History of England 1-6

It is hard to appreciate the extent to which inflation exercised the finest minds. In Seventies Britain, ‘push’ and ‘pull’ on supply and demand worked simultaneously; with increased wages, spending power grew, and prices rose. A largely unionized nation responded by asking for higher wages, and employers had to raise prices to cover their costs, which in turn led to higher wage demands. If you were affiliated to a union, the spiral need not inconvenience you, but if you were not so affiliated, or were not a wage earner at all, you could find yourself unable to afford anything beyond the absolute necessities. There were other factors too. For example, the problem was exacerbated by the unions’ fondness for ‘free collective bargaining’ for wages, but that can only work where they have similar traditions, where their interests do not intersect, where the nation has no other commitments, and where there is money in the collective pot. These conditions could not be met. Small wonder that Roy Jenkins likened the role of government in this period to that of the mountaineer on a wild and unpredictable upland. ‘The bigger [beasts] were known as union leaders and the smaller ones as constituency parties, and … when they did come down, they must on no account be enraged.’

Certainly Bill Bryson, an American observer, found this to be so. While working for a UK newspaper, he found himself having to deal with the print checker. This man looked through the proofs at his leisure, if at all, and was not averse to using force to prevent anyone, however important, from crossing the line into his office; for this of course represented a breach of ‘demarcation’. When Bryson himself attempted to proffer the proofs, the man retorted, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m eating pizza!’ The print unions were run on lines that recalled medieval guilds or Masonic lodges: each union had its ‘chapel’, and each chapel had its ‘chapel father’. If miners had their ‘pit villages’, so the printers had what we might call ‘print families’: it was not so much a cartel as a family concern. Other unions could boast similar traditions.

It was all a far cry from the world envisaged by Barbara Castle, who in February 1975 had reflected in her diary: ‘To me socialism is not just militant trade unionism. It is the gentle society in which every producer remembers he is a consumer too.’ And Callaghan himself felt bound in 1978 to remark that ‘Society today is so organized that every individual group almost has the power to disrupt it. How is their power to be channelled into constructive channels?’ The question was never to be resolved in his political lifetime.

1976 had been the hottest year in recorded history and one of the most scorching in the world of British politics, so it was with relief that the government and the nation welcomed the celebrations for the queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. It seemed as if every house had its bunting, every street its party. Callaghan, as firm a believer in monarchy as he was in every traditional institution, was delighted to be called up by the queen to share the accolades. But once the bunting was taken down, the nation was once again revealed as poor, shabby and, above all, discontented. The punk band the Sex Pistols had released ‘God Save the Queen’, a less than reverent celebration of her role in which she was described as being a ‘moron’. It was banned by as many radio stations as could keep up with its popularity, but reached number one in the charts.

Callaghan had established a cap on wage increases of 5 per cent in order to hold down inflation. It was audacious for the time, but it held, more or less, until 25 September 1978, when the Ford workers agreed to strike. With inflation standing at 8 per cent, 5 per cent was not enough, they argued. Their action took immediate effect. From then on, strikes sprang up like toadstools after rain. Most damagingly, the public sector unions, many of them representing the least affluent, felt bound to join in. Callaghan saw his pay policy unravel almost daily, and Michael Foot, who had done so much to champion the unions and had the most right to feel betrayed, unleashed a speech of unprecedented fury at the Labour party conference. The delegates were reminded with biting sarcasm of the kind of pay policy they could expect under the Tories – it was known as ‘unemployment’.