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'Governing in Hard Times': the Heath Government

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'Governing in Hard Times': the Heath Government ‘Governing in Hard Times’: The Heath Government and Civil Emergencies – the 1972 and the 1974 Miners’ Strikes. Rosaleen Anne Hughes Ph. D thesis 2012 1 Abstract This thesis examines how the government of Edward Heath (Prime Minister 1970- 74) managed the two most significant domestic political and economic crises which determined both its fate and its long term reputation; first, the 1972 miners’ strike and secondly, the 1973-4 miners’ dispute and the three-day week. Its defeat by the miners in 1972 was an enormous humiliation from which the Heath government never fully recovered. The violent mass picketing which accompanied the strike shook both the government’s and the public’s confidence in the ability of the state to maintain law and order. Their victory boosted the miners’ confidence to take industrial action again in the autumn of 1973 when their position was strengthened by the oil price rise in the wake of the Yom Kippur war. This led to the imposition of a three-day week on industry which ended in the general election of February 1974 and the fall of the Heath Government. This thesis uses the new material in the National Archives to examine the interplay between these events and the government machinery for handling civil emergencies. It reveals the manner in which Heath’s first attempt to reform the system was defeated by Whitehall resistance. The incompetent handling of the 1972 miners strike then strengthened the case for reform and led to the thorough overhaul of contingency planning which laid the foundations for the system which exists to the present day. It examines the factors which influenced the handling of the crises, including the relationship between the Prime Minister and his colleagues, between ministers and officials, the problems posed by external events and the cumulative exhaustion which placed ministers and officials as well as the machinery of government under increasing strain. 2 Contents Introduction 4 Ch. 1 Creaking and groaning 37 Ch. 2 We must be prepared 67 Ch. 3 A victory for violence 96 Ch. 4 Bayonets and power stations 132 Ch. 5 A ‘red-meat’ settlement or a special case 164 Ch. 6 Honour and party unity 208 Conclusion 240 Appendix 1 Chronology 262 Appendix 2 List of Abbreviations 267 Bibliography 268 Diagrams Fig. 1 Cabinet Committees in November 1970 56 Fig. 2 Cabinet Committees and 1972 miners’ strike 91 Fig. 3 Cabinet Committees and 1973-4 crisis 174 3 Introduction General Aims The 1970s have been perceived, both at the time and in retrospect, as a ‘benighted decade’ in British politics.1 Near contemporary commentators described it as ‘a decade of gloom and fitful despair’2 and contrasted the successes of the earlier postwar period with the ‘discontented, quarrelsome, unsteady, ineffective, self- defeating seventies’.3 Politicians of both the left and right have castigated the era,4 and one former senior Whitehall official has described it as ‘the nadir of British government’.5 Recent historians have adopted a more revisionist approach to the decade and attempted to redress what they see as an imbalance in previous accounts and emphasised such positive aspects of the era as relatively low unemployment, compared to the 1980s and after, rising living standards, the renaissance of the women’s movement and the vibrancy of popular culture.6 Black and Pemberton have also argued that memories of the decade have to some extent been constructed by politicians of left and right so that, ‘What might be dubbed “false memory syndrome” is therefore powerfully reinforced by present-day political rhetoric and “spin”.’7 But the predominant memory of the era is still one of strikes and power cuts, the national humiliation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) dictating the terms of a loan to the British government and the bitter confrontations on the picket line during the public sector strikes in the winter of discontent of 1978-9. 1 Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, 'Reassessing the seventies: the benighted decade', British Academy Review, no. 14, 2009, p. 15. 2 Phillip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall: Britain in the Seventies (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), p. xiii. 3 Samuel H Beer, Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions of Collectivism (London: Faber, 1982), p. 1. 4 Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber, 2009), p. 1. 5 Sir John Gieve (Permanent Secretary, Home Office, 2001-05, Deputy Governor Bank of England 2006-9) interviewed on Peston and the Money Men, BBC Radio 4, 17 August 2009. 6 Beckett, When the Lights Went Out. 7 Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, ‘The benighted decade’, paper presented at the Centre for Contemporary British History conference on ‘Reassessing the 1970s’, London, July 2010. 4 The overall purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the reassessment of this reputation for poor government in the light of the recent releases of the government papers in the National Archives. Its methodological aim is to achieve this by examining how the government of Edward Heath (Prime Minister 1970-74) managed two episodes which constituted major crises. The term ‘crisis’ has been defined as having two meanings; first, ‘an unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty’, and secondly, ‘a crucial stage or turning point’.8 The events which have been selected for examination conform to both senses of the term; they placed the government under immense strain and they left an indelible mark on the political landscape. The defeat by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the 1972 strike was an enormous humiliation for the Heath government from which it never fully recovered. The violent mass picketing which accompanied the strike shook both the government’s and the public’s confidence in the ability of the state to maintain law and order and became a familiar feature of strikes and demonstrations throughout the decade. Their victory in 1972 boosted the miners’ confidence to take industrial action again in the autumn of 1973 when their position was strengthened by the oil shock in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, which marked the end of the era of cheap energy. This led to the imposition of a three-day week on industry which ended in the general election of February 1974 and the fall of the Heath Government.9 Two main arguments underpin this thesis and justify a study of the early 1970s. First, it was an era when the government faced an acute series of economic, social and political problems, often in conjunction with each other, which placed greater strain on ministers, officials and the machinery of government than at any time since the Second World War. It was also a period of transition during which many of the assumptions which had underpinned economic policy making since the late 1940s 8 http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=crisis, online thesaurus, accessed 12.3.2012. 9 The overtime ban which preceded the 1972 strike began on 1 November 1971 and that which preceded the 1974 strike on 12 November 1973 but, for the sake of brevity, they will be referred to throughout as the 1972 and the 1974 disputes or crises. 5 were eroded. Ministers and officials thus struggled to deal with a changed political and economic landscape with inadequate policy instruments. Secondly, the two main political parties drew different lessons from the conflicts of 1972 and 1974 which determined the course of British politics for the remainder of the decade and beyond. Their two defeats by the NUM left a legacy of bitterness in the Conservative Party which informed its view of industrial relations into the 1980s. After Margaret Thatcher replaced Heath as Party Leader in 1975 it determined that never again would it allow itself to be beaten by the trade unions. The role which the trade unions played in the fall of the Heath government in 1974 convinced the Labour Party that it could only govern with the consent of the unions. This lay behind the policies of high public expenditure and the absence of wage restraint followed by the government of Harold Wilson (Prime Minister 1974-76), which resulted in the soaring inflation of 27% in the autumn of 1975 and led to the IMF crisis in the autumn of 1976. Themes A number of inter-related and overlapping themes run through the history of the early 1970s and will be examined in the context of the crises. While this thesis is not an economic history the issue of relative economic decline played a dominant role in the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The long-standing and controversial debate over the causes of relative British economic decline began in the late 1950s. One view linked poor economic performance to global overstretch: the retention of unsustainable international military and political ambitions, coupled with the defence of the sterling area and the international role of the pound as a world reserve currency, led to low domestic investment, which was the key cause of Britain’s decline.10 Another perspective emphasised attitudinal conservatism on the part of both management and unions, which led to commercial, technological and managerial weakness and restrictive practices by workers, as the key factors behind economic stagnation.11 10 Andrew Shonfield, British Economic Policy since the War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958). 11 Michael Shanks, The Stagnant Society: A Warning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). 6 The UK’s relative economic decline has generated a heated academic debate and an extensive body of literature, of which the most controversial was the work of Correlli Barnett, who argued
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