The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (62 page)

Sunday 28 September

When we were last at the Imperial Hotel two years ago, Tony Wilson, a seventeen-year-old who worked in the hotel as a sort of page boy, told us that he earned only £14 for an eighty-hour week. I suggested he form a union. Well, he knocked on the bedroom door and there he was with his little spectacles and his cheeky manner, and he said, ‘Oh, Mr Benn, I formed that union. When they heard that Mr Benn had suggested it, it spread like wildfire. We’ve got the TGWU here – and we’re 60 per cent unionised – and we’ve now got £20 for a forty-hour week.’

I was invited to the POEU/UPW dinner and was asked to speak. Afterwards Bryan Stanley paid a tribute to Roy, Denis and Jim, and said, ‘I want to say a word about Tony Benn. I’m very sorry that he was moved from the Department of Industry and from Telecommunications. It’s not for me to comment on the circumstances but he was the best Minister the Post Office has ever had because he identified himself with our members. We were very sad to see him go.’

It was a courageous speech and Jim and Denis looked absolutely sick. I wish Harold had been there but he arrived later, just as we were thanking and leaving. I tried to avoid him but he saw me through the door.

Wednesday 1 October

I worked till 3 in the morning on my speech for the industrial policy debate today. Judith presented the industrial policy statement in a very academic way. There were various other speakers. A Young Socialist from West Stirlingshire made a marvellous speech. It was the youngsters in many ways
who stole the limelight. One man got up and said, ‘I cannot let this occasion go by without saying plainly that the removal of Tony Benn from the Department of Industry simply for implementing our policies has created a deep mood of cynicism and despair.’

I spoke for about fifteen minutes and it was very effective. I got a rather different sort of standing ovation from Michael, Denis and Harold, in that it began on the fringes and moved into the middle. I don’t think Jack Jones stood up and I know he was reading his newspaper throughout my speech, as he had through Eric Heffer’s and Judith Hart’s.

I had been asked to go with Jack Jones to see a delegation from the TGWU about offshore oil workers, so I left the platform and Jack walked out with me. Well, he turned on me and I hope I can be forgiven for repeating what he said.

‘What’s the fucking use of talking about redundancies in that general way when I’ve got these fucking workers and you have done fuck all about them?’

‘The offshore oil workers?’ I asked.

‘Yes, these people at Graythorpe. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there.’

‘Not only have I been there, Jack, but I’ve been trying to get new orders for them from the oil companies for the last two months. Indeed, yours is the one union that hasn’t taken any interest whatever in this issue.’

He said, ‘Well, what about getting union recognition on the rigs?’

‘I’m working on that too.’

‘The National Union of Seamen have done a deal on their own in which the men on the rigs are members of the NUS, not the TGWU.’

I said, ‘You’ve been slow off the mark. They’ve done it and it’s nothing to do with me. I’m not in charge of the National Union of Seamen.’

He was boiling with rage. ‘Who do they think they are, all this criticism of the Government?’ and he referred to the Tribune Group. I told him I wasn’t even a member of the Tribune Group.

We arrived at the Planet Room, where all these awfully nice guys – shop stewards and one full-time official – were waiting in the hallway. I shook hands with them and in Jack’s presence I told them what I had done.

‘I’ve been up to Scotland. I’ve been to Graythorpe and Nigg, and I’ve seen the union committee and the Scottish TUC. I’ve written to the oil companies, and the OPEC oil prices will help. I’ve also arranged a new licensing round. I’ll continue to help in any way I can. I’ll keep in touch with Jack Jones. If you want to come to London you can see me. Jack has been pressing me on this.’ This was quite untrue and he knew it, and when I said that I think he felt guilty.

Friday 10 October

I had a dream that Harold had called me in and said, ‘I want you to be Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household with a seat in the House of Lords in charge of boxing under the Minister of Sport.’ He told me this in the great
Cabinet Room, which was full of people. ‘I’m afraid this doesn’t mean a place in the Cabinet for you,’ he said. I replied, ‘Harold, I must think about it,’ and Sir John Hunt said, ‘Boxing is very important. We must preserve the quality and excellence of the Lonsdale Belt.’

Tuesday 21 October

The
Daily Mirror
ran a story under the heading, ‘Britain to become the nuclear dustbin of the world’, by a Stanley Bonnet. In fact, the man behind it was Bryn Jones from Friends of the Earth, who is the industrial correspondent on the
Mirror.
It was about the BNFL contract under which we would reprocess 4,000 tons of irradiated fuel from Japan and would then have the problem of disposing of the toxic waste. I decided to go on the ‘World at One’ so a chap came along to interview me. I think I put the case across and I told the Department to put out a background note.

I rang Marcia and invited her for a sandwich lunch. She came in Harold’s car and gave me a message from Harold, ‘Tell him to keep cheerful.’ I asked how it was going at Number 10 and she said it was awful. ‘In the old days I had Gerald Kaufman to work with but now it’s Haines who’s the official man and Bernard Donoughue,’ whom Marcia thought was just feeding Harold’s insecurities.

‘I have good personal relations with Harold but I’m shut out completely.’

She said that Harold sometimes nearly gives up and she was sure that one day he’d resign.

Well, that’s a load of rubbish! She asked what I thought about being moved. I said, ‘It was like moving Nye Bevan from the Health Service. It was a complete capitulation.’

‘Harold was under heavy pressure,’ she said, ‘not just from outside but from inside too.’ Well to hell with that. ‘Harold reported that you had lectured him more than he had ever been lectured before. He does have a difficult time and he thought it best to move you, and he found a way which both met the criticism and annoyed the others.’

I said we should keep in touch because I like Marcia. If she went it would be awful.

Thursday 23 October

At 8.50 this morning, just before I went off to work, Caroline and I were in the bedroom and there was the most enormous explosion. I thought it was a bomb in Roy Jenkins’s house near by. So I dashed down the stairs and opened the front door and I saw there were a lot of people about 150 yards down the street. Then, through the trees in Campden Hill Square, I saw flames licking up twenty-five to thirty feet and realised that the explosion was over by Hugh Fraser’s house. Indeed, it turned out that someone had put a thirty-pound bomb near his Jaguar.

The street was in a tremendous state of uproar with police cars and fire
engines all over the place. There had been a bomb just up the road at Notting Hill when the Jordanian Ambassador was hurt, but this was the closest to home and it absolutely shook us. A friend of Josh’s, who comes up the hill every day to meet Josh, said the boy just in front of him had been blown off his bicycle. Some of the windows in the house next to ours had been blown out.

The press turned up in their hundreds and Caroline went down and asked whether any schoolchildren had been injured and when they said no, she went up to the school and told the headmaster, so that when anxious parents rang up, he was able to tell them that everything was all right.

Monday 3 November

Arrived at Aberdeen at 8.30 for the landing of the first oil from the Forties Field. After breakfast at the Skeandhu Hotel, a film was shown of the Forties Field and then Harold Wilson arrived with Jim Callaghan, Sir Eric Drake of BP and a lot of others, and we all drove to BP’s headquarters at Dyce.

The first thing I noticed was that the workers who actually bring the oil ashore were kept behind a barbed wire fence and just allowed to wave to us as we drove by. We arrived at a huge tent, constructed at a cost of £40,000, and laid with an extravagant red carpet. The tent was about the size of two football pitches and held 1,000 people, most of whom had been brought up from London. We were given a cup of coffee as we waited for the Queen to arrive.

Eventually we were taken out on the dais to watch the Queen’s Rolls Royce approaching. Out came the Queen in a green dress, followed by the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Andrew. She shook hands with all of us, and we went back into the tent and had drinks, and the Queen circulated. Then she went into the computer control room and we followed. She pressed a few buttons I believe before going outside for her walkabout. There, behind another fence, were about 500 Aberdonians waving Union Jacks, and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh walked in front of them as if they were animals in a zoo.

At lunch I sat next to Mrs Steel, the wife of David Steel, who is to succeed Drake as Chairman of BP. Jim was on her other side and he said how much he enjoyed the Foreign Office and it wasn’t like the Treasury. ‘You know, you would enjoy the Foreign Office, Tony.’

I said, ‘Well, Jim, perhaps in your second administration that will be possible.’ He laughed.

To be frank, the day was a complete waste of time and money, and when you see the Queen in action, everything else is just absorbed into this frozen feudal hierarchy. All the old bigwigs are brought out into the open as if they were somehow responsible for a great industrial achievement, while the workers are presented as natives and barbarians who can be greeted but have to be kept at a distance. It is a disgrace that a Labour government
should allow this to continue. I know there is a security problem but there was no need for this. I also felt that this great Scottish occasion was just an opportunity for the London Establishment to come up and lord it over the Scots.

Saturday 8 November

On the train back from Bristol, a nervous, rather weedy-looking buffet car attendant came round with coffee. He told me he served in the army but after four or five stints in Northern Ireland, he had a nervous breakdown. ‘It was terrible,’ he said. ‘The children spit at you, the grown-ups throw stones at you and shield behind the children. My friends were blown up, but what really upset me was that I used to go out with a Catholic girl who was going to be teacher. Her brothers found out and shot her through the knee caps as a punishment for going out with a British soldier. She had to have both legs amputated.’

It was a most brutal story. My God, we have to get out of Ireland.

There was a programme last night about the Orange Order in Glasgow marching through Catholic areas to provoke them. We will have to get out because the English cannot solve the Irish problem.

Tuesday 11 November

The
Scottish Daily News
died yesterday.

Cabinet at 10 and there was an oral report on Chrysler. I had stayed up till 3 am going through all my papers on this. Eric Varley told us that American-owned Chrysler had been in difficulties earlier this year and that 25,000 jobs would be directly affected. Chrysler have said that if the UK took it over, it would have losses of £55 million and another £80 million would be needed for investment. The alternative would be to let it go into liquidation in three months.

I said, ‘Prime Minister, this is the biggest collapse in the industrial history of this country, twice the size of UCS, involving perhaps 67,000 people at a cost in unemployment pay of about £70 million. It is a disaster. This is a repeat of the motorbike industry, and it is happening year after year.’ Harold Wilson said it wasn’t a lame duck, it was a dead duck. ‘138,000 working days have been lost in disputes in the motor industry this year and the report must go forward and be agreed.’

That was the end of that discussion and we went on to devolution. Had a most fitful night just lying on the couch with the light on and my door open so people could see me. Every time the division bell rang I went to vote – I have no idea how many times.

Thursday 13 November

Cabinet at 10 and the much delayed discussion on public expenditure.
Harold opened by saying this was the hardest of all decisions for any government to make and he hoped there would be no recriminations.

Denis Healey began, ‘We are talking about the period when we are returning to full employment. Output will be rising from 1977 to 1979. There will be a shortage of resources and money. We must make room for investment and exports. A 10 per cent increase in investment is expected in 1977–9. We must aim at a balance of payments surplus in 1978–9 or else the debt repayment will burden us and mortgage the North Sea oil. The Crosland proposals for lower cuts would pre-empt resources and would be a recipe for disaster. We cannot escape these cuts. We cannot borrow unless we make the cuts now or within the next six months. We are already borrowing 20 pence in every pound. The only alternatives to public-expenditure cuts are to print money or raise interest rates and a quarter of the PSBR is now due to the recession.

‘As for taxation, some increases are inevitable which will undermine the £6 pay-limit policy. If company tax is raised it will either cut jobs, investment or prices: on income tax you might go up by between 5p and 9p in the pound, which will cut take-home pay and the unions will then start bargaining on post-tax income.

‘At the Labour clubs you’ll find there’s an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure. They will all tell you about Paddy Murphy up the street who’s got eighteen children, has not worked for years, lives on unemployment benefit, has a colour television and goes to Majorca for his holidays.’ If that’s the case, I’d be interested to know how many people who frequent the Labour clubs actually vote Labour.

Wednesday 19 November

Lunch with the Japanese Ambassador, Mr Kato. His wife was most amusing, very beautiful, and had been brought up in America. We had a long talk about acupuncture – the Ambassador has arthritis and he has had fifteen injections at £20 each which have done him no good at all. Madame Kato said, ‘I could have bought a new outfit with that.’