A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  The government had accepted that the Scottish Parliament would only be set up after a referendum in Scotland in which a simple majority would not be enough; at least 40 per cent of the Scottish electorate must vote ‘Yes’. Would this be so hard to achieve? When the referendum was finally held, the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns were both rather ragged. Most of the Scottish media were in favour of devolution revolution and a ‘Yes’ vote was generally thought to be inevitable. The timing, however, was pitch-perfect terrible. The campaign ran in February 1979 against a backdrop of the ‘winter of discontent’, terrible weather and a collapse in government prestige. Voting against devolution was for some a way of registering contempt for Labour. Others simply could not be bothered. In the end, though most of Scotland voted in favour of home rule, turnout was low and only 32.9 per cent voted ‘Yes’, far below the 40 per cent hurdle.

  Devolution was dead for twenty years to come. Callaghan, Foot and John Smith did everything they could to find some way of reviving the bill or postponing it but by now the majority of the SNP had had enough. They issued ultimatums to the government and eventually put down a motion of censure, though not all of them voted. Mrs Thatcher saw her chance. Labour lost the vote by a whisker and the general election of 1979 was duly triggered. This would bring about the election of a now implacable opponent of home rule. It would plunge Labour into chaos in Scotland as well as elsewhere. The SNP group was cut from eleven MPs to just two, and never regained the initiative. Earlier in this section we noted that Mrs Thatcher was lucky in her enemies and the Scottish Nationalists were yet another good example.

  Wales’s part in the story runs parallel to Scotland’s in many ways. Like Scotland, Wales had become a post-war Labour stronghold in her industrial heartland, with a Liberal tradition in the rural areas. Like Scotland, Wales had experienced a rise of interest in the national question between the wars – Plaid Cymru, the party of Wales, had been founded in 1925, nine years before the SNP. Like the Scottish nationalists, the Welsh nationalists were dominated in the early years by literary men, poets and lecturers, and had little working-class support. In the post-war years Wales, like Scotland, had benefited from the scattering of regional policy initiatives, above all the great steel rolling-mill at Llanwern in 1962 but also the Shotton blast furnace, the Licensing Centre at Swansea, the Passport Office at Newport, two nuclear power stations, and factories run by Rover, Ford, Hoover, Hotpoint and others – the equivalent to the car-making plants and aluminium smelters of the Scots. Just as in the Scottish Highlands, vast acreages of conifers were planted by the Forestry Commission, so too it happened across the hillsides of rural Wales. The Scots got a development agency. So did the Welsh. If the Scots popularly expressed their national pride through the up-and-down fortunes of their football team, and the occasional even dodgier pop phenomenon like the Bay City Rollers, the Welsh had rugby. At Cardiff Arms Park, renamed the Welsh National Stadium in 1970, England failed to win a single game between 1964 and 1979.

  Politically, however, Wales was in a weaker position. She had been incorporated by England too early in her history to have developed separate institutions of modern statehood. Her ‘Act of Union’ came in 1536, not 1707, and it was a crucial difference. Wales had no single powerful national church, no parliament to look back on, no Enlightenment universities or modern legal code of her own. Indeed she had no official capital until Cardiff was recognized as such as late as 1955; no minister or administrative offices until the fifties and no Secretary of State for Wales until 1964. Welshness was celebrated more as a linguistic and religious quality, though the decline in religious attendance hit the nonconformist chapel tradition almost as hard as it hit the Church of England. Politically, the Welsh had looked to Westminster men as their heroes, David Lloyd George most obviously, but Nye Bevan too. The decline of Liberalism had left Wales dominated by Labour and with all the drawbacks of the one-party statelet – internal backbiting, political stagnation and an unbalanced attitude to London, which was simultaneously the remote and alien capital and the source of power, money and jobs. Clever Welshmen from Raymond Williams to Dylan Thomas often emigrated, becoming exiled professors and writers, endlessly harking back to the romantic day-before-yesterday.

  In the Fifties Welsh nationalists began to find cultural and political issues which spurred them on. Instead of attacking post-boxes and stealing the Stone of Destiny, Welsh nationalism was inspired to fight for the survival of the Welsh language. English road-signs would be painted out, people refused to fill in forms written in English and there were successful campaigns for more Welsh broadcasting. But the biggest early spur was water. Indeed it could almost be said that water was the Welsh oil, particularly after the drowning of the Tryweryn valley in north-west Wales to create a reservoir for the people of Liverpool. This was done by Act of Parliament in 1957, despite almost all Welsh MPs voting against it. As one historian put it: ‘Liverpool’s ability to ignore the virtually unanimous opinion of the representatives of the Welsh people, confirmed one of the central tenets of Plaid Cymru – that the national Welsh community, under the existing order, was wholly powerless.’ Attacks on the Tryweryn reservoir followed and the Free Wales Army was formed in 1963. Violent Welsh nationalism was, thankfully, almost as unpopular and badly organized as violent Scottish nationalism, but there were explosions in the sixties and two men died in 1969 trying to blow up the Royal train during the Prince of Wales’s Investiture. There would also be a more widespread and persistent campaign of burning out holiday homes and full-time homes owned by English incomers to Welsh-speaking areas.

  Plaid Cymru’s first breakthrough came at the Carmarthen by-election of 1966, a year before the SNP won Hamilton. Gwynfor Evans, a nationalist campaigner since the thirties and Plaid Cymru’s leader since 1945, would lose the seat in the 1970 general election but two striking Plaid Cymru by-election performances in Rhondda West and Caerphilly in 1967 and 1968 suggested it was no flash in the pan. At last complacent Welsh Labour was being challenged. In the first 1974 election, Plaid Cymru would win two seats, and take a third in the second election of that year. Just as in Scotland, this produced a divided response among Labour in Wales. Should the nationalists be fought, as Neil Kinnock believed, or should they be paid to go away, with offers of devolution, as Michael Foot thought?

  By then, like Scotland, the client economy of Wales was in very deep trouble. Yet despite the success of Plaid Cymru in local elections during the final years of ‘old Labour’ rule, they did not seem to pose quite the threat of the SNP. And of course, there was no oil boom in Welsh waters. So the proposed Welsh assembly was to have fewer powers than the Scottish one. It was to oversee a large chunk of public expenditure but would not be able to make laws. This was hardly likely to make anyone’s blood pound. When the matter was put to a referendum the Welsh voted overwhelmingly against the planned assembly, by 956,000 votes to 243,000. Every one of the new Welsh counties voted ‘No’. Plaid Cymru, unlike the SNP, did not vote for the end of the Labour government but in the Thatcher years Wales, like Scotland, was dominated by the politics of resistance to Conservatism. It would be a long wait.

  95

  The Boyo and the Bolsheviks

  Michael Foot’s leadership saved the Labour Party from splitting into two but was in all other respects a disaster. He was too old, too decent, too gentle, to take on the hard left or to modernize his party. Foot’s politics were those of a would-be parliamentary revolutionary detained in a second-hand bookshop. When roused (which was often), his hair would flap, his face contort with passion, his hands would whip around excitedly and denunciations would pour from him with a fluency Martin Luther would envy. He was in his late sixties during his time as leader – he would be seventy just after the 1983 election – and he looked his age. Contemptuous of the shallow presentational tricks of television, he could look dishevelled and was famously denounced for wearing a ‘donkey jacket’ (it was actually, he insisted, rather a smart green woollen coat) at the
Cenotaph. His skills were for whipping up the socialist faithful in meetings or for finger-stabbing attacks on the Tory enemy in House of Commons debates. He seemed to live in an earlier century, though it was never clear which one, communing with heroes such as Swift, Byron or Hazlitt, rather than in a political system which depended on television performance, ruthless organization and managerial discipline. He was a political poet in a prose age.

  Perhaps nobody in the early eighties could have disciplined the Labour Party or reined in its wilder members. Foot did his best yet he led Labour to the party’s worst defeat in modern times, on the basis of a hard-left, anti-Europe, anti-nuclear, if-it-moves-nationalize-it manifesto aptly described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Kaufman had also bravely but fruitlessly urged him to stand down before the election. The campaign which followed has gone down in history as one of the least competent, most disorganized few weeks of chaos ever arranged by a modern political party. Foot impersonated a late nineteenth-century radical, touring open meetings and making long semi-literary effusions from crowded platforms to gatherings of the faithful. It was as if he had not condescended to notice the radio age, never mind the television one. He appeared with the very Trotskyists he had earlier denounced and was clearly at odds with his deputy, Denis Healey, over such minor matters as the defence of the country. Labour’s two former prime ministers, Wilson and Callaghan, both publicly attacked Foot’s principled unilateralism. After all this, it was surprising that the party scraped into second place and held off the SDP-Liberal Alliance. It is a measure of the affection felt for Michael Foot that his swift retirement after that defeat was greeted with little recrimination.

  Yet it also meant that when Neil Kinnock won the subsequent leadership election he had a mandate for change no previous Labour leader had enjoyed. ‘Enjoyed’ is perhaps not the word. Kinnock had won by a huge majority. He had 71 per cent of the electoral college votes, against 19 per cent for his nearest rival Roy Hattersley, while Tony Benn, the obvious left-wing challenger, was out of Parliament briefly, having lost his Bristol seat. Kinnock had been elected after a series of blistering campaign speeches, a left-winger by the standards of anyone who wasn’t actually a revolutionary. He wanted the swift abandonment of all Britain’s nuclear weapons. He believed in nationalization and planning. He wanted Britain to withdraw from Europe. He wanted to abolish private medicine and to repeal the Tory laws on trade union reform. And to start with, the only fights he picked with his party were over organizational matters, such as the campaign to force Labour MPs to submit to reselection, which handed a noose to militant local activists. Yet after the chaos of the 1983 campaign, he was also sure that the party needed radical reform.

  Though the modern age of attempted ruthless control over the media is popularly believed to have begun with Peter Mandelson’s arrival as Labour’s director of communications, it actually began when Patricia Hewitt, a radical Australian known for her campaigning on civil liberties, joined Kinnock’s new office. It was she who began keeping the leader away from journalists, trying to control interviews and placing him like a precious stone only in flattering settings. Kinnock, for his part, knew how unsightly old Labour looked to the rest of the country and was prepared, if not happy, to be groomed. He gathered round him a rugby scrum of tough and aggressive aides, many of whom went on to become ministers in the Blair years – Charles Clarke, the burly son of a powerful Whitehall mandarin; John Reid, a wild former Communist Labour backbencher; Hewitt; and Peter Mandelson. Kinnock was the first to flirt, indeed to enter into full physical relations, with the once-abhorred world of advertising, and to seek out the support of pro-Labour pop singers such as Tracey Ullmann and Billy Bragg, long before ‘Cool Britannia’ was thought of in the Blair years. He smartened up his own style, ending the informal mateyness which had made him popular among colleagues, and introduced a new code of discipline in the shadow cabinet, a code which would have had him thrown out a few years earlier.

  In the Commons he tried hard to discomfit Thatcher at her awesome best, which was not easy and rarely successful. The two of them loathed each other with a chemical passion. Labour’s dreadful poll ratings very slowly began to improve. There was talk of ‘the Kinnock factor’. But there were awesome problems for Labour which could not be dealt with by pop stars, friends in the advertising world or well-educated Australian ladies barking at journalists. The first of these was that the party harboured a substantial and vocal minority of people who were not really parliamentary politicians at all, but revolutionaries of one kind or another. They included Arthur Scargill and his brand of insurrectionary trade unionism; the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, which had been busy infiltrating the party since the sixties; and assorted hard-left councils, determined to defy ‘Thatcher’ (also known as the democratically elected government) by various illegal stratagems.

  Kinnock dealt with them all. Had he not done so New Labour would never have happened and Tony Blair would have enjoyed a well-remunerated and obscure career as a genial barrister specializing in employment law. Yet Kinnock himself was a passionate man whose own politics were to the left of the new mood of the country. He was beginning an agonizing journey which meant confronting and defeating people who sounded not so different from his younger self; while moving steadily, but never quite far enough, towards the centre. On this journey much of his natural wit, his balls-of-the-feet, exuberant, extempore rhetoric and convivial bounce would be silenced, sellotaped and sedated (as he might well have alliterated). He had come into politics as if it was rugby, us against them, a violent contact sport much enjoyed by all participants. He found that in leadership it was more serious, drearier and nastier than rugby. The game was changing. Week after week, he was confronting in Thatcher someone whose principles had set firm long before and whose politics, love them or hate them, seemed to express those principles. Yet he was by necessity changing, a man on the move, who could not renounce his former beliefs nor yet quite stand by them. He was always having to shade, to hedge and to qualify, to dodge the ball, not kick it. The press soon dubbed him ‘the Welsh windbag’.

  The first and hardest example of what he was up against came with the miners’ strike. As we have seen, Kinnock and Scargill loathed each other – indeed, the NUM president may have been the only human being on the planet that Kinnock disliked more than Margaret Thatcher. He distrusted Scargill’s aims, despised his tactics and realized early on that he was certain to fail. As the spawn of socialist Welsh miners, Kinnock could not demonize the strike without demonizing his own upbringing and origins, yet he knew it was a disaster. As the violence spread, the Conservatives and the press were waiting for him to denounce the pickets and to praise the police. He simply could not. Too many of his own side thought the violence was the fault of the police. As the strike hardened, one obvious tactic was to attack Scargill’s failure to hold a national ballot. Yet acutely conscious of the feelings of striking miners, he could not bring himself to attack the embattled trade union. So he was caught, volubly, even eloquently inarticulate, between the rock of Thatcher and the hard place of Scargill. In the Commons, white-faced, week by week, he was taunted by the Tories for his weakness. In the coalfields he was denounced as the miner’s son too frightened to come to the support of the miners. So he made lengthy arguments about the case for coal and the harshness of the Tories which were, as he knew full well, only adjacent to the row consuming the nation. These were impossible circumstances. In them, Kinnock at least managed to avoid fusing Labour and the NUM in the mind of floating voters, ensuring that Scargill’s utter political defeat was his alone. But this lost year destroyed his early momentum and damped down his old blazing certainty. It stole his hwyl – and a Welsh politician without hwyl is like a Jewish agent without chutzpah.

  It is said that the difference between being an Opposition politician and a Government one is that in Government you get up each morning and decide what to do while in Opposition you get up and decide what y
ou are going to say. It is hardly Kinnock’s fault that in British politics he is remembered for talking. His critics recall his imprecise long-windedness, the product of self-critical and painful political readjustment. His admirers recall his great platform speeches, the saw-edged wit and air-punching passion. There was one time, however, lasting for just a few minutes, when Kinnock spoke so well he united most of the political world in admiration.

  This happened on 1 October 1985 at the main auditorium in Bournemouth, the well-off Dorset coastal resort where Labour conferences never seem entirely at home. A few days earlier Liverpool City Council, formally Labour-run but in fact controlled by the Revolutionary Socialist League, had sent out redundancy notices to its 31,000 staff. The revolutionaries, known by the name of their newspaper Militant, were a party-within-a-party, a parasitic body nuzzled inside Labour and chewing its guts. They had some five thousand members who paid a proportion of their incomes to the RSL, so that the Militant Tendency had 140 full-time workers, more than the staff of the Social Democrats and Liberals combined. They were present all round the country but Liverpool was their great stronghold. There they practised Trotsky’s politics of ‘the transitional demand’ – the habit of making impractical demands for more spending, higher wages and so on, so that when the capitalist lackeys refuse them, you can push on to the next stage, leading to collapse and then revolution. In Liverpool where they were building thousands of new council houses, this meant setting an illegal council budget and cheerfully bankrupting the city. Sending out the redundancy notices to the council’s entire staff was supposed to show Thatcher they would not back down, or shrink from the chaos ahead. Like Scargill, Militant’s leaders thought they could destroy the Tories on the streets.