When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  Crosland began mocking Maplin as ‘Heathograd’. Like the best political insults, it had a strong core of truth. The prime minister remained determined to see the scheme built. He personally reprimanded Michael Heseltine, one of the more ambivalent members of the Cabinet, for failing to sell it to Tory MPs with sufficient enthusiasm. Heseltine recalls in his memoirs: ‘The prime minister insisted categorically [that] anyone with doubts [be] put firmly in his place.’

  Yet Heath, with stubborn confidence, as on other occasions during his government, increasingly ignored the way the situation was developing. The predicted cost of reclaiming the land for Maplin rose from £70 million in 1971 to £110 million in 1972 to £175 million in 1973. By the autumn of 1973, with a building boom in the south of England pushing up construction prices, the overall cost of Maplin was being talked about in Parliament as £1,000 million, or £2,000 million, or even higher.

  In September, the government conceded that the airport would not open in 1980, as planned, but in 1982. The following week, the international oil crisis that Dalyell had half-predicted began, with seemingly disastrous implications for civil aviation and airport-building. In November, Maplin’s opening date was put back again, to 1983. On 16 January 1974, with the Heath government now struggling with a whole host of oil-related problems, it was announced in the Commons that Maplin was to be subject to a ‘wide-ranging and comprehensive’ review. ‘In view of the ornithological implications,’ the Conservative MP and Maplin critic Robert Adley asked the environment secretary Geoffrey Rippon with typically heavy-handed Commons wit, ‘may I ask whether my right honourable and learned friend is able to differentiate between a lame duck and a dead duck?’

  One weekday morning three decades later, I took a train from London towards the Maplin Sands. The train was clean and modern, with air conditioning and a smooth gliding motion, but it took four times as long as the public transport the airport’s planners had envisaged. Shoeburyness, six miles short of the sands, was the last stop. Half a dozen other passengers got off.

  I started walking north-east towards the airport site. The centre of Shoeburyness – a few shops, a quiet seaside park – soon gave way to dusty cul-de-sacs and fenced-off old warehouses. Beyond them flat countryside opened out, windy and treeless, with empty roads and tidal creeks where the skeletons of ancient boats gleamed in the silence. All the way to the east, where the airport would have been, there was blue-grey sea and an empty horizon.

  The Ministry of Defence was still using the sands as an artillery range. When I reached the southern boundary of the MOD land, there was a phone number pinned to the fence for inquiries about access. I rang it, and a security officer politely explained that access would be difficult. But when I mentioned my interest in the airport, he offered a consolation. ‘The experiment’, as he called the Maplin scheme, had left one trace: the trial bank built out to sea in 1973. ‘People round here’, he said, ‘call it sand island.’ Then he explained how to get the best view of it.

  I took a taxi back to Shoeburyness, walked to the north end of the park and looked out to sea. The sun had come out and the waves were a deep blue; just below the horizon, too far out to be a sandbank, there was a sliver of gold. The sun went in and it disappeared. Then the sea brightened again and the golden sliver returned. I put 20p in a seafront telescope and traced its profile, which was long and bare and gently sloping, like some fantastical sand dune marooned in an ocean or a story-book desert island that had lost its palm trees. Two container ships ghosted by behind it. A small passing cloud covered it in rippling shadow. Next to the telescope, a middle-aged man was sitting on a bench watching the sea. I asked him if I had been looking at sand island. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said. ‘But I do believe it was something to do with the airport at one time.’

  When I got back to London, the jumbo jets were moaning overhead as usual, queueing for Heathrow. In Salisbury a few weeks later, near the end of our interview, I asked Heath if he wished Maplin had been built. ‘Yes,’ he said with emphasis. ‘There would have been enormous benefit.’ From the depths of his chair came a heavy mirthless laugh. ‘Look what’s happening over London at the moment – all that. And if we’d done Maplin in time the cost was bearable.’

  The scheme – perhaps the most melancholy symbol of Heath’s foiled ambitions for Britain – was never cancelled by his government. That decision was taken by the next administration. The idea was never quite killed off, however. During the late seventies, and again in the eighties, and into the present century, the idea of an airport built on an artificial island in the North Sea or the Thames Estuary has periodically bobbed to the surface. Besides Heath, its supporters have included the consumer guru Sir Terence Conran, the British National Party and, most vocally since his election in 2008, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

  *

  Many of the Heath government’s other great hopes proved less enduring. The first of these was its ability to transform the economy smoothly. In July 1970, barely a month after the Conservatives’ election triumph, the chancellor Iain Macleod died of a heart attack, and the new administration lost one of its best economic brains, most effective communicators and most popular figures. Almost immediately, the fragile recovery inherited from Wilson, far from strengthening into a boom under Heath as the Conservatives had planned, seemed to go into reverse.

  Growth fell from a vigorous 3.3 per cent in the second half of 1970 to a sickly 0.3 per cent in the first half of 1971. Inflation, which had been steadily declining before the election, began to rise sharply afterwards. Most dramatically of all, the number of unemployed Britons, which had grown slowly in 1969 and 1970, suddenly surged by over a quarter in 1971. By the end of the year, the total was approaching a million, a level not seen since 1940.

  In Britain, as in many Western democracies, the mass unemployment of the Depression years and the fear that it might return still chilled politicians, economists and voters. ‘Full employment’ – official code for a situation where only those who would not or could not work were jobless for long – ‘had to be maintained,’ says Brendon Sewill, who was a special adviser to Macleod’s less able successor as chancellor, Anthony Barber. ‘To suggest that you should … increase the level of unemployment so that [for example] trade unions became weaker was unthinkable.’ Having grown up and formed many of his political ideas during the Depression, Heath, even more than most, regarded mass unemployment as a social evil. Yet within three months of his becoming prime minister, the Conservative Research Department announced that a ‘seismic change’ in the British job market was under way. The CRD saw only one parallel in recent British history: the years leading up to the thirties.

  The government’s response was jumpy. In the run-up to the 1970 election, and particularly at the Selsdon Park conference, the Conservatives had given contradictory signals about how they would treat the economy. As well as promoting Heath’s rather conventional, essentially Keynesian ideas about using state initiatives and new ministries to invigorate business, the party had talked another, tougher, in some respects new economic language: reduce the government’s role, free up the market, let ‘lame duck’ enterprises fail. Some of this was just political point-scoring, an attempt to distinguish the Conservative approach from Wilson’s Keynesian policies in the sixties. But the Tories’ new tone also reflected the influence of a genuinely anti-Keynesian school of economics that had been gathering momentum in Britain and the US since the Second World War.

  In Britain by 1970, this movement had an effective propaganda and research centre, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), several influential advocates in the media and a small but increasingly active minority of converts in the parliamentary Conservative party. Even Heath himself had offered them intermittent encouragement. His abolition of Resale Price Maintenance in 1964 had been a deregulating, anti-government initiative, influenced by the arguments of an IEA pamphlet. In 1969, he appeared to promise further such reforms in his speech to the Conservat
ive Party conference: ‘We will banish the regulation and control of business activities,’ he said. ‘We will begin to introduce private ownership into nationalized industries.’

  Yet Heath’s bold undertakings soon turned out to be little more than rhetoric, one of his periodic – and often damaging – moments of overcompensation for his lack of charisma as a public speaker. In office, he made only a few early concessions to the new right-wing radicalism. He ‘denationalized’ (the word ‘privatized’ was still thought too raw and undignified even for use in IEA pamphlets) the pubs of Carlisle, a backwater of the state-owned economy left over from the First World War, and the travel agents Thomas Cook.

  But as the broader economy began to ail he quickly switched back to traditional Keynesian remedies. In early 1971, when the aircraft division of Rolls-Royce was threatened with bankruptcy, the Conservatives effectively nationalized it, citing the size of its workforce in areas already short of jobs. In the summer, the government began to increase public spending on housing and public works. In the autumn, a secret Cabinet committee chaired by Sir William Armstrong, Heath’s most trusted civil-service adviser, began a review of the economic situation. Its conclusion that cutting unemployment should be an urgent priority would heavily colour the government’s policies the following year: simultaneous tax cuts, increases in state benefits, and new subsidies for industry, the latter on an unprecedented scale for a Conservative administration, especially one elected promising to let ‘lame ducks’ fail. Heath’s critics quickly came up with a memorable phrase for the direction of economic policy from 1971 onwards. They called it his ‘U-turn’.

  Democratic governments always betray some of their initial promise. Incompatible interest groups and electioneering’s necessary half-truths see to that. But Heath’s administration had started out with less political credit than most. It owed its existence to a shock election result, miscalculations by opponents and a vague feeling of national disillusionment rather than to any deep popular enthusiasm for Heath and his brand of Conservatism. As soon as the government’s novelty wore off and it encountered the inevitable problems of office, public attitudes to Heath and the Tories simply reverted, in a sense, to what they had been for much of the sixties. At the end of 1970, after a strikingly brief post-election honeymoon, the Conservatives fell behind Labour in the polls – including the one poll that had correctly predicted their recent general-election victory – and remained behind almost continuously for the next three years.

  Yet over this period their unpopularity also acquired new dimensions. Some of this would come from the right-wing radicals at the IEA and inside the party, and their reaction to the ‘U-turn’; and some would come from the other strengthening political movement that Heath, for all his ponderous moderation and reasonable intentions, roused to fury and politically lethal plotting: the trade unions.

  PART TWO

  Shocks

  4

  Close the Gates!

  The week before Heath took office, a junior official from the National Union of Mineworkers appeared on a local television discussion programme called Yorkshire Matters. Arthur Scargill was thirty-two. He wore a black suit which emphasized the paleness of his face. His hair, swept back in an old-fashioned fifties style, was already receding slightly, and he had the beginnings of a double chin. He spoke in a thin but piercing voice that leapt unevenly in tone at moments of emphasis, almost as if it were still breaking.

  Yet there was an air of utter confidence about Scargill. Beside him sat two other junior officials from other unions, selected for the programme, as he had been, solely for being promising Yorkshire trade unionists. They were slightly older and talked at greater length, attempting, with some awkwardness, to sound simultaneously moderate and militant about the appropriate function of unions in modern Britain. Scargill watched them with his small bright eyes, making a show of listening carefully. But a faintly mocking smile kept sneaking across his face. Then he broke in: ‘I’m completely convinced that victory is won by militancy,’ he said, his smile gone in an instant, his eyes abruptly cold and fierce. ‘I’ve never known the employer who gives you anything. You get as much as you are prepared to go out and take.’

  The bare, overlit set of the programme was silent for a moment. When the discussion started again, the balance had shifted. The other union officials and even the presenter now deferred to Scargill as the show’s main attraction. At the end, it was suggested he might become leader of the NUM one day. ‘Well, I hope you’re right, obviously,’ said Scargill with utter composure, his long dagger nose completely still in the studio lights. Only a single impatient bob of a shiny black shoe betrayed other feelings.

  *

  In 1970, the unions were approaching their zenith. Ever since they had been pioneered in Britain in the nineteenth century, their potency had risen and fallen. As recently as the fifties, they had been widely written off, their memberships stagnating, their faith in class-based collective action considered out of step with the aspirational, more individualistic Britain emerging from the first post-war consumer boom. Yet such dips in influence had proved temporary. From their intimate involvement in the founding and functioning of the Labour Party, to the unique legal protections they had enjoyed since the Edwardian era, to the powerful economic position Keynesian thinking assumed they should naturally occupy, the trade unions’ underlying trajectory was upward. Their total membership increased every year during the forties, fifties and sixties. During the late sixties and seventies, this growth accelerated: in 1968, 43 per cent of the British workforce were union members; by 1978, the figure was 54 per cent. Although this was not an especially high proportion by international standards – in Denmark and Sweden at the end of the seventies membership was around 70 per cent – the power of British trade unionists was magnified by their willingness to use it.

  The reasons for this were as much social and economic as political. Britain in the sixties and seventies was a Western country particularly troubled by rising inflation, unemployment and taxation, yet the material expectations of its population were still growing. In this context, it made sense to join a union which, assuming politicians, employers and economists continued to accept such a role for them, would give you a degree of protection from the bad times and increase your ability to cash in when times were good. It also made sense, once you were in a union, to support at least periodically the exercise of union power. In his 1976 book The New Barons: Union Power in the 1970s, The Economist’s labour correspondent Stephen Milligan – a telling position for a magazine aimed at business executives – noted that successful strikes boosted the recruitment of new members and the profile of victorious unions, making further strikes and further gains for members more likely in the future.

  From the early sixties, the apparent logic of acting militantly began to change how British unions functioned. Many of them were already vast, dispersed organizations: in 1964, the biggest, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), had over 1.5 million members, from Birmingham brewery staff to Scottish sewage workers. Previously, such unions had been steered by elected general secretaries, often autocratic in style and in the job for decades. But, during the sixties, this top-down, hierarchical way of doing things began to be challenged by a less deferential, more egalitarian form of industrial relations, a shift that went with the grain of social change in Britain as a whole. In rapidly increasing numbers shop stewards started representing small groups of people in individual workplaces. The stewards were unpaid, usually unelected, part-time and younger than regular union officials, yet increasingly they came to dominate the everyday dealings between workers and management. ‘Down on the shopfloor or in the office,’ the leading analyst of trade unions Robert Taylor could write by 1978, ‘the wise or foolish words of a trade union general secretary do not enjoy a lasting impact in the course of industrial relations. The gulf between the settled world of the union leader sitting in head office (usually down in London suburbia a long way fro
m Britain’s industrial heartland) and the fluid, informal routine of union life in industry remains enormous.’ During the seventies, the number of shop stewards in Britain quadrupled.

  Most of them were not revolutionaries. In fact, Taylor found that many were as keen to avoid strikes and other frictions in industrial relations as their employers were. Acting as the valued link between the workers and the bosses brought its own satisfactions. However, one feature of the seventies was the frequency with which people who did not think of themselves as terribly political ended up in confrontational situations, through seeking to defend what they saw as their interests against an increasingly threatening outside world. Another feature of the decade was the spread of radical left-wing activism, which had revived in Britain in the fifties and sixties, into new and fruitful areas. Militant trade unionism was by far the most significant example. In 1987, a much less sympathetic time for unions, the left-wing historian Raphael Samuel looked back at seventies union activism for part of an essay called ‘The Lost World of British Communism’:

  Trade unionism in the 1970s was not only a cause. For its most fervent defenders … it was also, in the absence of socialism or communism, something approaching a workers’ faith … Beneath the militant rhetoric, and the seemingly narrow demands, it is possible to discern a quasi-religious impulse at work … a search for self-transcendence; the claim to collective dignity by reference to the past; the joy of a wider belonging. Strikes, for those who took part in them, took on something of the character of [religious] Revivals, such as those which swept the coalfields in the past: an occasion for mass conversion, a time when all things are made anew. The mass picket was a ceremonial demonstration of strength. Confrontations with the police, however unequal the contestants, were cathartic … The main enemy were characterized as ‘scabs’, a category of folk-devil which treated as pariahs any who flinched from the storm. The struggle to defend trade unionism, like the struggle for socialism in earlier years, was indivisible.