The British Left and the Defence Economy: Rockets, Guns and Kidney Machines, 1970–83 1526144018, 9781526144010

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The British left and the defence economy

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The British left and the defence economy Rockets, guns and kidney machines, 1970–83 Keith Mc Loughlin

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Keith Mc Loughlin 2022

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The right of Keith Mc Loughlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 4401 0  hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Prime Minister James Callaghan at Ruskin College, 18 October 1976. Courtesy of Ruskin College, University of Oxford. Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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War is a matter not so much of arms as of money, which makes arms of use. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction 1 1 The left and the defence economy in the early Cold War 11 2 Guns before butter: Labour’s defence review 41 3 Taking on the defence economy 69 4 Workers and the defence economy: the case of Lucas Aerospace 98 5 Post-material protest? Peace activism and the defence economy 126 6 The defence economy, the left and the ‘second Cold War’ 154 Epilogue 188 Bibliography 198 Index 217

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Acknowledgements

This book was written during a global pandemic. In Britain, as elsewhere, COVID-19 has refocused attention on how technology can meet the needs of the most vulnerable in society. As we applauded the National Health Service, manufacturers converted their production lines to meet the demand for ventilators and Personal Protective Equipment. Among the businesses who most quickly responded to the crisis were defence companies who converted engines used in combat aircraft to medical equipment so that critically ill people could breathe. Although the wider economic, political and social consequences of the pandemic are yet to be determined, it is clear the defence industry can convert its production when it chooses to do so. By looking at events forty years ago, this book has arrived at the same conclusion. The obstacle to military-industrial conversion is political, not technological. I commenced this research at University College Dublin a decade ago. I am thankful to the supportive community there, including Richard Aldous, Aaron Donaghy, Robert Gerwarth, Ezequiel Mercau, Christopher Prior, Sandra Scanlon, Jennifer Wellington and William Mulligan, whose insistence that I focus on political economy has shaped my research ever since. Since coming to the UK in 2015 I have been inspired by more historians and students than I can include here. I am grateful to Tom Kelsey’s thoughts on social democracy and David Edgerton’s advice on the history of technology. I wish to thank the supportive heads of department alongside whom I have had the privilege of working: Richard Toye at Exeter and Simon Potter at Bristol. I also wish to thank Andrew Thorpe, whose comments and support gave me the confidence to write the book. Any errors are mine, alone. With regards to sources, I am thankful to Hilary Wainwright and her material on the Lucas Aerospace workers. Adhering to her request, I have not identified individuals or places from her deposition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. In such instances in which individuals are identified, it is either from other archives or secondary material. I am grateful to the editorial board of Contemporary British History for allowing me to

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Acknowledgements ix use material from my 2017 article on the Lucas plan. Special thanks are due to the staff at the Barrow-in-Furness Constituency Labour Party, the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Modern Records Centre, the National Archives and the Working Class Movement Library. I am deeply appreciative to the commissioning editors at Manchester University Press, particularly Lucy Burns, Rob Byron and Tony Mason, for their guidance and patience and to the external readers for their very useful feedback on earlier drafts. My cousin Aileen Mc Loughlin put me up and took me out on each of my enjoyable research trips to Manchester. My family have always been on hand to lend me encouragement, while my wider family of in-laws have provided me with both support and distraction when either was needed. I am particularly thankful to Bernadette, Mal, Paul and Marie, who have listened to my prattling about this book for several years. No words can adequately express that gratitude I feel towards my parents, Ann and John. It goes without saying that, without them, this book would not have been possible. I hope it makes them proud. I met my wife Jennifer at a point where both the author and the research were on shaky ground. Given that my focus is on the British left, I am reminded of E.P. Thompson when he said of his wife Dorothy in The Making of the English Working Class that ‘her collaboration is to be found, not in this or that particular, but in the way the whole problem is seen’.1 I am blessed to have her, as I am our daughter Lillian who arrived just as I completed the final draft. Heavitree, Midsummer’s Day 2021

Note 1 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 13.

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Introduction

He shall judge between the nations, And shall arbitrate for many peoples; They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, And their spears into pruning-hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, Neither shall they learn war any more. Isaiah 2:41 You choose your leaders to place your trust, As their lies wash you down and their promises rust. You’ll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns. And the public wants what the public gets, But I don’t get what this society wants, I’m going underground. The Jam, ‘Going Underground’ 2

This book argues that, in Britain, the Cold War was an economic and social necessity. In contrast to the prevailing emphasis that historians have placed on cultural, diplomatic and military experiences, this book demonstrates that Britain’s Cold War was primarily an economic experience. During the era covered here, the 1960s through to the 1980s, Britain’s defence economy sustained thousands of workers and their communities in what was a period of seismic economic and industrial change. Military industry was recognised by both Conservative and Labour governments as a generator of economic growth and job creation. The defence economy absorbed a large share of state-funded research and development, over 5 per cent of Gross National Product, and employed at least three hundred thousand workers directly, with many more in supply chains across the country. Through the lucrative selling of weapons abroad, arms dealers contributed millions of pounds to the balance of payments at a time when other commercial industries relied heavily on state support. The political imperative of facing down the threat of the Soviet Union provided arms manufacturers with what was essentially a blank cheque as governments absorbed cost overruns in the hundreds of

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millions of pounds. The defence economy largely escaped the market pressures that had devastated other industries, such as merchant shipbuilding and steelmaking. There was an undeniable electoral advantage in sustaining the defence economy, not least for the Labour party, which depended on votes from industrialised areas. And it was not just politicians who were responsible; the civil service and most of the trade union movement were also highly protective of the arms industry. Whilst many industrial workers faced the dole queue, defence workers, such as those tasked on the Polaris fleet of nuclear submarines in the mid-1960s, affectionately referred to military contracts as ‘gravy boats’.3 Historians have tended to focus on areas other than the economy when exploring Britain’s Cold War. This has varied from cultural production, identity politics, memory and more prolifically ‘nuclear culture’, which is everything from opposition to ‘the bomb’ to nuclear power.4 However, the Cold War was as much to do with economy as it was ideology. The decline of manufacturing, recession and the consequent strain on the welfare state brought about the transition from an interventionist social-democratic state to a free-market neoliberal state during this era, which is referred to by some historians as the ‘fulcrum of the twentieth century’.5 Yet the defence economy is rarely acknowledged in the sprawling literature on this transformative period.6 The political establishment understood that military spending ameliorated the decline of British industry. Procurement decisions were not exclusively motivated by national security. Britain had its own distinctive military-industrial complex, one that was nurtured by the socialdemocratic state and one that continued despite the Thatcherite free-market reforms in the 1980s. Encouraged by industry, guided by the civil service, monitored by the military and to the relief of the trade unions, postwar British governments used expensive military projects to stave off unemployment. With its blend of capitalist production within a wider social-democratic welfare state, combined with the added dimensions of foreign policy and technological development, the defence economy has much to reveal about the condition of British postwar statecraft. Whilst each of the sectors mentioned above saw the economic necessity of expensive military projects, not everyone was convinced that employment should rely on the war industry. The peace movement has long occupied a place in studies of the period, but historians have also overlooked the fact that disarmament activists did not just oppose nuclear weapons; they diagnosed, opposed and offered an alternative to Britain’s military-industrial complex. Comprised of activists, politicians and workers, this movement has almost entirely escaped attention.7 This assembly was situated on the left ideologically and argued that the defence economy contaminated British social democracy by lining the pockets of international multinationals who

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Introduction 3 fuelled the Cold War arms race. Few could dispute that Britain’s industry was in turmoil in the 1970s, but these activists argued that the defence economy was the root of the problem, not the solution to it. This opposition to the military was part of a wider socialist challenge to the capitalist economy and a foreign policy expressed through NATO and nuclear weapons. The left saw defence and the failure of postwar economic management as part of the same problem, one that demanded a feasible and desirable solution by converting military industry into ‘socially useful’ production – swords into ploughshares, guns into butter, rockets and guns into kidney machines. By the early 1970s the left used its growing stature in the Labour party to change government policy whilst workers in defence companies developed volumes of blueprints and prototypes. In so doing, a new form of social democracy was proposed, one that was shaped by workers and was faithful to the socialist welfare state rather than the capitalist warfare state. Although this movement failed, this should not be mistaken as an indicator of irrelevance. Instead, its quarrel with the industrial and political elite over the course of the period covered in this book revealed the defence economy’s political power. For all the attention that Britain’s Cold War, its economy and its politics have received, the real extent of its military-industrial complex and the peace movement that opposed it have yet to be determined. Defence and economy were inextricably linked. As the so-called ‘father of scientific history’ Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) concluded, ‘war is a matter not so much of arms as of money, which makes arms of use’.8 Beginning with the 1951 rearmament crisis, Chapter 1 demonstrates how the development of Britain’s Cold War defence economy was a serious cause for concern on the left. Despite Labour’s stated aim to significantly reduce defence spending when in government in the 1960s, by the end of that decade Britain was committed to expensive and sophisticated weapon systems while the ambition for a socialist economy had not been realised. Amid the ‘global shock’ of the early 1970s, Britain’s industries reached a crisis point. With the future of capitalism seemingly in doubt, the left strengthened its position in the party and took a leading role in shaping policy, including a pledge to significantly reduce defence spending. Chapter 2 reveals the bitter infighting within the Labour movement in the mid-1970s as the government decided to sustain the defence economy while it imposed cuts on the welfare state. Using government and party records, it shows how defence was perceived as an economic necessity, where the justification for military spending was jobs at home, not just the communist threat overseas. Chapter 3 explores how the left, dismayed by this breach of the party’s manifesto, developed its own comprehensive alternative to the defence economy based on socially useful production with plans to convert armaments to medical equipment. However, the vested interest of the political-industrial complex

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scuppered this attempt to reverse the trajectory of the Cold War defence economy. At the same time a workers’ campaign to convert their production lines from guns to kidney machines was similarly halted, not only by company management but by the Labour government and the trade unions. Chapter 4 explores the famous case of the Lucas Aerospace workers, whose alternative plan for production proposed an alternative to dehumanising Fordism that would contribute to disarmament. Chapter 5 shows how, inspired by the political and industrial left, peace activists in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the associated Campaign against Arms Trade (CAAT) moved away from the ‘post-materialist’ campaigning of the 1960s, to a platform more attuned to the economic and social crises of the 1970s by focusing on employment more than nuclear weapons. Yet, just as a formidable critique of the defence economy was established, the return of the nuclear threat in the late 1970s diverted attention away from the economy once more. Chapter 6 argues that the early 1980s was a missed opportunity as the left failed to advance a persuasive case for a peaceful economy, despite record unemployment and the revival of the Cold War.

Applications At an obvious level this is a book about the British left and its opposition to the Cold War defence economy. But there are other applications. Looking beyond the factional conflict that has characterised the Labour party throughout its history, this battle over the defence economy was part of a war over the direction of social democracy, which was itself facing immense challenges, both external and domestic, in the period covered here. Social democracy is a highly interpretative and elasticated term. It is characterised by macroeconomic management by the state alongside a welfare state funded by taxpayers within the conventions of a democratic system. But its reliance on capitalist private industry, the extent of its redistribution to the poorest in society and the conflict between individualism and collectivism provided the most contentious areas of debate within the Labour movement and its wider associated environment of socialist intellectuals. Defence and foreign policy generated vastly differing positions within the Labour movement, not least during the Cold War as one side favoured an alliance with the Western powers whilst the other advocated a stance of non-alignment similar to that of the Nordic social democracies that involved a more constructive stance towards communist republics, with some even going as far to promote ‘pro-Sovietism’.9 The decades of feuds within the Labour party over its international position has been a source of fascination for historians and there is no shortage of literature on the subject.10 However, the connection

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Introduction 5 between political economy and foreign policy is less well understood. Important interventions on the connection between the Cold War and affluence, the arms trade and the economic cost of rearmament are the exception, rather than the convention when it comes to scholarship.11 As a starting point, we should consider how the Cold War stirred divisions within British social democracy. As Lawrence Black argued, many on the right wing of the Labour party, who positioned themselves as social democrats, were also considered the ‘bitterest enemies of communism’.12 These ‘revisionists’ were among the most committed supporters of NATO and the capitalist defence industry. Often occupying ministerial positions relating to defence and external affairs, they understood the economic value of the arms industry. As Denis Healey revealed in his memoir, the ‘cancellation of an aircraft or the closure of a dockyard’ could throw ‘thousands of people out of work – perhaps in a marginal constituency of vital importance’, adding that ministers ‘often came under political or industrial pressures which had nothing to do with defence at all’.13 As we will see, the cultivation of the defence industry was paramount to these social democrats in the 1970s as commercial manufacturing experienced a traumatic decline. This outlook was the norm on the centre left who made up the majority of the Labour parliamentary party whose form of ‘military Keynesianism’ was imposed to retain jobs, electoral favour and a close relationship with allies in NATO.14 Such an outlook could be likened to what Michael Brenes depicted as ‘Cold War liberals’ in the United States, such as the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who combined anti-communism with a ‘New Deal’ economic policy where the sprawling state-supported defence industry would help sustain employment levels.15 The Labour right wing was strongly ‘Atlanticist’ in its outlook and saw in the Cold War liberals across the water a political kindred. Defence was central to this and epitomised the confluence of state planning and private industry that characterised this form of socialdemocratic political economy. But there was another vision of social democracy that was very different to that outlined above. The left of the party, whose reach among socialist intellectuals and some trade unions was considerable, argued that the defence economy denied resources to industry and the welfare state while perpetuating an arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences for the world. Beginning with Bevan and his followers in the early Cold War, these socialists criticised the government from the back benches and expressed their alternative vision in pamphlets and in their newspaper, Tribune. This school of ‘democratic socialism’ differed from the right of the party in its insistence on the public ownership of industry, a debate that almost caused Labour to rupture in the early 1960s and that finally split the party when figures on the right formed the Social Democratic Party in 1981. The left saw in the defence

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industry a clear example of misguided capitalist enterprise that exploited the skills of its employees for immoral ends. By the 1970s the left situated defence at the centre of its ambition for workers’ control of industry and found in the case of Lucas Aerospace an outstanding example of a shop-floor initiative that exposed the military-industrial complex. Defence was an important and overlooked component of the left’s wider strategy for a ‘socially useful’ economy, and its ambition for a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’.16 The transition from social democracy to neoliberalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s is complex, as recent interventions have convincingly argued.17 This book makes a timely contribution to these debates by arguing that the defence economy was a function of a form of social democracy that fused the efficiency of capitalist production with the vigilance of a supportive state ready to intervene when it thought it was necessary. The end for which this was pursued was the social-democratic objective of full employment, corporatism between industry, the state and the trade unions, and social advancement through advanced education and training, alongside the diplomatic benefits of a strong military to ward off the communist threat in Europe. Given its strain on the public purse, it is surprising that it has eluded the attention of many historians. Up until the late 1960s, for example, the state was spending more on defence than it was on education. It exerted a political influence of significant proportions, from Downing Street to those industrial communities reliant on military contracts that tended to vote Labour. The shift to a highly technological defence posture, which was implemented to try to keep costs down, resulted in overspending of hundreds of millions at a time when the economy was quite clearly in crisis. The eye-watering amounts spent on weapons systems in the era covered in this book, which became truly apparent only once they became operational in the early 1980s, were reason enough for contemporaries to seriously question the purpose of Britain’s defence posture. As the Guardian newspaper commented at the time, there was a ‘perfectly acceptable intellectual case for changing the whole structure of Britain’s defence effort’ when ‘an impoverished, middle-sized power dabbles in almost every form of military activity, from nuclear deterrence to fishery protection’.18 But the economic, electoral, diplomatic, military and social benefits were too compelling to undermine. As a 1978 Labour government policy paper plainly stated, the defence industry was of ‘significant economic and social importance’.19 Recalling his band The Jam’s first number-one hit single in 1980, Paul Weller corrected the assumption that the lyrics to ‘Going Underground’ were

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Introduction 7 inspired by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a year before the single was released. Instead, Weller stated that it ‘was more about what was going on in our own country’ as ‘a response to Thatcherism, which was starting to bite’. Reflecting on the lyrics themselves, Weller homed in on one line in particular: ‘“Kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns” – 27 years later, nothing’s changed. I still hear it being played on the radio at least once a year and I think, “Wow, this sounds really powerful”’.20 Although defence occupies just over 2 per cent of GNP in the twenty-first century, it continues to hold a significant influence over industrial strategy with evidence to suggest that this will tighten further. For whilst the neoliberal consensus has endured through crises including the War on Terror and the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic and global security threats have revived interest in the defence economy. The Conservative government’s 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy pledged a level of public spending on defence not seen since the end of the Cold War. It projected a significant expansion of military industry with the bonus of technological ‘spin-off’ to other industries.21 There exists a broad political consensus on the defence economy. Even under the leadership of the CND-supporting Jeremy Corbyn, in 2017 Labour pledged that it would publish a Defence Industrial Strategy white paper to stimulate aerospace, shipbuilding and steelmaking. Despite an economy that is almost entirely privatised, the state continues to foot the bill for grand military projects to the tune of billions of pounds, such as the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales aircraft carriers. By contrast, those calling for industrial conversion are marginalised. The irony that defence industries were among the most enthusiastic in converting weapons of war to ventilators when the pandemic first struck would not have been lost on those who recalled the feuds four decades ago; those same feuds on which this book is focused. Although the effects of the current health crisis are yet to be determined, significant public spending on infrastructural projects remains likely for the immediate future. Given his commitment to investing in industry, including the domestic defence economy, Boris Johnson has even been described as a ‘social democrat’.22 In its applications both to history and to our own times, the defence economy is deserving of a more central position in our understanding of contemporary economics, foreign affairs, industrial development and social policy. This book explores the debate over the soul of British socialism, expressed through the Labour movement, during a transformative era in the long 1970s. But it is also applicable to the political economy of this century, one where the distinction between neoliberalism and social democracy is less clear and the imperative of electoral gain can escape the constraints

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of fiscal prudence. At a time of renewed economic nationalism, the cultivation of the defence industry is part of a longer-term trajectory that dates to the beginning of the Cold War. As this book demonstrates, defence is much more than a matter of national security.

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Notes 1 The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books: New Anglicized Edition, ed, Bruce Metzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 641. 2 Paul Weller, The Jam, ‘Going Underground’, Polydor Records (1980). Fair dealing under Section 30(2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 3 Peter Hennessy and James Jinks, The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 251. 4 Tony Shaw, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965)’, English Historical Review, 121:494 (2006), pp. 1351–1384; Christopher Moores, ‘Opposition to the Greenham Women’s Peace Camps in 1980s Britain: RAGE Against the “Obscene”’, History Workshop Journal, 78:1 (2014), pp. 204–227; Matthew Grant, ‘Making Sense of Nuclear War: Narratives of Voluntary Civil Defence and the Memory of Britain’s Cold War’, Social History, 44:2 (2019), pp. 229–254; Jonathan Hogg, British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long 20th Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 5 Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, ‘Introduction’ in Reassessing 1970s Britain, ed. Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 15. 6 Keith Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, in Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Decade, ed. Richard Coopey and Nicholas Woodward (London: University College London Press, 1996), pp. 212–235; David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 7 Brief allusions are made in Dan Keohane, Labour Party Defence Policy since 1945 (London: Leicester University Press, 1993); and Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, Volume 2: Labour’s Foreign Policy since 1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 8 George Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7. 9 Darren Lilleker, Against the Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party 1945–89 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). 10 Ann Lane, ‘Foreign and Defence Policy’, in New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974–79, ed. Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 154–170; John Callaghan, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History (London: Routledge, 2007); Mark Phythian, The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945–2006 (London: Routledge,

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Introduction 9 2007); Len Scott, ‘Labour and the Bomb: The First 80 Years’, International Affairs, 82:4 (2006), pp. 685–700; Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis (eds), The British Labour Party and the Wider World: Domestic Politics, Internationalism and Foreign Policy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 11 Richard Toye and Nicholas Lawton, ‘“The Challenge of Co-Existence”: The Labour Party, Affluence, and the Cold War, 1951–64’, in The British Labour Party and the Wider World, ed. Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), pp. 145–166; Steven Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture during the “Golden Age”, c. 1950–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 40.2 (2001), pp. 241–267; Mark Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales since 1964: ‘To Secure our Rightful Share’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Till Geiger, Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War: The Political Economy and the Economic Impact of the British Defence Effort, 1945–1955 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy; David Edgerton, ‘War and the Development of the British Welfare State’, in Warfare and Welfare: Military Conflict and Welfare State Development in Western Countries ed. Herbert Obinger, Klaus Petersen and Peter Starke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 12 Lawrence Black, ‘“The Bitterest Enemies of Communism”: Labour Revisionists, Atlanticism and the Cold War’, Contemporary British History, 15:3 (2001), pp. 26–62. 13 Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 256. 14 Richard Toye, ‘The Labour Party and the Economics of Rearmament, 1935–39’, Twentieth Century British History, 12:3 (2001), pp. 303–326. 15 Michael Brenes, For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy – Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). 16 ‘February 1974 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labourparty.org.uk/manifestos/1974/ Feb/1974-feb-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 5 February 2015]. 17 Aled Davies, The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Britain, 1959–1979 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); David Edgerton, ‘What Came between New Liberalism and Neo-Liberalism? Rethinking Keynesianism, the Welfare State and Social Democracy’, in The Neoliberal Age? Politics, Economy, Society, and Culture in Britain since c.1970, ed. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Ben Jackson and Aled Davies (London: University College Press, 2021), pp. 30–51; Guy Ortolano, Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 18 David Fairhall, ‘Mulley denounces Labour call for defence cuts’, Guardian, 12 July 1977, p. 24. 19 TNA (The National Archives), CAB 129/199/11, ‘Statement on the Defence Estimates 1978’. 20 Tom Pinnock, ‘Paul Weller’s 30 best songs’, Uncut, 29 May 2015, www.uncut.co.uk/ features/paul-wellers-30-best-songs-68698/11/ [accessed 10 March 2020].

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21 Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, www.gov.uk/government/publications/globalbritain-in-a-competitive-age-the-integrated-review-of-security-defence-developmentand-foreign-policy [accessed 5 April 2021]. 22 Patrick O’Flynn, ‘Do Tories know the truth about Boris Johnson?’, Spectator, 24 January 2021, www.spectator.co.uk/article/Do-Tories-know-the-truth-aboutBoris-Johnson [accessed 5 April 2021].

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The left and the defence economy in the early Cold War

The dispute over Britain’s defence economy on which this book is based had its roots in the early years of the twentieth century. The left had a complex history with ‘militarism’ and the war economy. The pioneering socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb made the case on the eve of the First World War for the compulsory devotion of ‘twenty hours a week to a course of physical development, technical education, and military training’ for young men, believing that the ‘economic and social advantages would in themselves be fully worth its cost’.1 On the other hand, other prominent Labourites such as Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald objected to British participation in the First World War on conscientious grounds. During the depression of the 1930s senior Labour figures and left-leaning economists supported a form of ‘military Keynesianism’ where the state invested in the defence economy to stimulate growth and reduce unemployment.2 Although the rearmament programme failed to live up to expectations, many on the right wing of the Labour movement, including politicians and trade unionists, believed that defence had an important role to play in economic, industrial and social policy. Having demonstrated its aptitude in helping to manage the war economy, Labour won a landslide victory in the 1945 general election on the platform that, having won the war, Britain was ‘preparing to win the peace’.3 That Labour government, led by Clement Attlee, nationalised large parts of industry and expanded the welfare state in a programme of democratic socialism that was unprecedented in its scale and left a legacy that subsequent Labour administrations would ‘struggle to emulate’.4 But the Attlee government that founded the National Health Service (NHS) was the same one that commenced a rearmament programme when relations between the capitalist West and communist East deteriorated in the late 1940s. As well as creating a ‘New Jerusalem’ this government was also building a ‘new Sparta’ as the Cold War began.5 Alarmed by the diversion of material and technological resources to military ends, politicians and scientists on the left warned that this new war economy could undermine the development of civil industry.

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When a £4.7 billion rearmament package was announced by Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, in 1951, three ministers resigned in protest. As John Callaghan observed, the left felt that ‘costly overseas military commitments’ meant ‘that the future of the welfare state was jeopardised, let alone any further advances towards a socialist or social democratic society in Britain’.6 After a decade of bitter infighting, the election of Harold Wilson as Labour’s leader in 1963 granted the party a renewed sense of unity. But although Wilson’s 1964–70 governments reduced defence spending not inconsiderably, his time in office was considered a failure. The promise of his ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ was not realised as Labour’s ambitious plans for economic expansion were undone by the objective of holding up the value of the pound. Although the government began the withdrawal from far-flung military outposts east of the Suez Canal, the defence economy was sustained. The continuation of the Cold War commitment, combined with the apparent failure to generate substantial industrial growth, led to a revival of radical socialist thinking within the Labour movement in the early 1970s. As Stephen Meredith observed, ‘the failure of social democracy to cope with economic difficulties’ witnessed ‘the formal abandonment of the traditional tools (and some of the goals) of social democratic political economy’.7 With Labour’s right wing in retreat, the left asserted itself in the party’s policy committees which were growing in power and influence. As global capitalism descended into crisis while a more peaceful détente characterised Cold War relations, the left felt that the state needed to overhaul industry by converting the defence economy to socially useful production. Within the 1970s ‘marketplace of ideas’ to reverse Britain’s economic decline, the left set its sights on the undoing of the military-industrial complex to achieve a socialist anti-militaristic economy.

Guns before dentures Why the left came to see defence expenditure as the culprit for Britain’s postwar economic decline can be explained by its experiences during the 1945–51 Labour government. This was the government responsible for an impressive reconstruction programme, including an ambitious public-housing scheme, the nationalisation of heavy industries and the establishment of the NHS in 1948. But this was also the era of early superpower tensions, a ‘cold war’ in which the government committed Britain to take the side of liberal democratic capitalism in the West against state-socialist communism beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’. The Attlee government’s enthusiasm for the North Atlantic Treaty alongside the secret construction of an atomic bomb

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embodied the shift from Labour’s fraternal relations with international socialism to a foreign policy that, as Mark Phythian observed, ‘accepted the logic of Cold War balance of power alliances and high levels of defence spending’.8 This was the beginning of a conflict within the Labour party that would last for the next forty years. As Phythian concluded, Labour ‘was always a broad church, but these issues exposed a fault line that was to wrack the Party from the 1950s to the 1980s’, with the issues not only affecting foreign policy but also dictating ‘the limits of the possible in domestic policy’.9 The Cold War was as much a matter of economy as it was ideological. The left deeply resented the Attlee government’s ‘Atlanticism’, its close relations with the United States that involved both financial reliance and military cooperation. Suspicious of what they felt were the hegemonic ambitions of American capitalism, socialists desired an independent path beyond the influence of either Cold War superpower. Only such a route could ensure a democratic socialist economy at home and a foreign policy based on human rights and ending all forms of imperialism. However, the right wing of the party, which made up the majority of both the government and the parliamentary party, felt that Britain’s best interest was served in a close alliance with the United States, a stance that was equally shared with the Conservatives. Britain was a beneficiary of the Marshall Plan, and sterling was valued as a reserve currency to the dollar as part of the Bretton Woods agreement.10 Central to the ambition of retaining international influence was a military capability which could feasibly play a role in deterring Soviet hegemony in central Europe. Despite the demobilisation and restructuring of the war economy, the Attlee government cultivated a ‘large, strong and powerful’ defence industry with ‘a higher proportion of wartime output than the US one until the early 1950s’.11 Labour’s leadership felt that the sector would boost the wider economy, particularly civilian aircraft, which was predicted by some as the likely successor to heavy industries such as cotton and coal mining.12 From the beginning defence drove the aerospace industry. In 1948 £75 million was spent on the procurement of military aircraft, with a further £21 million on research and development. By 1950 the Labour government had pledged £780 million on rearmament, of which £250 million was spent on military research.13 This was also a ‘golden age for British arms exports’ in which, alongside the United States, Britain dominated the global market, which itself made a considerable contribution to the balance of payments, then a key indicator of national economic performance.14 But whatever the economic benefit of the defence industry, British scientists warned that state investment into the arms industry would restrict growth in more important areas. Only a few months after the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the organic chemist and president of

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the Royal Society, Robert Robinson, posed the question ‘Why not attack cancer and tuberculosis on the atomic bomb scale?’.15 Scientists on the left were particularly concerned about the impact that military spending would have on scientific research. J.D. Bernal, a communist, biologist and historian of science who opposed the nuclear arms race, was perturbed by Britain’s high levels of defence spending and the proportion of scientific research devoted to military-industrial technology.16 Another example of this was Patrick Blackett, whose 1948 Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy was critical of nuclear weapons, a view that cost him his position as a scientific adviser to the Attlee government. Blackett remained a key intellectual figure on the left and influenced Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ speech in 1963 and scientific policy during the 1964–70 government. But these warnings went unheeded by the Labour government. With British troops engaged in military action in Korea, the government decided in the summer of 1950 to accelerate the rearmament programme. Some ministers felt that ‘another global war might break out any time after 1955’ and that ‘the decision to rearm would have to be faced sooner rather than later’.17 The economic dimension weighed heavily, with some officials warning that it would be politically unpopular if rearmament led to further reductions in private consumption, particularly given the unpopularity of food rationing that was still ongoing since the war. Nevertheless, the government decided to rearm despite the likely strain it would put on the domestic economy. As Grace Huxford observed, the Korean War and the rearmament of 1950–51 ‘challenged the welfare agenda of Attlee’s post-war Labour government, threatening party unity’.18 This tension came to the boil when Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, who was firmly on the right of the party, introduced a rearmament package of £4.7 billion in January 1951. To finance the programme he imposed charges on false teeth and spectacles on the NHS and raised prescription charges. In the House of Commons Gaitskell urged the nation to put ‘aside for the time being the greater comforts and satisfactions of a higher standard of living’ in order to build ‘defences for the safety of [the] country, the defence of democracy and the preservation of peace’.19 As Mark Phythian remarked, rearmament presented the Attlee government ‘with a choice between guns and dental health. It chose guns.’ 20 The consequence was the resignation of three ministers: John Freeman, Harold Wilson and Aneurin Bevan, the latter of whom was the health secretary who had established the NHS three years earlier before his relocation to the Ministry of Labour. In one sense, Bevan had much to gain from a rearmament package that would have relieved unemployment in manufacturing

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industries. But his ideological objection to Britain’s alliance with the United States, his fidelity to the NHS, his personal antipathy towards Gaitskell and his role as the de facto leader of the Labour left wing all prompted him to resign in dramatic circumstances. In his resignation address to the House of Commons, Bevan felt that ‘the £4,700 million arms programme’ could not ‘be achieved without irreparable damage to the economy of Great Britain’.21 The skilled orator warned that the American economy was busily engaged in a rate of defence production that was so extensive that it was causing the global economy to suffer as the cost of vital materials, particularly metals, soared. This was a cautionary warning; Britain need not follow this dangerous and wasteful path. Bevan concluded that the ‘western world’ had ‘embarked upon a campaign of arms production upon a scale, so quickly, and of such an extent that the foundations of political liberty and parliamentary democracy will not be able to sustain the shock’. At a cost of £23 million pounds, the prescription charges were relatively modest – only half of one per cent of the rearmament package itself. In his history of the Labour party Andrew Thorpe felt that ‘in retrospect’ it was ‘astonishing that some solution could not have been found’ to avoid such a political fallout, one that ended up weakening Attlee’s position.22 For the left the actual expenditure was less significant than the symbolism that this political economy represented. Targeting ‘teeth and specs’ was considered cynical and uncaring, targeting as it did people who were among the most vulnerable. If these charges were accepted meekly, it might leave the health service open to potentially more damaging measures in the future. The day after Bevan’s speech, Harold Wilson (who had resigned as President of the Board of Trade) told fellow MPs that the basis of Britain’s economy would be ‘disrupted and the standard of living, including the social services of our people endangered’ if rearmament was implemented.23 Above all the rearmament crisis was about symbolism as the left exploited the visual impact of a government spending money on armaments at the expense of medical equipment. Despite the very real growth of nationalised health provision, the emergence of a new warfare state entrenched Labour into a bitter factional divide, one that persisted for the rest of the century. Thereafter, Labourites were generally pigeonholed into either the ‘Bevanite’ or ‘Gaitskellite’ groupings. The episode demonstrated how the welfare state was be used as a measure of one’s socialist credentials. As Tim Bale and Andrew Seaton observed, the NHS represented a ‘sacred cow’ for the left, whilst defence was portrayed as an exhibition of responsible statecraft by those on the right.24 As Bale observed, for Labour moderates ‘Gaitskell was its hero, Bevan its prima-donna’; but on the left ‘Gaitskell was the cold warrior out to prove a point and do down a rival; Bevan was a man of principle’

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as ‘spending on warfare was tantamount to admitting that the ethical and practical arguments had been lost to the Conservative orthodoxy’.25 Labour’s rearmament package was so extensive that not even Winston Churchill’s Conservative government, which returned to power in October 1951, agreed to implement it. In a cabinet meeting in 1952 the Conservative Chancellor, ‘Rab’ Butler, gave a stark warning to his ministerial colleagues on the impact that rearmament was having on the wider manufacturing economy. He stated that, in contrast with its relatively strong trading position before the war, Britain was ‘losing contracts to Germany and Japan’. He concluded that ‘unless we can keep down the burdens on the economy, I see little prospect of being able to do anything in this field. The claims of defence and industrial investment and of our best exports are directly and inescapably competitive; they all depend on the same sections of the engineering industry.’ 26 Despite his concerns Butler could not prevent a significant rise in defence spending, which peaked at over 11 per cent of Gross Domestic Product in 1955. In his account of postwar British defence policy Michael Dockrill concluded that ‘in the end the Bevanites turned out to be correct in their assumptions’ as civil and defence contractors competed for the same raw materials and skilled labour, as were the ‘metal-producing industries’ which were under ‘increasing strain as orders poured in for iron and steel for the new tanks, guns, aircraft and other military equipment the Ministry of Defence was ordering’.27 This was compounded by less American financial assistance than had been anticipated, whilst by contrast West Germany received enough Marshall Aid to transform its war-torn economy. To make matters worse, the rearmament programme was not deemed ‘very successful’. As Dockrill concluded, ‘more money was invested in missile and rocket research and development’, but ‘many of the missiles which emerged from the drawing board at the end of the 1950s were already obsolescent’ by the start of the next decade. The cost of Britain’s Cold War commitment and the question of whether it should be playing a role in the first place, featured prominently on the left through into the 1960s.

‘Restating our socialism’ With Labour having lost the general elections in 1951 and 1955, the social democratic right of the party, now led by Hugh Gaitskell as party leader, revised the assumptions on which socialist governance should be based.28 These ‘revisionists’ argued that public ownership was not the solution to all industrial problems and that Labour needed to adapt to the changing character of British society, namely the rise of affluence and individualism. This narrative was framed in the context of the Cold War that by the late

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1950s was as much a battleground over washing machines as it was over nuclear weapons.29 For the left this apparent shift in the party towards the right only intensified the left’s quest for a planned economy. Although there was a small element of ‘pro-Sovietism’ in the Labour movement, even many a moderate socialist was impressed by the economic and scientific achievements of the USSR in the 1950s. 30 As John Callaghan concluded, many on the left considered the Soviet Union ‘at once profoundly repellent and yet capable of exercising an immense attractive force throughout the decade’.31 Many on the left continued to exercise a contempt for American capitalism. Throughout the 1950s, as Rhiannon Vickers noted, rearmament continued to feature in the socialist critique of ‘Atlanticism’ as it was ‘said to contribute heavily to the chronic balance of payments problem of the period’.32 Despite its numerical minority in the parliamentary party at around sixty MPs, the left was supported by some of the larger trade unions, in particular the Transport and General Workers’ Union led by Frank Cousins who staunchly opposed excessive military spending.33 By the late 1950s the two factions in the Labour movement had gravitated towards very different positions on both the Cold War and the economy. Horrified at the Soviet Union’s repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, combined with the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, social democrats on the Labour right considered themselves to be the ‘the bitterest enemies of communism’.34 With the likes of Attlee and Ernest Bevin having departed from the political scene, a younger generation of Labourites attached themselves to this position, including future cabinet ministers such as Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins, and a future prime minister in the form of Jim Callaghan. Although Labour polled well with the electorate on welfare issues, the Conservatives usually enjoyed a 10 per cent lead on the question of ‘defence and armaments’, whilst an overwhelming 86 per cent of Labour voters felt that Britain needed to have a nuclear deterrent.35 Social democrats had plenty of reason to believe that the electorate – including the Labour-voting working class – supported Britain’s commitment to NATO and all that entailed. But the left felt that it had won the moral argument that nuclear weapons represented an unacceptable threat to humanity. Many a left-wing Labourite joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament after its formation in 1957, and it went on to court the affection of the political left for decades thereafter. But from the outset CND was, as Rhiannon Vickers accurately observed, ‘profoundly middle class’ and ‘was less successful in attracting working-class Labour members; some of them worried that CND was drawing attention away from economic issues, and workers in the defence industry felt threatened by its stance on unilateral disarmament’.36 This anxiety persisted throughout the Cold War. For the left to have any chance of electoral success, it would have to convince these

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workers that a viable alternative to military industry was possible and, indeed, preferable. The embarrassment in 1956 of the Suez Crisis (in which Britain and other powers sought to regain control of the Suez Canal nationalised by Egypt), combined with runaway defence spending, led the Conservatives to reshape Britain’s military posture. In 1957 the Macmillan government published one of the most significant statements on defence since the war in the form of the Sandys defence white paper. As David French argued, it sought the contraction of Britain’s military capabilities ‘in an era when economic constraints, coupled with the need for Britain to play a full part in maintaining the Western deterrent against Soviet expansion in Europe, dictated that Britain’s ability to project military power beyond Europe had to shrink’.37 The review was a revealing statement of political economy. It restated the government’s commitment to economic prosperity, stating that Britain’s influence in the world depended on ‘the health of its internal economy and the success of her export trade’ and that the ‘claims of military expenditure needed to be weighed against economic strength’.38 The review made clear the extent of the defence economy, which involved 7 per cent of the working population either serving in the military (this was accounting for National Service), one-eighth of those in metal-using industries, two-thirds of those in research and development and a large force of personnel abroad, such as the British Army on the Rhine, and which placed a ‘severe strain upon the balance of payments’. The solution, according to Sandys, was a greater reliance on missiles and rocketry within a more technologically orientated defence programme based on nuclear deterrence. As Matthew Grant observed in his study of civil defence, the ‘possession of the deterring hydrogen bomb’, combined with the ‘belief in the lessening importance of conventional forces and a parallel increase in the need for inexpensive “political” initiatives, all seemed to fit nicely with the pressing economic need for cuts’.39 The Conservatives’ admission of the damaging impacts of postwar rearmament could have come straight from a contemporary socialist critique. But it also reflected a widely held conviction by the late 1950s that Britain’s economic performance was constrained by the size of its military industry, a point made in Andrew Shonfield’s British Economic Policy since the War in 1958.40 But the Sandys white paper was not the end of the defence economy by any means. As David Edgerton observed, the 1957 review only reflected ‘a distinct technological enthusiasm in defence’, a form of ‘techno-nationalism’ where British companies were tasked with cutting-edge, experimental and highly expensive military projects.41 The Macmillan government reorganised the aircraft industry to reduce the duplication of research in the hope of

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a more efficient defence sector. It also pressed ahead with missile systems manufactured by domestic firms. However, several key projects failed without ever entering operational service. The most important of these was the Blue Streak, a ballistic missile developed by de Havilland and Rolls-Royce that would replace the V-bomber airborne nuclear deterrent. The cancellation of Blue Streak in 1960 was, in the eyes of Peter Hennessy, down to its ‘cost and vulnerability’.42 But in a revisionist account another explanation was the combination of the industry and the services who were both more comfortable with piloted aircraft rather than missiles, in the case of industry because it had a better export potential. Sandys did not stay in his post for long, and by the early 1960s the Conservative government was committed to a series of expensive military projects, such as the CVA-01 aircraft carrier and the TSR-2 multi-role combat aircraft. An exasperated Harold Macmillan reminded the government’s chief scientific adviser, Solly Zuckerman, of the old saying ‘kill them when they are no bigger than sprats’ before concluding that ‘Defence R&D projects’ had ‘become almost impossible to get rid of when they reach the size of a herring’.43 The Conservatives’ difficulty in controlling the defence budget was pounced on by Harold Wilson when he was elected as the Labour party’s new leader after Gaitskell’s untimely death in 1963. One point of attack was the purchase of the American Polaris submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile in December 1962, a decision that made the left-wing Labour MP Richard Crossman conclude that Britain was ‘not and never can become an independent nuclear power’.44 The purchase of the Polaris missile undermined not only the Conservatives’ initial preference for a ‘national’ deterrent but also the heavy spending on research and development that had gone to waste. Although the candidate of the left, Wilson displayed a modernising verve that soothed factional rivalries in the party, at least for a while. In his most famous speech where he informed delegates that Labour was ‘restating’ its socialism to adapt to the modernising demands of the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ at the party conference in October 1963, Wilson rounded on the Conservatives’ mishandling of political economy. His argument was heavily based on the military-industrial problem, reflecting his resignation from Attlee’s government twelve years earlier. He told the delegates at Scarborough that: We have spent thousands of millions in the past few years on misdirected research and development contracts in the field of defence. If we were now to use the technique of R. and D. contracts in civil industry I believe we could within a measurable period of time establish new industries which would make us once again one of the foremost industrial nations in the world. We know this can be done.45

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Central to Wilson’s message was that state-funded science should have an economic and social utility. Referring to the Conservative government’s emphasis on military technology, he told the conference that ‘over half of our trained scientists were engaged in defence projects or so-called defence projects’ whilst too ‘many of our scientists were employed on purely prestige projects that never left the drawing board’. For Wilson the Blue Streak debacle revealed the futility of trying to keep pace with the Cold War arms race. Instead, the Labour leader acknowledged the ‘formidable Soviet challenge in the education of scientists and technologists, and above all, in the ruthless application of scientific techniques in Soviet industry’, which proved that Britain’s future lay ‘not in military strength alone but in the efforts, the sacrifices, and above all the energies which a free people can mobilise for the future greatness of our country’. This rhetoric was framed within a broad (and inexact) modernising objective that the whole party could get behind. As Edgerton described it, the speech was an example of ‘socialist technological chauvinism’ that was ‘critical of military technology and technology for the rich’ and argued instead for the ‘planning of science and technology for the common good’.46 This partisan tone was intensified in Labour’s manifesto at the 1964 general election, where the Conservatives were pilloried for the resources ‘lavished on wasteful military projects’ while the ‘Government has imposed on itself an ever-increasing burden of interest payments on the national debt, vital community services have been starved of resources’.47 As Labour returned to government after thirteen years in opposition, defence was very much a matter of its political economy.

‘Pensions or Polaris, bases or bathrooms’ In an article in the New Left Review shortly before the 1964 general election, the socialist historian Perry Anderson was encouraged by the ‘close homology between Labour’s attacks on archaism and dilettantism in British industry, and its attacks on illusions of grandeur in British defence policy’.48 But he sounded a note of caution. Observing Harold Wilson’s tendency to perceive defence spending as a primarily domestic problem, Anderson predicted that, if returned to government, the ‘weight of American conformism’ would realign Labour’s foreign policy back to the centre ground. He concluded that Wilson had ‘largely neglected the outside world’ but would ‘not be able to do so for long’. This was a prescient observation. When Labour was elected with a narrow majority of only four seats in 1964, Wilson and his administration faced a balance of payments deficit twice as large as they had expected. The consequence was the request for further American financial assistance and, more importantly for the left, constraining Labour’s programme

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for industrial expansion known as the ‘National Plan’. On his first day as Prime Minister, Wilson ruled out any devaluation of the pound. The consequent controls on public spending haunted the Labour movement for years afterwards as the pound was eventually devalued in November 1967.49 Even before Labour was defeated at the 1970 general election, it had become, in the words of Andrew Thorpe, ‘a byword for failure and demoralisation, broken promises and dashed hopes, not just for Labourites but for a large section of the wider population’.50 But what about defence spending? When it came to the defence economy, Wilson’s Labour government was, depending on the circumstances, idealist, reactionary and pragmatic. The first indication that the new Prime Minister would not commit to wholescale reductions in the military programme was in his decision not to cancel the Polaris nuclear deterrent. Despite Labour’s 1964 manifesto stating that Polaris was ‘not independent’ and would ‘not deter’, Wilson told his defence secretary Denis Healey to inform the House of Commons that the fleet of submarines, which were under construction, had ‘passed the point of no return’ and that the government was compelled to see the project through to completion. However, this was not entirely accurate. The Royal Navy had informed Wilson that the submarines could still be used for attack roles alongside conventional submarines without the ballistic nuclear missile facility.51 But he told Healey ‘not to demur’ and his defence secretary complied.52 Given the strength of feeling on the left of the party, the Prime Minister performed an act of ‘Wilsonian sleight of hand’ to save Polaris.53 The reasons were electoral, industrial and political. Wilson understood that the deterrent provided an entrée into strategic thinking in Washington and fortified Britain’s role in NATO. Ever mindful of public opinion, he was also aware that Polaris had its own emotional appeal ‘to the man in the pub’, not least as China had detonated its first nuclear weapon only days before the 1964 general election.54 But there were also industrial factors at play. Vickers, who built two of the submarines and employed over fifteen thousand workers, had petitioned the government to commit to the fleet. Not for the first time, a Labour government conducted defence policy ever mindful of the economic and industrial consequences. For the left Polaris was a matter of political economy as much as it was a moral issue of the possession of nuclear weapons. With Labour finally back in government, the left was able to scrutinise ministers from the same side of the aisle. In July 1965 73 Labour MPs proposed a motion to scrap Polaris while it was still in its early stages of development in order to ‘make a notable contribution to relieving the Government of the financial pressures which bear upon it’ and that ‘out of the surplus could come more for housing, education, hospitals and help to poorer peoples’.55 The following month, in what was described in the press as an ‘astonishing victory’ for

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the left, a similar motion signed by 77 Labour MPs was adopted by the parliamentary party.56 This backbench faction was led by Frank Allaun, the left-wing MP for Salford East. Described in one obituary as being either ‘naive or optimistic, or just unappreciative of war culture’, his style ‘was intensely gentle, the voice never raised, but the questions – chiefly on peace and housing – insistent’ and that with his ‘beautiful manners and the soft Lancashire voice’ he ‘must have got on ministerial nerves’.57 The chairman of the Labour Action for Peace group, Allaun served as the principal private secretary to Arthur Greenwood, a fellow CND member, only to resign after five months over Labour’s refusal to condemn American military action in Vietnam. When pressed by the media for comment, Allaun characteristically stated, ‘I prefer the freedom of the Back Benches’.58 He was a qualified accountant, and no defence debate in the Commons was complete without his questioning of the figures. A champion of the poor in one of the most deprived constituencies in the country, he consistently argued that abject social conditions could be remedied by cuts in military spending. Speaking for many on the left of the party, he told the House of Commons that the ‘modern equivalent of guns or butter’ was ‘pensions or Polaris, bases or bathrooms’, and that ‘people need bathrooms in their houses, and that is what the money should be spent on’.59 Despite the decision on Polaris, Allaun and his left-wing colleagues had reason for optimism. In 1965 Labour cancelled several large military projects: the Hawker Siddeley P-1154 supersonic vertical take-off aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley HS-681 military transport aircraft and, most significantly, the British Aerospace Corporation TSR-2, a complex multi-role combat aircraft that had accrued research and development costs of over £272 million by the time Labour entered government with close to £1 million per week being spent on its development.60 This was a decisive action and suggested that the new Labour government would address the defence industry without scruple or sentiment. Looking to reverse industrial decline, two reports commissioned by the government investigated aerospace and shipbuilding. The Plowden report into the aerospace industry in 1965 argued that the sector was held back by over-investment in military projects, with ‘erratic government policy’ denying the sector a consistent programme.61 It concluded that the defence argument was less powerful than it had been during the 1950s rearmament and that the civilian aircraft industry needed extensive state support if it was to survive. None the less, the report warned that sudden and drastic reductions would ‘kill the aircraft industry’ and leave Britain strategically vulnerable if it had to rely on imports. The picture in shipbuilding was much the same. The 1966 Geddes report noted that competitors abroad had wisely focused on the cargo-ship market instead of the more costly and labour-intensive passenger liners and warships that

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predominated in British shipyards.62 Commenting on the overreliance on military work, the report warned that ‘British naval demand must be a source of strength not of weakness in the industry’. In keeping with its manifesto commitment, in February 1966 Wilson’s government commenced a comprehensive spending review in order to reduce defence expenditure. The review announced that a withdrawal from Aden was expected in 1968 whilst reductions in military commitments in the Far East would be spread over the course of a decade. A new aircraft carrier, which had been proposed by the Conservatives, would be cancelled and the order for the American F-111 fighter plane set to replace the TSR-2 would go ahead, but at a reduced level.63 The review was a statement of socialist political economy, asserting that ‘military strength’ was of little value if was ‘achieved at the expense of economic health’. The government stated that the inherited rate of defence spending ‘would have imposed an excessive burden both in resources and in foreign exchange’ and would have been ‘seriously damaging to Britain’s economy, at a time when we need a rapid increase in production so that we can export more and import less’ and ‘when industry must be re-equipped and modernise’.64 This was a continuation of Wilson’s ‘white heat’ rhetoric with the stated aim of converting military research into civilian science and technology. Having brought the economy under control and with the Conservatives less popular with the electorate, Labour won the general election in 1966 with a majority of 98 seats. On the matter of diversifying the defence economy, the manifesto went further still in pledging to bring ‘defence spending down to a stable level of about 6 per cent of our national wealth’, and ‘direct new capital and skills to vital industrial modernisation’, concluding that the country would ‘benefit from this new realism in defence’.65 However, the electoral victory was the start of four troubled years for Wilson’s government. By 1966 Britain’s share of manufactured goods globally had fallen from over 20 per cent in 1954 to just over 13 per cent, which led to balance-of-payments deficits and sterling crises in 1966 and in 1967.66 For all its professed ‘realism’, the Wilson government was trying to sustain the value of sterling and expand the economy at the same time, a futile endeavour later described by Wilson’s biographer Ben Pimlott as trying to ‘omnipotently’ defy ‘the law of gravity’.67 Labour’s inability to boost economic output stirred debate as to the root cause of Britain’s modest productivity; some advocated more state investment, others for industrial relations reform to stamp out ‘illegal’ strike action that international customers frequently blamed for taking their business elsewhere.68 But for many on the left the problem was the burden of Britain’s excessive defence spending. For all its stated aims of converting the military sector, the left felt that the defence review had not gone nearly far enough. Instead, the main problem remained,

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the commitment to the Cold War. The discourse on defence in the late 1960s was dominated more by economy than it was by strategic factors. This was particularly true of defence specialists on the left, such as Albert Booth, the MP for Barrow-in-Furness where fifteen thousand workers were employed by the Vickers armaments company that was, by far, the largest employer in the town. Despite many of his constituents relying on military work, Booth was a committed supporter of industrial conversion and nuclear disarmament. In a symbolic gesture, he addressed a CND rally outside the shipyard on the day that the Polaris nuclear submarine HMS Repulse was launched. Blaming industrial decline on the burden of defence, he stated that: Britain’s shipbuilding industry is paying dearly for the pursuit of independent military power. Exchequer expenditure on the Polaris programme is ten times as great as expenditure on the development of Britain’s merchant shipping capacity. With half a million unemployed, it is painfully apparent this high military expenditure brings no guarantee of employment. It is no coincidence that the Japanese and Swedish shipbuilding industries, free from a military curtailment, have massively expanded their production while Britain’s share of world shipbuilding exports has fallen drastically.69

Two weeks after Booth’s speech, the government was hit by crisis as the pound, which had been under immense pressure for over three years, was devalued by 14 per cent. With Wilson’s standing considerably dented, both the left and right of the party tried to steer the government’s political economy. Whilst the left sought more investment to reflate the economy, the right looked to exploit any export opportunity to stabilise the balance of payments. In the aftermath of the devaluation Labour was gripped by another bitter crisis comparable to the rearmament debate in 1951. In December 1967 ministers on the right, George Brown, Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey, lobbied the cabinet to sell naval equipment to South Africa. The issue was a particularly controversial one for Labour. Whilst successive Conservative governments had sold weapons to the Pretoria government with little compunction despite Apartheid, the left moved Labour towards a position of an arms embargo, a position on which it was elected to government in 1964. Not long in government, Harold Wilson reluctantly honoured an agreed sale of 16 Hawker Siddeley Buccaneer naval strike aircraft to South Africa, an act that suggested ‘the way in which the party had to come to terms with unpleasant facts in world affairs’.70 Although the government imposed a ban on any further sales after 1964, the right wing used the devaluation crisis as an excuse to revive the arms trade. A showdown in cabinet over an order of naval equipment worth £100 million was debated in what Richard Crossman, left-wing minister for the social services, described

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as ‘an hour and a half of mutual abuse’.71 In his memoir the defence secretary Denis Healey recalled that it was the ‘most unpleasant’ meeting that he ‘had ever attended’, a ‘deplorable episode’ that was ‘characteristic of any government in serious trouble’.72 Whilst the left based its case on its moral aversion to racism, the right relied on economic arguments. As the employment minister, Ray Gunter, argued, there were ‘other Socialist principles and one is full employment: it is alright for us to be lofty when we shan’t have to pay for it; the British worker will feel differently when he loses his job.’ 73 Not for the first time, Wilson played his ministers off each other to tilt the balance in his favour. The arms embargo remained in place. As Phythian remarked, the episode had ‘merely been the occasion for the working out of a power struggle within the Labour government’.74 The ghost of 1951 still lingered. In the middle of the arms crisis Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan’s widow, advised the government to ‘cut the defence programme and so make it possible both to avoid cuts in the social services and to prevent the reintroduction of prescription charges’.75 The early signs for the left were positive. The order for 50 F-111 combat aircraft intended to replace the TSR-2 was cancelled. Healey indicated that the withdrawal from commitments ‘East of Suez’, such as Malaysia and Singapore, would happen sooner than first outlined, whilst all aircraft carrier programmes were to be scrapped by 1971.76 In his account of Wilson’s foreign policy Chris Wrigley concluded that the withdrawal from a world role was not a ‘radical review made on the flood-tide of a massive general election victory but because of a seriously deteriorating economy and changed international circumstances’.77 As Saki Dockrill concluded, Labour’s ‘left wing wanted deep defence cuts, while its right wing, when priorities had to be determined, preferred modest reductions in defence expenditure rather than in the social services’ and that, given ‘the increasing economic pressures throughout the defence debate, the writing was on the wall for Britain’s future world military role’.78 However, this was not the end of the defence economy. It is important not to overstate Britain’s retreat from a world role at this point, as many declinist historians have been inclined to do. Neither was the warfare state the only victim of devaluation; the welfare state also suffered. Wilson warned the left that ‘no spending commitments’ would be excluded from cuts ‘simply because my honourable friends put motions on the order paper that certain areas of policy should be sacrosanct’.79 In the aftermath of the devaluation the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, informed the government and the nation that they were in for ‘two years’ hard slog’.80 In his history of the welfare state Rodney Lowe remarked that there was a ‘constant check on welfare policy’ in the 1960s, with devaluation ‘merely an extreme example’.81 He noted that after a sterling crisis governments typically reduced domestic demand, limiting imports and maximising exports to keep speculators

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at bay. Consequently, the government sought arms exports wherever it could, South Africa aside. Although Wilson vetoed the South African arms sale, his administration cultivated the weapons trade with the Middle East. The sale of the British Aerospace Corporation’s Lightning aircraft to Saudi Arabia was regarded by Phythian as a ‘watershed in the British government’s approach to arms sales decision making’ with the ‘growing personal involvement of politicians’.82 Nikolas Gardner interpreted the sale as a ‘desire to revive British industry while maintaining British influence east of Suez in the context of severe budgetary restrictions’.83 Saudi Arabia was not the sole recipient. Iran was a long-established customer, buying 707 Chieftain tanks built by the troubled car manufacturer British Leyland. Despite many a Labour minister’s commitment to Zionism, an order for tanks worth £100 million from Israel was rejected owing to the threat of an Arab boycott of buying British armaments.84 More significantly still, the devaluation crisis accelerated a process of decolonisation that led to the Europeanisation of British defence and foreign policy. Denis Healey’s amended defence review in 1968 refocused the commitment to collective European security: The foundation of Britain’s security now, as always, lies in the maintenance of peace in Europe. Our first priority, therefore, must still be to give the fullest possible support to the North Atlantic Alliance. Our contribution will be formidable. The size and striking power of the Royal Navy is, after that of the United States Navy, greater than that possessed by any other member of the Alliance. Our army is well-trained and superbly equipped, and has more recent and varied fighting experience than any other European army. The Royal Air Force, equipped with the most modern combat aircraft, will be second to none in Europe.85

As important as the financial constraints obviously were, the Labour government’s withdrawal from former imperial outposts was part of a planned shift in Britain’s defence posture, one that was committed to a militaryindustrial role within NATO expressed in Western Europe and the North Atlantic maritime region. Edward Longinotti argued that the withdrawal from ‘East of Suez’ was a political choice that was not entirely induced by economic constraints.86 The accelerated shift from empire to a continental role stimulated the defence economy for over a decade thereafter. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier jump-jet, which proved a great export success, had its first test flight in 1967 followed by the Anglo-French Jaguar in 1968. Britain joined Italy and West Germany to build the Panavia Tornado multi-role combat aircraft, a complex endeavour that came the closest to the TSR-2 and involved British Aerospace Corporation and Rolls-Royce who had a 40 per cent share in its engine development. Announcing his review in the

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House of Commons, Healey felt that a ‘wider European cooperation in defence procurement would bring great benefits, not only in the defence field itself, but also for the development of European technology as a whole’. But this was unacceptable to the left who were appalled by this renewed commitment to expensive military projects. Frank Allaun responded that ‘if we could save this vast sum each year the problems now facing the nation and the Government would be largely solved. Labour’s plans for housing, health, education and pensions, in which we deeply believe, could be overfulfilled. Industrial re-equipment could surge forward and our contribution to the war on want could become significant.’87 When it came to the defence economy, the Wilson government’s record was a mixed bag. Expensive prestige projects, such as the TSR-2, were cancelled, but other weapons systems were ordered in their place. The ban on arms sales to South Africa won support on the left but was undone by arms trading elsewhere, often in war-torn regions. Although the government did not provide military support to the United States in the Vietnam War, the left interpreted the lack of outright criticism as an indication of tacit support.88 For sure, Labour reduced military expenditure while in office, not least in research and development where, as David Edgerton noted, the left-wing minister Tony Benn made a significant impact at the Ministry of Technology in late 1960s.89 With its commitment to school and university reform, the Labour government could credibly claim that it had tilted the balance away from the military and towards the needs of wider society. Seven years after Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech, Labour’s general election manifesto remarked that in ‘a truly Socialist shift in priorities’, Britain finally spent ‘more on education than on defence’ by the end of the decade.90 This was a commendable achievement given the runaway defence spending that Labour inherited in 1964. But the left was far from impressed. The failure to implement the economic stimulus of the National Plan, which was effectively sabotaged by the deflationary measures to save sterling, was considered a betrayal by the left. The social services stood still, at best, and were assessed by Stephen Thornton in his history as ‘disappointing’ as Wilson ‘himself made some serious errors’ by not investing more in welfare infrastructure.91 For many on the left defence was the culprit for these disappointments. A reduction of close to 1 per cent of GDP spending on defence was not considered enough to reverse the military-industrial machine and there was evidence to suggest that there was a renewed commitment to the defence economy by the decade’s end as the government reorganised the sector into large conglomerates. Towards the end of its tenure in government, there were ominous signs that the left would make life very difficult for the party’s leadership, particularly on the defence question. In a House of Commons vote on Denis Healey’s last defence white paper in March 1970

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(optimistically titled ‘Security in the Seventies’), MPs on the Labour left refused to support the government. Bob Mellish, the exasperated Chief Whip, complained ‘I have a family of five children and I care about nuclear war’, adding that the majority of the party was ‘nauseated that this crowd alone think they have special views and principles’.92 It was a sign of things to come for the rest of the decade and beyond.

The international left and the military-industrial complex The British left was influenced as much by international factors as it was by domestic ones. The 1960s was a decade of Cold War crises, from Berlin to Cuba and Vietnam. It took an outgoing American president and former five-star general Dwight Eisenhower to give to the world its most famous description of an overly powerful defence economy – the ‘military-industrial complex’. In his farewell address on 17 January 1961 he warned his fellow citizens that the American arms industry was incomparable in scale even to that of the Second World War or Korean War, something ‘new in the American experience’ as before Pearl Harbor the ‘United States had no armaments industry’ and that ‘American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well’. The Republican President framed the military-industrial complex within the inexorable rise of statesponsored science and technology, which he felt undermined individual freedom and competitive enterprise. Despite his own culpability in creating the complex in the first place, Eisenhower warned that ‘only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry’ could ‘compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together’.93 Eisenhower was not alone. As the Soviet Union built missiles and rockets to achieve strategic parity with the United States, Nikita Khrushchev ‘dreamed’ of using whatever money he could spare in bettering the living conditions of his citizens to catch up with the West.94 Indicative of this widespread anxiety, in 1962 the United Nations published a special report that demonstrated how defence spending placed a ‘heavy economic and social burden on most countries’ and absorbed ‘a large volume of human and material resources of all kinds, which could be used to increase economic and social welfare throughout the world’.95 The committee noted that over $120 billion was spent on armaments per year, a sum which in the case of some developing countries accounted for all governmental spending. The UN observed how the defence sector was concentrated among a handful of powerful companies in the capitalist West, while it commanded a substantial portion of resources in the planned economies of the communist East. The committee was unequivocal

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in its conclusions: converting national defence industries would incur ‘rapid’ economic and social benefits, provide harmonious international relations and be ‘an unqualified blessing to all mankind’.96 Only six months after the release of this report the world teetered on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. The Cuban Missile Crisis put disarmament firmly on the diplomatic agenda. This led to significant test-ban treaties in 1963 that prohibited overground nuclear weapons testing and marked the end of the era of the ‘mushroom cloud’ that symbolised the Cold War up to that point. In keeping with this spirit of disarmament, the Department of Defense set up an Office for Economic Adjustment in 1961 to find work for displaced military personnel and industrial workers with a view to creating a more diverse economic base that was less reliant on military work. However, it was underfunded, short-staffed and not particularly interested in industrial conversion.97 Moreover, the Cuban Missile Crisis only strengthened the Kennedy administration’s case for a ‘flexible response’ build-up of conventional forces to offer more options than a nuclear ‘massive retaliation’ in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union. The American defence economy continued to expand as the Vietnam War intensified as the 1960s went on. As Michael Brenes observed, the ‘Cold War coalition’ of industrialists and politicians was ‘hostile to any plan for wholesale reform of the military-industrial complex’.98 Those on the left who were opposed to runaway defence spending petitioned Congress and the Senate to pass legislation to restrict the defence budget and establish apparatus for industrial conversion. The most prominent proponent was George McGovern, the senator for South Dakota and later the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern and others introduced a bill for a National Economic Conversion Commission in 1963; however, both the Democrats and Republicans blocked it as congressmen and senators across the party divide relied on military work to ensure reelection in their local districts.99 Despite this setback McGovern and the ‘new liberalism’ on the left grew in strength, and his 1964 book War Against Want: America’s Food for Peace Program, resulted in the Senate grating $700 million to combat hunger in the United States, a success that demonstrated to the international left what was possible.100 After Eisenhower’s famous farewell address, academics and political insiders began to explore the American military-industrial complex, creating frameworks of analysis later used by the left in Britain. One of George McGovern’s advisers was Seymour Melman, an engineering professor at Columbia University who wrote extensively on the American defence economy and industrial conversion. The activist and linguist Noam Chomsky credited Melman with mobilising what was once a ‘weak and scattered resistance to war and other military operations’ at a time when there was ‘widespread opposition to the diversion of resources to military production’.101 Melman

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argued that the centralisation of the federal government created a permanent war economy, concluding that the sector existed outside of normal market conditions with the Department of Defense acting as both the main customer and main shareholder, a dynamic he labelled ‘Pentagon capitalism’. In his 1964 paper ‘Alternatives to Arms Prosperity’ Melman made the case that the resources used for arms could be reapplied to civilian industries for ‘greater economic security and a sense of well-being without precedent’, an idea he developed further in his Defence Economy: Conversion of Industries and Occupations to Civilian Needs.102 Well to the left of conventional American politics, he fused his criticism of the defence economy with his support for workers’ control of industrial production, a combination that later proved attractive to the British left. Such was his influence, Melman was reputedly followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during his career. As the Vietnam War polarised the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent intellectuals with governmental experience also warned of the excessive influence of the military-industrial complex. In his widely distributed 1970 book The Pentagon of Power Lewis Mumford argued that the defence economy had wasted the technological opportunities presented in the postwar era. John Kenneth Galbraith, the professor of economics at Harvard who had advised the Kennedy administration on foreign affairs, published the influential How to Control the Military in 1969. An icon of American liberal thought, Galbraith ‘deeply believed that the militaryindustrial complex was not a structural necessity of the post-war economic growth’ and felt that the government should have provided ‘desperately needed public goods’ which would have answered the Keynesian need for an activist public sector.103 Galbraith was joined by Michael Harrington, the author of the 1962 The Other America: Poverty in the United States, who held the American defence economy responsible for the neglect of America’s isolated poor.104 By the early 1970s the military-industrial complex was a lively field of inquiry in the United States and established contingent themes, including the accountability and power of government, misplaced political economy and the need to reverse the arms race and the power of large military-industrial corporations.105 This academic and political ferment inspired a more assertive approach adopted by the British left in the 1970s. It was no longer enough to simply examine the government’s figures and question them in Parliament; instead, well researched and detailed alternatives were necessary. As non-governmental organisations began to challenge the assumptions of elite politics, a new ‘think-tank’ was established to explore the implications of the conventional global arms industry, one that was an independent authority not tied to the defence establishment in contrast with the RAND corporation in the United States. In 1966 the Swedish government established a state-sponsored forum

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to investigate military expenditure and the potential for disarmament.106 The Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute (SIPRI) provided the space and support for researchers to investigate the impact that defence spending had on economic growth. Its first three directors were British, and all had experience of working in government or military science. The first was Robert Neild, an economist who had resigned as Harold Wilson’s adviser in 1966 when his advice to devalue the pound went unheeded.107 His successor, Frank Barnaby, was a scientist who had worked in the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in the 1950s but later turned against nuclear deterrence on moral grounds. His successor and remarkably similarly named Frank Blackaby was another economist who had worked in the Treasury before editing the first two SIPRI yearbooks in 1968 and 1969.108 SIPRI brought together academic defence specialists who went on to make a significant impact on the left in the 1970s. The most important figure was Mary Kaldor, an Oxford politics graduate and daughter of Nicholas Kaldor who had once been Jim Callaghan’s adviser at the Treasury. Mary Kaldor was an expert in the global arms trade and contributed to one of SIPRI’s first publications on the issue.109 Kaldor worked with veteran Labour MPs as well as her own younger generation of politicians who were supporters of disarmament and who rejuvenated the defence debate, providing it with a detailed, data-driven approach appropriate for the challenging economic crises of the 1970s. The Labour party was becoming more open to external influences by the early 1970s, and these specialists made good on the opportunity to reform defence and economic strategy. A door was opened to a wider socialist peace movement, one that challenged the defence, industrial and political establishments when Labour returned to government in 1974.

‘A fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power’ Labour’s four years in opposition from 1970 to 1974 were described by Andrew Thorpe as ‘a period of intense activity as economic crises intensified’ and ‘policies were reworked; positions were changed’.110 It was also a low point for the Labour right wing, which was divided over the future of social democracy and membership of the Common Market.111 As Mark WickhamJones observed, the ‘disappointing experience in office diminished their authority and left them exhausted, even bewildered’ with Harold Wilson no longer ‘an effective leader, indeed he devoted much time to writing his memoirs after 1970’.112 The left capitalised on this and forged ahead with its own Alternative Economy Strategy, which was revealed in its fullest extent in Labour’s Programme 1973, a radical agenda closer to a planned

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economy rather than to managed ‘demand and supply’ capitalism. Although watered down after a series of fraught committee meetings, the strategy was abundantly clear throughout Labour’s next election manifesto, including a wide extension of public ownership and industrial democracy to ‘bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’.113 Although in the numerical minority in the party, the left shaped Labour’s agenda in the early 1970s amid the crisis of domestic and international capitalism. As well as being committed socialist economists, those who moved the party to the left were supporters of disarmament and saw in the defence economy an example of misplaced capitalist political economy. One such example was the CND member Stuart Holland, who provided Wilson with often unheeded economic advice in the 1960s, who came to believe ‘that a high level of state control was necessary in order to combat the rise of multinational power and to rejuvenate the stuttering British economy’, a means ‘by which Britain could reverse recent global trends and develop a socialist economy’.114 A similarly minded figure with a considerable political influence was Ian Mikardo. First elected to Parliament at the 1945 landslide, he was firmly on the ‘Bevanite’ left of the party and was highly effective on Labour’s policy committees. From 1966 to 1970 he was the chairman of the select committee on nationalised industries before chairing the party’s international committee from 1973 to 1978; this became a forum in which to condemn the defence economy. Mikardo was a master in the drafting of policy documents: one House of Commons clerk claimed that he ‘was simply the most skilful operator in committee that any of us ever saw’.115 ‘Mik’, as he was affectionately known on the left, was a shrewd businessman and was for many years the House of Commons’s unofficial bookmaker. But his commercial interests with companies behind the Iron Curtain aroused suspicions that he was a communist ‘fellow traveller’. Roy Mason, the right-wing Labour defence minister, remembered how on a trade mission to Poland in the 1950s Mikardo rushed off as soon as the plane landed to set up ‘trade deals on behalf of his own companies’.116 As Mason concluded, there ‘were no flies on Ian’. Mikardo’s chairmanship of important committees was decisive in shaping party policy while in opposition. As he later commented, the ‘National Executive Committee realised that we had to write a fresh political prospectus getting us back to the party’s purposes which the government had partially abandoned’.117 He and others on the left sought to ‘democratise’ the party by giving the membership a stake in deciding policy and compelling the leadership to adhere to the manifesto, an objective that underpinned the left-wing Campaign for Labour Party Democracy founded in 1971. This ‘democratisation’ amounted to the strengthening of the National Executive

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Committee’s powers on ‘electoral repercussions, considerations of equity, factional advantage, policy issues and so forth’, which many on the right resentfully labelled the ‘Mikardo Doctrine’.118 Crucially, this encompassed the drafting committees for the party’s general election manifesto. As Mark Wickham-Jones has argued, for ‘Labour left-wingers, manifestos in the 1970s and early 1980s offered an opportunity to impose their agenda upon others within the party and upon state actors’.119 This meant that policy documents in the National Executive Committee would directly materialise as electoral pledges. The defence economy was no exception. When, for example, the National Executive Committee resolved in May 1973 that ‘military expenditure overseas’ still represented ‘a significant burden on the balance of payments’, it compelled the next Labour government to ‘continue to look for ways of removing more of this from the economy’.120 The left rarely enjoyed a position of such prominence as it had in the early 1970s. By 1973, and with the country in turmoil due to energy crises and a three-day working week, the left had shifted the discourse on defence firmly towards the economic dimension. This was clear to see at that year’s party conference in Blackpool. In keeping with the left’s influence on the party’s National Executive Committee, the annual conference also moved towards more radical positions. Between 1970 and 1973 the party leadership was defeated in eight of 27 key votes, including nuclear disarmament. As Lewis Minkin concluded, this showed ‘a loss of control’ over the party membership and the trade unions as motions were passed by block votes from the conference floor of which the Labour leadership had ‘grave reservations’.121 On 4 October 1973 the Fire Brigades’ Union called for ‘military expenditure’ to be slashed ‘initially by at least £1,000 million per year’ to ‘release resources to expand social spending at home and allow more generous aid to poor nations’. 122 The union emphasised that ‘among the items that bear heavily in the general election – prices, homes, hospitals and schools’ was reducing defence spending, which needed to be ‘declared firmly and clearly by Labour’. Stan Newens, the former Labour MP, spoke passionately from the floor when he recalled the ‘euphoria’ after Labour’s 1964 election victory before it was ‘forced to mutilate our programme’ and ‘sacrifice the aims we had stated’ as ‘we refused to shed the crippling burden of our overseas military expenditure’.123 Newens spoke for many on the left when he advised that defence had to be cut if Labour was to realise the ambitions it had set itself ‘in so many fields’. Thereafter, those on the left considered themselves to be the ‘custodians of the manifesto’ and used the document to try and coerce reluctant ministers to implement socialist reforms. A National Enterprise Board was set up to extend public ownership, although there was considerable resistance to it from the Labour leadership and private enterprise as battle lines were drawn

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over the future of British industry. When the next general election came in February 1974, Labour was committed to reducing defence spending by hundreds of millions of pounds to an approximate figure of a European ‘average’ of GNP: the ‘ultimate objective of the movement towards a more satisfactory relationship in Europe must be the mutual and concurrent phasing out of NATO and the Warsaw Pact’.124 This was all the more significant when Labour, again led by Harold Wilson, was elected back into government after a narrow electoral victory. To the dismay of the defence industry and allies in NATO, the Labour government was elected on a pledge to reduce the military budget so significantly that it represented a unilateral break with the postwar settlement. The question was whether the government would obey or ignore the pressure from the left.

Notes 1 Matthew Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 127. 2 Nicholas Crafts and Terence Mills, ‘Rearmament to the Rescue? New Estimates of the Impact of “Keynesian” Policies in 1930s’ Britain’, Journal of Economic History, 73:4 (2013), pp. 1077–1104. 3 Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War: The Labour Party during the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 305. 4 Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 119. 5 David Edgerton, ‘War, Reconstruction, and the Nationalisation of Britain, 1939–1951’, Past & Present, 210:6 (2011), p. 46. 6 John Callaghan, ‘The Cold War and the March of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’, Contemporary British History, 15:3 (2001), p. 4 7 Stephen Meredith, Labours Old and New: The Parliamentary Right of the British Labour Party 1970–79 and the Roots of New Labour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 5. 8 Phythian, The Labour Party, War and International Relations, p. 36. 9 Ibid., p. 20. 10 Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 11 Edgerton, Warfare State, p. 101. 12 Geoffrey Owen, From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry since the Second World War (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 303. 13 Edgerton, Warfare State, p. 101. 14 Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (Sevenoaks: Coronet, 1978), pp. 106–108. 15 Jeff Hughes, ‘Mugwumps? The Royal Society and the Governance of PostWar British Science’, in Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914–79, ed. Don

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Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 84. 16 Edgerton, Warfare State, pp. 223–224. 17 Geiger, Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War, p. 37. 18 Grace Huxford, The Korean War in Britain: Citizenship, Selfhood and Forgetting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 4. 19 Hansard, HC Deb 15 February 1951, ‘Defence (Government Policy)’, vol 484 cc623–670. 20 Phythian, The Labour Party, War and International Relations, p. 49. 21 Hansard, HC Deb 23 April 1951, ‘Mr Aneurin Bevan (Statement)’, vol 487 cc34–43. 22 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 138. 23 Hansard, HC Deb 24 April 1951, ‘Mr Harold Wilson (Statement)’, vol 487 cc228–231. 24 Andrew Seaton, ‘Against the “Sacred Cow”: NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine, 1948–72’, Twentieth Century British History, 26:3 (2015), pp. 424–449. 25 Tim Bale, Sacred Cows and Common Sense: The Symbolic Statecraft and Political Culture of the British Labour Party (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 50. 26 David French, Army, Empire, and Cold War: The British Army and Military Policy, 1945–1971 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 150. 27 Michael Dockrill, British Defence Policy since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 44. 28 Lawrence Black, ‘Social Democracy as a Way of Life: Fellowship and the Socialist Union, 1951–9’, Twentieth Century British History, 10:4 (1999), pp. 499–539. 29 Stuart Middleton, ‘“Affluence” and the Left in Britain, c.1958–1974’, English Historical Review, 129:536 (2014), pp. 107–138; Richard Toye and Nicholas Lawton, ‘“The Challenge of Co-Existence”: The Labour Party, Affluence, and the Cold War, 1951–64’, in The British Labour Party and the Wider World, ed. Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis, pp. 145–166; Steven Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture during the “Golden Age”, c. 1950–1970’, Journal of British Studies, 40.2 (2001), pp. 241–267. 30 Darren Lilleker, Against the Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party 1945–89 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). 31 John Callaghan, ‘The Left and the “Unfinished Revolution”: Bevanites and Soviet Russia in the 1950s’, Contemporary British History, 15:3 (2001), p. 63. 32 Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, p. 196. 33 Robert Taylor, ‘Trade Union Freedom and the Labour Party: Arthur Deakin, Frank Cousins and the Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1945–1964’, in The Labour Party: A Centenary History, ed. Brian Brivati and Brian Heffernan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 187–219.

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34 Lawrence Black, ‘“The Bitterest Enemies of Communism”’, p. 28. 35 Ibid., p. 54. 36 Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, p. 44. 37 David French, ‘Duncan Sandys and the Projection of British Power after Suez’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 24:1 (2013), p. 41. 38 Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO), ‘Defence: Outline of Future Policy’ (Cmnd.124), p. 3. 39 Matthew Grant, ‘Home Defence and the Sandys Defence White Paper, 1957’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31:6 (2008), p. 932. 40 Andrew Shonfield, British Economic Policy since the War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), as quoted in Geiger, Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War, p. 2. 41 Edgerton, Warfare State, p. 231. 42 Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010 (London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 60–61. 43 Richard Moore, ‘Bad Strategy and Bomber Dreams: A New View of the Blue Streak Cancellation’, Contemporary British History, 27:2 (2013), p. 160. 44 Richard Crossman, ‘Defence after Blue Streak’, New Statesman, 14 May 1960, p. 701. 45 ‘Labour’s Plan for Science: Reprint of Speech by the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, MP, Leader of the Labour Party, at the Annual Conference, Scarborough, Tuesday, October 1, 1963’, http://nottspolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ Labours-Plan-for-science.pdf [accessed 20 March 2019]. 46 David Edgerton, ‘The “White Heat” Revisited: The British Government and Technology in the 1960s’, Twentieth Century British History, 7 (1996), p. 80. 47 ‘1964 Labour Party Election Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/ 1964/1964-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 20 March 2019]. 48 Perry Anderson, ‘Critique of Wilsonism’, New Left Review, September/October 1964, https://newleftreview.org/issues/I27 [accessed 1 April 2019]. 49 Scott Newton, ‘The Sterling Devaluation of 1967, the International Economy and Post-War Social Democracy’, English Historical Review, 125:515 (2010), pp. 912–945. 50 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 162. 51 Kristan Stoddart, Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1964–70 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 21. 52 Healey, The Time of My Life, p. 302. 53 Philip Ziegler, Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p. 210. 54 Ibid., p. 208. 55 ‘MPs ask for £500m. cuts in defence’, Guardian, 23 July 1965, p. 22. 56 Ian Aitken, ‘Victory on defence for Left’, Guardian, 3 August 1965, p. 1. 57 Edward Pearce, ‘Frank Allaun: Dedicated peace campaigner and thorn in the side of the Labour establishment’, Guardian, 27 November 2002,

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www.theguardian.com/news/2002/nov/27/guardianobituaries.obituaries1 [accessed 4 February 2015]. 58 Frank Allaun, The Struggle for Peace: A Personal Account of Sixty Years Campaigning Inside and Outside of Parliament (London: Labour Action for Peace, 1992), p. 16. 59 Hansard, HC Deb 3 August 1965, ‘Arms Expenditure’, vol 717 cc1605–1622. 60 Sean Straw and John Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Demise of TSR-2, October 1964 –April 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 20:4 (1997), p. 20. 61 HMSO, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Aircraft Industry Appointed by the Minister of Aviation under the Chairmanship of Lord Plowden 1964–65 (Cmnd. 2853). 62 HMSO, Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee 1965–1966 Report (Cmnd. 2937). 63 Callaghan, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History, p. 264. 64 HMSO, Statement on the Defence Estimates 1966: Part I The Defence Review (Cmnd. 2901), p. 1. 65 ‘1966 Labour Party Election Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/ 1966/1966-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 15 June 2019]. 66 French, Army, Empire, and Cold War, p. 270. 67 Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 363. 68 Jim Tomlinson, ‘The British “Productivity Problem” in the 1960s’, Past & Present, 175:1 (2002), pp. 188–210. 69 Cumbria County Library, Barrow-in-Furness, BD/So/7/24, Stop Polaris, November 1967, p. 4. 70 John Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Debate over Arms to South Africa in 1964’, Contemporary British History, 12:3 (1998), pp. 62–63. 71 The Crossman Diaries, ed. Anthony Howard (London: Mandarin, 1991), p. 422. 72 Healey, The Time of My Life, pp. 335–336. 73 Tim Bale, ‘“A Deplorable Episode”? South African Arms and the Statecraft of British Social Democracy’, Labour History Review, 62:1 (1997), p. 78. 74 Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales, p. 14. 75 Rudolph Klein, ‘Labour’s agony’, The Observer, 7 January 1968, p. 8. 76 Dockrill, British Defence since 1945, p. 95. 77 Chris Wrigley, ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Harold Wilson and Labour Foreign Policy 1964–70’, in The Wilson Governments 1964–1970, ed. Richard Coopey, Stephen Fielding and Nick Tiratsoo (London: Pinter, 1993). p. 123. 78 Saki Dockrill, Britain’s Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between Europe and the World? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 215. 79 Bale, ‘“A Deplorable Episode”?’, p. 35. 80 John Campbell, Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), pp. 309–359. 81 Rodney Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 69. 82 Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales since 1964, p. 198.

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83 Nikolas Gardner, ‘The Harold Wilson Government, Airwork Services Limited, and the Saudi Arabian Air Defence Scheme, 1965–73’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42:2 (2007), p. 345. 84 Saul Bronfield, ‘The “Chieftain Tank Affair”: Realpolitik, Perfidy and the Genesis of the Merkava’, Contemporary British History, 29:3 (2014), pp. 380–400; Simon Smith, ‘Centurions and Chieftains: Tank Sales and British Policy towards Israel in the Aftermath of the Six-Day War’, Contemporary British History, 28:2 (2014), pp. 219–239. 85 HMSO, ‘Statement on the Defence Estimates 1968’ (Cmnd. 3540), p. 3. 86 Edward Longinotti, ‘Britain’s Withdrawal from East of Suez: From Economic Determinism to Political Choice’, Contemporary British History, 29:3 (2015), pp. 318–340. 87 Hansard, HC Deb 4 March 1968, ‘Defence’, vol 760 cc50–172. 88 Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party and the War in Vietnam’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 10:2 (2008), pp. 41–70; Kevin Boyle, ‘The Price of Peace: Vietnam, the Pound, and the Crisis of the American Empire’, Diplomatic History, 27:1 (2003), pp. 37–72. 89 Edgerton, Warfare State, pp. 266–268. 90 ‘1970 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1970/1970labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 5 March 2020]. 91 Stephen Thornton, ‘A Case of Confusion and Incoherence: Social Security under Wilson, 1964–70’, Contemporary British History, 20:3 (2006), p. 455. 92 Francis Boyd and Ian Aitken, ‘Chief Whip in despair as 36 desert Labour’, Guardian, 6 March 1970, p. 1. 93 ‘Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961’, https:// avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp [accessed 5 May 2015]. 94 Sergei Khrushchev, ‘The Military-Industrial Complex, 1953–1964’, in Nikita Khrushchev, ed. William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 258. 95 ‘Economic and Social Consequences of Disarmament: Report of Secretary General Transmitting the Study of His Consultative Group’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York 1962, p. 47, https:// stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1175&context=prism [accessed 4 February 2019]. 96 Ibid., p. 52. 97 Peter Southwood, Disarming Military Industries: Turning an Outbreak into an Enduring Legacy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 190. 98 Brenes, For Might and for Right, p. 105. 99 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 100 Robert Sam Anson, McGovern: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 136. 101 Jennifer Bayot, ‘Seymour Melman, 86, dies; Spurred Anti-war movement’, The New York Times, 18 December 2004, p. A17. 102 Seymour Melman, ‘Economic Alternatives to Arms Prosperity’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 351 (1964), p. 131.

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103 James Cypher, ‘Economic Consequences of Armaments Production: Institutional Perspectives of J.K. Galbraith and T.B. Veblen’, Journal of Economic Issues, 42:1 (2008), pp. 45–46. 104 Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 98. 105 Omer Carey, The Military-Industrial Complex and United States Foreign Policy (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1969); William Proxmire, Report from Wasteland: America’s Military-Industrial Complex (New York: Praeger, 1970); Sam Sarkesian, The Military-Industrial Complex: A Reassessment (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972); J.A. Stockfisch, Plowshares Into Swords: Managing the American Defense Establishment (New York: Mason and Lipscomb, 1973); Steven Rosen, Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1973). 106 Southwood, Disarming Military Industries, p. 98. 107 Mary Kaldor, ‘Robert Neild obituary’, Guardian, 8 January 2019, www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jan/08/robert-neild-obituary [accessed 4 April 2020]. 108 Frank Barnaby, ‘Frank Blackaby: economist with a passion for world peace and disarmament’, Guardian, 20 May 2000, www.theguardian.com/news/2000/ may/20/guardianobituaries [accessed 4 April 2020]. 109 The Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute, The Arms Trade with the Third World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 110 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 185. 111 Meredith, Labours Old and New, pp. 14–15. 112 Mark Wickham-Jones, Economic Strategy and the Labour Party: Politics and Policymaking (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 119. 113 John Callaghan, ‘Rise and Fall of the Alternative Economic Strategy: From Internationalisation of Capital to “Globalisation”’, Contemporary British History, 14:3 (2000), p. 109. 114 Richard Jobson, ‘A New Hope for an Old Britain?’ Nostalgia and the British Labour Party’s Alternative Economic Strategy, 1970–1983’, Journal of Policy History, 27:4 (2015), pp. 670–694; Stuart Holland, ‘Alternative European and Economic Strategies’, in Reassessing 1970s Britain, ed. Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 106–107. 115 Tam Dalyell, ‘Mikardo, Ian [known as Mik]’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 25 May 2006. 116 Roy Mason, Paying the Price (London: Robert Hale, 1999), p. 138. 117 Wickham-Jones, Economic Strategy and the Labour Party, p. 119. 118 Paul McCormick, ‘The Labour Party: Three Unnoticed Changes’, British Journal of Political Science, 10:3 (1980), p. 383. 119 Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘Custodians of the Manifesto: The Struggle over Labour’s Electoral Platforms, 1974–1983’, in Electoral Pledges in Britain since 1918, ed. David Thackeray and Richard Toye (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 209.

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120 Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), NEC Home Policy Committee, 7 May 1973, ‘Labour’s Programme for Britain’, p. 2.8. 121 Lewis Minkin, The Labour Party Conference: A Study in the Politics of IntraParty Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 345. 122 LHASC, 1973 Labour Party Conference Report, p. 303. 123 LHASC, NEC Home Policy Committee, 7 May 1973, ‘Labour’s Programme for Britain’, p. 2.8. 124 ‘February 1974 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labourparty.org.uk/manifestos/ 1974/Feb/1974-feb-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 5 February 2015].

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Guns before butter: Labour’s defence review

In February 1974 the Labour party was elected on a manifesto to reduce defence spending by hundreds of millions of pounds. Labour inherited an economic crisis that was, in the words of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, the worst Britain had ‘ever faced in peacetime’ that called for a ‘period of sacrifice’ where the ‘burdens would be fairly shared’.1 The Conservative government had bequeathed a disastrous economic situation with an ill-advised public spending ‘dash for growth’ resulting in inflationary pressures and ever-rising prices. The NHS creaked under the financial strain as workers went on strike to resist government spending cuts.2 Healey set a target of a £3.7 billion reduction to public spending across all departments, and defence was no exception. The left called for Britain’s defence spending to be set at a rate closer to a ‘European average’ and even an immediate reduction of £1 billion to alleviate the strain on the economy. As Michael Dockrill noted, by 1974 it was acknowledged that Britain bore a larger defence burden than its allies in Europe and that these economic rivals enjoyed a ‘decided advantage’ for that reason.3 The Labour government was even more divided than it had been in the 1960s, with each minister guarding their own departmental budget. Defence became primarily a matter of political economy as ministers clashed over its scale and purpose. This was a point where the defence economy could have been significantly reduced – but only if the government desired to do so. Instead, the majority of Harold Wilson’s government committed itself to the defence economy. Shortly after his appointment as Labour’s defence secretary, Roy Mason commenced a review of military expenditure, just as Healey had done in the 1960s. Backed by the Ministry of Defence and crucially the Prime Minister, Mason reaffirmed Britain’s commitment to the Cold War and ensured that the defence economy emerged unscathed.4 In what Ann Lane called ‘the politics of managing a party deeply divided internally on the question of defence spending’, the Labour leadership won a decisive victory over the left.5 This chapter shows how government ministers, snatching victory from the jaws of the Treasury and the left, used employment

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to justify military expenditure during one of the worst economic crises in the postwar era. Although there was a compelling argument to reduce spending on expensive ‘prestige’ military projects and divert investment elsewhere, a combination of industry, politics and the military ensured that the defence economy survived. The result infuriated the left. As one account remarked, the cuts announced in the defence review were ‘phoney’ and revealed how the Labour leadership could manipulate the figures and ‘fulfil its manifesto pledge by statistical sleight of hand’, proving that, ‘if anything’, it was ‘less capable of making major changes in defence policy than in 1964–70’.6

‘The Reds weren’t just under the bed; they were in it’ When Harold Wilson returned to 10 Downing Street on 4 March 1974 as Prime Minister, Labour MPs nervously awaited a call to be offered a ministerial portfolio. One such hopeful was Roy Mason who had spent two enjoyable years as a junior minister at the Ministry of Defence with responsibility for military procurement in the late 1960s.7 The MP for his native town of Barnsley sat in the kitchen of his rented accommodation drinking tea with his landlady when he was called for by the Prime Minister. To his delight he was offered the position of defence secretary. For Mason this was a dream appointment that he likened to ‘going home’ to his most favoured of departments. His apparent delight confused his fellow Yorkshireman; Harold Wilson leaned forward and told Mason plainly, ‘it will be tough’.8 Roy Mason was as good an example as could be found of a right-wing Labour MP who, toughened by his experience of deprivation, was inspired by a deep sense of community, patriotism and social conservatism. Only a few months earlier he had picketed alongside the coal miners who eventually brought down the Conservative government. A former miner himself and a National Union of Mineworkers official, he told a rally in 1973 that it was ‘a pity that we cannot close all the mines tomorrow, but we cannot. The nation depends upon them. That is why we must pay the miners, and pay them well, until that day of the final closure gloriously arrives.’ 9 But for all his working-class credentials, Mason never identified as left-wing. Like others on the right of the Labour movement who endured the infighting of the 1950s and early 1960s, he believed in a mixed capitalist economy and abhorred any sympathy towards the Soviet Union. Mason was not a conciliatory figure and his diminutive stature was compensated by his pugnacious temperament. The Ulster Unionist John Laird later described him as ‘a hard, wee rubber ball – he kept bouncing’.10 He served in two of the most hazardous ministerial positions: defence from 1974 to 1976 and

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Northern Ireland from 1976 to 1979. For taking a hard line against republican paramilitaries, he and his wife had to live with additional security for the rest of their lives. This prospect of an assassination attempt would have rattled many a minister, but for the staunchly patriotic Roy Mason, as the title of his autobiography stated, it was worth Paying the Price. But this was not the only price that he felt was worth paying. While defence secretary, he battled to protect his department’s budget in the face of attacks from the Treasury and from the left. With respect to the former, Mason considered another fellow Yorkshireman, Denis Healey, a formidable adversary given his tenure as defence secretary in the 1960s. Although both men were on the right of the party and represented seats in their native county, their relationship was strained. As the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Michael Carver later observed, ‘the principal challenge to the Ministry [of Defence] was that of its traditional ogre, the Chancellor’, who in the form of Denis Healey’s ‘bushy eyebrows it was impossible to pull the main product of his native Yorkshire – wool’.11 However difficult his relations were with Healey, Mason reserved his most intense feelings for the left. As one biographical account put it, his ‘distaste for what he dismissed as the fantasies and conspiracies of the left was deepened by his appointment as secretary of state for defence’ as he ‘enthused about the military and reacted negatively to attempts within the Labour Party to reassess the fundamentals of defence’.12 But he could not ignore the left’s claims, personified by Ian Mikardo, whom Mason considered a ‘dangerous opponent because he was a slick, clever operator, with a fair degree of personal popularity in the party’.13 Alarmed by the position that the left had in the party machinery, he recalled that ‘the Reds weren’t just under the bed, they were in it’.14 Mason inherited a defence economy that had grown considerably since Labour had been in government four years earlier. Reversing the reduction of defence spending in the 1960s, the Conservative government led by Edward Heath increased military expenditure to over 6 per cent of Gross National Product. £400 million was spent on the British Army on the Rhine, whilst the building of an aircraft carrier, Invincible, was commenced by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1973.15 The Conservatives authorised the enhancement of the Polaris warhead to counter improvements in anti-ballistic missile defence systems around Moscow. Codenamed ‘Chevaline’, the project spiralled to over five times its initial estimate and cost over £1 billion by the time of its completion in 1980.16 In aerospace the Conservatives decided not to participate in the European Airbus or support the British Aerospace Corporation 3–11 passenger aircraft, which some considered a feasible rival to the American giant, Boeing. The result was that the sector was even more reliant on military orders, with over half of aerospace workers tasked on

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defence contracts. The nationalisation of Rolls-Royce in 1971 after the American company Lockheed cancelled a deal to buy the RB211 engine was because it was ‘essential to national defence’.17 Rolls-Royce was Britain’s pre-eminent aero-engines manufacturer and provided reactors for the Royal Navy’s expanding fleet of nuclear submarines. As the economy ‘stagflated’ as inflation and unemployment went up simultaneously in the early 1970s, the Conservatives used defence procurement to stimulate employment, such as the Nimrod maritime patrol vessels ordered in 1972.18 In short Heath’s government reversed Labour’s reforms in the 1960s and accelerated the growth of the defence economy. As David Edgerton noted, ‘by the mid-1970s defence R&D had grown very considerably and reached levels, in real terms, higher than those of the 1960s peak’.19 Roy Mason accepted the need to reassess the defence budget given the condition of the economy, but the question was how much could be cut without undermining Britain’s strategic credibility. He was no starry-eyed nostalgist for an imperial role and was focused primarily on the Cold War frontier in Europe. He acknowledged that the Warsaw Pact’s numerical superiority was overwhelming, with over 40 per cent more soldiers than NATO. He admitted that in conventional forces ‘the West was outnumbered and outgunned’ and it would have been ‘insane to drop our guard when faced with those types of odds’.20 The memory of the Soviet Union’s suppression of the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’ was still fresh and there was evidence to suggest that it had made significant technological improvements to its ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines. The defence review was officially announced in the Queen’s speech to Parliament on 12 March, which included a vague commitment to ‘a modern and effective defence system while reducing its cost as a proportion of our national resources’.21 In a written parliamentary response to a Labour colleague, Mason explained that he initiated ‘a review of current defence commitments and capabilities against the resources that, given the economic prospects of the country, we can afford to devote to defence’.22 Such a review was politically and strategically sensitive. As well as the implications for the defence economy, international allies demanded consultation and reassurance. Dismissing an amendment by the left in Parliament calling for immediate cuts to the defence programme, the defence secretary replied that he ‘would not take arbitrary decisions, and a review [would] be conducted calmly and rationally’.23 The official advice from the civil service had been to conduct a review covertly behind the scenes, a view expressed by the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt. But Mason disagreed, dismissing Hunt as ‘the voice of the true civil servant, obsessed with secrecy but with little understanding of the political realities’.24 However, although the review was announced in Parliament, developments within ministerial

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departments remained classified. In the weeks following the announcement of the review, the Ministry of Defence outlined the fundamentals of Britain’s defence posture, which it determined was the ‘critical level’.25 This involved the nuclear deterrent, conventional naval forces, combat aircraft and an army presence on the continent. As a negotiating position with the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence proposed a ‘first level’, which would relinquish some support roles in the Mediterranean, reduce auxiliary military transport and phase out responsibilities in far-flung dependencies, such as Diego Garcia and Gan, as well as reduce pay among service personnel and support staff. Sir Michael Carver was ‘determined to secure a dominant voice in this exercise for the chiefs of staff, setting out clear priorities and establishing a “critical level” of forces below which Britain’s support of NATO would be put in question’.26 In a reference to the left, the Ministry objected to ‘spectacular individual cuts that would not be compatible and would unravel the Alliance’, advising Labour’s defence ministers to protect the ‘first level’ at all costs ‘despite the inevitable mauling’ Britain would receive from its NATO allies for relinquishing roles in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.27 But the economy was never too far away. Knowing that employment was central to the government’s political agenda, the Ministry planned to revert back to the jobs argument as frequently as possible. It claimed that reducing defence down to the ‘critical level’ would result in heavy immediate layoffs, something in the region of ‘50,000 servicemen and 10,000 workers in defence industry’.28 Some defence industries risked being run down without any chance of a revival, such as helicopter manufacturing, which would result in the military having to rely on imports from abroad. Certain companies would be particularly badly affected. Rolls-Royce, which would lose five thousand jobs in Bristol and Derby if defence projects were scrapped, was still reeling from the RB211 crisis and it relied heavily on another state-funded contract, the supersonic passenger aircraft Concorde, which used the Olympus aero-engine used in the Vulcan nuclear bomber. By 1974 Concorde was overdue and well over its estimated cost with no interest from international buyers and was vulnerable to cancellation given the state of the economy. This combination of fragile civil and defence work made Bristol liable to thousands of redundancies with few alternatives for displaced workers. Bristol was not unique in this respect and Labour defence ministers capitalised on this during negotiations. Other areas were similarly reliant on a defence monoculture. The Ministry of Defence added that the guided weapons industry ‘would become obsolete’ and the technological base, on which hundreds of millions of pounds were already spent, would also be lost and result in unemployment at Barrow-in-Furness, Chatham and Devonport, towns already dependent on military work, with the Ministry of Defence

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stressing that ‘the economy might not be able to absorb’ this displaced defence workforce. As compelling as the employment argument was, it was not a given that this would be an effective strategy. Large parts of the civil service felt that the Ministry of Defence had escaped with uncontrolled spending for too long. The Treasury doubted the integrity of the defence estimates with its deficit of between £50 million and £100 million in the 1973/74 financial year. An exasperated official bemoaned the ‘old story of a department leaving central financial work to a junior, and not informing themselves at senior level’.29 At Denis Healey’s instruction, all government departments were subject to a spending audit to determine how savings could be made as Labour sought to reverse the Conservatives’ ‘dash for growth’ overspending that led both to inflation and to a public sector deficit. No sector was safe from the Treasury, not even the social and welfare services that were so highly valued by the Labour movement. But of all the departments, the Ministry of Defence was considered the worst culprit for overspending as the ‘errors’ in its finances were of a ‘much bigger magnitude than the social services programmes’ and that ‘from the point of view of economic management and financial forecasting’ there was to be ‘no easy road on defence’.30 Yet, for all the compelling reasons for cutting the defence budget, the Treasury faced a difficult task politically as the House of Commons’s Expenditure Committee made up of MPs from both main parties concluded that ‘shortterm cuts’ would ‘affect the efficiency of the Services to an unacceptable extent’. As the Guardian reported, this point had ‘been fully conceded by Mr Mason, if not the left wing of his party’.31

A crisis in Cyprus and a nuclear test in Nevada Despite announcing the review in the House of Commons, Roy Mason and his junior ministers did not give much away in defence debates. However, this policy was interrupted by the revelation of a British nuclear test in the Nevada desert in June 1974 as part of the top-secret Polaris improvement programme, Chevaline. Initially the Ministry of Defence tried to keep press speculation at bay by refusing to either ‘confirm or deny’ that a test had occurred.32 But the left went on the attack and, once again, economy was the main concern. In the House of Commons Frank Allaun asked Harold Wilson if the ‘so-called improvement to the cost of the Polaris missile’ came ‘at a cost of about £100 millions?’ 33 The Prime Minister tried to underplay the cost, responding that the nuclear deterrent made up ‘£39 millions out of a total expenditure of £3,600 millions’ in defence spending per year, laconically adding that he was ‘not under-rating the importance of £39

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millions, but it should not be over-rated either’.34 But this did not take the heat out of the controversy. The left wing convened an emergency meeting and concluded that ‘the government was prepared to ignore majority feeling in the party, provided that it could be presented as a fait accompli’.35 Contrasting motions were put forward by both factions of the party, with the right praising the government for ‘taking the necessary steps to ensure Britain’s defence’, whilst the left condemned the government for not consulting the parliamentary party beforehand.36 As Ian Mikardo lamented, ‘that leaves us back where we were before the meeting started, doesn’t it?’ With the party locked in stalemate, Wilson stepped in to tilt the argument decisively in favour of defence. At a cabinet meeting on 27 June the Prime Minister faced disgruntled ministers angered by the lack of consultation.37 In her diary the social services secretary Barbara Castle noted an unusual solidarity as ministers on both the left and the right agreed that the secretive nature of the test needed to be re-examined.38 In response Wilson restated that the test was initiated by the previous Conservative government and was authorised after a meeting of relevant ministers including Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey and Roy Mason.39 The issue was not discussed again in cabinet until 20 November. By that point Labour had narrowly won a general election that October with a majority of four seats, but it did so on an election manifesto that was again further to the left. In response to the test the left included a pledge to renounce ‘any intention of moving towards a new generation of strategic nuclear weapons’, while saying that, in the event of ‘closure of or cutting back on defence establishments’, ‘alternative sources of employment will be sought, where possible by taking on major contract work and research for outside industry’.40 At the November cabinet meeting Wilson divulged little and admitted only there ‘was a little bit of modernisation going on’ to the Polaris missile.41 Although there was a wider discussion on the purpose of the nuclear deterrent, it was matters of economy that again predominated. Whilst the Prime Minister felt that the improvements ‘necessary to ensure the continuing credibility of the present force’ were ‘relatively cheap’, other ministers weighted in with ‘strong views held by some members of the Government Party’ that the money could have been spent elsewhere.42 The cabinet minute, which reflected the majority in the government, emphasised that ‘even with the proposed improvements’, the ‘cost of the Polaris force was less than 2 per cent of the defence budget’ and that ‘this was a small price to pay for the advantages it conferred’. With a vigorous debate extending beyond the allocated time, Harold Wilson excused himself early to unveil a plaque to Winston Churchill, a symbolic gesture in the circumstances.43 Barbara Castle was disgusted and lamented in her diary that ‘the spirit of CND no longer walks the land’.44

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This ‘little bit of modernisation’ was another example of Wilsonian sleight of hand. Rumours of a Polaris improvement programme had circulated within the party and the wider peace movement for some time. Particular attention was given to the possibility of a Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicle (MIRV) that was developed by the Americans for their Poseidon ballistic missiles. In 1974 CND dedicated a pamphlet specifically to it, titled We Shall Not Be MIRVed.45 The government repeatedly denied that any improvements to the Polaris missile resembled the MIRV, but this was only partially true. Although not the same, Chevaline did entail multiple warheads as well as decoys and penetration aids to confuse Soviet defence systems. The controversial test, which took place on 24 May 1974, was the first such trial of this system, with another taking place in 1976.46 Although the project was inherited from the Conservatives, the previous Wilson administration had initiated preliminary research into a Polaris improvement in the late 1960s as part of the ‘Moscow Criterion’, the ability to deliver a knock-out blow to the Russian capital that was deemed the minimum requirement for the British deterrent to be credible.47 In dry technical terms Chevaline stopped short of a ‘new generation’ of nuclear weapon systems the left fundamentally opposed, but it was none the less significant enough to warrant its concealment. Politically, had the full extent and cost of Chevaline been exposed, it would have been disastrous for the government. As Kristan Stoddart observed, in ‘the absence of a large majority in Parliament the Labour frontbench could not afford to alienate backbench MPs who could exercise considerable influence on government policy’.48 Mason admitted that the left had been ‘sniffing around the issue’ for months, adding that it was the government’s ‘best kept secret’ and its revelation would have ‘torn the party apart’.49 He expressed his gratitude to Wilson’s ‘guile and political skill’ in his handling of the issue, concluding that if Chevaline was cancelled ‘the French would have been left as the only effective nuclear power’ in Europe and that Britain’s influence ‘would have been diminished’. As Stoddart observed, there was ‘little doubt’ in Wilson’s mind of the ‘politico-military implications’ even if he had a ‘limited understanding of the difficulties of developing the cutting-edge technologies involved’.50 As the project spiralled beyond its initial estimates in the early 1970s, Wilson did everything he could to restrict debate on it.51 This episode demonstrated that the Prime Minister was willing to take decisions ‘sharply contrary to the spirit of its election pledge’ when it came to defence.52 During the nuclear test controversy in June 1974 the editor of The Times pondered whether the ‘fratricidal squabble’ over the nuclear test might have prompted the Labour government ‘to appease the left in other areas of policy’, even if that was ‘damaging economically, as well as electorally’.53

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If the episode had ever put defence on the back foot, a small but convenient conventional conflict restored its political and economic capital. The Cypriot crisis began after a military coup d’état unseated the President, Archbishop Makarios, followed by a Turkish invasion of the northern part of the island. As foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan tried to broker a peaceful solution alongside the American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger.54 But when Turkey mounted another invasion in August, Roy Mason organised a military task force to rescue stranded Britons as well as other foreign nationals caught up in the conflict. In what he characteristically described as ‘the biggest rescue operation undertaken by British forces since Dunkirk’, 27,000 civilians were evacuated by the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy without a single casualty.55 The Cypriot emergency showed that Britain could still play a meaningful role in conventional wars in the European theatre. The fact that it was in the Mediterranean, a region that the Ministry of Defence wished to remain militarily involved in but from which the Treasury wanted to withdraw, was a timely boost for Mason. The press reported sardonically that ‘if Britain’s military involvement in Cyprus was not so obviously reluctant, it might almost have been arranged by the public relations staff at the Ministry of Defence to demonstrate just how difficult further expenditure cuts are going to be’.56

Defence cut: But is it enough? The military operation in Cyprus inspired a more assertive stance from the Ministry of Defence. In a fraught meeting on 12 September 1974 its representatives clashed with Treasury officials. Responding to claims that its figures were unreliable, the Ministry argued that there was ‘an unmanageable set of variables’ including ‘strikes, shortages, excess demand in the defence industries, and in the industries which supply defence contractors’ as well as the ‘general economic situation’.57 One Treasury official noted the ‘great deal of opposition’ that was ‘explicitly described at one point as Treasury interference with the MoD’s affairs’. By the end of the discussion the Treasury team ‘managed to smooth ruffled feelings’ and remarked that by the end of the meeting there ‘was sweetness, if not much light’.58 The Ministry of Defence pressed ahead with its agenda, effectively outmanoeuvring the Treasury by bringing a preliminary defence review to the cabinet for approval. At a meeting on 31 October Wilson advised his ministers that Britain would withdraw from commitments in Brunei, Cyprus (pending a peaceful outcome to the crisis), Oman and Mauritius.59 This would be accompanied by a withdrawal from support roles in the Mediterranean, eight thousand fewer troops in West Germany, and three thousand fewer

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in the home army, subject to conditions in Northern Ireland, who would be demobilised over the course of a decade. Whilst some ministers found the proposed reductions ‘disturbing’, the official minute recorded that ‘it was argued that a high level of defence spending was a contributory factor in our slow rate of growth’ and that ‘major reductions were necessary if we were going to strengthen the economy’.60 The ‘industrial implications’ were thought to be ‘manageable’, although there would ‘be difficulties in particular areas’ and it would be necessary to have ‘consultations with both sides of industry to minimise any adverse effects’. The defence review was a sensitive matter of both political economy and diplomacy. How much the government was willing to spend impacted not only the defence economy at home but relations with key international allies. Aware that defence spending was a particularly divisive matter in an already fractured cabinet, Wilson wanted to get the review through Parliament as urgently as possible, advising that the timing ‘for international consultation’ with allies was ‘very tight’. The Prime Minister was apprehensive about the reaction that was likely to come from Washington. Both the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the President Gerald Ford expressed their displeasure to Wilson and other high-ranking officials, including the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt and the foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan.61 On 20 November Wilson informed the cabinet that he and a small delegation had visited Bonn and Washington earlier in the month to discuss the proposed reductions. Having met with Kissinger and the American defence secretary James Schlesinger, Wilson reported that the discussions ‘were very friendly’ and that the Americans had ‘shown an understanding of our problems’, but were none the less concerned by the outlined review, particularly the withdrawal of personnel from West Germany and the Mediterranean. Concluding, the Prime Minister warned his colleagues that the proposed defence cuts represented ‘the limit of what the Americans regarded as tolerable’.62 But it was not just the left who felt that the time had come to restrain the defence economy. Shortly after the commencement of the review, the government instructed the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) to investigate the economic impact of Britain’s defence expenditure. The CPRS was founded by Heath in 1971 to incorporate specialists into policymaking. Involving economists and industrialists, the CPRS was, in the words of Simon James, ‘accepted, challenged and ignored’ by ministers over its twelve-year history until it was finally disbanded by Margaret Thatcher.63 In a confidential document circulated exclusively to the cabinet, the CPRS concluded that the ‘very large increase in the UK’s defence expenditure’ after the Korean War ‘had very serious consequences’ and a ‘prejudicial effect’ on economic performance that was made more difficult by the ‘concentration of skill

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and effort on defence’.64 Military expenditure reduced productive investment in industry and denied resources that could have been better used to develop engineering exports just as international competitor nations ‘with smaller defence burdens’ were ‘able to gain strong competitive advances in international trade’. The report advised that the economy required ‘a major shift of resources into the balance of payments and productive investment’, something that defence would have ‘an important part to play in’. The CPRS advocated that the government make immediate cuts to the defence programme, arguing that the impact on employment would ‘be manageable’ and would make a ‘particular contribution to meeting the present and perspective shortage [….] in skilled manpower’. Had this document been made public knowledge, it would have strengthened the left’s case immeasurably. Here was an example of leading authorities close to government who all concluded that the defence economy was responsible for Britain’s relative economic decline since the Second World War. They were as far removed from the left as could be imagined, including among them bankers and company executives. The report also represented commercial private industry’s resentment of the defence sector’s historically close relationship with the state and its absorption of vital material resources. This was the same argument that Harold Wilson had used to such good effect in his 1963 ‘white heat’ speech. But ten years later the world-weary Prime Minister was much more pragmatic when it came to the sensitivities of statecraft. The CPRS report was discussed by the cabinet, but it was recorded that ministers generally felt that the employment implications of the proposed cuts would again be ‘manageable’ and there was no need to reverse the defence economy in the way that the report suggested. On the contrary, some Labour ministers extolled the virtues of a functioning military industry and its wider economic contribution, not least in the realm of arms exports, which would ‘take up some of the capacity released by the reduced requirements of our own Services’.65 The provocative CPRS report and its damning verdict on the postwar military-industrial complex was condemned to the archives. On 3 December 1974 Roy Mason announced the preliminary conclusions of his defence review in the House of Commons where he stated that, over the following ten years, defence spending would be reduced by approximately £4.7 billion. He claimed that the review took ‘account, on the one hand, of our economic situation and, on the other, of the threat to our national security, the overriding importance of NATO, our position as a leading European Power and our responsibilities overseas’.66 The reductions in the planned defence programme were thought likely ‘to reduce employment in the defence industries by only some 10,000, or 4 per cent., over the period up to 1978–79’, with some areas more acutely affected than

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others. When asked towards the end of his statement by Arthur Palmer, a Labour backbencher on the right of the party, if he was committed to the defence of freedom and ‘social democracy’ in Europe, Mason responded forcefully that he was a ‘fervent patriot, and I should not, as Secretary of State for Defence, allow the forces within Western Europe, in particular, to be run down whilst I am in that office to the point of which I personally should feel that the security of the State or the defence of the realm was in jeopardy’. The review was reported as a victory for the defence economy. Under the headline ‘Mason carves kindest cuts over 10 years’ the Guardian concluded that there was no chance of resignations from the military ‘top brass’; instead, the government made a ‘long list of compromises, military, diplomatic and party political’.67 The commitment to the nuclear deterrent was reaffirmed, as was the controversial aircraft carrier, HMS Invincible. Only the conventional surface navy was affected, with a plan to reduce warship building by one-seventh. There was comparably little discussion of the military threat posed by the Warsaw Pact; instead, the review was a matter of domestic political economy. In one press analysis the decision to move ship refitting to the Royal Dockyards aroused comment from one defence correspondent who noted that, with ‘46,000 workers’ at stake, the government was ‘trying to keep unemployment down’ in ‘marginal Labour constituencies, including Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth’.68 One senior political journalist felt that the defence review was ‘flavoured to the taste of the Germans not only in that it intensifies the European emphasis of our defence effort’ but also because it showed that the government had ‘the measure of the Left’.69 However, he sounded a note of caution: once Mason’s ‘deceptive figuring’ was worked out, there would be ‘more bitter complaints than we have yet heard’. The Times was more complimentary to the ‘patriot’ Mason, goading the left by asking what ‘Mr Allaun and Mr Mikardo would do if they had the chance to decide between defence and social spending’ – ‘would they leave any effective defence at all?’ 70 Although it passed through the cabinet and Parliament, Mason’s preliminary defence review sparked a furious row in the Labour party. In the party’s Labour Weekly newspaper the left felt that the review was ‘totally inadequate’ in meeting ‘the pressing needs of the immediate situation’.71 Sidney Bidwell, a veteran backbencher, questioned if the savings made would assist the ‘national economy in these troubled times’ and if the ‘proposed cuts really measured up to the desires of our movement to turn swords into ploughshares?’ 72 Responding to this criticism, Mason stressed that ‘massive cuts’ could not be made at ‘a drop of a hat’ as it would ‘not be fair to all those servicemen and civilians most affected’.73 But his assertion that Britain spent

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less on defence ‘then the French or Germans’ and about as much per head as ‘the Norwegians and the Dutch’ was met with incredulity by the left-leaning Labour Weekly, which welcomed the possibility of ‘more socially useful areas of public expenditure’ but considered the review as little more than a ‘step along the road’ to deeper cuts in the future.74 The editor argued that ‘in spite of all our economic difficulties – caused in part at least by our over-commitment to the defence of the West since the end of the war’, Britain would still ‘continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of the defence burden’ by spending more than its European allies, including West Germany, a ‘far richer country which has long land boundaries with Warsaw Pact states’. Tribune, the paper of the Labour left, described Mason’s proposed cuts as ‘illusory’ and likened the situation to the three years between 1965 and 1968 when ‘the Labour Cabinet had resisted the will of the rank and file over ending our military bases East of Suez and arms spending’, only to eventually give way. The group of Labour left MPs who wrote the article warned that ‘this time we must not wait for three years if we are determined to avoid the suffering that delay caused and the electoral defeat which followed in 1970’.75 The episode demonstrated that defence was regarded primarily as an economic and employment issue by both sides of the argument. Supporting Mason, the junior defence minister Alan Lee Williams emphasised that the cuts were ‘not phoney’ and that it was likely that ten thousand jobs would be cut by the end of the decade as a result. He argued that ‘of course we are right to save money and to recognise the economic situation’, but a balance needed to be struck, a feat that he believed the defence secretary had achieved and ought to have been recognised by ‘Comrades in the Labour Party’ who should ‘stop moaning’.76 Such was the sustained criticism from the left, Mason issued another statement in February 1975 that provided a firmer economic justification for a thriving defence industry. He warned that ‘shipbuilding, the aircraft industry, other defence equipment firms and particularly electronics would lose substantial orders’ had further cuts been proposed.77 He added that ‘pulling out of international projects such as MRCA’ Tornado aircraft would have the ‘most severe consequences both for British industry and for our hopes of future collaboration on defence with our European partners’, while exports would have suffered and the ‘armed forces would become increasingly dependent on foreign purchases for their equipment’. The justification for defence spending was based on a form of economic nationalism, one that fused the interest of domestic industrial firms with the strategic oversight of military-industrial projects. These arguments had deep roots in a nationalised defence economy that was cultivated by the

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British state in the postwar era and that enjoyed a form of protectionism outside the competitive conditions of a market economy. Mason refused to allow the left a last word on the social implications of the defence economy; instead, he frequently reverted to the justification that Britain’s military industry was itself a form of economic stimulus at a time when the wider manufacturing industry was in crisis. The review staked out two very different interpretations of social democracy. Whereas the right of the party considered the defence economy an example of productive state management of a capitalist economy, one that contributed to the socialist objective of full employment, the left argued that the defence economy did not serve any social utility and absorbed resources needed to sustain a fairer society and a functioning welfare state. The right self-identified as ‘social democrats’, moderate socialists aligned to the political centre. Indeed, junior ministers involved in the defence review went on to join the Social Democratic Party which broke away from Labour in 1981, including Alan Lee Williams, James Wellbeloved and Bill Rodgers. Although this strand of centrist social democracy made the running with Labour back in government, the defence review was still provisional and liable to both economic and political fluctuations. The left went on the offensive by using the party machinery to hit back. In Labour’s international committee Frank Allaun proposed a motion ‘that the NEC, disturbed by the fact that there is to be an increase in arms spending, in both real and cash terms’, would ask ‘the government to make substantial reductions’. For Allaun the ministers’ reliance on job creation as a justification for military expenditure was not acceptable; the defence economy had to be converted: ‘what must be provided is different employment, not unemployment’.78 Hostile to the industrial, media, military and political establishments, Allaun complained to Labour Weekly that ‘the Press, [and the] Lords are not interested in arms cuts. This is partly why millions of newspaper readers do not yet realise that the arms budget is going up, and not down. We cannot tolerate this failure to carry out our election pledge.’ 79 Unedifying spectacles of party disunity were played out in the full view of the House of Commons. In one late-night debate the junior defence minister Bill Rodgers dismissed the left as being either ‘cynical or disillusioned as to be unrepresentative of the people of this country’ and were ‘either extraordinarily naive or extraordinarily hypocritical’.80 The latter description was an important one. Although he had no documentary evidence to prove it, Mason later claimed in his memoir that several left-wing MPs pleaded with him in private to spare their constituencies from defence cuts. He specifically named the MP for Preston, Stan Thorne, who represented a marginal constituency that relied on military work at British Aerospace Corporation. The other was Eric Heffer, a trenchant critic of Britain’s Cold

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War military role who none the less asked Mason to spare the shipyards of his native Liverpool.81 Whether such meetings happened is far from certain; going off the record would have prevented the revelation of embarrassing evidence later. There is no documentary evidence in Mason’s personal papers held in his native Barnsley. Nevertheless, these exchanges are entirely plausible given how reliant local economies were on defence and how intertwined civil and military production was. The apparent contradiction between some on the left’s private lobbying and its public criticism of the defence economy irritated Labour ministers, particularly when its parliamentary majority was a slender handful of seats. The recalcitrant left was a problem for party discipline as 1974 ended. On 18 December 55 MPs on the left voted against the defence review white paper despite a three-line whip imposed by the government. The exasperated Chief Whip Bob Mellish threatened to resign in protest. Meanwhile, the public spending cuts initiated by the Treasury had failed to relieve the pressure on the economy; deeper reductions were needed, and defence found itself in the line of fire. As one journalist argued on the night of the left’s rebellion, ‘if discipline is to be enforced the Chief Whip needs the backing of his Leader’.82 Harold Wilson did not disappoint.

‘More important than Irishmen with eighteen children’ In 1975 Roy Mason was fighting a battle on two fronts against rival departments on one hand and the left on the other. At the Labour party conference several left-leaning constituencies and trade unions demanded an immediate reduction of £1 billion to the defence budget, with the savings diverted to the social services instead. Not known for any conciliatory behaviour during his ministerial career, Roy Mason dispatched a highly critical letter to the party’s National Executive Committee in February 1975 in which he argued that that the left’s proposed cut of £1 billion would ‘gravely damage NATO strategy and the political cohesion that British security relies on’ and was ‘the height of irresponsibility’.83 The Royal Navy ‘would be decimated’, the British Army on the Rhine would leave ‘a gap of 65 kilometres on the front line’ and the Royal Air Force would be left with an ‘outmoded capability’. Such cuts could precipitate American withdrawal from Western Europe, a nightmare scenario in which Mason argued that Britain would be vilified internationally as ‘the architects of the collapse of NATO’ that would in turn ‘condition their attitude towards Britain as an economic partner’. In Paying the Price Mason dismissed this behaviour as a ‘slash and burn’ approach to policy. But the left continued to build momentum. The National

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Executive Committee sent a letter to the Prime Minister stating that unless defence was reduced immediately there would be ‘insufficient resources to re-equip industry, build more homes and wage war on want on the scale needed’.84 It warned that there could ‘be no repetition by this Labour government of the 1966–70 fiasco’ when the ‘flouting of conference decisions at that time lead to widespread disillusionment and defeat at the general election’. This view was by no means restricted to the left. MPs. The head of the Prime Minister’s own Policy Unit was also fiercely opposed to the initial conclusions reached by the defence review. Bernard Donoghue, an Oxford graduate and former lecturer at the London School of Economics, wrote to Harold Wilson in February 1975, arguing that ‘the savings claimed’ in the review were ‘for the most part phoney’ and that the chiefs of the defence staff were ‘reported to be surprised when it went through virtually unscathed’.85 He advised that the government order a second review ‘except this time under vigorous ministerial and Treasury scrutiny’ instead of being left to the Ministry of Defence. Although Donoghue was certainly not of the left and could be best described as a moderate social democrat, he pleaded with Wilson to reconsider the proportion of national resources that was dedicated to defence given the constraints faced by the wider economy. He stated that defence was ‘not sacrosanct, and in the event of public expenditure cuts’ should be ‘the first item to be cut, not the last’. Donoghue had himself experienced poverty in his youth and the likelihood of cuts in the social services resonated with him deeply. He warned Wilson that he was not alone and that a similar sentiment was spreading through the parliamentary party, even ‘beyond the Mikardo fringe’ on the left. However, the Prime Minister did not budge. Despite the fragility of the economy, Wilson quelled any rumours that further defence cuts were on the cards, advising the cabinet that although all public expenditure programmes were liable to review, it was ‘not appropriate to consider the figures as being provisional in the Defence White paper’.86 Callaghan, Mason and Wilson formed a formidable coalition and were aware of the defence review’s economic and diplomatic implications. This was demonstrated in a letter from Mason to Schlesinger in April 1975 in which he restated Britain’s commitment to military-industrial projects despite its troubled economy. Mason stated that the ‘defence-related industries’ played ‘an important part in national economies’ and ‘industrial development’, providing ‘substantial employment and a significant contribution to the balance of payments’.87 Fending off attacks in the House of Commons a few weeks later, he defended the review on the basis that if the government had implemented ‘sudden and drastic cuts’ the ‘industrial and employment

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implications would have been very serious, at a time when unemployment was rising’.88 Ever mindful of the political capital to be gained from sustaining jobs, he was ‘glad to say’ that he did ‘not foresee any threat of widespread unemployment in any region of the country as a result of the measures we have adopted as a result of the defence review’. However, even the employment argument was beginning to lose traction. Owing to inaccurate figures at the Treasury, Denis Healey’s first budget in 1974 was not sufficiently austere and created inflationary pressures that persisted for the remainder of that government. Thereafter he put more emphasis on reducing inflation rather than creating or sustaining jobs, beginning with his second budget in April 1975. For a Labour government to restrict public spending at a time of rising unemployment was highly significant, and marked, in Jim Tomlinson’s estimation, ‘a turning point in post-war economic policy’ in breaking with the bipartisan Keynesian consensus of injecting money into the economy to revive growth.89 The Chancellor of the Exchequer negotiated with the leading trade unions to keep wage demands down to relieve pressure on the pound. He was monitored closely by Gerald Ford’s administration in Washington, which was itself trying to cope with deep-seated economic problems, and which had lost faith in Harold Wilson’s economic management. By contrast, Healey’s move to deflate the economy was welcomed in Washington as it would boost sterling as a reserve currency for the dollar. However, Ford, Kissinger and Schlesinger were concerned that ‘Mason’s former boss’ would enforce further defence cuts and weaken Britain’s commitment to NATO.90 Mason and Wilson tried to allay these concerns at a meeting with Schlesinger at the Prime Minister’s official country residence in September. In a revealing insight Wilson stated that ‘there was no need to expect any changes to defence expenditure’ given that ‘the defence review had already taken place, and Mr. Mason had received full support from his cabinet colleagues’.91 The only opposition to this, Wilson added, was ‘the Chancellor of the Exchequer on expenditure grounds’ and the left, with whom Wilson had taken ‘a very firm line with opposition as existed within the party’. Concluding, the Prime Minister admitted that ‘although there might be a few maverick backbenchers’ the ‘present British government was robustly pro-NATO’. Washington might have been reassured, but domestic opposition continued to clamour for further defence cuts. Mason was reported to have responded to the Treasury’s demand for an immediate cut of £100 million with ‘audible cries of pain’.92 But as the Guardian reported, ‘while Mr Mason has vigorously protested that defence is being asked to bear too much of the burden, an alliance of Left-wing ministers and Mr Anthony Crosland, the Environment Secretary, has argued that they must reflect labour’s priorities’.93 Another

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report from the CPRS on 3 December outlined that an immediate reduction of £1.5 billion was required across the government’s public spending programmes, which would be ‘very difficult to find’ and would ‘involve further reductions in sensitive programmes’ to ‘which Ministers attach very high priority and could not be exempt’.94 The think-tank summarised each department’s agreed spending cuts over the following two years, which made for sobering reading: £220 million in health care, £200 million in social security and a remarkable £306 million in housing schemes. No exact figure was provided by defence, but it was clear that the CPRS felt that the review had not gone far enough. It pondered whether the ‘defence review could, by adopting a different approach, have produced greater savings in planned public expenditure’. In its report it concluded that defence was ‘low priority’ in contrast to social welfare programmes and should be liable to further reductions to relieve the pressure on health and the social services. Recognising Britain’s ‘reliability as an ally’ and ‘the risk of encouraging other members of NATO to follow suit’, the government’s advisory council was still inclined to ask ‘how big a reduction can be safely made to the defence programme’ without causing a diplomatic or military crisis.95 What happened over the next three cabinet meetings decided the fate of the defence economy for the rest of the decade and beyond. The first instalment took place in a cabinet meeting on 9 December as £3.75 billion worth of public expenditure cuts were sought by the end of 1978. Healey weighed in, stating that ‘in the view of the Treasury a further £350 million’ ought to have been taken out of the defence programme. In search for support from the left, the Chancellor had made an impassioned plea, arguing that ‘it would be wholly unacceptable to the Labour Party if the Government were to cut total public expenditure’ with all that ‘implied for Education and the social services programmes, and at the same time reduced defence by no more than £100 million’.96 Mason’s case was almost entirely based on economic factors, so much so that Bernard Donoghue remarked that he had virtually ‘abandoned the defence argument’ altogether.97 The left-wing industry minister Tony Benn wrote in his diary that Mason led with the argument that the ‘aircraft and shipbuilding industries would be affected’ if such a reduction was implemented.98 The defence secretary cited the export orders for Chieftain tanks to Iran worth £1 billion that might be lost and the fact that shipbuilding ‘could be severely damaged’, specifically naming Swan Hunter in the north-east of England which was ‘asking for the advance placing of a defence order in order to survive’. Mason veered back towards the Cold War with some inflated scaremongering that ‘a future German Government would have reason to embark on vast military expenditure, provoke a change in the whole attitude of the USSR, and thus jeopardise

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international peace’. But this was ridiculed by ministers on the basis that such cuts proposed would not seriously impact Britain’s NATO commitment and that, ‘having spent proportionally more on defence’, the government was ‘merely asking’ its allies ‘to recognise the weaker condition of the British economy’.99 Before the meeting went out of control, Wilson intervened by requesting that Mason draw up a proposal for cuts at a compromise level of £275 million, but only to minor equipment orders, support roles and research. Two days later at the next cabinet meeting, Wilson revised this down to £175 million, but Mason refused to accept this due to its ‘industrial, military, political and international consequences’.100 At that point the issue was put on hold as far as the cabinet was concerned. But the national media, presumably tipped off by disgruntled ministers, focused their attention on the defence debate that represented the sharp end of an already controversial quest for public spending reductions. Healey was depicted in the press as in search for slashing cuts to the defence programme, but Mason and the Prime Minister had presented an argument that defence was a ‘special case’ and that further cuts would ‘lead to big redundancies in the armaments industries at a time of already record levels of unemployment’.101 A week later the Guardian wrote that Healey had revised his request for defence savings from £800 million to £500 million spread over 1977–80, but this was ‘still unacceptably high’ to Mason as fifty thousand jobs in the industry could be affected if Healey’s proposed programme was agreed by the cabinet.102 The day before the next cabinet showdown on 15 January, The Times reported that Mason and his deputy minister, Bill Rodgers, had threatened to resign if excessive defence cuts were ordered.103 The stage was set for a remarkable encounter for those present. In a highly charged cabinet meeting Roy Mason recalled that ‘apart from Jim Callaghan, I didn’t have an ally in the room’ as ‘other colleagues had their own patches to look after’.104 Healey thundered out of the blocks by stating that he ‘deeply resented the series of newspaper leaks which had been damaging to the Government and to the Party’ before considering it ‘untenable’ that Britain should spend more of its Gross National Product on defence than its allies before demanding that Mason make an immediate cut of £220 million.105 But the defence secretary did not consent. As foreign secretary, Callaghan intervened on Mason’s behalf, arguing that the ‘savings already achieved were most satisfactory’ and that from the point of view of the Foreign Office, further cuts would weaken Britain’s relationship ‘with the Americans and the Germans’. But Healey’s deputy at the Treasury, Joel Barnett, responded that a saving of £200 million was ‘a hopelessly inadequate contribution’ given that other departments were prepared to sacrifice twice as much, adding that Mason’s threat of widespread job losses was misleading.

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With Mason in a corner, Callaghan slipped him a note with one word on it – ‘compromise’. The defence economy was on the ropes. There was remarkably little discussion of Britain’s Cold War commitment and Mason’s fearmongering about the potential for a revival of German militarism did more harm than good. Instead, defence was primarily a matter of domestic political economy. Despite this, the employment argument had worn thin as ministers in other departments, from education to health, had an equal if not superior claim to job creation. In other circumstances the defence budget could have expected deeper reductions. The legacy of the 1950s rearmament again lingered, not least when Denis Healey made an emotional appeal for the soul of social democracy when he claimed it would be ‘wholly unacceptable’ to the Labour party if education and welfare endured significant cutbacks only for defence to escape comparatively lightly. Healey’s own political clout and combativeness, combined with the support of many in the cabinet, could have been expected to win the day. But Harold Wilson’s intervention was decisive. Again, it was matters closer to home that underpinned his justification for supporting the defence economy. The official minute recorded the Prime Minister’s conclusion as follows: it was argued that the consequence of defence cuts for employment must be kept in mind. Even the savings identified as acceptable by the Defence Secretary would mean a loss of some 3,200 industrial jobs. To go further would cause very severe problems in particular industries, especially shipbuilding and electronics, the effect of which would be felt quickly. Many of the jobs lost would be in politically sensitive areas with poor chances for redeployment.106

Whilst the minute was written in the usual dry, unrevealing style, Bernard Donoghue’s diary entry recorded Wilson at his most direct and irreverent. According to Donoghue, Wilson stated that he was ‘absolutely firmly against defence cuts’ and how the military was a special case that was ‘more important than school meals, or social security for Irishmen with eighteen children’.107 In the end a package of cuts amounting to £193 million was agreed, far less than what Healey was initially aiming for. Donoghue was ‘very depressed’ after the meeting and later recorded that both Healey and Barnett ‘trudged’ out of the cabinet office ‘looking very down as well’.108 In the following day’s press ‘the bitter dispute’ between Mason and Healey was said to have been ‘finally resolved at an acrimonious Cabinet meeting’ with ‘honours about even’.109 But the left was horrified with the outcome. Tony Benn described it as ‘an unparalleled act of national self-destruction’.110

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The defence review reaffirmed Britain’s commitment to the Cold War. The cuts made were, as was described at the time, to the tail, not the teeth of Britain’s military. Despite the détente in Cold War relations, the threat of the Soviet Union was considered real. The review also restated Britain’s place as a military power within NATO and its closeness to the United States. But for thousands of workers and their families the review was a matter of economic necessity as expensive military projects escaped intact. As both government and party sources demonstrate, the review was not so much a question of geopolitical strategy as it was domestic political economy. In what was an ideal opportunity to impose cuts on the defence budget in order to spare the welfare state, the Labour government decided to choose guns over butter. As Denis Healey noted, Britain had made ‘an exceptionally high contribution to the defence of the Western world, in ways which imposed a heavy strain on her resources of skilled manpower and of foreign exchange’.111 The consequence was that by 1977 ‘Germany was spending 3.1 per cent of its GDP on defence and 11.5 per cent on social security’, but ‘Britain was spending 4.9 per cent on defence and only 8.9 per cent on social security’. The review demonstrated the continuity of thought among social democrats on the right of the party who considered defence to be an economic stimulant as much as a matter of diplomacy and national security. As such, 1974–75 was more in keeping with 1951. The difference on this occasion was that Harold Wilson was staunchly on the side of defence. As Healey later concluded, ‘Wilson had long since abandoned the position that led him to resign from the Atlee government with Nye Bevan’ in 1951.112 Having shepherded the review to safety, Wilson unexpectedly retired just three months later and Jim Callaghan succeeded, ensuring that there was no change in direction.

The wasted billions The defence review was a turning point for the left. Roy Mason later recalled that the Conservatives did not pose much of a challenge in Parliament, offering little more than ‘officially critical’ responses and, given that they had lost two general elections in one year, ‘their hearts weren’t in it’.113 Instead, the ‘real trouble over defence matters’ came from the ‘left-wing rebellion over the review’ that was ‘like a red rag to a bull’. The 1974 intake of new Labour MPs boosted the ranks of the left with new expertise. One example was Robin Cook, a future foreign secretary in the Blair government who resigned from the cabinet over the Iraq War in 2003. Disregarded by Mason as ‘a bearded Scottish unilateralist’, Cook was a brilliant performer

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in the House of Commons, which proved to be a hallmark of his parliamentary career.114 In December 1974 he stated that ‘the military-industrial complexes are developing military technology at a rate which has a mad momentum of its own and continues regardless of the economic and diplomatic changes’.115 Speaking in support of his own amendment to the government’s white paper on defence in May 1975, he argued that the government should have ‘carried out a radical surgery on our defence commitments and reduced them to a level which would give us the resources we need to create a strong economy, which is the only foundation we can really hope for to ensure our security’.116 A member of CND, Cook was another link between the wider peace movement and the Labour party. Alongside Mary Kaldor and the CND activist Dan Smith, Cook authored a Fabian Society pamphlet in October 1975, Defence Review: An Anti-White Paper. It contended that Mason’s review was based on ‘strategic myths’, namely the need to maintain a conventional military presence on the continent, despite ‘no European government actually ever expecting a Soviet invasion’.117 The secretive nature of Labour’s conduct of defence policy, evident in the nuclear test and the vague replies over improvements to Polaris in parliamentary debates, displayed ‘an unwillingness to allow a well-informed public debate’ on defence issues and suggested ‘that the government may not be confident about its justification for strategy’. The Anti-White Paper argued that ‘the most remarkable feature’ of the defence review was that ‘major projects’ remained ‘largely unscathed or even reappraised’.118 The explanation was rooted in the government’s commitment to the defence industry and to major military infrastructure projects to keep up with the development of international military systems. The decision ‘to preserve the capacity to produce armaments’ committed the government ‘to an indefinite expansion which in order to survive will create a constant demand for new weapons’.119 To ‘stop the government caving in to the growing pressure to order new weapons’ the authors advised that policymakers pursue only what was ‘strategically desirable and economically possible’ and ‘evolve a system that frees us from the limitations imposed by the military-industrial complex’. That those large-scale projects survived the review, despite their excessive cost and questionable strategic value, suggested to the left that industry, politics and the state were choosing arguments based on the economy rather than military considerations. In his own pamphlet published that the same year, Frank Allaun observed ‘the constant clamour by the armament firms for further orders for new weapons on the excuse of keeping their capacity available’.120 In his Wasted £30,000,000,000 Spent on False Security, Allaun named thirteen firms which each received in excess of £100 million in government defence contracts, including British Aerospace

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Corporation, British Leyland, British Petroleum, EMI, Ferranti, General Electric Company, Hawker Siddeley, Lucas, Philips, Plessey, Rolls-Royce, Vickers and Westland Aircraft, concluding that ‘war is a terrible business, but it is also a terribly profitable business’. Allaun made it a straight choice between butter and guns; by making the ‘switch from arms to welfare’, he argued, the government would find the ‘cash for pensions’ and ‘better pay for nurses, teachers and post office workers’, which would reap economic and electoral gains. Speaking for many on the left, Allaun concluded that ‘massive arms cuts and a new foreign policy are the key issues for Labour’s success’.121 But how could the left change this trajectory? For all the promise of the early 1970s, the left failed to achieve the vital breakthrough in the government. A deflationary budget was voted through in April 1975 which imposed cuts on the social services, whilst two months later a clear majority of the British electorate voted to stay in the Common Market despite many on the left campaigning for a vote to leave.122 The right of the party reasserted itself in the key areas of defence, economy and foreign affairs. For Frank Allaun, if change were to come, it would have to be from outside of the parliamentary party. As he concluded in 1975, ‘whether or not our leaders respond will depend mainly on the amount of pressure exerted from below’.123 Despite the review, Allaun felt that there were ‘grounds for hope’, including ‘a great wave of progressive views inside the working-class movement; the influx into Parliament of new, live, young, sincere, progressive and forthright Labour M.P.s’; and ‘better policies worked out by the Party whilst in Opposition’. With the defence review over, the left took on the defence economy with renewed conviction with its alternative for industrial conversion to provide a ‘socialist solution’ to end ‘British defence pretentions’.124

Notes 1 TNA, CAB 128/54/3, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 14 March 1974 at 11.00am’, p. 3. 2 Peder Clark, ‘“Problems of Today and Tomorrow”: Prevention and the National Health Service in the 1970s’, Social History of Medicine, 33:3 (2019), pp. 981–1000; Jack Saunders, ‘Emotions, Social Practices and the Changing Composition of Class, Race and Gender in the National Health Service, 1970–79: “Lively Discussion Ensued”’, History Workshop Journal, 88 (2019), pp. 204–228. 3 Dockrill, British Defence since 1945, p. 86. 4 Stuart Croft, Peter Dornan, Wynn Rees and Matthew Uttley, Britain and Defence 1945–2000: A Policy Re-Evaluation (Harlow: Longman, 2001).

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5 Lane, ‘Foreign and Defence Policy’, pp. 154–156. 6 Malcolm Chalmers, Paying for Defence: Military Spending and British Decline (London: Pluto, 1985), p. 96. 7 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, p. 251. 8 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 123. 9 Jörg Arnold, ‘“Like Being on Death Row”: Britain and the End of Coal, c. 1970 to the Present’, Contemporary British History, 32:1 (2018), p. 2. 10 Anne McHardy, ‘Lord Mason of Barnsley’, Guardian, 20 April 2015, www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/20/lord-mason-of-barnsley [accessed 16 April 2018]. 11 Michael Carver, Tightrope Walking: British Defence Policy since 1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 67. 12 David Howell, ‘Mason, Roy, Baron Mason of Barnsley’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 10 January 2019. 13 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 138. 14 Ibid., p. 143. 15 Dockrill, British Defence since 1945, p. 103. 16 Kristan Stoddart, ‘The British Labour Government and the Development of Chevaline, 1974–79’, Cold War History, 10.3 (2010), pp. 287–314. 17 Owen, From Empire to Europe, p. 318. 18 Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, p. 223. 19 Edgerton, Warfare State, pp. 259–260. 20 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 124 21 Hansard, HC Deb 12 March 1974, ‘Queen’s Speech’, vol 870 cc43–47. 22 Hansard, HC Deb 21 March 1974, ‘(Written Responses)’, vol 870 cc153–154W. 23 David McKie, ‘Mason resists demands for quick defence cuts’, Guardian, 30 March 1974, p. 4. 24 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 126. 25 TNA, DEFE 11/566, ‘Defence Studies Party (DC/74/2) and Chiefs of Staff Report’. 26 Hugh Beach, ‘Carver (Richard) Michael Power [Mike], Baron Carver’, Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography, 6 January 2005. 27 TNA, DEFE 11/566, ‘Defence Studies Party (DC/74/2) and Chiefs of Staff Report’. 28 Ibid. 29 TNA, T 225/4120, ‘Shortfall in 1973–74 – Defence’, 22 July 1974. 30 Ibid. 31 David Fairhall, ‘MPs claim defence cuts cost nearly as much as saving’, Guardian, 13 August 1974, p. 5. 32 ‘Nuclear test by Britain?’, Guardian, 22 June 1974, p. 24. 33 Hansard, HC Deb 24 June 1974, ‘British Nuclear Test’, vol 875 cc989–1001. 34 ‘Nuclear test “within Labour Programme”’, Guardian, 25 June 1974, p. 4. 35 Ian Aitken, ‘Wilson bomb shatters Left Wing’, Guardian, 25 June 1974, p. 1. 36 ‘PLP anger at bomb test’, Labour Weekly, 5 July 1974, p. 1.

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37 TNA, CAB 128/54/21, ‘Conclusions of the Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 27 June 1974 at 11.00am’, p. 11. 38 Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1974–76 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 124. 39 TNA, CAB 129/178/10, ‘Nuclear Testing: Note by the Prime Minister’, 31 July 1974, p. 1 40 ‘October 1974 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/ 1974/Oct/1974-oct-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 15 October 2016]. 41 Zeigler, Wilson, p. 460. 42 TNA, CAB/128/55/22, ‘Conclusions of a Cabinet Meeting held at Number 10 Downing Street on Wednesday 20 November at 11.00am’, p. 2 43 Ziegler, Wilson, p. 460. 44 Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1974–76, p. 124. 45 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, We Shall Not Be MIRVed (London: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1974). 46 Kristan Stoddart, The Sword and the Shield: Britain, America, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1970–1976 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 142–143. 47 Kristan Stoddart, ‘Maintaining the “Moscow Criterion”: British Strategic Nuclear Targeting 1974–1979’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31:6 (2008), pp. 897–924. 48 Kristan Stoddart, ‘The British Labour Government and the Development of Chevaline, 1974–79’, Cold War History, 10:3 (2010), p. 291. 49 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 147. 50 Stoddart, The Sword and the Shield, p. 141. 51 John Baylis, ‘British Nuclear Doctrine: The “Moscow Criteria” and the Polaris Improvement Programme’, Contemporary British History, 19:1 (2005), p. 60. 52 Keohane, Labour Party Defence Policy since 1945, p. 129. 53 ‘Labour’s nuclear dilemma’, The Times, 26 June 1974, p. 19. 54 John Clarke, ‘“A Minor Disagreement within the Family”: Henry Kissinger and James Callaghan during the Cyprus Crisis of 1974’, in Reform and Renewal: Transatlantic Relations during the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Catherine Hynes and Sandra Scanlon (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 151–170. 55 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 129. 56 David Fairhall, ‘Cyprus puts defence cuts in doubt’, Guardian, 14 August 1974, p. 24. 57 TNA, T 225/4120, M. Scholar to J. Hansford, 16 September 1974. 58 TNA, T 225/4120, J. Hansford, ‘Defence Budget: Forecast Return’, 17 September 1974. 59 TNA, CAB 129/179/26, ‘Defence Review: Memorandum by the Prime Minister’, 28 October 1974, pp. 1–4. 60 TNA, CAB 128/55/16, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 31 October 1974 at 10.30am’, p. 2

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61 Thomas Robb, ‘The “Limit of What Is Tolerable”: British Defence Cuts and the “Special Relationship”, 1974–1976’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 22:2 (2011), p. 326. 62 TNA, CAB 128/55/22, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday 20 November 1974 at 10.00 am’, p. 2. 63 Simon James, ‘The Central Policy Review Staff, 1970–83’, Political Studies, 34 (1986), pp. 423–440. 64 TNA, CAB 129/180/7, ‘Defence Review – Economic and Employment Implications: Memorandum by the Central Policy Review Staff’, 15 November 1974, p. 2. 65 TNA, CAB 128/55/22, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday 20 November 1974 at 10.00 am’, p. 2. 66 Hansard, HC Deb 3 December 1974, ‘Defence Review’, vol 882 cc1351–1369. 67 David Fairhall, ‘Mason carves kindest cuts in 10 Years’, Guardian, 4 December 1974, p. 1. 68 ‘Ships go, dockyards stay’, Guardian, 4 December 1974, p. 12. 69 Peter Jenkins, ‘Wilson off the fence’, Guardian, 6 December 1974, p. 14. 70 Ronald Butt, ‘Government puts Left foot forward’, The Times, 5 December 1974, p. 18. 71 Martin Linton, ‘Defence cut: But is it enough?’, Labour Weekly, 6 December 1974, p. 1. 72 Julia Langdon, ‘Mason treads with care’, Labour Weekly, 6 December 1974, p. 3. 73 ‘Defence cuts: Mason replies’, Labour Weekly, 6 December 1974, p. 6. 74 ‘Defence – A step along the road’, Labour Weekly, 6 December 1976, p. 7. 75 Frank Allaun, Robin Cook. Arthur Latham, Stan Newens and Jo Richardson, ‘Those defence “cuts”’, Tribune, 21 February 1975, p. 5. 76 ‘Defence cuts are no illusion’, Labour Weekly, 31 January 1975, p. 14. 77 ‘Mason lashes critics’, Labour Weekly, 5 February 1975, p. 1. 78 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1973–74/64, 18 December 1974. 79 ‘Arms spending is going up’, Labour Weekly, 6 December 1974, p. 13. 80 Hansard, HC Deb 16 December 1974, ‘Defence’, vol 883 cc1147–1297. 81 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 144. 82 ‘Mellish and the mutineers’, Guardian, 19 December 1974, p. 19. 83 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1974–75/44, 11 February 1975, ‘Annual Conference Resolutions: Letter from Roy Mason MP to NEC International Committee’, p. 4. 84 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1974–75/67, 6 May 1975, ‘An Appeal to the Labour and Trade Union Movement for a Real Cut in Arms Spending’, pp. 1–2. 85 TNA, PREM 16/329, Donoughue to Wilson, 26 February 1975. 86 TNA, CAB 128/56/11, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 6 March 1975 at 11.00 am’, p. 2. 87 TNA, DEFE 13/1084, Mason to Schlesinger, 18 April 1975. 88 Hansard, HC Deb 6 May 1975, ‘Defence’, vol 891 cc1225–1352.

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89 Jim Tomlinson, ‘Economic Policy’, in New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments 1974–1979, ed. Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson, p. 59. 90 Thomas Robb, ‘The “Limit of What Is Tolerable”’, p. 325. 91 TNA, PREM 16/330, ‘Note of a Meeting over Lunch between the Prime Minister and the United States Secretary of Defense at Chequers on Saturday 2 September at 1.00pm’. 92 Ian Aitken, ‘Cabinet’s Final Agony on Spending Cuts’, Guardian, 1 December 1975, p. 1. 93 Ibid. 94 TNA, CAB 129/186/18, ‘Public Expenditure 1979–80: Memorandum by the Central Policy Review Staff’, p. 1. 95 Ibid., p. 6. 96 TNA, CAB 128/57/24, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Tuesday 9 December 1975’, p. 6. 97 Donoughue, Downing Street Diary, p. 379. 98 Tony Benn, Against the Tide: Diaries 1973–76 (London: Hutchinson, 1989), p. 476. 99 TNA, CAB 128/57/24, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Tuesday 9 December 1975’, pp. 7–8. 100 TNA, CAB 128/57/25, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 11 December 1975’, p. 6. 101 Peter Cole, ‘Battle for Healey on defence cuts’, Guardian, 8 December 1975, p. 5. 102 Adam Raphael, ‘Concession on defence cuts’, Guardian, 15 December 1975, p. 1. 103 Henry Stanhope, ‘Mr Mason threatens to resign over cuts’, The Times, 14 January 1976, p. 3. 104 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 149. 105 TNA, CAB 128/58/1, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 15 January 1976’, p. 10. 106 Ibid, p. 11. 107 Donoughue, Downing Street Diaries, p. 593. 108 Ibid. 109 Adam Raphael, ‘Defence to escape heaviest cash cuts’, Guardian, 16 January 1976, p. 1. 110 Ibid. 111 Healey, The Time of My Life, p. 412. 112 Ibid., p. 446. 113 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 135. 114 Ibid., p. 130. 115 Hansard, HC Deb 16 December 1974, ‘Defence’, vol 883 cc1147–1297. 116 Hansard, HC Deb 6 May 1975, ‘Defence’, vol 891 cc1225–1352. 117 Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and Robin Cook, Defence Review: An Anti-White Paper (London: Fabian Society, 1975), p. 16.

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118 Ibid., p. 5. 119 Ibid., p. 11. 120 Working Class Movement Library (WCML), Shelf mark: AG, Peace Box 1, Frank Allaun, The Wasted £30,000,000,000 Spent on False Security (London: National Society of Operative Printers, 1975), p. 22. 121 Ibid., p. 37. 122 Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 369. 123 WCLM, Frank Allaun, The Wasted £30,000,000,000 Spent on False Security, p. 39. 124 Cook, Kaldor and Smith, Defence Review: An Anti-White Paper, p. 23.

3

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Taking on the defence economy

In Paying the Price Roy Mason concluded that ‘in Labour circles, Defence was by far the least popular department’.1 For although he carried the defence review through acrimonious cabinet debates, the government’s defence programme was still at risk to a left-wing coup. By 1975 the economic situation had not greatly improved, and another sterling crisis a year later led to an intervention by the International Monetary Fund which demanded further cuts to the social services. With the domestic economy in crisis, the left felt that an alternative defence review, one much more radical than the government’s, was required to alleviate the strain on the economy and convert weapons systems into equipment for hospitals and housing in meeting the needs of society’s most vulnerable. This chapter demonstrates how the left took on the defence economy for the remainder of the Labour government. In December 1974 the party’s international committee set up a study group to examine the economic and social implications of Britain’s defence industry. The ‘Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade’ met for the next three years and published a widely distributed paperback, Sense about Defence. Patrick Seyd considered it ‘a more detailed analysis than ever before’ which showed that ‘economics and defence were the two main concerns of the left in the 1970s’, whilst the historian Ben Pimlott described it as ‘the best-researched party document on defence since the war’.2 However, just as it had during the government’s review, the defence economy survived. Labour ministers projected the defence economy as an example of sound economic management with the added bonuses of its upskilling workers, many of whom had left school at an early age, technological ‘spin-off’ to the commercial sector, a profitable arms trade and deterring the Soviet Union. Such was the close relationship between the state and the defence economy that the Labour government led by Jim Callaghan took most of the sector into public ownership in 1977 and continued to provide a steady flow of military work to the newly nationalised corporations. The same administration also agreed to a request from NATO for a 3 per cent

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increase in defence spending as it continued with the highly expensive Chevaline missile improvement system that cost over £1 billion by the time Labour lost the 1979 general election. Not even the Foreign Office could achieve a pilot industrial conversion project to demonstrate Britain’s commitment to disarmament; the idea was shot down by the Department of Industry which considered the idea to be reckless. This chapter shows how defence was a matter of political economy and an expression of moderate social democracy, one that sought to work within the capitalist system rather than break with it. For all its endeavour, the political left had failed to change the Labour’s government’s policy.

A left-wing defence review The Labour party’s National Executive Committee was the ideal setting to develop an alternative vision for the defence economy. As Andrew Thorpe observed, in the early 1970s almost fifty working groups explored new ideas and policies.3 Mark Wickham-Jones argued that Labour’s institutional character and its ‘pluralist nature’ meant that the ‘sub-committees of the NEC’ were ‘extremely influential in the formation of policy’.4 This was particularly true of economic and industrial affairs as the National Executive Committee used its influence to shape manifesto pledges, particularly the adoption of the Alternative Economic Strategy with its objective of taking top-performing companies into public ownership. These various committees had their meetings in the House of Commons and provided a setting by which policies could be developed. Some of its most influential committees were chaired by left-wing figures, such as Tony Benn in the industry committee and Ian Mikardo in the international committee. As the left pushed to ‘democratise’ the party, the National Executive Committee was the bridge between the government and the wider Labour movement, which included academics, trade unionists and representatives from socialist organisations. This was a sort of parallel administration of its own with the ability to weld the government to awkward policy positions. As Roy Mason readily admitted, the National Executive Committee was both ‘dominated by the left’ and ‘had real power’.5 In his history of Labour’s defence policies since the war, Dan Keohane observed that ‘from the mid-1970s, the left-wing and predominately antinuclear wing of the party had gained a dominant position on the NEC’, with Rhiannon Vickers agreeing that it ‘was looking for a new approach to defence in general’.6 It was in this context that on 9 December 1974 Ian Mikardo chaired the first meeting of a new committee specifically tasked to investigate the economic implications of Britain’s military programme.

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However, the veteran left-wing MP emphasised that this study group would be based on cuts ‘of a different magnitude’ from those announced by Roy Mason in Parliament a week earlier when he first revealed the conclusions arrived at in the defence review.7 Mikardo observed that the National Executive Committee had several similar groups who were tasked on specific areas of policy that had, in his estimation, ‘received less attention than they perhaps merited’ in previous Labour governments. The socialist critique of the defence economy, which had its roots earlier in the century and gained momentum in the 1960s, was thought deserving of its own specific party study. From the beginning, the group asserted its own independent credibility. In a letter to the secretary of the international committee, Ron Huzzard, Mikardo felt it would have been ‘pointless for the committee’ to have followed ‘the government line or derived their conclusions from government sources’.8 What was needed was an external view, one that was informed by the international academic network of non-governmental experts, as seen in the previous chapter, who were known to Mikardo and Allaun. In a meeting on 17 February 1975 Mikardo instructed that those new members be invited from four categories: academics, government ministers, industrialists and trade unionists.9 Incorporating such authorities would have boosted the group’s authenticity and visibility in the party. On a more pragmatic level, it would have swelled the ranks of the group’s membership that numbered a modest half-dozen left-wing MPs in its first few meetings, including the usual stalwarts on the left such as Judith Hart and Jo Richardson. The study group risked looking like a Tribune talking shop, one that could be easily dismissed by the Labour government as irrelevant. Mikardo took the bold and potentially risky decision to invite ministers to partake in the group, even if their views differed sharply from those already present. However, by June Labour government ministers outnumbered the left. In a comment aimed to rouse left-wing support on the international committee, Mikardo stated that the majority of participants on the defence study group ‘supported Government policy against Party policy’. His initial tolerance had clearly worn thin as he advised that ‘fewer co-options from the Labour Right’, would be sought, or else the study group would be ‘disbanded altogether’.10 Among these now unwelcome intruders were Labour ministers who represented the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Defence and who were firmly on the social-democratic right wing of the party, such as Bill Rodgers and James Wellbeloved, a minister known for his ‘fervent criticism’ of the Soviet Union ‘which earned him unflattering comment among his own colleagues in the tearoom’ to such an extent that Harold Wilson denied him promotion ‘in order not to annoy the party left-wing on whom he himself relied’.11 Another was Alan Lee Williams, Roy Mason’s parliamentary private secretary and a columnist for the centrist journal

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Socialist Commentary. In May 1974 he argued that the Labour government needed to re-emphasise its commitment to NATO and that ‘a future European security system must be built on upon existing realities of military power, political strength and on an expanding economic strength and capacity’.12 These ministers were also involved in the Social Democratic Alliance, a group on the right of the party that fused Eurocentrism and a support for the capitalist economy. As its 1975 manifesto stated: Britain is part of the Western community of free nations and we are determined to maintain the common defence of our basic liberties. There is no future for an isolationist Britain. In these difficult times, we need our friends and allies more than ever. The only alternative is a closed society or a siege economy. The consequences of this are appalling for our democracy and future prosperity. We utterly oppose those who would weaken or break our commitment to membership of NATO and the Western community.13

The defence study group occurred at a time of factional tension. The referendum on whether to stay in the Common Market, held on 5 June 1975, generally divided the party along left and right lines, whilst the imposition of the mandatory reselection of MPs put significant pressure on social democrats who found themselves at odds with their left-leaning Constituency Labour Party. One such example was Reg Prentice, who had served as Labour’s education secretary and minister for overseas development and who was described by Geoff Horn as ‘one of the first front-line Labour politicians on the Right to openly advocate a new political approach and a fundamental adjustment by British social democracy to the harsher economic conditions of the 1970s’.14 As Ivor Crewe and Anthony King argued in their history of the Social Democratic Party, the birth of the breakaway party occurred during the mid-1970s as the ‘shift to the left on the NEC and the annual conference’ had ‘an inevitable impact on party policy’.15 After the SDP merged with the Liberal party to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988, Alan Lee Williams wrote his own history of the party alongside his twin brother and defence expert, Geoffrey. There they accounted for the Labour study group in detail, recalling that it was ‘chaired by the formidable unilateralist Ian Mikardo’ and was ‘completely captured by the anti-nuclear Left’ who argued that defence was ‘a prime source of economic weakness’.16 The ‘cost approach’, they observed, dominated the report and a number of alternative policies were discussed, all of which rested on what the Williams brothers dismissed as the ‘virtuous’ assumption that massive defence cuts were a good thing’, whilst the ‘classic preference for social welfare expenditure was restated.17 By the summer of 1975 the study group was more evenly split between left and right. Crucially, it incorporated academics who were invited at

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Mikardo’s request. Mary Kaldor was instrumental in expanding the remit of the study group to consider the wider ‘strategic implications’ of potential cuts in military spending, arguing that if the group did not explore the ‘overall character of the defence programme’, then it would be criticised for ignoring the ‘political, strategic, and defence implications in so doing’.18 The study group positioned itself as an alternative defence review, one that was legitimised in its setting in a Labour party committee but could arrive at a completely different set of conclusions to that of the government. It was not sufficient to assess Britain’s military programme on a case-by-case basis. Instead, Kaldor implored that the group examine the ‘conceptual underpinning’ that accepted, almost without question, ‘the most demanding and costly tasks’, including the ‘concentration in Central Europe, the Eastern Atlantic, the UK Base and the Polaris fleet’. The left was in full agreement with this proposal and suggested that the group determine the impact that a £1 billion cut would have on the defence programme, a figure that was floated at the annual party conference the year previously. Unsurprisingly, the ministers objected and informed the group that they ‘were reluctant to prepare the joint papers for which they were asked’.

‘Economically so naïve as to be almost illiterate’ For the next few months, the study group was wrought by bad-tempered correspondence and disputes. One such example was a paper from Frank Blackaby, who was invited to join from the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute and who authored a report on the consequences of a £1 billion cut to the defence programme. Blackaby argued that there was ‘immense unsatisfied demands’ for public spending in the social services, including ‘slums to be cleared’ and ‘antiquated hospitals and schools to be replaced’. The solution lay in shifting resources from the ‘regrettable necessities” like military expenditure to the production of goods and services which ‘increase human satisfaction’.19 He estimated that over one million Britons were employed in the military sector either directly or otherwise, whether service personnel or within the defence industry. However, a cut of £1 billion was predicted to make a ‘negligible’ effect as 180,000 of those workers could be expected at any given time to be ‘looking for, or moving into, different types of employment’ and that such a cut ‘would only be a small addition to the industrial change’ that was ‘going on all the time’. Blackaby’s paper was lambasted by Gerald Kaufman, a junior minister at the Department of Industry, who felt that the paper ‘would expose the Labour Party to ridicule’ if it was ever published and was ‘economically so naïve as to be almost illiterate’.20 Kaufman was firmly on the right of the

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party, as was his superior, the industry secretary Eric Varley who replaced Tony Benn after the Common Market referendum. Kaufman told the study group that ‘defence expenditure, though reduced’, was ‘crucial’ to the economy. ‘Without warship building’, he claimed, ‘the shipbuilding industry would collapse almost overnight’ and there was ‘a very steady export market from military planes’. Frank Judd, another defence minister, wondered if this was ‘an information exercise’ to ‘think the unthinkable’ and that ‘Ministers could hardly become directly involved in an exercise which may well result in criticism of present Government policy’.21 But this did not deter the left. In his paper ‘Defence Programme Options to 1980–1’, the academic David Greenwood contemplated the immediate withdrawal of Polaris, a smaller conventional naval fleet and a reduced air presence, asking if ‘the United Kingdom could accept a somewhat lower place in the pecking order of military power and influence’.22 At the next meeting a letter from the defence secretary was read out, with Mason in agreement with the figures, but he advised the group to take ‘into full account the several profound implications to which Mr. Greenwood points’.23 Another meeting on 11 December 1975 did little to soothe the differences of opinion. A ‘lengthy discussion’ played out among the 22 people attending on the controversial issue of the arms trade. Two papers with contrasting conclusions were up for discussion, one from Robin Cook and the other from Alan Lee Williams. The only point of agreement was on the size of the export industry itself, with about eighty thousand employed by it and a net contribution of £570 million to the balance of payments each year. Thereafter, ‘divergences arose over a wide range of issues’ as the two sides came to blows.24 Far from feeling a sense of guilt-ridden complicity in deadly conflicts around the world, Labour ministers argued that Britain’s arms trade needed only to be diversified to achieve an optimal financial return. They argued that ‘the precariousness of the British arms trade necessitated a more reliable base for British exports’, given ‘that half of weapons sales went to the Middle East’ and that ‘if tension were to decline in that region, there would be a colossal collapse in our arms sales’. This was a remarkable admission expressed with a cold rationalism. But it only reiterated a point that was already well acknowledged: that the arms trade was perceived as an economic asset by the government. A large domestic defence economy, with the capability to produce cutting-edge weaponry, bestowed Britain with a commercial edge over its rivals, such as France and the United States. The Labour ministers insisted that the ‘UK had a clear comparative advantage in the production of arms’ and that it should ‘continue to export them and derive the benefits of that advantage’. Although the exports to the Middle East were controversial, the left was particularly vexed by the crisis in Chile, which was led by a right-wing Chilean government

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which had ousted the Marxist leader Salvador Allende in a coup in 1973. The Labour government had decided to honour naval sales but imposed a ban on new equipment orders. As Mark Phythian noted, ‘the Labour left saw in this an opportunity to reopen the debate and withhold delivery of the outstanding naval vessels and aeroengines’.25 However, there was no indication that the government was about to change its policy, and by the time it left office four years later it had sold naval vessels to Chile and trained its service personnel to use them. As Phythian concluded, the Chilean affair revealed a ‘fundamental flaw in the government’s position – a consequence of trying to move far enough to appease the left while attempting to minimise the negative impact on Britain’s reputation as an arms supplier’.26 In the end it achieved neither. This was the wider contemporary background as the left-wing members of the study group accused the ministers of ‘pursuing arms sales with little or no strategic concern’, adding that they were ‘reinforcing repressive regimes by contributing to the prestige and status of ruling military elites’.27 The left felt that the arms trade created a defence industry that demanded a flow of government orders to sustain itself, a situation made worse by its dependency on international conflict. As the minutes described, the left argued that ‘the high level of industrial capacity which arms sales maintained encouraged further R & D, which in turn generated great pressure for spending on development and procurement’. This ‘pressure for spending’ amounted to a permanent war economy and ‘an inbuilt tendency to encourage new arms orders’ from within business, government and the military. The distance between the two sides could not be reconciled, and in March 1976 the defence ministers resigned in protest. In his letter to Mikardo, Alan Lee Williams reminded the group of ‘Mr Brezhnev’s reaffirmation that there would be no let-up in the ideological struggle, despite recent moves towards Détente’.28 He argued that the left was ‘in danger of underestimating the manpower implications of a reduction of £1,000m per year’ as there would not only be direct redundancies and a loss of recruitment but also substantial reductions in military support and civilian employees. He warned that despite ‘excellent papers’ from both sides of the dispute, the study group risked ‘misleading the NEC’ should only its viewpoint prevail. Mason and his junior defence ministers all ‘shared the view that the Mikardo group was the enemy of any sensible defence policy, intent on finding whatever ammunition it could to fire against the government’.29 On 14 May the Guardian reported that a ‘fierce battle’ was expected between the left and the right on the National Executive Committee over the study group’s proposed defence cuts of a further £1 billion.30 Williams felt that the country and the party ‘ought to know’ that an alternative view was proposed. He argued that the loss of naval contracts would be ‘catastrophic’ and that abandoning

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the Tornado aircraft would lead to the loss of 36,000 jobs.31 Although the National Executive Committee approved a £1 billion cut to the defence budget that same month, the media felt that it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that the Labour leadership would feel ‘bound by the decision, because the old troubles of trying to reconcile party and Government policy never seem to be resolved’.32

‘An undue influence’ With the ministers having departed, the study group became a left-wing think-tank. If Mikardo had wanted a balance of viewpoints at least at the early stage, he ruled that any papers submitted by the government ministers ‘be excluded’ from the final report.33 The result was Sense about Defence, a paperback published by the independent Quartet Books in July 1977 but purporting to represent the Labour party as an official policy document. So controversial was the report that Labour’s defence secretary, Fred Mulley, took the ‘unprecedented step’ of issuing a statement to the press to distance the government from the publication. Mulley was less abrasive than his predecessor but was equally committed to the defence economy. He condemned the report, stating that while it would have been ‘wrong to bankrupt the country by spending more than our economy can afford’ it would also have been ‘absolute folly not to take the measures necessary to protect our way of life’.34 A ‘secondary row’ was reported as the ministers who had withdrawn from the group were angered not to see their contributions included in the report. At a press briefing John Gilbert, a junior defence minister, stated that the study group did ‘not form the policy of the Labour Party, or even its national executive’ and considered the proposed defence proposals as being ‘highly irresponsible’.35 Mulley, who had ‘already dissociated himself from the group and its findings’, was reported to be in Saudi Arabia ‘signing a £500m defence contract’. Sense about Defence made the case that a credible national security could be achieved more affordably without nuclear weapons but within NATO. It argued that ‘a continuing commitment of ground and air forces to Allied Command Europe’ was ‘crucial’ but could be achieved ‘at a reduced cost by adopting more cost-effective methods’.36 In this respect the report was not a statement of pacifism or isolationism, but a manifesto for a more concentrated conventional military programme within a more balanced socialist economy. None the less, the report was unequivocally of the left and contained assertions well outside of the Labour government. Sense about Defence made the claim that the Soviet Union was a status quo power with little expansionist intent and that ‘in world-wide interventions’ it had

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‘been far more cautious that the Americans’.37 NATO was therefore based on the false assumption that a sudden invasion of Central Europe by the Warsaw Pact could happen at any time and, taking this a step further, the authors contended that the Soviet Union’s need for parity in nuclear weapons was only in response to the existence of such arsenals in the West. This argument represented the overall feeling on the study group that was informed by the expertise of left-wing specialists such as Robert Neild, the economist and founding member of SIPRI, who provided a paper to the study group on the question ‘Is There a Soviet Threat?’ 38 The report warned that, despite détente, the global arms race was ‘not merely continuing’ but ‘becoming both more extensive and more intensive’, as evidenced by the rise in defence spending among military alliances and the expansion of arms trading in the developing world.39 The authors concluded that unilateral action from a British government would be ‘more productive than long-drawn-out international gatherings’ and provided an opportunity ‘to play a role in bringing about a less tense international climate’.40 Although these arguments were the standard fare of the peace movement and well to the left of conventional statecraft since the war, they were not altogether dismissed by the mainstream media. In the Guardian the defence correspondent David Fairhall felt that Sense about Defence made a ‘perfectly acceptable intellectual case for changing the whole structure of Britain’s defence effort’ when ‘an impoverished, middle-sized power dabbles in almost every form of military activity, from nuclear deterrence to fishery protection’.41 Having observed the study group closely, he articulated that it encountered a ‘dilemma in terms of Labour Party politics’ in trying to ‘demonstrate its seriousness by considering the strategic and political implications of drastic expenditure cuts’ while not ‘exceeding its terms of reference by prescribing policy’.42 He noted, for example, that the report did not make any judgements on the situation in Northern Ireland despite the intensity of feeling on the left towards the presence of British military personnel in Ireland.43 Fairhall concluded that it struck an ‘uneasy compromise’ in putting forward a case that was very clearly at odds with the Labour government whilst not denigrating the party leadership in the process. The left’s criticism of Britain’s postwar defence posture was well acknowledged, and Sense about Defence was an expression of arguments that had accumulated over the several decades. But it was its treatment of political economy that made the report stand out from previous left-wing polemics on defence. In its third chapter, ‘Defence Expenditure and the Economy’, Mary Kaldor pointed out the ‘inherent problems’ which had allowed the defence sector to play ‘such a dominant role in the economy’. On the back of Labour’s spending review, she noted that defence had ‘come to be seen as a convenient instrument for economic policy-making – creating jobs,

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saving companies, and supporting the institutions of technology’.44 Kaldor attributed this to the ‘subjective’ nature of military strategy, meaning that the justification for expensive defence projects was not always obvious, adding that the refusal to take direct control over economic planning had allowed multinational capital to cultivate a defence economy out of proportion to Britain’s relative economic size. This led to a dangerous trend, one where strategy was determined by commercial interests. Echoing Eisenhower, Kaldor argued that ‘defence production’ had ‘acquired a momentum of its own, exercising, in turn, an undue influence on military decision-making’. This was the language of the military-industrial complex. Sense about Defence represented the clearest and most detailed indication of the left’s shift towards political economy with its ‘guns or butter’ approach in the 1970s supplanting the moral crusade of nuclear disarmament in the early Cold War. It noted the testimony from one admiral at the House of Commons’s Public Accounts Committee who admitted in 1976 that the Royal Navy had ‘to give the shipbuilders a regular rolling programme of ship orders’ as there were skills ‘required especially for warship building and not for commercial shipbuilding, and of necessity we have to keep a flow of orders going to them’ to sustain a ‘regular programme of frigates, or destroyers, to come off in order to keep our own numbers up’.45 Representing as it did one of the most detailed diagnoses of Britain’s military-industrial complex, Sense about Defence arrived at conclusions that were subsequently consolidated by historians of the defence economy. Warren Chin remarked how, following a ‘series of financial disasters in weapons procurement’ in the 1960s, ‘successive British governments began to intervene in the operation of the firm, culminating in the imposition of a shadow bureaucracy which examined every detail of the financial and technical planning’.46 The industry was reorganised into a handful of conglomerates which created a monopolistic sector outside of normal market competition. With the state generally acting as the customer, the distance between politics and the industry was close. Having explored the postwar defence economy over the course of his academic career, Keith Hartley concluded that there was a political consensus of ‘buying British’ whenever possible to reap ‘the economic benefits in the form of jobs, technology, spin-off and contributions to the balances of payments’, even when in some cases this might have involved ‘higher costs, delays and poorer quality equipment’.47 At the time Sense about Defence argued that there was an ‘underlying structure of defence industries’ that represented a ‘bureaucratic self-interest and inertia within the compartmentalised defence hierarchy’.48 Based on its research, the study group witnessed defence companies’ unwillingness to diversify their output and instead their wish to concentrate on a particular set of weaponry with the aim of making them more sophisticated

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and, therefore, more enticing both to the state and for exports. This led to spiralling costs as governments were lured towards the latest technologies instead of more versatile conventional defence systems. The move towards a defence posture based on such technologies since the late 1950s had resulted in enormous cost overruns – the opposite of the intended ambition to keep defence spending down. At the same time the Labour government brought much of the defence economy into state ownership in the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act, which was passed after a three-year parliamentary campaign in 1977. Despite fierce opposition from the Conservatives and the private companies themselves, this legislation essentially formalised what had been a longstanding commercial dependence on the state. Since the 1960s governments had subsidised the defence economy to such an extent that, as Hartley argued, it made sense for Labour to bring the sector into public ownership.49 Chin noted that the ‘gradual elimination of first open and then even oligopolistic competition in the UK defence market was a deliberate policy of successive governments’ after the war and that in the 1970s politicians concluded that ‘promoting industrial concentration and monopoly was the best way of not only ensuring the survival of the industry, but also one way of promoting greater efficiency and industrial strength’.50 However, this was in truth a combination of economic nationalism and protectionism of an industry that relied so heavily on state orders that it would have veered on the precipice of bankruptcy had it been left to its own devices. Looking at the defence economy at the time that Sense about Defence was published, virtually all of Britain’s military procurement was within the remit of nationalised industries, from nuclear submarines to the multi-role combat aircraft. The two nationalised corporations, British Aerospace and British Shipbuilders, took what David Edgerton regarded as what remained of the old arms industry into state control, including some of the former giants of the sector, such as Hawker Siddeley, Vickers and Yarrow.51 By taking these firms into public ownership, the Labour government essentially formalised the defence economy’s role in wider economic planning, a policy that had been so evident during the spending review. Although nationalisation was often considered by the right as a radical socialist solution, in this instance it merely consolidated much of the existing structure within the sector as the same industrialists sat on corporate boards, and high-profile prestige projects continued with little fear of cancellation and generally well over their initial cost estimates. However, the left saw in the nationalisation of the aerospace and shipbuilding industries an opportunity to reform the sector and move it away from defence to socially useful production. Sense about Defence made the case that ‘there was a good deal of evidence’ to show that defence spending

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generated ‘less employment and exports than an equivalent deployment of resources in the civil sector of the same industries’, with the advantages of ‘spin-off’ likely to be offset by the disadvantages of military science and technology.52 The state had played an integral part in the defence economy for decades and was as responsible for the military-industrial complex as was the private armaments industry. The left argued that the ‘prevalence of military work’ in state-subsidised industry had imposed ‘a certain mentality on engineers and scientists – a preoccupation with sophistication and emphasis on complex and elaborate equipment instead of the cheap and simple products which people can actually use’.53 The same problem existed in the civil field as ‘much British R & D effort has gone into nuclear energy and Concorde’, two projects that were considered to be white elephants by the mid-1970s.54 Sense about Defence therefore chimed with the climate of the time, one that questioned the wisdom of postwar political economy and proposed alternatives to it. For example, academics, such as the military historian Michael Howard, brought attention to the Ministry of Defence’s development of genetic engineering and other forms of biological warfare.55 What made Sense about Defence particularly noteworthy was the detail of its alternatives, recommending immediate conversion and diversification of the defence economy. This was turning swords into ploughshares, but with a modern twist. ‘Conversion’ was defined as a process by which part of the militaryindustrial capacity ‘would move into a different field of manufacture’, ‘a once and for all change; and diversification, a widening of the base of activity – alternating military and non-military work for unconverted capacity’.56 The report included a long list of products: brake systems and monorail, integrated energy systems and power packs, pacemakers and dialysis machines. Although there was limitless potential, Sense about Defence remarked that there had ‘been no systematic attempt by the Government’ to identify an ‘alternative future’, and there has been no methodological investigation of the employment consequences of a lower defence effort’.57 In a concluding argument the report added that ‘in 1945 the Labour Government redeployed nine million people within twelve months. No one suggested that the war should continue to keep people in employment.’ 58 Sense about Defence was more a descendant of the Alternative Economic Strategy than it was the form of protest seen by CND in the 1950s and 1960s where material factors, such as employment and technology, were less prominent. It was also a contribution to the contemporary discourse surrounding industrial democracy and workers’ control, which was a central feature of the American left’s campaign to convert the military-industrial complex. The Institute for Workers’ Control was well known to left-wing activists and MPs on the study group and its publications were frequently

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cited. Sense about Defence was also an expression of proto-environmentalism, particularly with its blueprint for alternative energy systems, including solar, wave and wind power. Mary Kaldor’s paper on alternative non-military work at Barrow-in-Furness argued that the excessive working hours spent on submarines and warships would be better spent on offshore wind energies, which the Vickers armaments company was already tentatively engaged in. Achieving publicity in the Guardian, Kaldor’s paper was reported as having illustrated ‘how the general problem of defence conversion could be approached, and the need to coordinate government policies in such fields as industry, energy, and transport to develop markets for new technology’.59 The mechanism for this was an interventionist form of public ownership, one that had the legal right to move capitalist production in a peaceful and socially useful direction. For the left, nationalisation was not just a ‘tool for the orderly contraction of declining industries’ but an opportunity to move into different growth sectors. If done correctly, a state-orchestrated diversification could be highly profitable and would, in time, reduce the need for a sector that was heavily subsidised by the state, as was the case with the defence economy. The left had made its case, but it was up to the government to act.

‘Considerable economic and industrial significance’ In one of the most comprehensive accounts of the history of Labour’s foreign policy, Rhiannon Vickers felt that Sense about Defence was ‘ignored’ by the Labour government led by Jim Callaghan.60 For sure, none of the left’s proposals was enacted by that government and, instead, the defence economy grew in importance. But Sense about Defence was not so much ignored as responded to with a report of almost equal length by government ministers. The ‘ministerial response’ was not published as part of Sense about Defence but was instead included in full in a 1979 reissue of the study group’s papers, Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence, where it ‘rejected the policy of reducing military spending which was the basis of the study group’s remit’.61 Written by John Gilbert, John Tomlinson and James Wellbeloved, MPs on Labour’s right wing who had contributed to the study group, it began with the standard justification in the need to deter the Soviet Union, using the build-up of armaments beyond the Iron Curtain and the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 as evidence. Britain’s commitment to collective Western European security was re-emphasised, including its army on the continent and its naval presence in the east Atlantic. But these arguments, important as they were, did not make this response particularly exceptional or noteworthy. Instead, it was the economic and social impact

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of the defence industry. The ministers responded directly to the left’s attack on the government’s political economy, stating that ‘while no one would argue for defence expenditure on the grounds of the employment it generates’, it was still ‘a fact that defence is a large employer both directly in the armed forces and their supporting civilian personnel and through the defence industries’.62 The ministers were unconvinced by the case made for industrial conversion and suggested that it was ‘yet to be proved’ that a major transfer of resources to the civil sector would cause nothing other than ‘a fall in total national resources – a penalty that would be that more difficult to accept in times of high unemployment like the present’. What followed was as much a manifesto for a particular kind of social democracy found on the right of the Labour party as much as it was a statement of defence policy. The ministers asserted their own socialdemocratic credentials within a government that had to ‘meditate the competing claims on public expenditure’ and ‘reconcile strategic requirements with other important social needs’, such as in healthcare and pensions.63 The defence economy was firmly positioned within wider economic and social considerations. The ministers observed how ‘the state traditionally played an important part in developing and producing defence equipment’, and, with the sector having been largely nationalised that year, this would ‘produce a more socially efficient use of resources by eliminating unnecessary competition and duplication of facilities’.64 In keeping with convention since the war, the government preferred to order military equipment from British companies ‘whenever possible’ and organised ‘its defence procurement policy as to ensure the viability of its main suppliers’. Here the ministers demonstrated that the sector was a special case, one that was above market competition, with its ‘viability’ a matter for the state. This was particularly true of shipbuilding, which was recognised as being in a state of near-terminal decline, as ministers did not deny the ‘necessity’ to provide yards with ‘a regular rolling programme of orders’ to sustain its capability.65 But it was not just industrial firms that needed protecting; it was the workforce as well. Labour ministers remarked that ‘those employed in the defence economy benefited from specialised training, whether it was in administrative or industrial roles’, whilst ‘most servicemen’ enlisted ‘shortly after school leaving age’ and received ‘educational and technical training, often of an advanced kind’. Given the contemporary controversy surrounding further education and skills training, particularly with regards to comprehensive schooling, this was a politically charged response.66 The ministers remarked that it was common for military-industrial workers to return to commercial industry after several years, so that ‘while still young’, they were ‘better equipped to contribute to the civilian economy’

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having had experience in the defence economy or the services. Defence was presented as ‘not only a user of labour resources’ but was ‘also a producer’ of ‘skilled labour’. The ministers continued this line of argument in addressing the arms trade. They argued that ‘while any serious discussion must respect the sincerity and strength with which this view is held by those of a pacifist persuasion’, the reality was that this ‘was not a view held by the majority of people in this country’. They reaffirmed how ‘factors such as the character of the regime’ and ‘the possibility that the arms might disturb the balance of security’ were taken into consideration, demonstrated by ‘the embargo on arms sales of any sort to Chile and South Africa’. None the less, they made a firm economic argument. In addition to the eighty thousand workers involved in the arms trade, the ‘clearest financial benefits’ was in the balance of payments that was considered to be in the region of £850 million by 1978. Citing that ‘no link [had] been proved between military expenditure and the relatively poor performance, by international standards, of the British economy’, they argued that ‘the most rapid increase in civilian R&D’ tended to coincide ‘with the periods of most rapid growth in military R&D’, while the ‘slowest growth’ in civilian investment ‘occurred during periods of military retrenchment’. The government felt that defence was responsible for the ‘many valuable technological spin-offs from weapons development’ and that ‘private enterprise can rarely support the lengthy and complex research commonly required by military projects’. Concluding, the ministers stated that ‘jobs and arms exports are not justifications for such a level of defence spending although they must be numbered among the results’.67 The defence economy was an indispensable component of the government’s wider economic and industrial strategy. The harder the left pushed, the more ministers justified defence spending on the grounds of its contribution to society. Whereas the left argued that defence was not procured by a social process and did not serve any social utility, the right wing of the government pointed to the numerous instances where communities and workers depended on the nationalised defence economy, one that was cultivated by a benevolent state. The government led by Jim Callaghan took decisions to boost the sector even further. At NATO’s request Labour agreed to increase defence spending by 3 per cent in real terms in 1977. In his history of postwar British defence policy Michael Dockrill noted that the détente between the Cold War powers had begun to falter by this point and that Britain’s armed forces were ‘in urgent need of modernisation’ which, coupled with Soviet hostility to Western interests’, justified further expenditure.68 Again the domestic economy was a welcome recipient. The spending increase was assented to by the House of Commons Public Expenditure Committee, which felt that the investment in the arms industry would provide ‘confidence

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in British industry in the continuity of defence procurement plans’.69 In its official policy paper in February 1978 the government stated that it was responding to ‘a clear and collective recognition by the Alliance’s member governments for the need for an appropriate NATO response to the continued growth of the military capability of the Warsaw Pact’.70 The communist powers were estimated to have a threefold advantage in tanks and artillery, over double the fixed-wing tactical aircraft and a 50 per cent advantage in soldiers stationed in Central Europe. This renewed rearmament translated into a revival of international defence collaborations to standardise equipment and reduce the cost of developing complex military systems. Although American companies had much to gain from exporting their wares to European NATO members, members of the Congress had criticised the overreliance of some allies on American military hardware and encouraged instead a larger European defence economy to cope with the Soviet threat.71 This boosted the British defence economy further as the Labour government enthusiastically responded to this American request. When Fred Mulley presented his defence paper to cabinet in 1978 he was pleased to announce that the increase in defence spending was ‘warmly welcomed in NATO and particularly in the United States’.72 Consequently, expenditure on defence procurement increased to £2.7 billion in 1978, which was approximately 40 per cent of the total military budget.73 The government announced a new capital investment programme ‘to meet new demand’ in addition to an increase in training and apprenticeships. Thirty-eight firms stood to benefit from a minimum investment of £5 million with over two hundred thousand workers directly employed on military contracts and another seventy thousand in the export industry. As the Ministry of Defence acknowledged, although the ‘primary objective of defence procurement must be to ensure that the equipment needs of the Services’ were met in a ‘most timely and cost-effective manner’, there was also a ‘need to take the industrial implications of equipment programmes into account in making procurement decisions’. This was neatly and unequivocally distilled by the government when it stated at the end of its official policy statement that ‘the defence equipment programme’ was ‘large enough in itself to be of considerable economic and industrial significance’.74 In his 1976 book British Social Democracy: A Study in Development and Decay, David Howell, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, spoke for many on the left when he accused the Labour government of ‘shorttermism’, slamming its ‘surrender to economic orthodoxy’ and ‘a lack of principle in international affairs’.75 Condemning the Callaghan government’s ‘Safety First’ approach, Howell argued that in the ‘economic deterioration of the sixties and seventies’ Labour’s ‘commitment to social transformation

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became translated into a commitment to rationalise and modernise an ailing industrial structure’.76 The public spending cuts since 1974, particularly to the welfare state, combined with a deflationary economic policy to hold down prices and incomes, led Howell and others to conclude that the Labour government was merely a function of managerialism operating within a capitalist economy rather than a force for a transformative socialist system. In that same year sterling was once again devalued in crisis conditions, with the government imposing further cuts in public spending as a condition of a loan from the International Monetary Fund. It was, as Andrew Thorpe noted, ‘a watershed for the government’, and ‘highlighted further the ideological confusion and self-isolation of the social-democratic right within the party’.77 It was this ‘exhaustion of social democracy’, as Howell put it, that most concerned the left in the mid-to late 1970s. A decade later Martin Holmes arrived at a similar conclusion when he observed that ‘many leftwingers regarded the government’s mistake not only to be the postponement of socialist change but also the abdication of socialist principles in adopting monetarist solutions and tolerating high unemployment’.78 As Leo Panitch remarked, it was difficult to discern whether the Callaghan government represented ‘the centrepiece of a socialist economic strategy or of a modernised state capitalism’.79 However, the way the Labour government managed the defence economy challenges this ‘abandonment of social democracy’ thesis. As we have seen, Labour used nationalisation to consolidate the sector by bringing multinational capital into public ownership. It did so to sustain employment, even if this was a play to win electoral favour. The ministerial response demonstrated how defence was valued as having its own form of social utility – for what could be more socialist than the public ownership of industry in order to retain employment and stimulate skills training for the purposes of social and technological advancement? This was a form of social democracy that was in keeping with the social-democratic right of the party who considered themselves the ‘bitterest enemies of communism’ since the 1950s and whose logical expression was the Social Democratic Party of the 1980s. For Labourites and SDP figures, such as Alan Lee Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, the kind of unilateral disarmament that the left campaigned for was itself a betrayal of social democracy, for it undermined the cohesion of liberal democracy in the face of communist authoritarianism. Historians have analysed the contested nomenclature of British ‘social democracy’ in more recent times. As David Edgerton suggested, ‘far from expiring’, ‘British social democracy and the welfare state were to be at their peak’ in the 1970s in contrast to the economic liberalism in the subsequent decade.80 In his assessment of postwar public spending and the welfare

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state Jim Tomlinson questioned whether the so-called ‘short life of social democracy’ was a wholly accurate account of Britain since the 1970s.81 Max Crook remarked that spiralling unemployment was not politically viable for the Wilson and Callaghan governments and ‘the key element of the social democratic post-war consensus, full employment, was not completely sacrificed, although the government was unable to return to the extremely low unemployment levels of the 1950s and 1960s’.82 The social-democratic right that dominated the Labour government was guided by the principle of economic management within a capitalism system to achieve a more egalitarian society. Beset by problems, international and domestic, its legacy was tarnished for several decades until historians provided revisionist accounts in more recent times. As Aled Davies concluded in his history of British social democracy and the financial sector, the ‘economic strategy of British social democracy, and of the social democratic state, was designed to achieve the fundamental goal of a modern industrial economy in which export-led growth could resist national decline by overcoming the endemic deficit in the nation’s balance of payments; as well as providing stable, productive, and well-paid employment for all’.83 For Davies these social democrats ‘sought to reformulate and reconstruct their economic strategy in the 1970s in an attempt to advance the social-democratic project beyond the post-war settlement’.84 This was ultimately unsuccessful as the Conservatives’ electoral victory in 1979 was a watershed for British politics and society. None the less, we should be mindful of how these figures felt at the time. As Guy Ortolano concluded in his history of social-democratic urban planning, ‘rather than accepting the fate that history would later assign them, dynamic historical actors’ developed ‘their ideas and approaches in response to changing times’.85 By the late 1970s the social-democratic right had largely seen off the left and its attempt to convert the defence economy. Although bitter infighting in the Labour party was not far off in the early 1980s, the government had secured the defence sector a position in the economy that was beyond market competition and that boasted a political capital of considerable proportions. This was the culmination of a political struggle that had lasted since 1974, but also had its roots earlier than this in the modernisation of the defence economy in the late 1960s. This was also the seedbed for the eventual schism in the party itself in the early 1980s. In a debate in the House of Commons in March 1978 the Conservative MP Julian Critchley tried to associate the Labour government with the left’s ambition for industrial conversion. He was promptly taken to task by Alan Lee Williams, who asked if Critchley was aware that the government had made a response to Sense about Defence, one that had ‘clearly put the Social Democratic case?’ The Conservative graciously conceded that there was ‘no better Social Democrat’



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than Williams and asserted that he and others had ‘seen off the field’ and ‘might have saved the Labour Party’.86

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Yes, Minister Although the defence economy looked secure, the Labour government’s position in Parliament remained fragile. When it looked as though it would lose a vote of no confidence in March 1977, Jim Callaghan approached the Liberal party to form a pact so that the government could count on its support in parliamentary votes. The left was by no means a peripheral faction in one of the most finely balanced parliaments in the twentieth century. As such, left-wing MPs continued to harangue the Labour government in the hope that it would reverse its position or make concessions. As Ann Lane noted in her account of that government, although Labour had increased defence spending in 1977–78, it did so in the face of ‘considerable opposition within the Cabinet as well as from the left-wing of the Party’.87 In Tribune the National Executive Committee’s secretary Ron Huzzard argued that ‘instead of implementing NATO’s latest set of instructions’, there was an ‘urgent need for the British government to accept the Labour Party’s own policy in the field of armaments’.88 Delegates at the party conference in October 1977 regretted ‘the continued failure to make real cuts in Britain’s defence spending’ and resolved that the next general election manifesto should pledge to ‘reduce defence spending by £1,000m per year’ in addition ‘to the redeployment of human and material resources engaged in military production’.89 This was echoed on the National Executive Committee, which requested an immediate response from the defence secretary Fred Mulley.90 In his response Fred Mulley stated that it was a ‘fact of life that hundreds of thousands of people depend on defence for their livelihoods’ and that ‘defence orders for ships, aircraft [and] guided weapons play a big part in keeping large parts of British industry going’.91 But the prospect of a general election revived the left’s campaign to convert the defence economy as the National Executive Committee had a decisive role in shaping the party’s manifesto. In May 1978 the international committee asked ‘whether it can now really be said that the Government is committed to the manifesto pledge to bring down defence expenditure in line with our European allies’.92 The document was drafted by Frank Allaun, Robin Cook and Ian Mikardo, who felt that ‘the manifesto commitment is being ignored because GNP is not rising enough to bring defence expenditure proportionately in line with our European allies’. They regarded it as ‘disingenuous’ and ‘not very flattering to the intelligence of the NEC’ that the government could claim that military spending had fallen after it

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had just announced a new investment programme to develop the defence industry. That following month, the same three introduced their own manifesto, ‘Industrial Conversion in the Defence Industries’, which recommended a conversion branch within the new National Planning Commission and a ‘pilot arms conversion scheme’. The authors felt that a demonstration such as this would show ‘the government’s belief in conversion and its potential’ and could be achieved through an industry in ‘one of the nationalised corporations’ in either aerospace or shipbuilding.93 The paper accused the ‘proponents of retaining the present levels of defence expenditure’ as doing so only to ‘maintain the status-quo in order to save jobs’, a stance that was ‘short-sighted and ultimately dangerous’.94 Again, the inference of the military-industrial complex permeated the left’s arguments. ‘Industrial pressures’, the paper suggested, had a hand ‘in determining the present-day defence effort’. With the Ministry of Defence effectively a garrison against any reform of this nature, the left focused on the Department of Industry. For the Labour movement the department was among the most important in Whitehall. It was responsible for the implementation of industrial planning, including investment packages and agreements with private industry to stimulate productivity. After the return to government in 1974, Tony Benn was a controversial left-wing industry secretary who sought a radical extension of workers’ control until his demotion to the Department of Energy in 1975. His replacement was Eric Varley, a moderate social democrat who did not share Benn’s enthusiasm for industrial democracy. Like Mason and Mulley, Varley sought to preserve employment where possible and backed functioning private enterprise as part of the mixed economy. But Varley had to contend with the left who targeted the party’s industrial committee to implement industrial conversion, having not achieved it on the international committee. In a meeting on 29 June 1978 the left attended the industrial committee in substantial numbers and turned the conversation in the favour of peaceful production. The minutes recorded an agreement that ‘conversion was a part of industrial planning, and therefore the Party’s industrial policies were directly relevant’.95 The meeting was encouraging for the left. The committee ‘broadly endorsed’ the ideas set out in the industrial conversion paper and resolved to set up an ‘arms industry conversion unit’ and the implementation of a ‘pilot arms conversion scheme in a publicly owned company’.96 This was a departure from the standard government line, although crucially Eric Varley refused to provide a timeline as to when this would happen. The left recommended that industrial conversion be referred to specifically in the party’s election campaign literature ‘linking the questions of defence expenditure and arms industry conversion’ as ‘a basis for government action’ to build on the ‘initial

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contribution of the Study Group publication’.97 Buoyed by this success, in July the international committee drafted the foreign-policy section of the Labour party manifesto. In addition to a pledge not to order a successor system to the Polaris nuclear deterrent, the draft reiterated the 1974 ambition to ‘reduce the proportion of the nation’s resources devoted to defence’ into line with that carried by Britain’s ‘main allies’. But there was a new pledge, one that committed the next Labour government to provide ‘material support and encouragement to plans for industrial conversion so that the valuable resources of the defence industries can be used for the production of socially-needed goods’.98 This was restated publicly at the party conference on 6 October as a left-wing motion called for ‘extensive cuts in nuclear weaponry, and to spend the money thus saved on housing, education, the Health Service, public investment in the manufacturing industry, and development in the Third World’.99 Finally there were some encouraging signs for the left as its standing on the National Executive Committee committed the government to some form of industrial conversion, even if it was on a trial basis. Events within the Labour party were monitored closely by the civil service, particularly in the departments that stood most to lose if the defence economy was converted. The left looked as though it was about to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and the departments of defence, employment and industry set about preventing it. Eric Varley was advised by his civil servants at the Department of Industry that ‘Industrial Conversion in the Defence Industries’ was ‘explicitly a follow up to the chapters in Sense about Defence which based its conclusions on the same (and very inadequate) evidence as the previous document’.100 Varley was told that conversion ‘put people’s livelihoods at risk or spread unnecessary fears of redundancies with illconsidered proposals for new machinery and new action’ when the department observed that ‘if anything demands on the defence industry are increasing’.101 Varley may have made a calculated political judgement that, by giving the left a gesture on industrial conversion, he could shore up his own position on the National Executive Committee. But his concession to the left perturbed his officials. This was compounded by a speech given by the Prime Minister at the United Nations special session on disarmament in June when Jim Callaghan told delegates that Britain was committed to a ‘control of conventional armaments’, ‘restricting conventional arms sales’ and would participate in an exploration of ‘the problems of peace-keeping and of converting arms production facilities to civil purposes’.102 Callaghan was no champion of industrial conversion and was a steadfast advocate of the defence economy throughout his long ministerial career. But a spirit of détente continued to shape international relations. As a signatory of the 1975 Helsinki Accords and a member of the Conference in the Security and

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Co-operation in Europe, Britain was committed to providing ‘permanent machinery within which the countries of Europe with differing political systems’ to ‘replace confrontation by co-operation and so create a zone of peace’.103 Upon the Prime Minister’s return, and to demonstrate the government’s commitment to disarmament, officials at the Foreign Office organised a meeting with representatives of the Department of Industry and the Ministry of Defence on 26 June 1978 to discuss the potential for a pilot conversion scheme in a part of the defence industry. In its ‘Proposal for Demonstration Project in the Defence Industry’, civil servants in the Foreign Office felt that such a project would provide ‘a useful pointer to how the problems of conversion and readjustment in the economy might be tackled’.104 If implemented, it would show that Britain was ‘taking a serious interest in the area of conversion’ and that one demonstration, ‘even if it was only carried out in a single firm’, would be useful in showing ‘technical problems’ should ‘any wider conversion occur in the future’. But the reaction from the Department of Industry was not favourable. One official, who had been monitoring the left closely, responded by asking the Foreign Office ‘what is meant by socially useful? Are not important defence projects and exports savings not deemed to be socially useful?’ 105 In another response an industry civil servant reported that the department had ‘many reservations about the specific proposal’ and was ‘in one mind about the feasibility of the project’.106 In a damning reference to Sense about Defence officials argued that industrial conversion was on the table only because ‘theoretical studies’ had produced ‘academic material that disturbs no one’. Correspondence within the department condemned the proposal, dismissing the idea that a ‘reservoir of alternative projects’ existed to provide alternative employment as ‘dangerous nonsense’.107 As far as the Department of Industry was concerned, the Foreign Office had put ‘the cart firmly before the horse’ and if such a project were ever implemented it would cause ‘serious tensions’. As one particularly pointed response put it, the Foreign Office had expressed ‘pious hopes, but little understanding of the industrial context’.108 The Department of Industry decided to school the Foreign Office in the reality of both the Cold War and the domestic economy’s reliance on military work. It questioned first the complacent assumptions on global disarmament on which the proposal was based, particularly the view that a ‘generally lower level of military confrontation in the world’ would result in a reduced demand for weapons exports.109 This assertion was considered as ‘doubtful to say the least’ and was ‘hardly the basis’ on ‘which to take on a conversion project’. Instead, the increase in military expenditure and the investment drive in the defence economy announced earlier that year demonstrated

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that the demand on the armaments industry was ‘likely to increase’ and that ‘any conversion policy must rest on clear assumptions about defence reductions’. As one official at the Department of Industry remarked, ‘unless there is a radical shift in British defence policy or a substantial acceleration towards international disarmament, such assumptions are not present’.110 Instead, the department observed how British companies were ‘finding it increasingly difficult to break into new world markets’ and that, by contrast, the defence industry was having better success in boosting the commercial economy and ‘enabling UK capabilities to survive at a time when civilian production’ was making ‘little or no profit’.111 The Foreign Office’s ‘experiment’ was disregarded as ‘hardly a propitious time to advocate such economic losses’. The department firmly stated that such tampering would have serious repercussions for the wider economy. This was no more the case than in shipbuilding, where one official at the shipbuilding division of the department rubbished the ‘noises for Royal Navy yards to learn how to construct merchant shipping’ and pondered that such a step made his ‘mind boggle at the best of times, but especially now when every merchant ship ordered in the UK needs to be heavily subsidised and the industry faces massive redundancies despite this’.112 The prospects for shipbuilding ranged from uncertain to stark, and ‘any cut backs to Royal Navy shipping would pose problems to an industry’ in ‘the dimension of catastrophe’. Distinct from commercial manufacturing that normally had to contend with international competition, the department stressed that ‘practically all defence work’ was ‘carried out for the government’ and was ‘not subject to the competitive production of capital on the world market’. This candid correspondence, declassified thirty years later, reveal the value that was afforded to the nationalised defence economy. This protectionism was shared by both the civil service and the Labour government alike, who situated the defence industry at the centre of wider economic strategy. Whereas commercial manufacturing struggled to compete with the more affordable and punctual offerings from international competitors, the ‘cost plus’ contracts provided by the state, combined with arms exports, made the defence economy industrially indispensable. This was later proved correct. As one history of British shipbuilding noted, by the mid-1980s the nationalised corporation British Shipbuilders turned a profit of £185 million in its defence production, but the merchant side of the business made substantial losses totalling £525 million.113 As one industry official wrote to the Foreign Office, any staff member was ‘more than willing to meet’ in ‘case anyone thought of inflicting part of this exercise in our direction!’ 114 The civil service was, for the most part, broadly Keynesian in outlook, and senior officials who had experienced their formative years during or just

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after the war believed in the management of demand and supply in keeping with the broader postwar political consensus between the Conservatives and Labour.115 One such example was Ron Dearing, a senior official at the Department of Industry who had served in the Ministry of Technology in the 1960s where he had reorganised parts of the defence economy.116 Dearing was highly influential on Labour’s industrial planning in the 1970s; in one account the minister Gerald Kaufman recalled that Dearing had made a ‘deep impression on him’.117 In a revealing letter on 30 June to Leslie Huckfield, a left-leaning junior minister at the department, Dearing offered a somewhat disingenuous empathy to those in favour of industrial conversion, concluding that ‘only an impoverished soul could cavil’ at what was ‘being proposed’.118 But he was firmly protective of the defence economy. He remarked that ‘three-quarters’ of the nationalised British Aerospace was engaged in profitable military production and that, by contrast, commercial aerospace was not returning sufficient gains and rode ‘on the back of military production’. The situation was no better in shipbuilding, with warships ‘the only profitable side of the business’ and that the prospects for merchant shipbuilding were ‘appallingly bleak’. Dearing confided that ‘the more money expended in diminishing our stake in military industry, the less money there will be to create jobs for people who are likely to be unemployed as it is’. Dearing’s conclusion epitomised the defence economy’s position in the 1970s. Defence was not simply a matter of international security but an indispensable economic stimulant in troubled times. Private companies were brought into public ownership, not to radically reform the sector, but to shield it from the deindustrialisation that ravaged other forms of manufacturing. At a point where state investment in commercial industries, from cars to steel, resulted in only modest economic returns, the nationalisation of the defence economy was justified on the grounds of its unique combination of diplomacy, Cold War grand strategy, employment, social advancement and the economic return stemming from the trading of weapons overseas. Private companies relied heavily on government work, to such an extent that, as Warren Chin concluded, the ‘state increased its control over the activities of the defence contractor to the extent that by the 1970s British defence contractors resembled quasi state-regulated enterprises rather than commercially autonomous organisations’.119 Attempts to convert the defence economy, whether from the civil service or the left, were not entertained by this industrial-military-political settlement. Contrary to what some have concluded, those who advocated industrial conversion were not ignored, but received often forthright and revealing justifications for spending vast sums on the defence economy instead of hospitals or schools. For the right wing of the Labour party, such a choice was not incompatible with social

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democracy by any means, and its combination of full employment and anti-communism was an alluring one. Whilst much of the conventional understanding of twentieth-century Britain regards this period as the one where postwar social democracy was on the wane, the last two chapters have made the case that a particular type of social democracy proved remarkably durable. The defence economy, whose very existence depended on the state, was itself a welfare system of its own kind. For, although the left argued that defence did not serve any social utility and deprived resources from more deserving recipients, the social-democratic right continually justified defence spending by its socio-economic contribution. The militaryindustrial complex fended off the political left; it was now the turn of socialist workers at the frontline of the defence economy itself.

Notes 1 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 123. 2 Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987), p. 32; Ben Pimlott, ‘Trade Unions and the Second Coming of CND’, in Trade Unions in British Politics: The First 250 Years, ed. Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (New York: Longman, 1991), p. 207. 3 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 182. 4 Wickham-Jones, Economic Strategy and the Labour Party, p. 8. 5 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 137. 6 Keohane, Labour Party Defence Policy since 1945, p. 29; Vickers, Labour’s Foreign Policy since 1951, p. 114. 7 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 9 December 1974. 8 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1974–75/11, Ian Mikardo to Ron Huzzard, 18 December 1974. 9 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 17 February 1975. 10 LHASC, NEC International Committee, 10 June 1975. 11 Julia Langdon, ‘James Wellbeloved obituary’, Guardian, 17 September 2012, www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/sep/17/james-wellbeloved [accessed 24 June 2018]. 12 Alan Lee Williams, ‘A strategy for Western Europe’, Socialist Commentary, May 1974, p. 13. 13 The Social Democratic Alliance, ‘A manifesto’, Socialist Commentary, July/ August 1975, pp. 20–21. 14 Geoff Horn, Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 8. 15 Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life, and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 20.

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16 Alan Lee Williams and Geoffrey Lee Williams, Labour’s Decline and the Social Democrats’ Fall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 53. 17 Ibid., pp. 53–54. 18 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 22 July 1975. 19 Ibid., Frank Blackaby, ‘Note on the employment consequences of a £1,000 million cut (at 1974 prices) in military expenditure over 5 Years’, p. 1. 20 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Spending, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, ‘Commentary by Gerald Kaufman M.P. on Frank Blackaby’s “Military expenditure cuts” and Dan Smith’s “Aspects of conversion of arms industries”’. 21 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Spending, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 4 November 1975, ‘Letter from Frank Judd M.P.’. 22 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 15 October 1975. 23 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 20 November 1975, ‘Letter from the Secretary of State for Defence’, p. 2. 24 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 11 December 1975. 25 Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales, p. 110. 26 Ibid., p. 113. 27 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 11 December 1975. 28 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 18 March 1976, ‘Letter of resignation from Alan Lee Williams, MP, and Roderick MacFarquhar, MP and reply from the Chairman’. 29 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 142. 30 David Fairhall, ‘Labour row on defence cuts’, Guardian, 14 May 1976, p. 1. 31 David Fairhall, ‘MP discloses Labour split on arms cuts’, Guardian, 21 May 1976, p. 28. 32 Keith Harper, ‘Boot from the left for Mason over defence spending’, Guardian, 20 May 1976, p. 24. 33 LHASC, NEC International Committee, 6 December 1977. 34 Ian Aitken, ‘Mulley denounces Labour call for defence cuts’, Guardian, 12 July 1977, p. 24. 35 ‘Minister attacks Labour study group proposals to cut defence spending by £1,800m’, The Times, 23 September 1977, p. 2. 36 Sense about Defence: The Report of the Labour Party Study Group (London: Quartet, 1977), p. 22. 37 Ibid., p. 55. 38 Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and Steve Vines (eds), Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence: The Report and Papers of the Labour Party Study Group (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 550. 39 Sense about Defence, p. 66.

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40 Ibid., p. 67. 41 David Fairhall, ‘Mulley denounces Labour call for defence cuts’, Guardian, 12 July 1977, p. 24. 42 David Fairhall, ‘How Labour left would cut defence spending by a third’, Guardian, 25 July 1977, p. 4. 43 Stephen Howe, ‘Some Intellectual Origins of the Labour Left’s Thought about Ireland, c.1979–97’, in The British Labour Party and Twentieth Century Ireland: The Cause of Ireland, the Cause of Labour, ed. Laurence Marley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 182–196. 44 Sense about Defence, p. 48. 45 House of Commons, ‘Fifth Report from the Committee of Public Accounts together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Part of the Minutes of Evidence, Appendices and Index’, 22 March 1976, p. 202. 46 Chin, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform, pp. 40–41. 47 Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, p. 229. 48 Sense about Defence, p. 36. 49 Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, p. 223. 50 Chin, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform, p. 68. 51 Edgerton, Warfare State, p. 268. 52 Sense about Defence, p. 40. 53 Ibid., p. 45. 54 Andrew Wilson, The Concorde Fiasco (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973); Tom Kelsey, ‘Picking Losers: Concorde, Nuclear Power, and their Opponents in Britain, 1954–1995’ (Unpublished PhD thesis: King’s College London, 2020). 55 Jon Agar and Brian Balmer, ‘Defence Research and Genetic Engineering: Fears and Dissociation in the 1970s’, in Scientific Governance in Britain, 1914–79, ed. Don Leggett and Charlotte Sleigh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 122–143. 56 Sense about Defence, p. 78. 57 Ibid., p. 77. 58 Ibid., p. 80. 59 Peter Hildrew, ‘How the State could manage Barrow shipyard’, Guardian, 15 December 1976, p. 5. 60 Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, p. 114. 61 Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence, p. 505; The ministerial response is also available at the Modern Records Centre (MRC), MSS.292D/882.76/1, ‘Labour Party Defence Study Group on Defence Expenditure, the Arms Trade and Alternative Employment, 1975–76’. 62 Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence, p. 505. 63 Ibid., p. 508. 64 Ibid., p. 510. 65 Ibid., p. 511. 66 Terry Haydn, ‘The Strange Death of the Comprehensive School in England and Wales, 1965–2002’, Research Papers in Education, 19:4 (2004), pp. 415–432. 67 Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence, p. 513.

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68 Dockrill, British Defence Policy since 1945, p. 110. 69 TNA, CAB/129/201/17, ‘Public Expenditure to 1982–83: 1978 Report by the Public Expenditure Survey Committee (Part Two: Detailed Analysis of Programmes and Supplementary Analyses)’, p. 7. 70 TNA, CAB/129/199/11, ‘Draft Statement on the Defence Estimates 1978: Note from the Secretary of State for Defence’, pp. 1–10. 71 Carver, Tightrope Walking, p. 114. 72 TNA, CAB 128/63/3, ‘Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Thursday 2 February 1978 at 9.30 am’, p. 4. 73 TNA, CAB/129/199/11, ‘Statement on the Defence Estimates 1978: Note from the Secretary of State for Defence’, p. 3–1. 74 Ibid. 75 David Howell, British Social Democracy: A Study in Development and Decay (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 282. 76 Ibid., p. 298. 77 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 200. 78 Martin Holmes, The Labour Government, 1974–79: Political Aims and Economic Reality (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985) p. 166. 79 Leo Panitch, Working Class Politics in Crisis: Essays on Labour and the State (London: Verso, 1986), p. 116. 80 David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History (London: Penguin, 2018), p. 403. 81 Jim Tomlinson, ‘The Strange Survival of “Embedded Liberalism”: National Economic Management and Globalization in Britain from 1944’, Twentieth Century British History (2021), pp. 1–26. 82 Max Crook, ‘The Labour Governments 1974–1979: Social Democracy Abandoned?’, British Politics, 14 (2018), pp. 94–95. 83 Aled Davies, The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Britain, 1959–1979 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 18. 84 Ibid., p. 2. 85 Guy Ortolano, Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 21. 86 Ibid. 87 Ann Lane, ‘Foreign and Defence Policy’, p. 160; Ritchie Ovendale, British Defence Policy since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 154. 88 Ron Huzzard, ‘Defence spending: Where are the “cuts” which were promised?’, Tribune, 12 August 1977, p. 2. 89 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1977–78/14, ‘Annual Conference Decisions 1977’, p. 5. 90 LHASC, NEC International Committee, 10 January 1978, p. 2. 91 LHASC, NEC International Committee, Fred Mulley to Jenny Little, 31 January 1978, p. 1.

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92 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ‘Nuclear Weapons and Defence Expenditure’, ID/1977–78/146, 9 May 1978, p. 12. 93 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ‘Industrial Conversion in the Defence Industries’, 13 June 1978, p. 5. 94 Ibid., p. 6. 95 LHASC, NEC Industrial Committee, 29 June 1978, p. 2. 96 Ibid, p. 2. 97 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1977–78/173, ‘Industrial Conversion in the Defence Industries’, p. 9. 98 LHASC, NEC International Committee, ID/1978–79/203, ‘Labour’s Foreign Policy: Draft Section for Manifesto’, 17 July 1978, p. 1. 99 LHASC, Labour Party Conference Report 1978, p. 272. 100 TNA, FV 83–69, ‘Industrial Conversion of the Defence Industries, Background to NEC Meeting, 4 July 1978: Briefing for the Secretary of State for Defence’. 101 TNA, FV 83–69, ‘NEC Meeting 4 July 1978: Speaking Notes for the Secretary of State for Defence’. 102 Hansard, HC Deb 6 June 1978, ‘NATO and United Nations Meetings’, vol 951 cc28–41. 103 Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, p. 96. 104 TNA, FV 83–69, L. Carlaw, ‘Conversion of Arms Manufacture to Civilian Products’, July 1978. 105 TNA, FV 83–69, S.P. Connolly to L. Carlaw, 14 August 1978. 106 TNA, FV 83–69, E. Warne to D. Thomas [no date]. 107 TNA, FV 83–69, Binning to Wilmot, 11 August 1978. 108 TNA, FV 83–69, E. Warne to D. Thomas, 7 August 1978. 109 TNA, FV 83–69, R.W. Simpson to L. Carlaw, 22 August 1978. 110 Ibid. 111 TNA, FV 83–69, R. Jardine to L. Carlaw, 17 August 1978. 112 TNA, FV 83–69, R. Jardine to A. Buckley, ‘Implication of a Cut Back in Defence Expenditure/Conversion of the Air Defence Industries’, 24 July 1978. 113 Lewis Johnman and Hugh Murphy, British Shipbuilding and the State since 1918: A Political Economy of Decline (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), p. 220. 114 TNA, FV 83–69, R. Jardine to L. Carlaw, 17 August 1978. 115 Rodney Lowe, The Official History of the British Civil Service: Reforming the Civil Service, Volume I: the Fulton Years, 1966–81 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 383. 116 Roy Hattersley, ‘Lord Dearing’, 23 February 2009, Guardian, www.theguardian. com/education/2009/feb/23/obituary-lord-dearing-tuition-fees [accessed 4 April 2020]. 117 Gerald Kaufman, ‘Dearing, Ronald Ernest [Ron], Baron Dearing’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 10 January 2013. 118 TNA, FV 83–69, Dearing to Huckfield, 30 June 1978. 119 Chin, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform, p. 237.

4

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Workers and the defence economy: the case of Lucas Aerospace

In 1982 Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott wrote that ‘in recent years two overwhelming fears have haunted people in Britain: the fear of unemployment and the fear of war’.1 The revival of Cold War tensions coincided with the Conservative government’s economic policies that doubled the number of jobless, particularly in areas associated with manufacturing. Wainwright and Elliott noted a sense of helplessness among the public, with ‘forces that often seem to be outside the control of so-called “ordinary people”’ where the constant threat of redundancy’ was combined with the ‘momentum of the military machine carrying with it the threat of extermination’. But there was an alternative. The authors brought attention to a workers’ organisation that provided answers to both the Cold War arms race and the lengthening British dole queues. In their book The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making?, Wainwright and Elliott depicted the experiences of the workers at Lucas Aerospace, who since the late 1960s had advocated for ‘socially useful production’, rather than the company’s reliance on civil and military aviation. The ‘Lucas plan’, announced in 1976, provided a comprehensive blueprint for military-industrial conversion, with the workers even making prototypes of kidney machines assembled from the same technology used for defence purposes. The Lucas Aerospace workers embodied the idea of socially useful production and contributed to its definition as a term in political economy.2 The Lucas plan holds an esteemed position in socialist history alongside other expressions of workers’ agency in the 1970s, such as the infamous ‘work-in’ at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1972.3 Smaller groups of workers also provided alternatives to military production in other companies, including British Aerospace Corporation, Rolls-Royce and Vickers.4 However, the Lucas plan remains the most celebrated case given its ambition and size. Many on the left consider the workers to be an example of protoenvironmentalism that challenged Fordist mass production and provided an alternative to contemporary deindustrialisation. An article in the Guardian in 2014 remarked that ‘their practical, material initiatives momentarily

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widened the range of ideas, debates and possibilities – some of which persist’ and that ‘perhaps their argument was the most socially useful product left to us’.5 In 2016 a one-day conference was held at Birmingham Voluntary Service Council to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the plan, where its relevance was applied to the climate crisis, workplace precarity and the renewal of Trident.6 In 2018 The Plan: That Came from the Bottom Up was released and was part of the official selection at the BFI London Film Festival where it was packaged as a ‘gripping essay, reflecting on the dark consequences of capitalism on society and proposing an encouraging alternative for a troubling present’.7 However, for all the praise that the Lucas plan continues to receive from the left, it does not obscure the fact that the workers were rejected by the company management, the Labour government and the trade unions. As another Guardian article remarked in 2012, the Lucas plan represented an ‘utopia we nearly had’ as the company management, ‘playing off the different unions involved against each other’, refused to recognise the workers’ initiative and resisted ‘any attempt to challenge [their] right to decide what to manufacture’ as Lucas Aerospace continued to rely on civil and military aviation.8 Employees who had organised the workers’ committee later faced intimidation by management and some being made redundant. By the time that Wainwright and Elliott had completed their account of the workers’ experiences in 1982, and with the economy largely privatised, the Lucas plan already looked like a relic from a different era. Situated in the context of the defence economy, the Lucas workers and their struggle to achieve socially useful production demonstrated how entrenched the military-industrial complex was in 1970s Britain. At every step of the way the workers were impeded by the company management, the sectional interest of certain trade unions and a Labour government that considered the workers a threat to a most valuable industrial sector. Distinct from the academic and political spheres already discussed, here was an example of factory workers challenging the profit motive from within, risking their own jobs in the process. Reacting to the industrial crises of the late 1960s, they established their own cultures organically and largely without influence from the political and intellectual developments in the British left as seen in the previous chapters. As such, this account consolidates earlier arguments, namely that a social-democratic defence economy involving business, government and trade unions impeded anything that could undermine the defence economy. Availing of detailed archival resources, this case study demonstrates that despite the Labour government’s professed support for ‘industrial democracy’, the corporatist settlement of business, politics and mainstream trade unionism shielded the arms industry from an irritating intrusion. On the front line of a crumbling industrial landscape, by the early

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1980s the Lucas Aerospace workers continued to face the dilemma from which they had tried so hard to escape by having to choose between making arms or joining the dole queue.

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Socialism in one company Lucas Aerospace was a key player in the defence economy. In the 1960s it provided electronic parts for British Aerospace Corporation, Ferranti, RollsRoyce and other companies in both civil and military aircraft projects. Half of the company’s production was dedicated to military aircraft and other defence work. The company was based across seventeen factories and three geographical regions: London, the north-west of England and the west midlands. By the mid-1960s it employed over eighteen thousand workers, many of whom were highly skilled engineers. However, this reliance on the aerospace industry exposed Lucas to costly cancellations. Question marks hung over the supersonic passenger jet Concorde throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and it ended up yielding far less profit for the company and the British aerospace industry more broadly as far fewer aircraft were built than had been initially hoped. But it was the cancellation of the TSR-2, P-1154 and HS-681 military aircraft by the Labour government in 1965 that hurt the company the most. According to the company’s official history written in 1976, these cancellations ‘halved the aircraft industry in one blow’ and much of the company’s research and development ‘withered on the vine’.9 Historically, the Lucas company had a wide range of commercial interests, including car manufacturing earlier in the century. However, by the 1960s it had concentrated its interests largely in aerospace on the basis of its growth potential. This left the company exposed to crises in the sector, particularly that of Rolls-Royce in 1971. Lucas Aerospace was a leading supplier to Rolls-Royce, which had embarked on an ambitious plan to dominate the global aeroengines market. But after the American company Lockheed cancelled an order for the RB211 jet engine for its civilian Tri-Star aircraft, Rolls-Royce required a rescue package from the Conservative government. As Geoffrey Owen noted, the crisis ‘raised questions about the economic case for continuing to subsidise the development of civil aircraft and aero-engines’.10 The Rolls-Royce crisis resulted in Lucas Aerospace making two thousand workers redundant ‘almost overnight’.11 The uncertainty surrounding the industry prompted groups of its shop stewards to organise workers’ committees to propose alternative products other than aerospace that the company could manufacture within the existing capacity. Realising that the issue was larger than what one or two individual factories could solve by themselves,

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shop stewards organised a ‘combine committee’, or a body of workers’ representatives across the company. As one industrial relations journal observed in 1966, such committees had been a feature of British industry since the early part of the century but had increased in number by the mid-1960s ‘in order to function more effectively as a part of the workshop negotiating machinery’.12 In a pamphlet for the Fabian Society in 1977 Dave Elliott stated that the Lucas Aerospace combine committee was established ‘to coordinate the fight for better wages, conditions and job security and won several battles, including one on pensions and another and health and safety problems’.13 These early victories galvanised the workers’ committee and inspired a broader ambition to diversify the company’s output and move beyond aeroengines and military work. In 1974 the combine committee organised a Science and Technology Advisory Service to gather information about products that were developed by workers across the company to ‘form a strong new countervailing force’.14 The Lucas Aerospace workers were part of the wider fabric of industrial relations in Britain, which in the late 1960s and into 1970s were particularly strained. After the redundancies made by the company in 1971, workers responded with a short and unsuccessful occupation of the Lucas branch at Willesden, to which the company threatened ‘to remove machinery and tear down the roof’.15 Workers also occupied another factory at Burnley where after a strike lasting for thirteen weeks the management turned off the power supply. Such behaviour was part of a wider development in workers’ consciousness in the middle of the century. This was the era where the ‘untraditional worker’ emerged, one who was less deferential to both the company and the trade union convenor. Jack Saunders observed how, in the car industry, combine committees ‘encouraged the dynamics that were already expanding shop-floor activism by sharing information about rates and working conditions, which stimulated new demands’.16 In addition to striking, the workers at Lucas Aerospace sought other forms of industrial action with a view to diversifying the range of products that the company manufactured. Michael Gold argued that these workers’ committees represented a ‘positive challenge’ to company management, one that aimed to ‘harness creatively the motivation and commitment of shop-floor workers to defend their jobs in times of threat’.17 This development in shop-floor cultures was owed in part to the ‘decentralisation’ of industrial relations since the war. As Chris Howell observed, ‘a shift in the scope of bargaining to include work practices, work organization, technology’ and ‘the construction of a raft of new individual rights at work’, such as that in Lucas Aerospace, occurred throughout industry in the 1960s and 1970s.18 This trend encouraged a form of self-sufficiency that inspired workers and troubled company managements, as the Lucas Aerospace workers demonstrated.

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After Labour returned to government in 1974, discussion within the combine turned towards the possibility of the nationalisation of the aerospace sector, which was pledged in the party’s manifesto. Despite the left-leaning inclination of the combine members, there was little enthusiasm for state ownership or an unconditional allegiance to a Labour government. From their earliest meetings at Wortley Hall near Sheffield, workers were anxious that nationalisation would only reorganise the aerospace industry into a more compact entity with a loss of further jobs, just as the Labour government had done when it rationalised the sector in the late 1960s. There was little deference to politicians, with one shop steward stating that the inspiration for the workers’ alternative plan was as much a consequence of Harold Wilson’s economic mismanagement as it was the company’s resistance to change. By the autumn of 1974 and after further meetings, attention had shifted towards a different form of industrial output where the workers would utilise their skills in what their own publication, the Combine News, described as ‘socially useful production’.19 After the committee sent around a questionnaire to each branch, an overwhelming number of ideas was returned, including affordable heating equipment, hospital machinery and hybrid transport vehicles. But there was a notable absence of not a single new weapon system. As a shop steward and member of CND, Phil Asquith, recalled, ‘we weren’t going to be lobbying for more military orders like some of us had done in the past’.20 Such was the combine’s activity that it came to the attention of the most prominent left-wing politician in the country. In his diary entry on 11 November 1974 Tony Benn, wrote: ‘I went to one of the most inspiring meetings I have ever attended, the best organised combine in the country with all the unions represented’, a ‘complete shadow administration of a very important kind’; he concluded: ‘I found myself wholly in sympathy with them’.21 Earlier that day Labour’s industry secretary met the Lucas Aerospace combine committee at his department on Victoria Street, a short walk from the House of Commons. Benn responded to a request from the workers to arrange a meeting on the topic of Labour’s proposed nationalisation of the aerospace sector and listened to their concerns that public ownership would lead only to job losses. Benn had moved well to the left in the early 1970s when Labour was out of government. He was profoundly influenced by the workers at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders who had continued production after the collapse of that company in 1971–72, an exhibition of strength that prompted the Conservatives to take it into public ownership.22 Thereafter Benn came to be recognised as a champion of industrial democracy and the election of workers on to company boards. In more left-leaning quarters, such as the Institute for Workers’ Control that was set up in 1968, he was considered the most amenable national political figure to the cause of workers’

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dictating the mode of industrial output.23 In 1976 he contributed to a pamphlet titled The New Worker Co-Operatives.24 He thus encouraged the combine committee to take the initiative, stating that he was ‘aiming to ensure that those who work in the industry can play a vital part in controlling their own destiny’.25 In his meeting with the Lucas Aerospace workers he was quoted as saying that there was likely to be a decrease in aerospace and military projects following the defence review.26 Benn, who was also a supporter of disarmament, advised the workers to think ‘of ways of producing our way through a slump’ and ‘be prepared to diversify’.27 The combine committee was encouraged by this support and resolved to table an alternative plan to the company management rather than wait for the government to intervene on its behalf. In so doing, the workers had the support of a cabinet minister. However, Tony Benn was, at this crucial point for the workers, something of an isolated figure in the Labour government and within the Department of Industry. Harold Wilson was disturbed by his lurch towards the left in the early 1970s but felt that he could not exclude him from the cabinet given his influence on the left. Benn met the combine committee despite the ‘strident objections’ of his departmental officials, including his permanent secretary Sir Anthony Part, whose opposition to his minister was legendary in Whitehall after he suffered a mild heart attack induced by stress.28 Benn later reflected that ‘there was a great uneasiness in the office about my seeing them’ and that the idea of talking to shop stewards was foreign to most of the civil service.29 Anthony Part had worked well with the Conservatives’ industry ministers in the early 1970s, but also enjoyed good relations with trade union leaders. He was steadfastly behind the defence economy, commenting in his memoir that Rolls-Royce was rescued in 1971 ‘for defence reasons alone’ as ‘no government could have contemplated letting the company go under altogether’.30 He also had something of a vested interest in the outcome of this case as he had acted as a non-executive director of the Lucas company and was enamoured by the management’s record on innovation. Unsurprisingly, Part was hostile to the notion of workers’ control of commercial industrial production. He was far from alone; as he reflected in his memoir The Making of a Mandarin, Benn’s ‘philosophy’ was very much at odds with the Labour leadership and was ‘not that of the government’ in which he served. In 1975 the attention of the Labour movement was captured by the Common Market referendum, with Benn among the most prominent voices on the ‘leave’ campaign. The clear-cut vote to stay in the European Economic Community provided Harold Wilson with the opportunity to demote his outspoken minister to the Department of Energy, a portfolio that removed Benn from the most significant industrial planning. Had he stayed in the

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post, it is quite possible that the Lucas Aerospace workers would have been granted an opportunity to convert at least part of the company’s production lines. However, the appointment of Eric Varley as Benn’s successor was a setback in the combine’s fortunes and demonstrated that Wilson would have no more of Benn’s ‘wild leftism’.31 Varley’s political deputy Gerald Kaufman later wrote that Varley was ‘impatient with Benn’s hobby-horse of unviable workers’ co-operatives’ and offered little by way of support.32 In his popular manual How to Be a Minister Kaufman offered a thinly veiled swipe at Benn’s expense, describing him as a minister who ‘with very little knowledge of working-class life, was so enchanted with the very idea of shop stewards that he saw groups of them at his departmental headquarters whenever they asked to see him and was even rumoured to have a special room set aside for them’.33 As we have seen, Kaufman strongly criticised the left on Labour’s defence study group in the mid-1970s and was unyielding in his support for the defence economy. The Lucas Aerospace workers were about to get the same treatment.

The workers’ alternative On 9 January 1976 37 members of the Lucas Aerospace combine committee presented their alternative plan for long-term sustainable development to the company management in the factory’s conference room at Shaftmoor Lane in Birmingham. The combine committee amassed an extensive dossier, the result of over a year’s work, of ideas put forward by workers from each of the company’s 17 factories. The management promised a response within weeks. At the end of that month, the workers went public and launched their plan ‘to a crowded press conference in the upstairs room of a Fleet Street pub’, an area of London synonymous with print media that was specifically chosen to attract maximum coverage.34 The Guardian reported that the workers were ‘understandably’ concerned by the company’s reliance on ‘Britain’s defence programme’, which was considered vulnerable to government cuts given the defence review and the instability in the economy.35 A twelve-point plan was proposed in six ‘hefty’ documents that included blueprints for low-energy housing, advanced braking systems, a batterypowered car and ‘the extension of Lucas’ existing production of kidney machines and pacemakers’.36 The plan set forward a bold ambition for a workers’ alternative ‘in the event of further cutbacks to the aerospace industry’ and ensured that ‘among the products proposed’ was ‘a number which would be socially useful to the community at large’.37 It was also an intervention in the debate on industrial democracy. At that stage the Bullock committee, which had been

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commissioned by the Labour government, was still in session. The committee comprised influential trade union leaders and advocated a form of workers’ representation on company boards in order to avert strike action, although very different views existed as to what that would look like.38 Reporting on the workers’ press conference, the Financial Times observed that the combine committee felt that its plan was ‘far more significant in the long term than campaigns for workers participation or worker directors’.39 This was an expression of the long-held scepticism among the workers about representation on company boards. As industry continued to face deep structural problems, the workers posited a different approach to just relying on change from above. But it was not just the balance of industry that the workers objected to; it was also the company’s reliance on military contracts awarded by the state. The workers’ plan supported the defence cuts that had been pledged in Labour’s election manifestos in 1974, stating that such reductions in military spending were both ‘inevitable and desirable’.40 The combine situated defence within the wider uncertainty in the economy, including the imposition of pay restraint and the social services cuts made by the Labour government. The plan stated that ‘in order to make its austerity measures somewhat acceptable, the government will at least have to make a gesture towards cuts in defence expenditure’. This anti-militaristic streak was reported in The Times, which remarked that if the workers’ plan was implemented ‘aircraft equipment and systems for missiles would be replaced by components for low energy houses using solar heating’, among a range of alternatives.41 In a conversation with a journalist, one of the combine’s leading shop stewards, Ernie Scarbrow, remarked how the ‘traditional attitude with defence cuts is to fight desperately to retain the products that are being manufactured’; however, the ‘unhappy end’ was ‘redundancy’. By contrast he observed that ‘the idea of planning diversification through introducing alternative schemes is not considered’. The workers felt that there was still an opportunity to rescue the situation and ‘enough time to get the first part of an imaginative programme rolling’. But in a setback the combine committee learned of the management’s unfavourable verdict in May 1976. In a short statement Lucas Aerospace asserted that it intended ‘to concentrate on its traditional business which involves the development of aircraft systems and components for the aerospace and Defence industries’.42 The company disputed the combine’s predictions that the military sector would decline as a result of the Labour’s government’s spending review, instead emphasising that the ‘recent Defence cuts had not affected Lucas Aerospace to any great extent’.43 By this point Roy Mason’s defence review was finalised, and with it the military aircraft projects in which Lucas Aerospace was a sub-contractor, including the Jaguar, Hawk,

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Tornado and Sea Harrier. In its annual corporate statement at the end of 1975 the management concluded that the defence review would ‘not immediately affect business’ and that a ‘substantial improvement in results’ was expected resulting from military orders to the tune of £200 million ‘over the next decade’. Such was the lucrative quality of defence work that the company did ‘not accept that aircraft, military and civil’ did ‘not have a social utility’ as civil aircraft were ‘needed for business and pleasure’, whilst it was ‘necessary to maintain military aircraft for Defence’ – the company provided defence with a capital ‘D’ to leave the workers in no doubt as to its significance.44 To sweeten the pill, the company concluded that it was open to widening its range of products, reminding the combine that it had a reputation for manufacturing goods outside of defence work including, most notably, kidney machines. It concluded that ‘elected plant representatives and local management’ could review the order book in the future. But this was a vague offer that offered little to cheer the shop stewards. Whilst the company emphasised that it was open to further ‘consultation’, the response was interpreted as a flat rejection by the combine committee and a statement that it was business as usual. In the New Scientist one shop steward remarked that ‘central to what we were saying was a shift in power to those who work – not merely industrial democracy’ and that ‘clearly, management saw it as a challenge to their power and they weren’t having it’.45 In his pamphlet for the Fabian Society Dave Elliott argued that the company’s response served to ‘harden the resolve of the Combine and to widen support for the plan amongst the workforce’.46 One such example was a ‘consciousness raising’ event at Burnley on 28 July 1976 that attracted over two hundred participants. Burnley was one of the most active factories within the combine, and several managers also attended believing that ‘Lucas had relied [for] too long on guaranteed defence projects and should now seek more challenging alternatives’.47 An uneasy peace ensued. Workers carried on at their jobs, producing parts for military contracts as was expected of them. But, with the management unwilling to act on the plan’s recommendations, the combine committee resorted to petitioning sympathetic left-wing Labour MPs and the government. The effect was to divide the party along the usual left and right lines while attracting the attention of peace activists and trade unions who recognised the potential contained within the plan.

Dividing the Labour movement On 1 April 1976 MPs met at the House of Commons to debate a motion put down by the Labour government on its annual statement of the defence

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estimates – in effect, the last hurdle that Roy Mason had to negotiate so that his defence review was finalised. The motion stated that the House, ‘being aware of the economic factors which have led to cuts in all sectors of public spending, notes with approval that the defence cuts envisaged will fall on support services rather than on front-line forces, thereby maintaining the British contribution to NATO’.48 Before long the government minister, Brynmor John, was dealing with criticism from both sides of the aisle, including the stalwarts of the left, Frank Allaun and Robin Cook, who continued to attack the government’s defence review. Half-way through the debate, another voice from the Labour side joined in. Tom Litterick, the MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, brought to the attention of his fellow MPs ‘the propositions put forward by the workers of Lucas Aerospace’ in his own constituency ‘who worked out an armaments substitute production strategy’ that did ‘not threaten anyone, thus maintaining work and sensible economic activity in place of a destructive, wasteful and wholly inflationary economic activity’. Amid the disputes over the strength of the Red Army and whether Britain should stay in NATO, a workers’ initiative developing on factory floors made one of its first appearances in a House of Commons debate. But even a month before the company management had rejected the plan, Litterick lamented how ‘no one’ wanted ‘to listen to embarrassing policy statements such as those which have emerged from the workers of Lucas Aerospace, because the paranoia which underlies our arms strategy might be challenged by the voice of sanity, peace and hope for the rest of humanity’. The Lucas plan divided the Labour movement in precisely the same way that the broader question of the defence economy had already done. Whilst left-wing backbenchers and socialist activists lauded the plan as a compelling expression of workers’ foresight, government ministers thought the workers were unrealistic at best and threatening at worst. For the Labour government and many trade unions what was at stake was not just the arms industry but the sensitive balance of industrial relations. Assertive shop stewards were considered the root of Britain’s economic and industrial malaise, not only by commentators on the right but also by more centrist Labourites who preferred the more traditional, paternalistic trade-union conventions. This intersection between the defence economy and industrial relations has been rarely explored in the literature; however, in the case of Lucas Aerospace we can see how the dispute incorporated issues as disparate as foreign policy and the regulation of the factory floor. After the company management dismissed the plan, the workers needed assistance from the Labour movement to keep their ambition alive. They could rely on an enthusiastic response from many on the left, but among those who implemented policy the reception was far less favourable.

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On 18 February 1976, one month after the launch of the plan, the combine’s two most prominent shop stewards, Mike Cooley and Ernie Scarbrow, were invited to discuss their initiative to the Labour party defence study group in a committee room at the House of Commons. Second to the meeting with Tony Benn two years earlier, this was the highest political recognition that the combine had achieved. After discussing the plan in detail, Cooley and Scarbrow remarked that the company’s response was ‘hostile’, with the only indication of interest being in the ‘more obviously saleable products from the Plan’.49 But what was more troubling was the ‘general lack of interest’ on behalf of the government and the unions, with ‘a general absence’ of a policy on ‘socially useful production’. Clearly enamoured by the workers, the study group resolved to ‘bring the Corporate Plan to the attention of the NEC’s Industrial Policy Sub-Committee and the PLP’s Industry Group’.50 At the next earliest defence debate Allaun pressed the case in the Commons, citing how workers at Lucas Aerospace, Vickers and Rolls-Royce had provided plans for alternative products from ‘the harnessing of tidal energy, the jet propulsion of ships, machinery for the oil industry, and highly sophisticated medical machines not confined to kidney machines’.51 The Labour party defence study group, with its left-wing majority, was a vital access point for the combine to enter the anti-war and socialist spheres of activism. In 1975 a CND pamphlet stated that the plan was ‘going to be of very great importance not only to Lucas but to the rest of the trade union movement’.52 On 21 February 1976 Mike Cooley spoke at a conference organised by the Labour CND branch at the Holborn Library in London. To a receptive audience, he was highly critical of what he regarded as the ‘bankruptcy of our political and trade union leaders’ who spoke of ‘defence cuts’ but had ‘no concrete proposals whatsoever about alternative work’.53 Cooley’s pitch was grounded within a deeper critique of capitalist production where people had been ‘conditioned by the criteria of the market economy’ to accept the stark choice of either ‘demanding that military projects be continued or facing the dole queue’. He extended this to dehumanising mass-production with its fast-paced automated lines that relegated workers to a mere extension of the machinery. Cooley went into intricate detail as to how little rest was afforded to car workers at British Leyland (which was partly nationalised in 1975) and concluded that ‘a socialist economy cannot be based on a technology that is as brutal and depraved as that’. Long after the combine had been defeated, Cooley developed these arguments about automation and post-Fordism in his influential book Architect or Bee?54 The Lucas Aerospace workers provided CND with a focus different from the usual attention provided to nuclear weapons. For Cooley CND and

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other related groups had their own part to play in dismantling industrial exploitation and the settlement brokered by governments and trade unions that had helped to create it. He concluded that, in presenting its plan to the Labour movement, the combine was watching ‘very closely’ to see if politicians were ‘willing to demonstrate their support for it by their actions in the House of Commons’.55 Over the following months the case of the Lucas combine was repeatedly brought up in the House of Commons by MPs. The workers’ plan began to attract attention from politicians on Labour’s back benches who did not have the same dedication to disarmament as had Allaun, Mikardo and others, but who were deeply affected by the workers’ plight. The appeal of the plan was twofold. Firstly, it chimed with the attempts to find solutions to the industrial problems within some of Britain’s larger manufacturers, particularly the car industry. Secondly, it was applicable to local concerns, particularly unemployment and the creation of new jobs. Labour MPs who represented seats in the west midlands were made aware of the Lucas plan by a combination of delegations from workers and discussions in the House of Commons. As a result the case was raised in debates other than defence policy. Syd Tierney, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, expressed his concerns about the ‘deep structural unemployment problems’ in the region, but was ‘impressed’ by the planning arrangement put forward by the Lucas workers and suggested that the ‘National Enterprise Board could well play a part in encouraging both Lucas and the Trade Union Joint Committee to help in this venture’.56 In a debate on nationalisation Bob Cryer, the MP for Keighley near the Lucas factory at Bradford, remarked how the workers at Chrysler had also put forward plans for alternative production before he congratulated the Lucas workers who had ‘brought schemes for switching production from armaments to production for peaceful purposes’.57 ‘The talent’, Cryer concluded, ‘is there if only we bother to look’. The fate of the Lucas plan was to be decided not in Parliament but within the government departments in Whitehall and the trade unions who regulated industrial relations in each of its individual factories, itself a complex web of bureaucracy, convention and sectional interest. The government was initially receptive to at least consulting the plan and responding with suggestions as how best the workers could proceed. Gerald Kaufman for example was reported in the local media as expressing a ‘keen interest’.58 However, the reality was quite different. Although it suited the minister to tell the press that the government recognised the workers’ plan and would do its best to act on its recommendations, ministers were not inclined to become involved in a matter that was essentially between the workers and their representative trade unions. For the government to recognise the combine

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would be to break with standard union convention. Kaufman was later quoted by Wainwright and Elliott in a revealing insight:

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The Combine was in no sense a body which was representative of the workers on the shop floor. It was a self-selected group of people who decided that there was a job that had to be done, but they represented nobody but themselves. […] I am not knocking them. I am saying that there was no compulsion on anyone to deal with them any more than to deal with any other group of shop stewards who decided to get together on a factory basis.59

This question of ‘representation’ was the ultimate stumbling block for the Lucas Aerospace combine committee. The Lucas plan was tolerated at least initially, but a line was drawn at different stages when it appeared as through the workers might pose a particular problem. The management had already rejected the plan in May 1976 and reneged on its commitment to further talks when it refused to recognise the combine as being representative of all the employees. The committee wrote to the Department of Industry in October 1976 to state that ‘the company have blankly refused to meet our combine committee, instead giving small, disconnected pieces of information to each site’.60 The relationship between the workers and management deteriorated further when the company refused to grant resources to develop prototypes, with the combine complaining that this ‘represented a complete shift in the Company’s policy’ and ‘departed from industrial relations custom and practice’.61 The combine was now in a compromised position, dismissed or ignored by all except the Labour left and the disarmament movement. However, the workers were determined to stir support from the government. On 1 March 1977 a delegation of seventy workers ‘packed into a House of Commons Committee room’.62 Those attending included two ministers who were more to the left than were Kaufman and Varley: Albert Booth, a minister at the Department of Employment who was an avid supporter of disarmament, and Leslie Huckfield, another minister at the Department of Industry who looked upon the combine more sympathetically than did Kaufman or Varley. The meeting was prompted by the company’s ‘continued indifference to the corporate plan’, but also the threat of 1,100 redundancies that were announced by Lucas Aerospace as a result of a loss of orders, including 350 in Birmingham and 500 in Liverpool.63 Startled by this news and impressed by the plan, Jeff Rooker, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, organised a separate meeting attended by eleven Labour MPs and two members of the Lucas Aerospace management. One Labour backbencher who attended the meeting was Audrey Wise, who took up the combine’s cause for the rest of that parliament. Wise was another MP who represented a seat in the west midlands and informed the Guardian that the Lucas Aerospace management was ‘extremely vague’ on diversification. Famous

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for her straight-talking manner, she remarked that, ‘with 45 per cent of their work linked to Rolls-Royce and 23 per cent to the Ministry of Defence’, they had ‘not been very successful in diversifying’.64 The following day she took up the workers’ case at a defence debate in the Commons where she argued that ‘controlled disarmament’ would ‘have to look at alternative sources of employment for our people’ and that it was in ‘the interests of any Government, but particularly a Labour Government, to extend a helping hand to those workers’.65 This situation could not be entirely ignored by the Callaghan administration. The case of the Lucas combine had been gathering support on the party’s international policy committee and its defence study group. On the same day that Audrey Wise alerted the Commons, the defence study group met and provided further support to the workers.66 However, a decisive moment came when Leslie Huckfield, the minister at the Department of Industry, revealed the government’s hesitancy in a candid statement submitted to the study group that was omitted from the final report, Sense about Defence. On first appearances, Kaufman was not dissimilar to Benn and others on the left. He had supported workers’ co-operatives while in opposition in the early 1970s by assisting employees at the motorcycle firm Triumph Meriden in their two-year protest. He repeatedly encouraged the combine to pursue its plan through the management and the unions. But this was not an indication of overwhelming support, as the workers came to realise. His paper on the ‘Industrial and Employment Implications of Converting from Defence to Civil Production’ was initially empathetic and considered the Lucas Aerospace combine committee as ‘a worthwhile initiative’ that aimed to ‘utilise relevant skills in new ways’ by forming a ‘constructive approach’ where ‘large scale restructuring was a possibility’.67 However, he argued that such diversification would take longer than had been envisioned by the workers and that ‘a timescale of something like five years would be required to secure a large scale transition from military to civil production that makes proper use of the workforce’. He warned that production would have to be directed towards an existing market, or else a new market would ‘have to be won … and not be taken for granted’, adding that it took ‘years of often heavy investment, to either break into new markets or significantly expand an existing one’. Rapidly enacted industrial conversion would be open to what he felt was ‘high commercial risk for the companies concerned and may involve calls for large scale government support’. The reality of governing reverberated in Huckfield’s statement. Whilst expressing ‘a great deal of sympathy’ for the combine, he was concerned at ‘the very severe depression in the civilian side of aircraft and shipbuilding’ which was ‘changing the emphasis of the markets for defence industries in the short term’. His paper was grounded in this industrial reality and made

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the case that tinkering with the defence sector would risk immediate unemployment. ‘New jobs’, he contended, ‘must not be at the expense of other workers’ jobs in industries already producing for markets into which defence industries might expand’. He went further in arguing that ‘defence industries were an important part of the industrial structure’, and were ‘of material value to associated civilian industry’. Pertaining to Lucas, he remarked how ‘in aerospace in particular, defence research and development has an important benefit for the viability of the civil industry’. The export market, which was quoted by him as being worth some £850 million per year, could be sustained only ‘if the UK armed services continued to show confidence in it by buying it themselves’. As far as the Labour government was concerned, defence was just as ‘socially useful’ as anything the Lucas Aerospace workers proposed. Such sentiment was not particularly welcomed on the left, and Huckfield’s paper, along with other ministerial statements, was omitted from the final draft of the defence study group’s report. By contrast Sense about Defence was highly enthusiastic about the ‘impressive’ Lucas Aerospace workers’ plan, arguing that it was ‘not an aspiration or a moral assertion’ but ‘a series of concrete proposals which have been widely acclaimed in the specialist press’.68 The report emphasised how the workers ‘envisaged a planned transition from military to civilian work’, boosting the production of kidney machines and exploring other avenues, such as the ‘infant hobcart’ mobility vehicle. Yet, in keeping with the broader argument of Sense about Defence, the obstacle was not the technological challenges but the conservatism of the company management. The section concluded on the ominous note that ‘the initiative now lies with the government’.69

Business as usual In his 1977 pamphlet Dave Elliott, a lecturer at the Open University, ‘urged’ both ‘financial and moral support from the Government to help’ devise ‘new and more socially desirable products’.70 He concluded that ‘the Lucas Aerospace campaign should provide a sobering lesson for those who believe that the voluntary planning agreement concept would usher in a new era of industrial democracy and a creative, positive approach to industrial development’.71 Elliott worked closely with the combine committee and detected the deep scepticism among the workers towards the government. The Bullock report into industrial democracy, which concluded in 1977, was less than clear on the question of workers’ representation on corporate boards and said little to nothing on the role of combine committees. The nationalisation of the aerospace industry that year did

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not result in any immediate changes to its organisational structure. Instead, existing military contracts continued and Lucas Aerospace remained close to the larger aviation firms. If anything, the prospects for aerospace, both civil and military, improved considerably when the Callaghan government provided £250 million to Rolls-Royce to power the American Boeing 757, while the nationalised British Aerospace joined the European consortium Airbus as a partner on the new A310 passenger aircraft with associated military projects in the pipeline.72 These decisions had significantly positive effects for the industry long after the Labour government lost power in 1979. These developments made it easier for the company management and the government to fend off the workers’ plan. It also enhanced the position of the trade unions who were responsible for regulating workplace grievances in keeping with the social contract between them and the Labour government that was brokered in 1974. The Lucas combine found itself caught in the middle of this settlement as the government repeatedly advised the workers to consult their relevant union officials. For instance Leslie Huckfield’s paper to the defence study group recommended that ‘plans should [be] initially discussed with the Lucas management through recognised trade union channels’ as they understood ‘the difficulties which are likely to be encountered in any transition from military to civilian work’.73 But he added a note of caution. What the unions had told the government was that any transition between military to civilian work would ‘take a longer time than is frequently thought and must be carefully planned’. This reference to ‘recognised’ trade union procedure was interpreted by the workers as a ‘creeping innuendo’ and an abdication of responsibility by the Labour government.74 By 1977 the imposition of wage restraint to hold down inflation was wearing thin as workers and their families had to contend with rising prices. The cohesion demanded by the social contract had started to fray long before the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979 that contributed to the downfall of the Callaghan government. Although the Trades Union Congress offered a degree of unity, individual unions themselves bargained for better conditions and wages on a sectional basis. Such was the fragmentated quality of industrial relations that it was not accurate even to treat any given union as speaking with the same voice, such was the conflicting interests between workers, shop stewards and union leadership. As Robert Taylor observed, in the 1970s individual unions lobbied for wage claims so that ‘sectionalism and competitive unionism continued to weaken a positive response to intractable economic difficulties’.75 As Eric Hobsbawm argued in his famous 1978 article ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, there was a ‘growing division of workers into sections and groups, each pursuing its own economic interests irrespective of the rest’, which not only created a

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‘potential friction between groups of workers, but risk weakening the hold of the labour movement as a whole’.76 The Lucas combine was ultimately impeded by a combination of this sectionalism and the institutional conservatism and self-interest in some unions that protected the defence industry due to considerations of employment and political power. Such was the character of the combine committee that it professed to speak for workers across the respective trade unions and individual factories. Its ambition was not simply to improve conditions or achieve higher pay, as was the norm, but to develop dignified, humancentred work for the needs of society, not just the military or private finance. But this was a step too far for the government, which wanted to retain a harmonious relationship with the unions, ever conscious of their power. Despite the clamour for wage claims, the Labour government was on a relatively sound footing with the unions during the time that the combine was most active, to the extent that a return to free collective bargaining was envisioned once inflation was brought under control.77 With a general election rumoured to take place at some point in 1978, no radical proposal that could upset the balance of industry was seriously entertained. Shop-floor agency was permitted if it related to conditions and pay, but not if it undermined the role of individual union convenors in the factory, let alone reversed a form of industrial production that was, in the case of defence, returning a profit. Ironically, some of the larger trade union organisations were initially supportive of the combine. In June 1977 the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) commissioned a brief report into industrial conversion that was broadly supportive of the workers and brought attention to the catalogue of alternative products proposed from the shop floor. The TGWU stated that there was a ‘great deal of suspicion’ that proposals for ‘arms cuts’ contributed to the unemployment problem and that such opposition would exist until there were ‘concrete alternatives to provide jobs for redundant workers’.78 The union was convinced that it was ‘possible to convert a part of our military sector’ but that ‘the real obstacle [was] the lack of will to act’. Effective planning agreements would ‘provide a tremendous opportunity for producing things that we do need but which are not provided’. This statement was consistent with the TGWU’s support for industrial democracy as its general secretary, Jack Jones, argued that ‘a greatly advanced form of workplace democracy was essential to deal with the crisis of the 1970s’.79 However, this was an expression of conditional support. Although the TGWU recognised the Lucas workers’ initiative, it ‘emphasised’ that individual specialist trade unions ‘should be involved in all the discussions over alternative production’ and that such a transfer ‘could be carried out through

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a joint management committee involving both union representatives and managements’. The Lucas Aerospace workers realised that, although the TGWU offered support, it was these smaller unions that had the most leverage. On 1 November 1976 the combine wrote to the economic adviser to the Trades Union Congress, David Lea, informing him that the management was ‘intent on sacking highly skilled workers that you and this country so badly needs’.80 Lea responded supportively a week later, ‘sharing their concerns about the company’s unwillingness to meet’ and explained how their alternative plan had been discussed at a meeting of the TUC’s industrial strategy staff group. His advice was for the combine to return to the company management and emphasise that ‘workers have an interest in and a responsibility for planning a company’s future’.81 However, within a matter of months, Lea withdrew his support. When his intervention reached the ears of the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff, a union that was heavily involved in the military aerospace industry, an angry representative wrote to complain about the ‘misleading’ advice that had ‘cut across the official trade union movement within Lucas’, warning that the TUC should ‘not make any arrangement that would prejudice the existing procedural arrangements’ between ‘staff and manual unions’.82 David Lea apologised unreservedly, stating that it ‘was a matter of regret when existing procedures are accidentally cut across’.83 The TUC took a hands-off approach thereafter, and with it the combine lost yet another supporter. From this point on, the workers found themselves entangled in the red tape of trade union regulations. The question of official recognition was a persistent problem and one that was never fully satisfied. Even left-leaning unions were reluctant to recognise this form of workers’ initiative in the fear that it would jeopardise existing union structures across individual factories. Another example of this was the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, the executive of which refused to respond to the combine, an error of judgement that its general secretary, Hugh Scanlon, later regarded as ‘unforgivable’.84 If there was a clear example of a trade-union organisation that sided with military industry over the combine committee, it was the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, or CSEU. The confederation was made up of smaller unions that represented workers in professions as diverse as boilermakers, metalworkers and riveters. By the summer of 1977 the government was inclined to refer the combine and its supporters to consult with the confederation to advance their case. Responding to a letter from Jeff Rooker, Gerald Kaufman advised that the combine should pursue ‘their case through the CSEU’ and that it would be ‘very valuable’ if MPs who met the workers in March could add their ‘influence to persuade [them] to

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use the CSEU machinery’.85 However, relations between the workers and the confederation were fraught from the beginning as the union refused to recognise the combine as an official entity. The combine pleaded with the confederation that ‘it might just be a matter of routine for you, but for us it is a matter of whether we will lose our jobs or not’.86 Leslie Huckfield wrote to the combine, stating that both he and Kaufman had spoken to the confederation and felt that it was still the best channel to advance the workers’ initiative. Exasperated at the lack of progress, the combine committee wrote to the government to complain that it had been ‘continually given the impression by the Company that the Department [of Industry] supports them against us’.87 Left-wing trade unionists, some of whom were involved in the combine, called ‘upon the Government to investigate the obstruction by ministers and their colleagues’.88 Huckfield responded directly to the shop stewards, reiterating that the department had ‘consistently welcomed’ the combine and remained hopeful that at least some of what the combine had envisaged would be adopted by the company and that he was happy to report that a ‘working group’ was established between the company, unions, and workers with the intention ‘to report on the prospects of alternative work at these sites, and no doubt the working party will take into account [the] alternative products in the Plan’.89 That same month in the House Commons, Rooker called for an ‘inquiry into the role of the Department of Industry over the last two years, when it had done nothing to help these workers’.90 But any meaningful assistance was in short supply after an application from the combine for official recognition was rejected by the CSEU in April 1978. After a meeting of the confederation’s executive, this application was dismissed on the basis that there ‘was no provision in the constitution for the recognition of combine committees’.91 Instead, the confederation preferred to deal with the company management directly, as had been the time-honoured tradition. The issue at stake was not industrial conversion but employment and the continued expansion of the aerospace sector. The Lucas Aerospace management were more than happy to deal with the confederation in this respect.92 In June 1978 the company announced a new factory to be built at Huyton in Liverpool that would employ five hundred skilled workers in both civilian and military aerospace work. This news was ‘met with satisfaction’ by the confederation who confidently asserted that ‘there was no doubt that our representations had an influence on the matter’.93 But the local press had another angle. The Liverpool Echo remarked that the jobs resulted from a £6 million government rescue package to offset the running down of another Lucas factory in the neighbouring industrial estate at Broadgreen, a development that resulted in the loss of 1,450 jobs over the next two years. The episode provided the combine committee with further local press

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coverage as the workers petitioned the management and local MPs to consider the alternative products that could have saved jobs. As Mike Cooley defiantly informed a journalist, the fight ‘was not over yet’.94 The announcement aroused suspicions within the combine committee that the close relationship between the government, trade unions and the company management was responsible for this announcement. Huyton was symbolic as it was Harold Wilson’s constituency, one that he could tend to with more attention having retired as Prime Minister in 1976. Given the vital support he had provided the defence economy in his last two years in Downing Street, there was something ironic in the fact that the new Lucas Aerospace factory was set to be built on ‘Wilson Road’ in honour of the former Labour leader. Enjoying a life of semi-retirement on the backbenches, Wilson had written directly to the Department of Industry during the negotiations, with Gerald Kaufman happy to inform his former boss that the department would ‘be providing substantial help to Lucas Aerospace for this highly desirable project’.95 The news infuriated the combine who wrote angrily to an MP that it felt that ‘the inactivity of the Department of Industry may be more sinister than just bureaucratic obstruction’ given that Lucas was so ‘heavily dependent on government purchasing power’ that it ‘would not have dared to announce a factory closure in somewhere as sensitive as Liverpool without a nod from somewhere in government’.96 As has already been argued, the military-industrial sector was closely tied to the state and enjoyed the advantages of private profit and the safety net of public ownership simultaneously. Had Labour stayed in office, there was no reason to suggest that this would not have continued. The Lucas Aerospace combine committee, for all its early enthusiasm and promise, was undone by a combination of such corporatism and the power of the defence economy. The election of a Conservative government in May 1979 was yet another blow to the combine’s fortunes. Margaret Thatcher was elected on a platform to reduce governmental involvement in industrial management and put more responsibility on company management to settle pay claims. As the Conservatives’ manifesto stated, ‘pay bargaining in the private sector should be left to the companies and workers concerned. At the end of the day, no one should or can protect them from the results of the agreements they make.’ 97 Whatever little assistance the Labour government had offered to the workers, Thatcher’s administration offered even less. It also presented something of a problem for the company and the unions as the 1977 nationalisation proved short-lived after the Conservatives privatised the industry in 1980. As far as the combine was concerned, Labour’s election defeat meant that the company management ‘avoided the embarrassment of any political limelight’ that any ‘discussions on alternative products might

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have attracted under a Labour government’.98 There was by this stage an understandable weariness among the workers. As Wainwright and Elliott observed, ‘after being entangled for three years in the ropes of the [trade union] procedures and the red tape of the Department of Industry’, they ‘were in no position to stand up to the new offensive’.99

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A plan before its time? In 1978 a half-hour documentary was commissioned by the Open University in conjunction with the Centre for Alternative, Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) based at the North-East London Polytechnic, subsequently known as London Metropolitan University. The documentary was designed for the attention of students enrolled on Open University courses in engineering and the social sciences. Featuring interviews with Lucas Aerospace workers and shop stewards, it provided a compelling insight into 1970s deindustrialisation with its vivid depictions of closed factories and empty warehouses. In its opening scene Mike Cooley was driven around an industrial estate in Willesden where he pointed out each factory that was set for demolition or sold to low-skilled distribution companies, a prescient indication of how such companies became a staple of the industrial landscape for decades thereafter. By the time the documentary was filmed, the combine was showing signs of exhaustion, having endured trade union obstruction and government obfuscation. For these reasons the documentary was a plea for help as much as it was a manifesto for peaceful production. As its title ‘Doesn’t Anyone Want to Know?’ suggested, it was a critique of the political and trade-union bureaucracy that had stifled an original idea to reverse industrial decline from the shop floor upwards. In an interview alongside Ernie Scarbrow in a local pub, Cooley attributed the combine’s lack of success to it being ‘outside normal trade union traditions’ with the committee ‘not really accepted into the trade union structure’. As a result, the workers found that both company management and the trade unions were often ‘fearful, and even hostile, to the high level of rank-and-file activism’.100 Scarbrow agreed and concluded that the fragmentated structure of the unions by location and trade impeded any action on a ‘national scale or a multi-union scale’. The Labour MPs Jeff Rooker and Audrey Wise also contributed to the documentary, lamenting the lack of government action and reaffirming that decision-makers in Whitehall could have quite feasibly granted material resources to the workers. Wise emphasised that the government should have stepped in as a purchaser to buy the socially useful products that the combine had suggested, not least as the state was already Lucas Aerospace’s ‘biggest customer’ in the form

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of the Ministry of Defence. Even Tony Benn took time out from his hectic ministerial schedule to contribute to the programme, where in his usual style he compared the alternative plan to Robert the Bruce and the Levellers. Benn again encouraged the combine to keep trying as he ‘refused to believe that effort of this quality and character is wasted’. His statement that the issue could not be solved in ‘twenty-four hours or one week’ angered the Open University documentary makers who retorted that the ‘long term perspective may be fine for a politician like Tony Benn, but it doesn’t deal with the immediate problems of plant closures and loss of jobs which the alternative corporate plan was designed to avoid’. To ensure no one was in any doubt as to the severity of the situation, the documentary ended with footage of a wrecking-ball demolishing a factory. How can we assess the legacy of the Lucas Aerospace combine committee and its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to convert guns into kidney machines? Was it, as many have since argued, ‘a plan before its time’? The workers achieved a relatively small-scale success at Burnley where the management agreed to consider some of the more immediately profitable healthcare products. In his account of alternative corporate plans in the 1970s, Michael Gold observed that the initiative had limited the levels of redundancies at Lucas Aerospace in the late 1970s, stating that, in the end, ‘only a small number of jobs were lost’.101 However, this could be attributed as much to the upturn in aerospace and military work as much as to the combine committee itself. In any case one thousand workers were made redundant in 1982 in Burnley after the discontinuation of the Lockheed Tri-Star (the same culprit that almost ruined Rolls-Royce a decade earlier) and the reduced defence expenditure in Italy and West Germany that slowed down the production of the multi-role combat aircraft, Tornado. Dismayed by the management’s ruthlessness and lack of understanding, Phil Asquith, a veteran of the shop floor, bitterly resented how ‘the stewards always accepted that it would take several years for their alternative products in their corporate plan to come on stream – which was why they urged Lucas in 1976 to prepare for the sort of crisis that has now hit Burnley’.102 For many on the British left the Lucas plan was proof that industrial conversion was technologically feasible. With their blueprints and prototypes, the workers provided the material proof to suit the left’s intellectual arguments about socially useful work. The organic growth of shop-floor consciousness and the fusion of disarmament and welfare objectives was a boost to the academic and political left who were thrilled at the arrival of the plan in 1976. However, by the decade’s end, the left was just as disillusioned as were the workers themselves. In Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence Steve Vines contributed a paper on the Lucas plan specifically, arguing that ‘historical experience seems to indicate that pioneers often get

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a rough deal even though the value of their work is widely acclaimed after they have ceased to be in a position to benefit’.103 Vines blamed an unhelpful Labour government that had propped up ‘the owners of the arms producing industry’ and who had a ‘tremendous vested interest in remaining safely insulated within the sphere of military production’. Commenting on the experience of the workers, two other members of that study group, Dan and Ron Smith, concluded in the 1983 account, The Economics of Militarism, that it was ‘easy enough’ to ‘identify alternative products and solutions to problems’, but that the ‘whole process must be carried through in a receptive environment or it will collapse’.104 However, not all coverage on the left was as sympathetic. In his review of Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott’s account, The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making?, Grahame Thompson, another lecturer at the Open University, praised the ‘fascinating and enterprising attempt to preserve jobs’ but added more critical observations.105 Firstly, the fragmented composition of the combine resulted, in his estimation, in a lack of a ‘nationally agreed strategy’ so that it was ‘unlikely that the range of products could be successfully produced or marketed’. Thompson felt that the combine was guilty of being ‘too ambitious rather than not being ambitious enough’. This assessment, provided in the same year that the Conservatives won a landslide majority, reflected the editorial ambitions of Marxism Today to incorporate a more heterodox set of opinions. Many contributors argued that the left needed to adopt a more reformist stance and recognise the changing conditions of materialism engendered by the revival of free market capitalism. Thompson thus argued that ‘socially useful production’ was ‘relatively unexplored’ in the workers’ plan as there was ‘no argument that they would provide a financially and economically viable set of products’. But he went further and questioned whether ‘armaments production’ was ‘not as socially useful as is made out’, remarking that defence was ‘one of the UK’s most successful industries, and measured in terms of international competitiveness and the absence of a benign international situation, quite a socially useful one’, concluding that it was just as credible a socialist objective ‘to defend one’s national integrity’. This argument, which had been used by Labour ministers in the 1970s was used to stall the Lucas Aerospace combine committee. The value of this case study, as it is with the left more broadly in this book, was in what it revealed about the contemporary industrial, military and political consensus in postwar Britain. As was the case with the Alternative Economic Strategy, the Lucas plan was a socialist ambition that foundered on the rocks of social-democratic management of a mixed capitalist economy. By the early 1980s the combine was considered as something of a relic of a bygone era. A more hard-headed approach was thought necessary by Grahame Thompson



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instead of what he described as ‘somewhat moralistic attitude’ that mirrored the ‘more general Left hostility towards arms production’. Concluding his review, he advised that ‘fresh approaches’ were required in the more politically hostile climate in the 1980s so that the left did not ‘uncritically endorse or fetishise “workers initiatives” either’.106

Notes 1 Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott, The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making? (London: Allison and Busby, 1982), p. 1. 2 Mike Quiggin, ‘Socially Useful Production’, in Routledge Encyclopaedia of International Political Economy: Volume 3, ed. R.J. Jones (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 1429. 3 John Foster and Charles Woolfson, ‘How Workers on the Clyde Gained the Capacity for Class Struggle: The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ Work-In, 1971–72’, in British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–79, ed. Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman and John McIlroy (London: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 297–325. 4 Hilary Wainwright and Huw Beynon, The Workers’ Report on Vickers: The Vickers Shop Stewards Combine Committee Report on Work, Wages, Rationalisation, Closure, and Rank-and-File Organisation in a Multinational Company (London: Pluto, 1979). 5 Adrian Smith, ‘The Lucas Plan: What can it tell us about democratising technology today?’, Guardian, 22 January 2014, www.theguardian.com/science/ political-science/2014/jan/22/remembering-the-lucas-plan-what-can-it-tell-usabout-democratising-technology-today [accessed 14 May 2016]. 6 ‘The Plan’ Film, https://lucasplan.org.uk/the-plan-film/ [accessed 27 June 2020]. 7 British Council, ‘The Plan: That Came from the Bottom Up’, http://filmdirectory.britishcouncil.org/the-plan-that-came-from-the-bottom-up [accessed 27 June 2020]. 8 Anne Karpf, ‘Green Jobs: A Utopia we nearly had’, Guardian. 31 January 2012, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/31/jobs-growth-workers-vision [accessed 14 May 2016]. 9 Harold Nockolds, Lucas: The First Hundred Years (Vol. 2) (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1978), p. 287. 10 Owen, From Empire to Europe, p. 318. 11 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 21. 12 Shirley W. Lerner and John Bescob, ‘Shop Steward Combine Committees in the British Engineering Industry’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 4:1–3 (1966), pp. 154–164. 13 Dave Elliott, The Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Campaign: Young Fabian Pamphlet 46 (1977), p. 4. 14 ‘Technological Self-Help’, New Scientist, 21 March 1974, p. 732.

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15 Alan Tuckman, ‘Factory Occupation, Workers’ Cooperatives and Alternative Production: Lessons from Britain in the 1970s’, in Alternative Work Organizations, ed. Maurizio Atzeni (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 38–40. 16 Jack Saunders, ‘The Untraditional Worker: Class Re-Formation in Britain 1945–65’, Twentieth Century British History, 26:2 (2015), p. 243. 17 Michael Gold, ‘Worker Mobilization in the 1970s: Revisiting Work-ins, CoOperatives and Alternative Corporate Plans’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 18 (2004), p. 70. 18 Chris Howell, Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890–2000 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 88. 19 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 83. 20 Ibid., p. 10. 21 Benn, Against the Tide, p. 262. 22 John Foster and Charles Woolfson, ‘How Workers on the Clyde Gained the Capacity for Class Struggle: The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ Work-In, 1971–72’, in British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Vol. 2: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–79, ed. Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman and John McIlroy (London: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 297–325. 23 Can the Workers Run Industry?, ed. Ken Coates (London: Sphere, 1968). 24 Ken Coates and Tony Benn, The New Worker Co-Operatives (Nottingham: Spokesman Books for the Institute for Workers’ Control, 1976). 25 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–19, 11 November 1974. 26 Elliott, The Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Campaign, p. 5. 27 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–19, 11 November 1974. 28 John Medhurst, That Option No Longer Exists: Britain, 1974–76 (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014), p. 97. 29 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 83. 30 Anthony Part, The Making of a Mandarin (London: André Deutsch, 1990), p. 162. 31 Guardian, ‘Lord Varley’, 29 July 2008, www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/ jul/29/lords.labour [accessed 30 May 2016]. 32 Gerald Kaufman, ‘Eric Varley, Barron Varley’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 5 January 2012. 33 Gerald Kaufman, How to Be a Minister (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1982), p. 132. 34 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 140. 35 Rosemary Collins, ‘Lucas workers urge products switch’, Guardian, 23 January 1976, p. 6. 36 Examples of Lucas’s kidney machines are on exhibition at the Science Museum. See https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co137139/lucas-mkii-kidney-dialysis-machine-london-england-1970–1973-kidney-dialysis-machine. 37 Elliott, The Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Campaign, p. 6. 38 Adrian Williamson, ‘The Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy and the Post-War Consensus’, Contemporary British History, 30:1 (2016), pp. 119–149. 39 ‘Social products plan for Lucas’, Financial Times, 23 January 1976, p. 9.

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40 Institute for Workers’ Control, Lucas: An Alternative Plan (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978), p. 3. 41 ‘New role for defence works plants planned’, The Times, 14 February 1976, p. 4. 42 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, ‘A Response to a Report Called the “Lucas Plan”’. 43 LHASC, WAIN/8/1–8, ‘Lucas 78th Annual Report, 1975’, p. 2. 44 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, ‘A Response to a Report Called the “Lucas Plan”’. 45 ‘Lucas rejects alternative business plan’, New Scientist, 13 May 1976, p. 339. 46 Elliott, The Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Campaign, p. 11. 47 Ibid., p. 12. 48 Hansard, HC Deb 1 April 1976, ‘Defence’, vol 908 cc1591–1722. 49 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 18 February 1976, p. 2. 50 Ibid., p. 3. 51 Hansard, HC Deb 31 March 1976, ‘Defence’, vol 908 cc1324–1440. 52 Arms, Jobs and the Crisis (London: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1975), p. 17. 53 Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy (London: Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1976), p. 13 54 Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee?: The Human Price of Technology (London: Hogarth, 1987). 55 Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy, p. 18. 56 Hansard, HC Deb 21 June 1976, ‘Young People (Employment)’, vol 913 cc1103–1242. 57 Hansard, HC Deb 24 March 1976, ‘Nationalised Industries (Election of Members)’, vol 908 cc412–20. 58 ‘Union men unveil plans for Lucas’, The Birmingham Post, 23 April 1976, p. 8. 59 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 179. 60 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, 14 October 1978. 61 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, 29 December 1976. 62 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 173. 63 Elliott, The Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Campaign, p. 13. 64 ‘Bosses heads in the clouds’, Guardian, 21 March 1977, p. 7. 65 Hansard, HC Deb 22 March 1977, ‘Defence’, vol 928 cc1089–1210. 66 LHASC, NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure, Alternative Employment and the Arms Trade, 22 March 1977. 67 MRC, MSS/76/9/8, ‘Discussion Paper on the Industrial and Employment Implications of Converting from Defence to Civil Production, Submitted by Mr Huckfield, May 1977 to NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure’. 68 Sense about Defence, p. 91. 69 Ibid., p. 92. 70 ‘Shop floor should launch company plans, urge Fabians’, Guardian, 12 December 1977, p. 2. 71 Elliott, The Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Campaign, p. 20. 72 Owen, From Empire to Europe, p. 320.

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73 MRC, MSS/76/9/8, ‘Discussion Paper on the Industrial and Employment Implications of Converting from Defence to Civil Production, Submitted by Mr Huckfield, May 1977 to NEC Study Group on Defence Expenditure’. 74 Wainwright and Elliott, The Lucas Plan, p. 178. 75 Robert Taylor, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Social Contract’, in New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974–79, ed. Anthony Seldon and Kevin Hickson (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 102. 76 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The forward march of Labour halted?’, Marxism Today, September 1978, p. 284. 77 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 203. 78 Transport and General Workers’ Union, Military Spending, Defence Cuts and Alternative Employment: Statement Issued by the General Executive Council for the Twenty-Seventh Biennial Delegate Conference (1977), p. 8. 79 Williamson, ‘The Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy and the Post-War Consensus’, p. 129. 80 MRC, MSS.76/9/8, Ernie Scarbrow to David Lea, 1 November 1976. 81 MRC, MSS.76/9/8, David Lea to Ernie Scarbrow, 11 November 1976. 82 MRC, MSS.76/9/8, Ray Edwards to David Lea, 16 February 1977. 83 MRC, MSS.292D/260/2, David Lea to Ray Edwards, 7 February 1977. 84 Wainwright and Elliot, The Lucas Plan, p. 148. 85 Hansard, HC Deb 17 July 1978, ‘Lucas Aerospace’, vol 954 cc91–93W. 86 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, 6 October 1977. 87 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, 14 May 1978. 88 MRC, MSS.76/9/8, ‘Resolution from the Coventry Branch of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers’, 24 July 1978. 89 MRC, MSS.76/9/8, Leslie Huckfield to E.M. Jackson (Secretary of the AEUW Coventry Branch), 16 August 1978. 90 Hansard, HC Deb 10 July 1978, ‘Lucas Aerospace’, vol 953 cc998–999. 91 MRC, MSS.259/CSEU/1/1/10, 13 April 1978. 92 MRC, MSS.259/CSEU/1/1/10, 8 February 1978. 93 MRC, MSS.259/CSEU/1/1/10, 26 June 1978. 94 ‘£6m handout means 500 new jobs at Lucas Plant’, Liverpool Echo, 13 June 1978, p. 3. 95 Hansard, HC Deb 12 June 1978, ‘Lucas Aerospace’, vol 951 c354W. 96 LHASC, WAIN/8/9–18, 28 March 1978. 97 ‘Conservative General Election Manifesto 1979’, www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/110858 [accessed 20 June 2020]. 98 Wainwright and Elliot, The Lucas Plan, p. 197. 99 Ibid. 100 ‘Lucas plan documentary’, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pgQqfpub-c [accessed 25 May 2020]. 101 Gold, ‘Worker Mobilization in the 1970s’, p. 98. 102 Peter Hildrew, ‘Shop stewards fight “typically British” job cuts: After £21 million record profits last year, Lucas Aerospace in now sacking 1,050 workers. Peter Hildrew explains why’, Guardian, 2 March 1982, p. 4.

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103 Steve Vines, ‘The Lucas Aerospace Corporate Plan’, in Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence: The Report and Papers of the Labour Party Study Group, ed. Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and Steve Vines (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 477. 104 Dan Smith and Ron Smith, The Economics of Militarism (London: Pluto, 1983), p. 106. 105 Grahame Thompson, ‘Book Review: The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making? by Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliott’, Marxism Today, February 1983, p. 46. 106 Herbert Pimlott, ‘Write out of the Margins: Accessibility, Editorship and House Style in Marxism Today, 1957–91’, Journalism Studies, 7:5 (2006), pp. 782–806; Alexandre Campsie, ‘“Socialism Will Never Be the Same Again”: Reimagining British Left-Wing Ideas for the “New Times”’, Contemporary British History, 31:2 (2017), pp. 166–188.

5

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Post-material protest? Peace activism and the defence economy

In the early 1970s the peace movement in Britain was a shadow of its former self. As far as the public was concerned, the threat of nuclear war was far less acute than it had been in the most fraught period of the Cold War in the early 1960s, as the détente between the Cold War powers led to treaties that reduced the build-up of strategic nuclear weapons. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was the most prominent of these anti-war groups, endured a significant decline in membership. It was not uncommon for CND activists to encounter members of the public who were surprised that the campaign was still in existence. But, to ensure its own survival and adapt to the evolving climate of 1970s Britain, the peace movement gravitated towards political economy. Influenced by the Labour left and workers in the defence industry, disarmament activists focused on the military-industrial complex. Focusing on the two movements where this was most apparent, this chapter challenges the perception that the peace movement was ‘postmaterialist’ or beyond the economic and social concerns that preoccupied the lives of most hard-pressed Britons in the 1970s. Instead, CND and the Campaign against Arms Trade (CAAT) focused on the defence economy and on the everyday worker forced either to facilitate the arms industry or to join the dole queue. In a burst of activity in the mid-1970s the peace movement organised conferences and produced an abundant variety of publications on a wide range of issues, from the presence of military work on the university campus to the emergence of environmentalism and the war on domestic and global poverty. By the late 1970s there was a vibrant network of activists, politicians and workers who generated a vision for an alternative future free of military commitments. But the return of Cold War tensions, and with it the nuclear threat, restored much of the peace movement to its more ‘traditional’ campaign issues of unilateral disarmament and opposition to American military influence in Western Europe, as the ‘single issue’ of banning ‘the bomb’ returned to the forefront of its narrative. Even though political economy featured during CND’s ‘second wave’ in the early 1980s, it was peripheral

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by comparison to the 1970s. Despite the deepening unemployment crisis, the peace movement was preoccupied with the placement of cruise missiles on British territory and the confrontational posturing on either side of the Iron Curtain. Many on CND feared that a multifaceted approach would dilute the potency of its message, just as the preoccupation with the Vietnam War had done in the late 1960s. The campaign made a deliberate choice in 1981 to drop its economic dimension and focus entirely on the imposition of cruise missiles and the planned replacement of the Polaris submarine-based deterrent. Despite prominent disarmament activists, such as Mary Kaldor and E.P. Thompson, continuing to alert the public to the dangers of military industry, CND reverted to type at a critical period when the threat of war coincided with the reality of mass unemployment. These last two chapters make the case that the unique opportunity to fuse ‘materialist’ and ‘moral’ arguments was lost.

Living in a material world In 1968 Frank Parkin, a sociologist at the University of Kent, published his first academic study. Emanating from his doctoral research at the London School of Economics, Middle-Class Radicalism: The Social Bases for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament provided a ‘prescient account of a relatively new phenomenon, the radicalisation of the sons and daughters of the affluent middle class of the post-war period’.1 Within the context of increasingly ‘deviant’ social activism in the latter half of the 1960s, he argued that ‘whereas working class radicalism could be said to be geared largely to reforms of an economic or material kind, the radicalism of the middle class is directed mainly to social reforms which are basically moral in content’.2 Parkin conducted his study at a time when working-class employees were asserting their own sectional interests, either through the machinery of trade unionism or through direct bargaining with management, as we have seen in the previous chapter. He contrasted this perception of workingclass activism, which was based on materialist sectional interests, with a middle-class activism that derived ‘emotional’ satisfaction from ‘expressing personal values in action’. This loftier set of aspirations was agreed upon by Parkin’s contemporaries. An American sociologist noted how ‘unlike manual workers, whose integration into the industrial system Parkin believes to require only a calculative orientation, the higher status occupations of the educated involve a commitment to ideals and principles’.3 Parkin’s study became a part of what was later regarded as ‘post-material’ protest, which argued that activists with more economic stability and a higher social standing were far removed from ‘the mundane concerns about

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satisfying their basic material needs’.4 In a British context this post-materialism had its roots in the emergence of professional experts in the interwar period, but became more fully fledged by the late 1950s as an increasing number of university-educated middle-class citizens emerged. Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, observed this in a wider international context in his 1977 book The Silent Revolution, in which he noted the intergenerational shift towards a wider dispersion of affluence that had altered the social bases for activism. Whereas protest in the interwar era was based largely on economic concerns, such as hyperinflation and unemployment, he contended that activism in the middle of the century was motivated by ethical considerations surrounding foreign policy and human rights. Yet, whilst Inglehart spoke of a ‘post-materialist phenomenon’, he noted that, by the mid-1970s and with the onset of global recession and the ending of the Vietnam War, the ‘wave of protest had subsided’ and that ‘ironically enough, in a period of economic contraction, there was relative political calm’.5 However, he remarked a notable exception to this trend: ‘Great Britain constitutes the one striking exception to this pattern – a country in which things remained relatively calm during the wave of student protest, but where the politics of class confrontation were rather speedily revived in the 1970s’. Although Parkin’s assessment of CND was intended not as a criticism but more as an academic observation, it later became a stick to beat the campaign with. The economic and industrial crises of the 1970s, generated by assertive working-class organisation on shop floors and trade unions, made CND’s peace marches in the 1960s look comparatively irrelevant and passé. In their history of the campaign twenty years after its first wave, the former peace-activists-turned-academics Richard Taylor and Colin Pritchard dismissed CND as an ‘ultimate failure’ because of its approach based on ‘morality, reason and dramatic protest’. Employing Parkin’s famous description, they concluded that: Because the movement in the UK was one of middle-class radicalism par excellence and was therefore largely unconcerned with basic economic issues of jobs, investment alternatives, and so on, it failed to make the crucial breakthrough to the working class. It thus failed to build up sufficiently powerful forces to confront the massive vested interests of the military/industrial/State complex.6

CND’s failure to attract the support from the working class was dismissed by Taylor and Pritchard as proof that it was elitist and aloof. But they had comparatively little to say about the 1970s, a decade that is almost entirely overlooked in the histories of the peace movement given the comparative lull in activism when compared to CND’s two ‘waves’ in the 1960s and the

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1980s. Monsignor Bruce Kent, who served as CND’s general secretary from 1980 to 1985, recalled that the 1970s were ‘very lean years’ when ‘despite the constant escalation of the nuclear arms race’, the campaign’s membership dwindled to dangerously low figures.7 The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which focused public attention on the threat of nuclear war, was ultimately detrimental to CND as it resulted in the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty that moved nuclear testing underground. As Frank Allaun recalled, ‘ironically it was the success of this treaty which did more than anything else to undermine CND’ with many participants having ‘sat back thinking the job had been done, when clearly it had not’.8 This was a turning point for the British peace movement. By the mid-1960s, as Holger Nehring noted, the ‘visual arsenal’ of nuclear testing that had characterised the early Cold War had shifted towards ‘the politics of security’, namely the ‘perceptions of American imperialism’.9 The Vietnam War dominated anti-war protest in Britain and elsewhere to the point that many in CND were concerned that the original mission of unilateral disarmament was marginalised. Mark Phythian felt that CND marches in the late 1960s were effectively demonstrations against the Vietnam War in all but name and, ‘although laudable, were certainly a long way from CND’s original mission’ and weakened the ‘potency of its message’.10 Duncan Rees, a future general secretary of the campaign, felt that he was ‘marching more for the suffering people of Vietnam than for the abolition of nuclear weapons’.11 Worse still was the perception among the public that by the early 1970s statesmen had managed, as Lawrence Wittner put it, to tame the nuclear menace, as seen in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1972. This was in spite of the fact that the nuclear powers (including Britain) were developing missile technologies, and weapons proliferation was a constant threat. This is not to overlook the build-up of conventional arsenals and the arms trade. ‘Perceptions’, Wittner concluded, did ‘not always correspond to realities’.12 The lowly condition of CND in the early 1970s inspired among its few remaining members a sense of despondency and even panic, but also an appetite for a different approach, even if that alternative was not obvious at the time. CND’s membership was now as low as two thousand, a small fraction of its hundred thousand followers a decade earlier.13 It was clear that the ways of the past were draining the morale of those campaign veterans who were barely hanging on. The annual fifty-mile march from the Atomic Weapons Establishment to Trafalgar Square on Easter weekend came in for criticism. One member representing the Harlow CND branch addressed the annual conference in 1972 and captured the mood: There is no doubt in my mind that the campaign must go on, but it cannot go on as it does now. On the last march, when I almost collapsed after carrying

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that banner I don’t know how many miles, it occurred to me that this is exactly what the military wants us to do: run ourselves into the ground protesting so that they can be left to their own devices and are able to go on creating a situation from which we can never draw back.14

However, more recent scholarship has challenged the ‘middle-class radicalism’ label. Christopher Hill considered that Parkin’s designation was too simplistic and that it did a disservice to the ‘rivalries and tensions between the older, upper middle class, radicals who led CND and the younger, usually lower middle class who stood for more proactive and participatory forms of protest’.15 Jodi Burkett depicted the anti-nuclear movement in the 1960s as a multifaceted assembly in which CND was just one strand.16 Other campaigns, such as the Direct Action Committee and the Committee of 100, were comparatively radical. By contrast, CND relied on a largely moral argument in that Britain could provide an example to the world in unilaterally disarming its nuclear deterrent. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, tension existed within CND over its ‘single issue’ approach as some on the ‘radical edges of the movement’ preferred to take a stand on a variety of issues, including the economy and race. Peggy Duff, the first organising secretary of CND, recalled that some wanted a ‘much broader dissenting programme’ because ‘the money spent on arms could be used for housing, and racialism in some countries could lead to war’.17 But as Burkett noted, the majority of CND wished to focus ‘solely on nuclear weapons’ and not distract from the overriding cause of ‘eliminating the bomb’.18 This tension persisted and flared up when Cold War tensions resurfaced in the early 1980s. Adapting to the demands of the material world was not straightforward for many in the British peace movement.

Arms, Jobs and the Crisis However, there is another narrative, one that positions CND within the materialistic concerns of 1970s Britain. In her more sympathetic history, CND: Now More than Ever, the campaign’s general secretary, Kate Hudson, responded firmly to the accusation that the movement considered itself somehow above the economic and social crises in postwar Britain, stating that CND was ‘never cavalier in its attitude towards loss of jobs in the nuclear arms or nuclear power industries’ and was ‘committed to a policy of arms conversion – that is to say converting military production into socially useful production’.19 This, Hudson observed, was ‘particularly so in the 1970s, when there was an economic crisis in Britain and the whole Western world, linked in major part to the oil price crises’. She mentioned CND’s work with trade unions and workers, specifically Lucas Aerospace,

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who benefited from the platform that the campaign provided. Hudson’s treatment of the economic dimension was fleeting – a single paragraph – but it served as an important intervention. CND produced a far larger and more detailed set of economic analyses than it has ever been given credit for. Considered as part of a wider ‘left’, the campaign fused disarmament with social concerns to good effect in the 1970s. This economic ‘turn’ began in 1974 with Labour back in government and carrying out a defence-spending review. At its annual conference that year CND passed a resolution that called for a ‘drastic cut in arms spending, and that Government planning must ensure that the workers affected will be redeployed on peaceful production without loss of earnings’.20 Recognising the emphasis placed on the defence economy by Labour’s manifestos that year, the conference believed that ‘the campaign should devote far greater attention than previously to the effects of the high level of arms spending on the British economy, and particularly to the effects on the balance of payments’. This statement neatly set out the change in emphasis that was evident in CND over the next two or so years. It was owed at least in part to the influence of Labour party members, including Frank Allaun and Robin Cook, who were involved both in the campaign and in the Labour party defence study group. Activists recognised that defence policy did not exist in isolation, and was instead part of ‘an entire social, political and economic system’ which favoured deterrence over disarmament. There was a tendency among left-wing MPs to hitch any hopes that CND had on a benevolent Labour government. This is what Ian Mikardo meant when he stated that Labour was ‘the only arena in which the campaign could successfully ride’.21 However, by 1974 CND was less inclined to rely on the kindness of a Labour government under Harold Wilson. Given that he had consented to the continuation of Polaris in 1965 after criticising the deterrent during the 1964 election campaign, CND’s members had reason to distrust the Prime Minister. Wilson had also refused to act on the manifesto pledges to remove American Polaris bases in 1974, instead delaying any announcements until after the defence review. This frustrated CND even further, with those attending its conference becoming ‘increasingly sceptical of the Labour government’.22 This was part of a broader reshaping of the movement away from deference and towards a more autonomous and interventionist mode of campaigning. The delegates felt that CND had ‘suffered from an excessive attachment to parliamentary politics, particularly to Labour’ and that ‘the methods that served CND so well in the past are inappropriate to the politics of the 1970s’. These ‘new politics’ were based on dissent, rather than just an application of pressure on Parliament to effect change.23 In a similar manner to the Labour left and the Lucas Aerospace workers, CND posited its own alternative

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for peaceful industrial production, one that was not based on a reliance on military work. To this end it was influenced not only by politicians but by trade unionists and workers, the former having voted in successful disarmament motions at the Labour party conferences in 1972 and 1973 that compelled the party to take a more radical line on nuclear disarmament in its election material.24 In his chapter on CND Ben Pimlott noted the ‘latent Conference majority for unilateralism’ and that economic arguments had also ‘crept in’ to these resolutions.25 By 1974 CND’s organisers recognised that, despite the short supply of membership and financial resources, there was a potential for growth if it were to join forces with similar groups. Its general secretary, Duncan Rees, recalled the ambition to ‘strengthen its links with affiliated organisations’ in order ‘to develop an authoritative voice on nuclear and other defence issues, aimed at key opinion formers’.26 Turning away from petitioning the government did not mean that CND became any less political; instead, it meant that it would avail itself of the multifaceted composition of mid-1970s non-governmental activism that had a considerable influence on the Labour party in government. Given the monetary constraints resulting from its modest membership, CND’s organising council resolved that ‘education and research should be seen as a main priority’, with the traditional demonstrations, such as the long marches, only for ‘those ordinary members who want them’.27 With education in mind, CND targeted students specifically with a view to exposing the links between higher education and military research. One such example was Study War No More, a pamphlet authored by Zoe Fairbairns who was active in the feminist movement at St Andrew’s University and had spent time studying at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.28 Fairbairns responded to a request from the editorial board of CND’s newspaper Sanity who ran a feature on the military-industrial presence in academic research in British polytechnics and universities. The request from CND was for different kinds of material rather than the staple fare of stories about Polaris or the conflict within the Labour party, which she later remarked were ‘all important and interesting, but they had been done before’.29 She commenced her research by asking the Ministry of Defence for information. To her agreeable surprise, the Ministry provided Fairbairns with enough data to create a directory of defence contracts awarded to institutes of higher education, each with a short description of the military research being carried out there. Whilst the ministry told her that ‘only a small proportion’ of this scientific research was secret, Fairbairns spoke directly to some scientists who said ‘they were “not allowed” to discuss what work they were doing’. Study War No More accused the military of threatening academic freedom and, ‘given the chance’ it would use ‘the research facilities and trained minds

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found there to maintain and defend the present economic system against any forces opposing it’.30 Fairbairns advocated a campaign of information on campuses where the military was ‘trying to establish their political influence in an area where radical, socialist and progressive ideas [were] taking root’. Study War No More was favourably received and was considered a long-overdue inquiry into the military’s presence in academic affairs. Reviewing the pamphlet in Sanity in February 1975, the Oxford professor Alistair Buchan remarked that ‘a great deal of British scientific genius and managerial brilliance has been squandered on the nuclear programme, rather than being diversified to strengthen the country’s economy’.31 Instead, defence spending was responsible for the ‘inflationary spiral’ that deprived investment to the social services. Impressed by the fresh approach undertaken by Fairbairns, Buchan reflected that it was ‘amazing how little research has been done into the effects of defence on the economy in the UK’. That was all to change over the next few years as CND and the left produced a prolific output of publications on that precise problem. In February 1975 two CND conferences took place in Glasgow and London, attended by disarmament activists, politicians and trade unionists. The proceedings from these conference discussions were distilled into a pamphlet that was submitted for the consideration of the Labour party defence study group. Arms, Jobs and the Crisis stated that CND ‘had no policy on general economic questions, but it [had] of course on disarmament’ and that the pamphlet would ‘contribute to a very necessary public debate on the relation between the two’.32 The publication directly challenged the Labour government and the ongoing defence review, remarking that it was ‘extraordinary’ that ‘Labour ministers, supposedly committed to planning Britain’s economy, should find it inconceivable that men employed on arms could produce anything else’. The pamphlet was heavily influenced by both Allaun and Cook, who spoke at the conferences and whose arguments were apparent throughout. It acknowledged the emerging Lucas plan, which was launched only a month beforehand, and resolved to empower local workers to challenge their company management. Arms, Jobs and the Crisis looked and sounded as if it was straight from the Labour backbenches and concluded that, if the government stopped ‘ignoring conference policy’ on disarmament, it would ‘receive overwhelming backing from the people’ and would be ‘a lot nearer the solution of all our problems’.33 This publication signified the widening of CND’s remit beyond the singleissue of nuclear weapons. It also demonstrated its connection to the left wing of the Labour party where there was an important crossover of membership. Leading figures involved with CND, such as Mary Kaldor and

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Dan Smith, employed their insights from the Labour party defence study group to inform and redirect the campaign. In November 1975 Smith and David Griffiths submitted a policy brief, ‘Arms Cuts and Industrial Conversion’, that advised CND to lobby the government and ‘press for planning for conversion to start now’ (original emphasis).34 With its fragile parliamentary position and active left-wing contingent, CND felt that meaningful defence policy changes could be achieved by the Labour government if sufficient pressure were applied. Another one-day conference took place on 21 February 1976 in London, where the speakers included Robin Cook, Mike Cooley and Stuart Holland, the socialist economist.35 The conference was attended by 120 people and its success inspired another pamphlet, Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy, which went on to sell three thousand copies and required a reprinting – a significant feat for a campaign on the threat of disbanding only a few years earlier.36 The foreword to Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy was authored by Judith Hart, a backbencher on the left who had served in Wilson’s government in the 1960s as the Paymaster General and as a minister for overseas development, having sat on CND’s national council and taken part in its first march from Aldermaston to London in 1958. Hart’s own ministerial experience, which ranged from diplomacy to economic planning, prompted her to remark that CND ‘perhaps tended to be too isolated in its special interests and pressure group concerns in the past’ but was ‘now realising the need to make the connections between defence cuts and alternative employment, and between foreign policy and an economic and industrial policy for a socialist Britain’.37 Hart encouraged CND to join with the ‘good people’ in the Labour movement and within industry who were ‘contributing their energies and expertise’ to ‘harmonise our policy commitments to a degree of disarmament on the one hand and full employment on the other’. As such, Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy represented an intervention from the Labour left to inspire activism from within the peace movement to support its own crusade in dismantling the defence economy. Stuart Holland’s essay was particularly important as it was his clearest statement yet as to how reducing the defence economy could be affected through Labour’s industrial strategy. He lauded the Lucas Aerospace workers’ campaign to expand the production of health equipment, but noted that ‘kidney machine production techniques are still primitive’ and that, although there was plenty of demand from the NHS, ‘we are not in the business of efficient supply’.38 Holland argued that the National Enterprise Board could organise the defence industry to fulfil this existing capacity and that if Britain developed high-quality mass production of health equipment it ‘could define a comparative advantage in world trade in which we could not be beaten over the next 15–20 years’. By 1976 Holland and others on the left were

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in a less prominent position than they had been in the early 1970s as the Labour government avoided the implementation of their socialist programme. None the less, there were still battles to be won, defence being just one example. Holland concluded that socially useful production was ‘not invented by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or by academics in smoke-filled rooms, dreaming of how they can cause problems for a Labour Government’, but was a ‘crucial condition’ of ‘the future success of the British economy’. In CND’s conference later that year, delegates expressed ‘a good deal of enthusiasm for the conversion to peaceful production’.39 Within a year Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy had sold over five thousand copies, as had another similar publication, Labour and Disarmament: A Time for Decision, which sold three thousand copies within a few months.40 These publication sales provided a badly needed financial boost to the campaign that was steadily rebuilding. The shift towards the economic dimension was welcomed by campaign veterans, such as Phil Leeson, an economics lecturer at Manchester University, who regretted how CND ‘did not convince the workers’ as to the merits of disarmament during its 1960s heyday.41 In Sanity the conference on Labour’s industrial strategy was reported as being realistic in its assessment, noting that ‘government planning for disarmament’ was ‘still unlikely’, but given the ‘deep nature of Britain’s crisis’ the report suggested that wherever there was insecurity in military industry the ‘peace movement should provide alternatives’.42 The solution to this was a ‘broad-based and many-sided campaign’ in which CND would play an important role with the aim of ‘disarmament, defence cuts, and progressive economic policies, and for alternative products that people need’. Commenting on the publication of the Labour party study group’s report Sense about Defence in 1977, Jo Richardson concluded that CND could ‘only welcome this constructive, detailed and powerful case for reductions in our arms spending’.43 But it was the case of the Lucas Aerospace workers that excited the most interest. CND had monitored the workers’ situation since the publication of their alternative plan for peaceful production in 1976. By the time of its annual conference two years later CND’s delegates acknowledged that ‘the situation had worsened’ as ‘the management had sought to offer redundancies in trying to undermine the Lucas Combine Committee’.44 CND’s general secretary, Duncan Rees, argued that ‘if the campaign for arms cuts is to succeed in conditions of heavy unemployment’, then supportive ‘alternative production and peaceful engineering groups [had to] be made available’ to the workers. This sentiment was supported by the delegates, who pledged a ‘greater emphasis on the promotion of alternatives to employment of people and resources in the arms industries’.45 The 1978 conference was the best-attended in over a decade.46 Indicative of the prominence afforded

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to the economic dimension, a session was dedicated to industrial conversion that was addressed by Mike Cooley, who saw CND as a platform for ‘ideas to be diffused as widely as possible to the rest of society’.47 He was supported by CND’s trade union branch, who stated that if the ‘campaign for cuts in arms spending is to succeed in times of heavy unemployment, then the work of the Lucas stewards and others need to be matched by much stronger public demand’.48 By this point the campaign had done much to shed its ‘single issue’ identity that had characterised its earlier protests in the 1960s. Duncan Rees recalled that CND had ‘broadened the debate to arms manufacture’ and so demonstrated that the ‘moral dimension of disarmament had a practical side, creating or saving jobs at the same time as reducing armaments’.49 It was no exaggeration to say that CND had shifted from Frank Parkin’s designation of protest of a moral character; by the late 1970s, it had embraced materialist concerns.

‘Merchants of death’ Just as CND pivoted towards political economy, a new organisation was founded to expose Britain’s arms trade and its contribution to the defence economy. Sponsored by eight peace groups, including CND, Friends of the Earth and the War on Want, CAAT was founded in 1974. Working out of a small office in London’s Caledonian Road with just one full-time officer, Sandy Merritt, CAAT published a newsletter every two months with a view to the ‘raising of the arms trade in the “political arena”’ and ‘amongst the general public’.50 The campaign was the first of its kind in Britain in that it specifically focused on the arms trade, in terms of both its impact on fuelling conflicts abroad and undermining social advancement at home. CAAT immediately found support from a variety of peace groups, not all of them socialist, and some with religious affiliations, such as the Anglican Peace Fellowship, Christian Aid and Oxfam. For many on the left CAAT was a welcome addition to the crusade for socially useful production. It provided a rallying point on the arms trade that had polarised the Labour movement since the 1960s. With the Wilson and later Callaghan governments electing to export arms in the 1970s to war-torn nations in the Middle East, CAAT had ample evidence to stir up support from anti-war activists. At the invitation of the Labour Action for Peace and its chairman, Frank Allaun, CAAT was invited to launch one of its first pamphlets, Poverty and the Arms Trade, at the House of Commons on 16 October 1975. There it argued that while Britain’s overseas aid budget was £300 million per year, its annual intake from weapons exports was over £600 million. The consequence was that ‘many poor countries’ were ‘only pawns in the struggle

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between the rich West and the comparatively rich East, both blocks urging them to arm’.51 CAAT’s appeal to religious groups earned praise in high places; it was referenced by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1975 when he called for ‘a return to national values’ that should ‘be directed toward the Government’ in ending the arms industry.52 Poverty and the Arms Trade was remarkably successful and sold over 35,000 copies within a year. CAAT’s persistent focus on the domestic arms industry made it particularly relevant to the left. The main source of its criticism was the Defence Sales Organisation (DSO), which was set up by Denis Healey when he was defence secretary in 1966 to incorporate leading businessmen in order to maximise the efficiency and profitability of weapons exports. By the mid-1970s the DSO employed 330 civil servants at a cost of £1 million per year. CAAT accused it of ‘fuelling the flames of warfare and violence around the world’ and establishing an immoral connection of vested interests between private industry and the state where commercial advisers were themselves recipients of substantial state investment resulting from arms sales. One leading figure in the DSO was ‘none other than Lord Stokes’, who by 1975 was the chairman of the nationalised British Leyland company that specialised in mass-produced cars but also in engines for the Chieftain tank that was sold in large numbers to Iran.53 For CAAT this was a neat representation of the cosy relationship between business and politics, concluding that it was ‘no wonder people talk about the military-industrial complex!’ Its campaign literature included a regular round-up of the rumours in Westminster that Labour government officials were bribed by the American defence firms Northrop and Lockheed, concluding that ‘the arms trade includes not only hardware but people as well’.54 CAAT was just as committed to industrial conversion as was CND. Funds were a concern for its first few years, but a £500 donation from the Joseph Rowntree Fund led to a two-day conference in Birmingham that was attended by Lucas Aerospace workers and Labour MPs. The question was how best to use what resources it had available. Robin Cook advised CAAT that the ‘most effective way to influence MPs’ was to see them at their constituencies.55 CAAT adopted a campaign targeted towards local defence industries, initially advising its members to write to their local MPs, particularly if the military sector was a large employer in their area. But this approach yielded little by way of a return. Instead, in April 1977 CAAT took the controversial step of issuing leaflets directly to workers employed in the industry in what was considered the ‘first time’ that ‘mass leafleting of this type has been undertaken in this country’.56 This was a more invasive form of protest, one that encouraged activists to ‘stand outside the factory gate and hand out the leaflet’ and, if approached, ‘start a conversation with managers of local arms firms’.57 CAAT appreciated that

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by adopting this form of direct action its members should use their own discretion, suggesting that if they felt it was ‘not right’ they could edit the pamphlet and distribute it in a potentially less confrontational manner. In targeting employees rather than corporate management or politicians, CAAT emphasised that it was ‘not asking military production workers to give up their jobs’ but was ‘only asking them to start considering alternative production possibilities within their present jobs’. This was a campaign that was justified as having ‘to be undertaken, bit by bit, in every area of the country – and, indeed, the world – where people are engaged in production and preparation for war’. Judging by the lack of its mention in CAAT’s publications, it seems that this approach gained little success as economic uncertainty made this appeal to the conscience of the worker a hard sell. However, the issue was reignited by the publication of Anthony Sampson’s The Arms Bazaar in July 1977. Formerly a journalist at The Observer, Sampson had authored the bestselling Anatomy of Britain in 1962, which diagnosed the failings of big business and government that became part of the ‘overture to the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964’.58 Sampson was fascinated by the corporate world and saw how the international arms trade was motivated primarily by economic considerations. The Arms Bazaar also sold widely and put the arms trade at the centre of public discourse, at least for a while. There Sampson remarked that Britain’s arms exports, ‘although tiny compared to America’s’, were still ‘spectacular in relation to her own economy, and between 1972 and 1975 they went up from £257 million to £600 million’, adding that a quarter of Britain’s arms production went into exports and ‘both Labour and Conservative governments encouraged their official arms salesmen to greater efforts abroad’.59 Sampson’s journalistic flair was used to full effect when he visited an arms sales exhibition at Aldershot in 1976. The exhibition pushed up arms sales to £750 million overall. It went ahead ‘peacefully’ despite ‘some modest protests from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade [sic]’ as ‘Chieftain tanks were lined up along the lawn, while wives and children of soldiers clambered over them and popped up in the turret’. As was the case with Zoe Fairbairns, Sampson had remarkably little difficulty extracting information from the Ministry of Defence, who provided him with a box full of sales records. None the less, prior to awarding the contract, he remarked that arms sales were ‘carefully scrutinised by the diplomats and defence officials in private, and may be turned down’, as was the case with the Labour government over exports to Chile and South Africa. Sampson claimed that the arms trade was far from a democratic process, with only very patchy oversight of how contracts were awarded as Parliament was ‘not allowed to share in the decisions, or to know how the sales are apportioned’, concluding

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that ‘the British public are never told the extent to which they are arming the world’.60 Sampson brought attention to the arms trade in a series of strident articles in the mainstream press. In one such example in The Observer during the United Nations special session on disarmament in June 1978, Sampson described the arms trade as the ‘blind spot of a generation’ with the potential ‘to determine, not only the scarce allocation of precious resources, but the patterns of societies – complete with military industrial complexes and military elites – for decades to come’. Sampson was realistic in his assessment of the opposition to the arms trade in Britain, citing that only left-wing MPs, church leaders and ‘the redoubtable Campaign Against the Arms Trade’ offered any outward criticism. But his diagnosis of the bind that politicians found themselves in was very much in keeping with the thinking on the left at this point. Sampson observed that ‘most Members of Parliament are too worried about arms workers in their own constituencies, or too bored by the whole subject to concern themselves. With high unemployment and a history of export failures, few people are too keen to criticise one of Britain’s most successful exports, worth about £1 billion a year.’ 61 The Arms Bazaar provided further fuel to the left’s fire. Robin Cook wrote in the New Statesman that, once research and development costs were subtracted, the overall financial benefit to the state was modest, concluding that ‘there is a growing body of evidence that investment in almost anything else would yield a better return than armaments’.62 In addition to the economic dimension, Cook considered Britain’s share in the ‘sordid’ arms trade to be morally objectionable, and one that Labour was largely responsible for in setting up the DSO in 1966. Although the Callaghan government had cancelled an arms order to El Salvador in January 1979 after being ‘bombarded with letters’, CAAT speculated that it would, in conjunction with the defence industry, ‘step up their high-powered salesmanship’ after it was rumoured that China and Iran preferred the purchase of American aircraft over the British Harrier. Even if their sales pitch failed, CAAT felt that it was likely that the government would ‘probably increase procurement for the British armed forces (to keep the production lines going and avoid too many redundancies) and gradually sack large numbers of arms workers’. This was a dismal prospect for the peace movement, but CAAT continued to rally its membership to petition their local MPs, acknowledging that it was ‘a huge task, and it’s easy to feel powerless. But every CAAT supporter can make a start somewhere.’ 63 In May 1979 Labour lost the general election to the Conservatives. CAAT remarked that ‘campaigning against the arms trade wasn’t easy under the Labour government, with its twisted justification for arms sales exhibitions,

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the Defence Sales Organisation, and continuing sales to some of the most repressive governments in the world’.64 However, it readily accepted that campaigning against ‘Tory arms trade policies is going to be even more difficult’. CAAT’s objective was to make arms trading a major election issue by arousing ‘so much public indignation, from so many sectors of the community, that the government cannot press ahead with a policy of aggressive arms salesmanship’.65 The defence economy was central to this narrative, with CAAT arguing that it could generate ‘so much interest in alternative production that the government, arms manufacturers and trade unions’ would ‘have to start conversion planning’, concluding that it would ‘take a long time – and now is the time to start’. But there were ominous signs that industrial conversion was sliding from the scale of importance. In August 1979 CAAT received an appeal from the Centre for Alternative Industrial Technological Systems, which had been set up by the Lucas Aerospace workers a year earlier. CAAT informed its members that, although it might not be ‘tactically wise to ask you for money for a Lucas project’, ‘CAAT’s work has been much strengthened by the work of the Lucas shop stewards in presenting viable alternatives to military production’. However, it advised caution, recommending that their members support the centre, but only (in its original italics) ‘without limiting your contribution to CAAT in any way’.66 Thereafter, industrial conversion and socially useful production appeared far less frequently than they had done while Labour was in government in the 1970s. The revived threat of nuclear war, combined with expressions of superpower aggression on either side of the Iron Curtain, rendered the issue of the domestic economy as comparatively less important. The late 1970s was a turning point not only for CAAT but for the peace movement and the socialist campaign for a peaceful economy. As British protest entered its ‘second wave’, political economy had to compete for attention alongside this revival of the more traditional forms of disarmament activism.

The ‘ultimate capitalist weapon’ By the mid-1970s CND had broadened its campaign to incorporate issues beyond nuclear weapons. This willingness to adapt to evolving contemporary circumstances opened the door for the economic dimension, but this was not limited to industrial conversion. CND was also influenced by the emergence of the environmentalist movement in Britain and internationally, as seen in organisations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. There was much in common between environmentalism and nuclear disarmament.

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Most of their adherents associated with the left and had a dissenting attitude towards governments and multinational corporate power. Yet the relationship between the two movements was not always harmonious. There was a tendency among some British environmentalists to disregard CND as having been too preoccupied with ‘the bomb’ when a far broader approach incorporating industrial pollution could have been more effective. Val Stevens, an activist in the British Ecology Party that was formed in 1975, recalled that environmentalism had grown just as ‘the massive early support for CND had dwindled’ in the early 1970s and that nuclear war was only ‘one of the routes to destruction of the planet – but by no means the overriding one – more a nagging anxiety to the back of one’s mind’.67 As the 1970s went on, the dilemma of CND’s ‘single issue’ focus resurfaced. As Jodi Burkett observed, the gradual rise of the green agenda posed the question as to where CND ‘could be effective if it broadened out beyond the bomb’.68 This point was also argued by Meredith Veldman in her Fantasy, the Bomb and the Greening of Great Britain, which noted that many CND members had ‘marched on into the early Green movement’ to warn how ‘society would soon self-destruct if it failed to change its course’.69 Some CND activists came to regret that environmentalism had not featured more prevalently in the earlier years of the campaign. In Sanity one activist felt that the ‘ignoring of nuclear power in the 1960s was a big CND error’ and that environmentalism and nuclear disarmament were ‘strands of the same web’.70 The sustained growth of the ecological movement in the 1970s provided CND with an opportunity to make up for its detrimental singlemindedness in the past. One activist made an impassioned case that the campaign ‘should now seize on the opportunity of the strong feeling that exists on the power issue by relating it to the terrible threat posed to humanity by nuclear weapons’. Whatever the strength of feeling among the rank and file, the response from CND’s organising council was one of hesitation and reluctance. Resolutions at its conferences were carefully worded, often condemning nuclear power as an industrial pollutant but ‘leaving other organisations to deal with the detailed arguments about alternative energy use’.71 The link between nuclear power and weapons proliferation was closer to the CND’s mission as it included the military application of nuclear technology. Responding to claims that it was too narrow in its approach, CND responded that it was ‘always pointing out the implications of nuclear power’ and how ‘unilateral disarmament by Britain was an essential part of helping to stop nuclear proliferation’.72 The issue was stoked by a revived interest in the 1957 incident at Windscale (renamed Sellafield in 1990) when a fire dispersed radioactive materials into the air and there were rumours of a government

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cover-up when an official report was released in 1977.73 Windscale was closely linked to the weapons programme and housed materials used in the first British atomic bomb in 1952. In a resolution from a local CND group, the interest in the disaster demonstrated that the ‘thin divide between the acquisition of nuclear power and of nuclear weapons, long emphasised by CND, have at last penetrated to the general public’.74 Any public attention ought to have been welcomed, but there was evidence to suggest that the campaign’s leadership was nervous about the environmental issue taking over, just as the Vietnam cause had done in the late 1960s. In 1977, and for the first time in several years, CND’s annual conference made front-page column inches in The Times where it was depicted as sensing a ‘young protestors revival’.75 However, it was noted that ‘many of CND’s leading members’ were ‘anxious not to get involved in the alternative energy debate for fear of dissipating their scant resources’. This was very much the tone of Duncan Rees’s annual report as the organising secretary, in which he warned the membership that ‘despite the growth of public awareness of the nuclear issue’ there ‘was much work that had fallen by the wayside for far too long’.76 Rees became involved with CND just as it was in decline in the late 1960s and bemoaned how the Vietnam War sapped attention away from nuclear weapons. He considered that the environmental issue had the same capacity to distract, and as such was among the most fervent advocates of a concentrated ‘single issue’ campaign. In a plea to his fellow activists he argued that CND needed to ‘look at the issues that were most relevant and concentrate on them’ (original emphasis). The peace movement had evolved considerably since CND’s early 1960s zenith, with a variety of specific groups campaigning on a range of issues. Rees contended that a ‘campaign that tries to be all things to all people’ could not ‘really complain if people are not quite sure which way it is going’. As venerable as other crusades were, they had the potential to skew CND’s central message and so there was a need to reaffirm the importance of ‘concentrating on nuclear weapons’ (original emphasis).77 His advice was heeded in that environmentalism was neither excluded from CND’s remit nor did it overwhelm the campaign to the detriment of disarmament. Instead, the rhetoric firmly positioned nuclear energy in the context of its potential weaponisation. At the 1978 conference CND welcomed the ‘greatly increased public debate on the merits of peaceful nuclear energy’ but remarked how there was a ‘strong tendency’ to regard it ‘solely as a technological and not a political issue’.78 By contrast CND emphasised ‘the military implications of nuclear power, and also the need for unilateral disarmament by Britain as an essential part of helping to stop nuclear proliferation’. If CND needed assistance in reviving nuclear disarmament campaigning, it received it after the revelation of the Enhanced Radiation Weapon, or

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‘neutron bomb’, which was described by Mark Phythian as a ‘milestone in its revival’.79 The neutron bomb was first revealed in a press leak in the Washington Post on 6 June 1977 and instigated what the American Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, described as ‘a political explosion that reverberated throughout the United States and Europe’.80 The neutron bomb had been developed by the United States since 1974 as a tactical warhead to be delivered by short-range missiles. Its most controversial design characteristic was that it would not result in major infrastructural damage to buildings, but instead would kill the opposition through enhanced radiation. Because it killed people but spared property, the neutron bomb was regarded as the ‘ultimate capitalist weapon’.81 Its revelation caused a crisis within NATO as it ‘raised the spectre of a theatre nuclear war in Europe by promising a nuclear capability to destroy tanks and mechanised armour whilst minimising damage to buildings’.82 Callaghan had to use all his powers of diplomacy as an interlocutor between President Carter and the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who had to contend with an uproar within German public opinion. As Ann Lane noted, Callaghan was relieved when Carter eventually backtracked, although she argued that the Labour Prime Minister would have likely sided with Washington had the Americans pressed ahead. In the event, the unpopularity of the bomb was, in the words of Ann Lane, a ‘propaganda coup’ for the Russians.83 The neutron-bomb crisis was also a turning point for the peace movement, both in Britain and internationally. One of the most prominent examples of popular protest was in the Netherlands, where the Dutch Interchurch Peace Council campaigned alongside the communist-initiated ‘Stop the Neutron Bomb’, which led to the eventual resignation of the defence minister in March 1978.84 This inspired the international disarmament movement and, as Christopher Hitchens remarked in The New Statesman, it was ‘the first time the Strangeloves have lost a round for some time’ (a reference to the irrationally hawkish military commanders in the 1964 Cold War film satire, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb).85 As he pointed out, the problem with the neutron bomb was that it was designed to be used in relatively limited circumstances, thus blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear armaments. Its revelation (which was not intended by the Carter administration) proved what was already speculated, that NATO was modernising its nuclear forces in the anticipation of a potential war in Europe. With its distinctly materialist characteristics, the neutron bomb had the effect of uniting squabbling groups on the far left, particularly communist parties in Western Europe who, in their united front against the American bomb, decided to ‘respect each other’s right to different roads to socialism’.86

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In Britain the left was aghast. David Owen, Labour’s foreign secretary (and later a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party), recalled that ‘some unfortunate publicity had simplistically portrayed the neutron bomb as killing people, but not damaging buildings’, which provoked, ‘not surprisingly, an emotive public debate’.87 The 1977 Labour party conference resolved that the bomb made ‘a nuclear holocaust more likely’ and called for the government to renounce it unequivocally.88 The 1977 CND conference initiated a petition that was sent to President Carter.89 Another petition for the government to publicly renounce any intention of acquiring the weapon was handed into the Foreign Office and contained almost 160,000 signatures.90 The Labour left capitalised on this unexpected opportunity in furthering its disarmament campaign. Debating the defence estimates in the House of Commons in March 1978, Frank Allaun argued that ‘British disarmament proposals for the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament’ would be ‘praiseworthy if, at the very same time, we were not increasing our arms spending supporting the neutron bomb’.91 He asked the Labour government to follow ‘the policy of the Labour Party and, indeed, their own election commitments and to succumb no longer to the myths and pressures of the men of war’. In keeping with the government’s commitment to the defence economy, Mulley stood behind the neutron bomb, arguing that, while it was ‘still a nuclear weapon in the full sense, with all it means’, it was destined only for ‘hard’ military targets, such as tanks, whilst it was less likely ‘to have unintended collateral effects’ on civilians and property away from the military target.92 But this was an improbable scenario made all the more incredible after Carter announced its indefinite postponement later that month.93 The neutron bomb ‘fiasco’, as Kristan Stoddart described it, had handed the left a publicity victory that propelled the peace movement into a new wave of activism into the next decade. Recognising the ‘strong public feeling on the issue’ at its conference in 1978, CND resolved to continue its campaign in the run-up to the general election and demanded ‘a statement from the two main parties refusing the deployment of the neutron bomb’.94 The conference was addressed by Frank Allaun who ‘was applauded at length by delegates after his speech’.95 Although the Labour government was doing its best to thwart the left wing of its own party, Allaun and others had found in CND a receptive and increasingly engaged audience that was growing apace. The Conservatives’ victory at the 1979 general election only intensified the urgency felt by many in the peace movement at the alarming deterioration of international relations and the bellicosity of policy and rhetoric on either side of the Cold War divide. Only five years after imploring its membership not to give way to despondency, Duncan Rees warned his fellow activists ‘not to be complacent’, adding that the campaign ‘must now go out and take



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all our chances’ and that CND ‘must be seen to be campaigning on the alternative, and only, sane policies’.96

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Reverting to type? In his article on Labour and CND the activist and historian Richard Taylor noted that ‘in 1979, everything changed’.97 Taylor did not dedicate much by way of attention to the 1970s and overlooked the attention that CND provided to environmental and social issues. None the less, his conclusion is difficult to deny. The campaign, which had grown steadily throughout the decade and was boosted by the neutron-bomb revelation, was well positioned to capitalise on domestic and international events that revived Cold War tensions by the decade’s end. Whilst there was little difference by way of policy between the two main political parties, the election of the Conservatives to government in May 1979 was seen as a backward step for the détente. In Sanity Allaun described Thatcher’s administration as ‘the most reactionary and warlike government for the last twenty years, obsessed with the Soviet military threat’ who sought ‘negotiation through a position of military superiority’.98 By 1980 the Conservatives stated that they would proceed with a successor system to Polaris (Trident) and also revealed the secret Chevaline programme that had cost in excess of £1 billion – a statement that inflicted embarrassment on the Labour party leadership, as will be discussed further in the next chapter. By the end of that year the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, there were proxy wars in central America and a revolution in Iran, whilst NATO’s ‘double-track’ decision, announced on 12 December, planned to situate cruise missiles in Western Europe to counter the threat of the Soviet Union’s SS-20 intermediate-range missiles. These missiles would be in place by 1983 and, most controversially, would be under American operational control. President Carter ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow before Ronald Reagan won the presidential election that November on a platform of a harder line towards the Warsaw Pact.99 Consequently, nuclear disarmament movements grew rapidly in Western Europe as the threat of war seemed more ominous than it had done since the early 1960s. CND’s membership expanded to the point that its small staff in its office in Finsbury Park struggled to keep up with the paperwork. In October 1980 seventy thousand activists attended a rally in Trafalgar Square in what was the first public demonstration of its revival. Within the space of five years CND went from a struggling campaign at the periphery of public consciousness to a vehicle for popular discontent against the worsening international situation. As Duncan Rees recalled, ‘the development

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of CND from 1976 to 1981 was as astounding and remarkable as it was rapid. It was of course welcome in one sense, but it reflected an increasingly serious international situation and a growing threat posed by the increasingly bellicose nuclear policies of Britain and the US.’ 100 As James Hinton observed in his history of British anti-war activism, the ‘new Cold War stimulated both fear and hope’ as ‘superpowers relations worsened, the nuclear threat, forgotten during the years of détente, reasserted its hold over the popular imagination’.101 CND was poised to have its ‘second wave’. This ought to have been a vital boost to the campaign for military-industrial conversion and socially useful production. However, the revival of nuclear disarmament only returned CND to its original mission statement: opposing nuclear weapons. Whereas military-industrial conversion was afforded its own special session at the 1978 CND conference, a year later there was precious little mention of the economy as the campaign focused primarily on the worsening international situation. The new Cold War brought about a singularity of purpose as CND demonstrated against Trident and cruise missiles. The single-issue debate continued to pester the campaign. The protests at Greenham Common, for example, where a community largely of women encircled the missile base, were felt by many as a source of invaluable publicity but by others as a distraction from CND’s traditional forms of campaigning that involved marches on Parliament and lobbying the government supported by the left of the Labour party and likeminded trade unions whose members were, almost without exception, male.102 Unity of purpose was elevated above a multifaceted ‘something for everybody’ campaign. As The Times argued, CND needed to ‘adopt a more political stance, achieve a broader basis of support throughout the nation as a whole, and avoid splitting itself into opposing factions’; if it did, it would ‘stand a better chance than 20 years ago’.103 This sentiment was apparent in the annual conference that year, where delegates resolved that ‘CND must remain a united movement, broadly based on a wide variety of groups and movements which may differ to some extent on the vision of the future, and on their analysis of the causes of the arms race’.104 Although political economy featured, it was, by this point, a less prominent concern. When it did appear, CND still had the capacity for informed discussion. At the 1980 conference, for instance, it called on the government to decide between ‘welfare and warfare’, before setting out five agendas for an ‘alternative defence policy’, including ‘a clear definition of defence interests’, information on the money saved should Britain unilaterally disarm its nuclear weapons, forging an alliance of non-nuclear governments, a European ‘non-nuclear zone’ and the encouragement of more research into disarmament.105 However, the peace movement was responsible for some of the most widely digested and most impressively articulated writings on the British

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military-industrial complex. One such example was E.P. Thompson, the social historian who launched the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) Appeal on 28 April 1980 at the House of Commons with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith. END was established as a transnational movement, one that ‘saw the causes of peace, and civil freedoms and human rights, as indivisible’.106 Thompson was deeply perturbed by the rise of militarism on either side of the Cold War divide, which he labelled ‘exterminism’, which was fuelled by a military-industrial complex. In an article in the New Left Review in May 1980 he mocked what were presented by successive governments as the imperatives of ‘defence’ that ‘poison the nation’s economy’. Alarmed by defence spending among the superpowers, in a British context he observed the ‘inertial thrust of the national weapons-system-complex’, in which the ‘motive for the £1,000 million “Chevaline” programme’, was ‘finding something for the large scientific establishment at Aldermaston’ to do.107 Thompson was influenced by the research conducted by the left in the 1970s. Having thanked Mary Kaldor and Dan Smith, he argued that Britain’s defence sector carried ‘its own contradictions’ as it generated ‘both inflationary pressures and unemployment, since the manufacture of advanced weaponry is capital-intensive’ and ended with ‘technological obsolescence, as innovation becomes harder to achieve’.108 Around this time Mary Kaldor published one of her most famous works, The Baroque Arsenal, which explained how military companies ‘dreamed up’ weapons of ever-increasing, but ultimately pointless, sophistication in order to entice the interest of governments looking to stay a step ahead in the Cold War. Kaldor looked at the international scene more broadly, but her conclusions can also be applied to Britain. “Baroque armaments’, she wrote, were ‘the offspring of a marriage between private enterprise and the state, between the capitalist dynamic of the arms manufacturers and the conservatism that tends to characterise armed forces and the defence departments in peacetime’.109 For Kaldor, as for many on the left, the return to recession in the early 1980s was indicative of the failure of contemporary capitalism. ‘Baroque military technology’, she concluded, was a ‘product of contemporary social systems, a mixture of capitalism and central planning’, but ‘industrial conversion’ could ‘overcome the rigidity of centrally planned economies and, at the same time, avoid the crises that are inextricably linked with the dynamic of capitalism’.110 These ideas were outlined in the most widely distributed publications in the history of the British peace movement, Protest and Survive (1980). E.P. Thompson’s original pamphlet was so successful that it was followed up by a full-length multi-author Penguin book with the same title later in the year. Edited by Thompson and Dan Smith, the book title was a parody of the government’s civil defence guide, Protect and Survive, that advised, among

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other things, that people should stay at home in the event of a nuclear war. The calm rationality of the leaked guide, complete with instructions as to how to bury one’s dead while avoiding fallout, was derided as nonsense in many quarters. As Bruce Kent later commented, it ‘was the best thing the government did for CND. It made people realise that the suggestions it contained were absurd.’ 111 But in a more serious way Protect and Survive demonstrated the belief within the British state that a nuclear attack was not an unimaginable prospect. Thompson leaped on the opportunity. Containing eleven essays, Protest and Survive ‘caught the public imagination’ as fifty thousand copies were sold in less than a year as Thompson’s ‘inimitable combination of moral passion, scathing polemic and a “feel” for the popular mood of concern over the mounting nuclear and political threat acted as the catalyst for a new mass, international movement’.112 Protest and Survive synthesised the arguments that had been made against the defence economy in one accessible edition. Political economy featured in the form of two articles, ‘British Military Expenditure in the 1980s’ by Dan and Ron Smith, and Mary Kaldor’s ‘Disarmament: The Armament Process in Reverse’. In Kaldor’s essay she encouraged the ‘need to campaign against cruise missiles’, but only if the peace movement challenged ‘the military-industrial culture which created them’.113 As a historian of class conflict and the industrial revolution, E.P. Thompson wrote in the introduction that ‘permanent threat and periodic crises’ pressed ‘the men of the militaryindustrial interests’: The menace of nuclear war reaches far back into the economies of both parties, dictating priorities, and awarding power. Here, in failing economies, will be found the most secure and vigorous sectors, tapping the most advanced technological skills of both oppressed societies and diverting these away from peaceful and productive employment. […] Here, in this burgeoning sector, will be found the new expansionist drive for ‘markets’ for arms, as ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ powers compete to feed into the Middle East, Africa and Asia more sophisticated means to kill.114

Yet, for all of this, CND resolved to focus on nuclear weapons exclusively. In ‘a noisy debate’ at its annual conference in 1981 the delegates defeated a motion to adopt the slogan ‘Jobs not Bombs’, agreeing instead to a watered-down commitment to ‘support industrial and political action against nuclear weapons’.115 It was clear that the majority were happy to support workers, but only on the nuclear issue, not the wider unemployment problem. This was portrayed as a victory for the ‘traditionalists’ who wanted a non-partisan campaign against the ‘new wave, inspired mainly by the Socialist Workers’ Party’, who sought to ‘hitch CND’s bandwagon to the political struggle of the trade union movement’. This confrontation reflected a broader

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battle against entryism in the Labour party as well as CND, the latter having had a minority communist influence. The campaign’s leadership, particularly Bruce Kent, continually reaffirmed that it was not under any influence from Moscow, financial or otherwise.116 Unfortunately for those who had developed a case against the defence economy over the previous half-decade or longer, their work was a victim to the political battle within the campaign itself. The nagging dilemma of the ‘single issue’ was ultimately detrimental to the cause for socially useful production. This was a deeply unsatisfactory conclusion for those on the left who had kept CND going through some of its bleakest years in the early 1970s. As Britain’s largest disarmament group, CND’s closing itself off to the economic and employment crises of early 1980s Britain was a blow to the movement for socially useful production. With a membership totalling some four hundred thousand by 1983, had CND committed itself to a campaign to save jobs by converting the defence industry, industrial conversion would have garnered far more attention than it ultimately did and could have changed hearts and minds in significant quantities. As it transpired, CND went from the moralistic protest of ‘middleclass radicalism’ in the 1960s to embracing materialist concerns in the 1970s to returning to the ‘single-issue’ approach that many argued had served it so well. Whatever chance the socialist campaign against the defence economy stood, it would do so only within the Labour movement.

Notes 1 Krishnan Kumar, ‘Frank Parkin obituary’, 9 November 2011, Guardian, www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/09/frank-parkin [accessed 2 July 2020]. 2 Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 2. 3 David L. Westby, ‘Reviewed Work(s): Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. by Frank Parkin’, American Sociological Review, 34:3 (1969), p. 414. 4 Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson and Jean-François Mouhot, ‘Introduction: The Privatisation of Politics’, in The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain, ed. Matthew Hilton, James McKay, Nicholas Crowson and Jean-François Mouhot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 18. 5 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 262. 6 Richard Taylor and Colin Pritchard, The Protest Makers: The British Nuclear Disarmament Movement of 1958–1965, Twenty Years On (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980), p. 137.

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7 Bruce Kent, Undiscovered Ends: An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 168. 8 Mark Phythian, ‘CND’s Cold War’, Contemporary British History, 15:3 (2010), p. 141. 9 Holger Nehring, Politics of Security: British and West German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War, 1945–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 300. 10 Phythian, ‘CND’s Cold War’, p. 148. 11 Frank Barnaby and Douglas Holdstock, The British Nuclear Weapons Programme, 1952–2002 (London: Cass, 2003), p. 58. 12 Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, Volume 3: Towards Nuclear Abolition, A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2. 13 Ibid., p. 8. 14 London School of Economic and Political Science Special Collections (LSE), CND/2008/5/11, 1973 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Annual Conference Report, 16 October 1973. 15 Christopher Hill, Peace and Power in Cold War Britain: Media, Movements and Democracy, c.1945–68 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 11. 16 Jodi Burkett, ‘Re-Defining British Morality: “Britishness” and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 1958–68’, Twentieth Century British History, 21:2 (2010), pp. 184–205. 17 Peggy Duff, Left, Left, Left: A Personal Account of Six Protest Campaigns, 1945–65 (London: Allison & Busby, 1971), pp. 206–207. 18 Burkett, ‘Re-Defining British Morality’, p. 200. 19 Kate Hudson, CND – Now More than Ever: The Story of a Peace Movement (London: Vision, 2005), p. 112. 20 LSE, CND/2008/5/12, 1974 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Annual Conference Report, 2–3 November 1974, p. 6. 21 Richard Taylor, ‘Labour and CND, 1955–1987’, in Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 100. 22 LSE, CND/2008/5/12, Report of the Annual Conference, 2–3 November 1974. 23 LSE, CND/2008/5/12, Annual Conference Resolution, 2 November 1974. 24 Minkin, The Labour Party Conference, p. 301. 25 Pimlott, ‘Trade Unions and the Second Coming of CND’, p. 207. 26 Barnaby and Holdstock, The British Nuclear Weapons Programme, p. 59. 27 LSE, CND/2008/5/12, Report of the Annual Conference, 2–3 November 1974, p. 6. 28 Sarah Browne, ‘“A Veritable Hotbed of Feminism”: Women’s Liberation in St Andrews, Scotland, c.1968–c.1979’, Twentieth Century British History, 23:1 (2012), p. 110. 29 John Minnion and Philip Bolsover, The CND Story: The First Twenty-Five Years of CND in the Words of the People Involved (London: Allison and Busby, 1983), p. 69.

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30 Zoe Fairbairns, Study War No More (London: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1975), p. 30. 31 ‘The Economy Needs Defence Cuts’, Sanity, February/March 1975, p. 4. 32 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Arms, Jobs and the Crisis (London: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1975), p. 1. 33 Ibid., p. 17. 34 LSE, CND/2008/10/4, ‘Arms Cuts and Industrial Conversion: A Brief Provided by CND’, 18 November 1975, p. 10. 35 ‘Conference on Cuts’, Sanity, December/January 1976, p. 11. 36 LSE, CND/2008/4/11/1, ‘Report by the Organising Secretary on the Work of the National Council to the CND Annual Conference, 4–5 December 1976’, p. 6. 37 Defence Cuts and Labour’s Industrial Strategy (London: Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1976), p. 1. 38 Ibid., p. 24. 39 LSE, CND/2008/4/11/3, Annual Conference Report, 4–5 December 1976, p. 7. 40 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, Organising Secretary’s Report to the Conference, 26–27 November 1977, p. 5. 41 ‘Prosperity and Peace’, Sanity, August/September 1976, p. 3. 42 Ibid. 43 ‘Sense about Defence’, Sanity, October/November 1977, p. 3. 44 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, ‘General Secretary’s Report to the Annual Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Conference, 4 and 5 November 1978’. 45 LSE, CND/2005/5/15, ‘Resolutions Passed at the 1978 Annual Conference’. 46 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, ‘1978 Annual CND Conference Report’, p. 7. 47 ‘Mike Cooley addresses the Conference Delegates’, Sanity, November/December 1978, p. 9. 48 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, ‘Resolutions and Amendments’, CND Annual Conference, 4–5 November 1978. 49 Barnaby and Holdstock, The British Nuclear Weapons Programme, p. 59. 50 Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), ‘Supporters’ Newsletter 1’, 20 November 1974, p. 1. 51 David Fairhall, ‘Arms ban to end conflict’, Guardian, 17 October 1975, p. 7. 52 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 9’, 6 November 1975, p. 1. 53 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 4’, 4 April 1976, p. 2. 54 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 11’, 12 February 1976, p. 1. 55 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 10’, 7 January 1976, p. 1. 56 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 19’, 6 April 1977, p. 1. 57 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 20’, 1 June 1977, p. 2. 58 John Thompson, ‘Anthony Sampson’, Guardian, 21 December 2004, www.theguardian.com/media/2004/dec/21/pressandpublishing.booksobituaries, [accessed 4 August 2020]. 59 Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 294.

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60 Ibid., p. 299. 61 Anthony Sampson, ‘Arms Sales: Blindspot of a Generation’, The Observer, 18 June 1978, p. 9. 62 Robin Cook, ‘The Tragic Cost of Britain’s Arms Trade’, New Statesman, 30 June 1978. p. 9. 63 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 32’, 1 February 1979, p. 1. 64 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 34’, 12 May 1979, p. 1. 65 Ibid., p. 3. 66 CAAT, ‘Newsletter 36’, 23 August 1979, p. 3. 67 Minnion and Bolsover, The CND Story, p. 77. 68 Jodi Burkett, ‘The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Changing Attitudes towards the Earth in the Nuclear Age’, British Journal for the History of Science, 45:4 (2012), p. 637. 69 Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945- 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 305. 70 ‘The Great Debate on Nuclear Power: Strands of the Same Web’, Sanity, April/ May 1977, p. 5. 71 LSE, CND/2008/14, ‘Resolutions Passed by Conference’, 1977 CND Annual Conference Report, p. 3. 72 LSE, CND/2008/5, ‘CND Annual Conference 1977 Resolutions Adopted’. 73 Windscale Inquiry Report (London, 1978); Lorna Arnold, Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 143. 74 LSE, CND/2008/5, Proposal by Chippenham CND, ‘Resolutions and Amendments’, 1977 CND Annual Conference Report, p. 2. 75 ‘CND scents a Young Protestors Revival’, The Times, 28 November 1977, p. 1. 76 LSE, CND/2008/5, ‘Organising Secretary’s Report to CND Annual Conference, 26–27 November’, p. 12. 77 Ibid., p. 13. 78 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, ‘Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Energy and the Dangers of Nuclear Proliferation (as of May 1978)’. 79 Phythian, ‘CND’s Cold War’, p. 149. 80 Wittner, Struggle against the Bomb, p. 47. 81 Jonathan Steele, ‘Arms talks swing Carter against neutron bomb’, Guardian, 5 April 1978, p. 1. 82 Stoddart, Facing down the Soviet Union, p. 76. 83 Lane, ‘Foreign and Defence Policy’, p. 163. 84 April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992), p. 112. 85 Christopher Hitchens, ‘The Neutron Bomb and the Conscience of the Dutch’, New Statesman, 7 April 1978, p. 453. 86 ‘Bomb unites the Left’, Guardian, 9 August 1977, p. 6. 87 David Owen, Time to Declare (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 379–380 88 LHASC, 1977 Labour Party Conference Report, p. 203. 89 LSE, CND/2008/14, ‘Resolutions Passed at Conference’, p. 5. 90 Pimlott, ‘Trade Unions and the Second Coming of CND’, p. 208.

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91 Hansard, HC Deb 13 March 1978, ‘Defence’, vol 946 cc45–160. 92 LHASC, NEC International Department, 11 April 1978, pp. 2–3. 93 Stoddart, Facing Down the Soviet Union, p. 85. 94 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, ‘Resolutions and Amendments’, Annual Conference 4–5 November 1978. 95 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, Annual Conference Report, 4–5 November, p. 2. 96 LSE, CND/2008/5/15, ‘Organising Secretary’s Report of the Work of the National Council to the Annual Conference, 4–5 December 1979’, p. 13. 97 Taylor, ‘Labour and CND’, p. 121. 98 ‘Forlorn Hopes on Labour’s Hopes’, Sanity, September/October 1979, p. 4. 99 Paul Corthorn, ‘The Cold War and British Debates over the Boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics’, Cold War History, 13:1 (2013), pp. 43–66. 100 Hudson, CND: Now More than Ever, p. 112 101 James Hinton, Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), p. 183. 102 Ibid., p. 191. 103 ‘Does the CND stand a better chance now?’, The Times, 16 July 1980, p. 16. 104 LSE, CND/2008/5/17, 1980 CND Annual Conference Report, p. 3. 105 Ibid., p. 6. 106 Richard Taylor, ‘Thompson and the Peace Movement: From CND in the 1950s and 1960s to END in the 1980s’, in E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism, ed. Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 192. 107 E.P. Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization’, New Left Review, 1:121 (May/June 1980), p. 25. 108 Ibid., p. 16. 109 Mary Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal (London: André Deutsch, 1982), p. 5. 110 Ibid., p. 230. 111 Jacquelyn Arnold, ‘The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour Party and Civil Defence in the 1980s’, in Waiting for the Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956, ed. Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 52. 112 Taylor, ‘Thompson and the Peace Movement’, p. 189. 113 Mary Kaldor, ‘Disarmament: The Armaments Process in Reverse’ in Protest and Survive, ed. E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 215. 114 E.P. Thompson, ‘Protest and Survive’, in Protest and Survive, ed. E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, pp. 55–56. 115 Martin Lynton, ‘CND traditionalists defeat attempt to link campaign with fight on unemployment’, Guardian, 16 November 1981, p. 2 116 Clifford Longley, ‘CND fights off threat by extreme Left Wing’, The Times, 16 November 1981, p. 2.

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The defence economy, the left and the ‘second Cold War’

When the Conservatives won the general election in 1979, many outgoing Labour ministers felt that Margaret Thatcher was little more than a ‘flash in the pan’ and if the party ‘waited for more favourable circumstances, it would soon return to office’.1 The reality, of course, was very different. Shortly before leaving Downing Street for the last time as Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan accurately predicted that Thatcher represented a ‘watershed’ in British politics. Opposition is a difficult time for any party, but Labour tended to suffer more acutely from factional rivalries than did the Conservatives. Just as it had done in the early 1950s and again in the early 1970s, the party was deeply divided along left and right lines. Although many on the right felt that the Wilson and Callaghan governments had accomplished much to be proud of, the left felt a burning indignation towards the socialdemocratic tradition in the party, which it felt had spurned countless opportunities for a fairer economy over the previous fifteen years. Freed from the constraints of ministerial loyalty (such as they were), Tony Benn emerged as a rallying figure on the left and accused the Labour leadership ‘of betraying their own supporters’.2 Callaghan stayed on for a year after the election to ‘take the shine off the ball’ of the election defeat and pave the route for the like-minded Denis Healey to take over as party leader.3 But the influence of the left and its ability to unify behind a single candidate (after Benn elected not to stand) propelled the unlikely figure of Michael Foot to the party leadership. Foot was the most left-wing leader of the Labour party since George Lansbury almost half a century earlier. He was a fervent advocate of nuclear disarmament, having roused CND rallies since the late 1950s. He was a loyal supporter of Bevan and sided with him during the 1951 rearmament crisis, although he later fell out with the iconic founder of the NHS when Bevan renounced unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1957. Foot remained passionately committed to unilateralism and campaigned unsuccessfully at the 1959 general election in his local constituency of Plymouth Devonport, a town that relied heavily on military contracts and that was later represented

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by the leading social democrat David Owen. Foot was denied ministerial preference by Wilson in the 1960s but entered the cabinet in the important post of employment secretary in 1974. As Kenneth O. Morgan observed, in government he backed Callaghan ‘with great loyalty’, with ‘an excellent working and personal relationship, fortified by their mutual commitment to the Royal Navy’, adding that ‘he made no difficulties for the Prime Minister on either nuclear defence policy or Europe’.4 Foot impressed the trade unions and was vital in negotiating the terms of the ‘social contract’ in 1974. None the less, although Foot had served the government well in the 1970s, his three years as Labour’s leader in the early 1980s saw the party move firmly to the left as more interventionist socialist economic policies were adopted, including expanding nationalisation of industry and planning agreements with private companies. The National Enterprise Board, which had been neutered by the Wilson and Callaghan governments in the 1970s, was back as a force for public ownership. Despite the rapidly changing economic, industrial and social conditions of early 1980s Britain, Labour, as Richard Jobson argued, ‘seemed to be fundamentally in thrall to its historically orientated identity’, one where ‘traditional industries lay at the forefront of the British economy’.5 The left continued to occupy central positions on the National Executive Committee whilst the annual party conference expressed its influence by committing the party to unilateral nuclear disarmament and industrial conversion. International relations between the superpowers had entered a dangerous phase, sometimes referred to as the ‘second Cold War’, and there was reason to suggest that the public was fearful of nuclear war as cruise missiles were placed on either side of the Iron Curtain.6 This vision for peaceful production also chimed with the lengthening dole queues that had been apparent since the late 1970s, but dramatically increased in length during Thatcher’s first few years in Downing Street as the Conservatives’ free-market ‘monetarism’ came at the cost of over three million people out of work by 1982.7 As a consequence the early 1980s saw exhibitions of social dislocation worse even than the industrial disturbances in the 1970s, particularly in the case of race relations.8 The left was buoyed by displays of working-class resistance to the onset of deindustrialisation and privatisations, which was in the same vein as those of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and the Lucas Aerospace workers in the 1970s. 9 The economic, political and social conditions therefore seemed to have created a perfect storm in which a socialist alternative could flourish in government, one that would heal divisions at home and calm tensions abroad. However, this did not materialise for a combination of reasons. Despite the crises during Thatcher’s first two years in government, there was evidence to suggest that a form of economic recovery was on the horizon. Tax

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cuts and the scheme to buy council houses (which had been contemplated by the Labour government in the 1970s) proved immensely popular with the electorate.10 Then there was the so-called ‘Falklands factor’, where the Conservatives’ received a boost in the polls after victory in the war in the south Atlantic in 1982. Although the Falklands War was not exclusively responsible for the Conservatives’ landslide election success in 1983, it created a difficult situation for the left to advance a narrative on disarmament. There was an unmistakable lack of unity in the Labour movement on the defence issue, which was itself partly responsible in 1981 for the breakaway Social Democratic Party, which attracted several leading former Labour right-wing ministers who had specialised in defence and foreign affairs. Those who stayed in the party, such as Denis Healey, contributed to a fudged policy commitment, one that was described by Andrew Thorpe as a ‘nonsensical formula’ which stated that ‘Unilateralism and multilateralism must go hand in hand if either is to succeed’.11 Despite the attempts to make the case for a conventional defence, the left struggled to achieve a clear or persuasive narrative on national security, something that the Conservatives pounced on mercilessly. There was also evidence to suggest that some on the left sidelined industrial conversion for the sake of a greater emphasis on conventional forces to avoid a disastrous election defeat. None the less, given the ever-worsening crisis of deindustrialisation in the early 1980s, combined with widespread concerns about the future of the NHS, a clearer narrative could have been put forward by Labour on both conventional defence and socially useful production, which were not mutually exclusive. Instead, a confused policy stemmed from infighting and a belated, hurried response to the popular patriotism that emanated from the Falklands War. The landslide defeat in 1983 was an unedifying end to the campaign for socially useful production. Although some continued to fight for the cause, they did so in a less cohesive fashion, as key figures, such as Frank Allaun, left the political arena. The time has come to revisit this remarkable period in Labour’s history through the prism of the political economy of defence. As Jonathan David and Rohan McWilliam argued in their account of the Labour left in the 1980s, ‘historians need to make sense of the cultures of the left and explore where they failed, and also where they had an impact’.12 This concluding chapter will do just that.

An October revolution Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister after the general election of 3 May 1979 proved to be an ‘event of enormous significance for the British Labour Party’, even though ‘it did not seem so to everyone at the time’.13

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However, more seasoned authorities correctly judged the significance of the 1979 election. The fact that she was the first woman to hold the position was significant in and of itself; but it was her government’s trenchant opposition to ‘socialism’, which she broadly defined as bureaucratic welfarism, that set her apart from the postwar settlement. Under her guidance, and with the help of a committed team of right-wing ‘monetarists’, Britain embarked on a tumultuous pathway of economic liberalisation and privatisation, where the spirit of free-market entrepreneurialism was favoured over what was considered to be the ossified statism that characterised much of British industry, particularly in manufacturing.14 This transition was painful in many sectors and regions, whilst it was bitterly resisted in demonstrations of unrest in the first half of the 1980s. But it chimed with much of the electorate who wanted to escape from the paralysing industrial crises that had symbolised what many felt was governmental inertia in the 1970s. However, virtually no one, no matter how insightful, could have predicted in 1979 that Labour would spend the next 18 years in opposition. For the left the defeat in the 1979 general election was explained by Labour’s overly compromising manifesto. In the months leading up to the election a power struggle between the party leadership and the National Executive Committee led to several trade-offs in key areas, such as public ownership and the redistribution of economic resources. In a diary entry shortly after the defeat, Benn concluded that the ‘government’s positions should have been mapped out more thoroughly and that internal party democracy needed to be developed’.15 Benn was to the forefront of the power battle within the party over the next number of years as the moderate voices on the right of the party vied with the left who blamed the electoral defeat on Labour’s clutching to outdated social-democratic revisionism. The mood turned sour as the left sought to revert policy back to the character of the Alternative Economic Strategy of the early 1970s. By the end of 1979 Labour activists made the party increasingly hostile to MPs on the right. The mandatory reselection of MPs by their constituency parties was voted through in the annual conference in 1979 before greater powers for the National Executive Committee were passed the following year. Callaghan, who stayed on after the defeat, partly to assist Healey in taking over, did little to stem the left’s momentum. After a second ballot the former employment secretary and leader of the House of Commons, Michael Foot, was elected as the leader of the Labour party at the annual conference in 1980. Foot positioned himself as the compromise candidate who was less radical than Benn, but more likely to unite the party than the combative Healey. In his two-and-a-half years as party leader, Foot tried to appeal to forces of moderation, but was undeniably a man of the left. Under his leadership Labour moved to a socialist economic programme and became firmly

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Eurosceptic. By the time that he was elected as the party’s leader, several prominent former ministers on the right had begun founding the Social Democratic Party, which was a life-raft for beleaguered MPs who were on the receiving end of abuse from hostile constituency groups. Whilst Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams strongly opposed Labour’s policy on withdrawal from the Common Market, the other half of the ‘gang of four’, David Owen and Bill Rodgers, fervently opposed Labour’s policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Both Owen and Rodgers had served in defence and foreign affairs portfolios and felt, like Callaghan, that Labour’s position on unilateral disarmament would be interpreted by the electorate as a cry to ‘stop the world, we want to get off’.16 Although the conference voted down a left-wing motion to withdraw from NATO in 1980, the adoption of unilateral disarmament as a fully fledged party policy was a coup for the left and a reprise of the earlier conference victories in 1972–73 and in 1960. The position was justified by the left as a contribution to disarmament in a volatile global international climate, particularly the placement of cruise missiles in Western Europe to match the Soviet Union’s intermediate range SS-20 missiles. As the Labour left MP Joan Lestor stated at the 1980 conference, ‘it was a ridiculous argument to say that the cruise missiles would be accepted by Britain in order to “negotiate them away”’ afterwards.17 This tumultuous period in the party’s history and its subsequent landslide defeat at the 1983 general election have become synonymous with its divisive pledge on unilateral disarmament. The issue is generally framed as a ‘moral’ dilemma, in much the same way as it had been earlier in the Cold War. As Hinton argued, ‘fear that the bombs would go off more or less by accident was as important to mobilising the movement as moral revulsion at the threat to use them deliberately’.18 But far less is said of the economic considerations. As unemployment continued to rise, the discourse on the nuclear deterrent was often framed within more immediate materialist concerns. This was particularly the case in the early 1980s as the debate over whether to proceed with a successor system to the Polaris submarinebased deterrent dominated the discourse on defence. Aside from the usual arguments about the risk of nuclear war, the left situated the issue of the Polaris replacement – Trident – within the context of the economic recession. One example of this was a motion submitted to the National Executive Committee by Labour’s Orpington constituency branch in December 1979 which stated that the ‘adoption of the Trident option will burden public spending to the tune of £4,000 million during a period when all other public services are being cut back’, adding that ‘clearly Britain cannot afford this project’.19 Reflecting how the ideas put forward by the National Executive Committee and Sense about Defence had filtered into the wider Labour movement, by 1980 constituency parties in ever-increasing numbers submitted

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resolutions in favour of military-industrial conversion. The Labour members in Hemel Hempstead asked ‘the party to take active measures to help public understanding that reducing armaments in an agreed way will add security and make resources available for renewing British industry and improving social services’.20 In this they were backed by the Trades Union Congress, which also resolved ‘that the defence policy of the Tory Government will prove extremely harmful. It involves higher defence spending while all the rest of the public sector is cut back and at the same time increases reliance on nuclear weapons’.21 Despite the Conservatives’ parliamentary majority and their determination to press ahead with Trident, such were the economic conditions in 1980 that there was only ‘an adequate, but not overwhelming political and military justification for the replacement of Polaris’.22 However, controversy was just around the corner. For over five years the left had speculated that a secret Polaris-improvement programme was being carried out. Criticising the Conservatives in December 1979, the National Executive Committee condemned ‘the provocative NATO proposal to introduce the Cruise and Pershing missiles into Europe’ that contrasted ‘with the Labour Party policy of “no new generation of nuclear weapons in succession to Polaris”’.23 But on 24 January 1980 the Conservative defence secretary, Francis Pym, made an explosive revelation to the House of Commons, stating that ‘a vital improvement’, codenamed ‘Chevaline’, had been made to the Polaris ballistic missiles, one that ‘our immediate predecessors’, by which he meant Labour, had ‘continued and sustained’. Economy permeated throughout Pym’s statement as he postulated that ‘the House will not be surprised that it has also been costly’, adding that ‘the programme’s overall estimated cost totals about £1,000 million’.24 Without breaking stride, Pym then confirmed that the government was set to begin work on a replacement for the Polaris nuclear deterrent maintenance ‘and AngloAmerican co-operation in providing it’. To a captive audience Pym stated that he could not say ‘exactly what a new force would cost’ but felt it was ‘reasonable’ to expect that a ‘total capital cost in the range of £4,000 million to £5,000 million at today’s prices might be a realistic estimate’. The Conservatives had officially revealed former Labour ministers’ complicity in two of the most expensive military-industrial programmes ever undertaken by the British state. In addition to Chevaline the Callaghan administration had consented to a secret ministerial sub-committee in 1978 that examined the possibility of an eventual successor to Polaris.25 The Prime Minister took the proposal to Jimmy Carter in Guadeloupe in January 1979, where the American President agreed to the sale of the Trident ballistic missile to be stationed in a new fleet of British nuclear submarines set to enter service in the mid-1990s. Yet even those former Labour ministers who

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had consented to Chevaline and the studies into the Polaris replacement bristled at Pym’s statement. David Owen, who was at the point still in Labour’s shadow cabinet, criticised Pym for making a ‘cheap party political point’ that was made for ‘purely party political reasons to justify the decision to buy Trident missiles and embarrass the Labour Party for the fact that it had put the interests of the country first’.26 But for the left the statement confirmed what many had already suspected: that the previous Labour government had been actively engaged in modernising Polaris and preparing its replacement, thus contravening numerous general election manifestos in the 1970s. The party-political ramifications of this revelation would not have been lost on the Conservatives. As Roy Mason had said, Chevaline was the Labour government’s ‘best kept secret’, although he was in little doubt that it was well worth even the eventual £1 billion cost. As he argued in Paying the Price, had Labour cancelled Chevaline on the grounds of its cost in the 1970s, Britain’s ‘influence both in the United States and the Soviet Union would have been diminished’, the ‘French would have been left as the only effective nuclear power in Europe’ and the ‘Germans would have been tempted to come in with potentially grim consequences for stability in the world’.27 However, other senior ministers were less certain. Denis Healey regarded not cancelling Chevaline as one of his ‘major regrets’ in his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer.28 James Callaghan was equally troubled by the expense of the programme, recalling that although ‘it did succeed’ it ‘did cost more than everybody expected’, recalling that every ‘time they called for a new tranche, I used to write “agree” on the minute’ because ‘one always thought that it was around the corner’.29 But with the truth now revealed, the left was well positioned to criticise the same ministers who had imposed pay restraint and cuts in the social services programme in the 1970s at the same time that they had consented to a missile improvement that had spiralled to over five times its initial cost estimate. The revelation of the Chevaline programme and the Polaris replacement elicited a scornful rebuke from the left and put the Labour right wing further on the back foot. When given his chance to speak after Francis Pym’s statement, Robin Cook was ‘struck by how much we discuss defence policy in isolation from our economic and industrial situation’, and unless there was ‘a halt in the industrial collapse’ over which the Conservatives were ‘presiding with such complacency, Britain will be unable to compete militarily, just as it will be unable to compete in any other major economic or social field’.30 One motion from a constituency Labour party was ‘deeply concerned about the recent revelations that the last Labour government spent £1,000 million on developing a new nuclear deterrent in direct opposition to the NEC and conference decisions’.31 The Kensington branch took this a step

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further, regarding this a ‘flagrant breach of a specific commitment in the October 1974 Manifesto not to develop new systems’ and called on ‘Messrs. Wilson and Callaghan to explain their conduct’ in what was a ‘cynical evasion’. It was now widely acknowledged that the Labour government had laid the groundwork on which the Conservatives built their nuclear policies. The Observer noted in the days after Pym’s speech, ‘Mr Callaghan apparently shares responsibility with Mrs Thatcher, despite the Labour Party’s declared preference for non-nuclear diplomacy’.32 The National Executive Committee was bombarded with motions from the constituencies and the unions, most of which it happily accepted and ratified. Many of these framed the Conservatives’ announcement along the lines of political economy, with a resolution from the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff considering the ‘£5billion in securing Trident missile launching submarines’ a ‘waste of resources’ and demanding ‘that the money be diverted to aiding investment in British industry and social services’.33 Basildon was just one of many constituency parties that believed the money would have been ‘better spent on housing, education and the health service’ whilst Guildford party members called for the government to ‘stop wasting the people’s money on so-called defence and to redirect the finances released into the social services, health and education’.34 This groundswell of support inspired the National Executive Committee’s programme for party policy following on from the successful move to unilateral nuclear disarmament at the party’s annual conference. In a draft policy statement in December 1980, it argued that: Britain’s involvement in the arms race is dangerous. The vast growth of nuclear and conventional weapons has led to catastrophically wasteful expenditure. The arms race provides no defence against aggression. The best way of preserving our security is through a combination of disarmament and a scaled down defence expenditure which would foster both economic regeneration and peace. These two goals are inextricably linked.35

If Britain adhered to NATO’s demand for a 3 per cent increase in defence spending per year until 1986, it would ‘massively shift’ its ‘share of GDP towards armaments at the expense of even more draconian cuts in health, education and housing expenditure over the next few years’.36 Instead, the National Executive Committee resolved that ‘defence cuts should be used to reorganise arms industries to provide alternative socially useful products’. With Foot as the party leader and the National Executive Committee in a powerful position, Labour was set to adopt the arguments that the left had cultivated over the previous decade as its official platform. Defence now formed an important part of Labour’s wider economic and social policy agendas.

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A socialist defence policy Such was the momentum generated by the Chevaline and Trident announcements that the National Executive Committee set up another defence study group. At its first meeting on 11 February 1981 under the chairmanship of Frank Allaun, the group was formed to ‘examine current British Defence Policy and bring forward proposals so that the Labour Party can develop a Socialist Defence Policy for Britain in the 1980s and 1990s’.37 Its aim was to ‘formulate an overall, coherent policy for a democratic socialist society’ in time for the Labour party conference in 1982 so that it could be included in the next general election manifesto. Its membership included veterans of the 1970s defence disputes but also younger members, such as Mike Gapes and Clive Soley. From the beginning this study group was intent on a wide-ranging review. Acknowledging that Sense about Defence had ‘largely dealt with the question of Arms Spending and conversion of armaments industries to socially useful goods’, this incarnation would ‘consider other aspects of defence policy’, namely Britain’s role in NATO, civil defence and, of course, ‘the more recently adopted Conference decisions such as nuclear weapons’. At that first meeting Allaun proposed almost thirty new members. These included familiar defence specialists, such as David Greenwood and Mary Kaldor, as well as members of CND and the trade unions. Allaun also suggested a list of Labour MPs sympathetic to disarmament, including Robin Cook and Stan Newens, but also shadow defence ministers, such as John Cartwright and Brynmor John, who were on the right of the party. However, there was little doubt that the left was in the ascendancy, mirroring the wider battle for influence on the National Executive Committee and on the Labour movement more broadly. The study group’s discussions were occupied primarily by economic and military-strategic factors. In a meeting on 10 June 1981 Greenwood observed that the Conservative government had ‘realised that it was not possible to sustain even the existing defence programme at the projected levels of spending’ and that the ‘increasing costs of the Chevaline programme were an example of how Trident might run into trouble’.38 The study group continually used the weakening economy and industrial decline as reasons to advocate a far smaller military programme. Stuart Holland, who had returned to prominence with Labour having moved back to the left, commented in the meeting ‘that the problems of the defence budget made a very strong case for Party policy’ to make significant defence reductions. Applying previous arguments to an ever-worsening economic situation, Holland argued that ‘Defence contractors and defence industries had a large overall impact on the economy’ and that there ‘was an unanswerable case for planning agreements with them on a rolling five-year basis’. As he had

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long maintained, the defence economy was part of a larger problem whereby resources were sapped by military production to the detriment of sectors with a greater social utility. Labour, he felt, needed joined up thinking with the defence group working alongside the industrial committees to ‘study the indirect as well as the direct costs and benefits of cutting Trident’. Where Labour’s future defence programme was concerned, Holland stressed that ‘economic planning considerations were crucial’.39 If the study group members needed inspiration, they needed to only look at the inflow of resolutions sent on by local constituency parties, regional organisations and trade unions. These motions made a clear link between the faltering economy and military spending. The constituency party in the Leeds North-West constituency condemned ‘the Tory government for stimulating overseas arms sales and promoting defence contracts and military service as a means of providing jobs’ and recognised ‘that with unemployment soaring and vast areas being turned into industrial deserts there is urgent need for the Labour and Trade Union Movement and all working for peace to discuss the link between this situation and the ever increasing expenditure on arms’.40 This was just one example of how defence spending was depicted as having ruinous social consequences. Others framed the defence economy within the lines of the Conservatives’ revival of free-market liberalism. Labour’s Southern Regional Council recognised ‘that capitalism generates an arms build-up, and that the call for disarmament and peace must be won in the struggle for a socialist society’ so that the next Labour government needed to ‘massively increase spending on socially useful alternatives, so that workers in the defence industry are guaranteed a job in useful public services’.41 Other motions focused on the political economy of affording resources to defence at the expense of the welfare state. The Co-Operative Party, which had long been associated with Labour, noted ‘that the total expenditure on arms of this country amounts to several times the amount required to restore the country to full employment, and the restoration of the savage cuts in local government expenditure, particularly in the field of Welfare and Social Services and also the constraints upon the National Health Service’.42 The National Executive Committee’s records demonstrate how the left decentralised power away from the party leadership, using instead the apparatus of regional structures and local government to implement a socialist programme. In the early 1980s the Greater London Council (GLC) was perhaps the most notorious example of this, with left-wingers such as Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone to the fore.43 In June 1981 Labour’s contingent on the GLC urged ‘the allocation of the expenditure saved to Research and Development, and investment for civilian purposes, which would sustain the same number of jobs and could contribute substantially

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to strengthening our manufacturing industry’ while continuing to ‘expose the confidence trick played upon the public by the Tory Government through the Civil Defence Programme’.44 By 1982 and entering its third full year in opposition, the Labour party was engaged in a bitter internal struggle over policy. With defence specialists on the right, such as Bill Rodgers and Alan Lee Williams, long since defected to the SDP, others, such as Roy Hattersley, John Golding and Gerald Kaufman had decided to stay on and fight. Their aim was to prevent the party committing itself to an alternative economic strategy and unilateral nuclear disarmament, pledges they felt would almost certainly make the general election, whenever it was called, unwinnable. But to do so would require a reversal of fortune on the National Executive Committee, which, led by the left, issued another statement of a socialist defence policy in April 1982. ‘Labour’s Programme: Defence Security and Disarmament’ stated that the party believed in ‘collective security’ in the form of its commitment to NATO, but that it would ‘work towards the establishment of a new security system in Europe based on mutual trust and confidence, and knowledge of the objectives and capabilities of all sides’, adding that ‘the immediate priority for NATO is to reduce the pressure to hit the nuclear button, and UK renunciation of nuclear weapons will help to do that’.45 The left’s plans for unilateral nuclear disarmament were the most controversial and, ultimately, lacked clarity. It was not clear as to what timeline would be adopted or what would become of the nuclear submarines themselves, with some arguing that they could remain in operation, only without intercontinental ballistic missiles. This substantial room for interpretation was a problem for Labour right up until polling day in June 1983. But when it came to its plan for converting the defence industry, its proposals reflected a level of detail and maturity that came from almost a decade of policy development. With the number of unemployed approaching the postwar high of three million people, Labour framed the issue in the context of jobs. A million jobs are involved, directly or indirectly, in UK defence. It is now more difficult than ever for defence workers to find alternative employment if defence projects are cancelled or support facilities closed. That is why we support the Royal Ordnance Factories remaining in public hands. It is therefore essential to affect a phased conversion from meeting military requirements to meeting socially useful purposes. But it is clear that the difficulties can best be overcome as part of a wider strategy for the regeneration of British industry and developing new technology in which transitional arrangements would be necessary to assist the process of redeployment. Effective conventional defence will continue to require an efficient industrial base.46

The dire situation in Britain’s employment base factored heavily in the left’s thinking on the implementation of industrial conversion. To convince

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the electorate, particularly in those areas that depended on military work, Labour would have made a strong case that alternative employment could be easily found. The commitment to significantly reduce defence spending from 5.2 to 3.2 per cent of GNP – the European ‘average’ – was again used as a reference point. Job losses would almost certainly ensue, exacerbated by the rumours of equipment cancellations by the Conservative government. In the defence study group meeting on 19 October 1982 it was predicted that as many as 250,000 job losses could be expected and the ‘ripple effects’ on the society were likely to be profound given that the rate of unemployment was over two million at that point.47 However, the old Labour policy of sustaining jobs in defence for the sake of maintaining employment was no longer an option. For the left industrial conversion was part of a fundamental revision of Britain’s defence programme, one that constituted significantly lower levels of expenditure and without nuclear weapons. Taking the longer view, Mary Kaldor sought an end to the inconsistency in defence procurement that had proved so problematic for the economy. She ‘stressed that we must emphasise the need for conversion not just for job reasons but also in order to have a defence policy suited to Britain’s needs’. 48 For although in ‘1957 the Tories had planned to phase out manned aircraft and reduce defence roles’, this had ‘been reversed with the TSR2 development and its subsequent replacement, the MRCA’. Similarly, the 1966 Labour government had decided to phase out aircraft carriers ‘but pressures from within the Navy for alternatives had led to the concept of a smaller version of such a carrier, a “through deck cruiser”’, which lead to ‘the purchase of [HMS] Invincible’. Kaldor concluded that there was ‘a clear need for a Conversion Commission’ based on a fundamentally different defence programme, one that could in turn rejuvenate Britain’s depressed industrial base. This break from the social-democratic protectionism of the defence economy, which had characterised the 1970s Labour government, was given further weighting in what was the most important statement of policy during Michael Foot’s leadership of the party, Labour’s Programme 1982. The Labour defence study group also produced what Rhiannon Vickers described as ‘an extensive statement on Defence Industry Conversion and Economic Planning’ in March 1983 that reiterated similar solutions to the ‘problem of cutting defence expenditure and limiting the arms trade while protecting British jobs’.49 Commenting in the New Statesman, the defence study group member Ron Smith expressed concern that ‘militarism’ had filtered into wider society in the aftermath of the Falklands War. This would have to be countered with an assertive socialist narrative along the lines of butter over guns as defence exacted too much by way of resources in science, technology and welfare. For Smith the 1980s presented ‘serious dilemmas over roles, resources, technology and production which would have arisen whether or not there

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had been a revival in the peace movement and of an interest in military matters among socialists’.50 With the Conservatives rumoured to plan on spending £1 billion more on defence than on welfare, he urged Labour to redeploy the ‘reservoir of talent’ in the defence industry, and ‘recognise the crucial role that disarmament can play in the regeneration of British industry and plan to take advantage of it’.51 This was a recurring feature in socialist discourse at this point, with many articles on defence having been framed along the lines of political economy, and more specifically the threat to the welfare state. None the less, this evident revival of ‘militarism’ that Smith detected was a cause of concern on the left. No longer could the favourable conditions of détente be employed as an argument for disarmament. The Falklands War demonstrated that the need for conventional defence was real, whilst Cold War tensions continued to escalate. In the aftermath of the successful military victory in the South Atlantic an increasing number of socialists began to make a detailed case for a conventional defence in the hope that the wider electorate would be swayed in its thinking. The question was whether this approach had come too late or would make the decisive impact. One prominent example of this was in a report published by the Alternative Defence Commission, a body supported by the Lansbury House Trust Fund, named after the pacifist and advocate of public housing George Lansbury, who was also the Labour party leader between 1932 and 1935. The commission’s report, Defence without the Bomb, was sponsored by the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Bradford and was released in April 1983, only two months before the general election of that year. The report made the case that a conventional defence posture was possible, and that Britain could defend itself and its waters by non-nuclear means alone. It promoted the idea of ‘civil resistance’ based on, among other things, guerrilla warfare, in the event of an invasion. The commission was led by Frank Blackaby, the general secretary of Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute, who was closely associated with the left. Defence without the Bomb was another instalment of the defence-economic critique, but one that was informed by a wide base of contributors including academic specialists, politicians and religious groups both from within Britain and from beyond. The economic dimension was afforded as much attention as military strategy as the ‘Trident debate’ was, ‘showing that judgements about priorities in defence are inescapable’.52 The report felt a non-nuclear defence would free up resources for commercial enterprise and welfare and that a transition phase ought not to be too painful and that industrial conversion ‘must be viewed as part of national planning for economic recovery’, adding that there was ‘solid evidence that in the longer term a major shift of expenditure and resources towards the civilian sector would help to put the British



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economy on a sounder footing’.53 Upon its release, the Guardian welcomed the report for its offering a more detailed alternative to defence that had previously been offered by most pacifists and unilateralists. However, the fierce partisanship in the election campaign, which was described as ‘all heat and little light’, was considered a ‘poor arena in which to mount such a nuanced debate’. As the newspaper concluded, ‘at least the bones are there if anyone wishes to pick them up’.54

The British right and the defence economy As we have already seen, in the 1970s both Conservative and Labour governments cultivated a defence economy that was heavily supported by the state and that fulfilled socio-economic interests just as much as it did military and strategic ones. However, by the early 1980s this postwar settlement had become increasingly intolerable to many in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. By this point the extent of government overspend on the defence projects was clearly apparent. Chevaline was an obvious example of this as it ended up costing four times more than its original estimate. But there were others. The Nimrod early-warning aircraft, initiated in 1977 with a projected service date of 1982 was nowhere near completion by this stage and was eventually cancelled in 1986 at a cost of over £660 million. This was just one of several projects that were, in the words of Warren Chin, ‘plagued by technical and financial disaster’.55 Another example was the Stingray air-launched torpedo which, in 1969, was estimated to cost £74 million to develop which had, by 1980, risen to £920 million. The Mark 24 Tigerfish torpedo ended up costing over £1 billion whilst the cost of construction for the Type-21 frigate ships, initially costed at £1.3 million in 1974, escalated to six times that original sum, £6.7 million at the same prices allowing for inflation. Even the multi-role combat aircraft, on which the Labour government had put so much emphasis, increased in unit cost from £1.9 million to £2.4 million and entered service in 1980, four years later than originally predicted. All these costly projects were a consequence of the technological enthusiasm in weapons procurement seen in the Labour government of the late 1960s as defence policy became more ‘Europeanised’ after the retreat from roles ‘East of Suez’. But despite the controversy over the cancellation of TSR-2 in 1965, it was clear that any attempts at reforming the defence industry to keep costs down had failed. By the end of the 1970s defence spending was, unsurprisingly, on an upward trend as the cost of military equipment continued to escalate.56 In government the Conservatives commenced something of a revolution in postwar defence procurement when they gradually privatised the sector

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and opened it up to foreign competition. Gone were the cosy ‘cost-plus’ contracts that had characterised the defence economy for over a quarter of a century, and in were competitive bids to drive down prices. Such reforms were, of course, in keeping with Thatcher’s broader liberalising economic strategy. As Chin argues, ‘these reforms marked a significant break in the direction and emphasis of previous reforms in that they attempted to change the relationship between public agencies involved in the procurement process and defence industries’.57 These reforms were introduced to weed out inefficiencies in the services and the largely state-owned monopolies that characterised the industry, of which British Aerospace and British Shipbuilders (both of which were privatised in 1980) were two prominent examples. As Keith Hartley noted, ‘cost-plus’ contracts dwindled from 22 per cent to just 4 per cent of Ministry of Defence work, whilst competitive bids went from 14 per cent to almost half of all government orders.58 However, as was often the case with Thatcher in her early years as Prime Minister, the eventual privatisation of the defence economy was not initially a part of her political agenda. When Leader of the Opposition in the latter half of the 1970s, Thatcher had cultivated the image of a ‘cold warrior’ who warned the British public about the mirage of détente and how the Soviet Union was on the cusp of military superiority over NATO. This was most clearly articulated in her famous speech at Kensington town hall on 19 January 1976 where she quipped (inaccurately) that the Soviet Union ‘put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns’.59 Thatcher mounted a wider critique of Labour’s handling of the defence programme and the domestic economy, arguing that ‘the Socialists, in fact, seem to regard defence as almost infinitely cuttable’ and that they were ‘much more cautious when it comes to cutting other types of public expenditure’. This was not an assessment that was faithful to the evidence, as we have seen, but it was a useful rhetorical tool for the Conservative leader as she looked to make a name for herself on the world stage. It was for this oration that Thatcher was labelled as the ‘iron lady’ by the Russian army newspaper, the Red Star, a title she came to relish. Buoyed by domestic and global crises, the Conservatives’ 1979 general election manifesto accused Labour of having ‘weakened our defences and reduced our contribution to NATO’ and that ‘the Left’ was ‘pressing for still more reductions’.60 Without committing to an approximate figure, the manifesto stated that it was ‘already obvious that significant increases will be necessary’. However, the Conservatives’ return to government generated a bitter contest over the political economy of defence spending in a way not dissimilar to Labour’s experience earlier in the decade. Thatcher’s primary objective of controlling public expenditure collided with the stated ambition to expand the defence programme. This was as much a factional divide within the

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party as it was to do with military strategy. Her first defence secretary, Francis Pym, represented the centrist ‘one-nation’ tradition of the party. Over the first months of the government he found favour with Thatcher for his persuasive case to boost defence spending to show Britain’s commitment to the Atlantic Alliance. However, Thatcher’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, was an apostle of monetarism, the right-wing economic creed on which the government based its privatisation of business and industry. By 1980 Thatcher found herself swayed towards the Treasury, which, as we have seen, had had the pruning knives out for the Ministry of Defence for many years.61 Pym was replaced by John Nott, whose defence review in 1981 remains among the most controversial ever in peacetime. The review set out a vision to manage ‘defence, like other programmes’ in ‘cash terms’, concluding that ‘in a setting of economic difficulty, and given the Government’s determination to hold down total public expenditure, there could be no clearer or more concrete demonstration of resolve to maintain our vital priorities and our Alliance contribution’.62 The consequence was deep cuts to the Royal Navy. The Invincible aircraft carrier, which had been a target of left-wing criticism since the early 1970s, was to be sold to Australia, and conventional vessels were to be withdrawn, together with a loss of nearly twenty thousand service personnel. Having been effectively defeated during Labour’s defence review in 1975, the Treasury finally looked to be getting its way at last. It did so because of the determination of Howe and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury John Biffen, who was also aligned to the right of the party and who had long sought to control public spending. Biffen was used as the Treasury’s attack dog and was reported as leaving the Ministry of Defence ‘in no doubt’ of its displeasure after exceeding the cash limit in the 1979–80 financial year by £64 million, telling The Times that there were ‘no privileged spending departments in any quarter in Whitehall’.63 The Conservatives’ 1981 defence review was driven almost entirely by the question of political economy with both inflation and unemployment on the rise. By treating defence on ‘cash terms’, Thatcher’s administration had made a pledge to remove the privileged status that the defence economy had been afforded under the Wilson and Callaghan governments during the previous decade. Indeed, one of the problems that the Conservatives had inherited was that Labour had spent too much on the defence industry; there was evidence, for example, of a ‘procurement overhang’ whereby the Callaghan government had negotiateded four contracts for warships for electoral advantage in 1979.64 Thatcher and colleagues on the right of the party were clear that they wanted to bust this system; as Edward Hampshire remarked, ‘budgetary factors drove the decision to have a defence review, and the general capabilities that needed to be reduced in order to keep the

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defence budget under control’.65 The defence economy was gradually liberalised. Military aerospace and shipbuilding were taken out of public ownership in 1980, with a more competitive tendering system established. Gone were the ‘cost-plus’ contracts that had symbolised industrial excess in the defence sector. The Conservatives had managed to check the trajectory of the defence economy and unravel the social-democratic protection that it had been afforded by successive governments since the war. Such were the cuts to the Royal Navy’s surface fleet that the Conservatives’ navy minister, Keith Speed, resigned in protest. As Michael Dockrill noted, ‘he was not replaced’.66 But this was hardly acknowledged by the left; for, although it could agree that Thatcher’s government was looking to reduce the size of the national defence-industrial base, it did so in the context of an unstinting commitment to both cruise missiles and Trident, while at the same time making no pledge that the money saved would have been diverted into developing the NHS. Moreover, these reforms did take several years to take effect. In the meantime the Conservatives hunkered down on their monetarist economic policy even though industrial output fell by 16 per cent of Gross Domestic Product between 1979 and 1981, whilst unemployment exceeded three million people. A deflationary budget in 1981 made the situation worse, and the Central Policy Review Staff even recommended that the NHS be replaced by private health insurance, a proposal so controversial that it was immediately rejected by the Conservative government.67 None the less, the philosophy of ‘selfreliance’ ran deep in the emerging ‘Thatcherite’ agenda and borrowed from numerous influences on the new right since the middle of the century, as Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite observed.68 In the early 1980s the left had every reason to fear that the NHS, the ‘sacred cow’ of democratic socialism, was nearing its demise, as a consequence either of the Conservatives in government or of the inability for a declining economy to support it. The combination of threats to the welfare state and world peace ought to have put Labour in a commanding position to return to government when the next general election was called. However, the surprise invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 changed the trajectory of Thatcher’s premiership. Again, the economic dimension was never far from political consideration. Upon the advice of Harold Macmillan, Thatcher excluded her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, from her war cabinet. As she later reflected, ‘we were never tempted to compromise the security of our forces for financial reasons’.69 In contrast to this singlemindedness, Labour’s response to the crisis was mixed. As Mark Phythian argued, it was ‘unable to overcome the dilemma the invasion of the Falkland Islands presented it with’.70 The party’s front bench was generally in favour of sending a task force, but the left-wing back benches opposed it vehemently.

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This mixed response was epitomised in a National Executive Committee international committee resolution that admonished the ‘fascist’ Argentine government but that was also critical of the Conservative government for having ‘failed dismally in their duty to protect the people of the islands’.71 The left-wing MP Eric Heffer, who had supported the cause of socially useful production since the 1970s, angrily accused Michael Foot’s speech in favour of a military response as being ‘thoroughly jingoistic’. The internal disagreement over the Falklands was a sign of things to come when the general election was called a year later. Many members of the National Executive Committee were aware of the transnational state terror across Latin America, not least in Chile, which had been a particular interest for the left since the 1970s. The international committee emphasised ‘that the British Labour Movement has no quarrel with the people of Argentina; they too are the victims of a dictatorship which has brutally suppressed human rights’. But the economic dimension was, again, ever-present. The left focused on commercial links between Argentina and Britain, which some felt could distract the Conservatives from the primary task of ensuring the islanders’ safety. The National Executive Committee resolved that ‘all actions of the British Government must be directed to their protection rather than by concern for property interests, natural resources or salvaging the pride of discredited ministers’. A resolution submitted from the party’s northern regional council was more direct, calling for a campaign of pressure on the City and British banks financially involved in Argentina to refuse to reschedule Argentinian debts, and to refuse to finance current expenditure, particularly with regard to trade, which would ‘force the Junta more readily to the Conference table, under the auspices of the UN’.72 The cultural and financial connection between Argentina and the United Kingdom was extensive: as Ezequiel Mercau referred to it, it was the ‘war of British worlds’.73 But the idea of a neocolonial war disturbed many constituency Labour parties, which were alarmed at the ‘jingoism’ expressed at Westminster, with one branch regarding the conflict as ‘a leftover from imperialist competition between Spain and Britain in the 18th century’, saying that it was not the ‘responsibility of socialists to defend the legacies of colonialism’.74 The Falklands War and the ensuing military victory for the British task force was a turning point, but not the exclusive factor in the Conservatives’ landslide electoral victory in 1983 as the campaign itself was designed as a reminder of the victory of the previous year.75 The contradiction between Labour’s front bench and its backbenchers was a public -relations disaster, one that lived long in public memory. The Falklands boosted the Conservatives’ poll rating, improving from 31 per cent in April to 46 per cent in July 1982, by which time they had a 19-point lead over Labour. However, as Andrew

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Thorpe observed, the ‘“Falklands factor” probably only gave the Tories a short-term boost: in the longer term the more significant developments were tax cuts in 1982 and the economic upturn which began early in the same year. Labour did not lose the 1983 election because of the Falklands War.’ 76 The conflict was to have profound consequences on the British defence economy. As Dockrill observed, by 1985 defence expenditure had risen by 18 per cent, with 46 per cent spent on equipment.77 Although the military-industrial sector was opened to market competition after the Falklands War, Thatcher was still inclined to provide the defence economy with preferential treatment. Describing ‘the military-industrial complex under Thatcher’, Tom Kelsey argued that Britain’s defence industry ‘more generally was cordoned off from the free-market revolution of the Thatcher governments’ and that, when it came to aerospace and defence procurement, the Conservatives ‘often chose the costly route of developing British and European projects rather than building American alternatives under licence’.78 Despite the Thatcherite revolution, the postwar defence economy retained its momentum.

The 1983 general election In March 1983, as a general election approached, the weekly social commentary New Society observed that even the Conservatives were alarmed at the rate of increasing defence spending, thought to be ‘£18 billion per year’, which was ‘significantly larger than public spending on health and education’.79 But, as the journal argued, this expenditure did not equate to a significant influx of jobs and it was even more likely that numbers in the industry would fall as the investment would be spent instead on costly research and development. ‘Even if the next government is Tory or a coalition (between Labour and the SDP)’, it was claimed that employment was ‘sure to be a priority’ and that ‘the commitment to high defence spending may wilt’. Echoing much of the what the left had long argued, New Society stated as ‘fact’ that ‘the same sum spent on defence yields far less jobs than it would on education and health – on some estimates less than half’ and that if ‘industrial reconstruction is another priority, there’s no better fund of technological and engineering expertise than the workers in the arms industries’. Labour’s policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, which would leave ‘conventional forces untouched, might have a minimal impact on jobs’. If unemployment was the central issue of the election, there was a chance that Labour could make a convincing argument on the defence economy; the question was whether it could appeal to the court of public opinion.

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But there was confusion over policy from the start of the campaign. As had been the case four years earlier, the manifesto was vigorously contested by both sides of the party, with the left affirming its industrial strategy based around planning agreements with industries and the expansion of public ownership with the vague pledge to ‘establish a significant public stake in each important sector’ of the economy.80 It also pledged to take Britain out of the Common Market, as a Labour government that was ‘committed to radical, socialist policies for reviving the British economy’ was ‘bound to find continued membership a most serious obstacle to the fulfilment of those policies’, a culmination of years of socialist Euroscepticism that led to the formation of the breakaway SDP.81 But it was the party’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament that has elevated the manifesto to a legendary status within the history of election materials. As part of a sprawling explanation of its foreign policy as part of its 4,032-word manifesto, a future Labour government led by Michael Foot would set an ‘example and by common action with others’ use ‘unilateral steps taken by Britain to secure multilateral solutions on the international level’ to ‘enable Britain to pursue a non-nuclear defence policy’. Labour pledged to pursue multilateral disarmament within the United Nations, using its example of having given up its nuclear weapons first. This position put Labour at odds with the Conservatives on a key policy platform and ended (temporarily) the postwar consensus on nuclear deterrence that had endured since the late 1940s. Although the left had achieved conference victories on unilateral disarmament in the past, which in some instances led to relatively hostile statements on nuclear weapons in previous manifestos, it had not been able to align the party to a clear pledge to unilaterally disarm Britain’s nuclear weapons if elected to government. In his assessment Antoine Capet felt that this emphasis ‘reflected Labour’s desperate efforts to counter Margaret Thatcher’s policy of quasi-unconditional alignment on President Reagan’s wish for an escalation of the confrontation with the USSR, notably with an acceleration of the nuclear arms race’.82 Although Labour remained committed to NATO (as successive conferences had voted) it was unmistakably outside of conventional British statecraft on nuclear weapons. The problem was that the nuclear deterrent was considered as essentially Britain’s defence programme. Just as Harold Wilson had realised in 1965 when he decided to continue with the Polaris programme, the deterrent had an emotional impact on the average voter, one that Labour would be unwise to dispense with. For Labourites on the right of the party who were once closely associated with nuclear matters, this radical shift in policy created its own problems. The clearest indication of this was Denis Healey. On several occasions in the weeks leading up to polling day the press hopped on several of his phrases that were inconsistent with party policy. One such

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occasion came when he stated that Labour would give up Polaris only if the Russians made similar concessions, namely a refusal to adopt a ‘first strike policy’. In this he was described as having ‘rubbed salt into the policy wound’ in comments that ‘would have certainly embarrassed Mr Foot’.83 Right up until the vote Foot was still clarifying Labour’s position. He denied a rift within the party and told The Times that Britain needed a non-nuclear defence posture with military ‘forces recognisably equipped and deployed for defensive purposes’.84 Foot evocatively described the American cruise missiles being ‘dumped in British villages and shunted around the British countryside’ all under the control of the military in the Pentagon. But his appeal to sovereignty was obscured by the confusion over Polaris, which Foot maintained would be submitted as a bargaining chip at the United Nations disarmament talks in Geneva, at which he candidly, but unwisely, admitted that ‘a lot of things depend on the response of the Russians’. There was much detail in the manifesto that was lost on the electorate who had neither the energy nor the time to scrutinise what resembled more a policy document up for discussion on the National Executive Committee than a digestible statement for public consumption. None the less, from the point of view of the movement for socially useful production, which had its roots early in the previous decade, the 1983 Labour party manifesto was an achievement in itself. One of the largest political movements in Western Europe was committed to a bold set of pledges that ensured ‘that savings in military expenditure’ would ‘not lead to unemployment for those working in defence industries’, with the ‘material support and encouragement to plans for industrial conversion so that the valuable resources of the defence industries can be used for the production of useful goods’. This ambition was boosted by the support of the Trades Union Congress in the lead-up to the election with plans for a National Industrial Conversion Commission.85 Britain’s largest union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union, published its own report that set out the case for diversification. But, once again, right-wing unions dissented, namely the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers and the Electricians and Plumbers Union, which were led by Terry Duffy and Frank Chapple respectively. As was the case in the 1970s, the unions were not of one mind when it came to upsetting the balance of the defence economy. The sprawling length of Labour’s manifesto invited more by way of contradictions than it did consistency. The pledge to reduce defence spending and convert the arms industry was followed quickly by a commitment that Labour would build up Britain’s conventional military within the context of a reshaped defence posture. Opposing the ‘extravagant expenditure on Trident’, the manifesto stated that the ‘emphasis of our defence priorities in the 1980s and 1990s must be to create military forces that are clearly equipped and deployed for defensive purposes, and tailored more to Britain’s

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geography and economic resources’, a commitment that meant ‘maintaining adequate conventional forces’. The squaring of the disarmament circle with a commitment to conventional defence was a major deficiency in Labour’s message, one that was pounced on by the Conservatives. Thatcher’s government never hesitated to warn the electorate of the dangers posed by the Cold War and Labour’s apparent dereliction of responsibility in this respect. But it also played the employment card when it suited it. In the run-up to the election Michael Heseltine, the Conservatives’ defence secretary, provided a list of almost 500 establishments, in almost 270 constituencies who had each received over £5 million worth of contracts from the Ministry of Defence. He argued that Labour’s plan to reduce defence spending to a lower European average would equate to a cut of some £4.5 billion and a loss of four hundred thousand jobs, an inflated figure but one that would further shock the electorate.86 Labour’s shadow defence secretary, John Silkin, who was on the left of the party, tried in vain to make the case for a conventional military programme that would ‘endanger neither defence nor employment’ and that defence cuts would be implemented only after two years of economic growth. But his response did little to assuage the voters as Heseltine responded that the economy would need to grow at a rate of 5 per cent a year to provide enough jobs for those displaced by defence, a level of economic expansion not seen since the war and that looked incredibly unlikely in the circumstances. The momentum behind Labour’s commitment to unilateral disarmament was overwhelming and had been moving in that direction since the early 1970s. But by the 1983 general election the party was saddled with a commitment that was out of step with public opinion and that shrouded progressive egalitarian domestic policies that would have had a significant impact had they been implemented. Given the historic levels of unemployment, it was of little surprise that Labour pursued the Conservatives on the jobs issue. As the New Statesman observed, ‘only unemployment’ would ‘exceed defence as an election issue’; however, Labour needed to offer greater clarity on what ‘practical’ unilateralism would look like and what the alternative conventional defence posture would resemble.87 But this was not achieved. The problem was that any nuance in Labour’s policy position was lost in the media frenzy surrounding its pledge on nuclear disarmament. In one vox pop in Walsall, voters felt that Labour’s position was ‘extreme’ and that it would leave the country ‘defenceless’.88 Denis Healey reflected later that people felt ‘we were unilaterally disarming ourselves’ entirely, including conventional forces. He recalled being ‘torn to shreds’ at a meeting at a colliery canteen in Leeds, where miners said to him that ‘We’re never going to vote for a party which is in favour of unilaterally disarming Britain’.89 A month before the election national surveys indicated that most of the electorate supported an increase

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in defence spending and felt that Britain ‘would not be properly defended under a Labour government’. As Dan Keohane concluded, ‘such perceptions were fatal to Labour’s claim to form the government of the United Kingdom’.90 Labour paid the price, with the Conservatives winning 397 seats, with Labour on a mere 209 in its worst electoral performance since 1918. Michael Foot resigned as party leader and was replaced by Neil Kinnock, another candidate from the left, who led the party for the next nine years. The SDP/ Liberal alliance, which had among its ranks many former Labour defence and foreign affairs spokespersons, was only narrowly behind Labour in the percentage share of the popular vote, with some commentators pondering if Labour could survive as the official opposition.91 However, many on the left were unrepentant. The issue was not so much the policies themselves but the way they were put across to the electorate. In the New Statesman E.P. Thompson considered the election result as a mere ‘setback’, but not a defeat on the basis of the argument that the combined tally for the Labour and Liberal parties (what Thompson referred to as the ‘peace vote’) outnumbered the Conservatives’ poll. But there was little disguising Thompson’s disgust at the performance of the Labour leadership, who, aside from Foot, were described as evasive, ‘ill-prepared and under-briefed’ and at the fact that there was an ‘empty hole’ where a ‘non-nuclear defence might have been’.92 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Foot and others did not fully recognise the strength of public opinion on the issue of national security. Despite his criticism of the Argentine junta and support for the task force, Foot was portrayed unfairly as a pacifist who would compromise Britain’s defence as the Cold War showed little signs of letting up. Although Labour’s policy proposals to leave the Common Market and unilaterally disarm the nuclear deterrent played poorly in the opinion polls, as Andrew Thorpe argues, there was still a chance that ‘a strong case could have been made for each in the early 1980s, on strategic and economic grounds’. The factional divisions within the party, which exacerbated the perception of ‘extremism’, made a more nuanced narrative an immensely difficult task for Foot. As Thorpe concluded, the ‘real problem was that the left failed to discipline itself sufficiently to work out the policies and explain them fully’ and that, ‘as so often’, it ‘proved itself better at criticising the party leadership than at taking an opportunity to provide a lead itself’.93

Life in a northern town The question of defence spending was closely linked to concerns about deindustrialisation more broadly. This was no more the case than in local

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areas that relied on military contracts. Whilst the nuclear question dominated the agenda at a national level, the economic dimension of Britain’s defence programme was keenly contested in those constituencies that had a long tradition in the manufacture of armaments. Labour could ill afford to lose any seats and needed to pick up any marginal ones if it was to have a chance of overturning the Conservatives’ majority. But the lack of clarity on the defence issue was wielded as a powerful stick with which to beat local Labour candidates. One prominent example of this was in Plymouth Devonport, where the sitting MP was David Owen, Labour’s former foreign secretary and naval minister who had since defected to the Social Democratic Party. The city had an established naval tradition and the Labour candidate strove to reassure the constituents that a government under Michael Foot would extend work to ‘include a submarine refitting base and a frigate complex and that it was the Conservatives who cut the size of the Navy’.94 Owen was far from convinced and in the week leading up to polling day he suggested that ‘millions of Labour voters’ sensed the ‘internal contradiction between a Labour party moving simultaneously towards a “non-nuclear strategy” and being committed to slashing cuts in defence expenditure’.95 He was proved correct and also quadrupled his own majority at Plymouth, winning the seat with five thousand votes to spare over the Conservative candidate, Ann Widdecombe, with Labour a distant third. Whilst Owen’s defence credentials saved his political career, Labour’s frontbench shadow minister, Albert Booth, suffered the largest swing of any defeated candidate at the election at another constituency that relied heavily on military work. Barrow-in-Furness, situated on the north-west coast of England, had been held by Labour since 1945. The town’s largest employer by some distance was the multinational defence firm Vickers, which specialised in nuclear submarine and warship building. The company had built the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible in the 1970s, among other conventional vessels, and successfully constructed two of the four Resolution-class submarines as part of the Polaris nuclear deterrent. Such was Vickers’s success, the Conservative government decided to award the company the contract to build all four of the Vanguard class of submarines that would be equipped with the Trident ballistic missile system. The contract was highly beneficial given the crises in shipbuilding more generally, but also the fact that several thousand workers, most of whom were local, would be employed on the project into the next decade. Whilst the national conversation over Trident was shaped largely by strategic, and even patriotic, considerations, at Barrow the issue was framed within the context of employment. It was described in the local press as the ‘single issue’ of the campaign.96 The Conservative candidate, a qualified barrister from Salford, Cecil Franks, stated simply that ‘Barrow’s future for the next decade depended on Trident’.97

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Had Booth been of the social-democratic persuasion he would have had reason to feel aggrieved at his party’s policy on unilateral nuclear disarmament. But not only was Booth a supporter of the cause, he was an architect of the policy itself. A close colleague of Michael Foot, Booth had been a member of CND since the 1960s and led rallies through Barrow when nuclear submarines were launched at the Vickers shipyard. As we have seen, Booth detected the link between defence expenditure and industrial decline. Although he was a loyal cabinet minister to Wilson and Callaghan, Booth did not abandon his principled stand on disarmament and took an active role in the National Executive Committee defence study group, even while he was employment secretary, drafting a report with Mary Kaldor on alternative employment for naval workers at Barrow. Booth was a popular MP, if somewhat misunderstood at Barrow. As a party worker told the Sunday Times in 1976, locals found his views ‘hard to understand’ but most ‘still respected his sincerity’.98 However this respect was waning on the eve of the 1983 general election. The Conservative candidate accurately observed that ‘many Vickers apprentices and first-time voters were breaking with family traditions and not supporting Labour because of Labour’s plans to scrap Trident’.99 Barrow-in-Furness was a litmus test of the electoral appeal of Labour’s defence policy at the 1983 general election. At the election four years earlier Booth had won a clear-cut majority of 7,741 votes in what was considered a typically safe northern industrial Labour stronghold. Even considering its controversial stance on the nuclear deterrent, the party would have been confident of holding the seat. However, unfavourable polls in the weeks before the election prompted Michael Foot to take what he regarded as ‘the unusual step’ of writing to the local branch of the Confederation of Shipbuilders and Engineering Union ‘in order to counter the scare tactics of the Conservative Party about the effect of Labour’s non-nuclear policy on jobs’.100 Foot contended that ‘nearly half of Trident’s components’ were ‘American and [would] not provide jobs at home’. Instead, he emphasised the value of conventional non-nuclear defence production, such as hunter-killer submarines. ‘Cancelling Trident’, he claimed, would ‘enable Barrow to return to doing what it does so well: building modern conventional vessels’. Foot reaffirmed that Labour ‘was committed to effective defence through collective security which means continuing support for NATO’ and ‘sufficient military and naval strength to discourage aggression’. But it was the question of employment that was Foot’s focal point, noting that a Conservative government ‘which had presided over mass unemployment of three and a half million [was] ill-equipped to criticise the impact on jobs of Labour’s nonnuclear defence policy’. Booth added to this in the days running up to the election, asserting that the ‘£2,500 million’ that was required to build Trident

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would instead be used to build ‘twenty-one Type 22 frigates’, which would in turn create more jobs at Barrow.101 Labour sent the heavyweight figure of Denis Healey, then the shadow foreign secretary, to canvass for Booth. In his typically bombastic style, Healey slammed ‘Thatcher’s treatment of the Navy’, and quipped that she had ‘taken more ships than General Galtieri had sunk’.102 But defeat could not be averted. Whilst the swing against Labour nationally was 4 per cent, the swing against Booth was 14 per cent in what was later described as ‘one of the most memorable defeats of the 1983 general election’ where a shadow cabinet minister lost his seat by 4,577 votes.103 The local newspaper, which was broadly in favour of the Vickers company, conceded that Booth was a ‘man of principle’, but was ‘like a white knight courageously entering the battlefield bearing mysterious words that no longer have meaning’ such as ‘state control [and] unilateral disarmament’.104 Booth’s disarmament campaign was ‘not the battle cry that meant much to the people concerned about jobs, the cost of living, and Britain’s place in a hostile world’. Instead, ‘people in the real world’, by which the editor referred to the voters, believed ‘that the continuing threat of Soviet domination will not just go away, and if we throw away the deterrent’ it would ‘only make the likelihood of calamity even greater’.105 Booth quietly left the political stage after 17 years as Barrow’s MP. As the Conservatives celebrated their landslide victory and Labour picked up the pieces at their respective headquarters in London, David Howell recalled that this ‘spectacular reverse received little attention. Barrow was far away; Booth was self-effacing.’ 106 Ever the principled disciple of unilateral disarmament, he led a CND rally through the town the very next day. Given its almost total reliance on defence work, Barrow-in-Furness could be regarded as being somewhat exceptional in the context of the national economy. Booth was also an exceptional figure in that he had more at stake than other left-wing MPs in his commitment to the peace movement. One of his left-wing colleagues, Tam Dalyell, wrote of Booth that, while some people in the party ‘were annoyed that he seemed to throw away a safe Labour seat; many, many more people were lost in admiration for a patently honest man’.107 But as unique as the case of Barrow-in-Furness was, it none the less revealed significant characteristics of the defence economy more broadly. Although Vickers was chiefly engaged in military work, the company had a thriving civilian side of its business at Barrow adjacent to the warship yards that produced items from cement to pump equipment. However, once Vickers had completed the Polaris programme and had won several large warship orders, the company ran down this commercial sector from the late 1960s. The effect of this was that the engineering works ‘became a fragment’ by comparison to the ‘naval and army weapons and

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only a fraction the size of the shipbuilding works’.108 Vickers, and therefore the locality, became increasingly reliant on military work, much of which was awarded by the state. This was recognised by Booth when he became the town’s MP and prompted his research with Mary Kaldor in the defence study group, where they noted that, given the lack of investment in the commercial side of the company, ‘the armaments and naval shipbuilding division’ were ‘the only sections of Vickers to show continued growth and profitability’.109 This was an early diagnosis of what social scientists later considered Barrow’s ‘monoculture’ of dependence on military work.110 But this was not exclusively attributable to the corporate interests of Vickers. It was also nurtured by the Labour government in the 1970s. Booth and Kaldor wrote their paper a year before the Callaghan government nationalised the shipbuilding industry. Encouraged by this prospect, they advised that, for industrial conversion to occur, the state needed ‘to enter the industry as a direct investor’ and co-ordinate investment ‘with other related policies such as energy, transport, health, agriculture, etc’.111 But the reality was quite different. The government was not inclined to tamper with the balance of the defence economy and doubled down on justifying military spending on industrial and social grounds. Even though Vickers was taken into state ownership, the same executives sat on corporate boards and the same defence programmes continued apace. Mort and Spinardi observed that, in the three-year run-up to nationalisation in 1977, Vickers purposly reduced investment in the engineering and shipbuilding sides of the company in the knowledge that it was destined for public ownership should Labour stay in power. Consequently, the Barrow shipyard and its ‘diverse engineering works therefore suffered’ a ‘decline in status and visibility’.112 As was the case at Lucas Aerospace, workers at Vickers found military work to be a waste of their own skilled labour; but challenging the mode of the production was risky. One shop steward found himself without a job having returned from a position in the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. In conversation with Huw Beynon and Hilary Wainwright, he observed how ‘after nationalisation’, the same chairman sat on the nationalised board, while he was ‘on the streets. That’s nationalisation 1977 style.’ 113 The seeds of Albert Booth’s eventual defeat in 1983 were sown in the social-democratic settlement that upheld the defence economy in the late 1970s. Military work remained the core component of Vickers’s commercial interest. The company clearly had the potential for conversion and diversification; it was merely a case of investing in the engineering side of the business that had once been so successful. But the market-driven priority of post-IMF crisis Britain militated against this. For this reason, Booth had no example of a successful transfer of military to civil work to show to his sceptical

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constituents, many of whom had known Barrow only as a producer of machines for war. The revival of Cold War tension and the uncertainty caused by privatisation combined to undermine Booth and the Labour party’s defence policies at the 1983 general election. But this was not the epic watershed that some might have predicted at the time. The Conservatives went on to win the 1987 general election, but Labour regained the seat in 1992 under the more centrist social-democratic figure of John Hutton. The town would return a Labour MP in a continuous streak right up until 2019. With its maritime industrial heritage, Barrow-in-Furness was a constituency that normally voted Labour, but only if the party was solidly behind the nuclear deterrent on which its economic livelihood depended.

A missed opportunity? The landslide defeat that Labour experienced in 1983 was, in many respects, the end of the campaign for socially useful production. Key political figures, such as Frank Allaun, left the parliamentary stage, the workers at Lucas Aerospace were worn down by the company management, whilst the peace movement was practically myopic in its focus on nuclear weapons. After the election defeat Neil Kinnock replaced Michael Foot as Labour leader and the party maintained its support for unilateral nuclear disarmament. As Dan Keohane observed, there was a good deal of history repeated by the time the next general election came around in 1987 as Labour tried to make a convincing case for a conventional, non-nuclear defence only for the Conservatives to accuse it of leaving Britain defenceless. The Labour leadership questioned the affordability of Trident during that campaign and tried to pivot the debate back to safer ground in the form of the NHS and social welfare provision. But many voters, including many Labour ones, judged that the party had again got defence policy wrong as it ‘cried out against all natural experience’ in claiming that if you ‘throw away your most devastating weapon then you will be much safer’.114 In spite of this sentiment from among its own electoral base, Labour’s manifesto was highly critical of Trident, with much of that criticism expressed on the grounds of its cost, stating that ‘the Tories are buying the expensive American Trident system – a policy which increases nuclear armament without increasing security and, at the same time, diminishes our effective defences’ as ‘Trident’s cost of up to £10 billion will take up so much of our defence budget as to deny modern and necessary equipment to our front line forces’.115 Instead, in 1987 Labour pledged to fortify Britain’s conventional forces and was critical of the Conservatives’ neglect of conditions, equipment and pay. But there was a return to some of the older social-democratic pledges from the

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1970s as industrial conversion and socially useful production were dropped from the manifesto platform. The objective of building up conventional forces would ‘be based wherever possible on buying British-made rather than foreign equipment’, a policy that would ‘provide greater security for workers in our vital industries like aerospace, shipbuilding and engineering where jobs are in danger from the reductions which the Tories are making in conventional defence’.116 This could reasonably be considered as Labour moving back to something closer to its default setting, that defence was not just a matter of national security but an economic and industrial stimulus. This pledge, which was buried in another long manifesto, ought to have had some salience at least in those areas that depended on military work as the Thatcher government had opened up the sector to foreign competition. Although defence procurement might have been seen by some as a somewhat niche area of policy, it almost ended Thatcher’s premiership during the notorious ‘Westlands affair’ in 1986 when the defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, accused the Prime Minister of interference with a proposed merger between Britain’s last helicopter industry, British Aerospace, and a European consortium.117 To make matters worse, the Conservatives’ industry secretary, Leon Brittan, later resigned on the grounds that he had leaked sensitive information to the press. That the defence secretary resigned and that the Prime Minister almost lost her position were illustrative of the significance that the defence economy had. But Labour’s 1987 pledge to invest in the domestic defence industry was once again lost in the noise of the nuclear debate, a source of controversy that was pounced on mercilessly by the Conservatives. One could reasonably conclude that conventional defence and nuclear weapons were two sides of the same coin. However, it could also be argued that if Labour had established a clearer narrative earlier as to what a conventional defence would look like – and its benefits to the civilian economy – it is possible that, at the very least, a public conversation about the economic value of defence could have played out. In 1983 Labour’s narrative was confused on this central policy question as the party was pulled in different directions, from those who wanted to retain its fully fledged NATO commitment, those who wanted to unilaterally disarm and cut defence drastically, and others who sought the middle-ground – a non-nuclear posture that retained, and even developed, Britain’s conventional defence capability. But the latter case fell between the cracks of both extremes. Consequently it was drowned out by the conflict that engulfed the party in the early 1980s. Although the ‘Falklands’ factor’ might not have won Margaret Thatcher the 1983 general election on its own, it did make life difficult for the campaign to convert the defence economy into socially useful means. This, alongside the unilateralist quandary, was effectively the end of that



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movement which this book has treated as a coherent entity from its roots in the early Cold War to its most politically active expression in the 1970s. The opportunity to reform the defence economy was lost not in the 1983 general election but when the Labour governments under Wilson and Callaghan protected Britain’s military-industrial settlement that was so economically and politically valuable.

Notes 1 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 210. 2 Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam, ‘Introduction: New Histories of Labour and the Left in the 1980s’, in Labour and the Left in the 1980s, ed. Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 9. 3 Stephen Meredith, ‘James Callaghan, 1979–80’, in Leaders of the Opposition: From Churchill to Cameron, ed. Timothy Heppell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 109. 4 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Foot, Michael Mackintosh (1913–2010)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 26 May 2016. 5 Richard Jobson, Nostalgia and the Post-War Labour Party: Prisoners of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 102. 6 Aaron Donaghy, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); John Callaghan, ‘The International Context: End of an Era’, in Labour and the Left in the 1980s, ed. Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 9 7 Jim Tomlinson, ‘Thatcher, Monetarism and the Politics of Inflation’, in Making Thatcher’s Britain, ed. Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 62–77. 8 Simon Peplow, Race and Riots in Thatcher’s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 9 See Brian Marren, We Shall Not Be Moved: How Liverpool’s Working Class fought Redundancies, Closures and Cuts in the age of Thatcher (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 10 Aled Davies, ‘“Right to Buy”: The Development of a Conservative Housing Policy, 1945–1980’, Contemporary British History, 27:4 (2013), pp. 421–444. 11 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 219. 12 Davis and McWillam, ‘Introduction: New Histories of Labour and the Left in the 1980s’, p. 3. 13 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 209. 14 Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Macmillan, 1988). 15 Wickham-Jones, ‘Custodians of the Manifesto’, p. 224. 16 Guardian, ‘Left score again as unilateralists win day’, 3 October 1980, p. 4.

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17 Ibid. 18 Hinton, Protests and Visions, p. 183. 19 LHASC, International Committee, 4 December 1979, ‘Recommendations’, p. 2. 20 LHASC, International Committee, 8 January 1980, ‘Resolutions’, p. 5. 21 Ibid. 22 Robert Paterson, Britain’s Strategic Nuclear Deterrent: From Before the V-Bomber to Beyond Trident (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 89. 23 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1979–80/3, ‘Motion Submitted by Frank Allaun M.P.’, 13 November 1979. 24 Hansard, HC Deb 24 January 1980, ‘Defence’, vol 977 cc 672–784. 25 Kristan Stoddart, Facing down the Soviet Union: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1976–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 26 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, p. 490. 27 Mason, Paying the Price, p. 148. 28 Healey, The Time of My Life, p. 454 29 Hennessy, Muddling Through, p. 121. 30 Hansard, HC Deb 24 January 1980, ‘Defence’, vol 977 cc672–784. 31 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1979–80/197-May, ‘Resolutions’. 32 ‘Our pointless Polaris’, The Observer, 27 January 1980, p. 10. 33 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1979–80/212-Sept., ‘Resolution from APEX: Conservative Defence Policy’. 34 LHASC, International Committee, 9 September 1980, ‘Resolutions’. 35 LHASC, International Policy Conference, ‘Labour’s Policy on Defence and Disarmament (Final Draft)’, ID/1980–81/49-Dec, p. 1. 36 Ibid. 37 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1980–81/104-March, ‘Minutes of a meeting of NEC members of the Defence Study Group held on Wednesday 11 February 1983’, p. 2. 38 LHASC, International Committee, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Defence Study Group held at the House of Commons on 10 June 1981’, ID/1980–81/205-July, p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 2. 40 LHASC, International Committee, 10 November 1981, ‘Resolution from CLPs’. 41 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1980–81/192-June, ‘Resolutions from Southern Regional Council’. 42 LHASC, International Committee, 8 June 1982, ID/1981–82/176-June, Resolution from the Co-Operative Party on Disarmament’. 43 Hazel A. Atashroo, ‘Weaponising Peace: The Greater London Council, Cultural Policy and “GLC peace year 1983”’, Contemporary British History, 33:2 (2019), pp. 170–186. 44 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1980–81/191-June, ‘Resolution from the Greater London Labour Party Regional Council: Defence and Disarmament’. 45 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1981–82/107/April, ‘Labour’s Programme: Defence Security and Disarmament’, p. 4.

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46 Ibid., p. 6. 47 LHASC, NEC International Department, ID/1982–83/22-Nov, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of the Defence Study Group held on 19 October 1982 at the House of Commons’, p. 1. 48 Ibid., p. 3. 49 Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, p. 129. 50 Ron Smith, ‘Another Resolute Approach’, New Statesman, 8 October 1982, p. 7. 51 Ibid., p. 8. 52 Lansbury House Trust Fund, Defence without the Bomb: The Report of the Alternative Defence Commission (New York: International Publications Service, 1983), p. 3. 53 Ibid., pp. 274–275. 54 ‘A searching alternative in defence’, Guardian, 30 April 1983, p. 10. 55 Chin, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform, pp. 70–71. 56 Robert Self, British Foreign and Defence Policy since 1945: Challenges and Dilemmas in a Changing World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 167. 57 Chin, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform, p. 72. 58 Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, p. 227. 59 ‘Margaret Thatcher speech at Kensington town hall, 19 January 1976’, www. margaretthatcher.org/document/102939 [accessed 8 September 2020]. 60 ‘Conservative Party Manifesto 1979’, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/ 110858 [accessed 8 September 2020]. 61 Edward Hampshire, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s First U-Turn: Francis Pym and the Control of Defence Spending, 1979–81’, Contemporary British History, 29:3 (2014), pp. 359–379. 62 HMSO, ‘The United Kingdom Defence Programme: The Way Forward’ (Cmnd. 8288), p. 3. 63 Hugh Noyes, ‘Biffen rebuke for defence over-spending’, The Times, 13 March 1980, p. 2. 64 Edward Hampshire, ‘Strategic and Budgetary Necessity, or Decisionmaking “Along the Grain”? The Royal Navy and the 1981 Defence Review’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 39:7 (2016), p. 967. 65 Ibid., p. 976. 66 Dockrill, British Defence since 1945, p. 115. 67 Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945, p. 311. 68 Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Neo-Liberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite Social Policy’, Historical Journal, 55.2 (2012), pp. 497–520. 69 Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 105. 70 Phythian, The Labour Party, War and International Relations, p. 92. 71 LHASC, International Committee, ID/1981–82/120-April, ‘Falkland Islands’, p. 1.

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72 LHASC, International Committee, 8 June 1982, ID/1981–82/165-June, ‘Resolution from the Northern Regional Council on the Falkland Islands’. 73 Ezequiel Mercau, ‘War of the British Worlds: The Anglo-Argentines and the Falklands’, Journal of British Studies, 55 (2016), pp. 145–168. 74 LHASC, International Committee, 18 May 1982, ‘Resolutions’, p. 2. 75 Phythian, The Labour Party, War and International Relations, p. 93. 76 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 216. 77 Dockrill, British Defence since 1945, p. 122. 78 Kelsey, ‘Picking Losers: Concorde, Nuclear Power, and their Opponents in Britain, 1954–1995’, p. 294. 79 David Thomas, ‘How would defence cuts hit jobs?’, New Society, 3 March 1983, p. 334. 80 Wickham-Jones, ‘Custodians of the Manifesto’, p. 227. 81 Labour Party Manifesto 1983, https://web.archive.org/web/20150330053201/ www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1983/1983-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 4 August 2020]. 82 Antoine Capet, ‘Foreign Policy in the Labour Party Manifestos, 1945–1997: What Primacy?’, in The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain, ed. Brendan Simms and William Mulligan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 333. 83 Anthony Bevins, ‘Healey’s new line of Polaris’, The Times, 18 May 1983, p. 1. 84 ‘Foot denies a rift on defence’, The Times, 25 May 1983, p. 3. 85 Patrick Wintour, ‘Unions back Labour on switching defence jobs’, Guardian, 26 April 1983, p. 4. 86 Rodney Cowton, ‘Labour “will not reduce defence cash until economy is growing”’, The Times, 23 May 1983, p. 4. 87 Peter Kellner, ‘The political perils of practical unilateralism’, New Statesman, 18 February 1983, p. 7. 88 Robert Taylor, ‘Jobs issue fails to help Foot’, The Observer, 29 May 1983, p. 10. 89 Keohane, Labour Party Defence Policy since 1945, p. 67. 90 Ibid. 91 Vickers, The Labour Party and the World, p. 132. 92 E.P Thompson, ‘Prospects for peace’, New Statesman, 24 June 1983, p. 8. 93 Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party, p. 224. 94 Craig Seaton, ‘Dockyard holds casting vote’, The Times, 18 May 1983, p. 4. 95 David Owen, ‘A millstone manifesto ’round Labour’s Neck’, Guardian, 6 June 1983, p. 9. 96 ‘Trident the single issue in Furness’, North West Evening Mail, 23 May 1983, p. 1. 97 ‘Trident salvo’, North West Evening Mail, 7 June 1983, p. 9. 98 ‘Union man the unions will find hard to shift’, The Sunday Times, 11 April 1976, p. 16. 99 ‘Cliff-hanger day for Booth’, North West Evening Mail, 9 June 1983, p. 1.

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100 Barrow-in-Furness Constituency Labour Party (Barrow CLP), Letter from Michael Foot to the Secretary of the Confederation of Shipbuilders and Engineering Union, 18 May 1983. 101 ‘Cliff-hanger day for Booth’, North West Evening Mail, 9 June 1983, p. 1. 102 ‘Healey whips up Labour support’, North West Evening Mail, 7 June 1983, p. 5. Fortunato Galtieri Castelli was an Argentine general and President of Argentina from December 1981 to June 1982. Having ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982, he was removed from power soon after the Argentine defeat by British armed forces in the Falklands War. 103 Julia Langdon, ‘Albert Booth: obituary’, Guardian, 10 February 2010, www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/feb/10/albert-booth-obituary [accessed 23 June 2015]. 104 ‘Editorial’, North West Evening Mail, 10 June 1983, p. 12. 105 Ibid. 106 David Howell, ‘Booth, Albert Edward (1928–2010)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 9 January 2014. 107 Tam Dalyell, ‘Albert Booth: Principled Labour MP who served as Secretary of State under James Callaghan’, Independent, 11 February 2010, www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/albert-booth-principled-labour-mpwho-served-as-secretary-of-state-under-james-callaghan-1895853.html [accessed 26 June 2015]. 108 Maggie Mort and Graham Spinardi, ‘Defence and the Decline of UK Mechanical Engineering: The Case of Vickers at Barrow’, Business History, 46:1 (2004), p. 8. 109 Albert Booth and Mary Kaldor, ‘Alternative Employment for Naval Shipbuilding Workers’, in Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence: The Report and Papers of the Labour Party Study Group, ed. Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and Steve Vines (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 405. 110 Mort and Spinardi, ‘The Case of Vickers at Barrow’, p. 2. 111 Booth and Kaldor, ‘Alternative Employment for Naval Shipbuilding Workers’, p. 406. 112 Mort and Spinardi, ‘The Case of Vickers at Barrow’, p. 5. 113 Wainwright and Beynon, The Workers Report into Vickers, 52. 114 Keohane, Labour Party Defence Policy since 1945, p. 74 115 ‘1987 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1987/1987labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 30 September 2020] 116 Ibid. 117 Andrew S. Crines, Timothy Heppell and Peter Dorey, The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 28–30.

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Epilogue

#NHSNotTrident On Saturday 26 February 2016 the largest ‘anti-nuclear march in a generation’ took place in London’s Trafalgar Square.1 The crowd was in the tens of thousands, the largest demonstration against nuclear weapons since 1983. Such numbers could be explained by the Conservative government’s strategic defence review, which at that point was ongoing with a parliamentary vote on a successor system to the Trident submarine-based deterrent due later that year. But that attendance was also a consequence of the recently elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was the first unilateralist to hold that position since Michael Foot. A veteran of the Labour left, Corbyn’s unlikely ascension to the top of the party revived CND ahead of the crucial vote on whether to proceed with a successor to Trident, one that would commit Britain to nuclear deterrence into the 2060s. The protest demonstrated the wide appeal of nuclear disarmament across the left as members of the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party spoke from the platform. But Corbyn’s appeal, particularly among the younger generation, was undeniable. Although the moral opposition to nuclear weapons was repeatedly extolled by the speakers on that cold February day, there was no escaping the economic dimension. For those activists too young to remember the Cold War, or even the the Iraq War over a decade earlier, the impact of the financial crisis and the ensuing public spending cuts was felt keenly. Catchy slogans were emblazoned on badges, placards and T-shirts, all appropriate for the social media age, including ‘NHS Not Trident’, ‘Cut War Not Welfare’ and ‘Books Not Bombs’. The funding shortage in healthcare was to the forefront. As one activist remarked, ‘it’s such an excessive amount of money for a weapons system when the NHS and junior doctors are struggling.’ A student from Exeter who opposed tuition fees resented ‘having to pay to go to university’ while the government wanted ‘to spend £100bn on something that can only lead to the destruction of life on Earth’. Corbyn was aware of the campaign

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Epilogue 189 for socially useful production in the 1970s and 1980s and revived those arguments in front of a captive audience. Advocating for new environmentally friendly jobs in areas that were dependent on military contracts, he outlined a vision for a ‘different kind of politics in a different kind of world, a world that emphasises dealing with the crying needs of the poor and homeless in this country’. Although time was not on the protestors’ side, these were appropriate arguments in the economic circumstances. When the House of Commons debated the motion put down by the government to proceed with a successor system to Trident, a wide variety of opinions were expressed. Even the Conservative MP Crispin Blunt was sceptical of Trident’s cost when spending on conventional and digital defence systems was a preferable option. Well to left of this sentiment was the Scottish National Party’s MP Margaret Ferrier, who spoke of a ‘bottomless pit of cash [that] appears to be available for nukes’, before asking ‘how many more jobs could be created if we did not prioritise nuclear weapons over schools, hospitals, infrastructure and our conventional defence forces?’.2 The Prime Minister, Theresa May, made the economic case: the submarines would cost £41 billion over 35 years, a price she felt was worth paying for the advantages they bestowed. If May was expecting a rough time from the opposition Labour party, she did not get it. Instead, many Labour MPs provided statements that made the economic case for the successor system as if on the government’s behalf. Adrian Bailey, who had served in a junior defence portfolio during the last Labour government in the 2000s, informed the House of Commons that the successor system was ‘backed by trade unions, which recognise that any removal of Trident would have a huge impact on levels of employment and skills, which are absolutely essential to people’s welfare’. Much to Theresa May’s delight and Corbyn’s despondency, other Labourites jumped in to support Trident as MPs voted by an overwhelming majority to proceed with the successor system by 472 to 117. The cost dimension, which dominated the debate, was used to good effect by the Prime Minister, who stated that there were ‘jobs across about 350 constituencies in this country that are related to this industry. If we were not going to renew our nuclear deterrent, those people would of course be at risk of losing their jobs as a result.’ 3 The ambition of a peaceful economy continues to fight a battle against the military-industrial establishment. Although the defence economy is much smaller than it was during the Cold War (some estimates put it as low as thirty thousand workers) it continues to exert an influence out of proportion with its size. The tradition of falling back on the employment argument whenever anyone questions the strategic value of an expensive defence project remains. Labour is no exception to this, even when Jeremy Corbyn was the party leader. Much to his own personal disappointment and that

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190 Epilogue of his followers, the party conference voted to retain the nuclear deterrent. Even at the height of Corbyn’s popularity in 2017, Labour was even more committed to the defence economy than was the Conservative government. In its election manifesto that year it recognised the ‘considerable contribution’ that ‘responsible’ arms trading made to the economy and pledged to ‘support development and innovation in this sector and to ensure that it can continue to rely on a highly skilled workforce’. In much the same way as the Labour governments of the 1970s felt that defence stimulated the wider economy, the 2017 manifesto was ‘committed to a procurement process’ that supported ‘the British steel industry and defence manufacturing industry’, providing ‘good jobs throughout the supply chain’. In a bold conclusion, almost entirely overlooked by the media at the time, Labour pledged to publish a ‘Defence Industrial Strategy White Paper, including a National Shipbuilding Strategy to secure a long-term future for the industry, workers and defence’.4 Although many focused on Corbyn’s refusal to ever ‘push the button’ in the event of a hypothetical nuclear war, in the background the party and the trade unions understood the value of the defence economy. Despite Corbyn’s unilateralism, Labour narrowly held on to Barrow-in-Furness (where construction had already started on the new submarines) whilst the party gained a seat, Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, a constituency that heavily relied on military contracts and whose new Labour MP, Luke Pollard, was a son of a submariner and an advocate of the domestic warship industry. The popularity of Corbyn’s wider ambition to reverse austerity and pump money into public services was not lost on Theresa May’s successor as Prime Minister. Combined with achieving a Brexit deal, Boris Johnson’s stated aim of ‘levelling up’ the country chimed with the electorate and resulted in a comprehensive majority at the 2019 election. The two-pronged messaging of ‘Strengthening our NHS and ‘Getting Brexit Done’ was a clear departure from the more fiscally prudent Conservative administrations that came before. Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, which was released in March 2021, positioned the defence economy at the centre of Britain’s national recovery. Moving away from a free-market approach to military procurement that often included imports, the government revealed its ‘defence and security industrial strategy’ that would invest heavily in the domestic defence economy and use the ‘spin-off’ from military technology to stimulate British industry more broadly. Once again the defence economy was a useful political apparatus. Johnson’s stated aim of shoring up the union of the four nations included plans to build ships in Scotland, armoured vehicles in Wales and satellites in Northern Ireland. This defence review, which was considered the most significant overhaul since the end of the Cold War, clearly indicated

Epilogue 191

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the way in which defence continues to be seen as an expression of domestic policy first and foremost, particularly for those MPs whose constituencies stand to gain from state investment. With austerity economics turned on its head and a new consensus forming around a type of social democracy in all but name, not only has the defence economy survived the pandemic but its economic and political capital has increased considerably.

Back to the Future Nevertheless, for all this enthusiasm for a renewed military industry, the defence economy could falter on problems of its own making. The Public Accounts Committee, made up of MPs across party lines, reported in March 2021 that any new state investment in the sector would likely be lost in the Ministry of Defence’s ‘funding black hole’, which was thought to be as large as £17.4 billion with an additional projection of £20 billion to develop future capabilities not included in the government’s spending review. The chair of the committee and Labour MP Meg Hiller concluded that it was ‘crucial’ that this new money was ‘not instead just eaten up, once again, by the constant, debilitating time and budget overruns that have been eroding our national defence and security for years’.5 The ‘spending departments’, from local government and the social services, have long resented the runaway spending at the Ministry of Defence that was partially bailed out by the Johnson government with a £16 billion package towards the end of 2020. The department has been attacked in more recent times for its wastefulness and predilection for expensive ‘prestige’ projects when the everyday running of the military remains underfunded. Targets for such criticism include the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers that are the two largest ships ever built by the Royal Navy. Ordered by the Labour government in 2008 and commissioned by the Conservatives in 2017 and 2019, these warships risked not having fighter jets on board as the American Lockheed Martin F-35C was cancelled on the grounds of cost. One sceptic said that the aircraft carriers could ‘sink the defence budget without firing a shot’.6 The replacement aircraft order from the same company, the F-35, is the ‘most expensive weapons system in military history’, to such an extent that the Ministry of Defence can afford only 48 such aircraft (at the cost of at least £9.1 billion), a figure far less than its initial aspiration of 138.7 Then there is the saga of the Astute class of hunter-killer submarines where the first three boats were almost 60 per cent more expensive than was initially projected. Built at Barrow-in-Furness, the submarines were plagued by technical problems and

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192 Epilogue were colourfully described as like having a ‘V8 engine with a Morris Minor gearbox’.8 In many ways the left’s predictions in the 1970s have come true. Despite attempts by the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, and later the Blair and Brown Labour administrations, the defence economy has proved stubbornly resistant to any meaningful reform. Multinational defence companies exert considerable political power by lobbying and frequently relying on employment considerations as a way of getting at ministers. Taking a wrong step on defence procurement can be lethal for any politician, as seen during the 1986 ‘Westlands affair’ when two Conservative cabinet ministers, Michael Heseltine and Leon Brittan, resigned over a procurement scandal. Heseltine’s accusation of interference into the Yeovil-based helicopter manufacturer’s decision to select a potential buyer prompted his resignation as defence secretary and sowed the seeds for Margaret Thatcher’s eventual downfall four years later. The affair demonstrated the limitations to the Conservatives’ free-market approach to the defence economy as Heseltine’s desire for political oversight on military grounds collided with both Leon Brittan’s and Thatcher’s ambition for better commercial relations with the United States. Commenting at the time, the military historian Lawrence Freedman concluded that the episode represented the ‘competing pulls of an ideological preference for market forces and a desire to sustain a domestic defence industry’ as it was felt that ‘there were special security and broad foreign policy considerations that justified a more active government interest’.9 This appropriately describes the character of the defence economy both during and since the end of the Cold War. Warren Chin’s diagnosis of the military-industrial complex was as true of the 1990s as it was of the 1970s: ‘the inexorable rise in the cost of each new generation of equipment, the lack of an effective management regime to ensure that projects are completed on time and within cost, and finally the futile efforts of successive governments to reform the defence procurement process and eradicate the ills of cost escalation and delay’.10 As he observed, neither the Major nor the Blair government managed to effectively reform the defence economy as the aspiration for a ‘decisive’ cutting-edge world-beating weapons system remained. In this respect there was continuity with the governments since the Macmillan administration in the 1950s that tried and failed to replace personnel with machines in order to save money. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up costing over £20 billion.11 Both conflicts involved significant expense in personnel, but the cost of weapon systems was also a significant factor. In its 2005 defence equipment white paper the Labour government desired a more efficient and cost-effective sector, concluding that ‘together, the defence industry and government have to change their relationship’ to

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Epilogue 193 ‘help ensure the UK defence industry has a sustainable and bright future’ so that ‘we can avoid facing a crisis in a few years time’.12 But this was not to be the case. As the Astute crisis demonstrated, not even the rationalisation of the defence economy could resolve the crisis in weapons procurement which had bedevilled many a government since the Second World War. Opening the defence economy to private industry, which many hoped was the silver bullet, did not reverse the chronic overspend in the sector. Instead, the same problem persisted, namely the ambition to achieve the most advanced, sophisticated military technology within the capacity of the existing system. Procurement in the twenty-first century has largely continued the tradition of modifying existing armaments at great cost, the type of ‘baroqueness’ that Mary Kaldor had diagnosed in the early 1980s. Grand strategy is still underpinned by conventional and nuclear technologies, creating a lobby that provides an obstacle to serious reform. As Keith Hartley observed, ‘critics of UK defence industries point to waste, corruption, inefficiency, poor productivity, optimism bias, expensive and unreliable equipment, often delivered late and way over budget’ with a 2009 study finding that, for a large range of UK equipment programmes, the average programme delay was about five years, and the average cost increase was 40 per cent.13 The character of the defence economy was, in this respect, little different from the era covered in this book. As Hartley concluded, some of these ‘delays and cost overruns reflected a substantially overheated MOD equipment programme’, adding that ‘many participants in the procurement system have a vested interest and incentives in optimistically mis-estimating programme outcomes’ especially since the government ‘rarely cancels an equipment order’. The privatisation of the industry has done little to free the hands of the state; on the contrary, the government remains the primary customer of many defence companies. Given the proximity between electoral politics and the defence economy, the employment question continues to resonate. The defence economy might be much more compact in the twenty-first century, but the ambition to grow the sector and align it closely to state-backed science and technology at the time of writing could see the defence economy return to its postwar size and influence, at least in relative terms.

The Audit of War Despite the military victory at the Falklands in 1982 the right-wing historian Correlli Barnett was not swept away by the national fervour. Instead, he provided a withering analysis of Britain’s misplaced political economy since the Second World War, one that had cultivated militarism at the expense

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194 Epilogue of industrial growth. In his 1986 Audit of War Barnett dismissed the ‘hallucination’ in the quarter of a century after 1945 which was to ‘cost Britain in defence expenditure up to double the proportion of GNP spent by European industrial competitors’ and impose ‘a dead weight on Britain’s sluggish economy and on her fragile balance of payments, suck away from exports scarce manufacturing resources in advanced technology, and continue wartime concentration of much of Britain’s even scarcer R and D resources on defence projects’.14 The Audit of War became a staple of postwar declinism and the ‘sick man of Europe’ thesis. Although the extent of Barnett’s decline has since been challenged by historians such as David Egerton and Jim Tomlinson, there is still something to be said of his conclusions as Britain’s postwar experiences are continually reassessed.15 In the 1970s most commentators blamed Britain’s underwhelming postwar economic performance on either (if you were on the right) disruptive trade unions and recalcitrant workers or (if you were on the left) insufficient state investment and misplaced political economy. On the latter point this book has demonstrated that the left made the connection between relative economic decline and the exacting toll of the defence economy, which, combined with a foreign policy based on an inflated sense of importance, starved civilian industry of resources. In his memoir, published a few years after The Audit of War, Ian Mikardo asked the question ‘why should this economic benefit of supplying goods without encroaching on purchasing power be confined to the supply of warheads and shells and bullets? […] In economic terms what is the difference between supplying butter without charge to people who want it and supplying bombs without charge to people who don’t want them?’ 16 Because of their actions Mikardo and his comrades generated a considerable trail of evidence that this book has used to make the case that Britain had its own postwar military-industrial complex. The term is often associated with a covert and even conspiratorial agenda. But, as the left noted at the time, it was no secret; when pressed for answers, Labour ministers made plain their affections for the defence economy and the foreign arms trade, at the same time as they consented to the development of nuclear weapons capable of unimaginable horror and even, in the case of the neutron bomb, a device that was specifically targeted to disable and kill humans while leaving infrastructure and machinery intact. In his account of Eisenhower’s famous 1961 speech, James Ledbetter noted that those with ‘a dedicated interest in reducing military spending, including labor leaders and peace activists, took up the phrase ‘“military-industrial complex” with increasing fervour in coming years, steering the meaning toward their own interpretations’.17 Although the term was used less in Britain than in the United States, the implication was the same. The military-industrial complex was not conspiratorial; it was

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Epilogue 195 openly behavioural. In 1979, the left-wing authors of Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence rejected the ‘crude description of the malevolent influence of a shadowy military industrial complex’ and argued instead that the ‘strong input to arms programmes’ was largely ‘domestically determined’ and had ‘little if any relevance to the international scene’.18 The campaign for socially useful production was a part of the wider objective of a socialist economy within the marketplace for ideas that was 1970s and early 1980s Britain, between the end of the postwar socialdemocratic state and the ascendancy of the neoliberal free-market economy. It was a unique fusion of a foreign policy based on unilateral disarmament, industrial democracy and meaningful post-Fordist ‘human centred’ work. The left considered the defence economy as little more than a tool of oppressive market forces that manipulated the democratic state. As Dan Smith and Ron Smith argued in 1983 in their Economics of Militarism, the requirement for the defence economy was ‘based on the long-term requirement for economic stability and growth, assessed and established in political terms’.19 Through its literature and activism both within and outside of parliamentary politics, the left tried to expose the wastefulness of weapons procurement during the Cold War and establish a jarring contrast between that and the lengthening dole queues and missing hospital equipment. As the two Smiths concluded just after Labour had lost to a Conservative government still bathing in the victory of the Falklands War, ‘military spending is a complex and contradictory process. It erodes what it maintains; it buttresses what it undermines. Instead, to explain the economic phenomenon of military spending it is necessary to refer to the social, ideological and political fabric of advanced capitalism.’ 20 This combination of the social and political fabric, operating within a capitalist economy, amounted to a form of social democracy. In the British postwar sense this social democracy saw in the defence economy a way to achieve full employment and upskill the working population while deterring the Russians and satisfying the Americans. The ‘bitterest enemies of communism’ on the right of the Labour movement were among the most supportive of the defence industry and they, combined with most of the Conservatives and the civil service, made for a powerful consensus. In his history of the British nation in the twentieth century David Edgerton asked, ‘what would it take to show that the UK could usefully be described as social democratic after 1945’ and did it follow ‘a social democratic foreign policy, or defence policy?’ He concluded that ‘interestingly, it is highly unlikely anyone has ever made this claim’.21 Yet this is just the claim that The British Left and the Defence Economy has made. Defence was never just a matter of military considerations; it was often an economic and social

196 Epilogue imperative. The worse the industrial situation, the more clout the defence economy was able to exercise. If war was a tool of politics, then the defence economy was a function of British social democracy.

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Notes 1 Mark Townsend, ‘Trident rally is Britain’s biggest anti-nuclear march in a generation’, Guardian, 27 February 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ feb/27/cnd-rally-anti-nuclear-demonstration-trident-london [accessed 30 April 2021]. 2 Hansard, HC Deb 18 July 2016, ‘UK’s Nuclear Deterrent’, 18 July 2016, vol 613 cc 559. 3 Ibid. 4 ‘For the Many Not the Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017’, https:// labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-manifesto-2017.pdf [accessed 21 May 2021]. 5 UK Parliament Committees, ‘New defence money potentially lost in “funding black hole” at centre of UK defence equipment plan’, https://committees.parliament.uk/ committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/152776/new-defence-moneypotentially-lost-in-funding-black-hole-at-centre-of-uk-defence-equipment-plan/ [accessed 21 May 2021]. 6 Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Our new aircraft carrier could sink the defence budget without firing a shot’, Guardian, 17 December 2017, www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/dec/07/aircraft-carrier-defence-budget-hms-queen-elizabethroyal-navy [accessed 4 May 2021]. 7 Lucy Fisher, ‘Britain may halve fighter jet purchases’, The Times, 26 August 2020, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britain-may-halve-fighter-jet-purchases-nk2hfns8c [accessed 4 May 2021]. 8 Nick Hopkins, ‘Slow, leaky, rusty: Britain’s £10bn submarine beset by design flaws’, Guardian, 15 November 2012, www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/15/ hms-astute-submarine-slow-leaky-rusty [accessed 15 November 2012]. 9 Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Case of Westland and the Bias to Europe’, International Affairs, 63:1 (1986), p. 2. 10 Chin, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform, p. 237. 11 ‘Afghanistan and Iraq “have cost taxpayers £20bn”’, The Telegraph, 20 June 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7841631/ Afghanistan-and-Iraq-have-cost-taxpayers-20bn.html [accessed 5 May 2021]. 12 Ministry of Defence, Defence Industrial Strategy (Cmnd. 6697), https:// assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/272203/6697.pdf [accessed 4 May 2021]. 13 Keith Hartley, The Economics of Defence Policy: A New Perspective (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012), p. 184. 14 Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion & Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 304.

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Epilogue 197 15 David Edgerton, ‘The Decline of Declinism’, The Business History Review, 71:2 (1997), pp. 201–206; Jim Tomlinson, ‘De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-War British History’, Twentieth Century British History, 27:1 (2016), pp. 76–99. 16 Ian Mikardo, Backbencher (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 221. 17 James Ledbetter, Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 131. 18 Kaldor, Smith and Vines, Democratic Socialism and the Cost of Defence, p. 6. 19 Smith and Smith, The Economics of Militarism, pp. 100–101. 20 Ibid., p. 101. 21 David Edgerton, ‘What Came between New Liberalism and Neo-Liberalism? Rethinking Keynesianism, the Welfare State and Social Democracy’, in The Neoliberal Age? Politics, Economy, Society, and Culture in Britain since c.1970, ed. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Ben Jackson and Aled Davies (London: University College Press, 2021), p. 36.

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Bibliography 203 Ministry of Defence, Defence Industrial Strategy (Cmnd. 6697), https://assets.publishing. service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 272203/6697.pdf [accessed 4 May 2021] Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, www.gov.uk/government/publications/globalbritain-in-a-competitive-age-the-integrated-review-of-security-defence-developmentand-foreign-policy [accessed 5 April 2021] ‘1987 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1987/1987labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 30 September 2020] ‘Margaret Thatcher speech at Kensington town hall, 19 January 1976’, www. margaretthatcher.org/document/102939 [accessed 8 September 2020] ‘Conservative Party Manifesto 1979’, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110858 [accessed 8 September 2020] Labour Party Manifesto 1983, https://web.archive.org/web/20150330053201/http:// www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1983/1983-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 4 August 2020] ‘The Plan’ Film, https://lucasplan.org.uk/the-plan-film/ [accessed 27 June 2020] British Council, ‘The Plan: That Came from the Bottom Up’, http://film-directory. britishcouncil.org/the-plan-that-came-from-the-bottom-up [accessed 27 June 2020] ‘1970 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1970/1970labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 5 March 2020] ‘1966 Labour Party Election Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1966/ 1966-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 15 June 2019] ‘Labour’s Plan for Science: Reprint of Speech by the Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, MP, Leader of the Labour Party, at the Annual Conference, Scarborough, Tuesday, October 1, 1963’, http://nottspolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/LaboursPlan-for-science.pdf [accessed 20 March 2019] ‘1964 Labour Party Election Manifesto’, www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/ 1964/1964-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 20 March 2019] ‘Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961’, https://avalon. law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp [accessed 5 May 2015] ‘February 1974 Labour Party Manifesto’, www.labourparty.org.uk/manifestos/1974/ Feb/1974-feb-labour-manifesto.shtml [accessed 5 February 2015]

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Bibliography 205 Brooke, Stephen, Labour’s War: The Labour Party during the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Browne, Sarah, ‘“A Veritable Hotbed of Feminism”: Women’s Liberation in St Andrews, Scotland, c.1968–c.1979’, Twentieth Century British History, 23:1 (2012), pp. 100–123 Burkett, Jodi, ‘The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Changing Attitudes towards the Earth in the Nuclear Age’, British Journal for the History of Science, 45:4 (2012), pp. 625–639 Burkett, Jodi, ‘Re-Defining British Morality: “Britishness” and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 1958–68’, Twentieth Century British History, 21:2 (2010), pp. 184–205 Burkett, Jodi, ‘Peace Direct Action and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1958–62’, in NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945, ed. N.J. Crowson, Matthew Hilton and James McKay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 21–37 Callaghan, John, ‘The International Context: End of an Era’, in Labour and the Left in the 1980s, ed. Jonathan Davis and Rohan McWilliam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp. 132–150 Callaghan, John, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History (London: Routledge, 2007) Callaghan, John, ‘The Left and the “Unfinished Revolution”: Bevanites and Soviet Russia in the 1950s’, Contemporary British History, 15:3 (2001), pp. 63–82 Callaghan, John, ‘The Cold War and the March of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’, Contemporary British History, 15:3 (2001), pp. 1–25 Campsie, Alexandre, ‘“Socialism Will Never Be the Same Again”: Reimagining British Left-Wing Ideas for the “New Times”’, Contemporary British History, 31:2 (2017), pp. 166–188 Capet, Antoine, ‘Foreign Policy in the Labour Party Manifestos, 1945–1997: What Primacy?’, in The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000, ed. Brendan Simms and William Mulligan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 319–335 Carey, Omer, The Military-Industrial Complex and United States Foreign Policy (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1969) Carter, April, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics since 1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992) Carver, Michael, Tightrope Walking: British Defence Policy since 1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1992) Castle, Barbara, The Castle Diaries, 1974–76 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980) Chalmers, Malcolm, Paying for Defence: Military Spending and British Decline (London: Pluto, 1985) Chin, Warren, British Weapons Acquisition Policy and the Futility of Reform (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) Clark, Peder, ‘“Problems of Today and Tomorrow”: Prevention and the National Health Service in the 1970s’, Social History of Medicine, 33:3 (2019), pp. 981–1000

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214 Bibliography Saunders, Jack, ‘The Untraditional Worker: Class Re-Formation in Britain 1945–65’, Twentieth Century British History, 26: 2 (2015), pp. 225–248 Saunders, Robert, Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Scott, Len, ‘Selling or Selling Out Nuclear Disarmament? Labour, the Bomb, and the 1987 General Election’, International History Review, 34:1 (2012), pp. 115–137 Seaton, Andrew, ‘Against the “Sacred Cow”: NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine, 1948–72’, Twentieth Century British History, 26:3 (2015), pp. 424–449 Self, Robert, British Foreign and Defence Policy since 1945: Challenges and Dilemmas in a Changing World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Seyd, Patrick, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987) Shaw, Tony, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965)’, English Historical Review, 121:494 (2006), pp. 1351–1384 Shonfield, Andrew, British Economic Policy since the War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958) Smith, Dan and Ron Smith, The Economics of Militarism (London: Pluto Press, 1983) Smith, David, ‘Defence Contractors and Diversification into the Civil Sector: RollsRoyce, 1945–2005’, Business History, 49:5 (2007), pp. 669–694 Smith, Simon, ‘Centurions and Chieftains: Tank Sales and British Policy towards Israel in the Aftermath of the Six-Day War’, Contemporary British History, 28:2 (2014), pp. 219–239 Southwood, Peter, Disarming Military Industries: Turning an Outbreak into an Enduring Legacy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991) Stockfisch, J.A., Plowshares into Swords: Managing the American Defense Establishment (New York: Mason and Lipscomb, 1973) Stoddart, Kristan, Facing Down the Soviet Union: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1976–1983 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Stoddart, Kristan, The Sword and the Shield: Britain, America, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1970–1976 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Stoddart, Kristan, Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1964–70 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Stoddart, Kristan, ‘The British Labour Government and the Development of Chevaline, 1974–79’, Cold War History, 10:3 (2010), pp. 287–314 Stoddart, Kristan, ‘Maintaining the “Moscow Criterion”: British Strategic Nuclear Targeting 1974–1979’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31:6 (2008), pp. 897–924 Straw, Sean and John Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Demise of TSR-2, October 1964 – April 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 20:4 (1997), pp. 18–44 Suri, Jeremi, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence, ‘Neo-Liberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite Social Policy’, Historical Journal, 55.2 (2012), pp. 497–520 Taylor, Richard, ‘Labour and CND, 1955–87’, in Campaigns for Peace: British Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987)

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Index

Airbus 43, 113 Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act (1977) 79, 85, 92, 112, 117, 180 Allaun, Frank 22, 27, 46, 52, 54, 62–63, 71, 87, 107–109, 129, 131, 133, 136, 144–145, 156, 162 Alternative Economic Strategy 70, 80, 120, 157 Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AEUW) 115, 174, 180 Anderson, Perry 20 Anglican Peace Fellowship 136 arms exporting Chile 74–75, 83, 138 Iran 26, 58, 137, 139 Israel 26 Saudi Arabia 26, 76 South Africa 24–27, 83, 138 Asquith, Phil 102, 119 Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff 115, 161 Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) 31, 129 Attlee, Clement 11–14, 17 Barnaby, Frank 31 Barnett, Joel 59 Barrow-in-Furness 24, 43, 45, 81, 177–181, 190–191 Benn, Tony 27, 58, 60, 88, 102–104, 108, 111, 119, 154, 157 Bernal, J.D. 14

Bevan, Aneurin (Nye) 14–16, 25, 61, 154 Bevin, Ernest 17 Bidwell, Sidney 52 Biffen, John 169 Blackaby, Frank 31, 73, 166 Blackett, Patrick 14 Blue Streak 19–20 Boeing 43, 113 Booth, Albert 24, 110, 177–181 British Aerospace Corporation (BAC) 22, 26, 43, 54, 62, 100 British Aerospace 79, 92, 98, 113, 168, 182 British Army on the Rhine (BAOR) 18, 43, 55 British Leyland 26, 44, 63, 108 British Shipbuilders 79, 91, 168 Brown, George 24 Brunei 49 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 143 Bullock report (Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy) 104, 112 Butler, Richard (Rab) 16 Callaghan, James (Jim) 17, 24, 47, 49–50, 56, 59–61, 69, 81, 83–87, 89, 111, 113, 136, 139, 143, 154–155, 157, 158–161, 178, 180, 183 Campaign against Arms Trade (CAAT) 4, 126, 136–140 Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) 32

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218 Index Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 4, 17, 22, 24, 32, 47, 48, 62, 80, 102, 108, 126–137, 140–149, 154, 162, 178–179, 188 Carter, Jimmy 143–145, 159 Carver, Michael 43, 45 Castle, Barbara 47 Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) 50–51, 58 Centre for Alternative, Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) 118 Chatham 45, 52 Chevaline 43, 46, 48, 70, 145, 147, 159–160, 162, 167 Chieftain (tank) 26, 58, 137–138 Chilean crisis (1973) 74–75, 171 Chomsky, Noam 29 Christian Aid 136 Churchill, Winston 16, 47 communism 3–6, 84–85, 143, 149, 195 Concorde 45, 80, 100 Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU) 115–116 Cook, Robin 61–62, 74, 87, 107, 131, 133–134, 137, 139, 160, 162 Cooley, Mike 108, 117–118, 134, 136 Corbyn, Jeremy 7, 163, 188–190 Crosland, Anthony 57 Crossman, Richard 19, 24 Cryer, Bob 109 Cuban Missile Crisis 29, 129 Cyprus Crisis (1974) 46–49 De Havilland 19 Dearing, Ron 92 Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) 137, 140 Devonport 45, 154, 177, 190 Donoghue, Bernard 56, 58, 60 Duff, Peggy 130 Ecology Party 141 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 28–29, 194 Elliott, Dave 98, 101, 106, 112 Enhanced Radiation Weapon or ‘neutron bomb’ 143–145, 194

European Nuclear Disarmament (END) 147 F-111 23, 25 Fabian Society 62, 101, 106 Fairbairns, Zoe 132, 138 Foot, Michael 154–161, 165–167, 171–174, 176–178, 181, 188 Ford, Gerald 50, 57 Friends of the Earth 136, 140 Gaitskell, Hugh 12, 14–16 Galbraith, John Kenneth 30 Geddes Report on the Shipbuilding Industry 22 Gilbert, John 76, 81 Greenpeace 140 Greenwood, David 74, 162 Gunter, Ray 25 Hardie, Keir 11 Harington, Michael 30 Harrier jet 26, 106, 139 Hart, Judith 71, 134 Hawker Siddeley 22, 24, 26, 63, 79 Healey, Denis 5, 17, 21, 24–25, 27, 41, 43, 47, 58–61, 137, 154, 156–157, 160, 173, 175, 179 Heath, Edward 43, 50 Heffer, Eric 54, 171 Helsinki Accords 89 Heseltine, Michael 175, 182, 192 HMS Invincible 43, 52, 165, 169, 177 HMS Prince of Wales 7 HMS Queen Elizabeth 7, 191 Holland, Stuart 32, 134–135, 162–163 Howe, Geoffrey 169–170 HS-681 aircraft 22, 100 Huckfield, Leslie 92, 110–111, 116 Hunt, John 44, 50 Huzzard, Ron 71, 87 Institute for Workers’ Control 80, 102 Iraq War 61, 188, 192 Jaguar aircraft 26, 105 Jenkins, Roy 17, 25, 158 John, Brynmor 107, 162 Judd, Frank 74

Index 219

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Kaldor, Mary 31, 62, 73, 77–78, 127, 133, 147, 162, 165, 178, 180, 193 Kaufman, Gerald 73–74, 104, 109– 111, 115–117, 164 Kent, Bruce 129, 148–149 Khrushchev, Nikita 28 Kissinger, Henry 49–50, 57 Korean War 14, 28, 50 Labour Action for Peace 22, 136 Lea, David 115 Lestor, Joan 158 Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963) 129 Litterick, Tom 107 Lockheed 44, 100, 119, 137, 191 MacDonald, Ramsay 11 Macmillan, Harold 19, 170 Mason, Roy 32, 41–44, 46–49, 52–62, 69, 70–71, 74–75, 107, 160 Mauritius 49 McGovern, George 29 Mellish, Bob 28, 55 Melman, Seymour 29–30 Mikardo, Ian 32–33, 43, 47, 52, 56, 70–73, 75–76, 87, 109, 131, 194 Mulley, Fred 76, 84, 87–88, 144 Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicle (MIRV) 48 Mumford, Lewis 30 National Enterprise Board (NEB) 33, 109, 134, 155 National Executive Committee (NEC) 32–33, 54–55, 70–71, 72, 75–76, 87, 89, 155, 157–164, 171, 174, 178 National Health Service (NHS) 11, 12–15, 163 Neild, Robert 31, 77 Newens, Stan 33, 162 Nimrod aircraft 167 Nimrod maritime vessel 44 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) 3, 5, 17, 21, 26, 34, 44–45, 51, 55, 57–61, 69, 72, 76–77, 84, 107, 143, 158–159, 162–164, 168, 173, 178, 182

Northern Ireland 50, 77, 190 Nott, John 169 Owen, David 85, 144, 155, 158, 177 P-1154 aircraft 22 Panavia Tornado 26, 53, 76, 106, 119 Parkin, Frank 127–130 Part, Anthony 103 Plowden Report on the Aircraft Industry 22 Polaris 2, 19–24, 43, 46–48, 62, 73–74, 127, 131–132, 145, 158–160, 173–174, 177–179 Prague Spring 44, 81 Pym, Francis 159–160, 169 RB211 44–45, 100 Rees, Duncan 129, 132, 135–136, 142, 144, 145 Richardson, Jo 71, 135 Robinson, Robert 14 Rodgers, Bill 54, 59, 71, 85, 158, 164 Rolls-Royce 19, 26, 44–45, 63, 98, 100–103, 111–113, 119 Rooker, Jeff 110, 115–116, 118 Sampson, Anthony 138–139 Sandys, Duncan 18–19 Scanlon, Hugh 115 Scarbrow, Ernie 105, 108, 118 Schlesinger, James 50, 56–57 Shonfield, Andrew 18 Silkin, John 175 Smith, Dan 62, 134, 147, 195 Smith, Ron 120, 148, 165, 195 Social Democratic Alliance 72 Social Democratic Party (SDP) 5, 54, 72, 85, 164, 172–173, 176–177 Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) 148 Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute (SIPRI) 31, 73, 77, 166 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) 129 Swan Hunter 58 Thatcher, Margaret 2, 7, 50, 117, 145, 154–156, 167–170, 172–175, 179, 182, 192

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220 Index Thompson, E.P. 127, 147–148, 176 Thorne, Stan 54 Tierney, Syd 109 Tomlinson, John 81 Trade Union Congress (TUC) 113–115, 159, 174 Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) 114–115 Trident 145–146, 158–163, 166, 170, 174, 177–178, 188–189 TSR-2 19, 22–27, 100, 165, 167 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders 98, 102 Varley, Eric 74, 88–89, 104, 110 Vickers 21, 43, 63, 79, 81, 98, 108, 177–180 Vietnam War 27, 29–30, 128–129, 142 Wainwright, Hilary 98–99, 110, 118, 180

War on Want 136 Warsaw Pact 34, 52–53, 77, 84, 145 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney 11 Wellbeloved, James (Jim) 54, 71, 81 Weller, Paul 6–7 ‘Westlands affair’ 182, 192 Williams, Alan Lee 53–54, 71–75, 85–86, 164 Wilson, Harold 12, 14–15, 19–21, 23–27, 31–34, 42, 46–51, 55–61, 71, 86, 103–104, 117, 131, 155, 173 Windscale 141–142 Wise, Audrey 110–111, 118 Yarrow 79 Zuckerman, Solly 19