The Storytellers (9 page)

There had been one surreal experience around midnight. A man looking like Peter Betsworth had joined the
Sentinel
party for a short period and when Harvey addressed him by name, he'd been told, quite sternly, that he must be mistaken. Nonetheless, the look the man had given him suggested otherwise. George Gilder, who had been witness to this brief exchange, simply said, ‘Wheels within wheels, Mudd, nothing more,' as they stood at the bar collecting drinks.

He rose late. His mother was ecstatic. Mrs Thatcher had been called to the palace and invited by the Queen to form a government.

“Now things will get done, Harve, you'll see!”

With 608 results in, Labour had lost 42 seats and was on 264, the Conservatives had gained 56 seats and now had 323, which gave
them a working majority. The Scottish National Party had all but been eviscerated, retaining only 2 seats and losing 9. Their vote, it seemed, had largely migrated to Labour, blunting the Conservatives' advance north of the border. Other parties, such as the Ulster Unionists and Plaid Cymru, would end up sharing 14.

As he glanced at the constituency results he noticed that the swing to the Conservatives in Dagenham, where the Ford factory was located, had been a massive 14%, against the national average of 8%. Even in Longbridge the swing had been 10%. The working man's blind attachment to the union was over. Sylvia's ferocious independence was more widespread than he had imagined. Hers and the voices of those like her had found an echo in a hard-working lady, with forceful political opinions and a science degree from Somerville College, Oxford, who had pulled herself up by her own bootstraps and saw no good reason why others shouldn't do the same. Something really had happened during the night. The age of the principled patrician and all-seeing union boss was over. The individual as consumer now sat on the throne. For good or ill, their country had been reborn.

Part Two

C
HAPTER

T
HE NEXT TIME Harvey and Peter Betsworth met, the ambience was markedly different from what it had been during their first encounter. For a start, it was June and the weather had finally turned warm. Although St James's Park remained the MI5 man's venue of choice, he also appeared more relaxed.

“Forgive my manner at
The Sentinel
,” he said. “These little subterfuges serve their purpose.”

Harvey said nothing, as there seemed nothing he could usefully say. Subterfuge was subterfuge.

The two men sat on a bench overlooking the water enjoying the sun in the way men released from incarceration savour their first mouthful of decent food.

“What a winter it's been!” Peter Betsworth exclaimed, relieving some of the tension which had been building up over the last few months.

“You will have been pleased with the result,” Harvey said.

“Yes, we needed a change and we needed clarity and remarkably, considering the opacity of the democratic process, we seem to have got both.”

“But I take it there is still more to be done,” speculated Harvey, doubting he had been summoned for a chat.

“The hard part starts now,” stated his companion with a finality Harvey found alarming.

“Surely she can just do what she wanted to: curb inflation, reduce union power, lower taxes and cut government expenditure?”

“All things the previous government would like to have done,” the intelligence officer said laughing. “The body politic is better at defining objectives than attaining them. The problem, you see, is that the systems we are part of make many of our decisions for us and have vested interests. When the Shah of Iran was deposed in January, my profession – I regret to say – was caught on the hop. The monarch might not have been perfect, but he believed in a secular state, the education of women and the modernization of his country's economy – all objectives we in the West considered laudable.

“What we failed to notice was that many ordinary Iranians preferred Shia Islam to Western culture and when the beneficiaries of his push for greater education failed to find jobs because the economy was insufficiently developed, a combustible mix was created that the Shah's increasingly heavy-handed suppression of opposition only served to ignite. It was, I think, Otto von Bismarck who said,
Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen
– Politics is the art of the possible – so simply wishing for good things, Mr Mudd, is not enough.”

“Harvey, please. I would feel more comfortable.”

“Certainly. And on that basis you had better call me Peter,” his contact invited, adding with a dry laugh: “A sort of familiarity, I suppose.”

“So where do you think the problems lie?” Harvey asked, thinking that if this was going to be a tutorial he might as well make the most of it.

“The central problem of government, Harvey, contrary to what most people imagine, lies in the limitations of power, not in its surfeit.
Now don't get me wrong, governments can do a lot of unpleasant things to large numbers of people and that is real, especially to those affected. But a polity is a complex entity which must feed, clothe, house, entertain and protect those who make it up. This entails thousands of individual decisions, taken daily, that no rule book could prescribe.

“While a governing elite can always use force to impose its will, even picking on this or that minority to satisfy the worst instincts of its majority, terror tends to freeze decision-making, causing people to do what they imagine is expected of them, rather than what is best for either themselves or their polity. The great beauty of free-market capitalism is that it is a process which depends more on countless individual decisions than it does upon government edict.”

“So capitalism is without fault,” Harvey suggested wryly, slipping easily into the role of sceptical student.

“Certainly not!” exclaimed Peter Betsworth, rising nicely to Harvey's fly. “The redoubtable Karl Marx drew out most of its faults, but was blind to the fact that what he was talking about was the distribution of power and the self-interest of those who possess it, rather than about free-market capitalism per se. Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others, and as political economies go, you could say the same about free-market capitalism. The two are joined at the hip, which is not to say that both can't be improved.

“The difficulty our new government faces is that it only has a limited number of tools it can use to make things better. The last government and indeed the Conservative one before it, both tried logical persuasion and even legal sanction. But how do you persuade unions to persuade their members to take pay cuts, which is what below-inflation pay rises are? Unions exist to protect their members and if union bosses agree to do otherwise – to see the big picture, whatever that is – it serves only to empower their shop stewards who
live daily with the concerns of their members.

“And why should a profitable corporation make its workers take a pay cut? It wants smooth labour relations. Inflation is something it must contend with, not something it is responsible for.

“So the government's policy of attempting to keep wage increases below inflation was unacceptable to the unions as well as to the private sector. But unlike the private sector, the government could not afford to pay inflation-matching wages without borrowing more money from increasingly reluctant lenders and the public sector unions simply went on strike whenever the government threatened to pay less. Logical persuasion, therefore, was not a runner. The Trots say the system is bust and to some extent, they are right. But their solution that all payments should be mandated by the state, in accordance with ‘communist principles', walks us straight into totalitarian hell.”

“But didn't something like that work during the war?” the sceptical student asked.

“It did, and for short periods, when a polity has a single objective, more or less shared by everyone, such as to defeat an enemy, it can. Perhaps it even enabled the Soviet Union to launch mankind's first satellite into space. But state-mandated objectives eventually undermine the creative energy of an economy which relies on individuals interacting freely in their search for new and often unexpected ways to improve one another's lives.”

“So what options do our new masters have?” Harvey asked, beginning to think that the task sounded impossible.

“Well, what I am hearing is that they intend to pull government out of the economy. Not entirely obviously, but out of such things as trying to operate car companies, steel mills and coal mines.”

“Privatization?”

“This is turning into a lecture,” Peter Betsworth admitted, “and I am sorry. But you asked, and it is important, so let me do my best. To cover the cost of public sector wages, a government has three
sources: taxation, borrowing or a combination of the two. Generally, governments use a combination, but by and large government expenditure and tax receipts should balance over time, with borrowing used to smooth things out. But because people don't like paying taxes and politicians like being popular – whether elected or not, I have to say – the temptation to borrow is great. Now when you borrow, you are adding to the supply of money in an economy, just as any loan you get boosts your personal liquidity.

“If the extra money is spent on existing things that do not help you to repay the loan it simply pushes up the price of these things, causing inflation. Or, to put it another way, borrowing to pay ever-higher wages without any increase in the output these wages buy is inflationary: more money is simply chasing the same number of things.”

“So the government should tax more or borrow less,” suggested Harvey.

“Quite logical,” agreed Peter Betsworth, “but there is another factor to consider. Let's start with the ‘tax more' option. All the money raised in tax is money the state spends and individuals do not. Now if the creative energy of an economy depends upon individuals making decisions, the more their individual decision-making capacity is taken over by the state, the less effective that state's economy is likely to be. So there is a limit to how high taxes can go.

“As far as the ‘borrow less' option goes, the question here is how to manage the transition, because borrowing less means paying less and paying less means people getting hurt. The best analogy I can think of is that it is like trying to ease a person off a heroin addiction. Each injection of the drug produces a smaller high, so the taker increases his use until his body is overwhelmed by the drug and he dies. That is the position we were approaching last year. But to start reducing the amount of drug being taken causes the body great pain because it has become dependent. This is what we have ahead of us. I
don't believe anyone in the new administration has any idea how long our rehabilitation will take or how painful it will be.”

“And how is this going to curb the power of the unions?” Harvey wondered.

“Ah, now that is slightly different. That will be done through legislation: no more secondary picketing, no strike without a secret ballot, no forced enrolment – that sort of thing. But the real test will come when the government privatizes all those industries taken over by the state since the war and that won't be possible until they have shed all the men and women they can no longer afford.

“There will be a lot of anger and some fierce battles. There are signs the motor industry is starting to face reality. There is more debate going on within its unions than you might think. The worst confrontation will almost certainly be with the National Union of Mineworkers. The government will have to pick its moment. It must not get knocked off course this time.

“Here is a file on some of the key players in both industries. You might care to pay particular attention to Mr Derek Robinson, a Communist shop steward in British Leyland's Longbridge plant. He can take credit for causing more stoppages than anyone: approaching five hundred, I believe.”

“I've come across him,” said Harvey. “He seemed like a nice enough fellow. He thinks management has screwed up his industry and that the workers can do better.”

“Yes,” mused Peter Betsworth acidly. “I wouldn't wholly disagree with part of his analysis.”

“You seem to be preparing me for Armageddon,” Harvey said, smiling weakly.

“Well, let's say this government is likely to be a lot less popular in three years' time than it is today. We must just hope its members have the balls for it – although that is perhaps not the most appropriate expression in the circumstances.”

C
HAPTER

S
TANLEY PRESTON edged the car cautiously out of Longbridge. He was not a frequent driver but considered himself steady, although his 15 miles per hour in built-up areas and 45 more or less everywhere else did not always endear him to fellow motorists. He and Mabel had decided to visit Mabel's sister, Rita, who had married a Welshman from Merthyr, Davyn Pritchard, and perhaps take in the Brecon Beacons.

“He developed Cardiff docks,” recounted Mabel, reading from her guidebook. “Fair shovelled money in, it would seem, the money he hoped to make from his coal.”

“Who's that dear?”

“The Marquess of Bute. Poor man lost his wife. He did marry again though and had a child.”

“I don't suppose it was his coal,” muttered Stanley, forever puzzled by his wife's fascination with the aristocracy.

“Well it says here it was his coal,” complained Mabel.

“Yes, but who pulled it from the ground?”

Safely on the road south, Stanley locked into 45mph and held his ground.

“I still can't believe it Mabel. A 10% swing to the Tories – in Longbridge! A fair few of our brothers must have voted for her. It's not the world I knew, I can tell you.”

“Well things do change, dear,” soothed Mabel who had been on the end of her husband's discomfort since the election and would never confess that she had voted for Mrs Thatcher.

“It says here,” she went on, “that the population of Glamorganshire almost tripled in the first forty years of the nineteenth century, all on account of pig iron and coal. Imagine: farming one minute, factories the next! The Marquess helped make that happen. He built a railway to get coal from the valleys and the docks to ship it out.”

“Exploited on the land, exploited in the factories. Marx got that right,” Stanley growled, unsettled by the steady stream of cars that passed him whenever opportunity allowed and sometimes, even when it didn't. “Idiot!” he cussed under his breath as another frustrated driver squeezed passed just ahead of an oncoming truck.

“Who is, dear?”

“Didn't you see that?”

“Well if you went a little faster, dearest, they might be less inclined.”

It was a pleasant enough day and the miles were ticking by, with Stanley occasionally nuzzling 50 mph, while Mabel watched the passing fields, dipping back into her book whenever the view offered nothing new. She hadn't seen Rita for too long. It had caused a stir when her sister ran off with a Welshman, and a miner at that. Engineers saw themselves as a cut above, even when their task was on the assembly line. No black faces and a life underground for them.

“Here's an interesting fact,” she announced. “In 1913, over ten million tons of coal were exported from Cardiff docks and more than one hundred shipping companies were based there.”

“It's nothing like that now, I wouldn't think,” said Stanley.

“No, ships started using oil instead of coal, it says here. Sad that,
really,” Mabel mused. “Just to think: if we had stuck with coal we wouldn't be having to kowtow to those sheiks now.”

“Yes, we could have carried on kowtowing to your Marquess instead,” chortled Stanley, feeling that he had hoisted his wife on her own petard.

“Well at least he was a Scot,” snapped Mabel defensively. She rather liked the picture of the man by Henry Raeburn in her guidebook.

“Yes, and they now have the oil, too,” grumbled Stanley.

Mabel decided to keep her research to herself from then on. It was a long way to South Wales.

* * *

Mabel, Rita, Stanley and Davyn entered the town hall, next to the Carnegie Library, around 6.00 p.m. to be sure of a good seat. The Quar Ladies were meeting in another room and it had been a toss-up for Mabel and Rita whether or not to join them. But when Stanley told them their John would be there and that Jack Pugh was an energetic speaker, they had decided to stick with their men.

At 6.30 p.m., the local union officials entered with their guest and following the usual flattering introduction, which Jack considered no more than his due, the now national organizer began his talk.

“The election was a disappointment,” he admitted. Capitalist propaganda had bamboozled the electors, he claimed.

Mabel shifted in her seat. She had not felt in the least bamboozled. But then he started to say something that caught her attention.

“Coal made this country,” he asserted. “The industrial revolution was driven by coal. In 1700, less than three million tons was mined but this had more than doubled by the end of the century reaching sixteen million in 1815 and some thirty million by 1830. Those numbers speak for themselves. And when the easy money had been made by the iron masters and colliery owners, they went inland
after the deeper seams. The population in the Rhondda Valley went from some five hundred in 1800 to over one hundred and sixty-two thousand in 1921 after the Bute Merthyr Colliery was sunk and the Taff Vale Railway was extended to carry the coal to Cardiff docks. Coal, people, progress – it is as simple as that!”

‘And what about the Bute family's great borrowings and mighty investments?' Mabel wanted to call out. ‘Didn't vision and money fit in there somewhere?' But Jack Pugh had moved on.

“And what more can we learn from the people of the Rhondda Valley?” he pounded out, his reedy voice rising to its theme. “We learn about communitarianism; about the precious gifts of community, of sharing, of equality.

“Now I hardly need tell you, good people of Merthyr, about these things. It was the Rhondda Socialist Society that helped form the Communist Party of Great Britain; it was the people from these valleys who stood up against Tommy Moran and the British Union of Fascists; it was men from here who joined the International Brigade in Spain to fight General Francisco Franco; and it was to Tonypandy, just eighteen miles from here, the government sent troops to stop miners securing a fair wage from greedy mine owners intent on getting more for less.

“These are things you know,” he said, lowering his voice. “I am here to call upon that spirit again. Our new fascist government – and yes, that is what I believe we now have – is intent upon destroying the coal mining industry. Why? Because oil and foreign coal can be purchased more cheaply, enabling business to make even greater profits, profits which flow to the few, not to the many.”

A rumble of approval spread through the room and Mabel felt herself being carried along.

“Yours is an industry under great threat. Between 1920 and 1945, the number of men working in the mines fell from 1.2 million to eight hundred thousand, and in 1947 the mines were nationalized. But did
that help? You be the judge. In 1920, there were two thousand eight hundred and fifty-one working collieries producing two hundred and twenty-nine million tons of coal. Last year, one hundred and thirty million tons were produced from just one hundred and seventy. Brothers, nationalization was a boon to the owners not the workers.”

An even stronger murmur of approval ran through the audience. The now national organizer, albeit one of several, had them eating from his hand.

“We can expect no favours from this government…”

The sound of ‘No!' rose from the gathering.

“We must take a stand…”

The ‘Yes!' was half-sigh, half-release of pent-up worry and emotion, like a spontaneous response in one of the Baptist churches many in the room still attended. Even Harvey, sitting at the back, was ready to shout ‘Alleluia!' had anyone else been inclined.

“Now there is a man in Yorkshire, Arthur Scargill, who will take this fight to the government if you will give him your support.

“When the miners went on strike in 1972, thirty thousand engineers in Birmingham came out in solidarity. The mass picket of the Saltley Coke Depot, which Arthur helped organize, was a success. Solidarity with the miners closed power stations and docks and after seven weeks the government was defeated. Again in 1973, Arthur was a key figure in organizing the strike that brought down Edward Heath's Conservative government. Next year he will be putting himself forward for the presidency of the National Union of Mineworkers. I urge you to vote for him. If anyone can take on this heinous government and save the coal mining industry, it is Arthur Scargill.”

For a moment, there was silence. The message had been brought down to them from the mountain. Now what?

“Thank you,” Jack Pugh prompted, his arms outstretched, and they rose to give him the standing ovation he craved.

* * *

Harvey had come with Alun Davies, a seasoned reporter from the
Merthyr Express
. Although this was now the third occasion at which he'd seen Jack Pugh in action, he thought it time he met the man in person and Alun had been lined up by the national organizer for an interview after the meeting.

The venue was Y Dic Penderyn, a pub opposite the town hall.

“An insufferable little prick, I expect,” confided Alun as they walked from the hall. “They come here from nowhere, promising to refashion the earth in less time than it took God in the book of Genesis and after getting the people all wound up, they float off leaving us somewhere in the Book of Revelations to be crushed in the winepress of God's wrath.”

Inside they found a squash around the organizer, of people anxious to draw out some last drop of wisdom they might have missed and to be associated with the expression of their dreams. On seeing the reporter, Jack Pugh excused himself from his admirers – ‘Work to do, I am afraid' – and joined the journalists at a table with John, John's parents and their hosts, Rita and Davyn Pritchard. After introductions were made and drinks ordered, Alun Davies quickly got to work.

“Now tell me, Mr Pugh, how is this Arthur Scargill going to save our mines?”

“Jack, please.”

“Jack, Mr Pugh, certainly. Now what is the answer to the question?”

Stanley was bristling at the reporter's tone, but Davyn knew the reporter took no prisoners in his search for truth, a characteristic that endeared him to his readers, and so settled back with his beer to enjoy the joust.

“You are asking our communities to make a big commitment and probably, down the road, an even bigger sacrifice,” Alun elaborated,
“so they need to know.”

Jack didn't like any encounter with an intellectual equal, especially one who appeared hostile to his views and launched into a diatribe about the government being captured by the capitalist class.

“The government must be forced to keep the mines open,” Jack said, “and our power stations should be obliged to use our coal, rather than gas and cheap imports. Arthur has forced the government's hand twice before. He's a winner.”

“I could offer up the tale of King Canute,” Alun began, “but let me tell you instead about Dic Penderyn, who this fine establishment is named after. Davyn, you'll know this narrative well, but our visitors might not.”

Davyn Pritchard nodded a comfortable, worldly nod. Such stories had been the lifeblood of his youth.

“The great influx of people into the valleys happened because the ironmasters and colliers needed workers. The ironmasters and colliers came to the valleys because there were deposits of coal and iron ore. These industries expanded as fast as they did in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because Britain was industrializing. The population was growing. Cities were growing. The nation's wealth was growing. The place was abuzz with opportunity. Change abounded. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.

“After Boney was finally defeated in 1815, the continent was no longer off limits and industry had to adjust to new markets, new competition and to ever-improving ways of doing things. There were now more workers in the valleys than the factories needed. So factory owners laid off men and cut wages. But people were less quick to leave than they had been to come. They had built communities.

“In early 1831, frustrations boiled over, and the men working for the ironmaster William Crawshay, who had built Cyfarthfa Castle a few years earlier for a cost of some five million pounds in today's money, downed tools and took to the streets of Merthyr. Soon their
protest spread and in June the government sent in a Scottish regiment to restore order.

“A battle between soldiers and workers ensued. Many were injured, some were killed and the soldiers were forced to withdraw. Around eight thousand workers, waving red flags, effectively took control of Merthyr.”

“And it can be that way again,” interjected Jack Pugh, glowing with vicarious pride.

“It must have been frightening,” said Mabel, oblivious to Jack Pugh's withering stare.

“And so it was,” continued Alun. “The protest ran out of control and many of the families felt things had gone far enough. The rioters' council was split and by 7th June, the authorities had regained control using force. Twenty-six were arrested and two of them sentenced to death by hanging. One of these was Lewis Lewis, convicted of robbery, and the other was Richard Lewis convicted of stabbing a soldier in the leg with a seized bayonet.