeed become a target. Benn, attending cabinet with a freshly grown beard which caused much amusement around the table, mused whether this was not ‘the beginning of ten more years of Irish politics at Westminster which could be very unpleasant’. Meanwhile over in Northern Ireland itself, the hard men were at work. Loyalist mobs reacted with fury to the proposed disbanding of the B-Specials and IRA men were digging into the various civil rights and citizens’ defence organizations of Catholic Belfast and Derry. In November, at a tense meeting in Dublin, the IRA split, and the pro-violence Provisional Army Council or ‘Provos’ came into existence.

  Now the nature of the conflict would change. It had begun as a protest about unfairness, bigotry and political corruption. It turned into a fight to force an end to the United Kingdom and to bring about the unification of Ireland. Inspired by a heady mix of Marxism, romantic nationalism and the example of overseas guerrillas from Vietnam to Cuba, the Provos believed that so long as they had the support of most Catholics, they could end the partition of the island. Winning over much of the minority community took time. The IRA’s first success was to convince many Catholics living in Belfast, where they were heavily outnumbered, that only they could protect them against the Loyalist thugs and that the British Army was bloodied hand in bloodied glove with their enemies. This was not so but rumour and stone-throwing provocation, followed by over-reaction and army brutality, would soon make it seem that way. In the Irish Republic, many were instinctively with the IRA. In 1970 two Dublin cabinet ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, were sacked for being sympathizers with the Provos, though acquitted later of trying to illegally import arms into the Republic. Most of £100,000 voted by the Dail, the Irish Parliament, for the relief of Catholics in the North a year earlier had, in fact, been spent on arms and ammunition. Community defence was morphing into nationalist uprising.

  This was the crisis inherited by Heath, the nearly man in Irish peace-making, in 1970. He knew little about Northern Ireland when he arrived in office, though he had once been smuggled across the border under a blanket for lunch in the Republic. In one crucial respect he advanced on the underlying assumption of the Labour ministers. It would not be enough to protect Northern Catholics. Heath thought they would have to be given a stake in the running of Northern Ireland too. Eventually, he hoped, greater prosperity in Ireland, more trade across the border and common membership of Europe would ease the two communities towards an easier relationship. This is what happened, though only after decades of murder had exhausted them, too.

  67

  The Yachtsman

  Heath’s reputation has sunk particularly low. Perhaps this is not surprising. He was defeated as leader in 1975 after losing two generation elections and fell out spectacularly with the new order, Thatcherism. The triumph of Margaret Thatcher’s optimistic if divisive free-market politics attracted a blaze of intellectual, media and parliamentary support which saw her success as a refutation of Heath’s time. The brighter she burned then, by narrative necessity, the duller he must be. Certainly, his attempts to rein in trade union power and to conquer inflation failed. The cause that excited him more than any other, Europe, also inflamed his enemies who accused him of lying to the country about the true, political nature of the coming European Union. Heath did not help his cause by the implacable sulk that followed his ousting, a huff he managed to maintain for thirty years. His own account of his government is wooden and wearisomely self-justificatory, in prose almost as bad as Harold Wilson’s. Further, as a loner who could be extraordinarily rude even to his admirers, Heath never accumulated a team of public defenders. Those who worked with him and thought him a fine leader, such as Douglas Hurd, were rarely able to make themselves heard against the surging self-belief and vituperative journalism of the Thatcher years. F
inally Heath had little time in office compared to Wilson’s near-eight, just three and a half years.

  Almost friendless, Heath is a political leader whose reputation deserves to be revisited. He was the first outsider to break through the class barriers of the old Tory party and he promoted others like him to the cabinet. His European vision came first-hand. Before the war, on a student visit to Germany, he had literally rubbed shoulders with Hitler and met other Nazi leaders. Later he returned as a fighting officer to see their final defeat in 1945 and the war marked him more strongly than it marked Wilson. As Heath wrote later: ‘My generation did not have the option of living in the past; we had to work for the future. We were surrounded by destruction, homelessness, hunger and despair. Only by working together right across our continent had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation.’ He was a genuinely compassionate and unusually brave politician, whose analysis of what was wrong with Britain in the seventies was far more acute than Wilson’s. His struggle with trade union power, conducted at the worst possible time, was relentless but he was up against forces too big to conquer quickly. Like Margaret Thatcher, he believed Britain was in danger of becoming ungovernable. His strategic mistake was to attack union power head-on and in a single act, rather than piecemeal, as her wilier government would. Like her, he cut taxes and even began privatization. Unlike her, he was ruling at a time when public sympathy was more with unions than with government, and when huge rises in the price of oil and other commodities were knocking Western economies sideways. His 1972 U-turn on incomes policy and industrial intervention was indeed a humiliating moment for parliamentary democracy but, while stiff-necked and difficult, mostly Edward Heath was plain unlucky.

  He had risen through the Tory Party in Parliament as a tough chief whip and then as an equally tough negotiator on Europe in the Macmillan years. But Heath’s greatest achievement as a minister had come in 1964 when, as President of the Board of Trade, he abolished Resale Price Maintenance, or RPM. This is one of those reforms which sound dull and are now largely forgotten but which really did reshape the country. RPM allowed manufacturers to order shops to sell their products at a particular price. A shop which cut prices would be breaking the law. It therefore discriminated heavily in favour of small, relatively expensive shops rather than superstores; under RPM the supermarket revolution would have been much less dramatic and the ‘Tesco-ification’ of Britain impossible. Heath believed it stood in the way of proper competition and choice, and was inflationary. Yet were not small shopkeepers natural Conservatives? Many in the party and government opposed him, but he carried the day, a crucial defeat of producer interest by the new consumerism.

  68

  Ugandan Asians

  Heath in power showed that he was desperately worried about the anti-immigration mood revealed in this most bitter of elections. While denouncing Powell, he moved quickly to pass a highly controversial and restrictive piece of legislation which removed any right to immigrate to Britain from anyone who did not have a parent or grandparent born in the country. Heath’s manifesto had promised ‘a new single system of control over all immigration from overseas’. Nobody had spelled out that this system would be designed to exclude blacks but not whites, yet the grandparent rule was transparently designed to allow Australians, Canadians, South Africans and New Zealanders of white British origins to return to the UK, while keeping out the black and coloured people of the Commonwealth and colonies. Powell himself likened the distinction to a Nazi race purity law; he wanted a new definition of British citizenship instead. The grandparent rule was defeated by the right and the left combining for opposite reasons, though restored two years later. Had this been all, then Heath would go down in history as being yet another panicked Establishment man, slamming the door to keep his party happy.

  It was not all. For the Kenyan crisis was about to be replayed, at speed, in Uganda. Here the anti-British Prime Minister, Milton Obote, had just been replaced in a coup by the fat, swaggering, Sandhurst-educated Idi Amin who announced that he had been told in a dream he must expel that country’s Asians, just as the Kenyans had theirs. Amin was clearly a monster, whose thugs clubbed his enemies to death with staves, who threatened to kill British journalists, who was rumoured to keep human flesh in his fridge and to feast on it, and who enthused about the way the Nazis had dealt with the Jews. Though Powell argued angrily that Britain had no obligation to allow the trapped Ugandan Asians into her cities, Heath acted decisively to bring them in. Airlifts were arranged, with a resettlement board to help them, and 28,000 people arrived within a few weeks in 1971, eventually settling in the same areas as other East Africans – even though Leicester, becoming the ‘least white’ city in England, had published adverts in Ugandan newspapers pleading with migrants not to come there.

  Within a few years Powell would no longer be a Conservative. Heath had confronted him head-on and beaten him. Once seen as a future prime minister, or at least as a brilliant chancellor-to-be, Powell would spend the rest of his life far from even the fringes of power. His ideas, however, would continue to grow in power and influence. His hostility to European union would inspire the biggest revolt in the modern Tory Party, one which kept Britain out of the euro. His belief in rigorous free-market economics would powerfully influence Margaret Thatcher and her circle so that he would be treated as a prophet, Old Testament Enoch. On race and immigration, the picture is more mixed. His views frightened many and made him one of the most detested as well as admired politicians of post-war times. Those who knew him best insist he was not a racialist. The newspaper editor Clem Jones, who tried and failed to track down the little old lady chased by ‘piccaninnies’ from Powell’s speech nevertheless said ‘he was never a racist.’ Jones thought he had been affected by the anger of white Wolverhampton people who felt they were being crowded out; even in Powell’s own street ‘of good, solid, Victorian houses, next door went sort of coloured and then another house, and he saw the value of his own house go down’. But, added the newspaperman, Powell would work very hard as an MP for constituents of any colour: ‘We quite often used to go out for a meal, as a family, to a couple of Indian restaurants, and he was on extremely amiable terms with everybody there, ’cos having been in India and his wife brought up in India, they liked that kind of food.’

  On the numbers migrating to Britain, and the consequences for the population of non-whites living in the country, Powell’s figures which were much ridiculed at the time were not far out. Just before his 1968 speech, he suggested that by the end of the century, the number of black and Asian immigrants and their descendants would number between five and seven million, or about a tenth of the population. According to the 2001 census, the relevant figures were 4.7 million people identifying themselves as black or Asian, or 7.9 per cent of the total population, though with large-scale illegal immigration since then, the true numbers are certainly higher. Immigrants are far more strongly represented, in percentage terms as well as raw numbers, in London and the English cities than in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. It can also be argued that Powell did British democracy a kind of service by speaking out on an issue which had been up to then cloaked in elite silence and so provoking a debate which needed to happen at some time. Against that, his language still feels shockingly inflammatory and provocative nearly forty years later. He was talking just after the formation of the racist and fascist National Front in 1967 and though Powell himself was anti-Nazi and indeed had returned from Australia on the outbreak of war to fight the Germans, his words attracted the enthusiastic support of the would-be gauleiters of provincial Britain. Further, his core prediction, of civil unrest comparable to that suffered in the southern states of the United States, has not come about. Five notable outbreaks of inner city rioting since then, and a rise in street crime linked to disaffected youths from Caribbean and other immigrant communities do not add up to the conflagration he predicted.

  Immigration has chang
ed Britain more than almost any other single social event in post-1945 Britain – more than the increase in longevity, or the Pill, the collapse of deference or the spread of suburban housing. The only change which eclipses it is the triumph of the car. It was not a change that was asked for by the white population – though the terms and circumstances of 50 million people choosing suddenly to ask such a question are impossible to imagine. The majority of British people did not want the arrival of large numbers of blacks and Asians, just as they did not want an end to capital punishment, or deep British involvement in the European Union, or many of the other things the political elite has opted for. At no stage was there a measured and frank assessment of the likely scale of immigration led by party leaders, voluntarily, in front of the electorate. And while allowing this change by default, the main parties did very little to ensure that mass immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent was successful. West Indians got none of the help and forethought lavished on the demobilized Poles, or even the less adequate help given to the Ugandan Asians. There was no attempt to create mixed communities, or avoid mini-ghettos. Race relations legislation did come, but late and only to balance new restrictions: it simply castigated racialism in the white working-class community, rather than trying to understand it.

  So this is another example of Britain’s history of rule by elite, of liberal politicians acting above their electorates. The real question is whether this neglect of public opinion, and then of the consequences of immigration, not least for the immigrant families, has produced a better or worse country. The scents, flavours, controversies and rawness of Britain in the twenty-first century divide the country from its former self. It is not just those who have come, but the huge numbers of white British who have left, to South Africa, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, well over half a million in the sixties alone. Britain has become a world island, a little America, despite itself. Having once acquired an Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, the British have become multi-coloured in much the same way. With new migrations from Eastern Europe, Iraq, Somalia and Ethiopia, it is now clear that this is a far bigger story than simply a tidying-up after Empire.