A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Nothing might have followed Debord’s calls to revolution in London, had it not been for another European influence, this time dating back to the Spanish Civil War. Anarchists who continued small-scale guerrilla attacks on the Franco regime had developed the key techniques which would later be copied by terrorist groups from the IRA to the Baader Meinhoff group, indeed to al Qaeda – the use of a cell structure to make the group harder to break, and public communiqués, issued to the mainstream media with code-words, to explain their actions. They were a little more serious.

  From 1966 the First of May group was carrying out machine-gun attacks and small-scale bombings across Western Europe. Within a few years they were in contact with British admirers, in particular former students from Cambridge and Essex Universities. At Essex, a new and bleak place then, Anna Mendelson, from a girls’ high school in Stockport, and Hilary Creek, from a private school in Bristol, had been eagerly watching the 1968 revolt. So over at Cambridge had John Barker, from the posh Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, a journalist’s son, and Jim Greenfield, a lorry driver’s son from Widnes in Cheshire, studying medicine. They had studied the ‘Situationists’ and joined the ‘Kim Philby Dining Club’ in honour of the University’s most famous traitor. All of them committed radicals, they got to know each other through communes and the squatting movement in London, then threw themselves into the Claimants Union, an organization set up to try to extract maximum welfare payments for as many people as possible – and successful enough to have eighty branches across the UK by 1971. Through a young Scottish anarchist called Stuart Christie, who had spent three years in a Spanish prison for his part in a bungled plot to blow up General Franco, the university quartet – a strikingly handsome group – made contact with the First of May group. With others, including a petty criminal and heroin addict called Jake Prescott and a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign activist called Ian Purdie, they began to make and use bombs.

  As well as Biba their targets included the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall, a Spanish airline plane at Heathrow, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron, the site of the new Paddington Green police station (where IRA and al Qaeda suspects would later be held), the police computer, a Territorial Army centre in Holloway, the home of the chairman of Ford in Britain, a Rolls-Royce showroom in Paris, and two Conservative cabinet ministers – the trade minister, John Davies, and the employment secretary, Robert Carr, who was struggling to get Heath’s trade union legislation through Parliament, and whose white stuccoed home was hit by two bombs, one at the front door and one at the back. In all these attacks, no one was actually killed and just one person, a bystander, was hurt. The Angry Brigade issued regular communiqués under names from films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Wild Bunch and announced that their targets had been selected for execution. They would take on ‘High Pigs, Judges, Embassies, Spectacles, Property’ they said, and attack ‘the shoddy alienating culture pushed out by TV films and magazines…the ugly sterility of urban life’. After nine months the Angry Brigade were picked up by the police after a trip to Paris to collect gelignite. Raiding their squats, guns and bomb-making equipment were discovered and all the key players were given long prison sentences. The judge blamed their actions on ‘a warped misunderstanding of sociology’ and the English revolution was again postponed for lack of interest. The violent fringe of protest would continue, but always over secondary issues, such as Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the Irish ‘troubles’.

  Though in many ways the Angry Brigade were a non-event they represent the only direct confrontation between revolutionary protest, supposed to be one of the key ingredients of the sixties, and the evolving economy of pleasure which was the sixties’ real story. Other left-wing groups, mainly Trotskyists, would argue with each other and march, protest and publish about employment and foreign affairs. Revolutionary protest was only felt in its full force in Ireland.

  72

  Bloody Sunday

  Heath had worked closely with the Taoiseach (Prime Minister of the Irish Republic), Jack Lynch, and the new Stormont leader, Brian Faulkner, who, as a middle-class businessman by origin, was more in Heath’s image than the Old Etonian landowner, Chichester-Clark, had been. Eventually he had even managed to get the leaders of the Republic and Northern Ireland to sit and negotiate at the same table, something that had not happened since Partition in 1920. A measure of the intricate diplomacy required was that Heath served a bottle of Paddys whiskey, from the Republic, at Lynch’s end of the table, and Bushmills, made in Ulster, at Faulkner’s, with a bottle of Scotch between them, and considered it a significant sign when they both opted for Scotch. Chichester-Clark had simply demanded more and more troops, more and more repression, but Faulkner was open to a political solution. Inside Downing Street, three options were being studied. Northern Ireland could be carved into smaller, more intensely Protestant areas, with the rest surrendered to the Republic, thus effectively getting rid of many Catholics. Or it could be ruled by a power-sharing executive, giving Catholics a role in government. Or, finally, it could be governed jointly by Dublin and London, with its citizens having joint citizenship.

  Though Heath rejected the first option because it would be crude and leave too many people on the wrong side of borders and the last one, because the Unionists would refuse it, his second option would be followed by the British governments that followed him. A fourth option, advocated by Enoch Powell who continued his political odyssey by becoming an Ulster Unionist MP, was that the UK should fully incorporate Northern Ireland into British structures and treat it like Kent or Lincolnshire, but this was never taken seriously by Heath. His readiness to discuss other radical solutions gives the lie to the idea that London was pig-headed or unimaginative. But before he had a chance to open serious talks, the collapsing security situation had to be dealt with.

  Now politics shrivelled.

  If there was one moment when the ‘troubles’ became unstoppable it was 30 January 1972, ‘Bloody Sunday’, when troops from the Parachute Regiment killed thirteen unarmed civilians in Londonderry. Ordered in from Belfast to put a stop to stone-throwing Bogside demonstrators, they erupted into the Catholic ghetto and began firing, as it turned out, at unarmed people, many of them teenagers. Some were killed with shots to the back, clearly running away. It was the climax of weeks of escalation. Reluctantly, Heath had introduced internment for suspected terrorists. Reprisals against informers and anti-British feeling meant that the normal process of law was entirely ineffective against the growing IRA threat so, despite the damage it would do to relations with other European countries and the United States, he authorized the arrest and imprisonment in Long Kesh of 337 IRA suspects. In dawn raids, 3,000 troops had found three-quarters of the people they were looking for. Many were old or inactive. Many of the real Provo leaders escaped south of the border. Protests came in from around the world. There was an immediate upsurge in violence, with twenty-one people being killed in three days. The bombings and shootings simply increased in intensity. In the first eight weeks of 1972, forty-nine people were killed and more than 250 seriously injured.

  This was the background to the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ which, despite endless continuing inquiries and arguments, remains disputed territory. Who shot first? How involved were the IRA in provoking the confrontation? Why did the peaceful march split and stone-throwing begin? Why did the paratroopers suddenly appear to lose control? Whatever the answers, this was an appalling day when Britain’s reputation was damaged around the world. In Dublin, ministers reacted with fury and the British embassy was burned to the ground. ‘Bloody Sunday’ made it far easier for the IRA to raise funds abroad, particularly in the United States. The Provos hit back with a bomb attack on the Parachute Regiment’s Aldershot headquarters, killing seven people there – none of them soldiers. The violence led to yet more violence and by degrees to the imposition of direct rule by London and the no-jury Diplock Courts. In July 1973, twenty bombs w
ent off in Belfast, killing eleven people. Mainland Britain became a key Provo target. In October the following year, five people were killed and sixty injured in attacks on Guildford pubs and in December, twenty-one people were killed in pubs in Birmingham city centre.

  Assassinations would follow, of Tory MPs such as Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher’s close adviser, and Ian Gow, her popular former parliamentary private secretary. Vocal opponents of the IRA such as Ross McWhirter, would be gunned down and in 1975 a couple in London’s Marylebone were taken hostage by an IRA gang in the Balcombe Street Siege. Later IRA ‘spectaculars’ included the murder of Lord Mountbatten of Burma when boating with his family in Sligo in 1979, and culminated in the attempted assassination of Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet in Brighton in 1984. The ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland itself would see endless tit-for-tat car bombings and shootings, routine murder, torture and knee-capping of suspected informers and a quiet steady migration of ambitious people from the province. The security services would break the law in their desperate search for suspected terrorists. ‘Dirty protests’, involving the smearing of excrement on cell walls and fatal hunger strikes, would be used by republican prisoners in their war against the British State. Within a few years, what had been essentially a policing role by the British Army, separating Protestant bigots from rebellious Catholics, had become a full-scale terrorist or counter-insurgency war with all the paranoia, the kidnappings, the apparatus of repression and the corruption of political life that it brings.

  In his last attempt to avert what was coming, Heath believed he needed to persuade Dublin to drop its longstanding constitutional claim to the North, and to persuade mainstream Unionists to work with Catholic politicians. He failed, but not through want of trying. His first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, a new job made necessary by direct rule, was the bluff, amiable Willie Whitelaw. He met Provisional IRA leaders, including Gerry Adams, for face-to-face talks, a desperate gamble which, however, led nowhere: there was no compromise yet available. So, ignoring the IRA, the Sunningdale Agreement proposed a power-sharing executive, with six Unionists, four SDLP members and one from the non-sectarian Alliance Party. There would also be a Council of Ireland, bringing together politicians from Dublin and from the North, with authority over a limited range of issues, in return for Dublin renouncing authority over Northern Ireland. It was an ingenious multi-sided deal not so different in essence from what was later proposed by John Major and Tony Blair in the nineties. But too many Unionists were implacably opposed to it, and the moderates were routed at the first 1974 election. Meanwhile, in the Republic, its leader’s renunciation of the territorial claim to the North was declared unconstitutional and illegal. Heath concluded, with understandable bitterness: ‘Ultimately it was the people of Northern Ireland themselves who threw away the best chance of peace in the blood-stained history of the six counties.’

  73

  Authority Undermined

  Then the miners struck. At the beginning of 1972 the National Union of Mineworkers began their first national strike since the dark days of the twenties, pursuing a pay demand of 45 per cent. The government, with modest coal stocks, was quickly taken by surprise at the discipline and aggression of the strikers. A young unknown militant, a miner from Woolley colliery, organized some 15,000 of his comrades from across South Yorkshire in a mass picket of the Saltley coke depot, on which Birmingham depended for much of its fuel. Arthur Scargill, a rousing speaker, former Communist Party member and highly ambitious union activist, later described the confrontation with Midlands police at Saltley as ‘the greatest day of my life’. Soon he would be catapulted up as agent, then president of the Yorkshire miners. Heath blamed the police for being too soft. Scargill’s greatest day was, for the Prime Minister, ‘the most vivid, direct and terrifying challenge to the rule of law that I could ever recall emerging from within our own country…We were facing civil disorder on a massive scale.’ It was clear to Heath that the intention was to bring down the elected government but he decided he could not counter-attack immediately. Confronted with ‘the prospect of the country becoming ungovernable, or having to use the armed forces to restore order, which public opinion would never have tolerated’, Heath turned to a judge, Lord Wilberforce, for an independent inquiry into miners’ wages. From his point of view, it was a terrible mistake. Wilberforce said they should get well over 20 per cent, nearly 50 per cent higher than the average increase. The NUM settled for that, plus extra benefits, in one of the most clear-cut and overwhelming victories over a government that any British trade union has ever enjoyed.

  Heath and his ministers knew that they might have to go directly to the country with an appeal about who was in charge but before that, they tried a final round of compromise and negotiation. Triggered by the prospect of unemployment hitting one million, there now follows the famous U-turn which afterwards so scarred Heath’s reputation. It went by the ungainly name of ‘tripartism’, a three-way national agreement on prices and wages, investment and benefits, involving the government, the TUC and the CBI. The Industry Act of 1972 gave a Tory government unprecedented powers of industrial intervention, gleefully cheered by Tony Benn as ‘spadework for socialism’. There was much earnest wooing of moderate trade union leaders. Money, effort and organization went into Job Centres as unemployment rose steadily towards a million. The industrialists did as much as they could, sitting on yet more committees when in truth they might have been more usefully employed trying to run their companies. The unions, however, had the bit between their teeth. By first refusing to acknowledge Heath’s industrial relations court ‘as really legitimately a law of the land’ and then refusing to negotiate seriously until he repealed the Act, they made the breakdown of this last attempt at consensual economics inevitable. Within a year the CBI too would be calling for it to be scrapped.

  By now Heath had leaned so far to try to win the unions over that he was behaving like a Wilson-era socialist. He was reinstating planning, particularly regional planning. He was bailing out failing companies such as Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, partly because of the work-in discussed elsewhere – something Heath later believed was a mistake. He was offering the unions a privileged place in the running of the nation. From his perspective this was a last attempt to run the economy as a joint enterprise of British patriots, in which individual roles – trade union leader, company director, party politician – took second place behind a general belief in the common good, the wider politics of ‘Buy British’. Individuals followed the logic of their own interests instead. Trade union leaders had got their jobs by promising their members higher wages and better conditions. They could hardly be blamed for doing everything they could within the law to carry out the role they had been given. Industrialists, similarly, would live or die by profit margin and return to investors. They were not auxiliary politicians. Thatcherites later criticized Heath’s government for doing things which a government ought not to do, and not doing things it ought to. Governments should not try to run businesses, or do the wage bargaining of trade union officials and companies for them. They should not tell factories where to go. They should not attempt to control prices.

  All these things, said Tories of ten years later, were better left to the market. What government should do instead was set tough and clear rules by which the other forces in society had to live. Government should ensure low inflation by controlling the supply of money. It should enforce strong laws against intimidation or law-breaking at work. It should allow firms that fail to suffer the consequences. Overall, the Thatcher critique has been applauded, not simply in Britain but around the world, and Heath’s tripartism, or ‘corporatism’ has been derided and forgotten. Yet he started with an almost identical view to her later one. He had been an enthusiast for letting the market decide prices. He promised not to let lame ducks survive. At the time, Thatcher was his fervent supporter and even her outrider Sir Keith Joseph only converted to a full free-market philosophy in the middle of the seventies,
after the fall of the Heath government in which he had been a notably high-spending minister. The argument between the two sides of the Conservative Party was not one between toffs and the hard-nosed middle classes, or ‘ordinary people’, as many Thatcherites would later claim. Heath was no toff and his nose, though famously Concorde-large, was as hard as any.

  Heath was blown off course by a political version of the impossible storm that later wrecked his beloved yacht Morning Cloud. Much of the country was simply more left-wing than it was later. The unions, having defeated Wilson and Castle, were more self-confident than ever before or since. Many industrial workers, living in still-bleak towns far away from the glossy pop world of the big cities, did seem underpaid and left behind. After the Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Wilson experiences, politicians did not have the automatic level of respect that they had enjoyed when Heath had first entered the Commons. Heath always argued that he was forced to try consensus politics because in the seventies the alternative policy, the squeeze of mass unemployment which arrived in the Thatcher years, would simply not have been accepted by the country. And given the very rocky ride Mrs Thatcher had a full ten years later, after industrial and some social breakdown had softened the way for her radicalism, he was surely right.