Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  A similar situation arose over ‘needle time’, the name given to the agreement between the union and the BBC over how much radio airtime was permitted to be taken up with the broadcasting of records – the 1973 settlement allowed 97 hours a week across what were then the four national stations. Again the intention was to create work for MU members, by encouraging the use of almost-live performance. To cut down on the number of records played, bands would be invited to record songs for John Peel or one of the other Radio One shows, so that, for example, David Bowie would record four tracks in three hours for the standard fee of £12 a session, to be broadcast on a specified programme. Here there was no cheating and, as it happened, out of the practice came some of the best music of the era, particularly when Peel gave the opportunity to an unsigned band like Roxy Music or Siouxsie and the Banshees to record and broadcast for the first time. For the artists, the major handicap was learning not to offend the engineers and electricians in the strictly unionized BBC studios: ‘You weren’t even allowed to plug your own guitar amp into the mains socket, or adjust a microphone to your height,’ recalled Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti. ‘Any transgression of the rules threatened a union walkout.’

  The Musicians’ Union was an unusual case, of course, a body that included in its ranks both unemployed craftspeople and the biggest stars of the entertainment world. The same was true of Equity, its equivalent for actors, though this tended to attract a more vociferous far-left element than almost any other union. When Vanessa Redgrave, an active member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, was rehearsing her appearance on the Morecambe and Wise show, she attempted to engage the two men in political debate, arguing that they too were part of an exploited working class. ‘Do you own the BBC?’ she asked fervently. ‘No,’ replied Ernie Wise, casting a casual glance around the studio, ‘but we’re willing to make them an offer.’

  Even so, the regulations of the MU and Equity typified what became known as restrictive practices – or protective practices, as the docker Jack Dash insisted they be called – of the unions. Demarcation disputes, over which group of workers did which job, were reported endlessly in the press, while the newspaper industry itself was notorious for its ‘outrageously high manning levels’, as the unofficial history of the Sun noted: ‘members of the same basic workforce signed on twice for the same job, using false names to get a second wage packet’. Amongst the pseudonyms typically used by these phantom print workers were the likes of Mickey Mouse and Lester Piggott. The perceived obsession with rules and regulations, with the implication of work-shy workers and far-left shop stewards, was such that mere mention in a comedy of the union rule book could guarantee a laugh. The stand-up comic Bernard Manning used to tell a joke about Alexey Kosygin being shown round a British factory by Edward Heath, and being shocked by the slack working hours and the prevalence of tea breaks: ‘In Russia,’ he boasts, ‘we work from six in the morning till ten o’clock at night.’ ‘You couldn’t get these lads to do that,’ says Heath. ‘Why not?’ demands the Soviet premier, and Heath replies: ‘Because they’re all communists.’

  The spectre of communism was indeed then haunting political debate in the country. Following the traumatic events of its first quarter-century – the Berlin airlift, the Hungarian uprising, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Prague Spring – the Cold War spent the 1970s at an unprecedented level of calmness. It appeared for a while as though the conflict had been fought to a standstill, that the West and the East had settled for coexistence, or at least were catching their breath before resuming hostilities. But to a society that had been brought up to fear an external threat, in the form of Marxist expansionism, this sudden thawing of the Cold War was strangely disconcerting, and in its confusion the nation appeared to turn in on itself, to internalize the fear. The hatred that had been directed at Moscow was transferred to the supposed traitors in our midst; it wasn’t invasion but internal corruption that now captured the fevered imagination, a tendency that reached its most extraordinary manifestation in the belief amongst sections of the security services that Harold Wilson himself was a Soviet agent.

  Those who denounced ‘the communist menace to British industry and the country’ were at this stage more concerned with the Communist Party of Great Britain than with the various Trotskyist groups that were later to attract so much attention. And while politically the CPGB hadn’t had an MP since 1950 (the best it managed in the 1970s was the 6,000 votes registered by Jimmy Reid, who had led the work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders), there was, it was suggested, a serious industrial threat. In this interpretation of society, the party was believed to have worked tirelessly for several decades to get its men placed high in key unions, with the intention of destabilizing the nation. And when someone like Hugh Scanlon, a former party member, argued that the job of the unions ‘must be to change society itself, not merely to get the best out of existing society’, there were plenty who saw their fears confirmed.

  In the winter of 1973–74, as it became apparent that Heath’s government was heading for a decisive showdown with the unions, the red scare spread like a rash, with particular attention being focused on Mick McGahey, the vice-president of the National Union of Mineworkers and a member of the CPGB’s executive. When suggestions arose that troops might be sent in to deal with the imminent miners’ strike, it was McGahey’s contribution to the debate that captured the headlines, calling on soldiers who were placed in this situation to disobey orders. Harold Wilson put down a Commons motion condemning his comments, and the right-wing press denounced furiously this incitement to mutiny. ‘Tiny in numbers, the communists have nonetheless achieved a crippling grip on vital industries,’ claimed the Daily Express, ‘so that again and again we have missed our expansion targets and have been dragged down by industrial strife and sabotage. Whoever wins this election must make sure the communists lose.’

  Coming up fast behind McGahey as a communist bogeyman was Arthur Scargill, who was elected leader of the Yorkshire miners in 1973 and would become perhaps the most famous, certainly the most controversial, union leader in British history. He had been a member of the national committee of the Young Communist League, though whether he progressed into adult membership of the CPGB was never entirely clear. Certainly he never seemed to feel the need for a revolutionary party in the Leninist mould: his strategy, his style, his politics were all his own, not the product of a committee or a party position. Even so, he was widely considered to be a communist in all but name by his many enemies, amongst them Scargill’s own NUM president, Joe Gormley, who was secretly reporting back to the security services. (‘He loved his country,’ commented Gormley’s handler in Special Branch on his client. ‘He was a patriot and he was very wary about the growth of militancy within his union.’) An alternative, possibly more damaging, account of Scargill was that he was a self-publicizing grandstander. Ian MacGregor, who was chairman of the National Coal Board during the great strike of 1984–85, was later to write that the 1972 dispute gave Scargill ‘his first taste of three drugs, the effects of which were to addict him for ever. They were the glamour of leadership in battle, the power of the revolutionary mob and the magic of performing on television.’

  Some things are unarguable about Scargill. First, he was an effective public speaker, rising to the big occasion, even if his technique varied little – he started loud and angry, then increased the volume. Second, despite failing to communicate any clear programme for change, he was at heart a revolutionary: ‘It’s no good compromising. History is littered with abortive attempts to reform capitalism,’ he declared. ‘What we need is a complete and utter change in this society.’ And third, in the medium term he failed not only to instigate such a change, but also to secure the jobs and future of his members. The official account of his career notes that ‘In 1953, at the age of 15, he left school and went to work at the (now closed) Woolley Colliery which at that time employed 3,000 miners.’ Coincidentally, when he finally stood down as president of the NUM, aft
er twenty years in office, the entire membership of the national union now stood at 3,000. It had numbered 700,000 on its creation in 1945.

  The truth was that, although communists were undeniably represented in the ranks of trade union officials to an extent that belied their numbers in society, and although there was undoubtedly a longer-term political agenda in the minds of some, the vast majority of union members embarked upon industrial disputes, as they always had, simply because they wished to defend their livelihoods, and because they thought they were in with a decent shout of winning. The unions were not revolutionary institutions, but precisely the opposite; despite the rhetoric of Scanlon and Scargill, the function of trade unions was to achieve an accommodation within a capitalist society to the advantage of their members, and there was little appetite for anything more. ‘There isn’t a Lenin lurking in the wings,’ wrote Benn at the height of the struggle against the Industrial Relations Act in 1972. ‘The Angry Brigade couldn’t pick up a hundred votes in any constituency.’

  Furthermore, the popular 1970s perception that union members were, like the troops of the Great War, lions led by donkeys, tended to obscure the fact that, even in those militant days, unions did not exist simply to go on strike. The historic task of fighting to improve wages and conditions, in the face of continuing opposition by employers, was as vital a part of national life as ever it had been. The more mundane day-to-day concerns of unions were centred on their members’ welfare (in 1971 the General and Municipal Workers’ Union ‘spent £3.3 million on funeral benefits, considerably more than its total spending on strike pay’), and on issues like health and safety at work, a serious concern, as Benn noted when reporting the 1976 figures: ‘Eight workers a day are killed in industry, there are 3,000 accidents a day, 23 million man days lost by accidents – which is four times as many as by strikes.’

  There was one major exception, a strike that was purely and explicitly political from start to finish, but since it fitted into the mythology of neither right nor left, it has tended to be played down in industrial history. In 1973 representatives of the British and Irish governments, together with those of some parties in Northern Ireland, signed the Sunningdale Agreement (named after the civil service training centre in Berkshire, where the discussions took place). At the heart of the agreement was a proposal for a Northern Ireland Assembly that would represent both Protestant and Catholic parties in a power-sharing coalition government, and the Assembly did in due course come into being. Unfortunately, its very existence was opposed both by the IRA and, more importantly, by a majority of senior Protestant politicians. In the February 1974 general election the United Ulster Unionist Council, an anti-Sunningdale alliance, won eleven of the twelve Westminster seats for Northern Ireland, and it reasonably interpreted this as a popular vote against the Assembly. In May of that year a general strike in the province was called with the avowed intention of bringing down the Agreement.

  Initiated by the Ulster Workers’ Council, the strike was supported by the Ulster Defence Association, a recently launched umbrella organization of paramilitary loyalist groups, whose contribution in the form of roadblocks and armed threats ensured a huge response. ‘There was relatively little overt violence, but then there did not need to be,’ noted one account. ‘It was intimidation on a huge scale.’ And despite the declaration of a state of emergency in the Six Counties, there was little appetite for intervention by the armed forces, whose leadership allegedly had some sympathy for the strikers. As an army officer commented: ‘For the first time, the Army decided that it was right and that it knew best and the politicians had better toe the line.’

  As industrial output fell in the province, and the inevitable power blackouts began, the newly elected prime minister, Harold Wilson, made a wildly inflammatory TV broadcast, denouncing the strikers as ‘people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods’. A new phenomenon was born on the streets of Northern Ireland: people wearing little pieces of sponge in their buttonholes, to demonstrate that they were the spongers of whom he so disapproved, and that they remained defiant. After two weeks, Brian Faulkner, the man who had already had the dubious honour of being the last-ever prime minister of Northern Ireland, resigned as the chief executive of the Assembly, and the Sunningdale Agreement fell in ruins.

  Wilson’s fear and fury when confronted with the Protestant workers’ strike was perhaps understandable. He had, after all, been returned to Downing Street in a general election sparked by what was widely seen as a politically motivated strike; such action having brought down the previous government, he was more aware than anyone of the power of a mobilized working class.

  That election of February 1974 proved to be one of the great miscalculations of British political history. Edward Heath had a substantial parliamentary majority, despite the backbench sniping of Enoch Powell and his consorts, and was not obliged to call an election until the following year. But as the oil crisis worsened, and as the miners voted, by over 80 per cent, to extend their overtime ban into a full-scale strike, Heath decided that enough industrial militancy was enough, and that the country should make its mind up on a fundamental issue. ‘Do you want a strong government which has clear authority for the future to take the decision which will be needed?’ he asked in his television broadcast announcing that there would be an election. ‘Or do you want them to abandon the struggle against rising prices under pressure from one particular group of workers?’

  It was clearly intended as a rhetorical question, but the electorate took it as a serious enquiry. If the issue was ‘Who governs Britain?’ then the answer was self-evidently: ‘Not the man who can’t control the unions’. By polling day the country had endured two months’ worth of the three-day week and patience was running thin: wage packets were being hit, a million people had signed on the dole as the cutbacks started and there was a serious shortage of bread and other staple goods. It was, fortunately, the mildest January since 1932, which eased some of the pain, but even so everyone was being squeezed both at work and at home, and blame was being apportioned to the Arabs, the unions and the government; the only question, for electoral purposes, was: in what proportion?

  The press reported that the coming miners’ strike could make 4 million workers unemployed, and cause the deaths of up to 1 million pensioners, while Michael Chapman, the president of the Confederation of British Industry, said that the country was facing a crisis ‘almost as serious as the outbreak of war’. The government’s own pronouncements were simply self-contradictory: on 18 January the minister of power, Lord Carrington, announced the return of a four-day week, which never materialized; instead, within a fortnight, he was warning of a possible two-day week. In the midst of such extremities and such confusion, a prime minister who appeared to doubt his own authority was of little obvious use to the nation.

  The torment of the Tories was played out in the fifth series of the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, which aired in those crucial months of January and February 1974. The central character, Alf Garnett, a Conservative-supporting docker played by Warren Mitchell, had become a huge TV hero in the mid-1960s by articulating the fears and failings of the traditionalist white working class, whilst engaging in a perpetual struggle with both his subtly subversive wife, Else (Dandy Nichols), and his socialist son-in-law Mike (Anthony Booth). Now, as the government he had advocated through the years of Wilson’s administration began to disintegrate, he was left isolated, adrift in a sea of confusion, losing touch completely with his family: Else is more withering in her put-downs, Mike is mockingly triumphant, and his daughter Rita (Una Stubbs) has become vocal about the subjugation of women.

  Alf, who is himself working a three-day week, finds his world of certainties crashing about him. ‘You’ve got a little boy and you’ll find you’ll have to bring him up the same, the best way you know,’ he appeals tearfully to Rita, clutching at an analogy between parenting and Mike’s politics: ‘Y
ou’ll make mistakes. I suppose I have. I’ll admit some of my ideas might be wrong, I’ll admit that. But are his ideas right, eh? Can his lot prove that their way’s the right way? Can they prove that they know better than the rest of us?’

  But his opponents are not in the mood to give any quarter. ‘Everyone wants to get back on the job, everyone,’ seethes Rita, in an explosion of hatred at Heath. ‘And everyone wants to pay the miners. But old fatso won’t, oh no. He makes me sick, every time I see him on there with his great porky face wobbling with fat.’ Her husband meanwhile is exultant: ‘These are the greatest days England’s ever gone through,’ crows Mike. ‘The people are rising at last, they’re rising at last and they’ve said: We don’t want any crumbs from your economy.’

  And finally, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Alf Garnett spits out the truth he has so long hidden even from himself: ‘Sod Mister Heath!’

  PART TWO

  GOLDEN YEARS