History of England 1-6

But Foot remained the stalwart and self-confident exponent of the socialist creed. He was the living embodiment of left-wing values in the twentieth century, to be compared with Russell and Orwell. He was, according to his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘an utterly committed symbol of permanent opposition, a rebel, a maverick, in eternal conflict with authority’. He was an orator and not a politician. Perhaps most importantly, he maintained the role of public culture and civic discourse at a time when they seemed to be fading away. He was, in many ways, the last of the great Labour intellectuals and deserves an honoured place in the history of the twentieth century.

The Social Contract was reached between the TUC and the Labour government from 1974 to 1977. The premise on which it was founded now seems quixotic; the unions would show restraint if the government worked with them – in other words, if the government was prepared to accept every union demand for the protection of its members. ‘Please play nice,’ was the government’s hopeful exhortation. It was thus a corporatist experiment, and far more radical than the post-war consensual politics with which it is sometimes confused.

Beneath the Social Contract lay a basic ambiguity in the power relation between employee and employer, and, later, between employees and government. It was also predicated on the assumption that the unions would act as one, but they were effectively in competition with each other. The only certain effect was that, by 1976, it was as if the unions had discovered, according to Tom Jackson, leader of the postal workers, ‘a gigantic Las Vegas slot machine that had suddenly got stuck in favour of the customer’.

The unions were led not merely by old-fashioned workingclass socialists, but often by men who had fought against Fascism. When they had begun their crusade, the most basic workers’ rights were still to be attained, but the new generation had gained a degree of prosperity. The union leaders, however, often applied their ‘street-fighting’ mentality to contemporary conditions; capital was still the enemy and the union member was still the underdog. But by the late Seventies even the most ardent union leaders had begun to fear that their members’ demands had become unsustainable. Jack Jones spoke of ‘fair for all, not free-for-all’, and Hugh Scanlon openly expressed doubts about the country’s ability to cope. By this stage, however, a shift, so slow as to be almost imperceptible, had begun; the old guard was losing control over an increasingly ‘individualist’ membership. And so the late Seventies were marked by a discontent that was more petty capitalist than socialist.

But this still lay some way off. By 1976, there were few instances of industrial action. The unions had, after all, got almost all they wanted. But with prices rising and the pound falling, Wilson felt it was time to honour his promise to give the people a referendum on Europe. Previous polls suggested that only a minority supported Britain’s membership. The advocates of a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum set for 1975 should have had no grounds for complacency, yet their mood on the campaign trail was buoyant. Unexpected alliances coalesced: Conservatives offered their canvassing skills to Labour; Labour members lent Conservatives their buses. A festival atmosphere prevailed.

The mood in the ‘no’ camp was quite different. Although the government of the day had given equal funding to both sides, the ‘yes’ campaign could count on the support of big business – the ‘no’ campaign was a humble pile of pea-shooters beside the cannon of their rivals. Like their opponents, they came from seemingly incompatible positions; unlike them, these positions appeared to be those of the radical fringe. The National Front and the British Communist party, for example, were Eurosceptic. And so, as Enoch Powell and Tony Benn hectored the people from the same platform, many wavering voters saw only division and demagoguery. How could a nation that so obviously looked askance at Europe listen so warmly to the Europhiles? Across the Channel lay the Continent, where an ordinary family could now take its holidays; there was the Common Market, which made those holidays possible; and then the EEC, which surely had nothing to do with either holidays or the Common Market, was not regarded as having designs on English liberty.