What If Gordon Banks Had Played, Part 24

From “The British Polity” by P.Norton (Hull University, 1991)

The Jenkins Commission's proposals were implemented in full by the Howe administration and still form the basis of the British constitution. The Jenkins plan replaced the old first past the post Commons with a proportionally elected House of Commons based upon five member constituencies using the Single Transferable vote system. The new House of Commons included changing the Commons' chamber itself, abandoning the partially rebuilt chamber with its adversarial seating arrangement in favour of a semi circular arrangement with a desk for each member. The House of Lords was replaced by an elected Senate.

The changes also included a significant increase in local authorities autonomy and the introduction of Scottish and Welsh assemblies. A Bill of Rights was introduced as part of a written constitution, based upon the European Convention on Human Rights which the UK had withdrawn from two years earlier.

From “Britain's Changing Party System”, Page, Blackmore & Peele (Manchester University Press, 1996)

The Howe administration and the adoption of the STV electoral system saw the genesis of the present day party system. The old Labour and Conservative Parties had both been split into rival factions by the Powell era and with the change in the electoral system there was longer a inbuilt tendency towards the emergence of a two party system. The Labour Party, already split into two opposing political parties under the respective leaderships of Merlyn Rees and Tony Benn, drifted further apart after the resignation of Tony Benn from the transitional authority in June 1980.

The long legal battle between the two factions of the Labour party ended in November 1980 when the High Court ruled that Rees' faction was the legitimate successor to the pre-1977 Labour Party and hence had ownership of the Labour party's assets. The Benn faction was reborn as the Socialist Labour Party and, given the Rees coalition's attempts to restrain the unions, gained a greater proportion of the support of the trade unions. The Socialist Labour Party became the main opposition party to Merlyn Rees' coalition government in the 1980-1984 Parliament. Meanwhile the Labour Party, or the Social Democrats as they increasingly became known under Roy Jenkins' leadership, would over the next decade become the natural party of Government.

The Conservative Party meanwhile was in terminal decline. The name of the party would be permanently connected with the Powellite government and the party was relaunched in 1983 as the One Nation Party, initially under the leadership of Jim Prior. The Powellite rump of the party that opposed the change continued as a right-wing, anti-immigration, isolationist party but saw its support gradually decline throughout the 1980s. The emergence of the populist Reform Party in 1988 robbed the Conservatives of most of their remaining support and at the 1995 election the Conservative Party lost their last two Members of Parliament from the mainland.

The new electoral system also made it more practical for smaller parties to find electoral success. Apart from the Liberal Party who acted as a coalition partner to the Social Democrats for much of the late eighties and early nineties, the Reform party who took over the populist right from the Conservatives and the Scots and Welsh nationalists, the past fifteen years have also seen the emergence of the Green party who, while not sustaining their initial success in the 1989 election, have consolidated themselves as a mainstream political party.

From “An Unhappy Juncture: The Powell Government” by Anthony Selsdon (HarperCollins, 1988)

The remaining members of Powell's inner cabinet remained under house arrest for the next four years, although the restrictions upon their freedoms became increasingly light. The presence of Conservative MPs who had served in the Powell Government within the Howe and Rees coalitions made them reluctant to push for prosecution, and it was not until the election of the Social Democrat government under Roy Jenkins in 1984 that the members of the former government were brought to trial.

In the event ten members of the Powell Government or the armed services were indicted: Alan Clark, Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph, Norman Tebbit, Nicholas Ridley, Sir John Nott, Patrick Jenkin, Lord Lewin, Lord Bramall and Powell himself. In the absence of an extradition treaty with Rhodesia, Powell was tried in absentia while Norman Tebbit's ailing health prevented him from attending the hearing (halfway through the trial Tebbit's health was deemed to have deteriorated to the extent that he was deemed unfit to stand trial and his prosecution halted). The two military chiefs, Lord Lewin and Lord Bramall, had the charges against them dropped at an early stage of the proceedings.

The seven remaining defendants were charged with starting an aggressive war, genocide in Northern Ireland, war crimes in the Anglo-Irish war, government collusion with Ulster death squads, and on numerous specimen counts of murder in relation to the command to fire upon protesters and the killing of prisoners in Northern Ireland. The genocide charges, which relied almost totally upon the evidence of mass graves in Ulster, were rejected by the court in the absence of any evidence to either demonstrate a systematic attempt to eliminate Catholics or any success in refuting the claim that the graves were the result of unavoidable deaths during mass prison escapes. The charge of starting a war of aggression was sustained against Powell himself, and partially upheld against Sir John Nott. Insufficient evidence was put forward to sustain the murder charges in relation to Ulster death squads, nor the killing of prisoners in Northern Ireland for which responsibility was laid upon the late Airey Neave. Murder charges on the killing of protesters were upheld against Alan Clark and Nicholas Ridley during their periods as Defence Minister, and against Margaret Thatcher during her time as Home Secretary. Clark was also found guilty of war crimes in relation to the treatment of prisoners of war in the Anglo-Irish war.

In mitigation the claims by Margaret Thatcher and Alan Clark that Airey Neave had been in effective control of security matters was accepted, however Thatcher still received a fifteen year prison sentence, while Clark received two concurrent twenty year sentences. Nicholas Ridley's claim that, by the time of his short tenure as Defence Secretary, Neave was in almost total control of the armed forces was also accepted, and he received only a seven year sentence. Sir John Nott's claim that he had opposed the war with Ireland and sought to prevent it was partially accepted and in the event he received only a five year suspended sentence. The other senior members of the cabinet during the final years of the Powell government received short suspended sentences in relation to smaller transgressions; it was widely held that a blanket prosecution of all the Powell cabinet on the grounds of collective responsibility was prevented because of a desire to avoid the prosecution of Lord Howe and William Whitelaw.

From “Wasted Opportunities. Britain and the European Union since 1958” by H.Young (Orion, 1997)

The great challenge that once again faced Britain in the 1980s was the struggle to find a place in the world. As Dean Acheson's famously said, Britain had lost an Empire, but had yet to find a role. Those who originally faced this dilemma had wisely sought the answer in the European Economic Community, but Britain's participation came too late. Unwilling to detach themselves from the USA they were vetoed by de Gaulle, and then for six long years went into the blind isolationism of Powellism while Europe developed without them.

By the time that Powell fell the chasm between the UK and the European Community was too great to convince the British public; it was no longer a case of simply dropping trade barriers and and participating in European bodies, Britain would now have to surrender her currency before she was allowed to join the European club and would have to mould herself to the rules drawn up to benefit the economies of mainland Europe. The rest of the European Community was understandably not prepared to adapt their rules to suit the now crippled United Kingdom who had spurned them for so long.

The only alternative was the giant across the ocean and, thanks to their earlier obstinacy, it was to be here that Britain was forced to turn.

From “Making Sense of the Troubles”, J. McCrittrick (Blackstaff, 1999)

The Northern Ireland that the US forces were met with was an entirely different creature that which British forces had found a decade earlier. In 1971 Northern Ireland was 36% Catholic, by 1980 it had been “ethnically cleansed” — a combination of refugees fleeing the war, intimidation, government demolition of Catholic areas and protestant death squads had almost obliterated the Catholic population of Northern Ireland. The 1981 census found only 4% of Northern Ireland to be Catholic.

The economy of Ulster was in an even worse state than the rest of the country, and US reconstruction funds were desperately needed. However, US forces were met with distrust by the loyalist population who suspected that the US were intent on brokering a united Ireland. While the ethnic cleansing of Ulster had destroyed the IRA's base within the province, and led to a huge drop in IRA activity, US forces suffered constant low level activity from loyalist paramilitaries and, after the deaths of two US servicemen in May 1980 calls began for an end to US involvement in Ulster.

After his inauguration in January 1981 President Mondale immediately sought to fulfil his campaign promise of removing US troops from Ulster. The negotiation of a settlement was problematic though. The sympathies of the US lay with a united Ireland and the Rees Government, having successfully passed the hot potato of Northern Ireland to the USA, had little interest in accepting it back, however, despite their public announcements, the Irish government were less than keen on adopting the troubled province, especially now it was overwhelmingly protestant and violently opposed to the involvement of the Republic of Ireland in its affairs.

The Mondale plan for self-government to Northern Ireland was the ultimate result, introducing a similar electoral system to that on the mainland for a new Stormont assembly. The plan also included British payments of reparations to Catholics who had lost their homes in Ulster. The 1981 referendum offered a choice between adopting the Mondale plan and a United Ireland organised on a federal basis. Unsurprisingly, given the alternative, over ninety percent backed the Mondale plan and the US was relieved to be finally able to withdraw its troops.

No-one was under any illusion that the Mondale plan would be any sort of solution to the troubles, it merely returned the province to its pre-1972 situation. However, the simple fact that the population of Ulster was now far more homogenous led to a drastic reduction in violence in the province, not least because the IRA was now forced to conduct most of its operations from outside the province. Violence in the province continued, but would never again reach the levels seen in the 1970s.

From the Guardian, 2nd February 1991, Notes & Queries

Q: Was an MI5 conspiracy really pulling the strings behind the Powell government?

A: Rumours of a shadowy conspiracy behind the Powell government have circulated ever since the Government fell. The rumours seem to have started after Sir Walter Walker's attempted coup. Walker, a retired and mentally ill general, attempted to stage a one man coup in March 1980 and, after his arrest, claimed he was actually a part of a conspiracy that included various senior military and intelligence figures as well as the Earl of Mountbatten. Naturally, all of Walker's supposed co-conspirators seem to have been completely unaware of the conspiracy.

Those who accept Walker's claim have built up volumes of evidence about the conspiracy, and imagine that it was responsible for not only the murders of Julian Amery and Jim Molyneaux, but also the assassination of Queen Elizabeth and most of the terrorist atrocities in the late 1970s. There is little or no evidence for this, and the conspiracy theories tend to be based on misreading the inquiry reports, the protestations of innocence from the Angry Brigade murderers of Julian Amery and a few vague sentences in Jim Molyneaux's posthumously published memoirs. There are many different contradictory versions of the supposed plot, most of which are espoused by the same people who believe in UFOs and Atlantis and the most likely explanation is that the Powell government's crimes were all the fault of its politicians.

Letters to the Editor, The Times, 8th April 1994

Sir,

While I cannot deny the importance of British trade with the United States, nor ignore the benefits of decreasing trade barriers. However these benefits accrue to all participants and it should be an easy matter to negotiate such matters alone, there is no need to gild the lily with the adoption of supranational bodies. We can trade with the USA and Canada without membership of NAFTA; one can trade with a country without having to share the same bathwater.

While NAFTA in its present form may seem to pose no threat, British entry would be a first chip in our sovereignty, and a country can no more be a bit sovereign than one can be a bit pregnant. Either a country is sovereign, or it is not. Those matters that are unanimous today, will be majoritarian tomorrow. What is today voluntary will tomorrow be compulsory. Should Britain make the error of entering NAFTA she will be drawn ever closer into the mire, a tiny island alongside her giant and voracious protector. I have no doubts in predicting the end of Britain as an independent state within twenty years should she make the historic error of selling her independence for economic benefit.

J. ENOCH POWELL, AVONDALE, ZIMBABWE