THE first few months of the Labour government under “slippery” Harold Wilson from March 1974 brought serious departures from the decision-making of the previous Edward Heath Tory government, even though the general election of February 28 had left the Wilson government in an overall minority situation against other parties.

During the winter months Heath had put centre-stage the “unreasonableness” of a pay claim by the miners, and their follow-up industrial action.

Heath’s action plan was comprised of three planks: a declaration of national emergency; a three-day week for workers in industry (in the light of a deliberately exaggerated coal shortage due to the industrial action); and a general election on the issue of “who governs Britain?” Tony Benn had recorded in his diary on January 4: “Well, it is the class war and we have got to face it.”

The election had the look of a referendum about it: what do you want? To back sensible Conservative government or to back “chaos?” Heath was surprised when the count was done — as were the opinion pollsters — to discover that a majority of voters were backing Labour and therefore “chaos.”

The “chaos” was ended. Within days after taking office, employment minister Michael Foot had settled the miners’ pay claim — with more than had been offered by the Heath government and less than demanded — and the three-day working week and the national emergency were no more. The “chaos,” in so far as it had existed, had been created by Heath and co, not by the miners.

Foot immediately prioritised the repeal of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act which the Tories had over-optimistically engineered to crash down on the independence of trade unions by establishing an Industrial Relations Court with draconian powers to intervene in industrial action, and to fine unions and imprison individuals for contempt of court.

The massive and sustained trade-union led resistance to this legislation had eventually led to an acceptance by the Confederation of British Industries that it would have to go. And so it did. By the end of July 1974 it was off the statute book.

All this tidying up of the industrial landscape by a Wilson government which lacked a majority of seats in the Commons, though had four more than the Tories, produced relief and satisfaction for the left, but the plan in Labour’s election manifesto had already run into serious trouble.

The “socialist” element in the Labour Party had been vocally present at the annual conference of October 1973, and its February 1974 election manifesto, as Selina Todd observed in her insightful book The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010 (Hachette 2014), was “more explicitly socialist than that of any previous British government.”

This was evident from the manifesto commitment to drive forward “a fundamental and irreversible shift of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families.”

The Morning Star had reported of the conference on October 3 that: “Delegates expected the next Labour government to carry through a wide extension of public ownership.” The Times noted that the conference marked the ascendancy of the “Marxist” trend within the Labour Party.

That was going too far for Marxism Today’s editor, James Klugmann, whose November assessment was that for an “ascendancy of Marxism” vital elements were lacking. There was a “total lack of realisation of … the power of big capital and the institutions to sabotage and make impossible the realisation of large-scale nationalisation … essential to realise the aims of Conference.”

The programme omitted mention of banking, insurance and financial institutions, and the need for changes of Civil Service personnel and democratisation of the police and army. Without all this, Klugmann concluded that implementation of Labour’s programme would be “a very chancy thing indeed.”

Labour’s election manifesto promised that its government would set up a National Enterprise Board as a means of putting public funds into industry, and of acquiring prominent companies occupying a crucial role in the economy. In addition, planning agreements with major companies as a vehicle for securing an improved framework for investment were proposed, together with an extension of industrial democracy at the work-place.

Tony Benn’s appointment in March 1974 as industry minister was an encouraging signal for the left, with the caveat that he belonged to a minority of left-leaning ministers.

That year he was labelled by the right-wing novelist Kingsley Amis “the most dangerous figure in British politics today,” as baseless a charge as easily imaginable, given the limited support for his political position within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The “danger” for capitalism’s supremacy in Britain lay in Benn’s developing ability to put out a socialist message to the public at large in clear and persuasive terms, while the fact that this blocked his own career advancement within government limited that “danger” more than somewhat.

What happened to scupper the manifesto plan for industry was recorded with clarity in the memoir of Wilson’s policy unit adviser Bernard Donoughue, The Heat of the Kitchen (Politico’s Publishing 2003). The problem for Wilson (and therefore for Donoughue) was how best to dilute the plan into innocuousness for the owners of private industry. For the manifesto commitment, Wilson and most of his ministers had no taste.

In cahoots were Wilson, chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey and foreign secretary James Callaghan. Their private meeting on June 28 settled on taking the policies — and a White Paper — out of Benn’s hands. The Guardian newspaper on July 1, on Wilson’s briefing, indicated that this would be the case.

On July 9, in a Cabinet committee meeting at which Benn was present, a diluted substitute plan, far more amenable to industry’s bosses, was approved against Benn’s objections: in particular making planning agreements voluntary, not compulsory, and promising no more nationalisation in the next parliament.

Benn’s wings — and those of the manifesto — were thus snipped off, and the expressed wishes of the Labour Party’s membership were therefore treated as irrelevant.

Callaghan’s view, as recorded in Benn’s diary, could not have been more crystal-clear: “You can’t write a manifesto for the party in opposition and expect it to have any relationship to what the party does in government. We’re now entirely free to do what we like.” The Guardian was to headline on August 3: “Benn industry blueprint turns pale pink.”

On the international front, the new Wilson government (like the old one of 1964-1970) was no more committed to democracy than it was to democratic control of policy by the Labour Party’s membership. Foreign policy allegiances came first.

Thus the “Greek colonels,” who had wrested power from the democratic parliamentary process in April 1967, thereafter stifling public dissent with arrests, torture and sometimes killings, had remained an ally of Britain and the US within Nato.

Labour’s foreign secretary at that time, Michael Stewart, had gone as far as to assure his Cabinet colleagues on July 12 1968 that the regime was “the best you could expect in that country.”

But since early 1973 Greek public dissent had been asserting itself on the streets with heavy human sacrifice. A fascist coup in Cyprus in mid-July 1974 by Cyprus National Guard officers seeking integration with Greece (but provoking an invasion of the island within a week by Turkish forces), was the last straw for the rule of the colonels.

The Morning Star stated editorially on July 22: “By failing to bring immediate tough pressure on the Athens junta to withdraw its officers from Cyprus and end its aggression, the British and US governments made the Turkish invasion a virtual certainty.”

These events also brought about change in Greece. On July 24 1974 the Morning Star reported a huge public demonstration in Athens of people shouting for “Democracy, Democracy,” with “the hated junta teetering on the brink.”

The paper went on: “Ignoring police threats that force would be used if they failed to disperse, the crowds also ignored the fact that Greece was still officially under martial law.” The reins of power were now to be passed back to civilians, with democratic elections to come.

Democracy is never a gift from the rulers of capitalist societies.