Political commentary
The passion of Ted
Charles Moore
On Tuesday night, Mr Edward Heath was looking like an elder statesman. Now that he is thinner, his face is more lin- ed and distinguished. He was sounding like an elder statesman, too. A small frog in his throat, perhaps the remains of some mid- winter infection, gave his voice the slightly cracked quality of age. He was reminiscent and generalising, as elder statesmen are sup- posed to be. He said that he had come into Parliament in — a slight pause, as if it was so long ago that he could not for the mo- ment remember — 1950. At that election he had campaigned on Mr Churchill's slogan 'Set The People Free', yet now Mr Jenkin had the temerity to introduce his rate- capping bill, in defiance of Conservative principle.
It suited Labour, of course, to persuade itself that Mr Heath had always been the one village Hampden in the Conservative party, struggling for our old liberties against the pretensions of the centralists. But on the benches behind Mr Heath, MPs strained to remember such a time. Mr Nicholas Budgen rather unkindly inter- rupted him to quote from some of Mr Heath's own thoughts on local autonomy when last he held the reins of power. The mask of the elder statesman slipped and the old, angry, disappointed Ted rebuked his honourable friend for 'lowering himself' by daring to quote from such a source.
It is now ten years since Mr Heath's 'wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command' were sculpted into our national con- sciousness. Seeing him on Tuesday, one could not help comparing then with now. Ten years ago, a miners' overtime ban, let alone a miners' strike, was considered 'an attack upon the constitution' (words of Lord, then Mr Whitelaw, Employment Secretary at the time). Today the chairman of the National Coal Board says that an overtime ban saves the industry money. Neither remark suggests a very satisfactory state of affairs, but they do suggest a dif- ferent one.
The explanation that most people like to give for the change concerns the miners themselves. There are fewer of them, and they are richer. They have mortgages and cars and foreign holidays. They are more efficient and productive, and their pay is more closely related to productivity agreements which make them dislike over- time bans. They chose Arthur Scargill, but only because they believed (mistakenly) that he was competent. They are natural moderates, with a steak on each plate and 'a stake in the country'.
This must partly be true, but two things about it make it a rather undernourishing explanation. The first is that people who are poor have just as much, perhaps more, of a stake in the country as people who are rich. The miners in 1974 were not un- patriotic or revolutionary. They merely wanted more money, and with more reason than they do today, because inflation was eating it up. The second is that the really surprising thing about the last ten years is how little the coal industry has changed, not how much. It has the same structure, a similar spread of pits, and problems as severe for itself, though not for the country at large, as they have ever been. In evidence that he gave to the House of Lords Select Committee, whose report European Com- munity Coal Policy has recently appearpd, Professor Colin Robinson details the pre- sent plight. Demand for coal in 1982 stood at 120 million tonnes (it was 292 million in 1913), with no prospect that it will sustain itself at the level of 113-142 million tonnes in the year 2000 which the Department of Energy has predicted to the Sizewell in- quiry. Despite large government incentives, sales of coal to industry are one third down on what they were in 1970. The switch to coal predicted after each oil price rise has not taken place. Instead, coal has taken ad- vantage of the increase to put its own price up. The rate of closure of uneconomic pits is half that assumed in the Plan for Coal in 1974.
Nor has the Government stopped paying out. The Coal Industry Act of 1980 ended the deficit grants on which the industry had leaned. But in February (it always seems to be February) of the following year, the Government suddenly decided that it did not dare confront the miners. It pretended that there was no 'hit-list' of loss-making pits, agreed to limit coal imports and in- creased subsidy. In 1982-3, the Coal Board lost £111 million after government grants. Those grants amounted to £520 million. As if that wasn't enough, the Central Electrici- ty Generating Board is party to an agree- ment to buy British coal for power stations, which guarantees 70 per cent of the Coal Board's domestic market.
The Government has not shown that it wants, or rather, dares to alter its policies. Mr Walker, the Energy Secretary, finds the idea of privatisation attractive in principle, but is not doing anything about it. Instead of a change of policy, the Government settl- ed for a change of bosses. Send for MacGregor, just as one might send for Red Adair to stick his finger in a burst oil pipe, and things will sort themselves out. No doubt Mr MacGregor is much more compe- tent and determined than Lord Ezra ever was, but, being a practical businessman, he can only work with what he is given. He cannot change government policy towards manufacturing industry and does not aspire to. So of course he looks to the Govern- ment for support, just like his predecessors. He wants tripartite talks of unions, him and government on the future of the industry. He is not working for privatisation.
It is lovely to hear Mr MacGregor adop- ting the sentimentality of the 'coal com- munity' in order to talk up his latest in- dustry. He told the Select Committee, 'Those of us who are dedicated to the coal industry have a little saying which we have crocheted into a sampler which we hang in our bedrooms, and it says, "Petro- chemicals came from coal at the beginning of this century and will return there at the end of this century" '. He knows that he can count on continuing government subventions because most of those who are dedicated to the Conservative party have samplers in their bedrooms which say 'Give in to the miners'. That is thought to be the lesson of 1974. The events of those days convinced Tories that miners are knit together by some mystical bond which has only to be tested to become stronger.
It certainly was bad luck for Mr Heath to have to defend his incomes policy against a union as well-organised and close-knit as the miners. But it was not the revolutionary cunning of Lord Gormley (whom, at the time, we were supposed to regard as little better than a Scargill) which defeated the Government. It was defeated because its policies involved it in decisions which it was not competent to make, made according to comparisons which were unreal. And because the policy — 'counter-inflation' was the name — could not operate smoothly, the Government had to go in for moral exhortation. The Government represented order and decency and the miners stood for anarchy and greed. As a result, the miners and their supporters answered back in kind, and arguments rag- ed about whether mining was a horrible job and whether people who were prepared to do it 'deserved' more money. What had ac- tually happened was that Mr Heath, frightened for the first time by the miners in 1972, had produced inflation, and then claimed the right to decide who should suf- fer for his policy.
So when Mr Heath got up on Tuesday to tell Mr Jenkin, who had once manfully sup- ported him and told people to brush their teeth in the dark, not to interfere with people's lives, it was quite funny. Looking at this greatest of interferers, the Govern- ment may come to recognise that by depar- ting from his economic policies, it has also set itself free from the miners. Nowadays workers who want more pay are usually get- ting the price that they can exact in the market, and the Government stands aside. This is still not true of the miners, but if Mrs Thatcher dared to make it so, she would not undergo the passion of Ted. She would simply make her Exchequer more than half a billion pounds better off.
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