I like the lengthy chapters, as it's nice to be able to fully consider the whole while keeping it all in mind when reading. It's also nice to be able to judge about how much time I can devote to the various AARs.
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Thanks for your input, @Wraith11B! Nice to hear the length isn't always unmanageable.
And not something I'd thought about, the having time for other AARs point. I suppose if Echoes fully graduates to become 'event reading' then it does get a lot of words out they way at once.
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Yeah, knowing that own comments are extraordinarily, unabashedly, audaciously long, and yes, still trying to shorten them, giving apologies every time, sigh. Even this comment has started to seem longer than necessary to own eyes.
But that is for the comments, though. For the posts, on the other hand, never felt to refrain from writing long. That attribute is inapplicable as it is the domain of the writer of the work, belongs to only the creator of the work, can never be a subject of discussion with anyone else.
And yours; naaah, that return-update-after-long-time is beautiful.
Therefore; in however format, style, length, width, depth, pace you deem worthy to create, it is yours to decide, and know that: Write, write more, and all will be read. Well, eventually. Still rereading the last one. Heey, said it before, being a slow reader is almost a curse.
On a more selfish remark, though, will never say no to [lengthy] chapters. And yet, will still be looking for your updates, whether monthly or weekly, irregular or relentlessly frequent.
Write, damn you!
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You are the writer, we are readers. You should write in a style and manner that makes you the happiest. We will read as much and as often that you give us material. Thank you for what you have delivered.
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Thanks both for your thoughts!
I will say that I probably won't aim for chapters to consistently break the 10k words barrier…
And slow reading is good! It took long enough to write after all
I wouldn't worry about comments being too long. Everyone loves a detailed response, however left-field.
Thanks for the vote of confidence! My main gripe with the last chapter was the length of the footnotes, which were for my money entirely relevant and necessary but just look awful when formatted in-post. If only they'd bring back the link-to-section functionality – though that was before even my time.
I will say that I probably won't aim for chapters to consistently break the 10k words barrier…
Thank you!
And slow reading is good! It took long enough to write after all
On that… seeing as I'm still waiting for my supervisor to get back to me with thoughts on my latest drafts, there's not much I can do on the old thesis at the moment. Which means I have writing time set aside and nothing to write. What a terrible predicament…On a more selfish remark, though, will never say no to [lengthy] chapters. And yet, will still be looking for your updates, whether monthly or weekly, irregular or relentlessly frequent.
Write, damn you!
Thank you Midnite Duke! It's my pleasure to have you reading along with us.
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I've been getting some more writing done this evening (now up to 7k words on the next chapter!) and the more I go over my notes, which I've been putting together since this time last year, the more I am amazed at how many parallels there are between my plans for Lewis and the recent conduct of the sort-of British prime minister. Backbench rebellions, revolving-door cabinets, fudged resignations… the lot.
I can't decide to thank the fates for making it topical, or to curse them for making me look unoriginal. The answer, I think, is to give myself three more months to work at it in the hope that all my troubles simply melt away…
I can't decide to thank the fates for making it topical, or to curse them for making me look unoriginal. The answer, I think, is to give myself three more months to work at it in the hope that all my troubles simply melt away…
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Ah great. Was going to reply to this with some pseudo-knowledge on the subject but of course with hyper-bombastic-audacity,I've been getting some more writing done this evening (now up to 7k words on the next chapter!) and the more I go over my notes, which I've been putting together since this time last year, the more I am amazed at how many parallels there are between my plans for Lewis and the recent conduct of the sort-of British prime minister. Backbench rebellions, revolving-door cabinets, fudged resignations… the lot.
...then realised the newly-changed handle-title, got distracted in quick-laughter, and later forgot about what to write. Splendid.
Probably it was another round of bashing, from the hair-styles of these... of these... err... hmmm. naah, no need to be boorish... err... prime ministers, yeah, prime ministers, to their existential purposes in their characteristics for what they are, and what the relation to the Echoes or... naah, have completely forgotten it, the words are gone forever; enough of butchering the thread.
Anyway. Should save the comment.
Is it only imports, or sometimes exports too, Mr. Vandelay?
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I’m sorry to have caused you to forget your comment, fil. I can only imagine what high-wire levels of bombast Britain’s outgoing disgrace might have ilicited.
A bit of both. Latex is slow these days, but the chips and long matches still rake in a living.
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@DensleyBlair you may have seen through the ‘likes’ that I am still progressing through the back catalogue, in the formative years of the new Commonwealth government and that chapter on the dissolute Edward VIII in Newfoundland. Your alternate world remains as immersive as ever.
This is not a mistake the real Bolsheviks would have made (and certainly didn’t under Stalin, where internal CPSU opponents were of course conveniently lumped into the counter revolutionary basket, let alone real ones).
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l had noticed you were reading! Good to hear from you, @Bullfilter. You’ve got an action-packed time ahead!@DensleyBlair you may have seen through the ‘likes’ that I am still progressing through the back catalogue, in the formative years of the new Commonwealth government and that chapter on the dissolute Edward VIII in Newfoundland. Your alternate world remains as immersive as ever.
No, I think you’re right here. I very much tried to give the CPGB their own distinct flavour from the CPSU. And for all that I could imagine a number of the other Western European CPs being a bit more ruthless in their crackdowns, I think any immediate brutality by the British party would have rung a little hollow. For all of their dutiful Stalinist language, I don’t really read Cook, Pollitt et al. as having had the ruthlessness of their Moscow colleagues.
At the same time, I also think the British aristocracy are just too powerful to knock down in one swoop (and the game must have thought so too, as the reactionary/fascist uprising was a true-to-game event). With literally centuries of influence and means behind them, I think it’s fair to imagine a few of them could have hung around causing trouble after the Revolution.
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Looking back over the first page earlier after the lovely surprise of having been nominated as Character Writer of the Week (thanks again @Jestor!), I realised that today is in fact Echoes’ third birthday!
I can’t quite offer a celebratory chapter yet (it’s coming along well though!) but I would like to say a very sincere thanks to all who have stuck by this beast since 2019. God knows it’s been a crazy period of time, but to still have people following along – and even new faces joining the ride – heading into our fourth year continues to keep me going. Cheers to you all, and see you next year in the promised land (aka ‘Volume 2’)!
I can’t quite offer a celebratory chapter yet (it’s coming along well though!) but I would like to say a very sincere thanks to all who have stuck by this beast since 2019. God knows it’s been a crazy period of time, but to still have people following along – and even new faces joining the ride – heading into our fourth year continues to keep me going. Cheers to you all, and see you next year in the promised land (aka ‘Volume 2’)!
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Thanks to you both!Many happy returns, my dear chap.
I mentioned the milestone to my brother earlier on; he playfully suggested that with three years of writing and research under my belt I should start hawking Echoes around as a PhD
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Oh this is wonderful, proper wonderful.
For it is the Character WritAAR; and according to the filcatski-weekly-protocol, that part is music-free zone (unlike the others that are invaded by own posts) but reserved to other-wordly productions, so yours for that one is currently under progress;
But since it is also the third anniversary, one of the congratulations
It is thus, before that;I can’t quite offer a celebratory chapter yet (...) Cheers to you all, and see you next year in the promised land (aka ‘Volume 2’)!
Words can dance, words can jive
Having the time of their life, ooh
See that AAR, watch that scene
Three years it has been
Monday night and the lights are low
Looking out for an AAR to go
Where they play the right music, getting into prose
Revolution you hear in Echoes
Any chapter could well apply
Night is young and the music′s high
With a bit of rock music, everything is fine
Words in the mood for a dance
And when you get the chance
Echoes of the revolutionary
Young and sweet, bring dictionary
Tomorrow in Echoes
Feel the beat with your fellows, oh yeah
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life, ooh
See that AAR, read that story
Dig in the Echoes’ History
Echoes of the revolutionary
Young and sweet, bring dictionary
Tomorrow in Echoes
Feel the beat with your fellows, oh yeah
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life, ooh
See that AAR, read that story
Dig in the Echoes’ History
Still in Volume I, still in the young
Read them burning and then you're fine
Looking out for another, words will prance
You′re in the mood for a dance
And when you get the chance
Echoes of the revolutionary
Young and sweet, words legendary
Tomorrow in Echoes
Feel the beat with your fellows, oh yeah
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life, ooh
See that AAR, read that story
Dig in the Echoes’ History
Echoes of the revolutionary
Young and sweet, words legendary
Tomorrow in Echoes
Feel the beat with your fellows, oh yeah
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life, ooh
See that AAR, read that story
Dig in the Echoes’ History
...yes, appropriated from Dancing Queen, of the album Arrival by ABBA (1976), but sung in beauty-and-the-beast mode, just as this bloke had done around 2018, because that is what happens when one loves ABBA but also loves death metal:
- ...then why did you declare that war back in the day, mate?
- Yeah, no, retracted that. abba is all right.
- Sigh. You moron, you yourself mentioned abba, then proceeded with a war when it is declared ok to mention it.
- Look I said I accepted, it is ok now.
- Was it because abba songs remind you one of those summers that one of your ex-girlfriends broke up with you?
- Would you just shut up? I'm trying to celebrate the anniversary for the Echoes.
- You know what. It's getting late. Do whatever you want.
- Yeah. I will.
- All right.
- ALL RIGHT!
- sht.
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Thank you, fil. That was everything that I could have hoped for. And what a moving way to commemorate the historic peace in the ABBA Wars of 2021!
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I should make a general point to mention that @Nikolai has officially launched the Q2 ACAs. I’m pretty sure that Echoes is actually eligible again, what with the chapter that came out in… was it May? Anyway – no obligation to vote for it. The most important thing is just to vote at all!
Next chapter is maybe two-thirds done. Half-done, at a pessimistic estimate. Plenty of action coming!
And what a moving way to commemorate the historic peace in the ABBA Wars of 2021!Extra glad to have been able to help you get around the protocols. Intrigued to know what governs which zones are music-free and which zones are not…
Oh yeah, I’m excited for that one.
This… this was terrifying. Respect to the person who made it. But the Jekyll-and-Hyde presentation had me sweating anxiously in anticipation of the next fire-and-flames demon section.
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I should make a general point to mention that @Nikolai has officially launched the Q2 ACAs. I’m pretty sure that Echoes is actually eligible again, what with the chapter that came out in… was it May? Anyway – no obligation to vote for it. The most important thing is just to vote at all!
Next chapter is maybe two-thirds done. Half-done, at a pessimistic estimate. Plenty of action coming!
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As currently planned, the next chapter is split into five parts five parts. I was going to write all five and publish them together, but having just got to the end of part 3 there is so much already going on that I think I will split it in two. Things end on a good old-fashioned mid-chapter cliffhanger, so hopefully no one will feel short-changed by this decision. But then the first three parts alone come to over 13 thousand words, so feeling shortchanged would be very impressive going indeed.
Pending a light proof-read and an undoubtedly intensive formatting session later tonight, I will aim to have it all up in a few hours' time. Keep your eyes peeled!
Pending a light proof-read and an undoubtedly intensive formatting session later tonight, I will aim to have it all up in a few hours' time. Keep your eyes peeled!
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In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority (Part Two: Red Autumn I)
Chapter Six
In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority
Part Two
In The Autumn Of Our Youth: The Makings of ‘Red Autumn’
I.
While Common Beat succeeded in creating a temporary utopia in the parkland of East London, uniting tens of thousands of young idealists, old folkies and political activists in a campaign against racialism and right-wing violence, the deeper problems that had necessitated it in the first instance did not evaporate in the haze of cannabis smoke and acoustic guitars. The summer of 1967 had followed a fraught spring, beginning with the sudden death of Chairman Bevan, and ending with, first, the uneasy re-election of the Labour Unionist–Popular Frontist coalition and, next, David Lewis’s accession to the premiership. I have argued already in this book that Chairman Bevan’s project had been to reform the authoritarian Mosleyite system into one which was compatible with social liberal ideals (for example, by relinquishing state control of the press, abolishing the censorship, legalising abortion, decriminalising homosexual relations between men, and, less monumentally, by reforming the electoral system). David Lewis’s project, I have argued alongside this, promised to build upon this Bevanite liberalism by attempting to marry it with greater economic freedoms – that is, by a turn towards a ‘mixed’ economy: partly collectivised, partly nationalised, partly ‘liberalised’.[1] After the long summer vacation, the autumn of 1967 would see Lewis attempt to put this commitment to liberalisation into practice.
What exactly economic liberalism meant to David Lewis and his allies was a vexed question, and one liable to elicit a fluid answer. As regarded the perennially thorny question of the mines, liberalisation meant compromise. At the start of July, before the beginning of the parliamentary recess, Lewis had succeeded in reaching an accord with the National Federation of Miners’ Unions (NFMU) to implement a new shop-steward-led management structure within the mining industry, starting from September. Although his initial hope had been to restructure the collieries along simple centralist lines, ie with state managers given wide new powers of initiative, Lewis had been forced into compromise by his coalition partners in the LUPA, who remained wedded to the Bevanite proposal for mining reform. Articulated shortly before Bevan’s death, the ‘January Settlement’ endorsed some measure of worker control over the pits, as had been demonstrated as feasible by the workers at the Free Pits in the South Wales valleys. Yet the push for worker self-management was a rank-and-file concern, and national union bosses were content to see the halfway measure of worker-elected managers implemented in its stead. TUC general secretary Jack Jones was a firm, public supporter of ‘shop-stewardism’, and its implementation by the government in the coal industry represented a serious victory for the wider union movement following a year of strained relations between the government and the workers. When the first elections for shop-steward managers began on the week of September 4, the NFMU national executive greeted it as a cause for celebration, heralding ‘the return of the union to its rightful position at the heart of the mining industry’.
Lewis negotiating with the NFMU, May 1967.
Not everywhere, however, was the national executive’s jubilant attitude happily reflected. At the NFMU annual general meeting in July, three constituent groups had voted en bloc against the adoption of the government’s shop-steward proposals. These were the Derbyshire Mineworkers Association, the South Wales Miners’ Federation, and the ‘Yorkshire Left’ faction of the Yorkshire Miners’ Association. Significant opposition also came from the Union of Scottish Mineworkers, whose national executive had split over the issue (the dissenting party led by Lawrence Daly, also the New Left Coalition’s parliamentary spokesperson for coal and steel). Not coincidentally, the heartlands of South Wales, Yorkshire and Derbyshire represented some of the most important coal-mining regions of Britain – areas where union organisation was strong, and backed up by a long and proud mine-working culture. After the NFMU conference decision, dissenting union leaders Dennis Skinner (DMA), Arthur Scargill (YL) and Dai Francis (SWMF) had all publicly denounced the idea of worker-managers, and had all pledged their support to any collieries within their regions who wished to boycott managerial elections in September. When September arrived, each of the three stayed true to their word; in Derbyshire, only a third of pits had appointed a new manager from among their number by the end of September, while in South Yorkshire – where Yorkshire Left had their most concentrated following – the figure was more like a quarter. South Wales, meanwhile, returned no worker-managers whatsoever, the combined coordinating groups of the Free Pits instead jointly publishing a communique on September 6 emphasising their continued commitment to ‘self-determination along true autonomist principles, not the sham democracy foisted upon us by Lewis and his cronies’.
For Lewis, the abstentions were an unfortunate and embarrassing setback to what had been envisaged as a conciliatory reforming policy. The chairman faced a number of stern challenges in implementing his new vision for British industrial policy, and lying ahead in the autumn were some of the most key battles. Chief among these were the upcoming battles over two industrial bills, the Industrial Relations (Concilliation) Bill and the Mines and Quarries (Safety) Bill, whose ultimate fate in the Assembly would be decided upon over the coming months. The former was the result of the government’s negotiations with the TUC and the NFMU in June, whose provisions sought, in the words of its principle sponsor, the employment secretary Bob Mellish, ‘to reduce disruption caused by labour disputes, firstly by empowering an independent arbitration body, and secondly by enshrining in law a conciliation procedure to occur before the start of any strike activity’. In plain terms, this meant the stipulation of a new 28-day ‘cooling-off period’ before the start of a dispute, during which an independent conciliatory body would examine the issues and attempt a resolution. The bill had passed by a narrow margin at its first reading in early June, which had been picketed outside the Assembly by the anti-revisionist Communist Party of Great Britain. It had also led directly to the appearance of the first crack in the governing coalition’s united front, when Lewis sacked education secretary Jennie Lee in light of her opposition to the bill. Despite Lewis’s best efforts to see the bill progress along an expedited timetable, Assembly Chair Michael Foot (himself privately opposed to its provisions) had refused to accommodate the premier’s wishes. The IRCB, therefore, remained un-passed by the start of the autumn session, awaiting its second vote at the end of September following scrutiny by committee.
Jennie Lee and Peggy Herbison, IRCB rebels.
Alongside the IRCB was the second of Lewis’s two flagship pieces of reformist legislation, the Mines and Quarries (Safety) Bill, which had been drafted by Lewis in concert with Bureau of Coal and Steel director Jim Callaghan after the publication of the findings of the Aberfan inquiry in July. Chaired by two Welsh public servants, the barrister Leo Abse and the Assembly Member Cledwyn Hughes (a Labour Unionist moderate whose own views on coal power were unenthusiastic), the inquiry sat for 76 days between November 2 1966 and April 28 1967, hearing evidence from over 150 witnesses. Its final report (known commonly as the ‘Abse–Hughes Report’) was the product of two months’ further deliberation, ultimately published on July 10 – being delayed an extra week following the intervention of David Lewis himself, who wished to withhold its findings until after the conclusion of the NFMU conference on July 9. Locating blame for the Aberfan disaster squarely at the feet of British Coal – albeit shared ‘in varying degrees’ among various arms of the organisation – the report laid out in unequivocal terms the ‘strong and unanimous view … that the Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented’. It continued:
The Report which follows tells not of wickedness but of ignorance, ineptitude and a failure in communications. Ignorance on the part of those charged at all levels with the siting, control and daily management of tips; bungling ineptitude on the part of those who had the duty of supervising and directing them; and failure on the part of those having knowledge of the factors which affect tip safety to communicate that knowledge and to see that it was applied.[2]
Among its recommendations were new provisions for the siting, maintenance and treatment of spoil tips, with the absence of proper tipping policy having been singled out as ‘the basic cause of the disaster’. The report also called for British Coal to pay compensation to the community of Aberfan, on top of substantial damages to those personally injured, those who had lost family members, and those who had suffered damage to property.[3] While Abse and Hughes refrained from making specific recommendations as to the wider reform of safety standards and practices in the coal industry, the report did intervene in the debate over devolution of powers, coming out in favour of not only a devolved corporate organisation for Welsh coal, but also a devolved legislative body that would retain closer political oversight. This element of the report was eagerly seized upon by Gwynfor Evans and Carwyn James, the leaders of Welsh autonomist party Cymru Rydd and its first two representatives in the People’s Assembly. Over the summer, Cymru Rydd began a vigorous campaign in favour of an ‘Assembly for Wales’, proclaiming that the support of Abse and Hughes proved that ‘the voice of Wales’ was now ‘impossible to ignore’. In Wales, these strong words were given force by events on the ground. On July 22, Evans and James both spoke at a rally organised in Carmarthen in support of Welsh autonomy, their appearances drawing a crowd of 10 thousand in a town home to perhaps 15 thousand people. Other, more ad hoc manifestations of pro-autonomist feeling were equally conspicuous. Along the historically porous Welsh–English border, English-language road signs were frequently defaced with Welsh-language slogans by persons unknown, the most economical of whom left only a single word: Ymreolaeth! (‘Autonomy!’).
Protestors from the Cymdeithas yr Iaith Cymraeg (Society for the Welsh Language) fly-post over English-language signing on a public building in Monmouth (Trefynwy). Slogans read ‘Official status for the Welsh language!’ and ‘Use the Welsh language!’.[4]
In London, David Lewis was not overly troubled by what he privately belittled as ‘a little mischief in the valleys’. More concerning for him was the institutional backing Abse and Hughes’s conclusion had lent to the fight for Welsh autonomy, which was an element of the Bevanite inheritance the centralist Lewis was eager to disown. Responding to the report’s conclusions on July 11, Lewis announced that he accepted the ‘vast majority’ of the findings, and would work to implement ‘prudent, necessary reform’ to ensure that no tragedy on the scale of Aberfan ever occurred again. Putting mining reform ‘first and foremost’ on his list of priorities for the autumn session, Lewis announced that he would oversee the ‘thorough completion’ of his new programme for the coal industry before moving onto questions of political principle. This was an adroit sidestepping of the autonomy question – and not without precedent in the political history of the Commonwealth. One only need recall Oswald Mosley’s conclusion to his 1928 ‘Alliance Manifesto’ (‘Let us put through an emergency programme to meet the national danger; afterwards political debate on fundamental principle can be resumed.’) to see the skill with which practised politicians are often able to marry crisis with convenience.
Lewis’s calls for ‘prudent, necessary reform’ soon materialised in the form of the Mines and Quarries (Safety) Bill, which was completed as a first draft in time for the re-opening of the Assembly in September. Introduced by Jim Callaghan, director of the Bureau of Coal and Steel, on September 6, the bill was, for the most part, an unremarkable piece of legislation, taking up wholesale recommendations made by Abse and Hughes. These included strengthened provisions for the safe treatment of colliery spoil tips, tighter regulations governing the notification of industrial accidents, and more robust requirements for inspection of mines and quarries, which were now to be carried out by officers independent from British Coal. Only to those most sentimentally wedded to the corporatist model of a British state were these provisions controversial, attacking as they did instances of misconduct not by any political body, but by the theoretically non-governmental British Coal. Cymru Rydd protested that new independent powers should be devolved to local authorities rather than new, London-based government entities, but in the face of a centralist majority across the governing coalition these arguments went largely ignored. The bill handily passed its first reading on September 8, and Lewis and his cabinet colleagues looked forward confidently to what promised to be the first major legislative victory of their term in office.
David Lewis’s plans for the coal industry, however, did not stop short at a simple tightening-up of health and safety legislation. His campaign to overhaul middle management in the sector had already begun with the ‘managerialisation’ of shop stewards from the start of September, which, in spite of resistance and recalcitrance in militant regions, on the whole proceeded smoothly, thanks in no small part to the endorsements of the TUC and the NFMU national leadership. Yet the unions would have a harder time supporting the next stage of the government’s programme, whose focus now moved to ‘economisation and consolidation’.
Between 1961-66, Aneurin Bevan’s government closed down 35 per-cent of the Commonwealth’s pits, with the corresponding loss of 160 thousand jobs in the mining industry.[5] This was in spite of the bolstered status of coal to the British energy sector in the wake of the disaster at Windscale in 1957, which had cooled hopes for an immediate nuclear future. Many of the pits closed by Bevan were shuttered for good reason, with production having sharply declined or else reserves having dried up entirely. Because of this air of necessity, and thanks also to close working relations between the union leadership and the government, widespread industrial action in opposition to the closures never materialised. Instead, the government and the unions co-operated on a programme of case-by-case closure, with accompanying investment in local economies to ensure, so far as possible, the survival of the full employment shibboleth (in South Wales, this investment primarily went into the other great legacy industry, steel making). Those pits that remained open were also given the benefit of modern equipment and – in theory – advanced working practices. As a result, while the economic fabric of the mining regions underwent a dramatic shift, the social fabric remained more or less undisturbed; the smaller industry with which Britain was left was in good health, and in spite of having wielded the axe, ex-miner Bevan and his government continued to insist upon the centrality of coal to the Commonwealth’s energy supply. As the British Coal promotional film stated in spring 1966: ‘People will always need coal!’
In the aftermath of Aberfan, however, the solidity of coal’s continued pre-eminent position in the production of British energy was thrown into severe doubt. Bevan had refused to respond to Aberfan with a fresh round of cuts and closures, believing (not unreasonably) that if the coal industry were to recover then it would require every resource that the government could spare. This would mean pressing ahead with modernisations like electrification, and the installation of modern machinery and the implementation of modern practices – underscored now by a robust concern for safety, which previously, complacently, had been taken for granted. To Bevan, the physical and emotional recovery of Aberfan was to be at the heart of a far grander project of recovery in the mining industry, building upon the cutbacks made over the previous five years to ensure that what remained in the Commonwealth was a world-leading coal industry.
Evidently, Bevan’s grand plans never progressed beyond the dreaming stage. The late chairman’s death in March 1967, and the subsequent election of David Lewis to the premiership at the head of a Popular Front-led coalition, once again put the future of British mining in doubt. During the election campaign in April, Lewis had hinted at a realignment of British energy policy away from coal dependency – to the horror of some within his party, including Assembly Chair Michael Foot, whose sympathies lay with (and power base lay in) the Welsh coal-mining heartlands. In power, however, the new premier had left alone any hint of plans to embark upon another round of scaling back of the collieries, occupying himself first of all with his worker-manager programme and reforms to industrial relations law. What the clear-sighted could see, however, was that Lewis’s programme of reform was in fact a prelude to a more trenchant sally against what he saw as the ‘inefficient’ economic base.
TUC leadership, 1967.
General Secretary Jack Jones is on the right of the image.
Bevan’s bequest to Lewis had been warm relations between the government and the unions; excepting the disputes of ‘Black Winter’ which plagued the end of his premiership (and, indeed, his life), Bevan had successfully patched up industrial relations to their friendliest state in at least a generation. As we have seen, in spite of acute local difficulties, the national picture remained cordial. Initial TUC unease at the new government’s plans for a ‘brake’ on strike action in the form of the IRCB had been somewhat assuaged by the incorporation of shop stewards into Lewis’s plans for corporate restructuring – a key TUC policy goal since the middle of the decade. Nevertheless, even this quid pro quo this represented a shift in the government’s attitude towards the unions. The cordiality of the Bevan years had been kept afloat by easy consensual politics – the gift of a stable, if gradually overheating, economy, in which few tough problems demanded unsentimental attention. Lewis, conversely, inherited an economy in decline – the sluggish output of the last years of Bevan’s government finally collapsing into outright recession in the wake of renewed disruption over the ‘black’ winter of 1966–67. For novel problems, Lewis sought novel solutions – and he was hardly squeamish about meeting drastic times with drastic measures.
The Bevanite response to economic downturn at the other end of the decade had been to invest heavily in Britain’s economic ‘commanding heights’, funding modernising improvements whose aim was to boost productivity (the decade’s new watchword) in the coal and steel industries, on the railways, and in heavy industries like shipbuilding. This was itself a reaction against the late-Mosleyite push towards economic diversification by the development of a modern consumer goods industry – an area in which, by the mid-Sixties, Britain had long since been outstripped by the Germans, whose own soaring economy was kept artificially aloft for the duration of the 1960’s by easy American credit. While in hindsight Bevan deserves credit for his fundamental programme of modernisation – which, though unglamorous, provided a solid foundation upon which his successors could attempt, in spits and spurts, the development of new, more diverse industries – a preference for coal, steel and the railways could not keep an economy afloat all by itself. Hence David Lewis’s commitment to a programme of sweeping economic liberalisation, at whose heart would be the ‘latent creative potential’ of the working man (one might equally say ‘entrepreneurial spirit’), newly unleashed by a judicious loosening of planning controls in certain sectors of the economy. Alongside excessive bureaucratic controls, Lewis had a secondary target, in his eyes equally culpable as a brake on ‘enterprise’: the trade unions.
David Lewis.
In and of themselves, Lewis’s plans were already marked with a distinct badge of controversy. To suggest, as he did – tentatively at first, then, from the autumn of 1967, more and more insistently – that the state’s role should not be to plan the economy to its smallest degree, but rather to correct major inequalities or inefficiencies in an otherwise free-running system, was already a marked break from the notionally Marxist principles according to which the British economy operated.[6] Lewis went further, however, in his conceptualisation of the unions within this anti-liberal economic framework. To him, the role of the unions within an ‘advanced social-democratic economy’ should be similarly managerial and corrective. In other words, Lewis desired to formalise the consensual system, whose survival now seemed in doubt, that had supported economic good health earlier on in the decade. What he recognised – and what, in his unsentimental view of the unions, he was perhaps uniquely placed at the top of the British political class to recognise – was that the maintenance of such a system in all weathers and all seasons could not be achieved by goodwill alone. Hence his campaign to bind the unions to certain terms of good behaviour, and to fetter strike action with bureaucratic processes of mediation and arbitration. He wished, simply, to defang the unions as an ‘opposition’ force, refashioning them by legislative fiat into, in effect, non-governmental bodies tasked with ensuring the smooth running of the British economy by judicious management of the labour force. His principle method of achieving this aim was the IRCB. In the event that this method should fail (and, as we have seen, the bill’s proposals had already drawn significant opposition from the unionist rank and file) Lewis had a secondary strategy, perhaps most conveniently described after the classic manner as ‘divide and rule’. If he could not subdue the trade unions in their entirety, he would go after the biggest ‘troublemakers’ one by one. In autumn 1967, undoubtedly the biggest troublemaker of all was the National Federation of Miners’ Unions.
Although more than willing to get his hands dirty in a political dogfight, Lewis was clever enough to know when to pick his battles. He was also clever enough to recognise when subtlety and stealth trumped brawn and muscle. Having thus convinced himself of the necessity of cutting the miners’ union down to size in order to smooth the road towards subsequent industrial reforms, Lewis set about preparations for a sortie against the NFMU that would provide the greatest chance of avoiding a large-scale confrontation. To this end, he met with economic secretary Barbara Lewis and coal and steel minister Jim Callaghan to draft a series of additional clauses to the Mines and Quarries Bill. Under the cover of improvements to health and safety, the cabinet now proposed to give the new regulatory body strengthened powers to order the closure of mines deemed ‘unsafe’. The expanded bill also stipulated that a mine could be declared unsafe in cases where the depletion of coal fields could encourage risky or irresponsible working practices. As a final flourish to underscore government power, Lewis also oversaw the insertion of a clause allowing for the issuing of fines and penalty notices to collieries who failed to elect worker-managers – a clear swipe at the challenge presented by Skinner, Scargill and the Free Pits.
Miners picket a colliery, 1960's.
While not in themselves without their merits, these additional clauses combined to make the MQSB the most urgent attack in a generation on the dominance of the coal industry, and with it the strength of the miners’ unions. In the event of the bill’s passing, the new powers granted to the government would allow for a series of rapid pit closures in the name of workplace safety. For the first time, there seemed little question that such closures would be at least in part ideologically motivated, paving the way for Lewis’s long-desired transition away from coal. When Jim Callaghan announced in the Assembly on September 13 that the government proposed to amend the bill ahead of its second reading, the scope of the amendments provoked stern criticism from the opposition. Lawrence Daly led the charge against the bill, questioning the damaging impact rapid closures would have on the health of mining communities, and accusing the government of engaging in ‘cowardly, back-door authoritarianism’ by creating sweeping new powers. The amendments also drew furious condemnation from the NFMU, whose national executive committee met with Callaghan on September 15 to express their displeasure at having not been consulted on the changes, informally threatening strike action to meet any closures deemed ‘unjust’.
Privately, the pro-union Callaghan was uneasy about the scale of the powers Lewis wished to reserve for the government, but his loyalty to the coalition and his underlying belief in the necessity of industrial reform led him into the field of conflict. Nevertheless, there was much work still to be done before any of the bill’s proposed clauses would see life. In the calmest of times, steering such a bill through the Assembly would have been a formidable challenge for even the most canny political operator. Having attained the premiership after a legislative career of more than two decades, Lewis’s skills as both a wheeler-dealer and an enforcer were considerable. Yet even he would be tested by the effort required to strong-arm his coalition, by no means united behind him, into supporting his plans, and with the bill’s second reading scheduled for the middle of October, he could look forward to a month of intense, strained negotiation. Equally, the miners’ unions embarked upon a month of planning their latest fight against the government’s anti-coal policies, arranging pre-emptive strike ballots in defence of jobs and launching a public relations campaign calling for ‘Investment, not cuts!’. But Lewis had stood up to powerful opponents before and come out strengthened. Every indication from history suggested that, with a fair wind, his chances of success would be as good as anyone’s. Unfortunately for Lewis, as the autumn gathered momentum, fair winds were in vanishingly short supply.
*
II.
II.
The publication of the Abse–Hughes report, and the government’s subsequent adoption of the majority of its recommendations, had gone a considerable way to restoring relations between the injured mining communities of South Wales and the national government in London. Almost a year on from the tragedy, whose scars would never completely fade, it was at least possible to envisage a more optimistic future, in which the harsh lessons of the disaster inspired safer practice and closer scrutiny of public organisations. In two key places, however, the government declined to act on the report’s recommendations. The first we have already discussed; this was the question of political autonomy for Wales. The second was a testier subject still, liable to arouse a forceful emotional response in the Valleys and beyond. This was the question of Albert Roberts’ personal liability.
The report itself had been clear enough in its apportioning of the blame for Aberfan. Abse and Hughes had found British Coal solely responsible for the disaster, singling out various departments and individuals for their role in failing to prevent the fatal slip. Albert Roberts, the erstwhile chairman of British Coal, was among the individuals named as sharing in the blame. For his part, Roberts was found to have misled then-Coal and Steel director Aneurin Bevan on numerous occasions, dating from his appointment to the chairmanship of British Coal in 1958, as to the regularity of tip inspections. Roberts had already been temporarily releived of his position, pending the outcome of the inquiry, on December 12 1966, following persistent attempts to obstruct the government’s efforts to inspect other spoil tips in South Wales – but this final judgement proved fatal to his career. On July 11, the day after the report’s publication, Roberts was summoned to Lewis’s ministerial apartments in Whitehall and asked to offer his resignation. Seeing the writing on the wall, Roberts acquiesced. Fred Collinson, who had acted in Roberts’ stead for the duration of his temporary leave, and who had proven an ally of Lewis’s during the ‘collection raids’ scandal of the previous winter, was summoned shortly afterwards and told that he would be confirmed in his post on a permanent basis when the Assembly met later that week. The man known derisively among the coal-workers as ‘Old King Coal’, whose most conspicuous achievement as chairman of British Coal had been to set a new record for most air-miles travelled on trips to and from collieries, had finally been toppled. The government hoped that under Collinson, a dutiful former engineer who lacked Roberts’ politician’s instinct for publicity, British Coal could begin the long work of restructuring away from the fierce light of public scrutiny.
Former British Coal chairman Albert Roberts (right) on a visit to a far-off colliery.
For those who had been most grievously injured by Roberts’ misconduct, however, a simple resignation hardly seemed proportionate to the loss of 144 lives and the destruction of a community. While British Coal as a corporation had been made to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages, many among the friends and families of the victims of Aberfan believed that the findings of culpability warranted criminal prosecutions. Over the summer, trustees of the Aberfan Disaster Relief Fund (ADRF) received a petition with 287 signatures asking for money from the fund to be put towards a private prosecution against Albert Roberts, and all other named British Coal employees singled out by Abse and Hughes, on charges of manslaughter. Although agreeing in principle that Roberts had ‘got off lightly’, the trustees were reluctant to divert funds intended for the rebuilding of the community and the welfare of the bereaved in order to pursue a lengthy and expensive legal battle, with no guarantee of success. The Fund published a letter to this effect, explaining at length their decision not to investigate the possibility of prosecution, in the South Wales Guardian on August 3.
The Guardian letter took the heat out of some of the most vociferous calls for Roberts’ prosecution, with polling carried out by the same newspaper on August 11 finding that, while 74 per-cent of respondents believed that consequences suffered by the ‘named figures’ from British Coal had been too light, only 36 per-cent thought that a private prosecution would be a worthwhile course of action. On August 21, the Fund trustees called the first in a series of open meetings, to be held into the autumn, inviting community members to participate in the process of drafting a ‘Plan For the Future’, which would guide how the money would be used in the course of rebuilding. Certainly, there was still a great deal of pain in the Taff Valley ten months after the disaster. But in the midst of high-profile political campaigns for Welsh autonomy, and ongoing national disputes about the future the coal industry, the first steps towards recovery, taken by a community that had endured unimaginable tragedy, gave welcome reason for optimism as South Wales sought to move beyond the strife of the previous twelve months.
ADRF open meeting, 1967.
Not everyone, however, was so keen or so quick to move past what they saw as the crimes of British Coal. At 11.23am on August 28, Bank Holiday Monday, a small bomb went off in the foyer of the Cardiff Coal Exchange, the headquarters of British Coal in Wales. The explosion blew the front doors off their hinges and damaged a portion of the building’s 19th century facade, although no injuries were recorded. Ten days later, another small bomb was discovered in a dustbin at British Coal’s West Midlands lorry depot in Worcestershire – the same depot from which trucks had been sent to collect coal from the Free Pits in the Taff Valley in January. The bomb failed to go off and the site foreman called in the WB, who were able to dispose of it without incident.
The Cardiff bombing and the attempted bombing in Worcestershire both made the front page of every daily newspaper in the Commonwealth, although no one came forward to claim responsibility for the attacks, and neither did the authorities have any leads as to the identities of the attackers. Indeed, the apparently simply question of opening an investigation into the attacks revealed the extent to which the Commonwealth’s domestic security apparatus had diminished in its capabilities since the dark days of Mosley deploying the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence as a secret police force. Bevan had retained the BDI, albeit gutting much of the Mosley-era hierarchy, and introducing strict limits on its powers of surveillance and detention.[7] Most of the Bureau’s work during the 1960’s focused on threats from the emergent far-right, particularly after the rise to prominence of Enoch Powell from around 1966. In reality, however, much of the legwork in the fight against resurgent right-wing extremism was done at the community level; as we have seen, countless groups across a wide constituency joined the effort against racialism from the middle of the decade. Similarly, day-to-day crime-fighting responsibilities had been devolved to the volunteers in the Workers’ Brigades, whose work within their local communities included a duty of keeping the peace.[8] On the whole, however, crime remained low when compared to comparable capitalist economies in the West, particularly after the abolition of numerous political offences with which former opponents of the Mosley regime were routinely charged. Overall, therefore, demands for policing were light.
Welsh WB volunteers aid the clear-up effort in Aberfan.
Prior to the attacks in late summer, David Lewis had already proven himself unafraid of displays of force when it came to questions of ‘public order’. It had been at Lewis’s instigation that WB volunteers from England had been ordered to accompany the British Coal ‘collection convoys’ on their sorties against the Free Pits in January – an action which had widened the rift between Chairman Bevan and his then-deputy. Only a few hours after the bombing of the Cardiff Coal Exchange, Lewis personally phoned BDI director Peter Ashby and tasked him with setting up a new desk to investigate ‘Welsh autonomist radicalism’.[9] Up to this point, the autonomist movement in Wales had been confined to non-violent protest and direct action, and political organisation within the Commonwealth’s existing institutions (for example, through the trade unions via the SWMF, and through the People’s Assembly via Cymru Rydd). Owing to the novelty of the attacks, Ashby had little to guide him in opening his inquiries, beginning as a matter of course with surveillance of Cymru Rydd, though quickly finding no indications of violent activity.
Frustrated by a lack of swift progress, on September 11 Lewis authorised the deployment of English WB volunteers at a number of key infrastructural sites used to deliver Welsh resources (such as water and coal) to England, overruling the objections of domestic secretary and deputy premier Dick Crossman. Already embattled in his fight against the miners and the unions, however, Lewis wished to uphold his image as a strong premier, not willing to give in to ‘unlawful attempts to undermine the authority of central government’. Predictably, this display of force provoked outraged controversy in many parts of Wales. Carwyn James lambasted Lewis in the Assembly on September 13 for giving ‘a troubling new character to the English supremacy within Britain’, calling upon Dick Crossman to intervene. His co-leader of Cymru Rydd, Gwynfor Evans, compared Lewis’s policy to other episodes from the ‘centuries-long’ occupation of Wales by England, memorably illustrating his speech by holding up a thick stack of letters he had received from constituents appalled by the presence of English volunteers on Welsh soil. Lewis responded by attempting to reassure the autonomist leaders that the deployment of WB volunteers was a temporary measure, pending further information about the perpetrators of the Coal Exchange bombing, following the gathering of which the government would be able to employ a more ‘sympathetic’ policy.
Carwyn James (left) and Gwynfor Evans (right), joint leaders of Cymru Rydd.
Within the week, much of the uncertainty surrounding the new militant autonomist threat would be dispelled – no thanks, albeit, to any particular breakthrough in the efforts of the BDI. On the evening of Monday September 18, former British Coal chairman Albert Roberts, on holiday in the picturesque Devon harbour village of Clovelly, failed to return to his room at the Ship Inn bed and breakfast following a solo walk along the costal path towards Mouthmill Beach. Roberts’ wife Alice reported her husband missing to the Ship’s landlady, Florence Trenerry, shortly after 9 o’clock, and around 10 a group of WB volunteers arrived from nearby Bideford to take statements from Alice, Trennery, the B&B staff, and other guests. Word of the disappearance quickly spread throughout the village, and led by the WB volunteers a search party soon formed to retrace the costal path for any signs of Roberts. By midnight no trace had been discovered, at which point the party returned to Clovelly, planning to go out again after sunrise.
Upon their return to the Ship, however, the volunteers were met by John Worthy, the publican of the nearby Red Lion Inn, who reported that two of his guests were also missing: a young man and a young woman, both Welsh, who had booked a room under the names Evan Pritchard and Gwen Jones. Worthy recounted that Pritchard and Jones had checked in two days earlier, claiming to be recently-engaged students, in the village for a week-long walking holiday before returning to begin their final year at the University of Cardiff. He had seen the pair leave the Red Lion dressed in walking gear at about half past five in the afternoon, though they had not returned.
The news of the disappearance of Pritchard and Jones alongside that of Albert Roberts immediately raised grave questions in the mind of WB group leader Sergeant Tom Potts. Potts used the Ship’s telephone to make a call to the Devon WB regional headquarters in Exeter, from where the news of Roberts’ disappearance was relayed to the Domestic Bureau in Whitehall. At quarter past one in the morning, the news reached Dick Crossman, who made two calls of his own: the first to Peter Ashby, and the second to David Lewis. The three men were unanimous in their conclusion: Albert Roberts had been kidnapped.
'Wanted' poster reproduced in national newspapers showing alleged members of the MAC, 1968.
'Gwen Jones' and 'Evan Pritchard' are shown first and second on the top row.
Meanwhile, ‘Pritchard’ and ‘Jones’ had reached Wales. Passing Newport at around half past twelve, the pair stopped off at a garage on a small industrial park to the south of the village of Llantarnam at a quarter to one in the morning. Here, the pair were met by two co-conspirators waiting in a van marked with the livery of a fictitious painter-decorator from Caernarfon. Abandoning the original car in the garage, the four kidnappers moved Roberts into the van and set off on the second leg of their journey, heading north on the A4042 towards Abergavenny, and from there on into the wilds of mid Wales.
1965 CMG Humber Terrier, of the sort used by 'Jones' and 'Pritchard' in the kidnapping of Albert Roberts.
(Car enthusiasts among you may recognise that this is in fact an OTL 1965 Hillman Husky.)
In the morning, all national newspapers led with the story of Roberts’ disappearance, though none yet ventured to say for certain that the former coal boss had been kidnapped. The flagship Popular-Frontist broadsheet the Morning Post, whose daily circulation reached almost 1.4 millions by the end of 1967, described the incident as a ‘suspected kidnapping’, carrying a quote from an ‘anonymous governmental source’ (almost certainly Peter Ashby himself, via an intermediary) expressing the view that Roberts had been targeted by ‘militant Welsh autonomists’. The Post also provided a description of both ‘Pritchard’ and ‘Jones’, as well as the car in which they had travelled to Clovelly. The Daily Herald, historically loyal to the Labour Unionists, and increasingly cool on the Lewis premiership, differed from the Post in emphasising only what the authorities knew to be true: that Roberts had disappeared. Their story carried a quote from an unnamed spokesman for the Bureau of Domestic Affairs, who stated that the investigation remained ‘in its very early stages’, declining to identify ‘Pritchard’ or ‘Jones’ outside of the note that ‘two Welsh students are wanted for questioning’.[10] Left-wing paper of record the International similarly refused to indulge in speculation, giving only two lines of print over to ‘Pritchard’, ‘Jones’ and the car, while the social-democratic mouthpiece the Daily Express, whose editorial line steered close to that of Iain Macleod in the New Spectator, offered up the theory – then-unfounded – that the kidnapping related to the Coal Exchange bombing three weeks earlier.
Within hours, the Express were proven to have been astute in their speculation. At 4.30 p.m., the offices of the Caernarfon Evening Mail received an A4 envelope (delivered, in the language of the courts, by ‘a person or persons unknown’), enclosed within which were two items. The first was a communiqué from a group calling themselves the ‘Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru’, claiming responsibility not just for the kidnapping of Albert Roberts, but also for the Coal Exchange bombing the previous month.[11] In return for his safe release, the group demanded the dissolution of British Coal in Wales and the immediate turning over of all Welsh pits to worker control. As proof of their credibility, clipped to the letter was a photograph of Roberts himself holding up a copy of that morning’s Daily Herald, whose front page, somewhat ironically, hedged its answer to whether or not he had been kidnapped.
Caernarfon, 1968.
The offices of the Evening Mail are situated in the rooms above the shops visible in the mid-left of the image.
The statue in the foreground is of former President David Lloyd George.
As soon as they had read the communiqué and taken in its contents, the Mail’s editorial committee voted immediately to scrap the paper’s planned front page (a local affairs piece about refurbishments to the Bangor railway station). Committee chair Owain Jenkins rushed the communiqué down to the printers to deliver the original letter himself; a facsimile of both it and the photograph of Roberts would that evening appear prominently plastered beneath the Mail’s masthead. Clearly, not only was the communiqué of vital national political significance, it was also an astonishing coup de reportage. Jenkins and the others knew that this would likely be the story of their careers. The MAC wrote in their statement that they had entrusted their communications to the Mail owing to its known support for Welsh autonomist issues. The editorial committee returned the favour, appending their factual coverage (evidently straining in its efforts to remain neutral in tone) with an opinion piece by politics editor Megan Vaughan Davies calling for worker control of Welsh coalfields. (Vaughan Davies judiciously declined to lend her or the paper’s explicit support to the MAC, but evidently y Mudiad had chosen their interlocutors wisely.) The edition hit news-stands at 6 o’clock in the evening on September 19. The reaction was forceful and immediate, irreversibly raising the pitch of the battle over Welsh autonomy to a level of ferocity scarcely conceivable even weeks before.
*
III.
III.
Cliff Michelmore was joined by two guests for the September 19 edition of the CBC News at 10. The first was Owain Jenkins, who had been rushed to the CBC’s Manchester studios shortly after 7 o’clock. Joining Jenkins was Dick Crossman, fresh from a three-hour internal security meeting with Peter Ashby and David Lewis. Although less of a hardline centralist than Lewis, Crossman was hardly sympathetic to ‘terror tactics’; he spoke to Michelmore of his regret that the debate over Welsh autonomy had ‘degraded to the extremes’ and confirmed that the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence was ‘working tirelessly’ to recover Roberts safely. When Michelmore pressed Crossman on this point, asking whether the government was intent on countering the MAC by force or whether negotiations remained possible, Crossman gave something of a slippery answer: ‘Many in government, despite the events of the past week, continue to support the prospect of a devolved Welsh coal board. But Alberts Roberts’ safe recovery is non-negotiable’.
Dick Crossman on the CBC News at 10, September 19 1967.
If Crossman’s hedging will have likely irked the premier, the counter-argument offered by Jenkins can have only infuriated him. Michelmore opened his line of questioning with the Welsh journalist by pressing him on the link between the MAC and the Caernarfon Evening Mail. Jenkins first of all stated unequivocally that there was no pre-existing link between the newspaper and the kidnappers. ‘Until six hours ago’, Jenkins said, ‘along with the rest of the world I had no idea that the MAC even existed.’ Equally, Jenkins stated that he would co-operate with the security services, ‘recognising that I will now almost certainly be a person of interest to them’. Nevertheless, he was frank about his views on the broader political questions: on the question of coal he came out in full support of the autonomist position, and ventured that ‘extreme action, if not in the final instance defensible, does at least become understandable when the government appears set on sweeping widespread dissatisfaction under the rug’. Michelmore asked directly whether Jenkins was sympathetic to the MAC’s aims, and the newspaper editor responded with a wry innuendo: ‘I could call them fools for many reasons, but seeking our paper out would not be one of them.’
Owain Jenkins, editor of the Caernarfon Evening Mail, 1967.
At dawn the next day, agents of the BDI raided the offices of the Caernarfon Evening Mail, seizing the original communiqué and questioning newspaper staff about the circumstances of the letter’s arrival, as well as about any links to the ‘autonomist movement’. Later that morning, a second group of agents arrived to take away the paper’s archives, scouring back issues for any hints as to why the MAC had chosen to entrust them with their public communications. Owain Jenkins, who was still in Manchester, was met by two BDI agents in his hotel room shortly after 9 o’clock. While at no point was he under any suspicion as having directly aided the MAC, he continued to be surveilled by the intelligence services and was given strict instructions to report any further contact with the kidnappers to the Bureau immediately.
Meanwhile, in the Assembly, David Lewis was called to appear before a hastily-convened session of the domestic affairs committee, who wished to scrutinise the government’s handling of the MAC investigation. The committee was chaired by Alice Bacon, a veteran organiser with the National Union of Teachers and Schoolworkers who had entered the Assembly for the first time in 1963. Bacon had been a staunch supporter of Nye Bevan, and her extra-parliamentary expertise had landed her appointments within the Education Secretariat and the Bureau of Domestic Affairs in the late chairman’s government.[12] Having worked under David Lewis during his term as domestic secretary, helping to implement a number of his liberalising social reforms, Bacon was by no means the most hostile backbench critic the premier could have faced in defending his conduct. But where Lewis was willing to sacrifice an ounce of liberalism in exchange for what he saw as an equitable share of security, Bacon was less ready to loosen her grip on fundamental principles. For her, a liberal Commonwealth was necessarily a Commonwealth in which dissent – even violent – was countered only with proportionate force. In Bacon’s mind, both mass surveillance operations by the BDI, and the deployment of English WB volunteers throughout Wales, presented worrying hints of a return to authoritarianism in state security.
Alice Bacon at the LUPA autumn conference, 1967.
Facing the committee, Lewis did not care to disguise his frustration at having been distracted in his major campaign of the autumn: his industrial and union reforms. Dai Francis of the South Wales Miners’ Federation had been interviewed on CBC Radio that morning, issuing a direct appeal to Chairman Lewis not to press ahead with ‘divisive’ coal reforms that went against ‘the loud and clear expression of Welsh opinion’. (When asked unequivocally whether he supported the MAC, Francis said only that, so far as he and they were concerned, ‘our differences are tactical’.[13]) That the miners’ unions were prepared to use the Roberts kidnapping to press their grievances with Lewis’s non-autonomist solution to the problem of British Coal portended nothing good for the next stage of the premier’s campaign of reform. The second reading of the Industrial Relations Bill was scheduled for September 26, and in spite of intense lobbying within the coalition both during and after the summer, Lewis was by no means guaranteed a majority for his proposed changes to the law around strikes and trade union activity. Similarly, the Mines and Quarries Bill was next due to be considered by the Assembly on October 19, including a first reading of the new ‘closure power’ amendments. The unions having already threatened strike action to stop the implementation of the IRCB’s ‘anti-strike’ clauses, specifically the 28-day pre-strike ‘cooling-off period’, indications of an appetite for militant action to advance the autonomist position in the coal industry suggested that Britain could be in for a repeat of the previous autumn’s industrial unrest. While Lewis answered the domestic affairs committee’s questions about limits on WB deployments and the extent of surveillance operations, the chairman’s opponents in the Assembly began to voice more loudly and more openly their fears over his ‘strongman’ tactics. The question for Lewis was whether his core base of support, once consolidated by displays of strength, would continue to furnish him with enough backing to outweigh the increasing ranks of his doubters and critics.
Administrative buildings, University of Manchester, 1967.
Outside of the Assembly, too, opponents of the government’s increasingly authoritarian policies continued to make their feelings known – and not simply in the unions. Overnight on September 20, students at the University of Manchester spray-painted the slogans ‘Hang Roberts!’ and ‘MAC am byth!’ (‘MAC forever!’[14]) on the front door of the Department of Sociology. The next morning, the graffiti was seen by hundreds of new and returning students as they arrived for introductory events at the School of Social Sciences, prompting university authorities to issue a hasty threat to ban student meetings unless the authors came forward by the end of the day, fearing unrest or even violence. By midnight, the identities of the graffiti authors remained unknown, hence from the morning of Friday September 22 public mass gatherings by students became subject of a blanket interdiction.
In practice, without being able to rely on police or other security services to enforce the ban, the threat was an empty one. Nevertheless, the strict position adopted by the authorities – justified, as was becoming increasingly common, in the name of ‘public security’ – provoked a fierce and immediate backlash from both the student and teaching bodies. At midday on September 22, the students’ union organised a rally, supported by the teachers’ union, attended by over 2 thousand students – about one fifth of the total student population.[15] Speakers from the SU addressed the crowd with impassioned defences of free expression and fiery denunciations of managerial authoritarianism, with cries of ‘Our university!’, ‘Become ungovernable!’ and even ‘We are all the MAC!’ among those recorded by attendant student journalists. After the rally, students and teaching staff proceeded to parade along an impromptu course around the city’s university quarter, disrupting ongoing start-of-term events with raucous chanting and the setting off of flares, attracting the attention of the WB, who eventually persuaded the congregation to disperse.
Student protestors 'joust' in Manchester's Albert Square, 1967.
(I’m undecided as to whether Albert Square, named as it is for Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, would have undergone some change of name in the years following the revolution. (I could easily see it being called something like ‘Peterloo Square’.) For simple reasons of recognisability for our British readers (and our Mancunian readers in particular), I’ve left it well alone for now. But there’s a fair amount of Victoriana in Manchester that should probably be altered at some stage…)
The next day, however, the mass public antics were revived, this time in a more spontaneous fashion as students took to the streets with ever more absurdist and outlandish demonstrations of their presence. In one memorable instance, students congregated in Manchester’s Albert Square on the morning of September 23 to stage a mock brawl with improvised weapons and costumes – some participants dressed as medieval knights, complete with lances and ‘mounts’. With unrest spilling over into the rest of the city, representatives of the socialist-controlled regional government met with university senior management on Saturday evening to convince them to rescind their threatened ban on public meetings. After some arm-twisting, the university authorities agreed, and at 9 p.m. their representatives met with the SU to inform them that public gatherings would be allowed to go ahead untroubled. In place of the threatened ban, however, the university planned to delay the start of full term by one week, from September 25 to October 2, in order to ‘make provisions for the safe delivery of teaching in exceptional circumstances’.
A protestor makes their feelings known during an encounter with management.
Going from its local political climate alone, the city of Manchester may have seemed an unlikely location for a showdown between authoritarian managers and restless students. The city was a solid base of socialist support, continuing to favour the Labour Unionists over the Popular Front, and giving a higher-than-average share of its regional vote to the parties of the New Left Coalition at the last election in May. Compared with the Commonwealth as a whole, Manchester – an historic home for both liberalism and socialism in Britain – swung left. Yet its university was something of an anomaly. Having come to prominence as the home of the Commonwealth’s nascent computing and electronics industry during the post-war economic realignment, administration of the university had been closely monitored by the Mosleyite government. Bernard Whitehead, the university’s principal since 1958, was an engineer by training who had been heavily involved earlier on in his career in the design of the Comaero Comet. Certainly a supporter and an associate of Mosley’s, even if far from his closest friend or ally, Whitehead had nevertheless survived the anti-Mosleyite ‘purges’ carried out during the early years of Bevan’s premiership. 66 years old, he had been planning to retire the following year after an unremarkable decade in post. With the start of the academic year having proven unexpectedly eventful, however, Whitehead was determined to meet the unrest head-on in an attempt to maintain order.
Students and teachers stay warm, fed and entertained during a teach-out.
Ordinarily, Whitehead’s firm stance would have probably worked to produce the desired effect: to take the heat out of the student population ahead of the resumption of teaching. Of course, September 1967 was far from an ordinary month. With the unanticipated, growing sympathy for the MAC among the student body seemingly having sparked a wider anti-authoritarian movement, Whitehead and his managerial colleagues suddenly found themselves an easy target. Predictably, the day after the announcement of the delay to the start of term, renewed protest continued against the university’s ‘anti-democratic obstruction of our [the student body’s] right to learn’. At a rally in Turing Park to the north of the university quarter, student protestors were joined by representatives from the Amalgamated Union of University Teachers and Workers (UTW), who pledged their solidarity with students. Regional secretary Jim Alverton, a chemistry lecturer, announced that the branch had already sent an urgent letter of protest to Bernard Whitehead and the managing committee demanding that teachers be allowed to perform their jobs, as well as registering a complaint with education secretary John Dunwoody. In the meantime, Alverton said, ‘we will be out with you, to teach and to learn together, in defence of our university’.
True to management’s word, the next morning, on Monday September 25 students arriving for their first lectures of term found that faculty buildings remained locked and vacant. True to the unions’ words, both students and teaching staff convened elsewhere to carry on with university life at a number of informally-arranged ‘teach-out’ events in public spaces across the university quarter. Somewhere in the region of 5 thousand students are estimated to have taken part in events on the first day of the lockout, and at a second rally in Turing Park to mark the close of the day’s programme, the crowd numbered 3-4 thousand. Student union president Fiona Carradine made a defiant speech, praising students and staff for coming together to show ‘where the university’s true power lies’, issuing a challenge to Whitehead that ‘without us, your university does not exist’. Although the growing student movement was not motivated by any particular political or ideological cause, increasingly the protests caught the attention of explicitly left-wing student groups. Charlie Feldman, secretary of the university’s branch of Left Future, the youth wing of the CPCB, spoke at Turing Park on Monday evening linking Bernard Whitehead’s ‘strongman posturing’ to the increasing authoritarianism of David Lewis’s government, encouraging ‘direct revolutionary action’ in opposition to both. Similarly, Nina Hope of the Revolutionary Communist League, a small Maoist organisation with a presence across a number of universities in Britain, made the first explicit call for an occupation of university buildings to forcefully break off the lockout. Hope’s call was enthusiastically received by the crowd.
Protestors frequently took to blocking roads around the university quarter with impromptu marches.
Throughout the night, students and some teachers met in digs, bars and pubs across the city to discuss the state of the dispute. In the morning, protestors arrived back at the university quarter to find a conspicuous WB presence at sites of the previous day’s activities. Steel fences had also been erected in front of the main administrative buildings, in which management staff continued to work, apparently in fear of direct action against university property. Curtailing the day’s teach-out programme early, students and protesting teaching staff convened in front of the steel fences for an impromptu rally at midday, the purpose of which was simply to make as much noise as possible in order to disrupt university administration. WB volunteers stood watch over a crowd 5 thousand strong as students and staff sang, jeered, chanted revolutionary slogans, played musical instruments, banged on pots and pans, and, in one instance, even loudly recited Shelley’s ‘The Masque of Anarchy’. Any response from Whitehead or his colleagues, however, remained unforthcoming.
Protestors gather in Turing Park.
Shortly before one o’clock, news filtered through to the protesting students that the Industrial Relations Bill had narrowly passed its second reading in the Assembly, by a margin of 27 votes. This was in spite of a significant rebellion by backbench members of the LUPA, who had come out firmly against the bill after abstaining on the first reading. At this point, student union organisers appealed for calm and invited Jim Alverton to address the crowd via a megaphone. Alverton gave a short speech reiterating his commitment, and the commitment of the university’s branch of the UTW, in the fight against all limits upon protest and strike action. ‘Whether it’s David Lewis in Westminster, or Bernard Whitehead cowering behind steel fences just a few hundred yards from here, we stand united against all in power in Britain today attempting to curtail our rights as workers, as union members and as free citizens of the Commonwealth.’ Following Alverton’s speech, the crowd launched into a rendition of ‘Solidarity Forever’, embarking shortly after upon an anarchic, noisy procession through the accessible parts of the university quarter and out into the city beyond, bringing surrounding roads to a standstill. The procession culminated in Albert Square, where the crowd remained noisily for about half an hour, continuing to sing songs and chant slogans before dissipating of its own accord at around half past two.
At a quarter to three, a delegation of students and UTW members, unwilling to end the day without having taken some sort of concrete action, decided to enter the adjacent offices of the Manchester City Council, staging a spur-of-the-moment sit-in and demanding to speak to council chairman Stan Orme. Orme, a member of the New Socialist Front, had already used his position to force Whitehead to rescind the proposed ban on public meetings, and the student–teacher delegation hoped that he would intervene a second time to ask Whitehead to lift the lockout. Although the reception staff in the council building were unenthusiastic about the prospect of letting the protestors speak to the council chairman, the delegation eventually caught Orme by chance as he was leaving for an engagement in Salford that afternoon. Initially surprised by the motley group of young protestors and academics, Orme was nonetheless sympathetic to their demands, and expressed his outrage at Whitehead’s ‘commandeering’ of the WB to sustain the lockout. The council chairman promised to speak with both Whitehead and the commander of the Manchester WB that evening, and also told the protestors that he would raise the situation with his friends in the People’s Assembly for them to put to the government as an urgent matter. Satisfied, the protestors thanked Orme and soon returned home – an uncharacteristic interlude in what remained a heated dispute.
Stan Orme, 1967.
For David Lewis, the student rebellion in Manchester was an embarrassing distraction. Following the slim passage of the IRCB at its latest reading, relations between the two parties of the governing coalition were at their lowest ebb to date, with the premier having demanded the resignations of six Labour Unionist junior ministers who had voted against the bill. The incensed premier met with his deputy Dick Crossman on Tuesday night in his ministerial apartments, demanding to know why the Labour Unionist leader continued to prove ‘unable to whip his party into order’. Crossman replied tersely that, even if he were to impose such strict discipline on his AMs, after two contentious votes it was quite clear that the rebels were set on defying the government line, whatever the consequences. The deputy premier continued by offering the frank suggestion that, if Lewis were concerned about further rebellions, perhaps he should consider adopting a more conciliatory approach in his stance towards the unions. Lewis reminded Crossman that the bill as it stood was the product of compromise; he had conceded shop-steward managers, a hangover from Chairman Bevan’s January settlement, in return for LUPA backing on the cooling-off clause. Crossman countered that his agreement on that issue had been given in exchange for a guarantee not to press ahead with pit closures and a pro-nuclear energy policy. Now that Lewis had set upon passing the amended Mines and Quarries Bill, however, which included provisions to accelerate the closure of pits across the country, the LUPA leader argued that this agreement was null and void. Scrap the amendments, Crossman offered, and he would deliver the safe passage of the IRCB. But Lewis demurred, and Crossman left without any fresh agreement having been reached.
Crossman.
To mitigate his failure to patch up relations with Crossman, Lewis decided that what he needed most was a public relations victory. Specifically, he needed to reassert his authority both as leader of the government, and as the Commonwealth’s premier. To do this, he concluded that he had two options available to him: first, intervene successfully in the students’ dispute; second, safely recover Albert Roberts from the MAC, whose whereabouts remained unknown. Recovering Roberts, evidently, was easier said than done, hence Lewis rang his education secretary John Dunwoody. At the age of only 38, Dunwoody was the youngest member of Lewis’s cabinet, recently appointed to the education brief following the sacking of Jennie Lee in June. He had entered national politics four years prior at the 1963 election, standing in the Popular Front interest after a decade of activism in the circles of the anti-Mosleyite opposition at a regional level. By training and profession, he was a general practitioner, and in politics he continued to conduct himself soberly and with a regard for expert opinion. He was, in short, an ideal exemplar of the new generation of British establishment politician: active, diligent, and noticeably uninterested in the scheming and score-settling that had largely characterised Assembly life over the previous three decades.
By coincidence, Dunwoody received Lewis’s telephone call just after having turned off his television for the night following the end of the CBC News at 10. Appearing during one of the items that evening had been Fiona Carradine of the University of Manchester Students’ Union and Jim Alverton of the Manchester UTW, who had been interviewed by Brian Redhead in light of that afternoon’s demonstration in Albert Square. Having heard Carradine and Alverton speak eloquently about managerial authoritarianism and the denial of teachers’ right to work, Dunwoody had resolved to telephone Bernard Whitehead the following morning to ask him to account for his handling of the dispute. Lewis, in a similar mind, though of a more hardened disposition, asked Dunwoody, bluntly, to ‘get the doors open’.
John Dunwoody with wife Gwyneth, a Labour Unionist AM.
In the morning, Dunwoody telephoned Bernard Whitehead to inform him that he had ‘grave concerns’ about the lockout, and that his department would be taking formal measures to intervene unless students were readmitted to the university immediately. Whitehead remained bullish, telling the younger minister that he would not be told how to run ‘his’ university, and that the lockout would continue until the end of the week as previously announced. This, Whitehead explained, was to ensure that the university authorities could make arrangements to counter the ‘extreme minority’ among students whose supposed activities ‘present a threat to staff safety’. Dunwoody was unconvinced, and ended the conversation by telling Whitehead that he had until the end of the day to reverse course – or else the government would intervene to re-open university doors.
Privately, Whitehead knew that his case was not strong. While the legality or illegality of postponing the start of term was open to debate, insofar as the postponement constituted a lockout of staff the university were in breach of employment law. The Communist-era ban on lockouts had survived the long Mosley years, otherwise characterised by a reversal of the balance of power back in favour of (state) employers. Likely, the legislation had survived in thanks to the rarity of lockouts themselves; a lack of test cases forestalled any question of restoring an employer’s ‘right’ to lock out workers. Now that the long-obscured question had been dragged into the light of public scrutiny, even an emboldened Lewis government seeking to reconstruct the trade unions was not going to overturn the right to work – one of vanishingly few shibboleths that remained to unite the broad mainstream of political opinion by the end of the 1960’s.[16] With the attention of the government now squarely fixed on ensuring a swift resolution to disruption in Manchester, an injunction to overturn the lockout became more and more likely. In such an eventuality, management’s power to keep students out would be virtually non-existent. Whitehead’s gambit had backfired. Few recalled, by the end of the week, that the original source of the dispute had been an act of graffiti, and even fewer people cared. The discussion was now almost entirely about the inordinate response of the authorities, who were left desperately seeking means of de-escalating without completely losing face. Unfortunately for Whitehead and his colleagues in management, such means were to prove as elusive as the identity of the vandal whose nighttime mischief had sent Manchester into its week of frenzy.
Professor Bernard Whitehead.
Portrait painted to commemorate his retirement, 1968.
Following Dunwoody’s unambiguous intervention into the Manchester University dispute, all parties involved may have looked forward to de-escalation and an imminent resolution to proceedings. If each side launched a few final skirmishes, this was only to be expected; emotions had been running high for a week, and would hardly return to a regular pitch in one smooth action. When students and staff arrived for the morning’s activities to find that university maintenance staff had removed the steel fences (pre-empting a group of engineering students who had planned to dismantle them themselves that afternoon), the downfall of ‘Whitehead’s Fortress’ prompted jubilant celebrations in the courtyard of the administrative complex. Planned ‘teach-outs’ were moved from Turing Park to the courtyard, and included a pointed last-minute revision to the timetable: a lecture by politics PhD candidate Jess Goldacre on post-Revolutionary reforms to employment law made by the CPGB. Others were less high-brow in their means of protest, simply taking advantage of their newly available proximity to pelt Whitehead’s office with eggs. (Whitehead, having foreseen the danger after his morning conversation with John Dunwoody, had judiciously removed himself for the day to work from his home study.)
Victory to the students?
Meanwhile in Westminster, Assembly Chair Michael Foot began the day’s business by calling upon Labour Unionist AM Frank Allaun to deliver his resignation address. Allaun had been one of the few remaining open Bevanites in government before resigning his post as a junior housing minister to vote against the IRCB the day before. A member for the North West region and a Mancunian by birth, Allaun spoke with evident pride at having been involved in work to renovate Communist-era housing stock in Manchester, and having overseen the start of construction of 10 thousand new flats and houses across Lancashire since 1964. He outlined a belief, forged after years of service as a member of the Manchester City Council, that central government worked best when it did not dictate to the rest of the country, but rather supported the regions in their own self-directed efforts to improve themselves. Applying this philosophy to the realm of industrial relations, Allaun explained that he had been motivated to vote against the IRCB as he could not support the government’s intended policy of dictating a blanket 28-day ‘cooling-off period’, which he saw as too great an imposition upon the shop floors. While in principle he was not opposed to negotiation, recognising it as a necessary part of any industrial dispute, Allaun felt the policy as proposed was too inflexible, suggesting that the bill’s inflexibility betrayed an ulterior purpose: as a brake on union power, rather than a genuine attempt at easing negotation processes.
Allaun’s speech had been warmly received up to that point by government backbenchers and opposition members alike. But had its sole contribution to the debate around the IRCB been to have reiterated, once more, the perceived deficiencies of the cooling-off clause, it is unlikely that it would have been remembered as anything out of the ordinary for a day’s business in the Assembly. Allaun chose, however, to end his address with a topical reference, which he felt illustrated a broader, creeping return, six years after Mosley, to an inflexible, ‘top-down’ politics in Britain. Allaun referred, of course, to the lockout in Manchester, which he had been appraised of the previous evening during a telephone conversation with his friend and former colleague, chairman of Manchester City Council Stan Orme. Orme had called to ask Allaun whether he would raise the matter in parliament, or else bring it to the attention of someone who could – coincidentally finding the new backbencher in the process of writing his resignation address. Immediately after putting down the handset, Allaun returned to his writing desk and, in a flash of inspiration, rewrote his previously sober conclusion. I include below, in their entirety, the final two paragraphs of his speech, as delivered in the Assembly on September 27:
Ever since the long-awaited, long-worked-for removal of Oswald Mosley from office only six short years ago, political decision-making in Britain has tended, broadly, towards the careful and the consensual. This has been an entirely natural and welcome response to almost three decades of strongman politics beforehand, which verged in its worst excesses on the outright authoritarian and the dictatorial. But consensus is a fragile, difficult thing, and often those who cite it as a cure-all are too quick to forget that it works only when frank disagreement is freely tolerated. Those without the patience for difficult negotiation or the stomach for real conflict are liable, unfortunately, to substitute genuine consensus for an imposed unanimity. We have seen this only last week in Manchester, where university authorities responded to the possibility of disruption by quite literally, shamefully, shutting their doors to opposition. And while I understand from comrades in this House that events are, as I speak, drawing happily to a close in Manchester, other disputes – we may call them ‘lock-outs’ – persist closer to home.
In Whitehall, as in Manchester, there is evidence of a growing belief among those frustrated by the hard work of negotiation that it is they, not the students or the workers, who really do know best[17]; it is theirs which is the correct solution, and it must therefore be implemented without obstacle. Perhaps these people suspect that Mosley was right all along: that the best way to govern a country is indeed by force of will, without consultation? In any other country we would rightfully deplore such arrogance in government as symptomatic of a failing democracy – as we did, six years ago, when we took to the streets to condemn Mosley’s ever more cynical efforts in clinging onto power. Yet not a decade later we have a premier, who leads a party supported at the last election by one third of the electorate, who nevertheless drags his coalition, by the scruff of the neck, into supporting his programme almost as if it had been passed down from Mount Sinai, along with the Ten Commandments, as the very word of God himself. Just last night, my friend and comrade the deputy premier [Dick Crossman] met with the chairman to attempt a renegotiation of the Industrial Relations Bill, but was told only that he must do better in controlling his own party! How long must we endure having our government led by a man who, clearly, has closed his doors to the possibility that his programme may be flawed? Will the premier relent and accept that he must change course, or will he persist in his bloody-mindedness until it drives our coalition to the brink of destruction? In Manchester, Professor Whitehead saw the writing on the wall and acted, after much unnecessary unrest, to avert a crisis. I can only hope our premier undertakes a similar course of reflection, and, having so reflected, finds the courage to act, as I know he is capable of doing, in defence of the common welfare.
…
___________________________________
1: See Chapter 5: ‘Make This Your Commonwealth: Lewis in coalition’.
2: OOC: This wording is taken verbatim from the OTL Aberfan report, chaired by the Lord Justice Edmund-Davies.
3: The final sum paid by British Coal to the community and residents of Aberfan was a little over £500,000, including compensation of £2,500 to the family of each person killed in the disaster. On top of this, since October 1966 the Aberfan Disaster Relief Fund had received over £2 millions in popular donations.
[This is five-times the sum paid in OTL: £500 per family. In total the National Coal Board paid £160,000 – and the government forced the Relief Fund to cover the £150,000 required to move other tips still extant above the village! This money was eventually reinstated – albeit without interest, and so at a fraction of its 1966 value – by then-Welsh Secretary Ron Davies in 1997.]
4: OOC: Y Cymdeithas was formed OTL in 1962 following an infamous lecture given on BBC Radio by the poet and politician Saunders Lewis, entitled ‘Tynged yr Iaith’ (‘The Fate of the Language’). By the 1970s, the group had turned to direct action, including defacing English-only road signs with Welsh translations. This was a major factor in the eventual adoption of bilingual signage in Wales from 1972 (becoming a legal requirement in 1993).
The position of the language in nationalist debates is a controversial topic OTL, and I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say, as in OTL, in Echoes there are two dominant strains of nationalism (or ‘autonomism’, in Echoes-speak): cultural, and political. Crudely, cultural nationalism places greater emphasis on language issues and so on, whereas political nationalism places greater emphasis on (you guessed it) political independence. What differs from OTL is the relative strength of each in Echoes, where urgent political crises have pushed language and cultural issues to the side.
5: OOC: OTL cuts made between 1960–65 were to 43 per-cent of pits, with a loss of 200 thousand jobs. I am assuming Bevan is perhaps a little more sentimental than his Conservative and Labour OTL counterparts in his wielding of the axe…
6: Somewhat ironically, considering the extent to which his attention was taken up initially by the problem of coal, it was in Bevan’s own ‘commanding heights’ that Lewis and his predecessor found the strongest common cause. Lewis’s vision was for a British economy whose fundamental industries were kept under government management, subscribing to the basic social-democratic principle that certain sectors of the national economy simply could not be left to private enterprise. This explains his somewhat counterintuitive mistrust of the Free Pits; they offended Lewis the centralist, not Lewis the liberal.
As to the ‘notionally Marxist principles according to which the British economy operated’, it will not be controversial by this point to place them under extreme doubt.
7: Bevan himself had been a target of the BDI’s surveillance desk since at least the mid-Fifites, along with many of his allies in the internal anti-Mosleyite opposition. Coming to power, he had initiated a ‘clear-out’ of the surviving Mosley loyalists in the Bureau, as part of a wider programme of ‘de-Mosleyification’ within the civil service.
8: The peacekeeping role of the WB within local communities was somewhat loosely defined; volunteers were heavily restricted in their powers of arrest, and had no powers of stop and search. This was consistent with the position of the WB at the local level not as a police force, but as a body invested with responsibilities for the ‘defence of the community’. (It is worth remembering, in fact, that the WB had its origins in direct opposition to the old police force, the first brigades forming in East London to fight back against the pre-revolutionary Metropolitan Police, who allied with counter-revolutionary forces against the working-class uprisings in defence of private property and ‘public order’.)
9: Ashby’s own recollections of his telephone calls with David Lewis are available to read in his memoirs, published in two volumes from 1974–5. Under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 1976, full details of Lewis and Ashby’s conversation are scheduled to be made public on January 1, 1993.
10: The difference in coverage between the Post and the Herald was likely due to the fact that each paper received briefings from different government departments. The Post enjoyed preferential access to David Lewis’s office, while the Herald’s main sources came from Dick Crossman’s domestic office. (The ‘unnamed spokesman’ cited in the Herald’s coverage was likely Crossman himself.)
Previously the (literally) unrivalled paper of record of the Commonwealth, the Herald’s demotion to second-place alongside the LUPA during the Lewis premiership saw it develop a sometimes testy rivalry with the Post, which persisted years after Lewis’s exit from power. (This rivalry developed in spite of the fact that the tabloid Tribune, not the broadsheet Post, was the biggest selling of the Popular-Frontist journals.)
11: Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (roughly: MEE-dee-ad am-THI-fin CUM-ree): ‘Movement for the Defence of Wales’. Later references to ‘y Mudiad’ refer to ‘the Movement’.
12: OOC: In OTL, Bacon was a minister at the Home Office during the tenure of our in-character author Roy Jenkins as secretary of state. She was a key supporter of his far-reaching social reforms, which in TTL were enacted by David Lewis. (Evidently, this is not to present Jenkins and Lewis as analogues for each other.)
13: A comment which earned Francis a visit from BDI agents on September 23.
14: As in, ‘Long live the MAC!’.
15: This number becomes even more impressive when one considers that full term had not yet started, hence not all students had yet taken up residence on-site.
16: The others, I would argue, were a continued commitment to full employment (intimately linked to the right to work), and perhaps also a general agreement over the welfarist base of any economic settlement. Enoch Powell’s quixotic mix of nativism and self-sufficiency ran counter to both of these tenets, but in 1967 – despite some notoriety – he could not be called in any way ‘mainstream’.
17: OOC: With apologies to Douglas Jay.
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Err...
Hopefully, they return to that soon. Maybe in the 80s.
Yes, as has been broached on many other AARs, including The Butterfly Effect, British Coal is doomed to fail at some point in the 20th century, which would inevitably send shock waves through the working classes to such an extent it is hard to see how it could be avoided. Hundreds of thousands suddenly out of work and entire communities now with not only no jobs but no prospects of any others turning up either...
This is...a good idea in the short term, but will not work when every mine has to shut...and they will all have to shut.
Mmmm. Bet this is going to end well.
That's not really what Unions are for, or can really be, outside of rather authoritarian regimes keeping them around for extra surveillance.
Indeed. I think they are destined to get it in this timeline, considering Scotland is already on the way towards regional autonomy and...actually I can't remember what happened with Ireland? Maybe a map of Europe and the world is in order?
Oof.
I think it probably would be renamed after the Peterloo Massacre, yes. It looms large even in OTL memory, so it certainly will be a big cultural keystone for the city, and even country, during TTL. I think also the People's History Museum will come into existence much sooner, and very probably be a bit more expansive as well.
It did happen in OTL, though so far as I am aware, nothing has yet beaten the OTL Keele University revolt against the Thatcher government, which involved the SU, the entire student population and large sections of the staff and management declaring themselves independent from the UK, and creating their own currency, passports and laws.
That institution might not exist quite as it did OTL, but considering the rather socialist/liberal ethos of the founding members, and how...remarkably robust the university culture has remained on the far left (housing every student, attempted ataturky for all resources including energy and food, etc etc), it would be a shame not to see it in TTL, causing any number of headaches for the government and cracking out increasingly large amounts of various new socialist thinkers.
I suspect all the later universities, and polytechnics, are even more to the left than they were (and are). Lancaster University would, have been founded in the Bevan era, Manchester is presumably currently ballooning into having several polytechnics, which will eventually amalgamate into Manchester Metropolitan, and the venerable University itself.
If the government thinks it can go back to authoritarianism now the children of the revolution have grown up and received their bachelors in extremely left wing schools...they have a surprise incoming. That's only going to get worse when the children of the 50s grow.
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Speaking as an American, it can be interesting how so much can come from such minor actions. Speaking as a military man, guess there's no SAS/SBS to go rescue the kidnapped! Certainly it doesn't sound like they're available (which, OTL, they were though counter-terrorism hadn't quite entered the game, and GSG9 certainly isn't going to exist from which to form the basis for the OTL West's CT forces).
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