The Rest Is History - 417. Britain in 1974: State of Emergency (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

“Who governs Britain?” Britain in the early 1970’s was a state in crisis, and by 1974, things had never seemed bleaker. Held hostage by the Trade Unions, British industry was flailing. England��s sporting record was atrocious, the economy was tanking and the prospect of a miners’ strike loomed large. Violence was surging in Northern Ireland, as the IRA escalated its bombing campaigns, and the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War would send oil prices soaring, with the miners on the verge on plunging Britain into darkness. By the end of the year, the British people had voted in two general elections, had a three-day week enforced on them, and the Conservative party were on the cusp of electing their first female leader… Join Dominic and Tom for the first episode of their four-part epic on 1974, undoubtedly one of the darkest and most dramatic years in British political history… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London!  Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The issue before you is a simple one. As a country, we face grave problems at home and abroad. 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 particularly powerful group of workers? This time, the strife has got to stop. Only you can stop it. It's time for you to speak with your vote. It's time for your voice to be heard. The voice of the moderate and reasonable people of Britain. The voice of the majority. It's time for you to say to the extremists, the militants, and the plain and simply misguided, we've had enough. There's a lot to be done. For heaven's sake, let's get on with it. So that, Dominic, was Edward Heath. Uncanny someone. Who was, well, he ended up living in Salisbury, so a man I've always identified with.

And he, of course, was Prime Minister between 1970 and 1974. And there he was on the 7th of February 1974, addressing the nation and basically saying, everything's gone tits up. It's a nightmare. We're going to have to have an election. That's right. Because today's theme is 1974. We're looking at British politics in 1974, the period which you have described as being the worst year in British political history. Right. Well, that was almost exactly 50 years ago, Tom. And Ted Heath was asking the British people famously, who governs the elected government or the trade unions or the National Union of Mine Workers? And famously, the answer from the public was, not you. So yes, I think it probably, there is a very good argument that 1974, the year I was born, was the worst year in modern British political history. So post-war, obviously. Certainly post-war. So it sees one minor strike,

the second in two years. It sees two elections. It sees a three-day week. It sees an interminable series of bombings and terrorist attacks, both in Northern Ireland and in Britain, in London particularly. It sees countless predictions of coups and the breakdown of law and order, so on and so forth. England lose the ashes. England lose the ashes. England don't qualify for the 1974 World Cup. It's a year that I think has become emblematic of the global crisis of the 1970s, but specifically in Britain, it's the year that's become emblematic of the collapse of the sort of social democratic post-war consensus.

And it's the key moment, 1973-74, in the coming of Thatcherism, which will happen at the end of the decade. And so for listeners who are not British, who may not be particularly interested in the nuance of British politics, I mean, the reason this is such a fascinating episode is that, I mean, Britain is a very stable democracy, but this is the year where it really seems to be wobbling. And so we should say straight up that this is a subject of two of your books, State of Emergency, which goes up to the end of the Heath government, and then Seasons in the Sun, which begins with the Wilson government, which succeeds Heath's government and

goes up to 1979. They are brilliant books. Oh, Tom, so kind. You know, fantastic analysis of British politics, but also incredibly funny. So for listeners, you know, outside Britain thinking, oh, do I really want to listen to this? I would urge you to stick with it, both because it is fascinating as an analysis of how a very stable democracy can go through, you know, horrors and yet ultimately emerge from it. And simultaneously, it's very funny. I mean, it's a kind of, it's a dark comedy comedy it is because it's set against the backdrop of the 70s so the 70s is not just kind of inflation and oil crises and things but it's also a very gaudy moment in kind of popular culture so it's 1974 the abba won the eurovision song contest tom with uh with waterloo it's the year

of the grumble in the jungle of the godfather part two of course famously tom it's the year that wolverhampton wanderers won the league cup at wembley against manchester city so very important yes i thought you'd come to that now just to give people especially either our younger listeners or people who are outside britain a bit of context we should just set the scene by saying what had happened to britain since the war so there are two main things so one is that in the sort of 20 to 30 years since the end of the Second World War, Britain has retreated almost completely from empire. Its status in the world is vastly diminished. An extraordinary transformation, actually, with remarkably few domestic repercussions, I would say.

I mean, I think it's hard to think of any country in history that has suffered quite such an implosion of its global status in so short a time. With so few consequences, Tom. Never an election issue, never a massive deal, I would say, in domestic politics. It's not entirely voluntary, but it's as though people just aren't talking about it. So there's that, there's the retreat from empire. And I think one of the key things in the 70s Britain is that people feel a sense of diminished prestige. Number two is, for all the sort of excitement of the 60s and whatnot, Britain is going through a period of deep economic and very traumatic economic transformation. So the first

industrial nation is now becoming the first to de-industrialize. People losing their jobs, unemployment is beginning to go up, inflation is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. That was evident more than 10 years before. And the public had elected a new government led by Labour's Harold Wilson to try and deal with it in 1964. The white heat of technology, he famously said. And he had promised to modernize Britain, to create a new Britain in the white heat of the technological revolution. And by and large, he had failed.

So the electorate had kicked him out in 1970. He'd had to devalue the pound. There'd been constant problems with strikes, with international pressure on the British currency, lack of confidence in the British economy and so on. And so in 1970, the electorate had chosen another modernizer, the man you were so brilliantly impersonating at the beginning of the programme. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you. Which is Edward Heath.

And the story of this episode and the next episode, a lot of it is what you might call the tragedy of Edward Heath. The rudest man ever to be Prime Minister, you might say. Yeah. So perhaps we should talk a little about Heath because he's a new kind of Tory. He was born in 1916. He's from Kent and he's actually the kind of of tory he was born in 1916 he's from kent and he's actually the son of a very skilled kind of carpenter stroke builder and his mother was a lady's maid wasn't she was a lady's maid yeah so that's i mean kind of interesting because he

becomes the leader of the tories which traditionally have been the party of the kind of landed yes aristocracy and everything and the lady's maid was always the ambivalent servant in downtown kind of midway between the servants hall and upstairs. And there's something about that in Heath, is there? Do you think? Oh, definitely. Definitely. These things really matter. And it definitely matters with Heath. So Heath's little boy had been your absolute classic spoiled prodigy. So all the accounts of him growing up in Broadstairs in Kent are that he's perfect. He's never naughty. He always does the right thing. He's clever and everything at home is geared around him. So he has a special chair in which he can do his homework. He doesn't have to help with the washing up. He's bought a

piano because he's very good at the piano. Their family dog is named after him. He's given his initials, ERG. AndR-G, Erg. And at school, you know, everyone would say of Heath, he's like the sort of the incarnation of the school spirit, you know, but in a really kind of off-putting way. So he's the sort of boy who's a prefect at school when everybody says, you know, if he sees another boy breaking the school rules, he thinks that's disloyal to the school.

And Dominic, does he end up going to Oxford? And if he does, which college does he go to? He does. And he went to Balliol College, Oxford. Tom, like all the best people. And a famous story about him at Balliol College is that he was friends with a future Labour politician, Dennis Healey. And one day they were walking through the Balliol Quad and Dennis Healey said to him that a mutual friend who was also in the Labour Party, like Dennis Healey, or Dennis Healey

was actually a communist in those days. He said a mutual friend, he's going off to a pub for the weekend. He's going to stay there with his girlfriend. They're going to pretend to be a married couple. And Ted Heath apparently was so shocked. And he said, my goodness, he said, nobody in the Conservative Party would ever behave like that. And he meant it.

He absolutely meant it. Because he famously never went to bed with anyone. Never married. Not a man for the ladies. He had an extraordinary time as a young man. He went to Germany in the 1930s on a kind of tour. He met Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. Because he was at the Nuremberg Rally, wasn't he?

He was at the Nuremberg Rallys, taken by a sort of Oxford friend. And he shook hands, apparently, with Himmler. And he said Himmler had a very poor handshake, which does not surprise me. No. Limp and moist, I imagine. Yes. Then he went on holiday to the Spanish Civil War. He shook hands apparently with Himmler and he said that Himmler had a very poor handshake, which does not surprise me. No. Limp and moist, I imagine. Yes. Then he went on holiday to the Spanish Civil War and he was machine gunned by a nationalist plane.

The car he was in was machine gunned. And then he served in the Second World War time and commanded, was it in the artillery, I think, or the engineers or something like that, fighting their way into Germany. Because that is part of the backdrop of this, isn't it? And it's the same with the Falklands War, which we talked about earlier, that all the characters in this drama, they kind of have thick glasses or hunched shoulders and slightly shabby suits. Dandruff.

But they'd all been insanely brave in the war. That's right. So they all have those kind of memories. Exactly. To kind of buoy them. And for Heath, this memory of seeing the Nazis, of the Spanish Civil War, of fighting in the Second World War, I mean, this informs what becomes the great crusade of his career, isn't it? Which is to get Britain into the common market as

it was. Yes. He's a passionate Europhile. He went back to Nuremberg to see the trials at the end of the war. And he sits there in the courtroom and he says in his memoirs, as I watched these scenes, I thought to myself, never again. You know, the way to deal with this is to have European brotherhood and solidarity and absolutely all of this kind of thing. And as you say, the funny thing is that all the characters we'll be talking about, so many of them, they appear to be so ineffectual and just sort of world weary and stuff.

They'd been storming beaches and machine gunning Panzer divisions. What kinds of things. They had. Maybe that's what happens. Yeah. If you storm a beach in your 20s, by the time you're 50,

you look as though you're 80, you're knackered and you can't be bothered to do anything about anything. Yeah. Anyway. So, he is unbelievably rude.

I think that's one other thing to remember about Ted Heath. Partly because he's so selfish. He's very poor at small talk. He's always been spoiled. He expects to be the centre of attention. And there are all these stories about him going to dinners and refusing to speak to people, especially women.

Or there's a story that he's on a plane once when he's the Tory leader. And there's lots of turbulence that throws everybody to the floor, particularly this one woman journalist. And he says, bring brandy, bring brandy. And they bring brandy. And then he drinks it himself. So there's that behaviour.

So he becomes Tory leader, doesn't he? And you're very funny about him. So you say he doesn't really like the Tory party. I suppose not. So you write about him, confronted by the extravagantly hatted housewives, blue-rinsed ladies, retired colonels, and nasal-voiced businessmen who stuffed envelopes and organised jumble sales on the party's behalf.

He often looked as though he had trodden in something. Yes. And he says of the MPs in his party, so Tory MPs, there are three sorts of people in this party. Shits, bloody shits, and fucking shits. Yes. So as you say, spectacularly rude but the reason they choose him goes to that voice that you've just done tom so heath has this strange strangulated

accent he adopted it when he was at oxford because previously he almost certainly spoke with a kind of kentish accent yeah so he's adopted what he sees as a patrician accent he's adopted the habits of the upper classes, copied them. So yachting. He plays the piano, all this kind of thing. Yeah, that sort of stuff. He's socially insecure, I think it's fair to say. And in 1965, after a succession of kind of very tweedy,

old Etonian Tory prime ministers had been kicked out, the Tories decided they needed a Harold Wilson of their own, a moderniser, an aspirational moderniser. The first Tory leader, they say they want with wall to wall carpeting. And Ted Heath is this man. And they believe he's the kind of British Kennedy. And there are these unbelievably ridiculous profiles. People say, you know, the classless professional politician.

My favorite one is from The Observer. It says, Ted Heath likes to gather people, young people around him. He summons them on the telephone. Like Kennedy, he's very intelligent. He ruthlessly uses intellectuals and experts to advise him, to feed him with facts. It's part of his technique, the computer mind at work. So he's a technocrat. He's a technocrat.

But I mean, all this stuff is obviously massively, you know, this sort of the ruthless modern. But this is how he sees himself, isn't it? As someone, you know, you have a problem, you solve it. Totally. He absolutely sees himself that way. He loves nothing more than a committee meeting of other technocrats, other kind of, you know, sensible, centrist people. Yeah. And they'll get together and they'll hammer out the best solution in the national interest.

And he, you know, you mentioned of computers there. He likes the idea of the economy as a kind of computer that, you know, you can tap a few things in and slightly shift it and then everything will go well. And this is basically the understanding of the economy that, I mean, Labour share it, right? Yeah, to some degree. I mean, the idea that you bring in a plan, the plan works, everything's brilliant. Yes. You've just got to get the right plan. Yes. He's a pure technocrat. He's basically a frustrated civil servant.

Although you say in your book that he's also a frustrated hotelier. Yes, yes. You know, which is, I mean, he'd be ruder than Basil Fawlty. He said to somebody that he wished he'd been a hotelier, and the mind absolutely boggles with that because he would have been so rude. But when he got into Downing Street in the 1970s, to general surprise, I would say, Labour's Harold Wilson, who was a much more intuitive politician,

he was kicked out by the electorate in the summer of 1970. There'd been bad trade figures, they devalued the pound, the Wilson government was looking a bit shop-soiled. So in comes Heath, and he immediately redevelops Downing Street, number 10. So he modernized it. He put in all this sort of very garish kind of gold wallpaper and silver carpets. It's a very slightly Trumpian attitude to decor. And this is what he wants to do with Britain. He wants shiny new Britain with all sorts of changes. And he thinks very foolishly. He has an object lesson in doing too much too quickly.

Well, he famously destroys the ancient county. He does. Doesn't he? Yes. He kind of reorgan lesson in doing too much too quickly. Well, he famously destroys the ancient counties. He does. Doesn't he? He kind of reorganises it. Yes, he does. Which I think is the one thing of which he can never really be forgiven. Well, it's very poor, Tom. It's very poor form from Ted Heath to have reorganised the counties in that way. I completely agree with you. He wants to get Britain into Europe, and indeed he does, in 1973. That's his big passion project. But also, I mean,

it's a very unpropitious time to be making lots of changes. There's rising inflation in the world economy generally because world commodity prices are going up. British industry has been performing pretty badly for years, so is coming under enormous pressure from foreign competition. And as a result, having said initially that he would be ruthless, he ends up handing out big bailouts to lots of British businesses. And there's another issue which is going to run all the way through this week's podcasts,

which he's not responsible for, but which he doesn't necessarily handle terribly well. And this is the increasing violence in Northern Ireland. So this had begun in the mid-60s. This isn't a podcast about the troubles in Northern Ireland, but we'll just give you a tiny bit of background. This had begun in the mid-60s, intercommunal violence between the Catholic and Protestant communities of Northern Ireland. The British government sent in the army in 1969, actually to protect the Catholic community from Protestant rioters. But relations with the Catholics had broken down by the early 1970s.

So 1972, this Bloody Sunday, isn't there, where paras fire on protesters? Exactly. But even before that, they had instituted a curfew, which had been very unpopular. They had interned people without trial, which had been incredibly unpopular. And by 1972, you have in that year, almost 500 people killed. You basically have a low-level civil war going in in part of the United Kingdom. And Heath is spending enormous amounts of time trying to sort it out, trying to find a solution. Doing that thing that you talked about, Tom, trying to get people around the conference table. Why can't we hammer all this out and just chat about it and find a plan to get us through it? As always with Heath, he thinks there's maybe

some sort of committee room fix. But I mean, you say in your book that he's trying to sort, you know, as you say, a kind of low level civil war in the UK, but he just doesn't have time because he also has millions of other things to worry about. Because he's got Europe, he's got his counties to reorganise. And of course he's got a problem with the unions. Yes. I mean, this actually is the thing that dominates the news in Britain in the early 1970s. To an extent, I think that people born subsequently, you know, who've grown up in a very different world would find almost inconceivable. You know, every day there are stories on the front page of the papers about strikes, about

negotiations. There are the scenes on the news that you and I would have grown up with, Tom, of people kind of endlessly trooping in and out of number 10. Well, again, in the stage of emergency, you're right. Burly men with steel grey hair and thick glasses were forever trooping in and out of number 10, shaking their heads sorrowfully at what their members would think of the government's latest offer.

Well, that's how it worked. That's what happened. People used to describe this as the beer and sandwiches. Remember the phrase? Yeah, of course. People would always talk about them going in for beer and sandwiches with the prime minister. It never was beer and sandwiches, but they would pretend it was for their members' benefit because they didn't want to seem like it was smoked salmon and white wine, which it was.

In the press, generally, it was thought the unions were much too powerful. So they had about 13 million members, and it was often said they were more powerful than elected politicians. Actually, I could spend hours going into the details of all this, but I think there was an argument that they were actually much too weak. There are a thousand trade unions in Britain, small, fragmented, always squabbling with each other, competing with each other. So it wasn't like Germany, West Germany, where you had a few very, very strong unions and the government could do a deal with them and know that it would stick. In Britain, you would do a deal with one union and the next day another union would pop up. So it's like fighting the Hydra.

Exactly. Our flankets would attract members by making a more extravagant demand. But Dominic, having said that, there are a few unions that are incredibly powerful because they're in a position basically to put their boot on the throat of the economy, to sound like a Daily Telegraph leader. So the railways would be one, but the biggest one is the miners. Yes. Well, the miners have been very quiescent for years, actually, since the general strike of 1926. And then in 1972, they went on strike for more money. And they said quite reasonably, our members' pay has fallen massively behind other workers. And our members have not joined

in all this sort of excitement of the 1960s, the Carnaby Street kind of stuff. They're miles away and they haven't got enough money. And we would like a fair deal. And the government thought, well, we can stand up to the miners on this. Important to hold the line against inflation. And they lost. The miners basically choked the power stations of supplies of fuel. And Ted Heath had to give in. And there's huge public sympathy for the miners, isn't there? Yeah.

Their job is dangerous. Exactly. But Heath is addicted to this idea, so popular in the 70s, not just in Britain, but in the US. Nixon did it as well, for example, of incomes policies. So with inflation rising, he thinks that rather than have mass unemployment, it would be much better to have government mandated limits on how much people can earn and actually how much people pay in the shop. So it's all kinds of pay boards and price commissions. At the end of 1973, and this will be a sort of ticking time bomb for

the rest of this week, he unleashes what he calls stage three. Which doesn't sound good, does it? I mean, it sounds like a kind of medical condition. It does. Yes, it does. So stage three, your pay increase is limited to £2.25 a week, 7% a year. There's all kinds of exceptions. There's appendices. It's incredibly bureaucratic. There will be people going into companies. You run a decent sized business, ball bearing company. People would come in and they'd say, well, how much are you paying your workers? You can't pay them more than that. You can't offer them a bonus. You can't do all this. So it's very, very top down statist corporatist. But Heath was convinced that this would stop inflation.

Can I just ask you though, the Tories at this point are not really free market then, so as they will become, the idea that you let the market determine what wages and so on should be. I mean, this is a massive issue, Tom. So basically, no, but there are some Tories, most famously a chap called Enoch Powell, who thinks Ted Heath is sold out. We are meant to be a free market party. What the hell's going on? This is socialism. So there are a few people who are giving Ted Heath grief for this, but all your ex-tank commanders with the massive glasses, they're in favour of it. They say, well, it has to be done. They're very world weary and they just sort of say, well, this is the way of the world. We don't terribly like it, but it is what it is. So in that stage three, one quick thing I'll

mention, which is talking of ticking time bonds. As a sweetener for the unions, Heath says, listen, under this pay restriction thing, if inflation goes above a certain level, we'll have what we call threshold payments. So your pay will go up automatically along with it. Now, a lot of people think that's very inflationary. Prices go up, your pay goes up automatically. I mean, that's a recipe for runaway inflation. But he's very confident that inflation won't go up. All his experts are saying, what could possibly go wrong? Oil prices aren't going to suddenly go through the roof at the end of 1973. So this is a lovely little sweetener for the trade unions, and you'll never have to deliver on it. And at the same time as he's brought that policy in, simultaneously his Chancellor, Anthony Barber, has embarked on what becomes known as the Barber boom.

And this goes so well that you will describe Barber as having endured perhaps the roughest, worst judged and unluckiest ride of any chancellor since the war. So basically, Barber's attempt to dash for growth, it's called, isn't it? Yeah. Goes spectacularly wrong. I hate to say this, Tom, but Anthony Barber, he was a very sort of mild-mannered, balding, looked like a provincial accountant. Presumably had won the VC, had he? Yeah. He made Kwasi Kwarteng look like an absolute financial genius.

So he poured all this money into the economy and they said, it's fine because the incomes policy will keep inflation down. So it's kind of win-win. Well, there is at least one union that doesn't want to accept any restrictions on its pay. And that's the National Union of Mine Workers that we talked about earlier. That had a quarter of a million members. Obviously they've had their strike already in the Heath's premiership and won. and in the late summer joe gormley who was the leader of the num national union of mine workers who's this sort of craggy lancastrian you know looks like he was kind of born in a mine but is actually very pragmatic and essentially secretly feeding information to special branch about his own union would you believe i mean there's that sort of ludicrousness of british politics in the 70s

yeah he's informing on his own union yeah he goes to see heath and he says you know listen ted you've got to give me something all this kind of thing they come up with a wheeze that he's going to give them kind of special payments and then disastrously heath and barbara say that's open to all the unions. Everyone can have the special payments. And Gormley's like, oh, we need to have something just for us, special. And his members say they would like a 35% pay increase. And because it's increasingly militant, the miners' union, Gormley can't really stand up to them. And actually, why would he want to? Getting a big deal for his members is in his remit.

It's his job. Right, because it's not his job to keep the economy on track. No. So here's the thing. The big mistake that Heath and people like Heath were always making is they would get the union leaders in. The union leaders would be very jolly. Heath would play the piano for them, Tom.

Yeah. He would actually play like the red flag on the piano. Have a knees up. Yeah. It would be great fun. They'd have a great laugh. They'd all be sitting around telling their war stories and stuff. And Heath would say, listen, it's in the national interest for you to have a pay rise of 4% or something.

And the union leaders would sort of say, well, that's fine. But it's actually my job to ask you for 25%. And if I don't do that, I'll be kicked out. Yeah. And they'll get somebody who does do it. So you need to understand where we're coming from. And I think Heath couldn't do that because he was such a technocrat he just and because you know the school spirit and stuff well he's a kind of one nation tory they call it isn't it yes the idea that we're all in it together exactly we all rally around and he doesn't get that actually people

don't want to rally around they just want the best for themselves yeah So against this backdrop, they asked for 35%. And then we said, what could possibly go wrong? Four days before the coal board had come back to the miners with their counteroffer, which was about 16% or so. So four days before that, on the 6th of October, 1973,

would you believe it, Tom? The Arab nations, so Egypt and Syria, had launched a stunning surprise attack on Israel, launching the Yom Kippur War. The war rages for 10 days. The Americans are airlifting supplies to the Israelis and to punish them, the OPEC oil producers announce a 70% increase in the price of oil. Ouch. So we did an episode on the consequences of this, didn't we? The oil shock of 73. But it hits Britain peculiarly hard, even though actually, I mean,

Britain relative to America gets off more lightly, don't they? Because the Arab nations see Britain as being quite pro-Arab. Yes, they do. But it's still, it's as though, I mean, one historian says it's as though the whole country had awarded itself a 20% pay rise overnight. That's the injection of inflation by the massive increase in oil prices. And that thing that I mentioned under stage three, the threshold payments kick in. They kick in 11 times in three months or something like that. So more and more inflation is kind of pouring into the economy, if that's the right metaphor. So that is a huge, huge boost for the miners because the oil crisis gives them this weapon. The government can't rely on cheap imported oil for its power stations.

The government needs coal. And once again, as in 1972, they can cut off the supplies. And if they want to, effectively, they can plunge Britain into darkness. So the end of October, about nine, 10 days after the OPEC oil shock, the miners' union calls for industrial action. They launched initially what they used to do. The thing that you all saw in the papers in the 70s, an overtime ban. So that was always the first step. And so on the 13th of November, for the fifth time in three years, Tom, I mean, it's mind boggling now, the government announces a state of emergency in Britain. They ban the use of power in advertising, electric advertising. They order public buildings to limit their use

of electricity. They start to print ration cards, Tom, for petrol because they're so worried about forecourts being jammed with people desperate to fill up. Meanwhile, the British economy, into which all this money has been poured, is absolutely tanking. So Britain is not exporting enough and it's spending tons of money on imports. So the Bank of England has to announce this huge credit squeeze. So in other words, if you're using a credit card, you will be forced every month to pay back ever greater amounts of your balance because they're desperate to stamp out borrowing. And the sort of parallel story to all this is that the Queen's daughter is getting married. So on the 14th of November,

Wednesday, the 14th of November, Tom, you probably remember this. No, of course I don't. What was I then? I was six. Six in front of the TV. I was five. I was five. Fizzing with excitement as you watch the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips.

No, I was busy reading about dinosaurs. What a moment. And if you'd read the Times that day, you would have seen the cheery headline on the wedding day their special wedding edition the headline said um lights go out as emergency powers bite and then all the way down the front page there was a list of subheadings bank lending rate soars bank curbs wall street losses power plea rejected flood lights off ambulance ban hospitals under threat and all this kind of thing. So it's incredibly, incredibly gloomy.

And Heath calls in the miners at the end of that month, and he says, basically begs them, please don't do this. What can I give you? And there's a little man who says to him, and I always think this is an amazing line. He says, Prime Minister, what I don't understand is this. He says, you've told us we've got no option but to pay the Arabs the price they're demanding for oil. Now, as far as I know, he says, the Arabs didn't help us in World War I. Actually, they kind of did, but we'll forget about that.

And they didn't help us in World War II. We miners, we flogged our guts out and all that. And he says, why can't you pay us for coal? Well, you're prepared to pay the Arabs for oil. Heath doesn't have an answer. I mean, you can't run cars on coal, can you? No. I mean, that would be the obvious answer.

Okay. So you should have been in the meeting. I should. Because Heath says nothing. He just sits there very mutely and miserably. And then at the very end of the meeting, he says to the Scottish miners leader, Mick McGarvey, He's this kind of gravel voice, Glaswegian communist. And Heath says, what is it you want, Mr. McGarvey? And McGarvey says, I want to see the end of your government.

And on that bombshell time, I think we'll take a break. Wow. Things are looking bad for Heath. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. Wow. Things are looking bad for Heath. For more episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. He was a terrible speaker. He was preposterously rude and grumpy. He was far too impatient. He tried to do too much too quickly. And he was insensitive to the values and pressures that drove other people. It is worth pointing out,

however, that he was also incredibly unlucky. No PM since Ramsay MacDonald had been dealt such a terrible hand. So that Dominic is a top historian of the 1970s, namely yourself, writing in State of Emergency, your wonderful book on the Heath government, on Edward Heath. So he's a bad prime minister in all kinds of ways. He kind of gets things wrong. He introduces terrible policies. But as you say, the effect of these terrible policies is massively ratcheted up by bad luck. And you were describing before the break how his economic policies get kind of turbocharged into a kind of doom spiral by the huge misfortune of the Yom Kippur War and the resulting spike in oil prices. Yeah, I think maybe when you said they're all terrible policies and whatnot, I mean, they're very well-intentioned policies by and large.

I mean, of course, the place that he wants to get to, which is a sort of more modern, more streamlined, more efficient Britain, I think is a place that's not totally unreasonable. And at the time, as it were, sensible, centrist kind of people, the rest is politics people, Tom. They were all over Heath's policies. Right. So he's facing this real problem, late 1973, that pay rises for numbers of people across the British economy are rising massively because of this background of rising prices turbocharged by the oil spike. So what are Heath's options? Well, I mean, his first thing that he has to deal with is the miners' strike, or the looming miners' strike. They're not fully out on strike at the moment.

They've got this 35% demand. Now, he could just give in to them because that's what you do with trade unions. You appease them. What I would call the rest is politics approach, which is out of centrist kindness, Tom, he could give the miners a better deal. Now, almost everybody in his government thinks that's a very bad idea because that would just encourage other unions. Does Heath have the sense of obligation to the miners that lots of people have? Yes. The sense that they are a special case? To some degree he does. This is why he's very bad at politicising the crisis, actually, because some of his younger aides say to him, listen, you want to ratchet this up.

The enemy within. The enemy within. You do a Margaret Thatcher. You want to turn this into the elected government versus Bolshevik agitators. Because Mick McGarvey, who you ended with, I mean, he is a communist. Yeah. There are quite a few communists in the trade unions. So Jack Jones, who was the most powerful trade unionist in the land, he was the leader of the Transport and General Workers Union. He had been an absolute card-carrying communist.

Well, Jack Jones, you quote a fellow union leader describing him that he had a smile glinting like the sunlight on the brass plate of a coffin. Oh, God, that's harsh. Actually, Jack Jones is very pragmatic and a very impressive man in some ways. Anyway, that's by the by. So yes, he has a sense of paternalism. I think it's fair to say he really does believe in consensus, Tom. One nation.

Yeah. Yeah, one nation. Now, there are some of his aides who say, listen, we can't win. Why don't we plead special circumstances and give in to the miners? Just bite the bullet. Say it's a special case, the oil shock, energy a big issue, all this. But there are loads of people who then say, hey, you can't give in. You can't keep giving in to the union. So there are lots of mandarins who say this. Actually, people in the Labour Party who say it. So Heath's old Oxford friend, Roy Jenkins, he goes around saying to people, he's a big wig in the Labour Party, he goes around saying, Ted can't give in. Because if Ted gives in to the miners, next week it'll be the dockers, it'll be the railway men, it'll be somebody else. You just have to stand firm.

And actually, some of Heath's aides say to him, even at this stage, have an election. Have an election on this single issue. Do you support the government or do you support the miners? Stand up for the elected government. And so one of the people who's pressing that is Nigel Lawson, isn't it? Who will go on to become Mrs. Thatcher's chancellor. Yes, yes. And best known today probably as the father of Nigella Lawson. That's right. So Nigel Lawson is part of this little group of young, it seems odd for us, Tom, to think of them as young Turks.

I know. Nigella Lawson, Douglas Heard, William Wargrave, because they were Thatcherite ministers. They were Margaret Thatcher's ministers in the 1980s. But at the time, they're sort of 25. And they're saying, come on, let's have a bare knuckle fight with the unions. Let's have a crack at the unions.

Exactly. But he does nothing. He's very passive. He's very kind of weary. He's got a thyroid complaint, hasn't he? He does. Undiagnosed. Undiagnosed. So he's becoming enormously fat as well. People keep saying, God, he's getting fat. I mean, ironically, he's suffering inflation. He's inflating, yeah, ironically. But also he's becoming more and more miserable.

So he'll have meetings with the union leaders where he just says nothing at all and just looks like he's going to cry. Well, he must be shattered. I mean, he's had so many problems. I forgot to mention there's also a train strike. Yes, of course there is. And also Northern Ireland's really bad. So there's loads of stuff going on.

It's all very miserable. On the 12th of December, a crucial day, two things happen. First of all, his Chancellor, Anthony Barber, who's also shattered and looking very harassed, like a kind of very miserable vicar. Anthony Barber sends a report to all his cabinet colleagues and he says, we're now facing the gravest economic crisis since the end of the war. We've got no coal, we can't afford to buy any oil, inflation's through the roof, we're borrowing too much money, nobody abroad has got any confidence in the pound. And he says, we're going to have to scrap all our plans for spending. So Heath's education secretary, Tom, has a very ambitious plan out of kindness to increase.

Despite having snatched the milk from the poor little children. To increase nursery provision and to expand universities. And that person is Margaret Thatcher. And Barber says, that's got to go. Can't do it. It's no money. So there's that. And then at five o'clock that afternoon, having all read this incredibly depressing memo, they meet to discuss what they're going to do about the power situation. And they basically say, we're going to have to take incredibly drastic measures. So we're going to have to put industry, shops and offices on a three day working week. Offices will have to keep their temperatures below 63 degrees Fahrenheit. We'll

cut street lighting by 50%. We will ban the use of floodlights in sport. So this is very important, isn't it? Because it's ultimately what results in football being played on Sundays. Because previously that hadn't happened? Because it's ultimately what results in football being played on Sundays. On Sundays. Because previously that hadn't happened. Yes. Because they have to move the fixtures into daytime. Yes. Had this not happened, Tom, nobody would have even heard of Manchester City. Televised football and all this kind of thing would never have happened.

So TV has to turn off at 10.30. There's no broadcasts after 10.30 at night. And so late that afternoon, he stands up in the House of Commons and he says, this is the deal. At midnight on New Year's Eve, we're going on a three-day week. And then he gives this broadcast to the nation, which is the one that you always see in documentaries about the 70s. We shall have a harder Christmas than we've known since the war. That one.

Yeah, like the most depressing broadcast you've ever seen. Ho, ho, ho. In which the prime minister says, I want to speak to you about the grave emergency facing our country. You know, it's not Churchillian, put it that way. So Christmas comes, and Christmas is pretty awful. Because there's all this looming, the three-day week is coming. IRA bombs are going off in London, aren't they?

Right, so the IRA really now launches its campaign of bombing. There's been bombs in Belfast, by the way, or a shooting in 1972 and 1973, pretty much every single day. But now the IRA is launching its campaign on what at the time people called the British mainland. So seven days before Christmas, there are car bombs in London and Westminster, Pentonville, Hampstead, and 60 people are injured. Thankfully, nobody killed. There's an incredibly bleak mood in government. So there's a story that the Environment Secretary, Geoffrey Rippon, who's one of Heath's kind of great outriders, he has a kind of Christmas dinner party.

And he tells everybody this dinner party, we're the Weimar Republic. Yeah. You know, that's where we are now. Well, so a lot of those parallels. Loads. And also the other parallel that people are very keen on is Chile, which has just had the coup where Allende government has been toppled by General Pinochet. Absolutely.

And we will come on to this even more when Harold Wilson enters the story later this week, Tom. Well, of course, the other great philosopher who comments on what Britain needs at this point is David Bowie, isn't it? Of course. Yeah. He says that Britain needs an extreme right front to come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. That was before his White Duke phase, wasn't it?

Yeah. I'm afraid to say it, but it's a fascist phase. But the big hit of the year, Tom, is Merry Christmas, Everybody by Slade. They wanted to cheer everyone up, didn't they? Well, so Noddy Holder, the lead singer of Slade, was interviewed by Mojo. And he said that line, look to the future now, it's only just begun. He said he wanted to cheer everybody up.

He said the country couldn't have been at a lower ebb. Times like that, people always turn to showbiz. He wasn't wrong. But actually, because I'm very boring and a pedant, I checked and actually they recorded the song last summer. So he couldn't have. Oh, that's the quality of research that you expect from a top historian of the 70s. I mean, how could he possibly have done it as a reaction to the three-day week?

Three-day week hadn't even happened. Yeah, but maybe he saw that Heath's incomes policy was doomed. Yes, precisely. He didn't agree with incomes policies. He studied world commodity prices. He knew disaster was coming. Actually, the Queen, her Christmas message, Ted Heath rewrote her Christmas message. Because it was too damn beat.

Because it was too damn beat. She wanted to talk about the special difficulties that Britain is facing. And he said, no mention of difficulties. And then they rewrote it. And she said, I will not talk about the difficulties Britain is facing. And he said, still no good. And so she just had to show people princess anne's wedding photos some yeah and hadn't someone tried to abduct princess anne from yes a male or something that's right in 1974 someone tried to kidnap princess anne

and they said get out of the car or something she said not bloody likely yeah something along those lines whack them with a handbag exactly very impressive now abroad of course people have noticed that britain's going to hell in a handcart. And, you know, if you read sort of the New York Times, loves it. And Der Spiegel. The swinging London of the 60s has given way to a London as gloomy as the city described by Charles Dickens, with the once imperial streets of the capital now sparsely lighted, like the slummy streets of a former British imperial township. Oh, that's harsh. But Dominic, am I not right that somebody who had lived in the slummy streets of a former

British imperial township, namely Idi Amin, the leader of Uganda at this point, steps in and he says that Ugandans have seen the plight of Britain with great sorrow in raising a fund. That's right. The Save Britain Fund. The funny thing about this story, on the one hand, it's so bleak. It's so depressing. So cold and dark.

It's so funny. But it is also ludicrous. So Idi Amin, yes, he launches the Save Britain Fund. He says, I've decided to contribute 10,000 Ugandan shillings for my savings and I'm convinced that many Ugandans will donate generously to rescue their innocent friends in Britain.

The foreign office ignored him. They said, don't even reply to him. Don't encourage him. And then Idi Amin wrote again. And he said, listen, the people from the Kigazi district have donated a lorry load of vegetables and it's sitting on the tarmac at the airport. Please send a plane to come and get it. But again, they ignored him.

And he started sending telegrams to the Queen to say, you know, I make these kind offers and you're completely ignoring them. You're treating me very poorly. And of course, this was reported in Britain. And people didn't think it was funny. They thought it was humiliating. They thought it was terrible that Armin, who had been an officer in the Scottish Rifles or something, that he was laughing. They would say, you know, he's laughing at Britain. And he was. And it was, you know, there could be no more emblematic reminder of how low Britain's international prestige had fallen.

Meanwhile, the three-day week is kicking in, isn't it? Yes. Begins at midnight on New Year's Eve. It does. So we're now into 1974. Finally. So Tom, if you'd had a factory in your native Salisbury making Ted Heath memorabilia, you would only have had power in that factory either Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And if you'd had a shop, a Ted Heath souvenir shop, you'd have either had power mornings or afternoons. So you'd have had to choose which,

or you'd be told which, I don't know exactly how it worked. And then for the rest of the time, you'd have kind of candles and you'd be wrapped in a blanket or something because that's how people reacted. Now on the left, lots of people actually said the three-day week is a capitalist wheeze. Radicals kind of rushing around leaving lights on, aren't they? They are leaving lights on. So in Claycross, Derbyshire, the council turned up the street lighting to bring down capitalism. On TV, one of the most popular British comedies at the time was Till Death Us Do Part, the Alf Garnet comedy. Yeah, it's a guy playing a racist docker, is he? He's a guy in the East End. He's racist.

He's very conservative. So for our American listeners, this was the prototype for the show All in the Family, the Archie Bunker show that our American listeners will remember. And in that show, Alf's family, they go around turning on all the lights because they hate Ted Heath. In Doctor Who, Tom, Doctor Who had a story called The Monster of Peladon about a miners' strike on the planet Peladon. And the doctor actually goes to this planet and he says, pay the miners what you owe them. Don't grind the miners

into the dust. So among the, as it were, the chattering classes, There's a lot of sympathy for the miners, a lot of antipathy against Heath. And what I suppose he needed was he wanted people to feel that it was all the miners' fault, that they were suffering terrible privations, that the overmighty unions were turning people's lights off and people were shivering. But isn't the problem that the lights don't go off, that actually the measures work? Yes. And so therefore people feel that the government's overreacted. Exactly so. Exactly right, Tom. So for people listening to this, if you remember the 70s and you think, ah, the three-day week, those power cuts, you are misremembering. There were not

random, spontaneous, unexpected power cuts during the three-day week. There were other times in the 70s because of electricity worker strikes, but actually the three-day week works. And it's not even actually that cold. So it's an unseasonably warm winter. And isn't there also a further complication for Heath is that there's a slight kind of COVID thing that people actually quite enjoy not having to go to work. Yeah, there is a little bit. And they all kind of rediscover that people actually quite enjoy not having to go to work yeah there

is a little bit and they all kind of rediscover board games and things they do so people are playing cold it's board game or whatever they're doing and they're sort of reading by candlelight playing on their space hoppers and things they are exactly my favorite of all these stories is the daily mail of all newspapers tracked down a psychiatrist or psychologist or something very joy of sex who said to people what people should do in the three-day week is experiment more in their sex lives when when the kids are at school freezing in their classroom but you're at home because you haven't gone to work because there isn't any electricity at the factory or whatever so this is your chance very groovy very groovy behavior that article tom i

hate to say it but that was published nine months before i was born well so draw your own conclusions i think that's too much information there so as the weeks pass people become more and more irritated all this there's a brilliant example of this by the carry-on film actor kenneth williams who kept a diary, a wonderful diary, actually. I really recommend it to people. And he describes how on the 10th of January, he's on a train. The trains are now running again, but a lot of them have been cancelled. So the train is really crowded with people and everybody is complaining. And they're complaining not about the miners, but the government. And he writes in his diary, he says,

you feel all this in conversation that's gone too far. The three-day week is all rubbish and the miners should be paid. Oh, it's ghastly, he says. Ghastly. He thinks the miners should be hanged. He hates the miners. He's very right wing. Well, he also, he quotes somebody who complains about people kind of obeying the rules and say that they're like a load of sheep. Yes. Which is also quite COVID-y. Very COVID-y. I mean, people objecting to masks and lockdowns and things. Exactly. And blaming the government. Actually, it's the government who they blame.

So at Westminster, Ted Heath is there. He's got his thyroid complaint. He's very miserable. He's absolutely exhausted. He and his aides don't really know what to do. And then they get a lifeline. Because on the 9th of January, the trade union congress so it's the umbrella organization of all the unions they come to see him they've got a new general secretary he's called

len murray he's a very impressive man actually tom he's from shopshire isn't he so you're neck of the woods yeah and len murray had been born to an unmarried mother and he'd been sort of adopted by a nurse he fought in the british army the Second World War, I think it was. Then he worked at an engineering factory in Wolverhampton. From there, he worked his way up into New College, Oxford. He did his degree in two years, not three, and got a first in PPE, politics, philosophy, and economics, and then worked his way up to become the leader of Britain's trade union movement.

Very impressive. And he's a very decent, kind of mild-mannered man. He goes to see a barber and he says, listen, we'll help you out of this. Give the miners what they want. And I promise we will issue a statement saying this is a special case and no other union will use this as a kind of loophole. You know, we won't exploit this. We won't do all this.

And what does Ted Heath say? He says, no, no. He doesn't do all this. And what does Ted Heath say? He says, no, no. He doesn't believe in giving the miners what they want. And also, frankly, he doesn't believe that the trade union Congress can deliver, which actually they probably couldn't. But Len Murray himself said later, if we didn't deliver, he should have just taken the deal and then just hammered us for not delivering on our side of the bargain. And he could have used this as justification for his anti-union policies. He just should have taken the deal. But he thinks doing deals is what a grubby politician like Harold Wilson does. I'm not going to do a deal. I'm going to stick to my guns.

He's a man of destiny. So he's just sitting there in all these meetings. He's having endless meetings with these union leaders. And they say to him, is there nothing we can offer you that will satisfy you? And he says, basically, no, I just want you to accept what I'm offering. And do you know what he reminds me of, Tom? He's so Theresa May. He lacks the subtlety and the instincts and the killer ruthless, you know, the flexibility, you know, like a strategist, like a board games player or something. So he may have a degree from Oxford, Dominic, but he doesn't have a degree in people. Oh, Tom, that's so profound. Well done. Thank you for that. I enjoyed that. So all his aides say, call an election, just resolve the whole thing. Call an election, do it on the 7th of February. So three day week will be full swing. And he says, fine, I'll do i'll do it i'll do it and at the last minute he loses his nerve and he doesn't do

it he doesn't call this early election and a week later the miners say enough of the pussy footing you know let's go for broke massive all-out strike cut off the supplies to the power stations this is it kind of let's do it and the strike is going to begin at the beginning of february and he now thinks oh i should have called that election after all what a terrible mistake this has been and it's at this point tom that's yes my favorite bit in the whole story so this is um the head of the civil service sir william armstrong goes mad going mad yes and when you say he goes mad yes basically he has a breakdown yes so this is um this is a guy called sir william armstrong so it's a sign of how he governed as a technocrat that sir william armstrong who's the head of the civil service

is his right hand man, not an elected politician. So Sir William Armstrong is a classic kind of patrician Mandarin. He's a committee man. Sir Humphrey Appleby. Yeah, he's like Sir Humphrey from Yes Minister, although he's sort of more serious and less right. Machiavellian. Exactly, much less Machiavellian.

He's like Heath. He believes, you know, why can't we just get around the table and draw up a complicated policy that will sort this out with arrows? Yes. And at the beginning of January, he is completely overwhelmed. And he starts having these meetings where he will kind of lock people in the room and say, the communists have infiltrated the British government. They may be in the room as we speak. Which actually is a prefiguring of what will happen with Harold Wilson when he comes back into power. So let's just park that. That's a flag for later in the series. It totally is. It totally is. So that will come back in later episodes. So people are kind of thinking this isn't good. There's one account that he gets all the permanent

secretaries, so the other civil service bigwigs, and he locks them in a room and then he gives them a huge lecture about, and I quote, the Bible and sex, which is probably not ideal when you're dealing with a minor strike. And isn't there a story that the governor of the Bank of England comes to meet him and he takes all his clothes off and is speaking to the governor lying on the floor? Yeah, that's right. So there are two different ones that he's talking to a delegation from the Institute of Chartered Accountants and he addresses them while lying on the floor on his back. Oh, right. Yeah. Sorry, I was muddling it up. And the other is, is the governor of the Bank of England, he takes all his clothes off, chartered accountants and he addresses them while lying on the floor on his back oh right yeah sorry i was muddling it up and the other is this is the governor of bank of england he takes all his clothes

off his clothes not the governor's clothes that would be really peculiar right that really would be mad but either way at the end of this day that this has all come to a head basically everyone says to him you've got to take a break you know go home don't come back. So he's gone. And that gives you a sense of the unbelievably febrile, sort of hysterical mood at this point in Westminster and Whitehall. And he finally cracks and decides, I'm going to call an election. And ironically, he does it on the very day that he should have held the election. So everyone thought he should have the election on the 7th of February and he'd have probably won, but instead he calls it on the 7th of February for the 28th of February. And the one thing before we get into the election,

which we'll be doing next time, is this. Why did he do it, Tom? Because his premiership still had a year to run, more than a year to run. And even if he had won the election, so what? I mean, the miners weren't going to say the next morning, oh, fine, you've won the election. Yeah, we were wrong. We'll go back to work. I mean, that was never going to happen. It's like a sort of desperation measure. Well, it seems like he couldn't think of anything else to do. Exactly. That's exactly what it was. He felt like he'd run out of options. He'd call the election. But so what? Do you think part of anything else to do. Exactly. That's exactly what it was. He felt like he'd run out of options. He'd call the election.

So what? Do you think part of him wanted to lose? No, I don't. I don't think he ever thought he wanted to lose. You began that beautiful reading, Tom, which I'm sure everybody enjoyed. Yeah, thank you. Where he addressed the nation, and he doesn't realise it, but it's his final time as Prime Minister.

And he says to them, you know, for you to decide this, do the elected government run the country or does a particularly powerful group of workers, i.e. the miners, run the country? And he's going to get the answer on the 28th of February. And it's not the answer, Tom, that he's expecting. So we will come back tomorrow with that election, the first election of 1974, where Britain is being asked to choose who governs. And we will find out tomorrow. But Tom, of course, if people are members of our very own little union, of course, the National Union of Rest is History Club members, then they will be able to hear the whole of this series. Well, they'll be able to join us for beer and sandwiches, won't they? They will indeed.

That's exactly what they'll be doing. So join us on your space hoppers, please, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club. And if not, you will have to wait. We don't run a three-day week at the Rest is History, not this week. It's a four-episode week. Very exciting.

So we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.