Authority Undermined
Then the miners struck. At the beginning of 1972 the National Union of Mineworkers began their first national strike since the dark days of the twenties, pursuing a pay demand of 45 per cent. The government, with modest coal stocks, was quickly taken by surprise at the discipline and aggression of the strikers. A young unknown militant, a miner from Woolley colliery, organized some 15,000 of his comrades from across South Yorkshire in a mass picket of the Saltley coke depot, on which Birmingham depended for much of its fuel. Arthur Scargill, a rousing speaker, former Communist Party member and highly ambitious union activist, later described the confrontation with Midlands police at Saltley as ‘the greatest day of my life’. Soon he would be catapulted up as agent, then president of the Yorkshire miners. Heath blamed the police for being too soft. Scargill’s greatest day was, for the Prime Minister, ‘the most vivid, direct and terrifying challenge to the rule of law that I could ever recall emerging from within our own country…We were facing civil disorder on a massive scale.’ It was clear to Heath that the intention was to bring down the elected government but he decided he could not counter-attack immediately. Confronted with ‘the prospect of the country becoming ungovernable, or having to use the armed forces to restore order, which public opinion would never have tolerated’, Heath turned to a judge, Lord Wilberforce, for an independent inquiry into miners’ wages. From his point of view, it was a terrible mistake. Wilberforce said they should get well over 20 per cent, nearly 50 per cent higher than the average increase. The NUM settled for that, plus extra benefits, in one of the most clear-cut and overwhelming victories over a government that any British trade union has ever enjoyed.
Heath and his ministers knew that they might have to go directly to the country with an appeal about who was in charge but before that, they tried a final round of compromise and negotiation. Triggered by the prospect of unemployment hitting one million, there now follows the famous U-turn which afterwards so scarred Heath’s reputation. It went by the ungainly name of ‘tripartism’, a three-way national agreement on prices and wages, investment and benefits, involving the government, the TUC and the CBI. The Industry Act of 1972 gave a Tory government unprecedented powers of industrial intervention, gleefully cheered by Tony Benn as ‘spadework for socialism’. There was much earnest wooing of moderate trade union leaders. Money, effort and organization went into Job Centres as unemployment rose steadily towards a million. The industrialists did as much as they could, sitting on yet more committees when in truth they might have been more usefully employed trying to run their companies. The unions, however, had the bit between their teeth. By first refusing to acknowledge Heath’s industrial relations court ‘as really legitimately a law of the land’ and then refusing to negotiate seriously until he repealed the Act, they made the breakdown of this last attempt at consensual economics inevitable. Within a year the CBI too would be calling for it to be scrapped.
By now Heath had leaned so far to try to win the unions over that he was behaving like a Wilson-era socialist. He was reinstating planning, particularly regional planning. He was bailing out failing companies such as Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, partly because of the work-in discussed elsewhere – something Heath later believed was a mistake. He was offering the unions a privileged place in the running of the nation. From his perspective this was a last attempt to run the economy as a joint enterprise of British patriots, in which individual roles – trade union leader, company director, party politician – took second place behind a general belief in the common good, the wider politics of ‘Buy British’. Individuals followed the logic of their own interests instead. Trade union leaders had got their jobs by promising their members higher wages and better conditions. They could hardly be blamed for doing everything they could within the law to carry out the role they had been given. Industrialists, similarly, would live or die by profit margin and return to investors. They were not auxiliary politicians. Thatcherites later criticized Heath’s government for doing things which a government ought not to do, and not doing things it ought to. Governments should not try to run businesses, or do the wage bargaining of trade union officials and companies for them. They should not tell factories where to go. They should not attempt to control prices.
All these things, said Tories of ten years later, were better left to the market. What government should do instead was set tough and clear rules by which the other forces in society had to live. Government should ensure low inflation by controlling the supply of money. It should enforce strong laws against intimidation or law-breaking at work. It should allow firms that fail to suffer the consequences. Overall, the Thatcher critique has been applauded, not simply in Britain but around the world, and Heath’s tripartism, or ‘corporatism’ has been derided and forgotten. Yet he started with an almost identical view to her later one. He had been an enthusiast for letting the market decide prices. He promised not to let lame ducks survive. At the time, Thatcher was his fervent supporter and even her outrider Sir Keith Joseph only converted to a full free-market philosophy in the middle of the seventies, after the fall of the Heath government in which he had been a notably high-spending minister. The argument between the two sides of the Conservative Party was not one between toffs and the hard-nosed middle classes, or ‘ordinary people’, as many Thatcherites would later claim. Heath was no toff and his nose, though famously Concorde-large, was as hard as any.
Heath was blown off course by a political version of the impossible storm that later wrecked his beloved yacht Morning Cloud. Much of the country was simply more left-wing than it was later. The unions, having defeated Wilson and Castle, were more self-confident than ever before or since. Many industrial workers, living in still-bleak towns far away from the glossy pop world of the big cities, did seem underpaid and left behind. After the Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Wilson experiences, politicians did not have the automatic level of respect that they had enjoyed when Heath had first entered the Commons. Heath always argued that he was forced to try consensus politics because in the seventies the alternative policy, the squeeze of mass unemployment which arrived in the Thatcher years, would simply not have been accepted by the country. And given the very rocky ride Mrs Thatcher had a full ten years later, after industrial and some social breakdown had softened the way for her radicalism, he was surely right.
What finally finished off the Heath government was the short war between Israel and Egypt in October 1973, the Yom Kippur War. Israel’s swift and decisive victory was a humiliation for the Arab world and it struck back, using oil. OPEC, the organization of the oil-producing countries dominated by the Saudis, had seen the price of oil rising on world markets for some time. They decided to cut supplies to the West each month until Israel handed back its territorial gains and allowed the Palestinians their own state. There would be a total embargo on Israel’s most passionate supporters, the United States and the Netherlands. And those countries which were allowed oil would pay steadily more for it. In fact, prices rose fourfold. It was a global economic shock, shovelling further inflation into the industrialized world, but in Britain it arrived with special force. The miners put in yet another huge pay claim, which would have added half as much again to many pay-packets. Despite an appeal by its leader, the moderate Joe Gormley, the NUM executive rejected a 13 per cent pay increase and voted to ballot for another national strike. These were the days, just, before North Sea oil and gas were being produced commercially. Britain could survive high oil prices, even shortages, for a while. The country could hold out against a coal strike, for a while. But both together added up to what the Chancellor, Barber, called the greatest economic crisis since the war. It certainly compared to that of 1947. Coal stocks had not been built up in preparation. Now a whole series of panic measures were introduced.
Plans were made for petrol rationing and coupons printed and distributed. The national speed limit was cut by 20 miles per hour to 50 miles per hour to save fuel. Then in January 1974 came the announcement of a three-day working week. Ministers solemnly urged citizens to share baths and brush their teeth in the dark. Television, by now the nation’s sucky-sweet, was ended at 10.30 p.m. each evening. It is remembered as the darkest day (literally) in the story of mid-seventies Britain, and it was an embarrassing time in many ways. Yet it also gave millions an enjoyable frisson, the feeling of taking a holiday from everyday life. The writer Robert Elms recalls that though ‘this proud nation had been reduced to a shabby shambles, somewhere between a strife-torn South American dictatorship and a gloomy Soviet satellite, Bolivia meets Bulgaria, a banana republic with a banana shortage…The reality of course is that almost everybody absolutely loved it. They took to the three-day week with glee. They took terrible liberties.’
Heath and his ministers struggled to try to find a solution to the miners’ claim, though the climate was hardly helped when Mick McGahey, the legendary Scottish Communist mineworkers’ leader, asked by Heath what he really wanted, answered ‘to bring down the government’. Much messing about with intermediaries and many mixed messages, not least from the government’s own Pay Board, ensured that no effective compromise could be found. When the miners voted, 81 per cent were for striking, including those in some of the most traditionally moderate areas in the country. In February 1974 Heath asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament and went to the country on the election platform he had prepared two years earlier: ‘Who governs?’ The country’s answer, perhaps taking the question more literally than Heath had hoped, was ‘Not you, mate.’
Harold Wilson had expected the Tories to win again, and began the campaign in a depressed mood. A year earlier in Opposition he had prepared his own answer to inflation and the unions, the so-called Social Compact, or Social Contract. Agreed jointly between the union leaders and the Labour shadow cabinet, it was essentially a return to the politics of the forties, with price controls, a complex system of food subsidies, direct redistribution of wealth, controls on housing and investment and the end of the Tory union laws. In return for this Attlee-age manifesto from the politicians, the unions gave vague promises of voluntary pay restraint. It was a one-way deal but it was in Wilson’s interests to pretend that he could find practical agreements where Heath could not. It was in the unions’ interests to pretend they were signing up to a new era, if that would help expel the Tories and destroy their legislation. Outside observers saw it more plainly as a recipe for inflation which also offered the TUC a privileged place in government in return for very little.
But what was the alternative? The three-day week was not, it later turned out, quite the economic disaster it seemed. Industry had maintained almost all production – which shows how inefficient five-day working must have been – and relatively few jobs had been lost. But politics is half symbol, and Heath’s authority had gone. In the election campaign a public fed up of chaos and desperately looking for good news clutched at the Social Contract. Wilson was able to appear as the calm bringer of reason and order. This time, he was lucky as well. A slew of bad economic figures arrived during the campaign. Enoch Powell, Heath’s ancient nemesis, suddenly announced that he was quitting the Conservatives over their failure to offer the public a referendum on Europe, and called on everyone to vote Labour. A mistake by the Pay Board suggested that the miners were in fact relatively lower paid than had been recognized. And a surge in Liberal support, which took them from single-figure support to the backing of a quarter of those voting, turned out to help Labour more than the Tories. All this helped produce a late surge in Wilson’s favour. By the end of the campaign he had recovered some his old chirpiness and bounce. Having decided that Heath should not rule, however, the country seemed unsure that Wilson should either. Though Labour had won the most seats, 301 against the Conservatives’ 297, no party had an overall majority. Heath hung on, trying to do a deal with the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, who had 14 MPs, but eventually conceded defeat. Rather fatter, greyer and more personally conservative than he had been ten years earlier, Harold Wilson was back.
So Mick McGahey and friends had brought down the Heath government, with a little help from the oil-toting Saudi Royal Family, the Liberals and Enoch Powell. A more bizarre coalition of interests is hard to imagine. Edward Heath’s three and three-quarter years in Number Ten will be remembered for the three-day week, a rare moment when politics actually shakes everyday life out of its routine; and for taking Britain into Europe. But other important changes happened on his watch, too. The school-leaving age was at last raised to sixteen. To cope with international currency mayhem caused by that Nixon decision to suspend convertibility, the old imperial sterling area finally went in 1972. The Pill was made freely available on the National Health Service. Local government was radically reorganized, with no fewer than 800 English councils disappearing and huge new authorities, much disliked, being created in their place. Heath defended this on the basis that the old Victorian system could not cope with ‘the growth of car ownership and of suburbia, which were undermining the distinction between town and country’. Many others saw it as dreary big-is-better dogma. There was more of that when responsibility for NHS hospitals was taken away from hundreds of local boards and passed to new regional and area health authorities, at the suggestion of a new cult then just emerging – management consultants.
Political cynicism had been provoked in the fifties and sixties by the behaviour of the cliques who ran the country. By the seventies it was driven more by a sense of alienation. To many older Britons these were years of out-of-control change. Much of the loathing of Heath on the right of politics came from British membership of the Common Market which seemed the ultimate emblem of this rage for bigger and untraditional systems. Decimalization was almost as big a change to daily life. Though the original decision had been taken in 1965 during the first Wilson government, the disappearance in 1971 of a coinage going back to Anglo-Saxon times was widely blamed on Heath. Away flew the florins and half-crowns, halfpennies, farthings and sixpences, away went all the intricate triple-column mathematics of pounds, shillings and pence; and in came an unfamiliar if more rational decimal currency. Where would this end? Negotiators in Europe specifically fought to maintain the British pint measures in beer and milk, and the mile continued to keep the kilometre at bay. But in the seventies, the familiar seemed everywhere in retreat.