A Day of Destiny (copyright all media outlets)

On the day of Scotland's independence referendum, here's an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis? remembering the 1979 referendums in Scotland and Wales:

The issue of devolution dominated the last period of James Callaghan's administration. Support for some form of separate legislatures in Scotland and Wales was by now running too high for the Labour government to ignore, while there was pressure too from its parliamentary partners in the Liberal Party, who were long-standing supporters: ‘Unlike the other two parties,’ Jeremy Thorpe had pledged in the 1970 election campaign, ‘I would see that Scotland and Wales had their own parliaments, running all domestic affairs.’

Even the Conservatives, while opposing devolution, were wary of sensibilities north of the border. Back in 1973, in the days of Edward Heath, a proposed set of stamps commemorating great Britons had been amended at the last minute to remove Edward I (‘the Hammer of the Scots’) and to replace him with Henry V; to be on the safe side, Robert the Bruce was also included. And behind the scenes was the fear of another Ulster if some sort of concession were not made. ‘I don’t want them to turn to violence, of course,’ said Michael Foot, ‘but I think it’s quite likely.’

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

This requirement, this one final hurdle for the nationalists to overcome, was not of the government’s making. Desperate to stay in office, Callaghan was keen to appease the MPs of the SNP and Plaid Cymru and to see the devolution proposals through with as few quibbles as possible, but there was considerable disquiet amongst his own backbenchers. In Wales Neil Kinnock, a rising star of Labour, became known for his vociferous denunciations of nationalism, even claiming that there was a ‘linguistic racism’ operating in the principality against non-Welsh-speaking children.

Since the language question was of paramount importance to Plaid – the party’s first manifesto, written in 1925 by John Saunders Lewis, had insisted ‘We can aim at nothing less than to do away with the English language in Wales’ – it was not surprising that he became the target of nationalist attacks, including a 1977 pamphlet titled ‘Neil Kinnock and the Anti-Taffy League’.

A more subtle approach to linguistic sensitivity was displayed in 1974 when Selwyn Lloyd, as speaker of the House of Commons, allowed the two Plaid MPs to swear their oaths of allegiance in Welsh, so long as they also did so in English: ‘I thought that the two members concerned were slightly disappointed that I had deprived them of the chance of a public protest on behalf of the Welsh language,’ he chuckled.

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

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

‘Thank God they’re going independent,’ reflected Regan in The Sweeney. ‘We’ll be able to put that wall up again.’

Vote, vote, vote for Nigel (Barton)

I love election day. Even when it's only for members of the European Parliament, an occasion that's always spoiled a bit by not getting the results until the following Sunday.

So I've been out to do my voting and was somewhat surprised to find that there were other parties putting up candidates apart from UKIP. Judging by the coverage in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph (the two papers I read most frequently), I had thought this was a one-horse race, but it turns out that other people fancy their chances as well.

Last time round, in 2009, UKIP got around 2.5 million votes in the Euro-elections. The BNP got nearly 1 million, most of which - I assume - are now available, while many of the 2 million who voted LibDem (when that party was still in opposition) will also be looking for somewhere else to register a protest. Combined with the blanket media coverage, that means that UKIP should be very disappointed if they fall short of 4 million votes today; and they should be getting around 4.5 million.

And that, I suspect, is going to be their highpoint in their current form. If you don't vote UKIP this time, you're unlikely to do so at a general election next year. There's a chance that they might hit 30 per cent of the vote today, but on a general election turnout the same number of voters would produce around 14 per cent. And even that's optimistic.

Not that UKIP are irrelevant or unimportant. It seems to me that Nigel Farage is asking some very pertinent questions. It's just that UKIP don't have the answers. And nor, unfortunately, do any of the other parties, which is why they're so desperate to shout 'racist' in the hope that the questions aren't heard. This won't work. It will quite possibly restrict the possibility of UKIP support growing any further, but it leaves the problems untouched.

At the heart of those problems, the issue that resonates most strongly is quite clearly not Europe but immigration. And, for those who would like to see a Left alternative in Britain, the question that needs answering is: what benefit does the presence of large numbers of, say, Polish workers in the country bring to the British working class?

The typical Left response is that this is the wrong issue, that it's low wages, bad employment practices and underinvestment in social infrastructure that should really be the focus. Which may well be true, but isn't an answer; it's just telling people that they don't understand their lives well enough to ask the right question.

Nor is it an answer to say that we should celebrate the social diversity brought by immigration. Unless, of course, you can then point to the specific contribution made by those Polish workers. (My apologies for singling out Poles, by the way: it's intended merely as a shorthand, which is how I hear it being used by many of those who are discontented with mainstream politics.)

The real issue for the Left is why it's a rightwing party that's attracting the protest votes of the dissatisfied. The standard allegation is that UKIP are exploiting people's fears, which merely raises further questions: Is 'exploit' the correct word, or should it be 'articulate'? Is it fear or dislike?

We've been here before, of course. In fact we've been here for the last fifty years, and the tactic has always been to stifle dissent. 'Every year the head office gets a lot of resolutions for the union's annual conference from branches all over the country which are stongly colour prejudiced,' a TGWU official noted in 1968. 'The senior officers see to it that none of them comes up in debate.' The same year, Jeremy Isaacs, then a producer on Panorama, admitted: 'Television programmes deliberately underplayed the strength of racist feelings for years, out of the misguided but honourable feeling that inflammatory utterances could do damage.'

The significance of those comments coming in 1968 was that that was the year of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech. Isaacs added: 'The way feelings erupted after Enoch Powell's speech this year was evidence to me that the feeling has been under-represented on television, and other media.'

Powell's last contribution to British politics came in 1993 when he spoke on behalf of Alan Sked in the Newbury by-election. The man deputed to give him a lift to and from the constituency on that occasion was Nigel Farage. So inspired was Farage by Powell's arguments during their journey that he resolved to dedicate himself to a career in politics. Two decades later, and he seems to be doing alright for himself.

The fact that we seem to be going round and round the same issue decade after decade might be perceived as being a little depressing. So, to end on a cheery note: a fortnight after the 'rivers of blood', a poll found that 74 per cent of the British population supported Powell's views on immigration. If that were still the case, then Farage would be doing a whole lot better than he is.

Margaret Thatcher

To mark the passing of Margaret Thatcher, here’s an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s:

With Keith Joseph ruling himself out of the running, even before the race had started, Thatcher decided to rule herself in, on the grounds that ‘someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand’. In November 1974 she announced that she would be challenging Edward Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

She was not an obvious choice, partly because she, following Joseph, had begun to espouse the unfashionable cause of monetarism, and partly because the policies she had pursued in her previous incarnation as education secretary under Heath had led to her being dubbed by the Sun ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’. In retrospect, given the controversy she subsequently attracted, this was something of an overstatement. Her supposed offence was absurdly innocuous – under pressure from the Treasury, the statutory provision of free milk for schoolchildren was ended on her watch – but the tabloid sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ had a pleasing enough ring, and it lingered long in the memory.

An entry in Kenneth Williams’s diary in January 1972 captured some of the reaction to her time at education, as well as offering a foretaste of future protests: ‘There were barriers at Downing Street and mounted police. It depressed me very much. The bawling long-haired youths shouting “Thatcher Out!” and carrying coffins expressing sentiments like “Maggie Dead” etc was the spectacle of only another form of fascism.’

Mostly, though, Thatcher was an improbable candidate for the simple reason that she was a woman. That was, for the media, the overriding issue, and coverage of her tended to be couched in terms of her appearance, with a particular focus on her headwear. When she was education secretary, the Sunday Telegraph had described her as being ‘sometimes rather pretentious and given to the smart hat and neat pearls favoured by suburban ladies coming to Tory conferences for the first time’, and the image still dominated the declaration of her candidacy.

‘Try to forget her plummy voice and her extravagant hats and her Dresden-shepherdess appearance,’ advised the Daily Mirror. ‘She is the toughest member of the Shadow Cabinet, and even if she doesn’t win the battle for the Tory leadership she may yet be responsible for bringing down Ted Heath.’ But even Enoch Powell, who had as good a claim as any to be her trailblazer, had trouble forgetting these things, insisting that the Tories couldn’t possibly elect her: ‘They wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent,’ he shuddered. It was an image of which she was well aware, describing herself defiantly as ‘a middle-aged lady who likes hats’.

It was noticeable that when she did emerge as Heath’s successor, in February 1975, it was the handful of women Labour MPs who were the first to celebrate the achievement. ‘I am very pleased,’ said Gwyneth Dunwoody, while Joyce Butler went further: ‘Absolutely splendid. I am delighted. It is time we had women in the top jobs.’ And Shirley Williams added, ‘I cannot help admitting privately, as a woman, being pleased to see that in the Tory Party, of all parties, a woman has broken through.’

Thatcher’s victory in the 1975 leadership contest was no great endorsement of monetarism. Indeed it is doubtful how many of those who voted for her in the first ballot (when she defeated Heath), let alone in the second, when she saw off all other challengers, understood or believed her deeply held, if newly acquired, convictions on economics. The support was instead predicated on her courage in volunteering to bell the cat: ‘She’s the only man among them,’ was the phrase going around Westminster.

‘Suddenly Mrs Thatcher stands out among the Tory dwarfs like a life-size Snow White,’ editorialized the Daily Mirror before the first ballot. ‘A very tough Snow White.’ But it warned that if she became leader, the Conservatives would be taking on an image that was ‘Dominatingly middle-class. Suburban. Anti-union. Even more Southern English than it is now.’ It was precisely this image that excited those who sought hope in Thatcher’s election. The Daily Mail leader column that welcomed her arrival put it in the context of the great enemy of the right: ‘The majority of the British people do not want socialism. They do not want Bennery.’ The only question was whether this bold experiment of having a female leader might misfire and inadvertently hand the future to Tony Benn.

 

Let Us Now Praise ... Rhodes Boyson

 

The death of Rhodes Boyson, former Labour councillor and long-time Conservative MP, failed to make it onto the news bulletins of Radio 5 Live, though it was mentioned on Radio 4. Perhaps that's inevitable. Boyson has been out of the political spotlight for a long time - when I was writing Crisis? What Crisis? five years ago, I tried to get an interview with him, but he was already too ill by that stage.

Insofar as he is remembered by the general public, it's probably as that strangely old-fashioned, mutton-chopped figure who appeared on Have I Got News for You and who agreed with Ali G that there was something to be said for children getting caned at school. Or, just possibly, there might be memories of him as the right-wing education minister in Margaret Thatcher's government.

In thinking Tory circles, meanwhile, he's still remembered for the Black Papers of the 1970s, in which he lambasted contemporary education theory, and did so from a position of some authority, having been headmaster of Robert Montefiore School and of Highbury Grove comprehensive.

But my interest in Boyson, and the reason I wanted to speak with him, was largely on the strength of a little book he edited, Right Turn (Churchill Press, London, 1970), published shortly after the election of Edward Heath as prime minister. It's a fascinating document, no bigger than a paperback and with just 150-odd pages, but in that space its various contributors - including Ralph Harris, Alfred Sherman and Ross McWhirter - provide a comprehensive blueprint for Thatcherism, half-a-decade before Thatcher came to the same conclusions.

The key contribution, from my perspective, was the introductory essay by Boyson himself. He was later to publish his memoirs, Speaking My Mind (1995), but some of the background was covered in this thirteen-page piece.

He came from a radical family. His grandfather was 'blacklisted for trade union activities in the mills of the late 1880s', his father 'believed that socialism would bring world brotherhood and peace' and was a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and he himself was brought up within the faith. Born in Lancashire in 1925, his education came within the Labour movement, with its traditions of self-education and internationalism: 'The volumes of the Left Book Club were devoured by those of us who grew up in the depressed areas as the first recipients must have read the epistles of Saint Paul.'

His conversion to conservatism came from a belief that socialism, and in particular the Labour Party, had lost its way, had become attached to the state, and in the process had damaged the moral fibre of society: 'It has become destructive of the self-reliance and responsibility which were the pride of the 19th-century nonconformists.'

You don't have to agree with his conclusions, or the policy positions he came to as a consequence, to recognise the power of his story. There were many formerly on the left who came to endorse Thatcher (from Woodrow Wyatt to Paul Johnson), but Boyson's background and experiences lifted him well beyond their shabby ranks. For anyone wanting to understand what happened to the Conservative Party in the 1980s and beyond, there's no better place to start. Because, even more than Enoch Powell, Boyson represented the soul of the Thatcherite revolution.

  

The Good Samaritan

One of the inexorable laws of writing non-fiction books is that, as soon as you’ve published, new information will turn up that you wished you’d known when you were writing.

A few years back, I wrote a book on the Biba stores and within days of it hitting the shelves, I was contacted by people who’d worked there and who had tales to tell. I even discovered that one of my best friends, the architect and thriller writer Brian Freeborn, had included a rather charming little elegy to Biba in his novel Ten Days, Mr Cain? (Secker & Warburg, 1977).

In the latter instance, I slipped the reference into a subsequent book, Welcome to Big Biba. But even so, it wasn’t until I later re-visited Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (Secker & Warburg, 1975) that I found another wonderful bit about the hero’s wife nipping up to London on a regular basis to spend a dirty weekend with her lover, occasions which she liked to call ‘Biba weekends’, since she’d always visit the shop when in town.

So I put that bit into my most recent book, Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, since I figured it was unlikely I’d write a third book on Biba.

Now, however, I find something that should have been included in Crisis? What Crisis? And, in the absence of anywhere else, I thought I’d write about it here.

Towards the end of that book, I suggest that the principal political split in Britain at the end of the 1970s could be summarised by two interpretations of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

On the one side was Margaret Thatcher, who explained the moral of the tale to Brian Walden on Weekend World in her first major TV interview after her election as prime minister in 1979. ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions,’ she remarked; ‘he had money as well.’

And, she said, this confirmed her vision of the society she wished to build, a society that eschewed the socialist obsession with egalitarianism. ‘If opportunity and talent is unequally distributed, then allowing people to exercise that talent and opportunity means more inequality, but it also means you drag up the poor people, because there are the resources to do so.’

On the other side of the political divide, there was the veteran left-winger Ian Mikardo who celebrated in his memoirs (Back-Bencher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988) the frequently derided figure of the political activist, as opposed to the much vaunted silent majority.

These latter he characterized as: ‘the people who stay silent, who don’t utter a word of protest against the fruits of social injustice and deprivation; or against the system which hoards mountains of food in cold stores in rich countries whilst millions starve in the waste-lands; or against the erosion for company profit of the world’s natural resources, and the pollution of its air and its rivers and its oceans; or against the slide towards nuclear war and nuclear winter and nuclear holocaust.’

And, he concluded: ‘The Good Samaritan was an activist: those who passed by on the other side were members of the silent majority.’

(There was yet another interpretation of the Good Samaritan, this time from the one serious student of the New Testament in the House of Commons. Enoch Powell insisted that the story had to be understood in the historical context of those who heard it first, an audience who would have understood the racial relationship of the Jews and the Samaritans: ‘If the parable has a “moral”, it is that Jews and Samaritans should remember that they are not merely neighbours (literally) but kinsmen.’)

Having spent some time exploring this dispute over political interpretations of the teachings of Jesus, I was a little miffed today to find another reference in the popular fiction of the era. So I thought I’d mention it now.

I’ve been reading Anthony Price’s splendid Our Man in Camelot (Victor Gollancz, 1975), undoubtedly the best Cold War espionage thriller with Arthurian overtones I’ve ever read. And in it a CIA agent explains that ‘the moment of gratitude was also the most vulnerable one.’ In other words:

‘Remember what the Good Samaritan probably said to the guy as he rolled on the bandages: “Going down to Jericho, eh? Say, maybe you could give me an introduction to the Chamber of Commerce there?”’

Social networking – that’s the point of charity. Apparently.