The White Heat Of Foam: A Wilson wins in 1970 TL
A week is a long time in politics. Maybe if Harold Wilson had waited a week longer, England's loss in the World Cup quarter final to West Germany and the feelings of national embarrassment it engendered might have hurt his chances in the general election he had just called. Analysts certainly agree that both the 'Powell factor' of agreement with the hardline anti-immigration views of former Tory frontbencher Enoch Powell and the £31 million deficit in the balance of payments figures hurt Wilson's majority, to say nothing of the traumatic second term he had had with issues ranging from morally supporting the US government's stance on Vietnam to the devaluation of sterling he conducted. But none of that was enough to put Ted Heath into office- some analysts have suggested nothing could have been.
With a majority of 48, Harold Wilson had become the first Labour leader ever to win three elections, and if he served another full term, would be the party's longest-serving leader. On the other side of the Commons, despite Heath trying to cling on and defend his leadership, to say the rank and file of the Tories were unimpressed with him would be an understatement. His moderate leadership had cost them two elections against weak Labour governments, and the lesson they had taken from this and from the response to the Rivers of Blood speech debacle was that voters wanted a right-wing Tory leader. As a result, the senior figures in the parliamentary party informed Heath his position was untenable, and by July he had resigned, the first Tory leader since Austen Chamberlain never to serve as Prime Minister.
While Heath turned his attention to sailing, the Tories set about picking a new leader, and realistically only one person could win such a contest. Sure enough, the former Shadow Defence Secretary and, as the nickname Tony Benn coined for him around this time went, 'the dishonorable Member for Wolverhampton South West' Enoch Powell was elected Conservative leader. It remained to be seen, however, whether the selection of possibly the most controversial politician in the country to lead them would hurt or hinder the Tories.
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1975
Wilson's hopes for a more peaceful third term than his second were fairly quickly dashed. To make matters worse for him, the most pressing issues to hit home were ones which allowed Powell to rally support for his causes. While the 1970-5 Labour government had some notable achievements, most prominently the 1972 Sex Discrimination Act and 1973 Race Relations Act (the latter of which passed despite significant opposition from Powell) and the introduction of decimal currency passing without much of a hitch, the issues which the government failed to respond to in a way satisfactory to most voters were what were most widely remembered by voters.
For a start, the militancy of the IRA began to ramp up starting in mid-1971, with the murder of a British soldier in Belfast in July and the bombing of the Post Office Tower on Halloween. Powell's calls for 'law and order in Ulster' were becoming more appealing to voters, and even after 'Bloody Sunday' in January 1972, the view he took that the concerns about IRA members in the march by army paratroopers were valid was shared by many people; given that the Home Secretary backed up this view, Wilson could hardly take the moral high ground anyway. On a similar topic, Powell's aggressive criticism of Wilson's decision to allow a sizeable amount of the 50,000 Asian Ugandans expelled by the country by President Amin to settle in Britain helped play to the negative attitude to immigration many British people had at the time, with Wilson's protestation that allowing them to settle was 'the morally right thing' was either seen as pretentious or fell on deaf ears.
The other major issue on which Powell garnered public sympathy was that of strike action. Wilson took a fairly conciliatory position on the issue, at least at first, acquiescing to the NUM when its members struck in January 1972 by increasing their take-home pay. Powell criticized him for 'writing a cheque to any union leader who says his men will strike' and criticizing the lack of a secret ballot for strikes in the NUM in particular. Wilson retorted that such strikes could cripple British power grids, but the move did not endear him to the EEC, and by mid-1972 Britain's third attempt to enter the Common Market had been rejected. To make matters worse for Labour, Powell's point was proven further when Wilson agreed to a 35% pay increase and a ban on overtime for miners in late 1973 after the oil crisis hit Britain, and when in mid-1974 he agreed to a third consolation to the miners of a 20% pay rise, Powell famously declared, 'The Prime Minister needs to learn this country is not made of money!'
By the time 1975 rolled around and Wilson had to call an election, it was fairly clear to all observers he would not win a fourth term. The Labour Party was bitterly divided on how to solve the country's economic problems, with figures on the left like Tony Benn and Michael Foot advocating for further nationalization of the economy while those on the right like Foreign Secretary James Callaghan or Chancellor Denis Healey supported reducing public spending to reduce the debt, at least for a while; several members had very publicly left, with MPs like Dick Taverne and Eddie Milne going independent after public scandals and others, most notably Woodrow Wyatt and Reg Prentice, actively quit Labour for the Conservatives.
Practically everyone looked set to gain from the 1975 election besides Labour; the Tories, of course, due to Powell's popularity, but also the Liberals, who had enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and gained several seats from Labour and the Tories alike; the more extreme Irish parties (i.e. basically everyone except the UUP); and the SNP and Plaid Cymru, who sought to pick up seats in Scotland and Wales respectively due to anxiety over what the government would do with North Sea Oil and dissatisfaction with Labour's leadership in Wales respectively.
As expected, the election was a blowout. Powell's Tories won a majority of 84, despite only a slightly larger voteshare than 1970. This was mostly due to the fact that Labour lost over 11% of their 1970 vote and almost 100 seats, and the Liberals failed to make as big a breakthrough as they had hoped, with only 12 seats to their name. In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, only one of the seventeen newly drawn seats elected a Nationalist MP compared to two of the twelve in the 1970 election. The consensus of pundits, whether they liked it or not, was that Powell had a huge mandate to do whatever he pleased about the economy and immigration, and voters knew exactly what those things were.
In practice, however, this would not turn out to be the way things played out.
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1979
Once Wilson resigned, the question of who would succeed him was in a little more doubt than that of who would succeed Heath, but not much. The aggressive orator and former Trade Secretary Peter Shore was the stand-out choice; not only was he well-known as a powerful orator and satisfactorily radical for the Labour left, he was well-known as a patriotic figure and opponent of British involvement in the Common Market in the same way as Powell, minus the racialist rhetoric.
Shore's aggressive criticisms of Powell proved to be one of the three thorns in the side of his premiership. The second proved to be opposition from within his own party- while they were unable to bring down his policy initiatives like revoking the Race Relations Act, the privatization of numerous industries and tightened quotas on immigration, figures like Ian Gilmour and Jim Prior criticizing Powell's leadership in the press proved embarrassing to say the least. Many other members of his cabinet who did support his views ended up making themselves seriously unpopular, such as Margaret Thatcher, whose decision to cut budgets and provisions to schools including free school milk led to her being nicknamed 'milk-snatcher', and Sir Keith Joseph, who at the 1977 Conservative Party Conference made the ill-advised statement in his speech that 'children are being born by mothers least fitted to bring children into the world'.
On top of this, the implementation of laws that cracked down on immigrants and ethnic minorities, particularly Powell's government tightening stop-and-search laws that disproportionately affected non-white Britons, boiled over into active riots during 1976 in suburbs with large ethnic minority populations, most notably in Brixton in London, Toxteth in Liverpool and Handsworth in Birmingham. While Powell aggressively defended the stop-and-search laws, his critics noted that they, combined with the reduction in public spending, had worsened the existing ethnic tensions in the cities where the riots occurred; despite this, Powell did not relent or repeal the stop-and-search law. This, in combination with remarks like Joseph's aforementioned comment about 'unfit' mothers, added to the perception that Powell's government was not interested in controlling immigration so much as simply racist.
What proved the biggest thorn in Powell's side, however, was the fact the economy stubbornly refused to improve. Inflation continued to rise, and eventually, in late 1976, Powell's government was forced to seek an IMF loan of £2.3 billion. This was met with mockery from the Opposition, with Shore famously commenting, 'Your government has slashed spending to the bone, sold off Britain's assets to an assortment of random businessmen, and you still need to go cap-in-hand to the IMF- what does that tell us about this Conservative government's monetary policy?'
Having floundered despite his huge majority, in 1979 Powell decided to play his last gamble. In late 1978, he had steadfastly refused any public sector pay claims to be allowed above 5%, and disputes with local Conservative councils in many places led to strikes by members of a variety of professions, from doctors to dustmen to gravediggers, during the so-called 'Winter of Discontent'. The day after the unions organized the biggest collective strike in 53 years, the 22nd January 1979, Powell announced a general election, declaring that "Britain must make a choice between its democratically elected government, and the whims of union leaders blind to reality". The enthusiastic cheerleading of right-wing tabloids like the
Sun and the
Daily Mail suggested he was sure to win re-election with little difficulty, but on the campaign trail it would be a different story.
Shore launched Labour's campaign from his Stepney constituency, explaining a handful of the most important policies of Labour's manifesto, such as the abolition of the stop-and-search plan (neatly reminding voters of one of the most unpopular parts of Joseph's legacy in the process), a negotiated settlement with the TUC which he 'had discussed' with senior figures and believed was an effective compromise, and a plan to utilize the funds from North Sea Oil to invest in public services. It was an appealing package, and after two months of Powell rigidly refusing to compromise with the unions and expecting them to be shouted down, voters took notice, especially given the Liberals were still recovering from the quagmire of Jeremy Thorpe's resignation and the SNP were doing better with Tory voters angry with Powell's
laissez-faire policy than Labour voters without much reason to bolt from Shore.
While by the end of the campaign a Shore victory was expected, few predicted the result to be as intense a backlash against Powellism as it was. Labour won back power with a majority of 97, and the Tories won the fewest seats they had since 1945. Political analysts have speculated that Powell's arrogance in refusing to recognize the problems that caused the Winter of Discontent and his unwavering hostility to union members hurt him badly, and the Tory manifesto plan to spend the money from North Sea Oil on tax cuts to the rich alienated Scots from the Tories and pushed them towards the SNP. The biggest shock of the election, however, was the Liberals actually gaining seats at the cost of the Tories; though Jeremy Thorpe's old North Devon seat went blue, much of the rest of the country swung away from the Tories hard.
With Shore, something of an outsider to Labour policy on all its wings, now Prime Minister, the 1980s were to be an interesting time to say the least.
(Sorry if these seem weird or unrealistic, and that it's such a long post, this is just kind of a weird idea I had.)
