The Death of Consensus by Phil Tinline;

Author:Phil Tinline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

9

THE ENEMY WITHIN V. THE IRON HEEL

1976–9

Margaret Thatcher was struggling: at conference, in Shadow Cabinet, in the Commons. She was already in retreat, it seemed, from Joseph’s radical ideas. Callaghan’s cuts combined with Foot’s social contract seemed to have established a viable new normal, without the need for any more dramatic struggles. Nevertheless, Joseph continued his lonely crusade. In early December 1976, he told the Shadow Cabinet that the next Conservative government must prepare to confront trade union power. Having twice lost to the miners, that seemed suicidal. But Joseph insisted the alternative was worse. This was not just a question of wage rises, but wholesale union resistance to change, blocking economic prosperity and freedom alike. If a Conservative government flinched, it could mean that ‘we shall be pushed aside by parties to our right with the stomach to resist.’1 That summer, a young, aggressively right-wing party had risen to prominence.

The National Front, the child of Empire cranks and neo-Nazis, had come to public attention in the wake of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, with its incendiary calls for compulsory repatriation. By 1976, the party’s leaders were more coy about wanting a dictatorship, insisting that they were the democratic face of nationalism, who simply thought ‘the will of the majority should prevail’.2 The violence and intimidation carried out by NF supporters was an ongoing menace to black Britons and British Asians. In response to a series of racist murders, young Asians started organising direct action.

As Labour struggled on with no working majority, there was much concern about whether the Front could push aside the tired old parties and make a political breakthrough.3 In the hot summer of 1976, there appeared to be worrying signs that right-wing extremism was spreading its appeal: young punks wearing swastikas seemed ‘a nightmare coming to life’.4 A year later, the National Front would go on to win almost 120,000 votes (5.3 per cent) in the Greater London Council elections, and had done well enough in by-elections and membership, attracting support from both disaffected Conservatives and fed-up working-class Labour supporters, to become the fourth largest party in British politics. On its front page, the Mirror told its 12 million readers that the NF was on course to win a few seats at the next general election, after which ‘We will hear, regularly and alarmingly, of Parliamentary proceedings being disrupted.’5 And what if the uneasy industrial truce broke down? The nightmare Joseph had raised with the Conservative leadership also began to spread on the left: that renewed economic turmoil might give the National Front their chance.6

But how exactly? At the start of October 1976, as the Prime Minister warned that the IMF crisis could tip Britain into dictatorship, a new play was coming to the end of its first full week in Stratford-upon-Avon, in the glow of excited reviews. David Edgar’s Destiny walked its audience through a possible NF route to power. The play follows a right-wing army veteran turned City financier, Major Rolfe,

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