by David Renton
Numerous voices on the right maintained that behind the industrial militancy of the unions stood some kind of Communist conspiracy. As Rigsby put it in Rising Damp, ‘Don’t you know what’s behind these strikes? All this political unrest? Russian gold!’ Fears of Communist subversion of politics and industry were widely shared, among mainstream Conservatives as well as supporters of the Front:
John Davies, Heath’s former industry minister, told his children that this might be the last Christmas they would be able to enjoy. Heath himself ‘relied heavily for advice’ on his top civil servant, Sir William Armstrong; by the end of January 1974 Armstrong was talking wildly of coups and coalitions. The head of the CBI tells how, ‘We listened to a lecture on how Communists were infiltrating everything. They might even be infiltrating the room he was in.’10
Yet the idea of an imminent Labour-Communist insurgency was in every way at odds with the increasingly moderate instincts of both parties. Labour had been elected in 1964 on promises of national renewal; a ‘new Britain’ could be made in the white heat of what Harold Wilson promised would be a new ‘scientific revolution’. Labour was shaped by its defeats in the 1950s and consciously subordinating its cloth-cap electorate in favour of a new potential audience of middle-class voters, the sort of people who in previous elections might have been tempted to vote for the Liberals. From the mid-1960s onwards, voices could be heard on the left warning that Labour was losing the support of working-class voters who saw the party as too moderate. In 1968, for example, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre gave a broadcast on BBC radio, listing the ways in which Wilson’s government had disappointed its supporters. Labour had become obsessed with the task of conquering inflation. It railed against unofficial strikes. It adopted unemployment as a positive measure to be used to combat wage demands. Labour was silent in face of calls for home rule for Scotland and the party was also increasingly hostile to welfare beneficiaries. These moves needed to be seen as part of a single effort to reorient the Labour Party away from its roots. ‘If I am right,’ Macintyre mused, ‘what we are experiencing [is] not just another swing of the pendulum . . . but a permanent shift of the working class, perhaps not merely away from the Labour Party but even from the electoral system.’11
Three years later, Peter Sedgwick, a psychologist and a former activist in the New Left of the 1950s, argued that the institutions of the British left were failing to satisfy their social base and declining in consequence. Sedgwick contrasted the respect with which hundreds of thousands of workers would have viewed Labour MPs as recently as the early 1950s with the contempt that was felt twenty years later. Recalling a march in 1955, when thousands of trade unionists had gathered with their banners outside Parliament to protest against German rearmament, Sedgwick wrote:
nowadays you would not get a militant lobby like that, simply because very few workers would have enough faith in Parliament to take a day off and come down to London to waste their time and breath. The streets of London are held now less often by workers than by bands of middle-class radical youth, wave after wave of whom has known its brief hour of rebellion, before graduating into private careers and private opinions. The working class cannot graduate.12
The Labour Party won the two general elections of 1974. Labour left-wingers Tony Benn and Michael Foot joined the Cabinet, while the TUC was brought into contact with the government. Yet the number of strikes fell, before rallying briefly in winter 1978–1979. Labour reduced spending on public services. As expenditure fell, inequality rose. The period of the Wilson-Callaghan government became a time of sharp popular disillusionment, paving the way for the Conservatives’ victory in 1979.
Giving the Marx Memorial Lecture in March 1978, Eric Hobsbawm, historian and leading theoretician of the Communist Party of Great Britain, warned that Britain was changing. For a hundred years, the United Kingdom had been a uniquely proletarian society with very few rural and hardly any white-collar workers but no longer. As recently as 1964, two-thirds of British people had worked in manual occupations; by 1976, this had shrunk to barely half. This proportion, he warned, would fall further in the years to come. Hobsbawm feared that what he called ‘the peculiar structure of British trade unionism’ was already proving inadequate to the demise of large manufacturing workplaces, the rise of the public sector and the long-term dependence of millions of people on social security.13
The greatest factor in explaining the mood of working-class disenchantment with Labour was the rise in unemployment. As a result of Heath’s efforts in 1972–1973, unemployment had fallen to a figure of little more than half a million. It rose again in 1973 but not to its previous level. As late as January 1975, there were still only 678,000 people registered as without work. By the end of the year, however, this number had risen to 1,129,000. Throughout 1976, unemployment remained over a million. In December 1976, the jobless figure was up again to 1,273,000. Such persistent mass unemployment had not been seen in Britain since the 1930s.
At first, Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey let it be known that he planned to reduce unemployment. As late as November 1974, he complained that if the Tories had their way a million people would lose their jobs, a prospect he described as ‘morally obscene’. By April 1975, however, inflation was running at 33 per cent, more than five times higher than the equivalent in France, Italy, or West Germany. Healey responded by reinventing himself as a convert to ‘monetarism’, the ideological weapon of the right within the Conservative Party. Public spending was cut from 46 per cent in 1976 to under 40 per cent two years later. Taxes for the richest were cut from 70 to 65 per cent. Healey insisted that no employer should concede to a pay rise above 4.5 per cent. For the first time in post-war British life, the newspapers began to report instances of profitable companies shedding thousands of employees, such as textile giant Courtaulds, which made 20,000 staff redundant between 1972 and 1975, during three years of repeated record profits.
In July 1978 and in a sharp piece of political opportunism, the Conservatives produced a poster showing a line of the supposed unemployed waiting in a queue (the men and women photographed were in fact well-heeled volunteers from Hendon Young Conservatives) under the headline, ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. The papers made the image ubiquitous. ‘We’d have been drummed out of office’, Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher maintained, ‘if we’d had this level of unemployment.’14
Sarah Cox and Robert Golden described the impact of youth unemployment:
Young kids feel there is no harm adding to the ugliness around them, school leavers, rejected the adult world of work, vent their frustration on their surroundings. What else is there for them? . . . There is nowhere to go, nothing to do.15
Mass redundancies had a catastrophic effect on the labour movement. The places where jobs were lost (larger workplaces, heavy industry, the North) were Labour’s strongholds. In winter 1978–1979, Dave Widgery, anti-fascist writer and East End doctor, complained that
Whole regions of Britain are slipping quietly off the industrial map . . . British Leyland, Dunlop, Triang, Massey Ferguson, Singers, British Shipbuilding have announced major closures. Go to Liverpool or Wigan or Skelmersdale and see the bleakness in the streets and the despair in the faces.16
Because you were there
All these processes were the context to the upsurge of racism against migrants that was visible as the decade wore on. The 1970s were not a decade of mass immigration: in every single year except 1979, more people left the UK than settled here. Yet large numbers of British people had still not come to terms with the reality of Commonwealth migration which had begun in 1948 with the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush and continued until Labour’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. At the end of the Second World War, the white British had been the rulers of the world; now they had to share even their own country with their former subjects. According to the sociologists Robert Miles and Anne Phizacklea, ‘New Commonwealth immigrants come from former British colonies, they are the “nativ
es” who were conquered and their arrival in Britain serves to symbolise the decline of the British Empire and current economic ills.’17 The political psychologist Michael Billig’s interviews with supporters of the National Front record their claims that black people had lower intelligence than whites. They thought that Africans and Asians were ungrateful for the gift of empire and incapable of developing their own culture. They maintained that black people were ‘taking over’ Britain. In the words of two of his sources:
[I]f we’d left them to it . . . they’d be swinging about the trees, eating coconuts and things and dancing around fires and whatever. Everything that the black man has got he owes to the white man.
It is frightening to think that these strange people should be massing all around you all the time and doing things contrary to your culture . . . and not conforming or anything and not trying to live in peace with us in any way and just sticking in their separate cliques.18
At the end of the War, all British subjects (i.e. citizens of the UK or of its colonies) had enjoyed the right to enter and remain in the country. It was not so much the law which prevented the inhabitants of India or Tanzania from moving to London but the time and expense of travel. The Empire Windrush’s 1948 journey from Jamaica to London lasted four weeks. But as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, these practical barriers were reduced. By 1962, the year in which the film Dr No showed James Bond flying from London to Jamaica, the journey could be done in just 36 hours.19
The entitlement of all British subjects, both black and white, to travel at will remained the position in law until the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962.20 The 1962 Act was supposed to be a temporary measure which would last for no more than five years. It distinguished between UK citizens (people born in the UK or with a passport issued in the UK), who were protected from immigration control and Commonwealth citizens (defined by their holding of a passport issued outside the UK) who were not. After 1962, only the former retained the right to remain in Britain. As for the latter, they could travel to and settle in the United Kingdom only if they held employment vouchers from the Ministry of Labour, were students, members of the armed forces, or could support themselves and their dependent without working. The impact of the legislation was also softened to some extent by the terms of various independence treaties, including those which the UK made with Kenya and Uganda, which protected the UK citizenship of the country’s white and Asian minorities.
After 1964, Harold Wilson’s Labour government sought to deal with the problem of racist hostility to immigrants in two ways. A further Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 was introduced, converting the temporary 1962 measures into permanent barriers to further immigration. After the 1968 Act, Commonwealth citizens would have the right to enter the UK only if they had a parent or grandparent with British citizenship. This was the ‘drawbridge’ moment at which mass Commonwealth migration to the UK ended. Yet while immigration policy had been settled along racial lines, the government insisted that no one else in Britain should discriminate. A Race Relations Act was also passed, giving the Race Relations Board powers to act against discrimination in goods, facilities and services.
The demand that black British people, many of whom were ‘only’ first- or second-generation immigrants, should have equal status with white people struck millions of whites as the most grotesque infringement of their rights. This was the theme of Enoch Powell’s April 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Delivered in Powell’s clipped academic tones, coldly, with its author looking pale and clutching at his script, the message was that any laws to protect black people in Britain from racial discrimination would be a gross injustice to the white majority. The Race Relations Act, Powell insisted, would make whites an underclass in their own country: ‘The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.’
Speaking to an audience who had been watching over the last two weeks the news from America, where the murder of Martin Luther King had let to riots in a dozen US cities, Powell was not shy of warning of the threat of black militancy: ‘That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here.’
In Britain and in America, Powell maintained, when blacks and Asians pretended to ask for equality, they were lying. They were not in search of equal status but rather the creation of a new racial hierarchy where they would enjoy all the privileges which under the British Empire had been reserved for whites alone:
For these dangerous and divisive elements, the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided.
This fear of domination provided the context to Powell’s warning of civil unrest: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’21
The Conservative leader Edward Heath, rightly perceiving Powell’s speech as a bid for the leadership of the party, dismissed him from the shadow Cabinet. In the week that followed Enoch Powell’s removal, there were several marches in his support and other signs that hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people agreed with him. Some twenty workplaces, including the Smithfield meat market, witnessed unofficial walkouts in support of Powell. The largest of these racist strikes occurred on the London docks and was led by Harry Pearman, a supporter of the Christian anti-Communist campaign, Moral Rearmament. The strike movement among the dockers spread from the wharves in Poplar to Wapping and from there to Deptford, Southwark and Bermondsey, with perhaps a third of London’s 20,000 dockers joining walkouts calling for Powell’s reinstatement.22
At the time of Powell’s speech, Micky Fenn was member of the Communist Party. Fenn describes how, in a fit of desperation, his fellow Marxists suggested that they could disarm the increasing support for racism by calling a mass meeting. The Communists were worried that without outside help they would fail to persuade their fellow workers. Accordingly, they settled on the expedient of inviting two priests, one Anglican and one Catholic, to put a message of universal brotherhood against racism. The dockers were not impressed:
Danny Lyons, member of the Communist Party . . . called a meeting. It wasn’t that well attended – say five, six hundred people. But he got this priest to go forward to the stage. And that was like a fire just going out, embers dying off and someone chucking a can of petrol over it and it blowing up. And my blokes were really, really sick, because they had never had a situation in the dock when anybody came from outside intervening in our affairs. Anyway, it completely flared up and then they said they’re going to have a march. It was the only time I felt really ashamed to be a docker and when I watched it on the television I felt really sick, I mean it was disgraceful.23
A young Northumbria-born socialist Jim Nichol was working as a full-timer for another left-wing group, the International Socialists. In 1968, he drove IS’s one docker Terry Barrett to the same meeting. ‘Terry was magnificent,’ Nichol recalls:
he said, ‘If you stand with Powell you’re standing with the bosses.’ Other dockers threw coins at him as he spoke. When the motion was put to a vote, the left got just five votes. Terry sobbed afterwards. It nearly broke the guy.
Another anti-fascist, Dave Widgery, was a medical student at the time of Powell’s speech. He happened upon one of the dockers’ gatherings outside Parliament and was struck by the quiet dignity with which the dockers waited for their hero, how willing they were to put up with Powell’s ‘authority and arrogance’. In the days that followed, Widgery was teaching an evening class for young docker
s, ‘Powell had entered a vacuum. The dockers were already pissed off with Labour. They had no traditional loyalties like their parents. They were fairly cynical about unions but extremely class-conscious. The Left had no influence on them.’24
A second moment of racial antagonism occurred in 1972, with the immigration of Asians from Uganda, formerly a British colony, which had been independent only since 1962. Its first leader, Milton Obote, was regarded by the British as insufficiently anti-Soviet and they welcomed his ouster in a 1971 army coup. Obote’s replacement Idi Amin was invited on a state visit to Britain and The Telegraph described him as a ‘staunch friend of Britain’.25 Yet by 1972, Amin’s language had changed and he soon came to be seen as the very embodiment of the type that Powell had warned against, the black leader dominating all around him. In August 1972, Amin instructed his country’s 6,000 Asian citizens to leave Uganda within ninety days. But they were British passport holders. Edward Heath and his ministers were horrified at the prospect of allowing in such a number of migrants. Heath’s special envoy Geoffrey Rippon offered the Asians £2,000 (later reduced to £750) if they would renounce their British passports. But the offer received few takers. Amin brought the discussion repeatedly back to his country’s colonial past, telling journalists, ‘This is British imperialism. I am not going to listen to imperialist advice.’ There was a protest march against the Ugandan Asians by Smithfield meat porters. Leicester’s Labour council took out advertisements in Ugandan newspapers warning that the city was ‘virtually full’. Enoch Powell claimed that elderly of Britain were living in ‘actual physical fear’ at the prospect of the Ugandan Asians’ arrival. Such views did not make Powell unpopular. Both in 1972 and 1973, BBC viewers voted him their Man of the Year.26