The birth pangs of membership had only just begun – in little over two years’ time the whole issue would be subjected to the first of two plebiscites – but for now, Heath, Howe, Whitelaw and Pompidou could congratulate themselves on a duty well performed. Besides, the angry and the ignorant would surely see sense once the benefits of membership had become apparent. It was as well that Heath had realized his deepest dream, for as the year unfolded he had once more to face a recurring nightmare.
Over a billion pounds had been poured into the mining industry since the last miners’ strike, a clear reversal of previous policy. The miners, most assumed, were not spoiling for a second round. But their wages, though healthier than they had been, were not enough to draw more young men into the pits; an estimated 600 men were still leaving the industry every week. Then there was the renewed question of oil. Prices had been high enough two years previously, but now, after the Arab–Israeli war, they had quadrupled. In the miners’ gradual progress towards a second strike, there was no element of malice or greed. Their case was simple and even innocent in its way. They were going to ask for a further 35 per cent because they knew they were likely to get it. And so, once again, the cogs of negotiation creaked into movement. Heath was determined that the miners should stay within the bounds of his celebrated ‘stage three’ (a wage bracket which included some 4 million manual workers), while the miners and their leaders were equally determined to move out of it.
It was oil that proved decisive. The nation now relied upon it for 50 per cent of its energy. This in turn led one ‘little man’, who had been hanging back during one of the negotiations, to offer an observation. ‘Prime Minister,’ he asked, ‘why can’t you pay us for coal what you are willing to pay the Arabs for oil?’ It put Heath in a false position. Friends and colleagues noted a new lassitude in him, a weariness that cloyed his usually agile movements. What few of them realized was that Heath had physical as well as political handicaps with which to contend. An underactive thyroid gland had rendered him sluggish in thought and movement. The affliction could not have struck at a worse time.
Just when most, if not all, seemed lost, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress issued a remarkable minute. ‘The General Council accept that there is a distinctive and exceptional situation in the mining industry. If the Government are prepared to give an assurance that they will make possible a settlement between the miners and the National Coal Board, other unions will not use this as an argument in negotiations in their own settlements.’ Such a statement amounted to a hitherto unimaginable concession. The TUC seemed to be offering its sacred cow to the knife. Was it, many wondered, too good to be true?
Alas, it was. In a pattern that had become depressingly familiar, each side blamed the other for the failure of the agreement. As far as the unions were concerned, Heath rejected the offer, and as far as he was concerned, the fault lay with his subordinate, Tony Barber. But it is unlikely in any case that an agreement could have been reached: the government was too suspicious and the TUC was in no case to honour its resolution. In later years, some union leaders still insisted that ‘we could have made it stick’, but Gormley was always dubious. Len Murray, already a leading light in the union movement, even claimed that the government had the unions ‘over a barrel’: ‘If [Heath] had taken the offer and it had failed to work, and other unions had broken through, he would have been home and dry with all his anti-union policies – Industrial Relations Act and incomes policy. If it had worked, it would have been his great political triumph, showing he could bring the unions to heel.’
But Heath was not the man for such politicking. He was weary, and his capacity for optimism was running low. For months negotiations limped along, but after two years of economic U-turns, and with a defeat still fresh in his memory, Heath could scarcely surrender now. On 13 December 1973, he announced the three-day week. Another such had been put in place less than two years earlier, with ruinous runs on candles, but this one was official. It came into force on 1 January 1974. Unsurprisingly, the measure was resented, but the resentment sprang not merely from the inconvenience; it was felt to be premature and therefore politically futile. Against the advice of Whitelaw, Heath decided that the impasse with the miners could be broken only by going to the country. William Rees-Mogg of The Times agreed, though for reasons Heath was unlikely to have welcomed. ‘The Government’s policies have changed so much since 1970,’ observed Rees-Mogg, ‘that there is ample constitutional justification for an immediate election.’ But Heath had not called the election to defeat the miners; for him, the issue was broader and deeper. In a political broadcast, he summarized his stance. ‘The issue before you is a simple one … Do you want a strong Government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed? Do you want Parliament and the elected Government to continue to fight strenuously against inflation? Or do you want them to abandon the struggle against rising prices under pressure from one particular group of workers?’
As we have seen, Heath was broadly sympathetic to the unions, having himself risen from a scarcely privileged background. Ever assiduous, he had made it his business to understand the struggles and complexities of workingclass reality. But he could never bring himself to endorse the principle of collective bargaining, and without that he could make no headway with the unions. He stated his objection with customary frankness: ‘We have all seen what happens in that situation. The strongest wins, as he always does, and the weakest goes to the wall.’
And so, weakened in body and morale, Heath called an election, and a minute but telling swing to Labour was noticeable from the first. Still he soldiered on – there was work to be done, if only he could be given just a little more time. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Wilson returned to the attack, cheery and confident, the friend of the unions and the tribune of the people. When the results of the February election came through, it was clear that Heath’s attempts to balance the budget while satisfying the unions had left the country unmoved.
But Wilson’s victory was not yet complete. His was a minority government, and it would take a further election in October to secure power. Heath fought for time and a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals. To his sad and undignified fall, the Spectator played both raven and cockerel. ‘The squatter in No. 10 Downing Street has at last departed … Mr Edward Heath’s monomania was never more clearly seen than in the days after the general election when, a ludicrous and broken figure, he clung with grubby fingers to the crumbling precipice of power.’ It was sadly suggestive of Heath’s tenure that the most vitriolic of the attacks upon him should have come from a conservative periodical. And there was one more humiliation to come, from a quarter he could never have suspected; it was the work of one of his own protégés, and, more shocking yet, a woman.
When he took over government in June 1970 he had little idea of the tribulations which were to beset him. The faltering economy, the disintegration of Northern Ireland, two coal strikes and the exploding price of oil during the Arab–Israeli war were to leave him with the demeanour of a waxwork. His attempts at a corporate exercise in state affairs ended in failure, largely because the trade unions refused to participate, but this was only one of many disappointments that afflicted his premiership. The worst was the one which lingers in historians’ memory. Before the gruesome climax of the second miners’ strike he had reversed his policy of noninterference in industry, losing much authority in the process. He was in many respects a hapless figure, rendered more powerless by the first miners’ strike. The miners were carefully arranged to make the maximum impact, and the ‘flying pickets’ increased the strike’s efficiency. The miners won their case and climbed the ladder of industrial pay, while at the same time trumping other workers. The leaders of richer unions such as power workers and the dockers set their feet on the government’s rickety incomes policy, snapping it. The CBI, the TUC and the government could go on no more. The parlous state of Northern Ireland only thickened the brew.