Abstract
Every British Government since the Second World War has concerned itself in its domestic policy with a constellation of problems best described – to borrow recent Chinese terminology – as four modernisations: industry, the labour market, the financial sector and the state. They differed chiefly in the priorities they gave to each one and their consistency and strength of will. The government led by Edward Heath tried to give equal weight to all four aspects of modernisation; and displayed a greater willpower and singlemindedness than most. Its political exit in 1974 was correspondingly of more significance to Britain’s economic future than those of 1951, 1964 or 1970.
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Notes and References
Robert Carr, now Minister of Employment, set up a Court of Inquiry on 16 July; on 29 July, the dockers accepted the report on pay and condtions, and returned to work on 3 August, on which day the State of Emergency terminated. Generally, see K. Jeffery and P. Hennessy, States of Emergency (1983), Chapter 8.
Export of goods and services averaged 6.9 per cent increase; unfortunately imports stayed ahead at 7.5 per cent. Export performance was nearly twice as good as in previous postwar cycles; nevertheless, UK share of world trade fell from 14 per cent (1964) to 9.1 per cent (1973), almost exactly the obverse of Japanese performance (R. C O. Mathews et al., British Economic Growth, 1856–1973 (1981).
NEDC, British Industrial Performance (1985). A comparison with France’s progress over the previous decade is instructive.
In the end it ran up against Heath himself, who issued a public rebuke in September 1973, after a speech by Victor Rothschild had revealed a clear policy difference between them: Tessa Blackstone: Inside the Think Tank (1988), p. 55.
J. Ramsden, The Making of Conservative Policy (1980), pp. 279–83. Michael Fraser, though neither in Westminster or Whitehall, had charge of the Research Department and, unlike Peter Thomas who took over as Chairman after Barber, had personal access to Heath. Apart from this link, channels of communication rapidly silted up, leading to a situation in which isolation and resentment occurred. For nearly four years, the organisation had no role other than desultory speculation about the next election manifesto.
In November 1971, Professor Alan Walters submitted a paper to Heath on inflationary consequences of the consumer spending boom, found no support, and was promptly sacked (interview, 1983); Alan Walters, Britain’s Economic Renaissance (1986), p. 3–4.
Douglas Hurd, An End to Promises (1979), describes how he and the Private Office were concerned that ministers had become cut off not only from the Prime Minister, but from the party.
Madron Seligman, MEP, quoted in P. Whitehead (ed.), The Writing on the Wall (1985), p. 53.
Uwe Kitzinger, Diplomacy and Persuasion (1975), p. 59.
The negotiations were conducted by William Rodgers: see The Writing on the Wall, (1985) p. 67. The government had a majority of 112.
Wilson Committee, Appendix 3, Table 3.70. The best account of CCC is given by Michael Moran, The Politics of Banking (1986), pp. 14–15 and Chapter 3.
Cf. Wayne Parsons, The Political Economy of British Regional Policy (1988), Chapters 7 and 8, especially pp. 224–6 and 245–7.
Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall (1985), p. 81.
Interview with Robert Carr, Writing on the Wall, 1984 (LSE Library).
The timetable envisaged the Second Reading by December 1970, in order to take the Committee Stage on the floor of the House of Commons. Generally see Gerald Dorfman, Government versus Trades Unionism in British Politics since 1968 (1979), Chapter 3.
E. Wigham, The Power to Manage, (1973) pp. 236–8, 270, which gives a full account of the complexity of changes in the engineering industry, caused partly by white-collar unions’ (DATA which later became TASS and a section of the AUEW in 1972) success in establishing themselves as independent entities inside the AEU in the late 1960s. The battle at Coventry included not only the toolroom agreement, but also sectional disputes with ASTMS, at Girling Brakes and C. A. Parsons. December 1971, which saw the EEF’s pyrrhic victory, brought a treaty between them which in turn weakened the AUEW, causing Scanlon to moderate his tactics vis-à-vis government, and the EEF to revive its hopes of a new national settlement.
See Table 3 for quarterly figures from June 1971 onwards. The total number of jobs available in the UK had peaked in 1965–66; in the long, slow fall which followed, service industry and services did not repair more than half the losses in manufacturing industry, mining and transport, etc., while the increasing percentage of the elderly worsened the dependency ratio and multiplied state spending and borrowing (John Ermisch, The Political Economy of Demographic Change, 1983, pp. 127–9). In terms of the competition from Japan or Korea, labour had already overpriced itself by 1967, and heavily so after 1969, a point which Heath and Barber constantly reiterated. On the other hand, if public sector employment had not expanded in the late 1960s despite fiscal stringency and attempted retrenchment, redundancies would have dramatically increased after July 1966. The Labour Government habitually denied the existence of this secular rise in unemployment (cf. NEDC (69)2, a joint paper by Treasury, DEA and DEP), pretending that it was temporary and unusual. By 1971 there could be no doubt that it was not.
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© 1990 Keith Middlemas
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Middlemas, K. (1990). A Quiet Revolution?. In: Power, Competition and the State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378780_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378780_10
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