9
In Place of Strife 1963–70
YOUTH
When Butler looked back on a long parliamentary career – which he finally relinquished after 1964 to ply his inveterate political skills before a more appreciative audience as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge – he saw that his real monument was the 1944 Education Act which, so he liked to think, had opened the door of opportunity to all. The Butler Act remained for forty years the basis on which local authorities were responsible for maintaining state schools and assisting denominational schools. It finally took the heat out of the disputes over religious schooling which had bedevilled educational reform for more than a century. The practical result here was that the number of Church of England schools fell over the next twenty years to one in three of all primary schools, while Roman Catholic schools rose to one in ten of all secondary schools. The Act also gave substance to the aspiration of secondary education for all – before the war four out of five children had stayed in elementary schools till they entered the labour market at fourteen – by making a break at the age of eleven when children would move on for at least four more years’ schooling, once the long-postponed raising of the school-leaving age to fifteen was implemented in 1947.
The administrative genius of the Butler Act, explaining its longevity, was that, while it implicitly expected a selective basis to be generally adopted for the provision of secondary education, it left it open for local education authorities (LEAs) to institute multilateral or comprehensive schools. The result was that, in most areas of England and Wales, three types of school were provided for selective ‘eleven-plus’ education: grammar schools with an academic curriculum, designed to satisfy matriculation requirements for universities through the General Certificate of Education (GCE); technical schools with a vocational emphasis; and secondary-modern schools for the rest.
In 1944 it had been thought that the school population might divide in the proportions 5 : 15 : 80, implying a sharply tapered skills pyramid. By the mid-1950s it turned out that over 25 per cent of eleven-plus pupils in England and Wales were at grammar schools, fewer than 5 per cent at technical schools, and the remaining two-thirds at secondary-modern schools (with a further 1 per cent at a dozen or so comprehensive schools). Thus the grammar schools took a larger and the technical schools a smaller proportion of the population than had been envisaged. The perceived pedagogical advantages, or simply the social cachet, of a grammar-school education drove local authorities, under electoral pressure from parents, in this direction. In Wales grammar-school places were available for over 30 per cent of the age group. This was reflected in a correspondingly higher number of Welsh children staying at school beyond fifteen; in the early 1950s the proportion staying until eighteen in Wales was double that in England, and so was the proportion going on to some form of higher education. Scotland, with its much longer tradition of encouraging the democratic intellect, already had a school system which was more broadly based.
The fact was that in Britain – England worse than Wales or Scotland – education remained solidly class-bound. In England and Wales, two out of five children born in the professional and managerial classes in the early twentieth century had had a grammar-school education, rising to three out of five for those born in the late 1930s (the first cohort to benefit fully under the Butler Act). By contrast, children of unskilled manual workers, whose chance of secondary education had been one in a hundred before the First World War, had a one-in-ten chance of passing the eleven-plus after the Second. The best that could be said about this was that it was progress in the right direction. Moreover, once this post-Butler cohort was in grammar (or equivalent) schools, the initial social bias was progressively accentuated since many more children from a professional background stayed on beyond age seventeen. Such statistics indicate a complex of intractable social influences, as much a product of cultural aspirations as of economic inequalities. The easiest target, however, for those in search of an immediate remedy was the inequity of eleven-plus selection.
The idea that carefully designed tests could – regardless of prior tuition or home background – accurately measure a child’s intelligence quotient (IQ), was one which the work of the educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt (1883–1971) had done much to propagate. Educational selection based on IQ-testing had a plausible progressive pedigree; after all, it could be seen as a way of challenging existing social privilege in the name of sheer ability, to be found impartially among all classes. When the sociologist Michael Young introduced the term ‘meritocracy’ – in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) – he was pointing (with some misgivings) to this new sort of legitimation for social elites. But his worries about the chilling efficiency of a meritocratic hierarchy were premature at a time when the crass inefficiency of eleven-plus selection was more apparent. Not only was its social bias evident in the disproportionately high success rate of middle-class children: even among the privileged classes it was a poor indicator of academic aptitude, as shown by the good GCE results subsequently achieved at independent schools by children who had previously failed the eleven-plus. In due course, too, the integrity of Burt’s pioneer research was impugned, thus shaking the intellectual foundations of IQ-testing.
The post-war euphemisms about parity of esteem between different kinds of secondary schools were belied by social realities. The fact was that secondary-modern schools ended up preparing working-class-children for working-class jobs – or rather, instead of preparing them, simply conditioned them. Here was the nub of the case for comprehensive schools, which moved from being the policy of a few maverick (again mainly Welsh) councils to the status of a defining progressive nostrum. It remained an issue to be resolved through LEAs, not through the imposition of a single model from the centre. Butler delighted in the fact that this was so under his 1944 Act; and before the Conservatives left office in 1964 200 comprehensive schools had opened. Alongside Wales, the other early breakthrough for comprehensives came in Greater London, where Labour likewise dominated local government.1 What the incoming Labour Government did was to put its influence behind secondary-school reorganization, notably in the circular 10/65 which Crosland issued after he took over the Department of Education and Science in 1965. This influence, albeit without statutory sanctions, pushed open a door which was already ajar. There were over 1,000 comprehensive schools with over 30 per cent of secondary-school pupils by 1970; and 2,000 comprehensives with 60 per cent of pupils by 1974 – despite a change of government which put Margaret Thatcher in charge of education. By 1980 comprehensives had reached 90 per cent coverage, with only a few LEAs under firm Conservative control, like Kent, keeping their grammar schools.
At the time, pro-comprehensive rhetoric was commonly pitched against the grammar schools – Crosland’s self-ascribed mission ‘to destroy every fucking grammar school’ in the country was only unusual in its vernacular force. Yet grammar schools had generally done a good job, not least in educating the rising generation of meritocratic leaders like Wilson, Heath, Jenkins and Thatcher. It was the failings of the secondary-modern concept, and the puny resources devoted to technical education, which seem culpable in hindsight. The planned raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen was designed to remove some longstanding disparities in educational experience; but it was postponed in the economic crisis of 1968. The fact was that the gains for the majority from Labour’s policy were largely prospective; whereas the losses were immediate, through the disruption of reorganization and the loss of locally respected grammar schools. Such apprehensions were often to help the Conservatives electorally, as well as fuelling a (selective) movement by middle-class parents into the private system, leaving state secondary schools in this respect less comprehensive than before.
Crosland’s own passion for social equality need not be doubted, since this was wholly in keeping with the priorities of Labour revisionists (conventionally called ‘right-wing’). The fact that Crosland had himself attended a ‘public school’ had hardly made him tender towards this form of education. Yet the effect of Labour policy in the 1960s was curious. State grammar schools were shut down on the argument that otherwise a truly comprehensive system could not be created. Fee-paying schools in the independent sector, by contrast, though arguably the most socially divisive way of perpetuating privilege, were let be.
Independent schools of various kinds continued to educate about 5 per cent of all children, a drop from 9 per cent since the Second World War. This sector may have become smaller but it also became more efficient (the term used in granting recognition by state inspectors). The grotesque private-school incompetence memorialized by Eveyn Waugh in Decline and Fall (1928) steadily gave way to the businesslike approach of the top public schools, which made a hard sell in a tough market by emphasizing, on the demand side, tax-efficient ways of meeting school fees, and on the supply side, good teaching in small classes. In a league of their own stood a group of schools with a hybrid status, receiving a direct grant from the state, yet often members of the Headmasters’ Conference (the traditional definition of a public school). These 180 direct-grant schools were, for the most part, ancient endowed grammar schools which admitted a substantial proportion of children on scholarships funded by LEAs. Academically strenuous, with little more than 2 per cent of secondary schools entrants, they nonetheless accounted for about 8 per cent of those staying on to age eighteen, and half their school leavers went on to university. Over the years, many schemes for dealing with the prestigious ‘public’ schools had been mooted, some designed to abolish them, others to prop them up financially. Independent schools were not touched by the comprehensivization of the 1960s; but in 1975, the direct-grant schools – the crème de la crème of meritocratic selection – were abolished, though public schools still survived.
England’s selective school system had long been married to an even more selective university system, where likewise academic selection reinforced social discrimination. At the beginning of the century there had been 20,000 university students in Great Britain, about one-third of them undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. Indeed Oxbridge maintained its numerical domination of the academic profession until the Second World War. In the post-war years, with scholarships more widely available under the Butler Act, the proportion of university students for the first time went above 2 per cent of the relevant age group, rising to 4 per cent by 1962. By then there were thirty universities. Oxford and Cambridge, each with about 10,000 undergraduates, were dwarfed by London, with constituent colleges, like University College, King’s, Imperial and the London School of Economics, which were largely autonomous. Moreover, the five provincial colleges which London had spawned (Nottingham, Southampton, Hull, Exeter and Leicester) had in turn become universities in their own right, reinforcing the ranks of an earlier generation of civic or ‘red-brick’ universities (like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds). In Scotland the four ancient universities (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and St Andrews) had all expanded; and the University of Wales, under its 1893 charter as a federal institution, had fully constituent university colleges in Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea (later Lampeter too).
This was a story of expansion; but also still of restriction. For example, the proportion of students whose fathers were in manual occupations remained stuck from 1920 to 1960 at more or less a quarter. Whereas at least one in eight middle-class children eventually gained university places, fewer than one in a hundred working-class children did so. Perhaps surprisingly, the position in Scotland was not very different from that in England; and only in Wales were there significantly larger numbers of university entrants whose fathers were manual workers. By international standards, the proportion of the relevant age group in higher education was low – only 8 per cent in 1962, including all those in teacher-training and other colleges.
Here was the problem which confronted the Committee on Higher Education under the chairmanship of the economist Lord Robbins. The solution proposed in the Robbins Report in 1963 was to create an altogether bigger system of higher education. Since the Government had already committed itself to providing grants for all students admitted to university, this further commitment was not only expansive but expensive. The result was that the total number of students in higher education doubled by 1970. The number in universities, around 120,000 at the time of the Robbins Report, was to reach 370,000 by 1990.
The expansion which Robbins proposed over a twenty-year period was supposed to be geared in favour of science. At the time this was a fashionable plea. In 1959 C. P. Snow had created a notable stir in identifying ‘two cultures’ – those of the literary intellectuals and of the natural scientists – between whom there subsisted a gulf of mutual incomprehension. It was an updated form of the ‘gap’ which had worried Wells forty years previously; and one perennially advocated remedy was to improve scientific education. Robbins found that students taking degrees in scientific and technological subjects in 1962 were not far short of half the total in universities; and it was hoped that they would form a clear majority during the next twenty years. Instead, although the number of science students nearly doubled by 1980, the number of students in the arts went up by 160 per cent – by then including as many women as men. By contrast, for every two women taking medicine in 1980 there were still three men; in pure science, five men; and in technology, eighteen men.
Stubbornly, science thus remained, if not the male preserve it had once been, still unfriendly to women, at all levels. There was, of course, great distinction in British scientific research, with a haul of Nobel prizes, proportionate to population, which was internationally outstanding. It remains piquant that the most notable breakthrough of the post-war period, the discovery of the structure of the key genetic substance DNA at the Cavendish laboratory in 1953, resulted in Nobel prizes ten years later for all but one of the scientists most closely involved: for James Watson and Francis Crick, for their Cambridge colleagues Max Perutz and John Kendrew, and for Maurice Wilkins at King’s College, London. There could be nothing, however, for his colleague Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work had provided a crucial link: a magnificent role model for women in science, robbed of due recognition by her tragic death four years before the awards.
In the post-Robbins era, it was the new polytechnics which set the pace in opening up higher education to first-generation students. By the time he left the Education and Science Department in 1967, Crosland had commissioned thirty polytechnics, to be jointly controlled by his department and by local government. The aim was to provide a wider range of courses than universities, and to concentrate on teaching rather than research. Often regarded as a comprehensive form of higher education, some of them experienced similar problems in amalgamating existing institutions, with diverse objectives and incompatible traditions, operating on a shoestring on scattered sites. Many polytechnics, however, were immediately successful in carving out a new role, while others chose to follow an existing academic model, competing for students with universities.
Robbins gave an enormous boost to the clutch of new universities, already under construction, which received their own charters at once, with no tutelary attachment to existing institutions. Sussex was a notable success and was soon followed by East Anglia, York, Essex, Kent, Warwick and Lancaster, all built on greenfield sites in England. In Scotland, Stirling followed this model, but Dundee, Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh and Strathclyde in Glasgow each developed on an existing urban base. Indeed Strathclyde, formed out of the Royal College of Science, had some affinities with the nine English colleges of advanced technology which were given university status after Robbins; it may be significant that only Bath and Loughborough retained the word technology in their titles. By 1968 the total number of universities had reached fifty-six. But it should not be forgotten that London and the older red-brick universities were themselves expanding, sometimes almost out of recognition.
The most striking development in mass higher education was qualitative as well as quantitative. The Open University was very much the brainchild of Harold Wilson, and as prime minister he ensured that its launch received adequate resources. Using radio and television in innovative forms of distance learning, it recruited a student body, largely of part-timers, with a wholly different social profile from that of the traditional British undergraduate. Mature students, women students, disadvantaged students – for many people with thwarted educational aspirations the Open University became a lifeline. It was given broadcasting facilities on BBC networks at unsocial hours, which initially served to test the devotion of its students until the advent of cassettes and videos eased this particular rigour. The rigour of academic standards, however, was maintained in a highly traditional way. The Open University’s offer of the challenge of intellectual adventure, amid distracting human predicaments, irradiates Willy Russell’s play, and later film, Educating Rita (1979 and 1981).
Perceptions of academic life were palpably changing. In his day C. P. Snow had captured the nuances of a Cambridge college nicely in The Masters (1951); Kingsley Amis had rendered the post-war academic career pressures in a Welsh university college into high comedy in Lucky Jim (1954). But Amis’s own later prognostication that ‘more will mean worse’ did not have to be accepted to recognize that more certainly meant different. The proud civic university which Chamberlain had founded in Birmingham was to become a stylized backdrop for David Lodge’s witty exploration of Anglo-American academic interpenetration in Changing Places (1975). Above all, though Robbins himself would hardly have liked it, the post-Robbins ambience of a social-science department in a new university was unmistakable in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975), with its easy-come, easy-go, marxisant rationalizations of sexual irregularity between staff and students.
Students – even at Oxbridge this term was increasingly used – had become news by 1968. Beards and anoraks, placards and banners, chants and loud-hailers, served to mark the end of Britain’s exemption from the sort of student demonstrations in the streets which happened abroad. The Vietnam War provided the great focus for this kind of agitation; but in 1968 it was turned on targets nearer home, with occupations of college and university buildings which partly mimicked parallel events in France and the USA but also directed attention to more immediate student grievances. The fashionable Marxist claim was that students had a natural affinity with an exploited working class, though their links with organized labour rarely transcended this nebulous rhetoric. Some theorists even argued that, with an apathetic working class smothered by consumerism, the eternally renewed discontent of the young could itself bring about radical change in society.
Though few students perceived themselves as the shock troops of the revolution, their lifestyle was often a shock to parents, teachers, taxpayers – in short, to older people. The sexual behaviour of young people was escaping traditional controls, not least among students living away from home. This stereotyped impression of the ‘swinging sixties’ was often linked with the introduction of the new birth-control pill for women. But there is evidence indicating that changes in conduct in fact preceded – by as much as a decade – the widespread availability of the pill in the late 1960s, a development which was more a response to new sexual mores than their cause. Certainly the deterrent of unwanted pregnancy became less feared and artificial means of contraception more widely employed. Whether there was as much sexual activity among the young as talk about a ‘permissive society’ suggested is not easy to establish; but there was a new openness. The poet Philip Larkin, in his adopted role as professional curmudgeon, was to make himself the spokesman of the view that ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963’ – a poetic truth perhaps. Moreover, the use of drugs by young people achieved widespread prominence, provoking – as was sometimes intended – a backlash of disapproval. Thus the 1960s raised timeless issues of inter-generational conflict to new levels, partly because, with growing prosperity, economic independence was more quickly achieved by teenagers in a tight labour market. Students, too, were well provided for, with not only their fees paid from public funds but maintenance grants that were generous by international standards.
A conspicuous and noisy youth culture, which had been hotting up for years, came to the boil in the 1960s. Pop music became its most obvious bond, whether live or on records or radio. Since the war the USA had dominated this market; suddenly British groups acquired worldwide fame. The Beatles, whose spectacular career took off in 1962–3, were from Liverpool, as songs like ‘Penny Lane’ never let anyone forget. They had in John Lennon and Paul McCartney songwriters of genius, achieving deceptively simple effects which created an unparalleled number of enduring classics. ‘Yesterday’ was to be recorded in several hundred versions over the years. Apart from the Queen and the aged Churchill, the Beatles became instantly the most famous Britons alive, with a string of hits which all young people knew, even if some subcultures preferred the raw suggestiveness of the Rolling Stones. In their wake came dozens more groups, seeking to exploit the ‘Mersey sound’.
Here was the market tapped by pirate radio ships, broadcasting pop music almost non-stop on unlicensed frequencies. The Wilson Government, with its heavy-handed attempts to enforce the BBC’s monopoly, struck many young people as out of touch and foolish; and whether Wilson retrieved or compounded this folly by recommending the Beatles for the MBE is a moot point. Belatedly, the BBC launched Radio One – on dry land, but its own exercise in piracy nonetheless. No longer did the family cluster round the wireless in the sitting room to share a favourite programme; instead the car radio and the transistor set flourished – especially among young people, who had their own channel. Thus developments in technology and changes in consumer demand, which had once pioneered the crystal set, ultimately produced the Walkman – headphones to headphones in three generations.
In dress, too, Britain was surprisingly successful in catching an international idiom, marketed with panache from Carnaby Street, just off Regent Street, which temporarily became the young fashion centre of the world. Informality was the keynote, with protean uses of denim and bold floral fabrics, for men and women. The long skirts of the post-war decade were not simply shortened; the mini-skirt of the late-1960s hitched the hemline to the mid-thigh, which in itself made this a style which young women could best carry off. The big names here, like Mary Quant and Biba, were new names, reaching out to a young clientele. The power of popular culture to override, or at least mask, longstanding social distinctions was shown in many ways, setting styles which marked off generations rather than classes. Even a privileged education offered little insulation; the public-school accent, once a reliable indicator of social class, went into irreversible decline among teenagers, for whom it became just one of many funny voices they could do. It was more than an old fogeys’ joke that young men and women were indistinguishable in their long hair and jeans; young people of all backgrounds were indeed starting to look alike, and to feel at least a skin-deep affinity. Stumbling in the wake of such changes, the political parties began fumbling for the youth vote; there was little coherent opposition to the lowering of the voting age to eighteen in 1969.
CONSENSUS POLITICS
The twelve-month premiership of Sir Alec Douglas-Home in 1963–4 was dominated by Harold Wilson. No previous leader of the Opposition, without the authority of being an ex-prime minister himself, had enjoyed such an ascendancy. Moreover, it was deserved since Home may have been a stopgap but he turned out to be no pushover; though Wilson naturally made great sport at the idea of a fourteenth earl seeking to run a great modern country. Home’s riposte that, after all, his opponent could be called the fourteenth Mr Wilson, was nicely judged, but it could hardly remove the sting from a disadvantageous contrast in their backgrounds and experience. Home was unused to the House of Commons, where Wilson had perfected a punchy despatch-box style, partly by observing the methods of Macmillan. It was in these years that prime minister’s questions, normally a couple of times a week, became elevated into a gladiatorial contest. Home came across as a decent and honourable Tory of the old school; it was Wilson, with his common touch, who captured the public ear.
Wilson, at forty-six, seemed young in an era that had become used to statesmen of pensionable age: Churchill, Adenauer, Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Macmillan. But youth was now on his side. The sort of undergraduate send-up of fuddy-duddy politicians that had long been the staple of the Cambridge Footlights created a sensation when it hit a late-night television audience in That Was the Week That Was in 1962–3 (a sign of the new freedom which the BBC claimed under its director-general Sir Hugh Greene). Macmillan and Home were satirized as figures from the past. By contrast, the vigorous image of the Kennedy presidency seemed attractive. In November 1963 Kennedy’s assassination was widely mourned in Britain and – an even more sincere tribute – his political legacy was appropriated by Labour. Wilson, too, talked of getting the country moving again. His own pitch was to make a rhetorical link between science and socialism, projecting himself as the hero of meritocratic, technocratic middle managers whose energies would be released by a Labour Government in a purposive plan to regenerate Britain. This was a ‘classless’ appeal which put the Tories on the defensive in the class struggle, suggesting that it was their vested interest in maintaining ossified social distinctions, such as fourteenth earls, which was holding the country back.
If this sounded like Lloyd George reincarnated, it was hardly surprising in view of Wilson’s roots in north-country Nonconformist radicalism; yet his political career since 1951 had been founded on his image as a Bevanite; his role as champion of the left and of the party conference had been reaffirmed as recently as 1960, when he had stood against Gaitskell for the leadership. In fact Wilson’s priority all along had been party unity; he was no fundamentalist believer in nationalization or unilateralism; he was, like his colleague Crossman, really a Bevanite revisionist, working with the Labour left, but not of it. Here, too, Wilson aspired to be the Labour Macmillan, leading his party towards the middle ground under cover of traditional partisan slogans. Wilson set his agenda in a series of well-publicized speeches, hammering away at the need to create a new Britain, which would be able to afford higher social spending out of the increment of higher economic growth. This gave Labour a sharp image, though the content of the policies which would achieve this happy state was less distinctive.
The fact was that for at least a couple of years much of this agenda had been shared by the Conservatives, stirred from complacency about so-called affluence, and urgently moved to experiment. Heath, fresh from observing the new Europe, was given a wide brief in an expanded Board of Trade, where he pushed through his own pet scheme for freeing the economy from antiquated restrictions on competition. Resale price maintenance, a practice obliging shops to sell goods at standard prices set by the suppliers, was declared illegal – much to the fury of the small shopkeepers who were a vocal element in local Conservative associations. This was a brave move by Heath, which did him no harm once the dust had settled: it helped mark him out as an effective rival to the easygoing Maudling, should the Tories soon require a leader of Wilson’s age and aptitude.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1962, Reginald Maudling had been faced with the problem of reviving an economy in which unemployment averaged 2.6 per cent in 1963, the worst annual figure since the post-war welfare state had come into effect. The ‘stop-go’ cycle therefore entered its pre-election go phase, with a low bank-rate and a sufficient stimulus from consumer spending in the 1963 Budget to lift the growth rate from 4 per cent in 1963 to nearly 6 per cent in 1964 – though with the familiar mounting side-effects of overheating and a strain on the balance of payments. Maudling was determined to maintain his ‘dash for growth’, hoping that the balance of payments difficulties would be solved by an induced dynamism in exports, which were indeed rising. By 1964, however, with exports just over 10 per cent higher than in 1961, imports were nearly 20 per cent higher, sucked in by higher consumer spending.
It was politically impossible to do anything about this before a general election; and, since the opinion polls and the by-elections both indicated a big swing to Labour, Home decided to hold on until the last moment. His own inclination was to focus on the nuclear issue, where Wilson’s record was suspect, rather than on economic management, where the Government was on the defensive. It had to maintain that the roaring pre-election boom could be translated into a permanently higher growth level of 4 per cent: a claim which pushed Labour into bidding even higher. Labour’s insistent talk of ‘thirteen wasted years’ of Tory Government succeeded in catching a mood for change. Wilson’s poll ratings remained way ahead of Home’s; the fact that this was a matter of generalized image is shown by Wilson’s lead not just on competence but on sincerity too. Yet Home’s performance, in a modest register very much his own, should not be disparaged. After all, he inherited a demoralized party, facing the pit of electoral oblivion. To many people’s surprise, the general election in October 1964 turned out to be a close-run thing.
Labour only just squeaked home, with 317 seats out of 630. With 44 per cent of the popular vote, it was less than 1 per cent ahead of the Conservatives. Nonetheless the shift since 1959 was appreciable, with the Conservatives dropping 6 per cent in their share of the vote and losing 60 seats. More than half of Labour’s gains came from tightening its existing hold over traditional areas of support in London, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Scotland. But overall it did not win as much as the Conservatives lost, partly because the Liberal vote was underestimated; only nine Liberal MPs were returned, but the party’s share of the poll was 11 per cent, the highest since 1929. These were mainly anti-Conservative votes, many attracted by Jo Grimond’s strategy as Liberal leader in proclaiming the need for a realignment on the left. Plainly this was not achieved in any formal sense; but Liberal support indicated a reservoir of centre–left voters, distributed fairly evenly through all classes, which Labour might well pick up – a clear moral for Wilson in thinking ahead, as the close result made prudent, towards a further election at no distant interval.
Wilson’s Government, with a majority in single figures, was unusually dominated by electoral considerations, a fact which played alike to the prime minister’s skills and his inclination. He foresaw 1966 as the moment when he would form his ‘real’ cabinet, once his interim administration had improvised its way to a more convincing electoral victory, through adroit tactics and clever compromises, designed to keep everyone guessing. This end was duly achieved, but at the price of making the means into a way of life, from which it was subsequently difficult to escape. Wilson was the master but he accommodated his rivals for the leadership by making the stolid Callaghan Chancellor of the Exchequer and creating an entirely new economic ministry for the volatile Brown. Apart from the prime minister, only James Griffiths, Labour’s elder statesman at the new Welsh Office, and Patrick Gordon Walker, the Foreign Secretary, had previously held cabinet posts.1
Wilson’s political balancing act allowed him to reward his two closest allies from Bevanite days: Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle (the only woman in the cabinet). Each had to come to terms with a new role as minister, not least in relation to formidable civil servants. It took time for Dame Evelyn Sharp, confronted with the intellectual bully Crossman (self-described) as her minister at Housing and Local Government, to get him house-trained in the ways of Whitehall. The compensation was that this eye-opening process was recorded for posterity in his diaries, which later inspired the television series, Yes, Minister: the most successful seminars ever staged on the workings of the British constitution. Conversely, Castle got off on the right foot with the corpulent Sir Andrew Cohen in forming a high-profile partnership (‘Elephant and Castle’) bent on shaping the new Ministry of Overseas Development. The problem there was to reconcile Labour’s rhetoric about more aid to developing countries with the many competing claims on resources. In fact, Castle only lasted a year before being promoted, and the commitment to increase the level of overseas aid lasted hardly longer.
To the countries of the new Commonwealth, especially in black Africa, it made little difference that a Labour Government was now in office, as its handling of Rhodesia, the residual legacy of decolonization, was to show. Southern Rhodesia (or Rhodesia as it became after Northern Rhodesia achieved independence as Zambia) had enjoyed effective self-government, though without Dominion status, for forty years. By the 1960s, it was apparent that this gave Britain the worst of both worlds: a moral commitment to safeguard the rights of the black majority before granting independence, but no means of implementing this policy short of external coercion. It was obvious that the white supremacist government, under the wily and stubborn leadership of Ian Smith, was ready to make a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). British policy, under Home as subsequently under Wilson, was to head this off if possible, or at any rate for as long as possible. In 1965 there was still bipartisan support for the British Government’s statement of the five principles which were regarded as preconditions of independence – not an immediate move to majority rule, but guarantees that it would be expedited. The Smith regime, unmoved, declared UDI in November 1965.
At this stage Wilson’s confidence was impressive, if misplaced. In domestic politics, it was the Rhodesian lobby in the Tory Party which continually threatened to make trouble, unreconciled to the liberal consensus between the two front benches. The Government, for its part, had ruled out the use of force, which was naturally urged by some African states. Instead it relied on economic sanctions, especially an oil embargo, enforced under UN auspices. This was just enough to keep the Commonwealth Prime Ministers in line at their meeting in January 1966, with Wilson optimistically foreseeing a Rhodesian capitulation ‘in weeks rather than months’. Notoriously, this failed to happen. One reason was Britain’s avoidance of conflict with South Africa, which was left free to siphon off supplies to Rhodesia. As the weeks lengthened to months, Commonwealth pressure mounted for Britain to harden its stance by accepting the principle of no independence before majority rule (NIBMAR). Wilson’s compromise was to hold the threat of NIBMAR over Smith’s head to induce him to negotiate a settlement, within the terms of the five principles, but not going so far, so fast. The two men met on HMS Tiger, off Gibraltar, for three days of talks in December 1966. Wilson thought that he had gained Smith’s agreement to a sophisticated package of constitutional reforms; but Smith simply played for time by going home to consult his cabinet, which rejected the plan.
The Tiger terms would have been difficult to sell to Labour backbenchers and Commonwealth leaders alike, with their moral and emotional commitment to NIBMAR. The case for them depended on a rational calculation that this was the best settlement available. Since it was not available anyway, Wilson was relieved of the political odium but at the price of continued impotence. Worse, the failure of oil sanctions, vaguely blamed on the French at the time, ought not to have been such a puzzle since the Government was made aware of the swap agreements between the big oil companies which, in effect, allowed them to maintain supplies to Rhodesia. In any case, short of confrontation with South Africa, which rightly saw Rhodesia as the front-line rampart of white supremacy, economic sanctions could not exert sufficient pressure to achieve a settlement on the basis of NIBMAR, which was now official policy. There was thus an element of charade in Wilson’s further assignment off Gibraltar in October 1968. This time it was HMS Fearless; otherwise things were much the same – much the same old terms, much the same old weather, much the same old Smith, much the same old excuses. All that Wilson finally achieved was to show that further negotiation was fruitless and thus to hold together a world-weary political consensus about Rhodesia. As a potential electoral issue, it was a problem averted.
The central issue for the Wilson Government, from its first day, was the economic crisis. The balance of payments turned out to be in even worse shape than Labour’s partisan gibes at the hustings had suggested: a deficit of nearly £400 million on current account in 1964, the worst figure since the Second World War. In fact the deficit amounted to 1.3 per cent of GDP, compared with a deficit of 2.3 per cent which the Conservatives had inherited in 1951 (and a deficit of 4.4 per cent in 1989). It was nonetheless a real crisis, which the new Government, determined to pin the blame on their predecessors, initially made worse by including capital movements too, with the result that talk of a deficit of £800 millions spread further alarm in the markets. The two classic means of correcting such a deficit were deflation and devaluation. Deflation worked by cutting back economic growth, which duly cut back imports; but Labour had denounced this option as ‘stop-go’. Devaluation was a clear economic alternative, since signs that the pound was overvalued, not only against the US dollar (at $2.80) but even more strikingly against the German mark (still at a parity over 11 DM), were mounting with every sterling crisis. This option, however, was immediately ruled out by Wilson, in consultation with Brown and Callaghan.
The reason was partly economic – Wilson had an essentially micro-economic approach which predisposed him towards directly interventionist measures – but it was mainly political. Wilson’s view, which none of his colleagues challenged, was that Labour, the party of devaluation in 1949, simply could not afford to be cast in this role again: the more so since its parliamentary position was so precarious. So the Government was reluctant to wield either of the economic weapons in its hands. This left it at the mercy of events – and of the USA. For the critical importance of dollar support for sterling, with its overstretched role as a reserve currency, could be in no doubt; it was when US support was withdrawn that Suez had ended in tears. Macmillan had drawn the lesson that in future the UK should tag along with the USA, as a junior partner; this was the basis of his nuclear defence policy, maintaining Britain’s great power pretensions with a show of ‘independence’ which Wilson had derided. The irony was that Wilson pursued an economic strategy which was, in reality, similarly dependent on US support, and subject, therefore, to conditions determined by the Americans.
In November 1964 sterling was saved by concerted action on the part of a number of central banks, including the Bank of England, which raised its rate to 7 per cent, by now the conventional crisis level. A temporary surcharge on imports was imposed, despite being against GATT rules; and income tax went up to 8s 3d (41.25 per cent). The Treasury relied on this package doing the trick, by squeezing the economy back into balance. Meanwhile the new Department of Economic Affairs continued as though nothing had happened to disturb its plans for economic expansion. It was, like Lloyd George’s Ministry of Munitions before it, basically a vehicle for the unruly talents of one idiosyncratic individual. The way that Brown drove the vehicle, however, made for an unsteady if exciting ride. Brown’s instability – drink was one obvious problem – made him a mercurial colleague, prone to tender his resignation when he felt thwarted, but capable at his best of striking intuitively to the heart of a problem and of coaxing agreement against all odds.
The National Plan, to which Brown devoted long months of effort, was fashioned in this way. Published in September 1965, after elaborate consultations with both sides of industry and the NEDC apparatus, it set the goal of sustained growth at 4 per cent per annum – levels which were not wholly unrealistic, since they had been exceeded in 1963 and 1964, but which, even as the Plan was sent to the printers, were being rendered unattainable by Government decisions. There had been talk of ‘creative tension’ in the making of economic policy between the DEA, representing the real economy, and the Treasury, representing finance. The grip of the Treasury, with its massive expertise and its hold over the entire Whitehall machine, was never really loosened. Given the chronic weakness of sterling, Treasury policy was bound to prevail. Moreover, it is now known that in the summer of 1965, in order to secure US support of sterling, Callaghan gave assurances that the Government would maintain a tight policy. How deeply this compromised the National Plan was not immediately clear.
In all of this, Wilson’s position was crucial: not just in arbitrating between Callaghan and Brown, nor in insisting that nothing be done to spoil the Government’s election chances, but in reaching a package deal with the Johnson administration in Washington. What Johnson, with the escalation of the Vietnam war dominating his presidency, really wanted was British support in south-east Asia. He was forced to accept that he would not get British troops in Vietnam, only general expressions of sympathy for US aims from Wilson and Stewart (punctuated by specific dissociation from some later US military measures). There was, however, an indisputable linkage between sterling and Vietnam, often as this was officially denied at the time. The terms of the deal which Wilson was able to strike, therefore, were governed not only by how much the Americans wanted his help, but by how much he would pay for theirs in avoiding devaluation. If they perceived that he might easily devalue sterling – a step which they wished to avoid because it would in turn make the dollar vulnerable – they could not exact as high a price as they could if Wilson himself seemed prepared to do anything to avoid devaluation. Since the latter was in fact Wilson’s position, as the Americans correctly gathered, he had almost as few cards in his hand as Macmillan had had at Nassau. None of this was glorious; but at least Wilson avoided miring British troops in the swamps of Vietnam.
Wilson’s ascendancy was little impaired, either in his own Government or in the eyes of the public. Whatever economic difficulties the Government faced, they could for the time being be blamed upon the Conservatives, who remained in no shape to make an electoral comeback. Home, poor chap, would have to go, that was widely accepted. But Wilson used rumours of an imminent election to stall moves to select a more formidable Conservative leader; only in July 1965 did Home bow out, leaving the party to implement its new electoral procedure for the first time. Macleod was back in the shadow cabinet but was now suspect in the party: Powell even more so, as his action in standing for the leadership and his showing as a poor third in the ballot of Conservative MPs both served to confirm. The outcome was that Heath narrowly but decisively defeated Maudling. But the honeymoon effect on the Conservatives’ popularity was short-lived; despite the Government’s deflationary package in the summer of 1965, it was ahead again in the opinion polls by September.
In terms of presentation, the Wilson Government was doing magnificently. The National Plan went down well. Bank-rate had been eased; the economy was still growing, albeit not so fast; despite some fears about job losses, unemployment averaged only 1.5 per cent throughout 1965–6; in 1966 prices may have been 9 per cent higher than two years previously – but earnings were 11 per cent higher. As the more perceptive members of the cabinet recognized, Labour needed to capitalize on its popularity while its luck lasted and while its opponents were still in disarray. This was where Wilson’s leadership was seen at its most effective, in passing off a makeshift holding operation as the prelude to a period of constructive government. He was taken at his word in the country, meaning that the Labour campaign could, to an unusual extent, be built around him, since he was running ahead of his party.
The signal came with the Hull by-election in January 1966. The Government opportunely intervened by announcing that a suspension bridge over the River Humber would be built; at the time the intervention was hardly more necessary than the bridge itself, but Labour’s opinion-poll lead was comfortingly buttressed by a strong pro-Government swing. The general election followed and duly produced a Labour majority of 100 – a mirror-image of what the Conservatives had achieved in 1959. Like Gaitskell before him, Heath found himself politely ignored in his sober warnings about an economic fool’s paradise. The Conservative vote held up fairly well, only 1.5 per cent lower than in 1966; this compared with a drop of 2.7 per cent in the Liberal vote (which was, however, consolidated where the party needed it most, with the result that the number of Liberal MPs increased from 9 to 12). So Labour won two votes from the Liberals for every one from the Conservatives in increasing its share of the poll to 48 per cent, a level virtually identical with that of 1945. The Labour gains were much more evenly spread across the country than in 1964, with modest further increments from its old urban and industrial bastions, but now augmented with a broadcast scattering of support in mixed suburban constituencies, new towns, university cities and cathedral cities. Bristol North-West and Croydon South, Harrow East and Portsmouth West, Bebington and Billericay, High Peak and Chislehurst, Bedford and Exeter, Lancaster and York, Oxford and Cambridge – all went Labour for the first time since the constituencies were redrawn in 1949. Wilson’s dream of making Labour into ‘the natural party of government’ seemed to be well on the way to fulfilment.
SOCIAL POLICY
When the welfare state was created in Britain after the Second World War, it was often said to be the envy of the world. The Labour Party certainly took pride in having implemented it; and the Conservatives forswore any notion of dismantling it. Based on the Beveridge Plan, which in turn looked back to the poverty-line concept established by Rowntree at the beginning of the century, it aimed to slay the giant of Want, if not with a single blow then in a concerted and lethal attack. Full employment was itself the best means of tackling the sort of poverty that had been widespread throughout the old industrial areas between the wars. Concomitantly, the National Health Service alleviated the economic burden of family sickness, while child allowances channelled direct support to larger families. These measures cleared the ground for social insurance to require and assist everyone to cover themselves against the normal contingencies of life: the residual incidence of frictional unemployment, essentially while people were between jobs; sickness of a breadwinner; injury at work; old age. And just in case anyone still could not negotiate the tightrope of economic viability, there was the safety net of National Assistance, granted to individuals (like poor relief before it) once their genuine destitution had been established.
‘Poverty has been abolished,’ proclaimed the Durham miners’ leader, Sam Watson, to the Labour Party conference in 1950. This was no mere partisan claim. When Rowntree returned to his native York, half a century after his pioneer study, to direct a final social survey, published as Poverty and the Welfare State (1951), he revealed a less sombre, more gratifying picture than ever before. The headline story here pointed to a fall in the proportion of the working class living in poverty from over 30 per cent in the 1930s to under 3 per cent. The Times called it ‘the virtual elimination of the sheerest want’. Yet a decade later such judgements looked like period-piece complacency, and the talk now was of the ‘rediscovery of poverty’. Partly this was a matter of more sophisticated analysis of the empirical data, as Rowntree’s methods came to look crude beside the expertise developed in new university departments of sociology and social administration. But the achievement of Professor Peter Townsend, in particular, was to move the goalposts.
The concept of a poverty line had been radical in its day. By establishing a scientifically valid subsistence level, with a price-tag attached, it challenged those who were sceptical about poverty to explain how the poor could possibly get by on an income less than this. But its objectivity was spurious in that it reflected a middle-class expert assessment of what the poor needed, not an actual pattern of working-class expenditure. The poor were often to be criticized for ‘wasting’ their money on ‘non-essential’ items which nonetheless seemed important to them. The truth here was that necessities were, to a large extent, socially conditioned; they were what real people felt they needed to participate fully in the life of their own community. By the 1960s, this did not mean clogs and shawls, if it ever had. It could now be argued that if people could not afford access to television – at a time when television had become a conventional social bond – they were marginalized through their poverty. Introducing such subjective elements into the definition of poverty inevitably turned it into a relative concept, with implications for the political economy of welfare that were to be far-reaching.
It should not be supposed that the Conservatives had cut back on welfare expenditure. They may have harboured ideas of making savings on the NHS through eliminating waste; but the Guillebaud Report in 1965, largely guided by two specialists, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith (both policy advisers to the Labour Party), suggested that the NHS was efficiently run. Spending on it rose, first under Macleod, and later (more surprisingly) under Powell, whose period as Minister of Health in the early 1960s saw a notable expansion of the hospital-building programme. Social expenditure in fact broadly maintained its share of the national income during the 1950s. Then came a sharp and sustained acceleration.
An upward momentum here, putting increasing strain upon the Budget, was already apparent before the Wilson Government came to office. Its policies made things worse – or better, according to which way one looked at it. Labour was committed on principle to higher public expenditure, on the grounds that this had a bias towards disadvantaged social groups. Hence Crosland, the theorist of this strategy, could express satisfaction that during Labour’s period of office, 1964–70, public expenditure rose.1 Moreover what drove this process was the rise in social expenditure. Public spending on education, health, pensions and unemployment grew by 5 per cent a year in real terms in the period 1960–75. In fifteen years these programmes increased their share of GDP from just over 11 per cent to nearly 19 per cent – a major shift of resources, probably double what was achieved under the Attlee Government. Yet it did not produce the same sense of satisfaction, either among its supposed beneficiaries or among the electorate.
The reasons for the increase in social spending, which was common to other OECD countries, are complex. A relatively small part can be attributed simply to demography, especially more old people and dependent children in the population. Most was due to real benefit increases, though here demography exerted a secondary influence since an ageing population brought not only an inexorably higher pension bill to be met by the state, but also a growing constituency for whom higher state pensions were a priority. Whereas in 1951 14 per cent of the population were eligible for state pensions, over the next thirty years the proportion increased to 18 per cent (and rising). The assumption that the problem of poverty in old age could be met through a universal state pension had been unrealistic from the outset in 1948, since this was set at a level too low to be adequate in itself and was too seldom supplemented by cover from private sources. So many pensioners applied for National Assistance, and old people constituted one of the largest pockets of poverty for persistent rediscovery. In opposition, the Labour Party had worked out a new approach under Crossman, with a plan for a fully funded national superannuation scheme. This was one of Labour’s most prominent proposals in the 1959 and 1964 general elections. The aim was to give everyone the prospect of a secure and adequate pension, related to previous income.
The response of the Conservatives, who favoured private provision, was to give palliative increases to existing state pensioners. This succeeded in buying time for the expansion of occupational pension schemes, which came to act as a vested interest against radical change. Once Labour was in office, instead of going ahead with its big plan, it resorted to similar hand-to-mouth measures. One intractable problem, as in introducing any scheme which relied on long years of contributions to build up a self-financing fund, was how to deal with the generation who were too old to have contributed. Instead of the plan that had been prudently worked out in opposition, a pay-as-you-go scheme, financed from current contributions, was introduced in 1970, too late in the parliament to have any chance of passing. This meant that those soon approaching retirement would see an immediate benefit; it also meant that taxpayers were faced with a virtually open-ended commitment. The State Earnings-Related Pension Scheme (Serps) finally came into operation in 1978, much amended over the years, but retaining one feature that went back to the wholly different plan of twenty years previously: pensions that were linked to earnings.
Earnings-related supplements had been introduced for sickness and unemployment benefits in 1966; and the right to redundancy payments, established in 1965, was likewise geared to the lost earning-capacity of different individuals. The introduction of these indexed benefits signalled a consistent move away from the flat-rate principle, dependent as it was on a concept of subsistence which was now discredited. Instead, the poverty line was increasingly redefined as the level of National Assistance payments (renamed ‘supplementary benefits’ in 1966). In effect the poverty line itself had become index-linked – to average living standards – pushing up expectations to levels which were simultaneously difficult to satisfy and difficult to afford.
Measured by these relative standards, plentiful and well-publicized evidence emerged about the number of households with incomes below the (constantly rising) threshold. The Poor and the Poorest (1965) by Abel-Smith and Townsend became a peculiar kind of Christmas bestseller, tapping the seasonal market in compassion to raise popular consciousness of the problem. Nobody now dared say that poverty had been eliminated. Indeed, how could it be, failing the elimination of all relative disadvantage? Thus issues of income distribution became more closely intermeshed with those of poverty as such, once the new methodology framed the agenda in this way.
One immediate political implication was that a Government which sought to reduce the number of people living in poverty by simply raising the level of welfare benefits would be making a rod for its own back – by thus raising also the level of income on which the number living in poverty was calculated. The Wilson Government certainly encountered vocal criticism of this kind. Some statistics, which purported to demonstrate that it left more people living in poverty than ever before, in fact demonstrated that it had increased benefit levels in real terms, or else pointed to a much more deep-seated problem of relative inequality in wealth and incomes.
The ‘poverty lobby’ was now an active force, keeping up a barrage of well-informed propaganda on behalf of disadvantaged groups whose case had previously gone by default. A wholesome development in itself, this correspondingly created interest groups with their own axes to grind. The bureaucratization of a burgeoning social-administration community, whether employed by the state, local government, universities or voluntary organizations, meant that a growing number of experts had a professional interest in increasing the welfare budget. There is no need to demonize the welfare bureaucracy to acknowledge that in the process its own status and rewards were sometimes enhanced more tangibly than the living standards of its clients. Simply spending more public money was coming to be queried as a simplistic approach to complex issues of social justice.
An increased role for voluntary agencies – towards which the Labour Party had often been hostile – can be seen as one symptom of a growing reaction against statism. To be sure, mutual-aid associations, like those which ran playgroups and similar schemes for young children, look like an example of self-help; but often they sought and gained support from public funds, notably local authorities. Help the Aged (1961) was an example of a philanthropic care-giving organization which also raised popular consciousness about the inadequacies of public provision for old people. The best-known voluntary organizations in fact acted so as to prompt rather than obviate state action. Shelter (1966) took up the cause of the homeless, not by providing homes itself but by campaigning on the issue, with a panache that produced favourable publicity. As its director, Des Wilson, put it: ‘It was for the government to come up with the solutions.’ Likewise, the Child Poverty Action Group (1965) was effective in keeping the case for child allowances in the public eye, notably by seizing on survey evidence to show that large families remained a major cause of poverty.
These lobbyists were a radical influence, stirring the Wilson Government to action and chastising it when it fell short, especially the latter. The Government’s record in welfare policy was perceived as a disappointment not only because of its inability to find the necessary economic resources but also because of its inability to meet expectations which it had helped arouse in the first place. In housing, there was a cutback after the devaluation crisis, and the Government’s target of 500,000 new houses a year was abandoned; yet in 1967 and 1968 over 400,000 houses were built, a new record, well ahead of what Macmillan had achieved in the era before Shelter raised the stakes. Likewise the Government got little credit for its ingenious scheme to help poorer families, which was finally pushed through the cabinet against Treasury opposition in 1967. A substantial increase in the child allowance, paid to all, was matched by a fiscal ‘clawback’ which would only affect better-off families paying income tax, thus targeting help to the poor without requiring either an initiative on their part or a means test. If Labour expected any political reward from such measures, it was to be disillusioned by the reproaches of the Child Poverty Action Group during the 1970 election campaign.
Better received, less costly to implement, and more durable in its social impact was the legislation sponsored by the Home Office, notably during the two years after Roy Jenkins became Home Secretary in December 1965. As a backbencher Jenkins had been instrumental in introducing the Obscene Publications Act (1959), which introduced literary merit as a possible defence, and thus paved the way for Penguin Books’ successful legal battle over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. This measure signalled Jenkins’s concern about censorship, which he was to follow up as Home Secretary by insisting, against pressure from Buckingham Palace, that the Lord Chamberlain’s historic role in licensing stage productions should be ended. The form taken by the obscene-publications legislation, moreover, provided a model for subsequent measures in sensitive areas which were controversial but non-partisan, through private members’ bills which would subsequently be given the cover of Home Office support.
The death penalty had been abolished in this way in 1965. In 1966 Jenkins tried to persuade the rising Liberal MP David Steel, who had won a high place in the ballot on private members’ bills, to introduce a measure on homosexual-law reform; since Steel thought this too outré for his Scottish Border constituents, he opted for abortion reform instead. This proposal, for the first time permitting legal abortions, proved surprisingly popular, with opinion polls giving it over 70 per cent support, probably because both the prevalence and the dangers of illegal or ‘backstreet’ abortions were common knowledge. Homosexual-law reform soon followed, since in October 1966 Jenkins induced the cabinet to provide government time in the Commons for a private member’s bill, already introduced. The proposal to legalize homosexual acts between adults in private, which had been stalled since the Wolfenden Report had recommended it ten years previously, became law in 1967.
Similar libertarian moves were common in other western countries in this era; so was the backlash of self-proclaimed ‘moral majorities’ later. It was a sign of a new determination to assert personal and civil rights, of which ‘women’s liberation’ and ‘gay liberation’ were conspicuous examples; conversely it was a sign of the erosion of traditional norms of social behaviour and deference, which was making Britain a less easy nation to govern. The measures on hanging, censorship, abortion and homosexuality were not Labour manifesto pledges; in the Commons they attracted the cross-bench support of liberally minded MPs while encountering resistance from traditionalist (often Catholic) Labour members. Nonetheless they would not have been passed but for the existence of a Labour majority, aided during the years 1965–7 by a Labour Home Secretary prepared to mobilize it. It was understandable, therefore, that Labour should have been associated with the ‘permissive society’ – an association which Callaghan later tried to repudiate after he had succeeded Jenkins as Home Secretary.
Jenkins himself preferred the term ‘civilized society’ and was happy to nail his colours to this mast. The son of a Welsh Labour MP, with grammar school leading on to Oxford, he lived up to the Balliol myth of effortless superiority, with an enviable reputation (duly provoking envy among less talented colleagues) as an accomplished biographer. He was undeniably able to reach out to liberal public opinion more effectively than he projected himself in the class-bound confines of the Labour Movement. Along with his contemporaries, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey, he had been a committed Gaitskellite (at least until the Common Market issue erupted at the end of Gaitskell’s life). Healey at the Ministry of Defence and Crosland at the Department of Education had both entered the cabinet ahead of Jenkins, who initially made his mark in Whitehall as a tough-minded Minister of Aviation, unafraid to cancel expensive projects like the TSR-2 strike aircraft (though the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airliner survived). His promotion to the cabinet had been an expected step upwards; but the Home Office was notoriously the graveyard of political reputations. Jenkins’s achievement was to make himself the agent of policies which pleased most Labour supporters, at a time when they were getting tired of apologizing for their Government. By the end of 1967, Jenkins’s growing ministerial stature gave him a position which came to rival that of a now fading Wilson: a point not lost upon either of them.
RECOVERY
Wilson was famous for his adroit tactics; it was the strategy that was less apparent. The hopes which he had inspired, of using the big majority gained in March 1966 to carve out a coherent long-term policy, were soon jolted. The initial problem, or at least excuse, was a strike by the National Union of Seamen, which not only threatened the norms for wage settlements under the prices and incomes policy but also temporarily distorted the flow of imports and exports during the summer of 1966. Wilson chose to regard this as an overt challenge to his authority, making MPs’ flesh creep with allusions to a ‘tightly-knit group of politically motivated men’ (in the union, not the Government). This may have helped achieve a speedy settlement, though it also talked up the crisis, which was bound to be bad for sterling. Callaghan had tried to avoid overt deflation in his post-election budget by introducing the selective employment tax (SET), a bright idea of his adviser Nicholas Kaldor, as a means of giving incentives to the whole of the manufacturing sector by penalizing employment in the whole of the service sector of the economy. Whatever the long-term structural merits of such a plan might have been, the fact that any fiscal restraint from SET would not be felt for six months left the economy vulnerable in the short term (and in the long term SET was not to survive anyway).
It was the short term which mattered in the sterling crisis of July 1966. Wilson said the seamen’s strike had blown the Government off course. What the crisis revealed was that it had never been on a course likely to reconcile the existing exchange rate with economic growth. The case for devaluation had hitherto been plausibly resisted for political reasons; but the General Election removed and reversed this argument – there could be no better time to push it through than at the beginning of a parliament, with an impregnable majority at the Government’s back. Callaghan, a political animal to his fingertips, decided in mid-July that devaluation was now the only option. This left Wilson vulnerably isolated. Virtually all the big guns in his cabinet were now pointing the other way. His most important allies on the left, Crossman and Castle, were now ready to support devaluation, which was already advocated by right-wingers in the cabinet, with Brown to the fore, and they were now much reinforced by the arrival of Crosland and Jenkins. This was a powerful combination. Yet not only was Wilson unpersuaded: he made the grounds of his own scepticism into the means of rallying the cabinet once more behind the existing parity of sterling.
First Wilson squared Callaghan, face to face, to re-establish their axis before meeting the full cabinet. Here, what made all the difference was Europe. It was generally accepted – certainly the French Government was ready to say this – that the British economy could not be integrated with that of the EEC while sterling remained overvalued at $2.80. There were thus grounds for suspecting – and suspicion was deeply ingrained in Wilson’s temperament – that those who advocated devaluation had Europe in mind. Now support for British membership of the Common Market was not only growing: it was growing in a pattern which was to have far-reaching effects on the unity and effectiveness of the Labour Party for the next twenty years. By and large, the pro-Europeans were on the right of the party, especially the revisionists or social democrats who had once identified with Gaitskeil (except on this issue). And by and large, the opposition came from the left, many of them with old Bevanite loyalties. It was on these factional allegiances that Wilson now played. Seeing – or at any rate depicting – devaluation as a plot by the pro-Europeans in the cabinet, he called in his political debts. When Brown personalized the issue as one of leadership, Wilson knew that he was safe. Moreover, he adroitly seized on the point that some deflationary measures would be needed to make devaluation work. If this were so, he suavely argued, agreement on a deflationary package should surely precede a decision on the exchange rate. Having secured this agreement, Wilson progressively pushed devaluation into a hypothetical future, in a masterly display of prime ministerial power.
The July package amounted to a major squeeze: bank-rate at 7 per cent, cuts in Government spending (both at home and overseas), hire-purchase restrictions, and a complete freeze on wage and price increases. The immediate casualties were Brown and his National Plan. Brown’s credibility was critically sapped. His resignation from the cabinet – not his first, not his last, but one of the few actually in writing – though subsequently withdrawn, became public knowledge; he was pensioned off as Foreign Secretary, a much diminished figure. The National Plan was now dead. Michael Stewart, displaced from the Foreign Office, went to the DEA to pick up the pieces, especially over prices and incomes policy. A voluntary incomes policy had been sold to the unions in exchange for economic expansion; now they bristled at the threat of statutory restraint in an era when expansion had been sacrificed to the maintenance of the exchange rate.
Incomes policy set a conundrum during the Wilson Government similar to that set by conscription during the Asquith Coalition: how to appease the tender consciences of its backbench supporters by giving an ostensibly voluntary policy the force of law. In a replay of the Derby Scheme of 1915, the 1966 wage freeze was initially voluntary, but backed by a statutory requirement to notify proposed increases to the Prices and Incomes Board. Once this pantomime had duly proved ineffective, the freeze itself was finally given legislative backing for twelve months, creating the further problem of what to do when the twelve months were up. The short-term impact of these measures was impressive. The rise in industrial earnings was halved. Brute economic forces, of course, reinforced the policy, since the economy grew by little more than 2 per cent in either 1966 or 1967 (half the rate envisaged in the National Plan).
Such policies could be justified if the unpalatable medicine proved efficacious. A wage freeze, in particular, was a once-for-all emergency measure, staking all the Government’s remaining goodwill with its supporters in the trade unions upon one great gamble against the currency markets. Wilson was well aware that his decisive intervention needed vindication from results, especially on exports, by allowing a healthy pattern of growth to be resumed. True, the balance of payments for 1966 finished in the black, for the first time in three years, but it then plunged back into heavy deficit. The reason was a jump in imports at a time when exports were stagnant. The visible trade gap in 1967 touched £600 million, even wider than in 1964. Within a year of the July package it was obvious that more needed to be done.
Signs of a reorientation in Government policy began to emerge during the winter of 1966–7. First there was a defence review. Denis Healey was an intellectually masterful Minister of Defence throughout the Government’s period of office. In 1964 he had gone along with Wilson in presenting the continuation of the Polaris submarine-building programme as a fait accompli to a surprisingly complaisant cabinet. While maintaining Britain’s pretensions as a world power, Healey was tough-minded in seeking to achieve such ends only if the appropriate means were available, which they were not, as the July 1966 crisis demonstrated. Serious defence cuts, especially overseas, were now needed, and the obvious target was Britain’s presence east of Suez. Yet this was exactly what Wilson had promised the USA to maintain in exchange for support for sterling, which was more necessary than ever. So the Government’s difficulties went full circle.
Vietnam may have been President Johnson’s problem, but whenever he sneezed, Wilson caught a cold. His own domestic standing, especially with his old constituency on the left, was increasingly prejudiced by his complicity in this increasingly messy and unpopular war. Wilson had more than one reason, therefore, to wish it could be brought to a dignified conclusion – or any other kind. When the Soviet leader Kosygin visited Britain in February 1967, Wilson went into action as a mediator, using all his arts in negotiation to wring grudging concessions from Washington so as to enlist Kosygin’s good offices in dangling them before the Communist regime in Hanoi. Wilson was carried away by the drama of this personal summitry, relishing his hotline access to the Johnson administration. He imagined that he teetered on the edge of peace, while he anxiously waited for his calls to be returned, only to find that the line had gone dead, since Johnson was in no mood to settle, least of all in this manner. A comment recorded in a White House transcript – ‘we don’t give a goddamn about Wilson’ – captures the reality of the special relationship, which thereafter resumed its steady decline.
In the early months of 1967 Wilson seems to have had a change of heart, not only about Britain’s essentially ex-imperial role in the world but also, by implication, about its relations with Europe and the USA. He now rejected a further deal offered by the USA, explicitly linking support for sterling with a continued British presence in the Far East. Instead plans were made for a phased withdrawal east of Suez. Meanwhile the Government sought to seize the political initiative by launching a bid to enter the EEC. Brown’s move to the Foreign Office had pushed the matter up the agenda; by November 1966 the Government announced its intention to apply, which provoked relatively little dissension in the Labour Party; and from January to March 1967 Brown and Wilson made a series of exploratory visits to European capitals. They discovered only what they could have expected to discover: that five member states were well disposed but that de Gaulle was still adamant. Nonetheless, at the beginning of May the cabinet decided to make a formal application, without this entailing the resignation of the handful of sceptics, like Castle. Since entry was strongly favoured by the Conservative Party under Heath, not to mention the Liberals, the Government won overwhelming backing in the Commons, though with 36 Labour MPs voting against. All of this may have been symbolically important; but it cut no ice with de Gaulle, who immediately declared his continued opposition; and, despite cheerful noises from Brown, it was only a matter of time before the formal rejection of the British application came through in November.
By then there was a new situation, or rather an old situation (a sterling crisis) with a new outcome (devaluation). This was not a policy decision so much as a capitulation to events. Callaghan’s persistent reading of devaluation as a political catastrophe became self-confirming; a shaken man, he left the Treasury in the aftermath. By the end there was little dissension since there was little alternative, barring an International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue under onerous conditions. The pound was devalued by 15 per cent against the dollar, to a new rate of $2.40 (and 9.5 DM). Wilson, as usual, had an excuse; this time it was the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and the consequent closure of the Suez Canal, that was to blame. Indeed, unlike Callaghan, Wilson bounced back with a resilience bordering on effrontery, appearing on television to tell the British people that this gave them the chance to make a new start, and adding a folksy reassurance that ‘the pound here in Britain – in your pocket or purse or bank’ had not been devalued (presumably in case anyone thought they would only receive change from seventeen shillings the next morning).
For Wilson, it may have been a new start; it certainly meant starting all over again, with little to show for fifteen months of fruitless economic sacrifice. The next exercise in deflation would therefore be heavier to bear – economically, psychologically, politically. Bank-rate now stood at 8 per cent. The Government was already in serious difficulties, losing by-elections on swings of up to 18 per cent in the biggest turnover of votes between Labour and Conservatives since the war; and the Lanarkshire seat of Hamilton was lost to the Scottish Nationalists. The opinion polls told the same story; despite the lacklustre leadership of Heath, the Conservatives were way ahead.
Wilson needed a new Chancellor of the Exchequer. The two obvious candidates were Crosland and Jenkins, economically literate ministers who had long urged devaluation. Wilson chose Jenkins, feeling that he had the better political grasp, while Crosland remained at the Board of Trade. Balancing the advance of the Labour right, Wilson made sure his cabinet was buttressed with the support of old friends on the left. Crossman became Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, responsible for the handling (and sometimes mishandling) of the Government’s legislative programme. Castle, following a forceful stint at the Ministry of Transport, where she stepped up the campaign against drink-driving, was again promoted in April 1968, acquiring the resplendent title of First Secretary of State at the Department of Employment and Productivity. This gave her a wide-ranging brief in shaping industrial policy, on lines which had fateful consequences for the Government.
If these were all ministers on the way up, Brown was on the way out. At the beginning of 1968 he resigned once too often; it was another late-night, highly public row, another next-morning repentance. This time Wilson could afford to let him go; Stewart, who had obligingly made room for Brown at the Foreign Office, now obligingly went back. The incident came opportunely in the wake of a cabinet crisis (plot, said Wilson) largely engineered by Brown and Callaghan, over whether to resume arms sales to South Africa – an episode which allowed the prime minister to show himself still master in his own cabinet and thus cleared the air. Apart from the rumbling threats of the eclipsed Callaghan, now in exile at the Home Office, this became a more united and more collegial Government, with more input from other strong ministers, and relatively less from Wilson’s intensely personal ‘kitchen cabinet’, in which his personal secretary Marcia Williams remained a controversial figure. The cabinet was held together by common adversity, which notably cemented an effective working relationship between Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. Both Wilson and Jenkins had the strongest interest in making devaluation work.
To do so, more cuts were necessary, in order to release resources for exports and stop the immediate drain through overseas spending. In a series of meetings in January 1968, the cabinet eventually accepted Jenkins’s demand that withdrawal from military commitments east of Suez be accelerated. A deadline of late 1971 was agreed. Other cuts included cancellation of US fighter aircraft, emphasizing the symbolic importance of a reordering of priorities which the US Secretary of State feelingly called the ‘end of an era’. Defence spending, which had been stuck at about 6 per cent of GNP, was to fall to 4 per cent within seven years. The other cuts in government spending, though less contentious in cabinet, fell on commitments nearer to the hearts of Labour supporters, notably the postponement in raising the school-leaving age to sixteen and the abandonment of the target of 500,000 new houses. In his first Budget in March 1968 Jenkins piled on tax increases all round, not only duties on petrol, drink and tobacco, but also a once-for-all levy on high incomes, to the tune of £900 million. This drastic budget was well received on the Labour benches in the Commons, but in the country the Government’s deep unpopularity was testified by record swings against it in a string of by-elections.
Jenkins had promised ‘two years’ hard slog’ but he did not foresee the unremitting difficulty of the struggle to turn the balance of payments around. The deficit in 1968 was practically as bad as in 1967. The Basle agreement was negotiated in July 1968, providing for the rundown of sterling as a reserve currency; but in the meantime there was inadequate support should the pound face a renewed onslaught. Desperate plans were secretly prepared – first ‘Brutus’, then ‘Hecuba’ – for a further devaluation. In November 1968 the trade figures still seemed so unresponsive that an emergency scheme for import deposits was pushed through. Moreover, the Government’s prices and incomes policy was now disintegrating, with increasing anomalies in framing it, increasing difficulty in enforcing it, and increasing reluctance by Labour MPs to vote for its renewal.
It was in this context that Barbara Castle’s proposals for trade-union reform became so highly charged. She called her White Paper ‘In Place of Strife’ in homage to her hero Bevan’s political testament In Place of Fear (1952); but critics had a point when they said it was really In Place of Incomes Policy. A Royal Commission on the trade unions had recently endorsed the traditional British view that the law was best kept out of industrial relations; but the Conservatives had undoubtedly struck a popular chord in saying that a legal framework was now necessary. Trade unions could no longer count on a benign image, dating from the Bevin era; though 70 per cent of the public claimed to think them generally a good thing in 1964, and only 12 per cent bad – proportions similar to ten years previously – by 1969 only 57 per cent said good, and 26 per cent now said bad. Membership, at around 10 million, was virtually unchanged in a decade; but the days lost in industrial disputes, after five years of quiescence, were steadily rising. Moreover it was the ill-disciplined nature of spontaneous walkouts, led by shop stewards rather than sanctioned by the official union structure, which was highlighted as a problem. Castle’s aim was to create order out of chaos, on good socialist principles, by balancing new rights for trade unions against a new legal obligation to observe proper procedures.
The grand strategy of ‘In Place of Strife’ was overtaken by more pressing political priorities. Wilson was attracted by the idea of outflanking the Tories, as so often before; and trade-union reform made an appeal to ministers worried about the economy, both in itself as a means of promoting efficiency and through its effect on foreign confidence in sterling. Yet the very idea of arming government with powers to require strike ballots or impose a cooling-off period went against the grain in the Labour movement. Not only were the unions predictably hostile, but backbench Labour MPs threatened to withhold their support, and even in the cabinet a group of ministers, led by Callaghan, were clearly determined to wreck the measure. Wilson’s tactics were to speed up the whole process, so as to pre-empt opposition. A short bill was therefore prepared in April 1969, excluding compulsory strike ballots but giving government powers to intervene in disputes. Yet this too fell foul of the combination against it at all levels in the Labour Party. Eventually the Chief Whip told Wilson that he did not have a Commons majority to ensure the passage of such a bill. Wilson and Castle, locked in negotiations with the TUC, were left to devise a face-saving formula to cover their retreat.
There can be little doubt that the Government got the worst of both worlds in first ostentatiously bringing forward, and then ignominiously abandoning, trade-union legislation. Labour thus conceded the case for reform – and showed itself incapable of implementing it. What is remarkable is not that the Government was left in such poor shape in the summer of 1969 but that within a year it appeared to have staged such an impressive comeback. Just as economic weakness had spurred it to promise action on industrial relations, so economic recovery released the pressure upon it.
During 1969, unsteadily at first but then with compelling momentum, the monthly trade figures at last moved into the black. The balance-of-payments surplus for the year turned out to be nearly £500 million; in 1970 it was to touch £800 million. What had happened was that British exports in 1969, now priced more competitively in foreign currencies, were over 25 per cent greater in volume than before devaluation, whereas the increase in the volume of imports was only half as much. But since the increase in imports had come through first, and at the higher sterling prices which devaluation entailed, it took a couple of years for the net advantage to show.
So far as the Government’s electoral prospects were concerned, the economic recovery had come in the nick of time. Yet once Jenkins had achieved the balance-of-payments surplus, which had proved so elusive for so long, he was determined not to let it slip away again. Not only was the 1969 budget fairly severe, there was to be no electioneering budget in 1970 either – or rather it was a pre-election budget of a more sophisticated kind. Instead of a tax-cutting bonanza, which Jenkins thought would be a give-away in more than one sense, he instead sought to project a mood of confidence in continued prosperity through an exercise in fiscal and monetary prudence. Moreover this went down surprisingly well, not only in the markets but with the electorate. The swing back to Labour in the local-government elections in May 1970 encouraged talk of an early general election, which suddenly looked winnable for a Government which, only months previously, had been reeling from by-election rebuffs. Wellingborough had been lost on a swing of 10 per cent as recently as December 1969, the last of fifteen seats lost.
By June 1970, however, the sun had come out. Wilson, from his garden seat at 10 Downing Street, announced that he was going to the country and proceeded to spend a succession of cloudless days walking around shopping centres, chatting about the chances of the England soccer team in the World Cup in Mexico. In place of politics, one might say. It was the Conservative Party under Heath which sought to disturb the voters’ complacency, just as in 1966; but all the polls suggested that Wilson had correctly gauged the public mood. At the close of the campaign, however, there were disquieting signs for Labour – an anomalously bad set of trade figures, a break in the weather, England’s defeat in Mexico, a rogue poll showing a narrow Tory lead – which proved ominous. The swing to the Conservatives throughout the UK was the biggest since 1945. In England, where the anti-Labour swing was over 5 per cent, there was a fall in turnout to 71 per cent, 13 per cent lower than in 1950, nearly 5 per cent lower than in 1966. The fact was that a lot of people who might well have voted Labour had stayed at home. Worse was to follow.