Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  13

  Fringes

  ‘It’s coming some time, so maybe . . .’

  BENNY LEWIS: I had hoped that the younger members of the proletariat might have made a few changes. They seem to have given up though.

  Leslie Duxbury, Coronation Street (1972)

  ALAN: Look, the workers and the students must unite, right? We must link arms against the common enemy.

  RIGSBY: They won’t be linking arms with you. Not in those trousers.

  Eric Chappell, Rising Damp (1974)

  She had all the trendy ideas, men were destructive, society was polluting itself to death, our food was poisoned, war was coming in two minutes and our only hope was to kneel in front of hairy gurus from caves in India and find inner harmony.

  P.B. Yuill, Hazell and the Menacing Jester (1976)

  For the two big parties the rise of the National Front provided a worrying indication of how far their own support had slipped over recent years. In 1951 Labour and the Conservatives had between them been able to attract nearly 80 per cent of the electorate; by February 1974 this had fallen to a mere 55 per cent, hardly a ringing endorsement of the Westminster orthodoxy, and the establishment was beginning to get anxious. ‘A people drilled, dragooned and distracted into believing that there is no choice, that they are denied any real power to choose, can find themselves drifting into a target for extremists,’ warned Harold Wilson in a 1973 speech. ‘This is the danger, as democrats, that we could face in Britain, that we could see a lurch into fascism.’

  As the threat from the NF grew, and particularly as the party began occasionally to outperform the Liberals in by-elections, so the nervousness increased. In 1977 Nesta Wyn Ellis, a former Liberal candidate, wrote that Britain was displaying the preconditions necessary for fascism: ‘breakdown of traditional values, a militant working class/trade union caucus opposed to the capitalist status quo, monopoly capitalism (both state and private), economic crisis, high unemployment, state of war and therefore of emergency in relation to Ulster, the existence of the immigrant scapegoat, increasing powers of central government’. Such a society, she argued, ‘is especially threatening to a seemingly bewildered bourgeoisie of small shopkeepers, business people and professionals whose status and security are thus at risk’. And she concluded that a fascist movement might yet make serious headway, though for now the generalized disillusion ‘has taken the form of voting Liberal in England, SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales with increasing intensity in succeeding elections since 1955’.

  With a collapse in confidence in the mainstream, the 1970s did indeed prove fertile ground for fringe groups, both in politics and beyond. Some such began to transcend their position as fringe organizations in the period, as with the Liberals gaining nearly 20 per cent of the vote in February 1974, and the Scottish National Party later the same year topping 30 per cent in Scotland, though neither succeeded in overturning the iniquities of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Others, including the National Front and the Campaign for Social Democracy (founded by Dick Taverne, after he was deselected as a Labour MP), flourished but briefly and then disappeared, their place taken by others of a similar inclination. What they had in common, at least from a traditional perspective, was their appeal to that ‘bewildered bourgeoisie’ identified by Ellis. Jimmy Jack, secretary of Scottish TUC, was reported as saying in 1974 that ‘there was very little support for the Scottish National Party among the working class of Scotland; its adherents were mostly professional people, shopkeepers and small businessmen’. And, as home secretary Merlyn Rees saw it: ‘Welsh nationalism shows many of the traits of fascism.’

  Such comments reflected the establishment fear that nationalism could become a powerful threat to the Tory–Labour duopoly, and might ultimately lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom. These fears were not entirely groundless. A Scottish opinion poll in 1977 showed the SNP in the lead, with a clear margin over the Tories and Labour, and the following year the press became even more excited by the prospect of Scotland’s football team giving the cause of devolution a boost.

  Having qualified for the 1978 World Cup (unlike England), Scotland were drawn in what looked like a straightforward group from which they were considered sure to qualify, along with Holland, at the expense of Peru and Iran. And after that, with a team that included the likes of Kenny Dalglish, Joe Jordan and Archie Gemmill, who knew what might happen? The manager, Ally MacLeod, had promised to come home from Argentina with the trophy, and there were plenty who believed he might just do it, including the tens of thousands who put the official single, ‘Ole Ola’ by Rod Stewart, into the top 10. If they did win, warned the Daily Mail in a leader column whose jocular tone could not conceal a very real unease, ‘Scottish pride would be like distilled firewater. Hooched up on that, the nationalists could rampage to victory up there in any general election that followed.’ (The imagery of ‘rampaging’ was a veiled reference to the match played in the summer of 1977 at Wembley, when Scotland beat England 2–1 to win the Home Championship, and their fans celebrated by invading the pitch, ripping up large chunks of the turf and breaking the crossbar of one of the goals by swinging from it.) ‘With their lips Jim and Maggie may be shouting for Scotland,’ added the Mail. ‘But in their political hearts they’ll be rooting for those bonny outsiders from Peru and Iran.’ If so, then they were not to be let down, unlike the high expectations of Scottish fans which suffered a shattering blow; a loss to Peru and a draw with Iran meant that not even a 3–2 victory over Holland was enough for Scotland to progress beyond the group stages of the tournament.

  Even so, the issue of devolution dominated the last period of the Callaghan administration. Support for some form of separate legislatures in Scotland and Wales was by now running too high for the Labour government to ignore, while there was pressure too from its parliamentary partners in the Liberal Party, who were long-standing supporters: ‘Unlike the other two parties,’ Jeremy Thorpe had pledged in the 1970 election campaign, ‘I would see that Scotland and Wales had their own parliaments, running all domestic affairs.’ Even the Conservatives, while opposing devolution, were wary of sensibilities north of the border. Back in 1973, in the days of Heath, a proposed set of stamps commemorating great Britons had been amended at the last minute to remove Edward I (‘the Hammer of the Scots’) and to replace him with Henry V; to be on the safe side, Robert the Bruce was also included. And behind the scenes was the fear of another Ulster if some sort of concession were not made. ‘I don’t want them to turn to violence, of course,’ said Michael Foot, ‘but I think it’s quite likely.’

  And so the Scotland Act and the Wales Act of 1978 were passed, allowing for the creation of assemblies in Edinburgh and Cardiff that would take over the functions of the appropriate Whitehall departments, but only when and if referendums in the territories concerned showed a clear majority in favour. And, controversially, that was defined as entailing not simply a majority of those voting, but also the expressed support of 40 per cent of the entire electorate.

  This requirement, this one final hurdle for the nationalists to overcome, was not of the government’s making. Desperate to stay in office, Callaghan was keen to appease the MPs of the SNP and Plaid Cymru and to see the devolution proposals through with as few quibbles as possible, but there was considerable disquiet amongst his own backbenchers. In Wales Neil Kinnock, a rising star of Labour, became known for his vociferous denunciations of nationalism, even claiming that there was a ‘linguistic racism’ operating in the principality against non-Welsh-speaking children. Since the language question was of paramount importance to Plaid – the party’s first manifesto, written in 1925 by John Saunders Lewis, had insisted ‘We can aim at nothing less than to do away with the English language in Wales’ – it was not surprising that he became the target of nationalist attacks, including a 1977 pamphlet titled ‘Neil Kinnock and the Anti-Taffy League’. A more subtle approach to linguistic sensitivity was displayed in 1974 when Selwyn Lloyd, as sp
eaker of the House of Commons, allowed the two Plaid MPs to swear their oaths of allegiance in Welsh, so long as they also did so in English: ‘I thought that the two members concerned were slightly disappointed that I had deprived them of the chance of a public protest on behalf of the Welsh language,’ he chuckled.

  Also opposed to devolution was Tam Dalyell, who, as Labour MP for West Lothian, raised what Enoch Powell promptly dubbed the West Lothian Question: How could it be right to propose that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs sitting in a Westminster Parliament should be able to pass laws affecting the population of England but not their own constituents? And, as a corollary, what was the point of him representing a Scottish constituency if he couldn’t have any influence over domestic affairs there?

  When therefore an amendment was placed before Parliament calling for a mandate of 40 per cent of the electorate, there were many Labour MPs inclined to support the idea, seeing it as a reasonable prerequisite for such a major constitutional change, as well as being a way of snatching victory from the jaws of the nationalists. Thirty-four joined the Conservatives in the voting lobbies and ensured that the requirement was passed into law, despite the opposition of their own government. It was to prove a crucial decision in determining the subsequent fate of the Callaghan premiership, though the assumption was still that some form of devolution was probably inevitable and even perhaps, in some quarters, desirable. ‘Thank God they’re going independent,’ reflected Regan in The Sweeney. ‘We’ll be able to put that wall up again.’

  There was no equivalent to Plaid or the SNP in England, in terms either of philosophy – the National Front could hardly claim to be opposing a foreign ruling class – or of the cross-class alliances that the nationalists were beginning to build. For, despite the jibes of the political mainstream, the Welsh and Scottish parties were not simply the vehicles for a supposedly quasi-fascist petit bourgeoisie, but could draw on broad coalitions of support in the way that any successful party in an electoral democracy must. The same could not have been said of the NF; unlike Oswald Mosley’s movement forty years earlier, no intellectuals were attracted to its cause, no plausible leader emerged from within, and it never broke out from its heartlands in isolated sections of the working class and lower middle class.

  Precisely the opposite was sometimes alleged of their rivals on the far left, where intellectuals were said to be thicker on the ground than workers.

  The story of the British extra-parliamentary left in the ’70s was essentially that of the rise of Trotskyism and the associated decline of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the long-standing voice of the far left, but now seen as being tainted by its allegiance to Moscow, particularly after the Soviet Union crushed the liberalizing Czech regime in 1968. Inspired by the anti-Vietnam campaigns and by events in France in May of the same year – when student demonstrations briefly spread into a general strike, before normal service was resumed and Charles de Gaulle won a resounding election victory – a series of small Trotskyist factions began to see their profile raised in Britain, attracting a new generation of activists, most of them the children of working-class families, many of them beneficiaries of the expansion of tertiary education. When Ruth Rendell’s fictional detective Chief Inspector Wexford encounters a youth talking about revolution, he reflects that he ‘hadn’t actually heard anyone speak seriously of the promised revolution as a foreseeable thing since he was himself a teenager in the early ’30s’.

  The first to benefit from the new mood was the International Marxist Group, a relatively recent creation that was principally associated in the public mind with Tariq Ali: the former president of the Oxford Union edited the party newspapers Black Dwarf and Red Mole, and his connections with the likes of John Lennon and Mick Jagger ensured that he was always good copy. Coming up fast behind, however, and soon to overtake, were a trio of veteran Trotskyists – Ted Grant, Tony Cliff and Gerry Healy – who had in the 1940s been comrades in the Revolutionary Communist Party, but who had by now each founded his own organization, respectively Militant, the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Revolutionary Party. (These were their best-known incarnations, though all three groups had passed through other names en route.) These were the factions that would inherit the media’s red scares from the traditional Communists, though the numbers involved were less impressive than the coverage they received. One assessment claimed that in 1970 the orthodox communists outnumbered Trotskyists by around twelve to one, and that by the end of the decade this lead had shrunk to two to one, while the Institute for the Study of Conflict estimated there were 15,000 members of the various Trotskyist groups. Though it was certainly an overstatement, this was more than in any other Western nation but still a far cry from any kind of mass movement. And even if accepted, these figures were, in terms of total membership of the Marxist left, no real advance on where the CPGB had been in the late ’40s. Nor was it clear that the public at large was following the heated debates on the far left about whether, for example, the Soviet Union was a workers’ state, a degenerated workers’ state or a form of state capitalism, or that it cared either one way or the other.

  If it did care, then it would have been hard to tell. For as far as the media coverage was concerned, Trotskyism introduced just one major new element to British politics: the tactic of entryism, whereby the members of a revolutionary group would join the Labour Party for the purposes of gaining recruits and of promoting their message on a wider scale than would otherwise be available to them. All three of the major Trotskyist factions engaged in the practice at one time or other, but the most successful by far was Militant, the only major grouping still within Labour in the ’70s.

  Recruiting a predominantly young membership, often without family or even employment commitments, Militant made some headway in moribund party branches of the Labour Party, where meetings of the general management committee (GMC) of a constituency could be turned into ideological workshops to the exclusion of all others. ‘Making the GMC a place you wouldn’t go to unless you were a fanatic became a very commonplace thing,’ reflected Shirley Williams. ‘Resolutions going on until one o’clock in the morning. Voting down standing orders.’ Even Tony Benn, who devoted virtually all his waking hours to politics, had similar experiences of being bored to within an inch of his life. ‘The GMC went on for three hours and was entirely dominated by Bryan Beckingham, Pete Hammond and others from the Militant Tendency,’ he wrote wearily in his diary. ‘They moved endless resolutions. Their arguments are sensible and they make perfectly good radical points but they do go on interminably in their speeches. They have a certain pleading manner which just infuriates the others.’

  The more public attitude of Benn and the non-Marxist left towards Trotskyist groups did nothing to reassure those on the right who regarded all of them as being virtually synonymous. When a report on Militant’s infiltration of the party was produced in 1977, a subcommittee of the national executive committee, including Michael Foot and Eric Heffer, was appointed to decide upon a course of action. ‘The NEC has declared against witch hunts,’ it concluded. ‘It is because of our principles of democratic socialism that the NEC urges tolerance and believes that Trotskyist views cannot be beaten by disciplinary action.’ For those who remembered the bitterness of past expulsions, including that of Foot himself, there was a logic here; for others there was simply bafflement: if a witch hunt uncovered genuine witches, then why not prosecute? And Militant members were undeniably witches, their allegiance resting not with the Labour Party but with their own leadership, as Benn admitted: ‘people thought Militant was a piggy-back operation, riding on the back of the party and building up its own organization – which is true’. He too, however, opposed the expulsion of Militant members from Labour.

  The perspective from the far left saw Benn as a potentially useful figure. He recorded a speech by Militant founder Ted Grant in which ‘He paid tribute to me for the work I had done in trying to introduce more democracy into the Labour Party.
He said the spirit of democracy and discussion was a great tradition and the Militant Tendency could only gain from it.’ But Benn also argued that he was democracy’s best chance against such extremists. ‘The reason I am bitterly attacked by the ultra-left is because they know I am really the only guy who might save the parliamentary system by making the necessary reforms.’ This was probably a fair assessment. The Trotskyist groups may have grown during the second half of the ’70s, but to nowhere near the same degree as did the Labour left in the same period, when it looked possible, perhaps even probable, that Benn would inherit the party. In the 1930s the fear of fascism had been so great that any idealistic young person, from Denis Healey to Alfred Sherman, was likely to join the Communist Party, but now it was Labour that attracted the future generation of leaders; Charles Clarke, later to become home secretary in Tony Blair’s government, was elected president of the National Union of Students in 1975, and though he described himself as ‘a Marxist to the left of Tony Benn’ he was still well within the Labour fold.

  The chief problem that the Trotskyist left faced was its ultimate unattractiveness. It enjoyed limited success recruiting amongst students, some of whom found talk of permanent revolution and transitional demands intellectually stimulating, but its ability to build sustainable structures on the shop floor was less impressive. And a key element in that failure was the left’s lack of cultural connection with the working class. ‘Come off it,’ says the hero of Anthony Burgess’s 1985 to a socialist intellectual. ‘You don’t like the majority. You don’t like beer, football pools, darts.’ The reality could be even more dour. As the actor Corin Redgrave became increasingly fixated on his membership of the WRP, and began cutting down on his non-party socializing, his wife protested that she liked mixing with people who made her laugh. ‘Humour,’ he retorted, apparently with a straight face, ‘is the last bastion of the bourgeoisie.’ There was some truth in a Sunday Telegraph report on the far left that concluded it would never make much headway in Britain because here ‘people are intensely suspicious of intellectualized social theory’. This was, it claimed, why the mainstream parties relied on ‘good old British common sense’, a tendency described as ‘the most antirevolutionary instinct in history’.