Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Hall himself, provoked by the strikes, was ultimately to vote for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in 1979. (‘It wasn’t at all difficult,’ he noted. ‘In fact it positively felt good.’) But at this stage he was still a nervous moderate in the Labour ranks, one whose wishes in the October 1974 poll were granted by the electorate: ‘I want Labour to win with a very small majority so that their dogmatic excesses are kept in check.’

  Those excesses were, to all intents and purposes, represented by Tony Benn. The two most controversial issues of the Wilson government were both initiated by him: the referendum on whether to remain in the EEC, and the Industry Bill. This latter was to become the touchstone for the left in its evaluation of Labour’s performance in the 1970s, the key issue in the alleged betrayal of socialism, and thus the prime factor in the drive towards internal democracy that ultimately led to the 1981 split in the party and the creation of the SDP. In essence the argument was this: The 1973 Labour Party conference had called for – in those famous words – ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’, and the manifesto of February 1974 had reflected that aspiration. The October election campaign had even used as its slogan ‘Labour Keeps Its Promises’, and Benn, as industry secretary, was determined to do just that. But he was thwarted by what was seen as the leadership’s collaboration with the class enemy.

  Benn’s proposed industrial strategy had three central planks: the expansion of state ownership with, if necessary, the compulsory purchase of firms by a new National Enterprise Board; the adoption of planning agreements across all the key sectors of the economy; and the involvement of trade unions in decision-making, with a tripartite structure of government, management and workforce. All of this was precisely what the Labour movement had voted for and expected to happen, yet none of it was achieved. Instead Wilson himself personally intervened to have the proposed legislation completely rewritten, with the result that the bill that finally emerged was, as Eric Heffer, one of Benn’s ministers, put it, ‘emasculated out of all recognition’, so much so that it was barely worth the parliamentary time spent on it.

  The problem, as Benn and the left soon identified, was structural. The annual conference of the Labour Party, dominated by the massive block votes of the big trade unions, was supposed to be the primary policy-making body of the movement, but in reality it lacked the power to hold the leadership of the party to account. Instead the Labour MPs, who had little or no influence on the conference, simply went their own way, and – when in power – the prime minister and his cabinet went their own way, sometimes not even in accord with the wishes of the backbench MPs. For much of the post-war period, when the unions were led by right-wingers, this was not a problem save for the more radical grass-roots members, in whom no one was much interested: ‘You don’t need to worry about the outside left,’ Wilson had said. ‘They’ve got nowhere else to go.’ But with the leftwards drift of the unions in the early ’70s, the gap between them and the Parliamentary Labour Party, let alone the cabinet, became a major issue. Frustrations simmered as Wilson, in the words of veteran left-winger Ian Mikardo, took to treating the Labour Party ‘as one would treat an elderly, boring maiden aunt, sending her a birthday card (in October) every year but never inviting her to visit and never listening to what she said’. MPs on the right of the party countered that their job was to respond to the wishes of their electorate, not simply to those of their local activists, and certainly not to those of Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon. All of which made it nigh on impossible to reconcile the resolutions of conference with the practice of government.

  Because even if Wilson had wished to defer to conference decisions (and there was little indication that he did), the government was in too precarious a position, with too slender a mandate, to afford the luxury of ignoring the electorate. And there was by this stage a very definite public reaction against the left and the unions that worried many of the social democrats within Labour.

  Back when popular novels like The Leader, The Lost Diaries of Albert Smith and A State of Denmark had been written in the 1960s, warning of right-wing reactions against union power, the selling point had been ‘it could happen here’. Since then, there had been a marked change. In George Shipway’s The Chilian Club the message was more akin to ‘it should happen here’. The four heroes of the book are a group of retired Army officers who believe that Britain is on a downward slope, and resolve to do something about it on behalf of decent citizens everywhere, regardless of the laws of the land: ‘The laws imprisoned worthy citizens for momentary lapses on motorways,’ they argue; ‘the laws protected wildcat strikers, agitators, anarchic students and such allied vermin whose only object was destruction.’ Most importantly, they claim, the rise of the unions will undermine democracy. ‘If you rule industry you rule England,’ explains one of the protagonists. ‘The Russians have been fighting for years, and it seems they’ve won. Every union is now communist-controlled, and extremely – what’s the word? – militant.’ And so the four men resolve upon a programme of assassination, murdering key shop stewards, Moscow-controlled politicians and black rights leaders, a programme which is depicted with apparent enthusiasm and approval. The novel’s popularity was such that in 1975 a forthcoming film adaptation was announced, to be produced by Michael Klinger, who had earlier been responsible for Get Carter (though his stock had fallen somewhat since, for he was then in the midst of producing the Confessions series); the seemingly terminal decline of the British film industry meant that the movie never materialized.

  In fact it was not simply the unions that were pursuing extra-parliamentary methods at this point. In an essay contributed to the collection Why Is Britain Becoming Harder to Govern?, the Labour MP John Mackintosh pointed out that breaking the law had acquired a new popularity in recent years: ‘People at once say: “It worked for the miners. Why not for us?”’ And, he added, such campaigns were achieving success in a way that conventional action simply didn’t: ‘The individuals who ruined the test match cricket pitch in order to draw attention to what they believed was the wrongful conviction of a Mr George Davis obtained an immediate home office inquiry into the case.’ Similarly, in relation to another recent campaign of non-violent direct action, ‘the fishermen never had such concern shown about their problems as was forthcoming when the blockade of the ports was undertaken’.

  Employers too were beginning to push beyond normal lobbying practices, as they concentrated their fire on Benn’s Industry Bill. Even as the leaders of the CBI held private meetings with Wilson, demanding the watering down of the bill, a twin-track strategy of propaganda and thinly veiled threat was adopted to strengthen their hand. The firm Bristol Channel Repairers took out full-page newspaper adverts to protest at the nationalization of the ship-repairing industry, and included Benn’s home address, suggesting people visit him to discuss their opposition. ICI, concerned that it was one of the targets for future nationalization, relied on financial brute force to ensure that its message got through, spending ‘£60,000 writing to its 600,000 shareholders, 132,000 employees and 43,000 pensioners explaining why the NEB should not buy ICI’. Lord Watkinson, former head of Cadbury Schweppes, warned of conflict as employers ‘may be driven to develop industrial muscle power’, and threatened a policy of ‘confrontation and non-cooperation’. And a representative of the CBI told a parliamentary committee that its members would simply refuse to cooperate with any clauses that required the disclosure of information, while Sir Alistair Pilkington, chairman of the country’s largest glass company, declared that ‘he would go to prison rather than conform with the provisions in Tony Benn’s Industry Bill about disclosing information to the government and unions’.

  These suggestions of lawlessness from the upper ranks of the business establishment were among the pressures that were piling on Wilson in an attempt to stop Benn’s plans. They were, however, as nothing compared to the personal pressures on Benn an
d his family; amongst the many death threats they received was a letter addressed to his wife: ‘We regret that your husband is going to be killed and that you will be a widow, but it is in the public interest.’

  As the referendum campaign built up to its inevitable climax that would see Britain remain in the EEC, the newspapers stepped up their calls that Wilson take the opportunity of the vote to remove Benn from office, with coverage that was probably more hostile than any cabinet minister had previously faced: SACK BENN! was the stark front-page headline in the Sun, and the Sunday Mirror chipped in gleefully with BYE BYE BENN. ‘It is obvious,’ the man himself noted bitterly in his diary, ‘that there has been heavy briefing by Number 10.’ When the move did eventually come, it was not a sacking, nor even officially a demotion, rather a move sideways to become energy secretary, but no one was in any real doubt what it meant, or what the future of the Industry Bill would be. ‘What you are doing,’ Benn told Wilson, ‘is simply capitulating to the CBI, to the Tory press and to the Tories themselves, all of whom have demanded my sacking.’ And Neil Kinnock, later to become the bête noire of Benn’s supporters but at this stage still regarded as a left-winger, denounced the surrender in Tribune magazine: ‘We are now in the extraordinary and dangerously undemocratic situation where our foes have a direct influence on the selection of Labour ministers.’ (The objection was to the party’s enemies, not to external influences; after the February 1974 election Jack Jones had decided that the shadow employment spokesman, Reg Prentice, should not get the equivalent government post and had his own suggestion: ‘We needed a man at the employment post who was sympathetic to our views. We agreed that Michael Foot would be the ideal choice.’)

  Wilson’s work was now essentially complete. In 1973 the Labour Party had adopted a left-wing programme, but with Britain now securely part of Europe and with industrial policy reduced to something less than a shadow of its former self, he had done all he could to ensure that radical policies were off the agenda. He had but one last card to play in his remarkable political career.

  In March 1976, a few days after his sixtieth birthday, Wilson announced that he was resigning as leader of the party and as prime minister. He informed the cabinet of his decision, setting in motion a frantic race for the succession, and then went off to Parliament for his scheduled appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions, where he took the opportunity to attack the Labour left, while Enoch Powell – never one to miss a chance of slipping the knife into another former leader – praised him for ‘bringing peace to Ireland in contrast to the appalling policies of the previous government’.

  Rumours and theories to explain the shock announcement began to spread immediately, and the atmosphere of conspiracy and semi-scandal was compounded when his resignation honours list (swiftly, though erroneously, nicknamed ‘the lavender list’) was published. Widely seen as repaying personal favours, no matter the calibre of those who were rewarded, the list was described by Benn as comprising ‘inadequate, buccaneering, sharp shysters’, though family favourite Mike Yarwood did manage to slip in between the industrialists and impresarios and secured an OBE. Despite the whispers of scandals yet to break, however, none stood up to the mildest of scrutiny, particularly after Wilson’s press secretary, Joe Haines, revealed that the resignation had long been planned. Had the 1970 election gone according to plan, Wilson would have stood down a couple of years into that parliament ‘so that he wasn’t just another defeated prime minister’. Haines added, ‘I think he had run out of ideas on what he could do for Britain.’ Bernard Donoughue expressed much the same sentiment in his diary: ‘He has nothing else to give: just like an old boxer shadow-boxing. He knows the moves and goes through the motions, but he has lost his punch and the appetite to fight.’

  On Wilson’s last day in office, Donoughue noted that the outgoing prime minister had ‘No regrets. No proud memories. No lasting traces. Ultimately, he sees himself, as he sees others, in his own words as “a ship that passes in the night”.’ And indeed he passed very quietly, slipping peacefully away into nonentity and making no attempt to build a position as an elder statesman of the party from which he had become so estranged. In what looked like an act of auto-Stalinism he airbrushed himself out of existence. However history might judge him in future years, the immediate impression was that he had simply ceased to be a part of politics; the waters closed above him and he was gone. Just a week after his departure, Benn wrote: ‘I saw Harold tonight wandering round the House and he has absolutely shrunk; it shows that office is something that builds up a man only if he is somebody in his own right. And Wilson isn’t.’

  7

  Opposition

  ‘I think I got something to say to you’

  MARGO LEADBETTER: The day of the woman is coming.

  John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, The Good Life (1976)

  JEFFREY FOURMILE: Once upon a time there was this golden-haired Thatcher, who was wise and good and had magical powers . . .

  Johnnie Mortimer and Brian Cooke, George and Mildred (1977)

  Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beasley Street.

  John Cooper Clarke, ‘Beasley Street’ (1980)

  In 1970 the Daily Mirror ran a competition to celebrate the role of working women, asking readers to send in a description of their experience of being female in the workplace. The prize was to be ‘the difference between her pay and a man’s rate for the same job for three years’, and the winner was Ivy Williams, a welder from Hemel Hempstead, who had been in her job for twenty-eight years and who earned 7s. 5½d. an hour, three-quarters of the wage of her male colleagues. As a means of illustrating the employment inequality of the sexes, at a time when over 40 per cent of married women had jobs, it could scarcely be improved upon.

  The rise of feminism – or women’s liberation, as it was then known – was one of the more far-reaching developments of the early 1970s, though inevitably it was one that attracted a great deal of suspicion in a society that was still male-dominated. ‘It only dawned on me recently but Englishmen don’t like women. It’s not British reticence or any of that baloney at all, it’s that they plain don’t like them,’ says the heroine of Dee Wells’s 1973 novel Jane. ‘To them, women are the enemy. Crazy things you have to humour along like drunks or village idiots and that you escape from every chance you get. That’s what soccer games and pubs and men-only colleges and those dirty old clubs on Pall Mall are for.’ Wells was an expatriate American journalist, married to the philosopher A.J. Ayer, and therefore perhaps moved in somewhat exclusive circles (her appearance at a party was once memorably described by Roy Strong as ‘all cleavage, like a vampire on her night off’, which did nothing to invalidate her argument), but there was no doubt that she touched on something of a raw nerve. This was a country in which, until forced to change its policy at the end of 1971, the Wimpy burger chain banned women from entering their premises after midnight unless they were accompanied by a man, on the grounds that only prostitutes would be out alone in public at such an hour.

  Much of the argument in Wells’s novel derived from Germaine Greer’s incendiary 1970 book The Female Eunuch. It wasn’t the first work of modern feminism, but it was the first to make a major impression on the British market and to become a best-seller, thanks to Greer’s own persona as the articulate, sexy incarnation of the underground, to her instantly quotable prose style, and to John Holmes’s startling illustration for the paperback cover: a female torso with handles on the hips, hanging empty like a bathing costume on a clothes rail. Greer went beyond the public position of women to examine the private realm of oppression and complicity, and in so doing changed thousands of lives; ‘The Female Eunuch dramatically altered what I believed and the way I led my life,’ testified Dale Spender, another Australian expatriate living in London. As she ranged freely and widely over literary criticism, personal experience and the politics of self-liberation, Greer’s idiosyncratic iconoclasm made her an atypical feminist, but her readability and her acu
te insights – particularly into the everyday marginalization of women – made her the most famous of them all. She was to retain that position for the remainder of the century, existing as the media shorthand for the women’s movement, even as feminism drifted further and further away from the flamboyant counter-culture from which she had emerged.

  Despite Greer’s analysis of family and sexual life, there was truth too in the memory of Labour MP Joe Ashton, looking back on the ’70s: ‘No one ever really doubted that it was women who ran every establishment from Buckingham Palace to the Rovers Return. Basil Fawlty never ran Fawlty Towers. Nor did Alf Garnett run his house in Wapping.’ His focus on soaps and sitcoms was entirely appropriate. The soap opera, which in those days primarily meant Coronation Street and Crossroads, was essentially a female genre, with the latter centred on the figure of Meg, played by Noele Gordon, who was voted Female TV Personality of the Year right through the decade. Coronation Street was even more the province of strong women, dominated by the likes of Annie Walker, Elsie Tanner, Hilda Ogden, Rita Fairclough and – above all – Ena Sharples. ‘A woman needs a good, strong voice,’ Ena once declared. ‘It makes up for lack of muscle.’ Similarly, a recurrent theme in sitcoms, from Love Thy Neighbour to The Good Life, was the solid common sense of the female characters, as contrasted to the foibles of the men; Sybil Fawlty may have been seen as a ball-breaking battle-axe by Basil, but she was almost always in the right, and her impatience with her incompetent, arrogant husband was entirely justified.

  These, however, were the traditional and accepted images of women in the domestic sphere. The increasing demand for a female voice in public politics was more confusing, and it spawned a spate of novels that showed the gender tables being turned. The exploitative end of the market included such titles as The Droop (1972) by Ian Rosse (a pseudonym of J.F. Straker), which concerned a worldwide outbreak of male impotence, and W*I*T*C*H (1971) by Jane Harman (a pseudonym of Terry Harknett), the blurb for which promised ‘hordes of bare-breasted, shaven-headed girls on motorcycles’, but which was mostly about a radical feminist group attempting to seize power and being defeated when ‘every decent, law-abiding woman’ mobilizes in opposition. Then there were two books by science fiction writer Edmund Cooper, Five to Twelve (1968) and Who Needs Men? (1972), which offered satirical portraits of future societies in which women had achieved the upper hand; indeed Who Needs Men?, set in the twenty-fifth century, after men had almost destroyed the world in a terrible war, sees the male population of Britain reduced to a few thousand outlaws in the Scottish Highlands, while the rest of the country has become exclusively female. Sometimes seen as anti-feminist, Cooper’s novels are in truth witty burlesques (a typical joke sees the renaming of Nelson’s Column as Germaine’s Needle) that reaffirm humanity in the face of doctrinaire attitudes. More immediate depictions of the rise of women to political prominence came in Pamela Kettle’s The Day of the Women (1969), which depicted a new all-female party, IMPULSE, sweeping to power in a general election, and in Walter Harris’s The Mistress of Downing Street (1972), which starts with the assassination of the prime minister and his replacement by his young widow, Viola Jones; both purported to show the first female prime minister.