Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Nor, by the winter of 1978–79, could the government, which was busily paddling itself into the most dangerous of waters. It was taken as read that Callaghan would call an election for the autumn of 1978, when most commentators felt that he had a fair chance of winning. He chose not to do so, having made his own calculations which suggested the outcome would be a hung parliament with the Tories having the largest number of seats. ‘Why run the risk of a very doubtful election result in October 1978 if we could convert it into a more convincing majority in 1979?’ he reflected. ‘Moreover, the polls showed that as the country began to understand what we were trying to do, an increasing number liked what they saw.’

  In retrospect, it was a miscalculation even greater than that of Edward Heath when he called an unnecessary election in 1974. And it was compounded by the decision to go for another year of a wages policy. The selected figure this time was a maximum 5 per cent pay rise across the board, an arbitrary and unachievable target that enjoyed no support whatsoever within the union movement and had not been agreed by the TUC. Even as Callaghan was arguing for the new proposal at the Labour Party conference that autumn, workers at Ford were striking for 30 per cent. Buoyed by the company’s declared profits of £246m in 1977 for the British arm of its operations, Ford’s management were inclined to negotiate a deal, and after a nine-week strike did precisely that, settling for 17 per cent. The policy having thus been blown out of the water almost before it was launched, the government was clearly in for a stormy winter. Just how stormy did not become clear until the following year.

  It was, to start with, bitterly cold, the coldest January since 1963. Weeks of frost, freezing fog, hailstorms, sleet and snow were followed in early February by a combination of a sudden thaw and heavy rain that produced widespread flooding. And then came yet more blizzards. In Scotland there were reports of beer freezing in pub cellars and of frozen waves in Oban harbour as the temperature plunged to –25° Celsius, while the whole country’s transport system struggled to cope. Heath had at least been lucky with the weather in 1973–74; Callaghan was not. ‘Let those who possess industrial muscle or monopoly power resolve not to abuse their great strength,’ he had pleaded in his New Year’s message. ‘Individual greed and disregard for the well-being of others can undermine and divide our society.’ His call fell on deaf ears and the New Year started instead with strikes by the drivers of oil tankers and lorries. A series of one-day stoppages by rail workers and even by short-haul British Airways pilots added to the problems.

  Within days there was a fuel shortage, with just one petrol station reported open in Liverpool and with prices inflating daily from the existing 75p a gallon up to £2 and even £3 in some places. The AA warned drivers not to undertake long journeys: ‘They probably won’t be able to get back, because the situation is grim in many areas.’ Flying pickets sealed off the ports to lorries coming from abroad and fears of imminent food shortages sparked a wave of panic buying, many taking advantage of the deep-freezes that had become part of every middle-class household over the previous few years. Two million workers were threatened with being laid off if the strikes continued, pigs were reported to be resorting to cannibalism as food supplies to farms ran low, supermarkets began rationing essentials such as butter and sugar, and newspapers shrank in size as supplies of newsprint dwindled.

  Callaghan missed the onset of all this, being out of the country on a six-day trip to a summit meeting of Western leaders, a meeting which – to add insult to injury – was being held on the agreeably warm Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. His absence was duly noted, generally with an appropriately British reference to the weather. ‘Britain could well be on the brink of a disaster that will make Ted’s three-day week seem like a golden age,’ raged the Sun. ‘Meanwhile Jim yawns lazily on his tropic isle.’

  He returned on 10 January to be met at the airport by journalists demanding to hear his comments on the mounting chaos in the country. Adopting the reassuring, emollient attitude that had served him so well over the years, he dismissed such concerns as being parochial in their vision: ‘I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos,’ he said cheerily. For once he got it completely and stupidly wrong, misjudging the mood of a freezing, fed-up nation with catastrophic consequences.

  CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? mocked the headline in the Sun the next day, with withering scorn; ‘Sun-tanned premier Jim Callaghan breezed back into Britain yesterday and asked: Crisis? What Crisis?’ And, although Callaghan had not uttered the phrase, had not even used the word ‘crisis’, the expression attached itself to him instantly and came to symbolize his premiership in the popular memory, his apparent dislocation from reality, in much the same way as Marie Antoinette will for ever be remembered as saying ‘Let them eat cake.’ (She, of course, was also misquoted.) For several days the Sun ran a ticker tape across the top of its news pages with the words WHAT CRISIS? repeated over and over again, and it passed into other newspapers so that within a couple of weeks it had become the accepted shorthand to refer to the alleged indifference of the Labour movement to the people’s suffering. The formulation also became the key to Mike Yarwood’s impression of Callaghan: ‘I portrayed him as permanently believing that everything in the garden was lovely – “Strike? What strike?”’

  The phrase, however, was not new. It had been used as a newspaper headline as far back as December 1973 when the Daily Mail had run a pair of linked articles by the humorists Frank Muir and Benny Green, trying to have some fun in a previous winter of industrial disruption. Even the Sun itself had used the same headline in a 1974 article, trailing a television programme in which David Dimbleby looked at American portrayals of contemporary Britain. And since then it had turned up as the title of the fourth album by the progressive-pop band Supertramp, which reached the top 20 in late 1975. The cover showed a man wearing bathing trunks and sitting in a deckchair under a sunshade, while behind him sprawled a bleak, grey industrial landscape.

  In fact, the phrase derived ultimately from Kenneth Ross’s screenplay for the 1973 movie adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal. The terrorist group who are planning to assassinate Charles de Gaulle allocate to a female member the task of becoming the mistress of a senior official, so that they may keep track of the government’s movements. He stumbles into her apartment one evening, muttering his apologies for being late. ‘I didn’t go out,’ she says, ‘I just sat waiting for you to call.’ ‘It was impossible,’ he replies, ‘there was a crisis on.’ At which stage she utters the immortal words: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ ‘Never mind,’ he answers, as though he can expunge the phrase from the record. But she continues to ask as she begins her seduction of him.

  If ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ had already been common currency back in the final throes of the Heath government, what of the other phrase that became indelibly associated with those early months of 1979: the winter of discontent? Since it came from Shakespeare (the opening line of Richard III), the expression was already part of the language, so that, for example, Roy Jenkins could employ it as an image in a 1973 speech bemoaning the Labour Party’s poor performance in by-elections: ‘There is something very wrong indeed with an opposition party which in mid-term and in the winter of the government’s discontent cannot do better than this.’ In terms of Fleet Street and industrial disputes, however, it too came to prominence during Heath’s darkest days: THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT read the headline in London’s Evening Standard in February 1974, shortly before the election that saw the Conservatives removed from office. Again, though, it was the Sun that revived and popularized the expression in early 1979, and from then on it became the standard expression for Callaghan’s last winter.

  Thus did 1978–79 adopt the linguistic imagery – and eclipse the memory – of 1973–74, so that the Labour Party became associated with all the ills of 1970s Britain, as though the pre-Thatcher Tories had never really existed, or rather as though they had been closet so
cialists all along. In future years the phrase ‘the winter of discontent’ would frequently prompt confused memories of the three-day week, alongside the genuine events of the Callaghan era.

  Those events were to take a turn for the worse as January 1979 wore on. The transport strikes seemed like a return to the bad old days of all-powerful union leaders, especially when the lorry drivers’ dispute was made official by the TGWU, a fact that was damaging enough to a Labour government whose perceived job was to work in partnership with the unions, but there was more to come. The campaigns for pay rises of up to 40 per cent in private industry emboldened those in the public sector. Strikes by the low-paid employees of local authorities began to kick in by the end of the month, and suddenly it became not merely a grim acceptance of food and petrol shortages but something much more personal and emotive. ‘It was a nightmare,’ recalled Labour cabinet minister Peter Shore. ‘No one, in their wildest dreams, could have predicted such collective barbarity.’ Rubbish again began piling up in public places, schools closed for weeks on end for want of a caretaker, and hospitals found themselves at the mercy of picket lines composed of porters and cleaning staff.

  This latter was not entirely new. The previous year Tory MP Norman Tebbit had found, to his fury, that his wife was refused treatment at their local hospital because ‘some NHS maintenance workers were in dispute and were refusing to allow the admission of new “non-urgent” cases. It was their clinical judgement which over-rode that of my wife’s doctors.’ Now such stories became commonplace. So extreme did the disputes over medical care become that one orthopaedic consultant, Patrick Chesterman – sick of seeing patients turned away by pickets – staged a one-day protest of his own, refusing to treat trade unionists.

  But still it became worse, with London’s ambulance staff staging a work-to-rule. Even those who regarded themselves as sympathetic to Labour were feeling desperate. ‘The piles of uncollected rubbish are now being blown apart by the wind and central Soho looks like a tip from which buildings emerge,’ wrote Michael Palin in his diary, while Peter Hall went further: ‘We are a society of greed and anarchy: no honour, no responsibility, no pride. I sound like an old reactionary, which I’m not, but what we have now isn’t socialism, it’s fascism with those who have power injuring those who do not.’

  And then came the image that, above all others, was to dominate the folk memory of that winter. THEY WON’T EVEN LET US BURY OUR DEAD shuddered the front page of the Daily Mail in disbelief. The story concerned the gravediggers and crematorium workers employed by Liverpool City Council, who as members of NUPE were on strike with their colleagues. The consequence, it was reported, was that some two hundred corpses had had to be embalmed and were waiting in a temporary mortuary in a disused factory, while the area medical officer suggested that burial at sea might yet become an option. The absolute anger that the story provoked was sufficient to convince the strikers to return to work, while in Sedgefield, it was reported, a similar dispute also ended when the bereaved members of two families themselves dug graves for their deceased relatives. Thereafter, no account of the period was complete without reference to the story. ‘Our society was sick – morally, socially and economically,’ commented Thatcher in 1981. ‘Children were locked out of school; patients were prevented from having hospital treatment; the old were left unattended in their wheelchairs; the dead were not buried; and flying pickets patrolled the motorways.’

  But even without the gravediggers, the events of January and February 1979 were a disaster for Callaghan. ‘The sheer viciousness and nastiness of unions such as NUPE in the hospital service was displayed day after day on every TV screen in the land,’ wrote Tebbit in his memoirs, ‘as the sick, the old and little children were kicked around in a dirty fight between the government and the trades union wings of the Labour Party.’ For the first time, since these were disputes in services rather than manufacturing, it was the most vulnerable in society who could be reported as being hurt by industrial militancy – this was viewed not as a class but a moral issue. A Gallup poll found that the unions had reached a level of unpopularity unknown since such surveys had first started forty years earlier; 44 per cent even thought the very existence of unions was a bad thing. In the opinion polls, meanwhile, the Tories had opened up a nineteen-point lead over Labour, overturning the three-point lead Labour had held as recently as December.

  For the one person who had a good winter of discontent was Margaret Thatcher. She had been preaching about the follies of governmental pay policies – the immediate cause of the current disruption – and against the abuse of trade union powers for some time, and now it appeared as though her stance was vindicated. MORI found that 91 per cent of trade unionists supported her view that any strike should be preceded by a compulsory postal ballot of union members. Although her own employment spokesman, Jim Prior, and many other Heathite Tories disagreed with her entire stance, she had some support from her future chancellor Geoffrey Howe, who argued that union reform was essential to ensure that ‘it is much less easy for so many of their leaders to continue the pursuit of socialism, regardless of the wishes of their members’. She pressed on, calling for social security benefits for strikers to be abolished. The tougher she sounded, the more public support she got. ‘If someone is confronting our essential liberties and inflicting injury and hardship on the sick, the elderly and children,’ she declared defiantly, ‘then, by God, I will confront them.’

  A year earlier Peter Shore had warned that she was a serious threat, capable of connecting with the public on a gut level: ‘Mrs Thatcher is beginning to reflect a genuine English nationalist feeling, a deep feeling about the English and how they see themselves in terms of their own history.’ And Tony Benn had agreed: ‘What she is doing is long-range shelling deep behind our lines, attacking things we had assumed were already part of the consensus. There is a danger she will be political and we will be managerial.’ Now she was indeed responding politically, and Labour didn’t look capable even of being managerial. The 5 per cent pay policy was being revised upwards almost daily, and no matter what figure was arrived at, no one believed any more that it stood a chance of sticking. Freed from the restraints of the previous three years, there was a stampede of millions who had seen their wages fall behind prices and were determined to remedy the situation, heedless – it appeared – of political, personal and social consequence. In the ten months that led up to the general election of May 1979, some 13.5 million days were lost to strikes, more than in any single year of any Labour government, and comparable to the rates of industrial action in the early days of Heath. Now it was genuinely becoming a commonplace question: What was the point of a Labour government? ‘We’ve stumbled,’ admitted Callaghan in a TV interview, and if that hardly did justice to the situation, it was at least a franker admission of the situation than that offered by many on the left, who insisted that the crisis was largely the creation of a hostile media. ‘If anything was ever talked up,’ commented Dennis Skinner, years later, ‘it was that so-called winter of discontent.’ Benn had much the same perspective, noting in his diary: ‘We are in an atmosphere of siege and crisis which the media are continuing to play up.’

  If trade union militancy was the backdrop to the coming election, the immediate cause was the return of the nationalist question. The referendums on devolved government that had been promised in the Scotland Act and the Wales Act were held on 1 March 1979 with mixed results. In Wales the proposal was simply thrown out, by a majority of four to one of those voting, while in Scotland a narrow majority (51.6 per cent) voted in favour of devolution. This was not, however, anywhere near enough to meet the requirement that 40 per cent of the entire electoral roll should support the move, and both Acts were subsequently repealed by Parliament, provoking fury amongst nationalist MPs and precipitating the downfall of the Callaghan administration.

  The Conservative Party tabled a motion of no confidence in the government, hoping that all the minor parties would now rally t
o their side. And on 28 March, a packed House of Commons heard Michael Foot wind up the debate in one of the great parliamentary speeches, made all the more memorable for being also heard by the nation, full radio broadcasts of the House having commenced the previous year. Mocking both Thatcher and David Steel (the Lib-Lab pact had come to an end), he described her ‘leading her troops into battle snugly concealed behind a Scottish nationalist shield, with the boy David holding her hand’, and he warned the nationalists that they would suffer at the polls should they side against the government. It was all in vain, for the opposition parties held firm. By a single vote the Commons declared that they had no confidence in the government, and a general election was duly called, to be held on 3 May 1979, the only time in the century that an administration had fallen on such a vote.

  Going into that election, some on the Labour side took comfort from the fact that Callaghan was still far ahead of Thatcher in the polls when it came to individual popularity, forgetting perhaps that incumbent prime ministers, being familiar figures, generally do have the edge over untried leaders of the opposition. Others, most notably Tony Benn, were outraged by the way that Callaghan exercised a personal veto over the contents of the manifesto, striking out – in particular – any commitment to the abolition of the House of Lords. And even then, he ‘never mentioned the manifesto at all’, instead concentrating on his own personal appeal. Here was another crime to be added to the charge sheet being compiled by those who felt that the party lacked internal democracy. But even if the Lords commitment had been included, it is hard to see how it could have swung over sufficient votes.