The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (106 page)

In 1967 homosexuality between consenting adults was made legal, ending years of misery for men (homosexuality among women had never been a criminal offence) who had previously been liable to imprisonment. The painful procedure of divorce was made less cruel by removing the question of guilt and providing that after two years of separation a marriage could be ended on grounds of irretrievable breakdown. Perhaps most important of all, in 1965 Britain abolished the death penalty, though it was too late for many innocent victims of prejudiced trials such as Derek Bentley.

That same year Labour, by the Race Relations Act, set up the Race Relations Board to tackle racism. A growing number of Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants from the old empire had been encouraged since 1945 by successive governments to fill employment gaps in factories, hospitals and on the railways. In the mill towns of the north they were forming sizeable communities and cultural differences were being exploited by those who feared that immigrants would not adapt to the British lifestyle. The act made the incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence. In 1968 a second Race Relations Act rendered racial discrimination in employment, advertising and housing illegal, created new immigration-appeal procedures and gave the Race Relations Board power to act directly in the courts.

By now America was not only conquering space ahead of Russia by sending men to the moon and back, she was heavily involved in the former French Indo-China fighting communism in the shape of the North Vietnamese, who, backed by communist China, had invaded South Vietnam.

The Labour government supported the American presence in Vietnam, though it declined a US request to send British troops. But as the war dragged on it became extremely brutal in its methods. Not only the left of the Labour party–which hitherto Wilson had been regarded as part of–violently disapproved of what they regarded as neo-colonialism, but millions of young Americans were outraged by it. One of the most important effects of the American anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was that protest movements became mainstream. By 1968 all over the world the young had gathered for revolution.

In Paris a student protest against poor teaching under the conservative Gaullist government turned into a massive strike, while in Prague behind the Iron Curtain there were the first attempts to break up the monolithic communist system. In what is known as the Prague Spring the Czech Communist party leader Alexander Dubček attempted to introduce ‘socialism with a human face’ by abolishing censorship and introducing multi-party elections. But it ended in August 1968 with Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into Prague to restore what was effectively Soviet domination. There were photos in all the world’s newspapers of a despairing young Czech student named Jan Palach who burned himself alive in 1969, five months after the Prague Spring had failed to make it into summer.

Though British society was undergoing revolutionary change at all levels, Britain escaped revolutionary violence. Her problems were financial. Harold Wilson’s TV persona–he liked to be seen pipe in hand wearing a raincoat–was intended to reassure the viewer of his down-to-earth British credentials, but he seemed always to be fighting a losing battle against economic instability, having found himself in the middle of a balance of payments crisis when he took office, set off by Tory fiscal irresponsibility. He and his chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan staved off a devaluation crisis for long enough to win another election in 1966, massively increasing Labour’s majority to ninety-seven. But the British economy was failing. Industry was threatened externally by the rapidly reviving post-war economies of Germany, France and Japan and internally by the damage done by industrial action and strikes and soaring wage claims. The 1965 Trade Disputes Act made the strike weapon easier as it gave union leaders full legal protection to use it where there had been a threat of redundancy.

Wilson established the Prices and Incomes Board to investigate prices and wage demands with representatives from business and the trade unions, but when rising inflation necessitated giving the board legal powers to suppress soaring wage claims this angered the left in the Labour party as well as the trade unions themselves. Many felt that a Labour government with its roots in the trade union movement should not be in the business of preventing claims for higher wages. But Wilson had seen the figures: Britain could not afford the sort of claims which the unions were putting in. When he announced a statutory wage freeze to be put through Parliament to avoid devaluing the pound, there was uproar on the Labour backbenches. It would only get louder as the decade progressed.

Wilson’s novel weapons of wage freeze and wage restraint did not stop Britain arriving at another sterling crisis by the autumn of 1967, precipitated by her renewed desire to enter the Common Market. Strikes threatened, and confidence in the pound fell to a new low, with gold reserves rapidly diminishing. In November the government was forced to devalue the pound, having been unable to raise any further foreign loans to prop up its value. This was a traumatic moment for Labour, who had been desperate to avoid further association with this drastic remedy after its deployment by the Attlee government in 1949. Although Wilson, the cunning communicator, insisted the next day that this did not mean ‘the pound in your pocket’ was worth less, no one believed him.

The new $1 billion loan arranged for Britain by the International Monetary Fund had the usual conditions of curbing government spending for what was becoming a cap-in-hand nation. Harold Wilson in the late 1940s had himself resigned from government when charges for spectacles were introduced by the Attlee administration. Twenty years later he was presiding over prescription charges on the NHS, building fewer council houses and putting off (until 1973) that key improver of children’s lives, raising the school leaving age to sixteen.

Labour did not want to abandon all reforms, but they had to rely on emergency budgets to raise money. Worldwide, markets were in turmoil. Under Roy Jenkins, who replaced Callaghan as chancellor after the devaluation, there were price hikes on petrol, alcohol and cigarettes intended to control inflation. Austerity ruled at the gloomy Treasury. Once again, as in the late 1940s, Britons were allowed to take only £50 out of the country on holiday. It was not until the autumn of 1969 that economic recovery and a trade surplus put an end to a financial regime which Britons today would find unacceptable.

Meanwhile industrial action and the millions of days lost to industry were destroying the economy. Laws were needed to prevent wildcat unofficial strikes by left-wing shop stewards. Wilson and Barbara Castle, the secretary of state for employment and productivity, tried to use legislation to bring the trade union movement to heel, and in a famous White Paper entitled
In Place of Strife
they proposed that all strikes should first be approved by a ballot of the members. But MPs such as Jim Callaghan, who in a job-swap with Jenkins was now home secretary, were extremely unhappy at the idea of introducing laws of which the Conservative party might have been the author. A backbench revolt combined with the TUC’s refusal to accept fines or legislation against strikes ensured that by 1969 Wilson and Castle had to accept that the government had no chance of putting anti-strike legislation through Parliament, despite its enormous majority. They were forced to rely solely on the TUC’s word that it would use its influence to prevent unofficial strikes.

Britain’s revived attempt to join the Common Market was vetoed, for the second time, by de Gaulle shortly after the devaluation in 1967. Some comfort was derived from the resignation of de Gaulle in 1969, which suggested that next time it would be easier to be accepted into the Common Market. Britain therefore persisted with her negotiations for membership. Although Labour had set up a Ministry for Overseas Development to help the newly independent Commonwealth countries find their feet, the dynamics of nationalism had loosened ties between the old colonies and Britain. The increasing volume of trade with Europe made joining the Common Market seem inevitable.

Labour pressed on with relinquishing commitments, withdrawing what troops remained east of Suez. Under pressure from the African Commonwealth countries in 1965, the government imposed sanctions against the white Rhodesian politician Ian Smith when he made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence to evade the transition to black majority rule. Commonwealth pressure chimed in with Labour’s natural idealism to stop Britain selling arms to South Africa in 1967, though many argued that this would lose thousands of jobs in the UK and that South Africa would obtain arms anyway from the French and the Israelis. Nevertheless Labour believed that they should not be seen to approve of a pariah nation. However, the support of the Wilson government for the Nigerian authorities when they refused to allow Biafra to break away and fought a bloody war (1967–70) angered many on both sides of the House.

During the campaign for the 1970 general election Labour seemed bound to win again. The government had been responsible for a remarkable quantity of improvements to the fabric of modern Britain. Establishing a Parliamentary Ombudsman to look into failures in Whitehall departments made the process of government more accountable to the people. But in 1970 it seemed Britons were dissatisfied by the rising tax demands and attracted by the Conservatives’ patriotic reminders of Britain’s great-power past. Despite all Labour’s reforms their choppy financial record made the electorate turn to the more grandiose Conservatives, who denounced Labour’s economic ‘plans’, higher taxation and incomes policies as interference in people’s personal affairs.

The Conservatives presented a united front under their new leader Edward Heath, with his bright-blue eyes and booming voice. Heath came to power determined to succeed where Wilson had failed: he wanted to cut government spending and see off the unions. The millions of days lost in unofficial strikes continued to run down British industry and lose international markets, despite the TUC’s vow of self-regulation. But the Conservatives came to grief in the epidemic of inflation which gripped the world at the beginning of the 1970s. There were enormous rises in world food prices and commodities which badly hit British shops.

The Conservatives were forced to devote large sums of taxpayers’ money to saving some of Britain’s most famous industries such as Rolls-Royce aero-engines and Clydeside shipbuilders. But the Heath government’s decision to enforce a nationwide wage freeze when the TUC and the Confederation of British Industry together failed to reach a self-restricting wage limit outraged the unions. Their members were watching the price of milk and butter rise by 25 per cent a year. Heath set up two national organizations which were even more far-reaching than Wilson’s: the Price Commission and the Pay Board which had to approve all pay rises affecting more than a thousand people.

The subject nearest Heath’s heart was joining the European Common Market. This had always been one of his great enthusiasms (the others were yachting and music–he had been the organ scholar at Balliol College, Oxford). And fittingly it was under his government that Great Britain became part of the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973. To prepare for joining Europe, in 1971, the Conservatives brought in decimalization, the conversion of the British pound into a system based on tens to chime in with the continent. To a fanfare of national protest, the pound now comprised 100 new pence instead of 240 old pence; the sixpence was replaced by two and a half pence, and the shilling by five pence. Although Britain was also supposed to have converted to European kilometres, the majority of the population regardless of their age continue to talk about that ancient unit brought to Britain by the Romans, the mile. Nevertheless, kilograms and millimetres are now Britain’s official units for weights and measures.

The Market’s common external tariff ended Britain’s very close relationship with Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand, which sent almost 90 per cent of her dairy products to Britain and in return received over half of her imports from Britain. Nowadays most of New Zealand’s dairy trade is with Asian countries. The rupture of the former empire’s trading links angered many politicians. They feared the end of cheap food from the empire and the effect on Britain’s fishermen of not being allowed to fish at will in the seas surrounding Britain, given that each EEC country has its quota. The left wing of the Labour party began to turn anti-marketeer. So did some Conservatives who felt that the Commonwealth was being too swiftly abandoned for Europe.

Relations with the Commonwealth were made dramatically worse in 1971 when the government attempted to implement a harsh new Immigration Act. This would have prevented any further automatic immigration into Britain from former Commonwealth countries, while making it easier for EEC nationals. The bill aroused outrage on all sides of the House. MPs were still sensitive about the Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 in which he had proposed voluntary repatriation for Asians and West Indians. The legislation was altered: members of Commonwealth countries who wished to immigrate into this country who had a ‘grandpatrial’ connection, that is whose grandparents were from Britain, had preference over citizens of European Community countries. By accepting all 40,000 Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, in 1972 without a quibble, the Conservative government did something to restore good relations with the Commonwealth. So did the continuance of sanctions against Rhodesia.

As traditional supporters of the British arms industry, it was to be expected that under the Conservatives arms sales to South Africa would be resumed. That did not stop the increasingly assertive Commonwealth from condemning the move. In 1971 the Conservatives showed a return to a sort of mini-imperialism east of Suez by setting up a mutual defence pact with Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. Diplomatic relations were opened with Maoist China, which had been severed since 1949, an event memorialized by Beijing’s gift to London Zoo of two giant pandas named Chi-Chi and An-An.