A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  They might have guessed. It was not just on the economy that she was, by the old standards of the seventies, ferociously determined. In a series of strikes she had intervened to stop ministers settling with public sector workers, even when it would have been cheaper to do so. She had already shown her contempt for the top civil servants. She had kept the trade union leaders locked out. Len Murray, the TUC chairman who had spent half the Wilson and Callaghan years sitting round tables with the two of them, lugubriously grazing on the taxpayers’ sandwiches, was allowed into Downing Street just three times in Mrs Thatcher’s first five years. But the best evidence of the Thatcher style to date had been the struggle with the other European leaders to reclaim roughly £1 bn a year of net British payment to the Community – or, in Thatcherspeak, to get our money back. Doing so involved an anti-diplomatic brawl that careered from Dublin to Luxembourg and from Luxembourg to Brussels. She would not shut up and she would not back down.

  The German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, pretended to go to sleep and the French President, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, began to read a newspaper, then got his cars outside to rev their engines – not a subtle hint. She was entirely unfazed. In an epic four-hour meeting over dinner, she simply refused to shut up. Diplomats from all sides suggested interesting side-deals, trade-offs, honourable compromises. She brushed them all aside. Astonishingly, in the end, she got three-quarters of what she had first demanded. Astonishingly, she then said ‘No’. It was only when almost her entire cabinet were in favour of settlement that she grudgingly agreed, like a bloodied prizefighter desperate for just another slug, hauled away by worried friends. She might have had the mother of all makeovers – softer voice, softer hair, better teeth – but she was a raw, double-or-quits killer when she was cornered. The press and the country were beginning to notice it. And she wanted supporters, not colleagues, alongside her. Into the ring came Nigel Lawson, Cecil Parkinson and Norman Tebbit. She would need them. For a while chaos inside the Labour Party had helped protect her from the electoral consequences of her move away from the centre-ground. The Tories might be hated but Labour were unelectable.

  85

  The Left at War With Itself

  Civil wars tend to start with arguments about constitutions, which are always about raw power. Labour’s was no different. In its detail it was mind-dazingly complicated. It involved a host of organizations on the left, an alphabet soup of campaigns, coordinating committees and institutes run by people most of whom then disappeared from public life. It began with arguments which seemed merely about party rules, such as whether or not MPs should be able to be sacked by their local parties, and the exact percentage of votes for a Labour leader held by the unions, the party activists and MPs. It was nasty, personal, occasionally physical, and so disgusted the outside world that Labour very nearly disappeared as an effective organization. Those who mocked the smoothness and blandness of Tony Blair’s New Labour rarely remembered the voter-repelling punch-up that preceded it. This fight would be fought far from Westminster, in the bars and halls of Blackpool, Brighton and Wembley at Labour and trade union conferences. The issue was simply control – who ran the Labour Party and where was it going?

  There was widespread bitterness about what was considered to be the right-wing politics of the defeated Wilson-Callaghan government, and the paltry number of conference decisions which had actually made it into Labour’s election manifesto. For years lobby groups had beavered away to change the party’s policy, then finally won some ‘historic’ conference vote, only to see the Labour leadership ignore it all, and then lose anyway. Callaghan, for instance, had simply vetoed an elaborately prepared pledge to abolish the Lords. At the angry Labour conference of 1979 the party’s general secretary, no less, told him he wished ‘our prime minister would sometimes act in our interests like a Tory prime minister acts in their interests’. One former Labour MP, Tom Litterick, angrily flung a pile of Labour handbooks whose pledges on Europe, housing, women’s rights, the disabled and so on had been ditched by Callaghan from the manifesto: ‘“Jim will fix it,” they said. Aye, he fixed it. He fixed all of us. He fixed me in particular.’

  In this atmosphere, the left wanted to take power away from right-wing MPs and the traditional leaders and carry out a revolution from below. They believed that if they could control the party manifesto, choose the leader and bring the MPs to heel, they could turn Labour into a radical socialist party and then, when Thatcher’s economics destroyed her, win a general election. Some idea of their ultimate objective is clear from the agenda voted through at Labour’s October 1980 conference at Blackpool, which called for taking Britain out of the EC, unilateral nuclear disarmament, the closing of US bases in Britain, no incomes policy and State control of the whole of British industry, plus the creation of a thousand peers to abolish the House of Lords. Britain would become a North Sea Cuba. The Trotskyite Militant Tendency, which had infiltrated the Labour Party, believed in pushing socialist demands so far that the democratic system would collapse and full class revolution would be provoked. Benn, who thought that ‘their arguments are sensible and they make perfectly good radical points’, saw Militant as no more of a threat than the old Tribune group or the pre-war Independent Labour Party. Always a thoroughly decent man, Benn believed the left would end up with a thoroughly decent socialist victory. In fact thuggish intimidation in many local Labour parties by Militants was driving moderate members away in droves. In alliance with them were many mainstream trade unionists who simply felt let down by the Callaghan and Wilson governments; left-wing activists who were not Marxists, and those who were driven above all by single causes such as nuclear disarmament.

  Shrewd tactics and relentless campaigning enabled a small number of people to control enough local parties and union branches to have a disproportionate effect in Labour conference votes, where the big and undemocratic union block votes no longer automatically backed the leadership. At the 1980 conference the left won almost every important vote, utterly undermining Callaghan, who quit as leader two weeks later. Because new leadership rules were not yet in place, awaiting a special conference in January, Labour MPs had one final chance to choose their new leader. Michael Foot, the old radical and intellectual who had begun his time in Opposition, characteristically, by composing a book of essays about Swift, Hazlitt, Paine, Disraeli and other literary-political heroes, was persuaded to stand. Benn would have had no chance among Labour MPs, many of whom now saw him as a menacing figure, allied with the Trotskyist sans-culottes outside who would take away their privileges. But Foot was a great parliamentarian and someone had to be found to beat Denis Healey. The former Chancellor, whose natural pugnacity and abusive wit made him plenty of enemies at party conference, had become the villain of the Labour left.

  Early on Healey had pinpointed the fatal flaw in their strategy which was that if they did take over the Labour Party, the country wouldn’t vote for it. Activists, he told them, were different from ‘the great mass of the British people, for whom politics is something to think about once every year at most’. His robust remarks about what would later be called the loony left were hardly calculated to maximize his chances, despite his popularity in the country at the time. At any rate he was eventually beaten by Foot by 139 votes to 129. There are plenty who believe that Foot, who would endure much mockery as a party leader for his shabby appearance and rambling media performances, was actually the man who saved the Labour Party since he was the only leader remotely acceptable to both the old guard and the Bennite insurgents. It was a job that Foot took on entirely out of a sense of duty. With his old-style platform oratory, his intellectualism and his stick, he was always an unlikely figure to topple Margaret Thatcher. Worzel Gummidge against the Iron Lady; it was the stuff of children’s pop-up books. It was also the last blast of a romantic socialist intellectualism against the free market.

  The left marched on. At the special party conference Labour’s rules were indeed changed to give the unions 40 per
cent of the votes for future Labour leaders, the activists in the constituencies 30 per cent and the once-dominant MPs only 30 per cent. Labour’s struggle now moved to its next and decisive stage, with the left in exuberant mood. It was decided that Benn must challenge Healey for the deputy leadership the following year. This would signal an irreversible move. A Foot-Benn Labour Party was a very different proposition from one in which Healey had a strong voice. Both sides saw it as the final battle. Around the country Benn went campaigning with verve and relentless energy. At public meetings, Healey was booed and heckled and spat at. The vote was clearly going to be very close though with the complicated new electoral college system, no one knew how close.

  At this point, two other characters need to be reintroduced, both miners’ sons, both left-wingers, both men who had made their names by attacking Heath, one on picket lines and the other on the floor of the Commons. They were Arthur Scargill, the NUM boss, and Neil Kinnock. The intimidation of anyone who would not back Benn was getting worse though Benn himself sailed imperturbably through all that, apparently not noticing what was being said and done in his name. Scargill was one of the most aggressive, enough to finally provoke Kinnock into deciding that he could not support Benn. Nor could he support Healey, a right-winger. So he would abstain. He announced his decision in the Labour newspaper Tribune. Kinnock had been slowly moving away from the hard left, and had taken a position as the party’s education spokesman. He had run Foot’s campaign. Popular in the party, he was regarded with increasing suspicion by Benn himself. But this open break with the left’s champion shocked many of his friends. At the conference in Brighton, Benn was eventually beaten by Healey by a whisker, less than one per cent of the votes. Kinnock and Scargill clashed angrily on television. The seaside town was awash with ugly scenes and talk of betrayal. Kinnock was involved in several scuffles and finally, when attacked by a man in a public toilet, ‘beat the shit out of him…apparently there was blood and vomit all over the floor’. It was the inelegant end to an inelegant revolt; after that the left would be powerful in the party but could never hope to seize it.

  86

  The Nice Gang

  By then, however, many thought it was already too late. For a breakaway had begun and a new party was being formed. The idea had come first from Roy Jenkins before the Bennite revolt, as he contemplated the state of the British party system from his grand offices in Brussels, where he was President of the Commission. Offered a BBC lecture in 1979 to ruminate about the future, he argued that perhaps the two-party system established since Victorian times had come to the end of its useful life. Coalitions, he said, were not such a bad thing. It was time to strengthen ‘the radical centre’ and find a way through that accepted the free market economy but which also took unemployment seriously. His lecture was coded, tentative but clear enough. He was no longer a Labour politician and he was looking around. He was in touch with David Steel, the Liberal leader, but felt that although he was close to Liberal thinking, only a new party would give British politics the hard poke it needed. Always a famous host, he began holding lunches for old friends from the right of the Labour party, including Bill Rodgers, who was still in the shadow cabinet, and Shirley Williams, who had lost her seat but was still one of the best-liked politicians in the country. Then Jenkins made a second speech to journalists and their guests, Kinnock among them, in the Commons where he speculated more openly about a new party as ‘an experimental plane’ which might just take off. At this stage the public reaction from Labour MPs was discouraging. Williams had said that a new centre party would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’. David Owen, the young doctor who had been a rare glamorous star as Foreign Secretary in the Callaghan government and was now fighting against unilateral nuclear disarmament, said Labour moderates must stay in the party and fight even if it took ten or twenty years.

  The Bennite revolt changed many minds. After the Wembley conference, at which Owen was booed for his views on defence, he, Jenkins, Williams and Rodgers issued the Limehouse Declaration, describing Wembley as ‘calamitous’ and calling for a new start in British politics. That was duly formalized as the Social Democratic Party or SDP two months later, in March 1981. In total thirteen Labour MPs defected to it and many more might have done had not Roy Hattersley and others fought very hard to persuade them not to. Within two weeks 24,000 messages of support had flooded in and a temporary headquarters, manned by volunteers, had been found. Peers, journalists, students, academics and others were keen to join. The nice people’s party was on its way. Public meetings were packed from Scotland to the south coast of England. Media coverage was lavish and flattering. In September an electoral pact was agreed with the Liberal Party after delirious scenes at the party’s Llandudno conference, and the Alliance was formed. Trains proved an unlikely theme of the new party, with the SDP holding (literally) rolling conferences for their first two years, journalists and politicians crammed together singing their way round provincial Britain. After giving Labour a terrible shock in the Warrington by-election, the SDP won their first seat when Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives in November, with nearly half the votes cast, followed by Jenkins winning Glasgow Hillhead from the Tories the following year. Some sense of the early excitement can be captured by the thought that had they taken their stratospheric opinion poll ratings seriously (which sensibly they did not) the SDP could have expected to win nearly 600 out of the then 635 parliamentary seats.

  His victory allowed Jenkins to become the leader of the party in the Commons. But he had lost his old mastery of the place; or perhaps leading a rump group caught between Thatcher’s Conservatives and the baleful Labour ex-comrades was simply impossible. In due course Jenkins would lose his seat at the general election and Owen would take over as leader. The personality problems that would later cause such mayhem were soon unavoidable. David Owen was handsome, romantic, arrogant, dogmatic, Welsh, patriotic and never a team player. He had always believed that leadership was more rightly his and feared that Jenkins was leading the SDP towards a merger with the Liberals. Owen saw himself still as a socialist although of a new kind. Jenkins, for his part, found his old protégé Owen prickly and arrogant. In short, their relationship was every bit as cordial as that between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in later years. As with that, personal rivalry did hold the party back. The upsurge of the SDP shook even Mrs Thatcher, while it led some in the Labour Party to fear their cause was finished.

  It also gave a new lease of life to the Liberals. In the early fifties, the once mighty party of Gladstone and Asquith had been a negligible force, down to half a dozen MPs and 3 per cent of the national vote. Under Jo Grimond it had enjoyed a revival as the party of genuine liberalism and in the sixties it attracted an increasingly radical wing, anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, in favour of community politics and, in general, amiably stroppy. Liberal conferences were distinguished by stalls of organic apples, large hairy men in sandals and enthusiasts for obscure forms of land taxation, as if a medieval fair had somehow collided with a chartered surveyors’ seaside outing. Yet so great was the public disenchantment with conventional politics that this unlikely caravan rumbled ahead, particularly under the flamboyant, dandyish, sharp-witted Jeremy Thorpe. Faced with allegations about a homosexual affair and a murder plot (though only a dog perished, and the prosecution failed), Thorpe resigned. By the early eighties the party was being led by Steel, ‘the boy David’, looking for a strategy. The SDP provided a route back to the centre ground but Owen was not alone in despising the Liberals and the eventual merger between the parties was bitter and difficult. Nevertheless, by the early spring of 1982 the SDP and Liberals could look forward with some confidence to breaking the mould of British politics. Mrs Thatcher was hugely unpopular. Labour was in uproar. What could possibly go wrong?

  87

  The Falklands: Big Hair and Bald Men

  One of the many ironies of the Thatcher story is that she was rescued from the
political consequences of her monetarism by the blunders of her hated Foreign Office. In the great economic storms of 1979-81, and on the European budget battle, she had simply charged ahead, ignoring all the flapping around her in pursuit of a single goal. In the South Atlantic she would do exactly the same and with her great luck she was vindicated. A pattern was being established – ‘blinkered and proud of it’ – and she would move in the space of a couple of months from being one of the least popular prime ministers ever to being an unassailable national heroine. It could all so easily have gone wrong. A few more fuses working on Argentine bombs, another delivery of French-made Exocet missiles, a different point chosen for the attack, and the Falklands War could have been a terrible disaster, confirming an Argentine dictatorship in power and ending Mrs Thatcher’s political career. Of all the gambles in modern British public life, sending a task-force of ships from the shrunken and underfunded Royal Navy 8,000 miles away to take back some islands by force was one of the more extreme.

  On both sides, the conflict derived from colonial quarrels. The Falkland Islands had been named after a Royal Navy treasurer when English sailors first landed there in 1690 and though there had been Spanish and French settlements, the scattering of islands had been declared a British colony in 1833. Argentina, formed out of old Spanish colonies, had claimed them from the start too on the basis of proximity. By the sixties, the economic future of the 1,800 islanders who depended on sheep-farming and fishing looked bleak and the Foreign Office was clearly keen to somehow dispose of the problem. Labour had sent a submarine at one point to warn off an increasingly menacing Argentina. Under the Conservatives, however, a couple of serious mistakes were made. First there was a proposal to give sovereignty to the Argentines, but to lease back management of the islands for a fixed period, so that their Britishness would remain intact. Margaret Thatcher later distanced herself from the whole idea, but it was seriously entertained at the time and only withdrawn after protests from the islanders and angry backbench criticism. Then came the announced withdrawal of the only British naval vessel in the region, a patrol vessel HMS Endurance, while the Falkland islanders were given no special status in new legislation on British nationality. In Buenos Aires a newly installed junta under General Leopoldo Galtieri thought it understood what was going on. Galtieri was heavily dependent on the backing of the Argentine navy, itself passionately keen on taking over the islands, known to Argentina as the Malvinas. The following year would see the 150th anniversary of British ownership which the Argentines feared would somehow be used to reassert the Falklands’ British future. The junta misread Whitehall’s lack of policy and concluded that an invasion would be easy, popular and never reversed.