MrHola
Banned
I just found an interesting article written way back in 1994, speculating what might have happened had Ted Heath won in February 1974... what do you think?
''TWENTY years ago this week, the modern history of Britain began. The passage of time has done many things to that moment in February 1974 when Ted Heath's Government fell: clothed it in inevitability, called it a benign come-uppance, fixed it as the beginning of wisdom. Whatever its merits, a new age did start there, and much changed as a result. Inevitable, however, it wasn't. And what happened afterwards was neither unique nor inevitable.
The conventional wisdom is that the fall of Heath paved the way for the wonders of the Thatcher revolution. What you make of that depends partly on what you think of Thatcherism and all its works. Partly, but not entirely. It also requires a judgment on what would have happened if Heath had won. The principal consequence, in my opinion, would have been to pursue a similar result by different methods, and actually to accelerate rather than retard the reform of Britain. What happened was not carved in axiomatic stone, nor written in the stars. And by no means did it happen for the best.
Heath very nearly did win. Tactical misjudgment caused him to hold the election three weeks late. Most people now agree that at the beginning of February he could have stuffed the miners, whose rejection of his pay policy the election was called to overturn. As it was, the Tories got most votes. But the seats did not follow, and Heath finished up 20 short of a majority. Instead of the 60-seat margin most opinion polls gave him, he was ousted into opposition and thence, after another election in October, into the wilderness.
Had he won, the first effect would have been felt by trade unions. It would have been a defeat for the power of all unions, not just the miners. Arthur Scargill might still have become a name to reckon with, but the right historic verdict was offered by Vic Feather, the TUC general secretary, who told Heath jovially before the vote that if he won, he would secure both his incomes policy and his Industrial Relations Act. The Tory manifesto promised that the Act would be amended to temper its severities. But the momentum for disempowerment would have been unstoppable, and seven years of valueless argument saved.
The economy would have been hard to run. Inflation stood at 16 per cent and the balance of payments was in record deficit. The 1973 oil shock, in which prices quadrupled, would have reverberated through all economies, producing an era in which Heath's passion for growth was forcibly unrequited. "The lean years would need new policies and a new vocabulary," his political secretary, Douglas Hurd, wrote afterwards. "There would have to be an end to promises." After victory, however, such austerity would have been easier to sell. The six months of inflationary surrender and reckless give-aways with which Labour bought the October election would not have happened.
Ireland would have been another likely focus of accelerated development. The election occurred less than two months into the life of the Ulster power-sharing executive, one of the few British initiatives to have engaged both unionist and nationalist support. It was destroyed in May 1974 by a general strike which the Wilson cabinet declined to try to beat. A government that had just defeated the miners, albeit with the election of more hard-line Unionist MPs opposed to power-sharing, would have smashed the strike and extended an experiment which, 20 years and hundreds of deaths later, is once again being felt for.
No one can foretell hypothetical outcomes in Ireland. Power-sharing might not have changed much. But Europe is a different matter. One year after British entry, the only full-hearted European leader the country has ever had departed. Although this coincided with a period of oil-shocked stasis in the Community, when progress was always going to be slow, a re-elected Heath would have been recognised as a major European leader, pushing other leaders, and chivvying this country towards the heart of Europe which, even now, it only says it aspires to reach. The grotesque confusion of a nation that during the eighties embraced a series of large new Euro-obligations, while being led by someone who pretended they meant nothing, would not have occurred.
The biggest unresolved question, I think, is what would have happened to the corporate state. It and its trappings had become the central mechanism of Heathite government. Heath would surely have begun by embellishing it. He was at home with tripartite deals, and liked union leaders: his desperate desire for an accommodation was why he timed the election wrong. After the defeat, most of them would have been happy with a say in running an incomes policy. The German model, though with ministers in charge, would have begun to flourish, but not, I think, for ever. How quickly it would have evolved towards a market-oriented model with which many Tories would have been happier is the question.
ONE CERTAIN truth, however, is that the paladins of what became Thatcherism would have remained Heathites. Whitelaw, instead of kneeling at a new leader's feet, would have stroked the old one's ego. Howe, the mechanic of monetarism, would happily have supplied his corporatist services. Lawson, then a young speech-writer who once assured Heath he was the greatest leader since Peel, would have served the going cause, untouched by monetarist passions. Walker, Gilmour and Carrington would have been very important. Joseph, who confessed in April that only now had he become a Conservative, would not thus have renounced the past. With office still beckoning, what would have been the point? As for Mrs Thatcher, already much detested by Heath, she might have made it as far as Environment, but got nowhere near the Treasury, her highest confessed ambition.
Ideological argument, in other words, would have cut little ice. Biffen and Ridley might have promoted it from the backbenches but, whether on Europe or monetarism, their zeal would have found no favour with the vast majority of Tory politicians crawling, as ever, towards the main chance. The need for retrenchment would probably have imposed even on Heath, as the IMF did on Chancellor Healey, some monetarist rigours. But this would have been a government aiming at a 1978 election as the party of stability in hard times.
It would have been helped to win this contest by the Labour Party. Wilson, we know, would not have carried on, thereby provoking a bloody battle. This, once again, would have speeded the course of history. Labour's bitter divisions over Europe had left the centre-right depleted, which meant Jenkins was unelectable. The 1976 contest between Callaghan and Foot, advanced by a year or more, would have been waged on different terms, with Foot, who had impressive support even when the stake was the premiership, the likely victor. The Bennite left would have ensured a permanent struggle for Labour's soul, which at best might have issued in an earlier catharsis than Kinnock finally induced in the mid-eighties. At worst for Labour, it would have hastened the party realignment which Jenkins had been contemplating since 1971 and precipitated a decade later.
The fate of some of the artefacts of Thatcherism is hard to divine in this scenario. The Falklands war would surely not have been allowed to happen. Privatisation would have been no more clearly foreseen than it was by the Thatcherites in 1979, but where real competition existed would doubtless have entered the agenda. Heath would have resisted the doctrinal aspects, carrying the anti-state rage into every cranny of public life. What, equally, he would never have stomached is sky-high unemployment. Recession would have forced some of it upon him, but he would have fought it with the feeling of his generation.
By 1980, I guess, he would have gone. Having won the 1978 election, the party would have handed itself over to another leader who did not feel obliged, in victory, to lurch towards the deceiving satisfactions of a cure-all dogma. There would have been a certain loss. Some of the hard questions Thatcherism felt free to ask would have been fudged. Britain would have foregone the dubious pleasure of basking in a memorable persona let loose upon the world. On the other hand, many big questions would have been answered by different means. The issue of who runs Britain, and on what terms, which was the fons et origo of the Thatcherite proposition, would have been settled years earlier. A leader who was every bit as obsessed as his successor with the problem of British decline would have set his own hand to reversing it, by methods designed to enlist rather than antagonise the nation.
Such would have been the history that effaced the deterministic hosannas which now issue from Thatcherite chroniclers - to be cited, as the wheel turns, in damnation of her own successor. A flick of a coin in February 20 years ago, and we can say with certainty that historians would not have discovered, with the onset of what followed, that here was a big idea whose time had come.''
''TWENTY years ago this week, the modern history of Britain began. The passage of time has done many things to that moment in February 1974 when Ted Heath's Government fell: clothed it in inevitability, called it a benign come-uppance, fixed it as the beginning of wisdom. Whatever its merits, a new age did start there, and much changed as a result. Inevitable, however, it wasn't. And what happened afterwards was neither unique nor inevitable.
The conventional wisdom is that the fall of Heath paved the way for the wonders of the Thatcher revolution. What you make of that depends partly on what you think of Thatcherism and all its works. Partly, but not entirely. It also requires a judgment on what would have happened if Heath had won. The principal consequence, in my opinion, would have been to pursue a similar result by different methods, and actually to accelerate rather than retard the reform of Britain. What happened was not carved in axiomatic stone, nor written in the stars. And by no means did it happen for the best.
Heath very nearly did win. Tactical misjudgment caused him to hold the election three weeks late. Most people now agree that at the beginning of February he could have stuffed the miners, whose rejection of his pay policy the election was called to overturn. As it was, the Tories got most votes. But the seats did not follow, and Heath finished up 20 short of a majority. Instead of the 60-seat margin most opinion polls gave him, he was ousted into opposition and thence, after another election in October, into the wilderness.
Had he won, the first effect would have been felt by trade unions. It would have been a defeat for the power of all unions, not just the miners. Arthur Scargill might still have become a name to reckon with, but the right historic verdict was offered by Vic Feather, the TUC general secretary, who told Heath jovially before the vote that if he won, he would secure both his incomes policy and his Industrial Relations Act. The Tory manifesto promised that the Act would be amended to temper its severities. But the momentum for disempowerment would have been unstoppable, and seven years of valueless argument saved.
The economy would have been hard to run. Inflation stood at 16 per cent and the balance of payments was in record deficit. The 1973 oil shock, in which prices quadrupled, would have reverberated through all economies, producing an era in which Heath's passion for growth was forcibly unrequited. "The lean years would need new policies and a new vocabulary," his political secretary, Douglas Hurd, wrote afterwards. "There would have to be an end to promises." After victory, however, such austerity would have been easier to sell. The six months of inflationary surrender and reckless give-aways with which Labour bought the October election would not have happened.
Ireland would have been another likely focus of accelerated development. The election occurred less than two months into the life of the Ulster power-sharing executive, one of the few British initiatives to have engaged both unionist and nationalist support. It was destroyed in May 1974 by a general strike which the Wilson cabinet declined to try to beat. A government that had just defeated the miners, albeit with the election of more hard-line Unionist MPs opposed to power-sharing, would have smashed the strike and extended an experiment which, 20 years and hundreds of deaths later, is once again being felt for.
No one can foretell hypothetical outcomes in Ireland. Power-sharing might not have changed much. But Europe is a different matter. One year after British entry, the only full-hearted European leader the country has ever had departed. Although this coincided with a period of oil-shocked stasis in the Community, when progress was always going to be slow, a re-elected Heath would have been recognised as a major European leader, pushing other leaders, and chivvying this country towards the heart of Europe which, even now, it only says it aspires to reach. The grotesque confusion of a nation that during the eighties embraced a series of large new Euro-obligations, while being led by someone who pretended they meant nothing, would not have occurred.
The biggest unresolved question, I think, is what would have happened to the corporate state. It and its trappings had become the central mechanism of Heathite government. Heath would surely have begun by embellishing it. He was at home with tripartite deals, and liked union leaders: his desperate desire for an accommodation was why he timed the election wrong. After the defeat, most of them would have been happy with a say in running an incomes policy. The German model, though with ministers in charge, would have begun to flourish, but not, I think, for ever. How quickly it would have evolved towards a market-oriented model with which many Tories would have been happier is the question.
ONE CERTAIN truth, however, is that the paladins of what became Thatcherism would have remained Heathites. Whitelaw, instead of kneeling at a new leader's feet, would have stroked the old one's ego. Howe, the mechanic of monetarism, would happily have supplied his corporatist services. Lawson, then a young speech-writer who once assured Heath he was the greatest leader since Peel, would have served the going cause, untouched by monetarist passions. Walker, Gilmour and Carrington would have been very important. Joseph, who confessed in April that only now had he become a Conservative, would not thus have renounced the past. With office still beckoning, what would have been the point? As for Mrs Thatcher, already much detested by Heath, she might have made it as far as Environment, but got nowhere near the Treasury, her highest confessed ambition.
Ideological argument, in other words, would have cut little ice. Biffen and Ridley might have promoted it from the backbenches but, whether on Europe or monetarism, their zeal would have found no favour with the vast majority of Tory politicians crawling, as ever, towards the main chance. The need for retrenchment would probably have imposed even on Heath, as the IMF did on Chancellor Healey, some monetarist rigours. But this would have been a government aiming at a 1978 election as the party of stability in hard times.
It would have been helped to win this contest by the Labour Party. Wilson, we know, would not have carried on, thereby provoking a bloody battle. This, once again, would have speeded the course of history. Labour's bitter divisions over Europe had left the centre-right depleted, which meant Jenkins was unelectable. The 1976 contest between Callaghan and Foot, advanced by a year or more, would have been waged on different terms, with Foot, who had impressive support even when the stake was the premiership, the likely victor. The Bennite left would have ensured a permanent struggle for Labour's soul, which at best might have issued in an earlier catharsis than Kinnock finally induced in the mid-eighties. At worst for Labour, it would have hastened the party realignment which Jenkins had been contemplating since 1971 and precipitated a decade later.
The fate of some of the artefacts of Thatcherism is hard to divine in this scenario. The Falklands war would surely not have been allowed to happen. Privatisation would have been no more clearly foreseen than it was by the Thatcherites in 1979, but where real competition existed would doubtless have entered the agenda. Heath would have resisted the doctrinal aspects, carrying the anti-state rage into every cranny of public life. What, equally, he would never have stomached is sky-high unemployment. Recession would have forced some of it upon him, but he would have fought it with the feeling of his generation.
By 1980, I guess, he would have gone. Having won the 1978 election, the party would have handed itself over to another leader who did not feel obliged, in victory, to lurch towards the deceiving satisfactions of a cure-all dogma. There would have been a certain loss. Some of the hard questions Thatcherism felt free to ask would have been fudged. Britain would have foregone the dubious pleasure of basking in a memorable persona let loose upon the world. On the other hand, many big questions would have been answered by different means. The issue of who runs Britain, and on what terms, which was the fons et origo of the Thatcherite proposition, would have been settled years earlier. A leader who was every bit as obsessed as his successor with the problem of British decline would have set his own hand to reversing it, by methods designed to enlist rather than antagonise the nation.
Such would have been the history that effaced the deterministic hosannas which now issue from Thatcherite chroniclers - to be cited, as the wheel turns, in damnation of her own successor. A flick of a coin in February 20 years ago, and we can say with certainty that historians would not have discovered, with the onset of what followed, that here was a big idea whose time had come.''
