A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Tony Benn became the voice and leader of Labour’s peasants’ revolt. His enthusiasm for workers’ cooperatives and a National Enterprise Board had already made him a figure of ridicule in Fleet Street. Later he would become a kind of revered national grandfather, a white-haired, humorous sage whose wry memories of Attlee and Wilson would transfix audiences of all ages and views. His unbending hostility to nuclear weapons, American and British war-making, and market capitalism would inspire hundreds of thousands deep into the years of New Labour. But between the eager-beaver Anthony Wedgwood Benn, champion of Concorde, and the paternal Grandpa Tony, came the turbulent years of ‘Bennism’, the central phase of his political life. Radicalized by his children towards the politics of feminism, anti-nuclear campaigning and much else, he became increasingly detached from his colleagues as the Wilson-Callaghan government staggered towards collapse. Benn had come close to leaving it over his opposition to Labour’s deal with the Liberals, and he fell out badly with the other notably left-wing cabinet minister Michael Foot over parliamentary tactics on Europe.

  His general attitude to the party is well caught by his diary entry for 15 January 1978: ‘The whole Labour leadership now is totally demoralised and all the growth on the left is going to come up from the outside and underneath. This is the death of the Labour Party. It believes in nothing any more, except staying in power.’ Benn was in the curious position of still being a senior member of the government when he wrote this, attending intimate gatherings at Chequers, hobnobbing with visiting Americans, hearing deep military and security secrets, while at the same growing the eyes and ears of an outsider. He was on the side of the strikers who brought much of the country to a halt and his new friend Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was telling Benn he could be the next Labour leader himself. Though it seemed a fantasy in 1978, within a few years Benn would come within a hair’s breadth of winning the deputy leadership on a left-wing socialist ticket, during the middle of a vicious and deeply damaging Labour civil war.

  83

  Then Was the Winter of their Discontent

  The ‘winter of discontent’, a Shakespearean phrase, was used by Callaghan himself to describe the industrial and social chaos of 1978-9. It has stuck in people’s memories, as few political events do – the schools closed, the ports blockaded, the rubbish rotting in the streets, the dead unburied. Actions by individual union branches and shop stewards were reckless and heartless. Left-wing union leaders and activists whipped up the disputes for their own purposes. Right-wing newspapers, desperate to see the end of Labour, exaggerated the effects and rammed home the picture of a nation no longer governable. But much of the fault for this was Callaghan’s. It was not just that he had opposed the legal restrictions on union power pleaded for by Wilson and Castle, and then fought for vainly by Heath. It was not even that he and Healey, acting in good faith, had imposed a more drastic squeeze on public spending and thus on the poorest families, than was economically necessary…though none of that helped. It was also that by trying to impose an unreasonably tough new pay limit on the country, and then dithering about the date of the election, he destroyed the fragile calm he had so greatly enjoyed.

  Most people, including most of the cabinet, had assumed that Callaghan would call a general election in the autumn of 1978. The economic news was still good, Labour was ahead in the polls. Two dates in October had already been pencilled in, though 12 October had been ruled out because it was Margaret Thatcher’s birthday. But Callaghan, musing at his Sussex farm during the summer, decided that he did not trust the polls. He would wait, soldiering on until the spring. When the Prime Minister invited half a dozen trade union leaders to his farm to discuss the election, they left still thinking he was going in the autumn. Then, at the TUC conference, with the world agog for an announcement, Callaghan sang a verse from an old music hall song, originally by Vesta Victoria:

  There was I waiting at the church, waiting at the church, waiting at the church

  When I found he’d left me in the lurch, Lor’ how it did upset me

  All at once he sent me round a note, here’s the very note, this is what he wrote,

  Can’t get away to marry you today, My wife won’t let me.

  While a good enough song in its day, it was hardly a clear message to Britain. Was the jilted bride Mrs Thatcher? The trade union movement? Callaghan’s intention was to suggest that he was delaying the election but many trade union leaders and newspaper correspondents assumed just the opposite. When he finally came clean to the cabinet, they were shocked.

  This might not have mattered so much had Callaghan also not promised a new 5 per cent pay limit to bring inflation down further. Because of the 1974-5 cash limit on pay rises at a time of high inflation, take-home pay for most people had been falling. Public sector workers had had a particularly hard time. There were the inevitable stories of fat cat directors and bosses awarding themselves high settlements. The union leaders and many ministers thought that a further period of pay limits would be impossible to sell, while a 5 per cent limit, which appears to have come from Callaghan almost off the cuff, was widely considered to be ludicrously tough.

  Had Callaghan gone to the country in October then the promise of further pay restraint might have helped boost Labour’s popularity, while the unions could have comforted themselves with the thought that it was probably mere window-dressing. By delaying the election until the following spring, Callaghan ensured that his 5 per cent would be tested in Britain’s increasingly impatient and dangerous industrial relations market. First up, almost as soon as Callaghan had finished his music-hall turn, were the 57,000 car-workers employed by Ford, the US giant. The Transport & General Workers’ Union called not for 5 per cent but for 30 per cent, on the back of high profits (and, it has to be said, an 80 per cent pay rise just awarded to Ford’s chairman). Callaghan was badly embarrassed – his son, as it happened, worked for the company – and when after five weeks of lost production, Ford eventually settled for 17 per cent, he became convinced he would lose the coming election.

  There was a vale of tears to be endured first. Oil tanker drivers also in the TGWU came out for 40 per cent, and were followed by road haulage drivers, workers at Ford’s nationalized rival British Leyland, then water and sewerage workers. BBC electricians threatened a blackout of Christmas television. The docks were picketed and closed down. Blazing braziers, surrounded by huddled figures in woolly hats, with snow whirling round them, were shown nightly on the television news. Hull, virtually cut off, was known as the ‘second Stalingrad’. The effects were felt directly by ministers along with the rest of the country. Bill Rodgers, the transport minister, whose mother was dying of cancer, found that vital chemotherapy chemicals were not being allowed out of Hull. Later, when the Health Secretary David Ennals was admitted to Westminster Hospital the local shop steward announced gleefully that he was ‘a legitimate target’ for action: ‘He won’t get the little extras our members provide patients. He won’t get his locker cleaned or the area around his bed tidied up. He won’t get tea or soup.’ In the middle of it all Callaghan went off for an international summit on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, staying on for talks and sightseeing in Barbados. Pictures of him swimming and sunning himself did not improve the national mood. When he returned to Heathrow, confronted by news reporters asking about the industrial crisis, he replied blandly: ‘I don’t think other people in the world will share the view that there is mounting chaos.’ This was famously translated by the Daily Mail and then the Sun into, ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ The nation’s mood grew no sunnier.

  As the railwaymen prepared to join the strikes, the worst blow for the government came from the public sector union NUPE, who called out more than a million school caretakers, cooks, ambulance men, refuse collectors on random stoppages for a £60 a week guaranteed minimum wage. Strikes by car workers were one thing. But now the public was being hit directly, and the most vulnerable were being hit the hardest. Children’s hospita
ls, old people’s homes and schools were all plunged into trouble. The single most notorious action was by the Liverpool Parks and Cemeteries Branch of the General & Municipal Workers’ Union, who refused to bury dead bodies, leaving more than 300 to pile up in a cold storage depot and a disused factory, and Liverpool council to discuss emergency plans for disposing of some corpses at sea. Funeral corteges were met at the cemeteries by pickets and forced to turn back. Strikers were confronted in local pubs and thumped.

  In the centre of London and other major cities, huge piles of rotting rubbish piled up, overrun with rats and a serious health hazard. Inside government, ordinary work almost ground to a halt. It must be recorded that most of those striking, the public sector workers in particular, were woefully badly paid and living in relative poverty; and that they had no history of industrial militancy. Nor was the crisis quite as dreadful as some of the papers and politicians showed it. As with Heath’s three-day week, many people gleefully enjoyed the enforced holiday from their public sector jobs. Nobody was proved to have died in hospital as a result of union action, there was no shortage of food in the shops and there was no violence. Troops were never used. This was chaos, and a direct challenge to the authority of the government. It was not a revolution, or an attempt to overthrow a government.

  Yet that is the effect it had. The revolution would bring in Thatcherism not socialism, and Labour would be overthrown, plunging quickly into civil war. A ‘St Valentine’s Day concordat’ was eventually unveiled between the government and the TUC, talking of annual assessments and guidance, targeting long-term inflation, virtually admitting the 5 per cent limit had been a mistake. After all the drama, it was a fig-leaf so thin and ragged it was barely worth holding up. By March most of the action had ended and various large settlements and inquiries had been set up. But in the Commons, the government was running out of allies, spirit and hope. The failure of the referendum on Scottish devolution meant that under previously agreed rules, the act would have to be repealed. This in turn gave the Scottish Nationalists no reason to continue supporting Labour. The Liberals, facing the highly embarrassing trial of Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy to murder (he would later be acquitted), had their own reasons for wanting an early election. In the drink-sodden, conspiracy-ridden, frenetic atmosphere of an exhausted Parliament, in which dying MPs had been carried through the lobbies to keep the government afloat, final attempts were made by Michael Foot and the Labour whips to find some kind of majority – Ulster Unionists, Irish Nationalists, renegade Scots were all approached. Callaghan, by now, was in a calmly fatalistic mood. He did not want to struggle on through another summer and autumn. Finally, on 28 March 1979, the game ended when the government was defeated by a single vote, brought down at last by a ragged coalition of Tories, Liberals, Scottish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists. Callaghan was the first Prime Minister since 1924 to have to go to Buckingham Palace and ask for a dissolution of Parliament, because he had lost a vote in the Commons.

  The five-week election campaign started after the Irish assassination of Mrs Thatcher’s wily leadership campaign manager, the Tory MP Airey Neave, murdered by a car-bomb on his way into the Commons underground car-park. On the Labour side it was dominated by Callaghan, still more popular than his party, who emphasized stable prices and his deal with the unions, if such it was. On the Tory side, Thatcher showed a new media savvy, working with the television news teams and taking the advice of her advertising gurus, the Saatchis. Callaghan, who had never expected to win, was soundly beaten. The Conservatives took sixty-one seats directly from Labour, gaining nearly 43 per cent of the vote, and a substantial overall majority, with 339 seats.

  What of the players in the last act of Old Labour and the Broken Consensus? Callaghan would stumble on as leader before retiring in October 1980. Healey would fight a desperate struggle against the left, as his party did its level best to commit suicide in public. Numerous moderates would form the breakaway SDP. The Scottish Nationalists, derided by Callaghan when they voted him down as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, lost eleven of their thirteen MPs. The unions would eventually lose almost half their members and any political influence they briefly enjoyed. More important than all that, mass unemployment would arrive in Britain. The one economic medicine so bitter that no minister in the seventies had thought of trying it was duly uncorked and poured into the spoon. It was time for Britain to grimace and open her mouth.

  Part Four

  The British Revolution

  84

  Margaret Roberts, Superstar

  In politics, if your tactics work and if you are lucky – then you will be remembered for your principles. Margaret Thatcher’s tactics did work; she was shrewd, manipulative and bold, verging on reckless. She was also extremely lucky. Had Labour not been busy disembowelling itself and had a corrupt, desperate dictatorship in South America not taken a nationalistic gamble with some island sheep-farmers, her government would probably have been destroyed after a single term. Had the majority in her cabinet who disagreed with her about the economy been prepared to say boo to a goose, she might have been forced out even before that. In either case her principles, ‘Thatcherism’, would be a half-forgotten doctrine, mumbled about by historians instead of being the single most potent medicine ever spooned down the gagging post-war British.

  Looking back more than a quarter of a century later, the epic events of the early eighties seem to have a clear pattern. Powerful ideas challenge the consensus and, after a nail-biting struggle, defeat the consensus. The early reverses of the Thatcherites, the ‘New Right’ promising ‘a New Enlightenment’, are turned into massive, nation-changing victories. Freedom wins. Yet if you stand back and ask what sort of Britain Mrs Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, the devout Lincolnshire Christian, hoped to create, the story is odder. She did not believe in privatizing industries or defeating inflation for merely economic reasons. She wanted to remoralize society, creating a nation whose Victorian values were expressed through secure marriages, self-reliance and savings, restraint, good neighbourliness, hard work. Though much attacked by church leaders she talked of God and morality a lot: ‘I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil.’ Yet Thatcherism heralded an age of unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinism. That is the thing about freedom. When you free people, you can never be sure what you are freeing them for.

  In the index to Lady Thatcher’s memoirs of her years as Prime Minister, under ‘monetary policy’, 115 separate page references are given. For ‘unemployment’ there are fifteen. This is a fair clue to the economic experiment which began immediately after she took office in 1979 and provides the first, the most important, and still the most controversial part of her story. An attentive reader of the Conservative manifesto for the 1979 election would have missed it. After four years of her leadership the Tories were still talking about a wages policy and the importance of consulting with the trade unions, perhaps on the German model. There was talk too of the need to control the money supply and offer council house tenants the right to buy their homes. But other privatization barely featured. Only the comparatively insignificant National Freight Corporation was to be sold. As to unemployment, Mrs Thatcher herself had been vigorously attacking the Labour government for its failure there. In 1977, when it stood at 1.3 million, she had told the country it was absolutely wrong to associate the Tories with people losing their jobs: ‘We would have been drummed out of office if we’d had this level of unemployment.’ And in case anyone had forgotten the message, the most successful Conservative campaign poster of the election, created by Charles and Maurice Saatchi, her advertising maestros, featured a long queue of gloomy-looking people (in fact Tory activists from North London) filing under a sign reading Unemployment Office, with the headline: ‘Labour Isn’t Working’.

  If voters had studied the new Prime Minister a little more closely they would have noticed a more abrasive edge. She had been aggressive about the fa
ilure to control the trade unions – ‘Never forget how near this country came to government by picket’ – and had already won the insult from the leaders of the Soviet Union of ‘Iron Lady’ for a powerfully anti-communist speech in 1977. It was an insult that pleased her very much rather as the derisive cartoon lampooning Harold Macmillan as ‘Supermac’ had become a badge of honour for him and ‘Tarzan’ would for Michael Heseltine. Irony rarely works with politicians of the first rank. But the voter might then have looked at the people around the Iron Lady and noted just how many of them were old-style mainstream Conservatives in the Heath tradition. To the extent that she was radical, she was clearly completely surrounded and outnumbered. It was calculated that of the possible Tory cabinet members, just two (Keith Joseph and Norman St John Stevas) had actually voted for her in the leadership contest of 1975. There had even been a bizarre notion to lure the former Labour Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, back from Brussels, where he was in rather happy self-imposed exile from British politics, to take over the Treasury again as Mrs Thatcher’s Tory Chancellor. The mind boggles – as it presumably did in 1977, for the offer was never made. A cabinet of ruddy-faced middle-aged Tory squires and former Heath supporters hardly looked like a revolutionary economic cabal. The man who did become Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, was eye-rubbingly reassuring, blander than warm milk. Denis Healey had memorably compared being attacked by him in the Commons to being savaged by a dead sheep. A magazine competition of the time asked readers to think of a line to use if the door rang one night and neighbours you could not stand were on the doorstep keen to join a party. The winning answer was: ‘Oh, do come in. Sir Geoffrey’s on sparkling form tonight.’ What could possibly be threatening about this lot?