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Edward Heath's government (June 1970 – March 1974) is one of the most dramatic and instructive reversals in post-war British political history. Heath came to power apparently promising a decisive break with the post-war consensus — less state intervention, an end to subsidising "lame duck" industries, legal curbs on trade union power, and economic renewal through competition rather than planning. Within barely two years he had executed a spectacular "U-turn," returning to interventionism, statutory incomes policies, and the very corporatist approaches he had seemed to repudiate. His premiership ended in the gravest crisis of authority since the war — a three-day week, a state of emergency, and outright defeat by the National Union of Mineworkers — and in the loss of an election he had called on the explicit question "Who governs Britain?"
Heath's government is therefore the pivotal case study in the breakdown of the post-war settlement. It demonstrates both the apparent exhaustion of the consensus model — the inability of government to control inflation or contain union power within the existing framework — and the failure of the first tentative attempt to escape it. The lessons Margaret Thatcher drew from Heath's defeat would shape her own determination never to "turn," and her later confrontation with the miners was in part a deliberate reversal of his humiliation.
Key Question: Why did Edward Heath's government collapse so completely, and what does its failure reveal about the condition of the post-war consensus by the early 1970s?
Key Definition: U-turn — the reversal, especially in 1972, of Heath's early commitment to a non-interventionist, free-market approach, in favour of nationalisation, subsidy and statutory wage-and-price controls. Whether the U-turn was a betrayal of principle or a pragmatic necessity is a central interpretive question.
This lesson belongs to Paper 2, Option 2S — The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007, Part One ("Building a New Britain, 1951–1979"). As a depth study, examiners expect precise command of the chronology of confrontation — the Industrial Relations Act, the U-turn, the two miners' strikes, the three-day week — and analysis framed by second-order concepts rather than mere narrative.
In January 1970 the shadow Cabinet met at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon to finalise its programme. Harold Wilson mockingly dubbed the result "Selsdon Man" — an allusion to a prehistoric hominid, implying that Heath's free-market instincts were primitive and reactionary. The Selsdon agenda, as caricatured, included:
| Policy | Detail |
|---|---|
| Reduced state intervention | An end to "lame duck" subsidies propping up failing industries |
| Trade union reform | Comprehensive legislation to regulate strikes and union conduct within a legal framework |
| Tax cuts | Reducing direct taxation and shifting towards indirect taxes |
| Law and order | A firmer line on crime and industrial disorder |
| Competition | Abolishing the interventionist apparatus of the Wilson years, including the Prices and Incomes Board |
It is important to handle "Selsdon Man" with care: historians dispute how genuinely radical the agenda was. Heath himself was no doctrinaire free-marketeer — he was a technocratic moderniser whose deepest commitment was to British membership of the EEC, not to Hayekian economics. Much of the "Selsdon" reputation was a label pinned on him by Wilson and later inflated by Thatcherites seeking a foil. This nuance matters for judging whether the subsequent U-turn was a betrayal of conviction or simply the abandonment of a position Heath had never held with ideological fervour.
The centrepiece of Heath's trade-union policy was the Industrial Relations Act 1971, an ambitious attempt to bring industrial relations within a comprehensive legal framework — succeeding where Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife had failed.
| Provision | Detail |
|---|---|
| Registration | Unions were required to register with a new Registrar; only registered unions enjoyed certain legal protections |
| National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) | A new court empowered to grant injunctions against strikes, award compensation, and order "cooling-off" periods and ballots |
| Unfair industrial practices | Defined categories of industrial action as "unfair" and legally actionable |
| Closed shop | Restricted (though did not wholly abolish) the closed shop |
The Act was a near-total failure in practice. The TUC instructed its affiliates not to register, robbing the system of legitimacy and rendering its machinery largely unworkable. The defining confrontation came in July 1972, when five dockers — the "Pentonville Five" — were imprisoned for contempt of the NIRC after defying an order against unlawful picketing. Their jailing provoked a wave of solidarity strikes and the threat of a general stoppage; the government extricated itself only by the device of the Official Solicitor intervening to secure the men's release — an undignified legal contrivance that exposed the state's inability to enforce its own law against a determined labour movement. The episode foreshadowed the central lesson of the period: that legal weapons alone could not master union power without a wider strategy. Thatcher would absorb precisely this lesson a decade later.
The most celebrated feature of Heath's premiership was the reversal of his early economic stance — the "U-turn" — driven above all by rising unemployment, which approached and then passed one million in 1972 (a politically shocking figure at the time).
| Event | Detail |
|---|---|
| Rolls-Royce | Nationalised in February 1971 when bankruptcy threatened its aero-engine business — an early breach of the "no lame ducks" principle, justified on strategic and employment grounds |
| Upper Clyde Shipbuilders | When closure was announced, the workforce staged a celebrated "work-in" (1971–72), led by the Communist shop stewards Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie. Public sympathy and the fear of unemployment forced the government to provide substantial public funds to keep the yards going — a humiliating retreat |
| Industry Act 1972 | Gave ministers sweeping powers to subsidise and direct industry — the very interventionism Selsdon had renounced |
| Statutory incomes policy | From November 1972 Heath imposed a statutory prices-and-incomes policy (a pay and price freeze, then phased controls) — exactly the corporatist tool he had promised to abandon, and the trigger for the fatal collision with the miners in 1973–74 |
Historiographical anchor. John Campbell (Edward Heath: A Biography, 1993) argues the U-turn flowed from Heath's fundamental pragmatism: never the ideologue his enemies painted, he reversed course because the alternative — mass unemployment in vulnerable regions — was politically and morally intolerable. Margaret Thatcher and her allies, by contrast, treated Heath's U-turn as the cautionary tale that defined her own creed ("the lady's not for turning," 1980). Andy Beckett (When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, 2009) situates the U-turn within the wider crisis of governability of the decade, resisting both the Thatcherite morality tale and any simple vindication of Heath.
The economic engine of the U-turn was the expansionary policy of Chancellor Anthony Barber, whose "dash for growth" — tax cuts, relaxed credit (the 1971 "Competition and Credit Control" reforms loosened bank lending) and reflation — was designed to drive unemployment back down and to prepare Britain for the competitive rigours of EEC membership. For a time it produced spectacular growth: the economy expanded by over 7% in 1973, the fastest rate of the post-war era. But the "Barber boom" overheated badly. It fuelled a property and asset bubble, sucked in imports, widened the balance-of-payments deficit, and pushed inflation sharply upward even before the oil shock struck in October 1973. When the statutory incomes policy then tried to hold wages down amid soaring prices, it collided head-on with a miners' union that could point to galloping inflation as justification for breaking the pay norm. The tragedy of Heath's economic policy is thus tightly causal: the very reflation intended to cure unemployment created the inflationary pressures that detonated the fatal confrontation with the NUM. A strong analytical answer makes this linkage explicit rather than treating the U-turn, inflation and the strikes as separate misfortunes.
This sequence also marks a watershed in economic ideas. The apparent failure of demand management to deliver low inflation and full employment together — the new phenomenon of "stagflation" — discredited the Keynesian orthodoxy that had underpinned policy since the war and gave a hearing to the monetarist critics (Milton Friedman, and at home Keith Joseph and the Institute of Economic Affairs) who argued that controlling the money supply, not managing demand, was the key to taming inflation. Heath's crisis, in other words, was not merely a political defeat but the moment the intellectual foundations of the post-war consensus began visibly to crack.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Background | Miners' pay had slipped relative to other industrial workers. The National Coal Board offered around 7.9%; the NUM's claim was far higher |
| Tactics | The Yorkshire leader Arthur Scargill organised "flying pickets" — mobile groups able to reinforce any weak point in the movement of coal |
| Battle of Saltley Gate | On 10 February 1972 thousands of Birmingham engineering workers struck in sympathy and joined the miners' picket at the Saltley coke depot, overwhelming the police, who closed the gates. Scargill hailed it as a landmark working-class victory |
| Wilberforce Inquiry | Lord Wilberforce's inquiry recommended large increases close to the NUM's demands; the government conceded |
| Significance | The 1972 victory proved a well-organised union could defeat the government through industrial muscle — emboldening the NUM and alarming the right |
| Event | Detail |
|---|---|
| OPEC oil shock | In October 1973, in the context of the Yom Kippur War, OPEC sharply raised oil prices (roughly quadrupling them over the following months), triggering a global economic crisis and intensifying British inflation |
| Impact on Britain | Energy costs soared as inflation, already high, accelerated towards the mid-teens and beyond (peaking at over 24% in 1975); the economy slid towards recession |
| Three-Day Week | Facing dwindling coal stocks (the miners had begun an overtime ban in November 1973), Heath imposed a three-day working week on industry from 1 January 1974 to conserve electricity, and television closed down early. The images of a darkened, rationed Britain dramatised the sense of national crisis |
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Background | The NUM pressed a pay claim that breached the government's Stage Three statutory policy |
| Escalation | An overtime ban from November 1973 became a full national strike on 10 February 1974 |
| The gamble | Heath called a general election for 28 February 1974 on the question "Who governs Britain?" — seeking a mandate to face down the miners |
| Result | The gamble failed. Labour won 301 seats to the Conservatives' 297 (though the Conservatives won marginally more votes, 37.9% to 37.2%); the Liberals surged to over six million votes but won only 14 seats. With no overall majority, Heath tried and failed to secure a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe's Liberals and resigned; Wilson formed a minority government and quickly settled with the miners |
The "Who governs?" election is a textbook study in the limits of a confrontational strategy: by framing the contest as government versus unions, Heath invited the electorate to conclude that he had failed to govern — and a significant protest vote went to the Liberals. The collapse of his authority is the clearest single illustration of the crisis of the post-war state in the 1970s.
Heath's most enduring achievement was Britain's accession to the European Economic Community, effective 1 January 1973 — the culmination of his deepest political conviction.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Negotiations | Conducted principally by Geoffrey Rippon; concluded in 1971–72, helped by de Gaulle's departure (1969) and Pompidou's greater openness |
| Parliamentary passage | The principle of entry was approved by 356 to 244 (October 1971), with 69 Labour pro-Europeans (led by Roy Jenkins) defying their party; the European Communities Act itself then passed by narrow margins against Labour and Conservative opposition |
| Terms | Britain accepted the Common Agricultural Policy, a phased budget contribution, and the existing body of Community law (the acquis communautaire) |
| Significance | Heath regarded entry as the supreme reorientation of Britain's world role — from declining imperial power to European partner. The terms (especially the budget and the CAP) and the principle would divide both major parties for decades, prompting the 1975 referendum and, ultimately, far longer controversy |
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