defending the nation edgerton
17
Defending the Nation
Britain, as it enters the 1980s, offers itself as a caricature of an exterminist formation. The imperatives of ‘defence’ poison the nation’s economy; the imperatives of ideology deflect even profitable weapons-manufacture into the hands of United States contractors. The subordinate inertial thrust of the national weapons-system-complex augments the imposts of NATO …
E. P. Thompson, 19801
And so today, we can rejoice at our success in the Falklands and take pride in the achievement of the men and women of our Task Force. But we do so, not as at some last flickering of a flame which must soon be dead. No – we rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.
Margaret Thatcher, Speech in Cheltenham, 19822
While the 1970s saw the high point of the welfare state and Labour’s social democracy at a time of economic convulsion, the 1970s and early 1980s also saw a strengthening of the power and influence of the warfare and security states. Questions of war were on the agenda as they had not been since the late 1950s and they, as much as the politics of production, were the issues of contention in what was an age of controversy. Yet governments, whether Labour or Conservative, followed similar policies.
THE TRAGEDY OF NORTHERN IRELAND
The greatest crisis in the United Kingdom in the 1970s is the one least written about in histories of the Kingdom, the bloody crisis in Northern Ireland which erupted in 1969.
Northern Ireland had its own government and parliament. The parliament was dominated by unionists; nationalists did not even contest elections outside a very few areas. It was effectively a one-party state, with a sizeable disenfranchised Catholic minority. That minority protested in 1969, and London sent in troops to keep order in place of the clearly partisan local police. The British army itself quickly became the target, and there started a war between the new Provisional IRA, founded in 1969, and the British state. On the one side was the Catholic population (represented from 1970 by a new Social Democratic and Labour Party), seeking to eliminate discrimination against it, which wanted union with Ireland; the unionist population wanted to remain in the United Kingdom. It was essentially a civil war, between the Provisional IRA and local Protestant power, one in which the central British state became involved as it defended, if not the status quo, then the integrity of the United Kingdom. From 1969 until the late 1990s Northern Ireland was a very major commitment of British forces, second only to Germany. Some 10–20,000 soldiers were there at any one time.
In the early 1970s conflict exploded, with, for example, British troops firing on unarmed demonstrators (Bloody Sunday, 1972), and PIRA (in the acronym used by the army) attacking British troops and others with guns and bombs. Internment without trial was introduced in 1971, which radicalized republicans and strengthened the Provisionals. The last ever sentence of death in the United Kingdom was handed down in Northern Ireland in 1972. Liam Holden had his sentence commuted to life. He served seventeen years, and his conviction was quashed years later when a court accepted that a false confession had been beaten from him by British troops.3
The war, for such it was, led to more deaths in the British army than in all the services in the Falklands War, and about a third of the deaths in Korea and Malaya. In proportion to population, the number of United Kingdom civilians killed was greater than in the Blitz. No other rich country in the capitalist world saw similar levels of domestic political violence after 1945; no part of a rich country was so intensively policed or so subject to special laws. Counter-insurgency returned to Ireland, and there was no British genius for light and effective counter-insurgency – it was a nasty, long business. British forces constrained and contained the PIRA but never defeated it.
The war quickly reached a stalemate, with the army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary sometimes working with paramilitary unionist organizations which were involved in their own sectarian war. It was a war of guns, of semi-automatic rifles, and of bombs. Lives were lost not just in Northern Ireland, but on the ‘mainland’, most notably the bombing of two pubs in Birmingham in 1974, with the loss of twenty-one lives. In 1982 twenty-one soldiers were killed outside Hyde Park Barracks, and in 1984 the Conservative Party conference hotel in Brighton was attacked, killing five and narrowly missing the prime minister. Two Conservative politicians were assassinated, as was Lord Mountbatten of Burma. In an echo of the suffragette campaign of the Edwardian years, the IRA made a major impact with a hunger strike in 1981, to back a demand for the recognition by the British that the PIRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners were not mere criminals but in effect political prisoners or prisoners of war. Ten hunger strikers starved themselves to death, led by Bobby Sands, who was elected to the Westminster parliament in a by-election. The deaths reverberated around the world. In Northern Ireland sixty died in violence around this time.
The Northern Ireland parliament, which had sat from 1921, was dissolved in 1972, with direct rule from London introduced, and abolished in 1973. These were extreme measures, revealing of the lack of legitimacy of the Northern Irish government and institutions, and of the seriousness of the war on the ground. In 1973 a Northern Ireland assembly, elected by PR, was established, with a power-sharing government and a Council of Ireland. It was brought down by unionist opposition, and especially by a general strike by Protestant workers in 1974, which the British government was not willing to break. Direct Rule was reimposed, which lasted until a new Northern Ireland assembly and government was established on similar lines to that of 1973, after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In the interim an assembly was elected (1982–6), but no powers were devolved to it.
The war had profound effects. It led to a strengthening of the security services, including the development of all sorts of security measures from CCTV recognition of car number plates to the mundane searches of bags at the entrance to public buildings. It transformed the security arrangements for the political class, now banished behind security controls. The complete blocking of Downing Street in 1989 with heavy gates was a telling late indicator. Not surprisingly the powers of the police, the development of new security measures and the enforcement of state secrecy caused increasing unease in critics on the left and elsewhere in the early 1970s.4
FALKLANDS
In the early 1980s the issue of war and militarism went from being an international and political one to a national one. The United Kingdom found itself, extraordinarily enough, fighting a right-wing dictatorship in Argentina. Sensing British weakness and taking advantage of a long-stoked nationalist view that the Falkland Islands were Argentine territories, the military regime landed forces in (now) uninhabited South Georgia and then the Falkland Islands in April 1982. What followed was the only war since December 1941 that the United Kingdom waged because its imperial territory was attacked. But it was different in that the people of the islands were considered British; the islanders were ‘kith and kin’ in a way the inhabitants of other colonies such as Hong Kong were not. British nationalism was aroused rather than imperial feeling; analogies were made with 1940, not 1941. The war burst onto a British public who had barely heard of the Falklands, and had lost its memory of Argentina as having once been a critical source of food. If Argentina was now known at all, it was for football.
In better days for both, the two countries had been tied to each other by powerful bonds of liberal sea-borne commerce. Now Argentina only bought British arms; the United Kingdom had no need of Argentine beef or wheat. They were two countries in economic turmoil, which had both suffered relative decline and were both experimenting with free market policies. For both, the Falklands were materially inconsequential. The islanders had lost their British nationality in 1981, and the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance was to be withdrawn.5 The Argentine writer Jorge Luis (Georgie to his intimates) Borges, who had British blood in his veins, famously remarked that the war was like two bald men fighting over a comb.6 However, the islands were ideologically of extreme significance to Argentina and, from April 1982, to British nationalism.
The House of Commons was recalled to sit on a Saturday immediately following the invasion. The call for action came from Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party.7 He had been MP for the naval dockyard town of Devonport between 1945 and 1955 and came from a liberal family from the area; he was very much a navalist. He was old enough to have agitated against Chamberlain and the ‘Men of Munich’ in 1940 and to have called for a second front in 1942. And here again he faced a prime minister who had betrayed British interests to fascists. Indeed, throughout the debate that day there were many conscious allusions to May 1940. One of the first speakers was Julian Amery, son of Leo ‘in the name of God go’ Amery who called on Chamberlain to resign in the Norway debate. Many contributors alleged that Thatcher’s government had fallen asleep on its watch, unlike the Labour government, who had warned off the Argentinians in the 1970s. On that Saturday the war that was to come to look like Thatcher’s war was parliament’s war: all parties except the Welsh nationalists were in favour.
The taking of the Falklands, in the austral winter, from a large conscript army so far from any base was a triumph for British arms, though luck as ever played its part.8 The British armada successfully landed one royal marine commando brigade and one infantry brigade of elite army troops, who ‘yomped’ their way across heathlands to take Port Stanley on 14 June 1982, having landed on 21 May. It was a small war – 255 British servicemen died, and 649 Argentines. 11,000 Argentines were taken prisoner. It was a war of equipment from another era. The commandos sailed to war on the last great emigrant liner, the Canberra, and most of the infantry on the last transatlantic liner, the QE2 (the remainder were aboard the Norland, a more modern Bremerhaven-built ferry). The British flagship, HMS Hermes, was a small aircraft carrier from the 1950s, converted to helicopters and Harriers. The Belgrano was a 1930s US cruiser which was sunk by British torpedoes of interwar design; the Vulcan bomber of the 1950s was used by the British, and the slightly older and also British Canberra bomber by the Argentines. The British aircraft carriers (with short-range Harriers aboard) were nothing like those of earlier generations, or the many floating airfields the US could deploy. The modern Royal Navy’s real capital ships were submarines, for launching nuclear weapons, useless in this encounter. The navy’s small two aircraft carriers and its destroyers and frigates faced Argentine forces with the advantage in air power. British victory meant an expensive new airfield on the islands and the saving of the pair of Invincible-class small carriers, one which was going to be sold. But there was no refocus on a large navy capable of distant operations; it shrank further. The Falklands War was the last independent action of the British state, the last gesture of British nationalism, at a moment when the British economy was still profoundly national too. John Bull rolled up his sleeves for a last quixotic adventure.
Illustration 17.1: On board HMS Incredible the nuclear-powered armoured punt, by Steve Bell, the greatest political cartoonist since Low. (© Steve Bell)
Illustration 17.2: Harry Hardnose, red-nosed, red-top journalist, by Steve Bell, 1982. Bell captures the historical memory of the joint development of the UK and Argentina and the sordid genius of the tabloid press. (© Steve Bell)
The Falklands War and responses to it discomfited the left, while giving energy to the right. The victory gave prestige and influence to the prime minister and diminished that not only of her opponents, but of many colleagues. In the midst of rising unemployment at home it turned people’s minds to contemplating British greatness. While the effects on opinion were electric, the Conservative share of the vote in the 1983 election actually fell compared to 1979.
The war prompted a discussion among left intellectuals about British national identity which would go on for decades. It was as if they had noticed British nationalism for the first time. The war was seen as confirming, indeed revealing, the grip of a new nationalism created in 1940.9 Some sought to criticize it, others to create a left version, as if none had ever existed before. ‘Englishness’ was something it was believed Mrs Thatcher had been able to understand and exploit. Both Englishness and nationalism were interpreted as descendants of imperialism. The empire was, again, the problem for the left.10 That the war was accidental, the British response contingent and opposed (in secret) by many Conservatives, was ignored, as was the push to war from large sections of the left.
THE COLD WAR AND SECOND COLD WAR
The 1970s were a period of increasing confrontations between the United States and its communist rivals across the world. In 1975 South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to forces supported by the Soviet Union and China respectively. In Africa liberation movements supported from the Soviet bloc and China were victorious in the Portuguese empire and making progress in Rhodesia and South Africa. In Europe, Portugal and Spain lost their fascist dictatorships. In Central America guerrillas were fighting the USA’s own ‘sons of bitches’ in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador. A brutal counter-revolution was underway in the southern cone, where the military had taken over with US support in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina.
International relations were reflected in domestic political contestations. In the 1970s the Labour government did not stop the completion of orders of warships and engine repairs for what was now the Pinochet regime in Chile.11 It also allowed delivery to the Argentine junta of two British Type 42 warships – the same type as HMS Sheffield, which was sunk by Argentine aircraft in the Falklands War. So little concern was there that at official level consideration was given to offering Argentina the small aircraft carrier HMS Invincible as well as Harriers and even aged Vulcan bombers.12 The Thatcher government actively sought to sell Chile new materiel and succeeded.
By the late 1970s the Labour government was pushing to increase defence expenditures. In what became known as a second Cold War, a new nuclear and conventional arms race was underway. The United Kingdom was rearming once more, pushing up defence expenditures from 4.5 per cent of GDP to a peak of 5.2 per cent in 1985; at the same time expenditure on education fell, so that by 1985 it was below defence expenditure again. The levels of both warlike and educational spending were back to the levels of the late 1960s as a proportion of GDP, and up one-third in real terms. New US nuclear weapons appeared. The installation of cruise missiles with nuclear warheads, while agreed to by Labour, was announced by the Conservatives in December 1979 and would lead to the astonishing revival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in concert with other anti-nuclear movements across Europe.
During the late 1960s and 1970s an extraordinary secret project was underway to upgrade the capacities of the Polaris missile. It was feared that Polaris could not be effective in future against anti-missile systems, so the government set out to create a new re-entry vehicle which could allow bombs to fall on a defended Soviet target – the so-called ‘Moscow Criterion’. Full development started in 1975, under the Labour government, but the programme was a deep secret, kept even from the cabinet. Its existence was not revealed until 1980. The Chevaline system became the payload of the Polaris missiles between 1982 and 1996, when Polaris was withdrawn.13
Contrary to the Labour manifesto of 1974, the Labour government conducted studies of the Polaris submarine-launched nuclear missile replacement systems, with officials, the prime minister and minister of defence in favour of another US system, the Trident C4.14 The Labour government rejected not only non-replacement, but also replacement with cheaper systems, including cruise missiles. The UK took a preliminary decision to acquire Trident from the US and got approval from the Americans for this. But the final decision was left to the incoming government. The missiles came from a common pool of rockets, and the warheads were of unclear nationality. Tridents (in the event the D5 rather than the C4) were to be carried by four new British-built submarines. These came into service in 1994–6, well after the end of the Cold War.
Why the continuing commitment to the dependent, or at best interdependent nuclear bomb by both the Labour government and the incoming Conservative one? It was not because, as an independent nation, the United Kingdom needed a bomb, whether to defend itself or punch above its weight. The idea that it was a truly independent British deterrent was for the public only. Internally the government repeatedly rejected actual independence in favour of dependence. Thus in 1979 the Conservative government was advised that the C4 missile could not be kept going for more than six to twelve months without US support – that was the extent of full British independence.15 British officials and politicians worried that the USA would feel it unnecessary to have it borrow US weapons, an almost touching condition of abject dependence. Indeed, an official rationale for a bomb only partly controlled by the British needed to be invented. It was that the alliance deterrent was made more credible by the prospect of a potentially suicidal action by a British prime minister: a ‘second centre’ of decision making made deterrence more credible and locked in the USA. What was made to appear a symbol of British national sovereignty depended for its value on a willingness to destroy the country for the sake of a wider alliance.
That increasing the effectiveness of deterrence was the motive behind acquiring Trident is dubious. It is far more likely simply that giving up even the pretence of a national bomb was too difficult. The bomb seemed to emanate power and influence (expressed in the false belief that being a member of the Security Council implied having a bomb, but only the US had the bomb when it was set up). It was inconceivable that France should have a bomb, while the United Kingdom did not (that only France had an independent bomb was not mentioned in this context). But the bomb was no mere irrationality. The bomb gave power to the prime minister, and of course to the controllers and builders of the bomb. The bomb was beyond the purview of the cabinet, who were rarely if ever given a chance to discuss it seriously. Even senior ministers with reservations were marginalized. It was a presidential weapon.
It was also a very important political weapon. As we have seen, there was no real difference between the policies of the Labour government and the Conservative opposition on nuclear matters. However, after 1979 one of the key changes in the Labour Party was that it became openly hostile to nuclear weapons. It now had an anti-nuclear leader, a veteran of the first efflorescence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s, Michael Foot. It adopted an anti-nuclear policy for the 1983 election, one hostile to US nuclear bases, as well as Trident. ‘One-sided disarmament’ was how proposals to get rid of nuclear weapons were labelled by the Tory government, or ‘unilateral nuclear disarmament’ – as if there was no debate to be had about the value of nuclear weapons, as if it were inconceivable that getting rid of nuclear weapons might be a way of making British forces stronger. A nuclear defence policy was also promised by the right-wing breakaway from Labour, the Social Democratic Party, and indeed the Liberal Party with which it fought the 1983 election. Rather importantly, they both wanted to cancel the Trident programme.
FOREIGN RELATIONS
The victory of the Conservative Party in the 1983 election meant a continuation not only of nuclear policy, but also of membership of the EEC, from which Labour had intended to withdraw. Mrs Thatcher supported British membership of the EEC. However, she demanded a rebate on the British contribution and got it. She was seen as a reluctant European, though she was very keen on the development of ever freer trade within the EEC, which is what the Single European Act of 1986 strongly pushed forward. However, it was clear that the primary British relationship was with the United States. In that sense Mrs Thatcher’s premiership was distinct from that of Edward Heath, and indeed that of Harold Wilson.
Mrs Thatcher was an enthusiastic Cold Warrior. She attempted to force a British boycott of the Moscow Olympics following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, supporting President Carter’s action. Globally famous as the ‘Iron Lady’, she was personally close to Ronald Reagan (in office from January 1981) and supportive of his strong anti-left actions across the world. That implied support for many brutal regimes of the right. But the USA could still treat the UK with contempt, as over the invasion of the Commonwealth nation of Grenada in 1983. The humiliation was not that, as claimed, it came out of the blue, but that London was aware from its diplomats in the Caribbean that US action was likely; indeed they reported troop build-up. Furthermore, the United Kingdom was asked by Caribbean nations to take part in an invasion of Grenada and refused. London told Washington of its opposition to military action: Margaret Thatcher expressed the gravest concern to Reagan, by telephone, before the invasion went ahead anyway.16
Mrs Thatcher was quick to recognize that the new Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev (from 1985) wanted change and helped thereby to bring a sudden and peaceful end to the Cold War in 1989. Yet this had potentially dangerous consequences for her. One of her concerns was that the United Kingdom would have to get rid of its nuclear weapons as a result of a US–Soviet deal. Mrs Thatcher was roused to fury by Ronald Reagan: ‘He nearly gave away the store,’ she told Boxing Day guests at Chequers, by which she meant he had nearly given away the nuclear weapons the United Kingdom oversaw.17 This had the merit of exposing the repeated argument that the United Kingdom had nuclear weapons in order to trade them away, the idea that the British state was fully in favour of multilateral nuclear disarmament.
Questions of foreign relations led to her fall as prime minister. She nearly fell as a result of the so-called Westland Affair of 1986. Defence secretary Michael Heseltine wanted to pursue a European alignment for the British helicopter company Westland (whose business was making US-designed Sikorski helicopters for British forces). Margaret Thatcher preferred a direct link with the US firm Sikorski, which went ahead, but proved temporary. Westland was eventually to link up with an Italian firm and to make European helicopters. The dispute had led to the resignation of Heseltine, and the industry secretary, Leon Brittan, who had backed Mrs Thatcher. Heseltine would lead the challenge which brought her down four years later. That challenge, and her defeat, resulted from her increasingly anti-EEC stance. Her chancellor and foreign secretary had been in favour of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism for stabilizing currencies and proposals for a ‘hard ECU’ (the ECU was a Common Market currency), which Margaret Thatcher noisily and publicly rejected. This led to the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, her foreign secretary, in 1990, the move against her by Michael Heseltine and her rejection by her parliamentary party in 1990. What motivated the animus towards the EEC of Margaret Thatcher is hard to fathom; anti-Germanism in the face of a unified Germany is one explanation.18 But what is more significant was the deep pro-EEC consensus which toppled her. This was one Mrs Thatcher could not break, any more than could Michael Foot.
THE INTEGRITY OF THE BRITISH STATE
Margaret Thatcher also restored the emphasis on the unitary character of the British state by rejecting devolution. For the first time since the Edwardian years there were calls, from the 1970s especially, for a measure of Home Rule, in this case for Scotland, and for Wales. This arose from the growth of nationalist parties in these nations. In Wales Plaid Cymru (formed 1925) grew rapidly in the 1960s (winning a by-election in 1966), and from the 1970s was contesting all Welsh seats, winning three in 1974. Much more dramatic was the Scottish case. During the 1970s the Scottish National Party (SNP), founded in 1934, grew very considerably, eating into both the Tory and the Labour vote in Scotland. Its rise was promoted by the prospect of new riches for Scotland. It was Scotland, Shetland and Orkney where most of the oil would land, making it, rather than England, the major oil producer. The SNP won a by-election in 1970 and advanced strongly, taking eleven seats in October 1974. There was for the first time since 1918 a significant group of nationalist MPs arguing for Home Rule or devolution.
As in the case of the Liberal government after 1910, the Labour government was to depend on nationalist votes as its slim majority was lost in by-elections by 1976. Labour proposed a controversial measure of devolution, opposed by the Tories and many Labour MPs. Queen Elizabeth made it very clear she believed in the Union. During her silver jubilee celebrations (1977), when the issue of devolution to Scotland and Wales was being debated, she noted that she recognized a revival of ‘awareness of historic national identities in these Islands’ and said: ‘I number Kings and Queens of England and of Scotland, and Princes of Wales among my ancestors and so I can readily understand these aspirations.’ ‘But,’ she made scandalously clear in the rider, ‘I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’19 That is, for all the informal references to her as ‘Queen of England’, not least by Enoch Powell, she has never been any such thing.20
A Labour backbencher, George Cunningham, a Scot sitting for Islington South, put in an amendment which required 40 per cent of the electorate (not merely those who had voted) to say yes. The amendment was passed. Scotland voted yes, but not enough to pass this very stiff additional test. Wales voted no. As a result the SNP lodged a confidence vote against the government, which was taken over by the Conservative opposition. Others who felt betrayed voted with them, with the result that the vote was lost by one. Into the lobby with the Conservatives, who were implacably opposed to devolution, went the SNP, turkeys voting for an early Christmas, it was said. With them went most of the Ulster Unionists, and the Liberals. Two Ulster Unionists voted with the government, as did Plaid Cymru and Scottish Labour. However two Irish nationalists abstained. Because Labour decided not to bring in a dying MP, they lost by one vote. Thus fell the Labour government, in an echo of the territorial politics of another era. With the return of the Conservative and Unionist party to power, devolution was dead. However, the economic and social policies of the new government, as well as its hostility to devolution, meant the near elimination of the Conservative and Unionist Party from Scotland, once one of its centres of strength.
REFLECTIONS ON DEFEAT
By the early 1980s the power of the central state against political opposition had been powerfully demonstrated. It held firm in Northern Ireland, it went to war to get back the Falkland Islands and it had dealt with opponents to the nuclear programme and bolstered the alliance with the United States. Membership of the EEC was confirmed. The nationalists had been thrown back.
The British state and constitution, its courts, police and parliament, were, deservedly or not, legitimate until the 1970s. There was pride in British democracy, fair play, decency and honesty. The United Kingdom had the mother of parliaments and the best police force in the world, famous for being unarmed, if one discounted Ireland, as most British people of course did. But from the 1970s especially this legitimacy was eroded, slowly, and for that reason more damagingly. The legitimacy of the British state suffered grievous blows. The victory of conventional authority woke people up to the nature of its power. As a result it was now the subject of investigation and critique as never before. There was sustained criticism of the police who used the ‘sus laws’ to stop and harass young black men, typically now British born. It became clear how official secrecy, upheld by powerful and intimidating laws, was used to suppress the politically difficult. Two journalists and a former soldier were tried by the Labour government for spying in 1978; they had in fact collated open source material and, while found guilty, were released.21
Real state secrets began to be revealed. It became known in the 1970s that the decision to build an atomic bomb in the 1940s was taken by a carefully selected group of ministers and then kept secret. It was only in the 1970s that the greatest wartime secret of all – the mass breaking of German codes – was made public. 1980 saw the revelation of the Chevaline programme, and its huge costs, which had been kept secret, even from most of the Labour cabinet. It became clearer that British governments had a lot to hide. For example, it was revealed that the state-owned BP and Shell, deliberately and with the covert support of the state, maintained oil supplies to white supremacist Rhodesia. This rendered absurd the Royal Navy’s decade-long ‘Beira Patrol’, with which it had prevented oil getting to Rhodesia via the Portuguese colonial port of Beira between 1965 and 1975. Margaret Thatcher told parliament that the state had covered up wartime espionage for the Soviet Union by elite figures.
Yet many scandals of the era were successfully covered up until very much later. Six men convicted of planting IRA bombs in Birmingham in 1974 were innocent. Rejecting their appeal, Lord Denning, a famous judge, argued that their case relied on the police having perjured themselves, using violence against them, inventing confessions. This ‘appalling vista’ was so preposterous it could not be true. And most people agreed. They were not released till 1991. The Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, convicted for the Guildford bombings of 1974, were entirely innocent but not released till 1989 and 1991. There would be many other cases of serious misbehaviour and cover-ups by the authorities, endorsed and upheld by inquests and other inquiries, where years later the lies, and the credulity of the inquirers, were painfully and at cost exposed.
The 1970s saw the rise of critical analysis of the British state and institutions from the left. This was a moment of investigation, critique and protest. Radical journalism in concert with non-elite academics produced all sorts of new information about the British state. Inquiries were launched into the secret state.22 There were exposés of the existence of GCHQ, police surveillance and new technologies of political control and a fresh concern for civil liberties. The issue of war, nuclear war especially, animated large chunks of the left, at least as much as unemployment. There were demonstrations in London, and on Greenham Common, a United States Air Force base (one of many) which was to house cruise missiles. A permanent camp of women stood outside it, a powerful instance of a strengthening feminist movement. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament produced much more thoughtful and engaged research than the first CND. The warfare state, and its relations to the USA, was becoming a little more visible. One of the enlighteners was the historian E. P. Thompson, who threw himself into this campaign as he had earlier against the new secret state. Thompson was among the war veterans who called for alternative forms of defence. Another was Peter Johnson, wartime bomber commander, who argued for a non-aligned United Kingdom, one which should reorient its policies around defence of the United Kingdom, rather than defence of West Germany; that would lead to lower costs and more defence.23 Duncan Campbell’s book The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier: American Military Power in Britain (London, 1984) was revelatory about the realities of military power in the United Kingdom, as was a hit BBC series Edge of Darkness (BBC 1985).
Defending the Nation
Britain, as it enters the 1980s, offers itself as a caricature of an exterminist formation. The imperatives of ‘defence’ poison the nation’s economy; the imperatives of ideology deflect even profitable weapons-manufacture into the hands of United States contractors. The subordinate inertial thrust of the national weapons-system-complex augments the imposts of NATO …
E. P. Thompson, 19801
And so today, we can rejoice at our success in the Falklands and take pride in the achievement of the men and women of our Task Force. But we do so, not as at some last flickering of a flame which must soon be dead. No – we rejoice that Britain has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.
Margaret Thatcher, Speech in Cheltenham, 19822
While the 1970s saw the high point of the welfare state and Labour’s social democracy at a time of economic convulsion, the 1970s and early 1980s also saw a strengthening of the power and influence of the warfare and security states. Questions of war were on the agenda as they had not been since the late 1950s and they, as much as the politics of production, were the issues of contention in what was an age of controversy. Yet governments, whether Labour or Conservative, followed similar policies.
THE TRAGEDY OF NORTHERN IRELAND
The greatest crisis in the United Kingdom in the 1970s is the one least written about in histories of the Kingdom, the bloody crisis in Northern Ireland which erupted in 1969.
Northern Ireland had its own government and parliament. The parliament was dominated by unionists; nationalists did not even contest elections outside a very few areas. It was effectively a one-party state, with a sizeable disenfranchised Catholic minority. That minority protested in 1969, and London sent in troops to keep order in place of the clearly partisan local police. The British army itself quickly became the target, and there started a war between the new Provisional IRA, founded in 1969, and the British state. On the one side was the Catholic population (represented from 1970 by a new Social Democratic and Labour Party), seeking to eliminate discrimination against it, which wanted union with Ireland; the unionist population wanted to remain in the United Kingdom. It was essentially a civil war, between the Provisional IRA and local Protestant power, one in which the central British state became involved as it defended, if not the status quo, then the integrity of the United Kingdom. From 1969 until the late 1990s Northern Ireland was a very major commitment of British forces, second only to Germany. Some 10–20,000 soldiers were there at any one time.
In the early 1970s conflict exploded, with, for example, British troops firing on unarmed demonstrators (Bloody Sunday, 1972), and PIRA (in the acronym used by the army) attacking British troops and others with guns and bombs. Internment without trial was introduced in 1971, which radicalized republicans and strengthened the Provisionals. The last ever sentence of death in the United Kingdom was handed down in Northern Ireland in 1972. Liam Holden had his sentence commuted to life. He served seventeen years, and his conviction was quashed years later when a court accepted that a false confession had been beaten from him by British troops.3
The war, for such it was, led to more deaths in the British army than in all the services in the Falklands War, and about a third of the deaths in Korea and Malaya. In proportion to population, the number of United Kingdom civilians killed was greater than in the Blitz. No other rich country in the capitalist world saw similar levels of domestic political violence after 1945; no part of a rich country was so intensively policed or so subject to special laws. Counter-insurgency returned to Ireland, and there was no British genius for light and effective counter-insurgency – it was a nasty, long business. British forces constrained and contained the PIRA but never defeated it.
The war quickly reached a stalemate, with the army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary sometimes working with paramilitary unionist organizations which were involved in their own sectarian war. It was a war of guns, of semi-automatic rifles, and of bombs. Lives were lost not just in Northern Ireland, but on the ‘mainland’, most notably the bombing of two pubs in Birmingham in 1974, with the loss of twenty-one lives. In 1982 twenty-one soldiers were killed outside Hyde Park Barracks, and in 1984 the Conservative Party conference hotel in Brighton was attacked, killing five and narrowly missing the prime minister. Two Conservative politicians were assassinated, as was Lord Mountbatten of Burma. In an echo of the suffragette campaign of the Edwardian years, the IRA made a major impact with a hunger strike in 1981, to back a demand for the recognition by the British that the PIRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners were not mere criminals but in effect political prisoners or prisoners of war. Ten hunger strikers starved themselves to death, led by Bobby Sands, who was elected to the Westminster parliament in a by-election. The deaths reverberated around the world. In Northern Ireland sixty died in violence around this time.
The Northern Ireland parliament, which had sat from 1921, was dissolved in 1972, with direct rule from London introduced, and abolished in 1973. These were extreme measures, revealing of the lack of legitimacy of the Northern Irish government and institutions, and of the seriousness of the war on the ground. In 1973 a Northern Ireland assembly, elected by PR, was established, with a power-sharing government and a Council of Ireland. It was brought down by unionist opposition, and especially by a general strike by Protestant workers in 1974, which the British government was not willing to break. Direct Rule was reimposed, which lasted until a new Northern Ireland assembly and government was established on similar lines to that of 1973, after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In the interim an assembly was elected (1982–6), but no powers were devolved to it.
The war had profound effects. It led to a strengthening of the security services, including the development of all sorts of security measures from CCTV recognition of car number plates to the mundane searches of bags at the entrance to public buildings. It transformed the security arrangements for the political class, now banished behind security controls. The complete blocking of Downing Street in 1989 with heavy gates was a telling late indicator. Not surprisingly the powers of the police, the development of new security measures and the enforcement of state secrecy caused increasing unease in critics on the left and elsewhere in the early 1970s.4
FALKLANDS
In the early 1980s the issue of war and militarism went from being an international and political one to a national one. The United Kingdom found itself, extraordinarily enough, fighting a right-wing dictatorship in Argentina. Sensing British weakness and taking advantage of a long-stoked nationalist view that the Falkland Islands were Argentine territories, the military regime landed forces in (now) uninhabited South Georgia and then the Falkland Islands in April 1982. What followed was the only war since December 1941 that the United Kingdom waged because its imperial territory was attacked. But it was different in that the people of the islands were considered British; the islanders were ‘kith and kin’ in a way the inhabitants of other colonies such as Hong Kong were not. British nationalism was aroused rather than imperial feeling; analogies were made with 1940, not 1941. The war burst onto a British public who had barely heard of the Falklands, and had lost its memory of Argentina as having once been a critical source of food. If Argentina was now known at all, it was for football.
In better days for both, the two countries had been tied to each other by powerful bonds of liberal sea-borne commerce. Now Argentina only bought British arms; the United Kingdom had no need of Argentine beef or wheat. They were two countries in economic turmoil, which had both suffered relative decline and were both experimenting with free market policies. For both, the Falklands were materially inconsequential. The islanders had lost their British nationality in 1981, and the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance was to be withdrawn.5 The Argentine writer Jorge Luis (Georgie to his intimates) Borges, who had British blood in his veins, famously remarked that the war was like two bald men fighting over a comb.6 However, the islands were ideologically of extreme significance to Argentina and, from April 1982, to British nationalism.
The House of Commons was recalled to sit on a Saturday immediately following the invasion. The call for action came from Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party.7 He had been MP for the naval dockyard town of Devonport between 1945 and 1955 and came from a liberal family from the area; he was very much a navalist. He was old enough to have agitated against Chamberlain and the ‘Men of Munich’ in 1940 and to have called for a second front in 1942. And here again he faced a prime minister who had betrayed British interests to fascists. Indeed, throughout the debate that day there were many conscious allusions to May 1940. One of the first speakers was Julian Amery, son of Leo ‘in the name of God go’ Amery who called on Chamberlain to resign in the Norway debate. Many contributors alleged that Thatcher’s government had fallen asleep on its watch, unlike the Labour government, who had warned off the Argentinians in the 1970s. On that Saturday the war that was to come to look like Thatcher’s war was parliament’s war: all parties except the Welsh nationalists were in favour.
The taking of the Falklands, in the austral winter, from a large conscript army so far from any base was a triumph for British arms, though luck as ever played its part.8 The British armada successfully landed one royal marine commando brigade and one infantry brigade of elite army troops, who ‘yomped’ their way across heathlands to take Port Stanley on 14 June 1982, having landed on 21 May. It was a small war – 255 British servicemen died, and 649 Argentines. 11,000 Argentines were taken prisoner. It was a war of equipment from another era. The commandos sailed to war on the last great emigrant liner, the Canberra, and most of the infantry on the last transatlantic liner, the QE2 (the remainder were aboard the Norland, a more modern Bremerhaven-built ferry). The British flagship, HMS Hermes, was a small aircraft carrier from the 1950s, converted to helicopters and Harriers. The Belgrano was a 1930s US cruiser which was sunk by British torpedoes of interwar design; the Vulcan bomber of the 1950s was used by the British, and the slightly older and also British Canberra bomber by the Argentines. The British aircraft carriers (with short-range Harriers aboard) were nothing like those of earlier generations, or the many floating airfields the US could deploy. The modern Royal Navy’s real capital ships were submarines, for launching nuclear weapons, useless in this encounter. The navy’s small two aircraft carriers and its destroyers and frigates faced Argentine forces with the advantage in air power. British victory meant an expensive new airfield on the islands and the saving of the pair of Invincible-class small carriers, one which was going to be sold. But there was no refocus on a large navy capable of distant operations; it shrank further. The Falklands War was the last independent action of the British state, the last gesture of British nationalism, at a moment when the British economy was still profoundly national too. John Bull rolled up his sleeves for a last quixotic adventure.
Illustration 17.1: On board HMS Incredible the nuclear-powered armoured punt, by Steve Bell, the greatest political cartoonist since Low. (© Steve Bell)
Illustration 17.2: Harry Hardnose, red-nosed, red-top journalist, by Steve Bell, 1982. Bell captures the historical memory of the joint development of the UK and Argentina and the sordid genius of the tabloid press. (© Steve Bell)
The Falklands War and responses to it discomfited the left, while giving energy to the right. The victory gave prestige and influence to the prime minister and diminished that not only of her opponents, but of many colleagues. In the midst of rising unemployment at home it turned people’s minds to contemplating British greatness. While the effects on opinion were electric, the Conservative share of the vote in the 1983 election actually fell compared to 1979.
The war prompted a discussion among left intellectuals about British national identity which would go on for decades. It was as if they had noticed British nationalism for the first time. The war was seen as confirming, indeed revealing, the grip of a new nationalism created in 1940.9 Some sought to criticize it, others to create a left version, as if none had ever existed before. ‘Englishness’ was something it was believed Mrs Thatcher had been able to understand and exploit. Both Englishness and nationalism were interpreted as descendants of imperialism. The empire was, again, the problem for the left.10 That the war was accidental, the British response contingent and opposed (in secret) by many Conservatives, was ignored, as was the push to war from large sections of the left.
THE COLD WAR AND SECOND COLD WAR
The 1970s were a period of increasing confrontations between the United States and its communist rivals across the world. In 1975 South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to forces supported by the Soviet Union and China respectively. In Africa liberation movements supported from the Soviet bloc and China were victorious in the Portuguese empire and making progress in Rhodesia and South Africa. In Europe, Portugal and Spain lost their fascist dictatorships. In Central America guerrillas were fighting the USA’s own ‘sons of bitches’ in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador. A brutal counter-revolution was underway in the southern cone, where the military had taken over with US support in Uruguay, Chile and Argentina.
International relations were reflected in domestic political contestations. In the 1970s the Labour government did not stop the completion of orders of warships and engine repairs for what was now the Pinochet regime in Chile.11 It also allowed delivery to the Argentine junta of two British Type 42 warships – the same type as HMS Sheffield, which was sunk by Argentine aircraft in the Falklands War. So little concern was there that at official level consideration was given to offering Argentina the small aircraft carrier HMS Invincible as well as Harriers and even aged Vulcan bombers.12 The Thatcher government actively sought to sell Chile new materiel and succeeded.
By the late 1970s the Labour government was pushing to increase defence expenditures. In what became known as a second Cold War, a new nuclear and conventional arms race was underway. The United Kingdom was rearming once more, pushing up defence expenditures from 4.5 per cent of GDP to a peak of 5.2 per cent in 1985; at the same time expenditure on education fell, so that by 1985 it was below defence expenditure again. The levels of both warlike and educational spending were back to the levels of the late 1960s as a proportion of GDP, and up one-third in real terms. New US nuclear weapons appeared. The installation of cruise missiles with nuclear warheads, while agreed to by Labour, was announced by the Conservatives in December 1979 and would lead to the astonishing revival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, in concert with other anti-nuclear movements across Europe.
During the late 1960s and 1970s an extraordinary secret project was underway to upgrade the capacities of the Polaris missile. It was feared that Polaris could not be effective in future against anti-missile systems, so the government set out to create a new re-entry vehicle which could allow bombs to fall on a defended Soviet target – the so-called ‘Moscow Criterion’. Full development started in 1975, under the Labour government, but the programme was a deep secret, kept even from the cabinet. Its existence was not revealed until 1980. The Chevaline system became the payload of the Polaris missiles between 1982 and 1996, when Polaris was withdrawn.13
Contrary to the Labour manifesto of 1974, the Labour government conducted studies of the Polaris submarine-launched nuclear missile replacement systems, with officials, the prime minister and minister of defence in favour of another US system, the Trident C4.14 The Labour government rejected not only non-replacement, but also replacement with cheaper systems, including cruise missiles. The UK took a preliminary decision to acquire Trident from the US and got approval from the Americans for this. But the final decision was left to the incoming government. The missiles came from a common pool of rockets, and the warheads were of unclear nationality. Tridents (in the event the D5 rather than the C4) were to be carried by four new British-built submarines. These came into service in 1994–6, well after the end of the Cold War.
Why the continuing commitment to the dependent, or at best interdependent nuclear bomb by both the Labour government and the incoming Conservative one? It was not because, as an independent nation, the United Kingdom needed a bomb, whether to defend itself or punch above its weight. The idea that it was a truly independent British deterrent was for the public only. Internally the government repeatedly rejected actual independence in favour of dependence. Thus in 1979 the Conservative government was advised that the C4 missile could not be kept going for more than six to twelve months without US support – that was the extent of full British independence.15 British officials and politicians worried that the USA would feel it unnecessary to have it borrow US weapons, an almost touching condition of abject dependence. Indeed, an official rationale for a bomb only partly controlled by the British needed to be invented. It was that the alliance deterrent was made more credible by the prospect of a potentially suicidal action by a British prime minister: a ‘second centre’ of decision making made deterrence more credible and locked in the USA. What was made to appear a symbol of British national sovereignty depended for its value on a willingness to destroy the country for the sake of a wider alliance.
That increasing the effectiveness of deterrence was the motive behind acquiring Trident is dubious. It is far more likely simply that giving up even the pretence of a national bomb was too difficult. The bomb seemed to emanate power and influence (expressed in the false belief that being a member of the Security Council implied having a bomb, but only the US had the bomb when it was set up). It was inconceivable that France should have a bomb, while the United Kingdom did not (that only France had an independent bomb was not mentioned in this context). But the bomb was no mere irrationality. The bomb gave power to the prime minister, and of course to the controllers and builders of the bomb. The bomb was beyond the purview of the cabinet, who were rarely if ever given a chance to discuss it seriously. Even senior ministers with reservations were marginalized. It was a presidential weapon.
It was also a very important political weapon. As we have seen, there was no real difference between the policies of the Labour government and the Conservative opposition on nuclear matters. However, after 1979 one of the key changes in the Labour Party was that it became openly hostile to nuclear weapons. It now had an anti-nuclear leader, a veteran of the first efflorescence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s, Michael Foot. It adopted an anti-nuclear policy for the 1983 election, one hostile to US nuclear bases, as well as Trident. ‘One-sided disarmament’ was how proposals to get rid of nuclear weapons were labelled by the Tory government, or ‘unilateral nuclear disarmament’ – as if there was no debate to be had about the value of nuclear weapons, as if it were inconceivable that getting rid of nuclear weapons might be a way of making British forces stronger. A nuclear defence policy was also promised by the right-wing breakaway from Labour, the Social Democratic Party, and indeed the Liberal Party with which it fought the 1983 election. Rather importantly, they both wanted to cancel the Trident programme.
FOREIGN RELATIONS
The victory of the Conservative Party in the 1983 election meant a continuation not only of nuclear policy, but also of membership of the EEC, from which Labour had intended to withdraw. Mrs Thatcher supported British membership of the EEC. However, she demanded a rebate on the British contribution and got it. She was seen as a reluctant European, though she was very keen on the development of ever freer trade within the EEC, which is what the Single European Act of 1986 strongly pushed forward. However, it was clear that the primary British relationship was with the United States. In that sense Mrs Thatcher’s premiership was distinct from that of Edward Heath, and indeed that of Harold Wilson.
Mrs Thatcher was an enthusiastic Cold Warrior. She attempted to force a British boycott of the Moscow Olympics following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, supporting President Carter’s action. Globally famous as the ‘Iron Lady’, she was personally close to Ronald Reagan (in office from January 1981) and supportive of his strong anti-left actions across the world. That implied support for many brutal regimes of the right. But the USA could still treat the UK with contempt, as over the invasion of the Commonwealth nation of Grenada in 1983. The humiliation was not that, as claimed, it came out of the blue, but that London was aware from its diplomats in the Caribbean that US action was likely; indeed they reported troop build-up. Furthermore, the United Kingdom was asked by Caribbean nations to take part in an invasion of Grenada and refused. London told Washington of its opposition to military action: Margaret Thatcher expressed the gravest concern to Reagan, by telephone, before the invasion went ahead anyway.16
Mrs Thatcher was quick to recognize that the new Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev (from 1985) wanted change and helped thereby to bring a sudden and peaceful end to the Cold War in 1989. Yet this had potentially dangerous consequences for her. One of her concerns was that the United Kingdom would have to get rid of its nuclear weapons as a result of a US–Soviet deal. Mrs Thatcher was roused to fury by Ronald Reagan: ‘He nearly gave away the store,’ she told Boxing Day guests at Chequers, by which she meant he had nearly given away the nuclear weapons the United Kingdom oversaw.17 This had the merit of exposing the repeated argument that the United Kingdom had nuclear weapons in order to trade them away, the idea that the British state was fully in favour of multilateral nuclear disarmament.
Questions of foreign relations led to her fall as prime minister. She nearly fell as a result of the so-called Westland Affair of 1986. Defence secretary Michael Heseltine wanted to pursue a European alignment for the British helicopter company Westland (whose business was making US-designed Sikorski helicopters for British forces). Margaret Thatcher preferred a direct link with the US firm Sikorski, which went ahead, but proved temporary. Westland was eventually to link up with an Italian firm and to make European helicopters. The dispute had led to the resignation of Heseltine, and the industry secretary, Leon Brittan, who had backed Mrs Thatcher. Heseltine would lead the challenge which brought her down four years later. That challenge, and her defeat, resulted from her increasingly anti-EEC stance. Her chancellor and foreign secretary had been in favour of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism for stabilizing currencies and proposals for a ‘hard ECU’ (the ECU was a Common Market currency), which Margaret Thatcher noisily and publicly rejected. This led to the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, her foreign secretary, in 1990, the move against her by Michael Heseltine and her rejection by her parliamentary party in 1990. What motivated the animus towards the EEC of Margaret Thatcher is hard to fathom; anti-Germanism in the face of a unified Germany is one explanation.18 But what is more significant was the deep pro-EEC consensus which toppled her. This was one Mrs Thatcher could not break, any more than could Michael Foot.
THE INTEGRITY OF THE BRITISH STATE
Margaret Thatcher also restored the emphasis on the unitary character of the British state by rejecting devolution. For the first time since the Edwardian years there were calls, from the 1970s especially, for a measure of Home Rule, in this case for Scotland, and for Wales. This arose from the growth of nationalist parties in these nations. In Wales Plaid Cymru (formed 1925) grew rapidly in the 1960s (winning a by-election in 1966), and from the 1970s was contesting all Welsh seats, winning three in 1974. Much more dramatic was the Scottish case. During the 1970s the Scottish National Party (SNP), founded in 1934, grew very considerably, eating into both the Tory and the Labour vote in Scotland. Its rise was promoted by the prospect of new riches for Scotland. It was Scotland, Shetland and Orkney where most of the oil would land, making it, rather than England, the major oil producer. The SNP won a by-election in 1970 and advanced strongly, taking eleven seats in October 1974. There was for the first time since 1918 a significant group of nationalist MPs arguing for Home Rule or devolution.
As in the case of the Liberal government after 1910, the Labour government was to depend on nationalist votes as its slim majority was lost in by-elections by 1976. Labour proposed a controversial measure of devolution, opposed by the Tories and many Labour MPs. Queen Elizabeth made it very clear she believed in the Union. During her silver jubilee celebrations (1977), when the issue of devolution to Scotland and Wales was being debated, she noted that she recognized a revival of ‘awareness of historic national identities in these Islands’ and said: ‘I number Kings and Queens of England and of Scotland, and Princes of Wales among my ancestors and so I can readily understand these aspirations.’ ‘But,’ she made scandalously clear in the rider, ‘I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’19 That is, for all the informal references to her as ‘Queen of England’, not least by Enoch Powell, she has never been any such thing.20
A Labour backbencher, George Cunningham, a Scot sitting for Islington South, put in an amendment which required 40 per cent of the electorate (not merely those who had voted) to say yes. The amendment was passed. Scotland voted yes, but not enough to pass this very stiff additional test. Wales voted no. As a result the SNP lodged a confidence vote against the government, which was taken over by the Conservative opposition. Others who felt betrayed voted with them, with the result that the vote was lost by one. Into the lobby with the Conservatives, who were implacably opposed to devolution, went the SNP, turkeys voting for an early Christmas, it was said. With them went most of the Ulster Unionists, and the Liberals. Two Ulster Unionists voted with the government, as did Plaid Cymru and Scottish Labour. However two Irish nationalists abstained. Because Labour decided not to bring in a dying MP, they lost by one vote. Thus fell the Labour government, in an echo of the territorial politics of another era. With the return of the Conservative and Unionist party to power, devolution was dead. However, the economic and social policies of the new government, as well as its hostility to devolution, meant the near elimination of the Conservative and Unionist Party from Scotland, once one of its centres of strength.
REFLECTIONS ON DEFEAT
By the early 1980s the power of the central state against political opposition had been powerfully demonstrated. It held firm in Northern Ireland, it went to war to get back the Falkland Islands and it had dealt with opponents to the nuclear programme and bolstered the alliance with the United States. Membership of the EEC was confirmed. The nationalists had been thrown back.
The British state and constitution, its courts, police and parliament, were, deservedly or not, legitimate until the 1970s. There was pride in British democracy, fair play, decency and honesty. The United Kingdom had the mother of parliaments and the best police force in the world, famous for being unarmed, if one discounted Ireland, as most British people of course did. But from the 1970s especially this legitimacy was eroded, slowly, and for that reason more damagingly. The legitimacy of the British state suffered grievous blows. The victory of conventional authority woke people up to the nature of its power. As a result it was now the subject of investigation and critique as never before. There was sustained criticism of the police who used the ‘sus laws’ to stop and harass young black men, typically now British born. It became clear how official secrecy, upheld by powerful and intimidating laws, was used to suppress the politically difficult. Two journalists and a former soldier were tried by the Labour government for spying in 1978; they had in fact collated open source material and, while found guilty, were released.21
Real state secrets began to be revealed. It became known in the 1970s that the decision to build an atomic bomb in the 1940s was taken by a carefully selected group of ministers and then kept secret. It was only in the 1970s that the greatest wartime secret of all – the mass breaking of German codes – was made public. 1980 saw the revelation of the Chevaline programme, and its huge costs, which had been kept secret, even from most of the Labour cabinet. It became clearer that British governments had a lot to hide. For example, it was revealed that the state-owned BP and Shell, deliberately and with the covert support of the state, maintained oil supplies to white supremacist Rhodesia. This rendered absurd the Royal Navy’s decade-long ‘Beira Patrol’, with which it had prevented oil getting to Rhodesia via the Portuguese colonial port of Beira between 1965 and 1975. Margaret Thatcher told parliament that the state had covered up wartime espionage for the Soviet Union by elite figures.
Yet many scandals of the era were successfully covered up until very much later. Six men convicted of planting IRA bombs in Birmingham in 1974 were innocent. Rejecting their appeal, Lord Denning, a famous judge, argued that their case relied on the police having perjured themselves, using violence against them, inventing confessions. This ‘appalling vista’ was so preposterous it could not be true. And most people agreed. They were not released till 1991. The Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, convicted for the Guildford bombings of 1974, were entirely innocent but not released till 1989 and 1991. There would be many other cases of serious misbehaviour and cover-ups by the authorities, endorsed and upheld by inquests and other inquiries, where years later the lies, and the credulity of the inquirers, were painfully and at cost exposed.
The 1970s saw the rise of critical analysis of the British state and institutions from the left. This was a moment of investigation, critique and protest. Radical journalism in concert with non-elite academics produced all sorts of new information about the British state. Inquiries were launched into the secret state.22 There were exposés of the existence of GCHQ, police surveillance and new technologies of political control and a fresh concern for civil liberties. The issue of war, nuclear war especially, animated large chunks of the left, at least as much as unemployment. There were demonstrations in London, and on Greenham Common, a United States Air Force base (one of many) which was to house cruise missiles. A permanent camp of women stood outside it, a powerful instance of a strengthening feminist movement. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament produced much more thoughtful and engaged research than the first CND. The warfare state, and its relations to the USA, was becoming a little more visible. One of the enlighteners was the historian E. P. Thompson, who threw himself into this campaign as he had earlier against the new secret state. Thompson was among the war veterans who called for alternative forms of defence. Another was Peter Johnson, wartime bomber commander, who argued for a non-aligned United Kingdom, one which should reorient its policies around defence of the United Kingdom, rather than defence of West Germany; that would lead to lower costs and more defence.23 Duncan Campbell’s book The Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier: American Military Power in Britain (London, 1984) was revelatory about the realities of military power in the United Kingdom, as was a hit BBC series Edge of Darkness (BBC 1985).
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