Yesterday's men revisited

Andrew Gimson

THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT, 1974-79: POLITICAL AIMS AND ECONOMIC REALITY by Martin Holmes

Macmillan, £25

THATCHER: THE FIRST TERM by Patrick Cosgrove

Bodley Head, £9.95

Patrick Cosgrave's is the better of these books, but Martin Holmes starts with a better joke. In his opening paragraph we are directed to the first of his 'Notes and References', and turning to page 188 we read: 'For a comprehensive analysis of the Heath Government see M. Holmes, Poli- tical Pressure and Economic Policy: British Government, 1970-4 (London: Butter- worths, 1982).' By page four we have reached note eight. Turning again to page 188, which it has proved expedient to mark with a slip of paper, we find: 'For a full account of the dispute see M. Holmes, op. cit., ch.7.' On page five, the pace of events having quickened, we hurry forward to note 12. Opening page 188, in which it has turned out to be more convenient to keep a finger, we are advised: 'See M. Holmes, op. cit., ch.3, for a full account of this period.'

Footnotes may be thought by the frivo- lous to be a frivolous study, but they reveal the historian. As a way of testing whether a history book is worth reading without actually reading it, they are even more useful than the Acknowledgments. In his footnotes the historian is most unselfcon- sciously himself. Take this charming exam- ple from Mr Cosgrave:

Mrs Thatcher has an unfortunate habit which offends against the constitution. She regular- ly refers to the government in which she is First Lord of the Treasury as hers. The proper style to be used by ministers is Her Majesty's Government. She is not, however, alone in this deplorable habit . . .

Dr Holmes, Lecturer in Politics at Lady Margaret Hall, establishes himself by means of his footnotes in the majestic Oxonian tradition of self-confidence. If one may offer him a word of advice about the footnotes of his next book, which will presumably be called something like Poli- tical Reality and Economic Pressure: the Thatcher Government, 1979-83, it is to borrow a helpful phrase from an earlier Oxford historian, M. Beerbohm, to attach to any paragraph threatening to be note- less: 'To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.' But the advice is impertinent. Nobody who, to a passage about faulty windscreen wipers fitted to British Leyland cars, can append the foot- note, 'The author, who has owned at various times, a Morris 1100, Austin 1300 and Marina 1.3, can speak from experience of this safety defect', needs advice about writing interesting notes. This one pro- vokes a poignant vision of Dr Holmes in his Morris 1100 in a shower of rain in Oxford, unable to see where he is going.

Lest the above remarks should have given the impression that Dr Holmes's book is entertaining, it must be said that his text does not often attain the level of his Notes and References. It is marred by continual infelicities of expression and lapses of grammar, too dull to quote, and is punctuated not only by commas in the wrong places but by extracts from the writings of Harold Wilson and others, which the author has not considered too dull to quote in extenso, but are almost too dull to read.

In fairness to Dr Holmes, some of his obscurer turns of phrase have been ren- dered more obscure by misprints. It be- comes doubly unfair to criticise him when we consider his environment: he is from the world of professional PhD-thesis wri- ters, a world where no obligation to write literately is admitted. And he has chosen a difficult genre. If it is not well-written, the history of a very recent period can easily seem as stale as yesterday's news.

A virtue of Dr Holmes's work is to remind us that the last Labour government was carried on in an atmosphere of almost uninterrupted economic crisis: Denis Healey presented no fewer than 15 Budgets. On taking office in March 1974, as leader of a minority government, Harold Wilson had inherited from Edward Heath a dangerously inflated economy. Within two days he had conceded the miners a 29 per cent pay rise. To restrain wages appeared essential, but Labour was committed to doing it by voluntary agree- ment with the unions. Statutory controls were an evil associated with the previous, Conservative administration. But as Dr Holmes drily observes, 'the unions were reluctant to make voluntary pay restraint a reality'. In the winter of 1977-78, troops had to be used to break the firemen's strike. In the autumn of 1978, car workers at Ford obtained a 15 per cent increase after a nine-week strike, destroying Mr Cal- laghan's five per cent policy. Water work- ers, lorry drivers, train drivers, hospital workers, worst of all gravediggers, went on strike. The Government fell. Mrs Thatcher came to power. She inherited a dangerous- ly inflated economy, conceded a pay rise of 32 per cent to the armed forces and reaffirmed that she would honour the recommendations of the Clegg Commis- sion on pay comparability, which applied to most of the public sector workers who had been on strike and were to prove extremely expensive.

If the Seventies saw the failure of in- comes policies, they also saw the emerg- ence of another method of controlling inflation. In the autumn of 1976, when sterling was under such pressure that the Government had already decided to apply to the IMF for help, Jim Callaghan told the Labour Party Conference:

We used to think you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting spending. I tell you in all candour that this option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the system.

This recantation marks the beginning of the practice of monetarism in the post- Heath era. At the IMF's insistence, spend- ing cuts were made, cash limits and money supply targets were introduced. By the end of 1977, inflation was under ten per cent. But the Labour Government did not be- lieve in the intrinsic merit of limiting the money supply. In April 1978 a newly expansionist Budget was introduced.

Many in the Conservative Party did not believe in the merit of limiting the money supply either. Mrs Thatcher had been converted, but as Mr Cosgrave makes clear, many MPs who voted for her in February 1975 'did not do so with any clear consciousness of the radical platform she subsequently adopted'. Her grip on her own party was precarious. In 1979, after four years as leader, her first Cabinet still contained a majority opposed to her econ- omic policy. According to Mr Cosgrave, she met this difficulty by giving the Cabinet no opportunity to consider overall econ- omic policy until June 1981. When the Chancellor presented his harshest Budget to the Cabinet, in March 1981, dissenters had a disagreeable choice: support it or resign. Like Mr Callaghan's ministerial • critics, they held to office, denying the Wets their Thorneycroft, Birch and Powell.

Mr Cosgrave asserts that we find 'the strongest evidence that Margaret Thatch- er's first term had changed the whole nature of the way the British people looked at politics' in Sir Geoffrey Howe's ability, with electoral impunity, to introduce four Budgets making 'no significant concession' to the unemployment figures. The elector- ate regretted unemployment, but did not regard it as the Government's fault; it was happy for inflation to be made the first objective. Mr Cosgrave's belief that this change in priorities is permanent is ques- tionable. Even Mrs Thatcher's lectures about inflation destroying jobs do not quite make up for the unfortunate fact that British inflation of the Seventies was less catastrophic than German inflation of the early Twenties, and has taught a less enduring lesson. The greatest danger to Mrs Thatcher, that people will get bored of her, is unintentionally confirmed by Mr Cos- grave. He finds nothing surprising to tell us about her. The remarks which he quotes her as having made to him when he was working for her are predictable. She is magnificently resolute and hard-working and 'has had no new general thoughts since she was a girl'. She is the opposite to those literary figures whose biographies demon- strate that they have fascinatingly compli- cated characters and have never done anything. Mr Cosgrave shows that while Mrs Thatcher's life is crowded with inci- dent, she herself is thin and dull. Churchill, if she had been one of his Great Contem- poraries, would have made the very sim- plicity of her character interesting, but it is not an easy task.