Edward Heath, Britain's prime minister from 1970 to 1974, has died. He was a fine musician and an excellent yachtsman, and I hope he is remembered that way.

The television, radio and newspaper coverage of the death of Sir Edward Heath, necessarily concentrating on his 1970-74 premiership, seems to have more in common with science fiction than with current affairs. The picture that they portray – of a land mired in the malaise of the Seventies – is one so far removed from the Britain of 2005 that it seems almost to be the story of another country altogether. Sir Edward’s obituaries, even the most generous of them, serve to remind us quite what a ghastly decade the Seventies were for the UK, and how much he was personally responsible for that.
The most obvious difference between then and now was the necessarily unspoken but all-pervading sense among the governing classes that Britain was in decline, and there was nothing much she could do about it. Indeed it was feared by the front benches of both political parties that even attempting to take steps to reverse that decline might merely exacerbate the situation. Politicians, businessmen, dons, writers, opinion-formers – all assumed that Britain’s time as a great power had passed, and the best they could do was to manage her inevitable decline in as civilised a way as possible. Although many top people in Britain in those days – including Heath – had been personally brave during the war, they evinced appalling moral cowardice when it came to fighting the problems that beset Britain in peacetime.
The worst act of appeasement, something that is quite inconceivable today, came in 1972 when the Heath government performed a spectacular and comprehensive U-turn on all its major industrial policies, ditching all the promises it had made only two years earlier in its election manifesto. Yet this spectacular volte face – which today would lead to the collapse of any government of either complexion – was swallowed by a Tory party that could not bear confrontation. All its promises, of tax-cuts, immigration controls, law and order measures and legislation to control the trade unions, were ditched overnight in an act of mass collective funk.
The footage on our TV screens in the recent Heath obituaries of striking miners, the three-day week and regular nationwide power-cuts are reminiscent of news stories from Eastern Europe or even the Third World: it’s almost incredible to think that they once represented the realities of daily life in Britain under Ted Heath. Hailed when he became leader of the Conservatives in 1965 as a classless modern technocrat, Heath quickly showed that he could be as curmudgeonly, vain, obtuse and downright rude as any of the hidebound reactionary Tory squires he was meant to supplant. Visitors to Chequers would be left to talk amongst themselves in the library before lunch until the prime minister deigned to finish reading an article in Yachting Monthly.
Perhaps the worst example of Heathite appeasement – again, inconceivable in today’s world – was the way that the Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled was released from Ealing police station in September 1970 after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine threatened the British government with reprisals against hostages if she were not handed over. Enoch Powell warned that this action was ‘not only wrong in itself but fraught with grave consequences for the future’, and he was soon proved right. Terrorists the world over were led to believe that Western governments – the Germans and Swiss also acceded to the PFLP’s demands – would be a soft touch if planes were hijacked and hostages taken. As a result the Seventies saw a terrifying upsurge in such acts.
For all that Heath’s ‘integrity’ has been constantly lauded in his obituaries, in fact his government took Britain into the Common Market in 1973 on a deliberately false prospectus. As part of his campaign for entry in 1972, Heath categorically stated that: ‘There is no question of eroding any national sovereignty. There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe, we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears I need hardly say are completely unjustified.’ We now know that Heath was in receipt of a letter from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, who had been specifically asked by him to report on ‘the constitutional implications of our becoming party to the Treaty of Rome’. Kilmuir’s letter concluded that ‘in my view the surrenders of sovereignty involved are serious ones’. Yet still Heath made his soothing statement.
Heath also promised that Britain would not enter the Common Market without ‘the full-hearted consent’ of the British people, yet the second reading of the European Communities Bill was only passed by 309 to 301 votes. Whatever that might represent, it was hardly full-hearted consent. Today the democratic situation is far healthier, with a referendum promised before Britain abolishes the pound, and another if ever the Government wished us to sign up to the now-moribund European Constitution. It seems incredible that back in the Seventies Britons were willing to put up with such political chicanery over such a vital issue regarding Britain’s future, but we were a far more deferential country a third of a century ago.
So much about Heath’s premiership smacks of a totally different historical era, or a different country: there was a national dock strike in July 1970 that forced the government to declare a national State of Emergency (the first of three); that November, £48m of taxpayer’s money (a vast sum for those days) was given to Rolls-Royce Ltd to offset losses; a supposedly Conservative government then nationalised the aero-engine and marine divisions of Rolls-Royce, the first nationalisation since Attlee 22 years earlier; top tax rates were 75 pence in the pound; British Rail went on work-to-rule for a 16% pay claim.
On 6 November 1972 the government announced a ninety day freeze on all prices, wages, rents and dividends. Every customer was invited to be a nark, reporting shopkeepers who sneaked so much as a penny on a can of beans. As under socialism, a huge bureaucracy geared up to administer every aspect of the economy. A Pay Board and Prices Commission set incomes and prices, rather than the free market; ministers were now responsible for all the prices in the shops. Ministers meeting in the Treasury were deciding the levels for plumbers’ rates, taxi fares and even the rents on furnished versus unfurnished flats. Even in wartime the Government had never interfered in the minutiae of economic decision-making to such an extent.
Subsidies were paid in December 1972 of £175m for the National Coal Board as well as a debt write-off of £475m; gas supplies were simply cut off for a whole month in February 1973; the mortgage rate reached 11%; petrol rationing coupons were distributed and street-lights were extinguished early to save energy; and on 13 December 1973, Heath ordered British industry to work a three-day week for the same reason. The following February the miners began an all-out strike in support of a pay claim of over 30%. That same month, when Heath asked the question ‘Who Governs Britain?’, the British electorate replied: ‘Not you.’
There might be plenty of things that are wrong with modern-day Britain, but at least we are not saddled with an industrial relations culture that pitted all-powerful union bosses – many of whom became household names – against fearful and generally defeatist government ministers who defined statesmanship as trying to avoid trouble.
One person at least had learnt the bitter lesson of the disastrous Heath U-Turn of 1972, though. Eight years later, at the 1980 Party Conference, when unemployment was far higher than the 1m that it had been under Heath and she was trailing badly in the opinion polls, Margaret Thatcher nevertheless defiantly barked to the party conference: “For those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase. “the U-turn”, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning”. She did not, and as a result the Heath period was fortunately consigned to the Dark Ages of British political history, only briefly resurrected this week because of his sad demise at the age of 89.