Recollections of an earlier Conservative government’s failed effort to take on the unions are a bit foggier, however. Yet the failure of Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act 1971 might provide some caution to the Conservative’s anti-union bullishness. They might also set out an alternative path to Keir Starmer’s non-committal timidity towards industrial action.

On 14 June 1970, the reigning World Cup champions England squandered a 2-0 lead over West Germany to lose 3-2 in extra time. Four days later, the Labour Party saw its 98-seat majority vanish before its eyes. For both England and Labour, the glow of their 1966 victories had finally been extinguished.

The Labour prime minister Harold Wilson spent the following day packing away his personal belongings in 10 Downing Street. His wife Mary described the exit as “barbarous”. Crowds had gathered outside Downing Street shouting “Out! Out! Out!”, but Wilson could not go immediately to Buckingham Palace to resign because the Queen was enjoying a day at Ascot. To drown out the jeers, Wilson played The Seekers’ “The Carnival Is Over” again and again on his record player.

When the new Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, entered Downing Street, he had two overriding missions. One was to bring Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC); the other was to crush the trade unions. The picture of trade union strength in 1970 was quite different from today. About half of British workers were in unions, compared to under a quarter now. In 1970, nearly 11 million working days in Britain were lost to strikes, more than any time since the General Strike of 1926. In contrast, less than a quarter of a million days were lost to strikes in 2019, the final full year of data before the pandemic.

Nor were those in the past solely aimed at Conservative government; strike action plagued. The final years of Wilson’s reign. The vast majority of these strikes were “unofficial” — that is to say, they were called without a ballot of members. Instead, a show of hands at a union meeting or the branch executive committee would be used as the mandate for a walk out.

The Employment Secretary Barbara Castle had tried to curb these actions. A trade unionist herself, Castle also wanted to update trade union rights, which were still relying on legal protections passed in 1906. Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, was intended to provide a charter of rights for unions, while also imposing certain legal responsibilities. When she presented the proposals in a secret meeting to the Trades Union Congress (TUC), however, she was met with stony silence. She later compared her efforts to win support for her reforms as “like trying to win the votes of undertakers for a recipe for immortality”.

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Once in office, Edward Heath was convinced that he could achieve what Labour failed to do. He would not only propose many of the punitive provisions outlined in In Place of Strife, but he would go further. He would establish a National Industrial Relations Court, which would have the power to grant injunctions to block strikes deemed to be injurious. It also banned the closed union shop, which had been a key Labour Party conviction (later abandoned by the Labour Party to align with European law, which forbids them).

When the Industrial Relations Bill was announced to the House of Commons in December 1970, Heath sat on the frontbenches grinning like “a Cheshire cat on a hot tin roof”, as Simon Jenkins put it. Heath thought he had forced the Labour Party into a corner. Labour would be forced either to repudiate its previous reforms and look hypocritical, or to oppose the legislation and look like it was in the pocket of the unions.

Heath’s clever scheme would backfire massively. The first thing Heath had not properly anticipated was both the skill and the scale of the opposition to the bill. It took seven months for the Government to push the bill through Parliament. In that time, it was met by ferocious resistance from Labour MPs, with the normally avuncular Willie Whitelaw being denounced as a “fascist” by Labour MPs in the House of Commons. Union activists took to the streets in enormous displays of solidarity.

To the surprise of many, Harold Wilson asked Barbara Castle to lead the charge against Heath’s trade union bill. While constantly subject to the charge of hypocrisy, Castle outlined the differences between her failed proposals and the Conservatives’. To add credibility to her arguments, Harold Wilson brought Michael Foot — doyen of the party’s Left — onto the frontbenches. Ever since his election in 1945, Foot had studiously avoided frontbench work, preferring to see himself as a principled outsider. When Foot first appeared at the despatch box, one journalist wrote in amazement: “It was as if Mary Whitehouse had turned up in the cast of Oh, Calcutta!”

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The second miscalculation Heath had made was about the Labour Party’s relationship with the unions. Rather than drive a wedge, the Industrial Relations Bill helped to reunify the Labour Party and the unions, as they vowed to work together to oppose the legislation. In February 1971, the Labour Liaison Committee was formed, with six members each from the Shadow Cabinet, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), and the TUC. It would become a crucial policy arm for the Labour Party during those years in opposition.

Out of the Liaison Committee emerged the Social Contract — a “great compact”, as Wilson called it — between the Labour Party and the unions. Labour vowed that it would repeal the Industrial Relation Act in the first session of the new Parliament. It would accompany this repeal with a raft of social welfare legislation and redistribution. Unions, in turn, would work to keep down wage demands through voluntary wage restraint.

In contrast, Heath continued to promote the image that he was in a great battle against the unions. This was his third miscalculation. Once he finally passed the Industrial Relations Act in June 1971, Heath had in effect taken ownership for subsequent industrial strife. He had passed a bill which was meant to end strikes, yet strikes only increased after the bill’s passage. In 1972, there were nearly 24 million working days lost to strike action, unseen since the General Strike.

Heath’s National Industrial Relations Court began imprisoning trade unionists who had gone on strike, contrary to the court’s injunctions. These arrests, like the famous Pentonville Five case, only provoked a further storm of industrial fury and unrest. In December 1970, when the legislation was first proposed, Heath had anticipated some backlash. “It is the storm before the calm,” he warned. But, he vowed: “Your government will not bow before the storm.”

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Yet, as Heath’s government trundled on, the storm got worse. The oil price spike in 1973, combined with domestic industrial unrest in the energy sector, led to the government imposing a highly unpopular three-day week and the rationing of electricity usage. The Government was struggling to survive, and the whiff of an early election hung in the air.

In a December 1973 meeting of the Liaison Committee, it was agreed that even if the Government tried to frame an upcoming general election as a battle between Britain and the unions, Labour must stand by the unions. Labour’s January 1974 party political broadcast emphasised its productive relationship with the unions, where they would be “working together” in the “national interest”, not seeking to prolong the fight.

The Labour Party saw an opportunity to use its union connections for its own political benefit. The Social Contract, agreed by the Liaison Committee, became a clever political ploy for Wilson. He was able to promote the image that he and the unions were equals and on the kinds of terms that could forge an agreement. A vote for Labour in the February 1974 election became a vote to end the industrial strife by supporting the party that had a good working relationship with the unions. On 4 March 1974, Harold Wilson strolled through the steps of Downing Street once more.

While the strength of the trade union movement today is not what it was in the Seventies, there are important lessons for Sunak and Starmer. First, for Sunak: Heath overplayed his hand. He thought he could “take on” the unions and promised that his legislation would do just that. He was caught off-guard by the strength of the solidarity of the union movement and its ability to adapt. Rather than quell industrial strife, he only provoked more conflict.

The second lesson, for Starmer, is that Wilson refused to play into Tory hands. He knew that Labour’s relationship with the unions was a sensitive topic, particularly after In Place of Strife. Yet rather than think he could make political gains by bashing the unions and trying to “out-Heath Heath”, he opted for a co-operative relationship with the union leadership. The Liaison Committee between the party and unions proved to be a great success, helping to develop a set of policy proposals and a working relationship that would stabilise Wilson’s tenure. In the February 1974 election, Wilson could credibly argue he had the relationship with the unions that could settle the industrial dispute.

Rather than see unions as the embarrassing relative at the party, a proper working relationship of mutual respect, support, and solidarity might just be the winning formula for Labour — especially when contrasted with Tory division and disarray. There are already some signs that Labour is adopting this approach, with recent communications condemning the Conservatives for threatening to fire striking nurses.

Sunak, on the other hand, seems to be repeating Heath’s mistakes. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill will not end industrial disruption, but in claiming that it will, Sunak is setting himself up for failure. If Sunak repeats Heath’s famous question of 1974, “Who governs?”, the answer after the next general election may well not be him.

Iain Macleod was the last Chancellor to die in office. He lasted 30 days, 17 of which were spent in recovery from a stomach operation. When he had his fatal heart attack, at 23:35 on July 20, 1970, it cast a dark omen over the already fragile Edward Heath government.

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The song in question, “Three Score and Ten”, tells the story of a single stormy night in 1884, and the horrific death toll that came with it:

And there were three score and ten, boys and men
Were lost from Grimsby Town
From Yarmouth down to Scarborough
Many hundreds more were drowned

Their herring craft, their trawlers
Their fishing smacks as well
They long did fight the bitter night
And battle with the swell.

But it’s not just the sentimental pleasure of singing a sad song with a catchy chorus that keeps this song alive. Fishing is woven deep into the culture of the British Isles: so deep, that despite today being only a tiny contributor to our economy, and with little political leverage, it may yet scupper Boris’s Brexit deal.

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Why, then, does fishing stir people up? It’s not jobs or money. According to Commons Library research, the UK fishing industry employs about 24,000 people and earns around £1.4bn per annum. As a proportion of Britain’s £2.1 trillion 2019 GDP, that’s small change. And with 27,000 employees in the UK alone, Amazon provides more jobs today than the entire British fishing sector.

The BBC recently had a go, suggesting that ‘supporters of Brexit’ see fishing as ‘a symbol of sovereignty that will now be regained’. But it goes deeper than abstract ideas of control. The environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth argues that if we’re to find national identity anywhere, it’s in the relationship we have with our landscape we inhabit. And for the inhabitants of the British Isles, no matter which wave of migration brought us here since this landmass was settled in about 900,000BC, that identity has been bound up with the sea.

Wherever you live in the British Isles, it’s not possible to be more than 70 miles from the sea. We have around 19,500 miles of coastline: more than Brazil. The sea has sustained and shaped Britain for thousands of years.

The usual angle on this story is about commerce and colonisation. In its pomp, the might of the British Empire was inseparable from its maritime culture. This fact, and Britain’s decline from imperial grandeur, underpinned the recent controversy over singing “Rule Britannia” at the Proms . But so far the culture war has largely ignored those working-class men who plied the same waves not to conquer or trade, but to catch fish.

Fishing has been part of British culture since time immemorial, but especially on the North Sea coast. The monks of Wyke Hull were granted a special licence to fish in the Humber by King Henry II in the 12^th century. Then in the 19^th century, when the arrival of railways opened up new inland markets for fresh fish, a wave of migration to the area made Hull a fishing boom town. Often-illiterate fishermen set sail in ‘fishing smacks’, light sail-powered vessels of around 50 feet with a crew of around four men, to trawl for deep-sea fish as far afield as the Faroes and Iceland.

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Working on a North Sea fishing smack was brutally dangerous: between 1863 and 1871 around 1,000 such boats were operating from ports along the northeast, and every year around 120 of them were lost to accidents. In Grimsby alone, 1,024 men were lost between 1880 and 1893, all from fishing smacks.

Nor was joining a fishing crew always a choice. The historian Peter Anson noted that of the boys and men who made up the Grimsby fishing fleet, “Most of the apprentices had been brought up in orphanages and reformatory schools.” It’s likely that of the “three score and ten” who died on that stormy October night in 1884, some had been forced into the trade.

This hard and dangerous work bred a unique working culture. In his 1934 travelogue English Journey, JB Priestley described fishing as employing perhaps the last of the wild men in this tamed Island of ours; fellows capable of working day and night without food or sleep […] and then also capable of going on the booze with equal energy and enthusiasm.

This culture was transmitted (as is often the case for working-class history) through myth and music. If they survived long enough to be drawn into the culture of working fishermen, apprentice smacksmen would soon learn the songs that beat the rhythms of working life at sea. Shanties and ‘capstan songs’, surviving today only in sheet music and the folk music scene, were tools of the trade: rhythmic tunes sung onboard to give the beat for hauling ropes to work the ship, or turning the capstan to winch in heavy nets.

Indeed, ”The Smacksman”  is itself a capstan song, which contrasts the idyllic appearance of life at sea with its grim reality. Nothing could be more quintessentially British than this cheerful sing-it-on-the-job ditty about having a horrible job:

Once I was a schoolboy, on the shores I used to roam
And watch the boats go out to sea, at the setting of the sun.
I thought I’d like the seafaring life but very soon I found
It wasn’t common sailing when we reached the fishing ground.

It was, “Heave on the trawl my boys, never mind the storm!”
When we get the fish aboard we’ll have another haul.
“Heave away the capstan, merrily heave away!”
It’s the same old cry in the middle of the night as it is in the early day.

The rhythms of fishing life occupied not just those at sea, but everyone onshore too. The whole community turned on the rhythm of the ‘long-tripper’ boats that by the onset of the First World War employed some 17,000 full-time fishermen. ‘Fishwives’ would mend nets, bait lines and process the catch, selling fish from the docks or carrying it to market in woven baskets. Even lullabies had a tang of the sea: the Northumbrian lullaby “Dance to your daddy” promises the baby “You shall have a fishy/When the boat comes in”.

As North Sea white fish grew in popularity, inland fishing declined. Britain lost the taste for herring (today, we export 93% of the British herring catch) and embraced cod-and-chips. Meanwhile, advances in fishing technology began to transform the industry from the dangerous sail-powered work of the 19^th-century smacksman to something more industrial, increasingly carried out by huge trawlers with refrigerated holds and even on-board canneries, that could put to sea for weeks at a time.

Then, in the mid-20th century, a sector focused not on inland fishing but North Sea trawling collided with the ‘rules-based international order’ — and sank.

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The 1970 Common Fisheries Policy was an attempt to address the growing problem of overfishing resulting from the ever more efficient design of 20^th-century trawlers. It wasn’t the first such attempt to allocate fishing rights; the nations signing the 1964 London Convention on Fisheries are all now EU members.

But when Britain joined the EEC in 1973, it was allocated quotas set based not on the total catch by British vessels, but only on fish caught in EEC waters. And these didn’t include the more distant North Sea fishing-grounds where the bulk of the British trawlers worked.

Thus it’s both true and not true that ‘Ted Heath sold British fishermen down the river’, as the popular perception has it today. Yes, CFP quotas were skewed against Britain — but this wouldn’t have mattered had Britain been able to go on fishing further afield. And Britain’s ‘long-tripper’ fishermen were defeated not by Brussels, but by geopolitics.

In the 1970s, in another effort to manage the excesses of overfishing, the UN established Exclusive Economic Zones around coastal states, giving each state the sole right to economic exploitation of these waters. This triggered the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland, over the right to fish off the Icelandic coast. At the height of the Cod Wars, British trawlers were shot at by Icelandic fishermen, and one large vessel was even shelled by Icelandic artillery after it was spotted fishing inside the limit.

Britain’s military clout seemed sure to guarantee victory in the Cod Wars. But Iceland had a trump card up its sleeve: geography. The Cod Wars took place at the height of the Cold War, and the US naval base on the Reykjanes peninsula in western Iceland was critical to America’s efforts to track Soviet movements via the key chokepoint between Greenland, Iceland and the UK.

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So Iceland threatened to withdraw from Nato if the British did not stop fishing in Icelandic waters. Fearful of losing its naval base, the United States put pressure on Britain. Britain folded: the Cod Wars ended in 1976 with Britain agreeing to respect an exclusive 200-mile Icelandic fishing zone around its coast.

But by then there was nowhere else for the British fleet to go. As an EEC member, quotas for British territorial waters had been set meanwhile by the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s no surprise, then, that that the peak year for British fishing was around 1 million tons of fish caught, in 1973 — the year Britain joined the EEC.

Thus British fishing sank under the triple weight of European treaties, marine conservation and Cold War geopolitics. Neither the Right nor the Left saw fit to fight for it: too working-class for the 20^th-century Tories, and too old-fashioned for the Thatcherites, nor was fishing ever a unionised power-base for the Labour Party. No one noticed as Britain’s once-thriving coastal communities slid into despair, becoming some of the most deprived in the country.

But if Brexit teaches us anything, it’s that ignoring something lots of people care about doesn’t make that thing go away. Today, fishing once again threatens to blow Brexit off course — and Boris may find that even his ‘compromise’ position is not enough to calm the political waters.

The Leave vote was as much about identity as substantive economic matters. And below the surface of Britain’s supposedly modern 21^st-century culture is a powerful undertow of maritime memory, that has nothing to do with imperial grandeur — and everything to do with fish. Boris’ deal may yet founder on our yearning for the unquiet sea.

To put it another way, few people were ever heard to say “I do hope Ted Heath is there” when they headed out for an evening. Stories of his rudeness and difficult-ness still abound more than a decade after his death, in 2005.

I only ever saw him up close once – when he gave evidence over several days at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.  His appearance was so grudging, his responses to the lawyers who questioned him (often rudely) of such superior rudeness that the lawyers several times sought protection from the presiding judges.

What was the cause of this great souring? None of Heath’s biographers have been able to say. Perhaps it was all caused by professional upset. Perhaps it was all caused by an unfulfilled private life, consisting of a lonely, lifelong bachelor-hood. Perhaps it was something else. We shall most likely never know.

Yet the British police, in an apparent effort to prosecute every celebrity from the 1970s, have been doing their best to provide an answer. 

Since that announcement in Salisbury Close we have seen investigations into similar accusations against Field Marshall Lord Bramall shown to be utterly false. Only last month it was reported that the Metropolitan Police have been forced to pay financial compensation to one of Britain’s most distinguished living soldiers. The reputation of Lord Bramall has been cleared, but only after a concerted campaign to prevent this veteran of the Normandy landings, now in his nineties, from dying with the allegations hanging over him. Sadly, his wife did die before the police, who never appeared in any hurry, corrected the error.

A similar situation occurred with the former MP Harvey Proctor, who was at one point publicly alleged to have engaged in acts of child sexual abuse with Edward Heath.  One of Proctor’s accusers – a person only known as ‘Nick’ – also made allegations against Heath, who happened to be a political opponent of Proctor’s.  That accuser could now himself be facing charges over his fantastical and erroneous claims. But those accused by ‘Nick’ have had to live with the consequences of his allegations. Having lost his job over the controversy, Proctor has been reduced to living in a garden shed. Last month he announced that he would sue the Metropolitan police.

Despite what Bramall and Proctor have endured, both are fortunate to be alive and able to fight the accusations against them. Specifically, they have been able to fight the police tactic of treating suspects as guilty until they can prove themselves innocent, a tactic exemplified lately by announcements from senior police that they believe allegations against Heath to be true.

Edward Heath is not in such a fortunate position.  Without having left any family, and without having left many friends or others keen to leap to his defence, it appears that the police may get away with destroying his reputation without having to prove a thing.

The latest chapter in the police’s two year investigation of the late Prime Minister is their production of a report.  Having leaked allegations to various papers for years – most noticeably the Mail on Sunday, which has spread lurid allegations across its front-pages – the police have now produced the full results of Operation Conifer: a total of seven individual disclosures stretching from the 1960s to the 1990s. That the former Prime Minister, under constant police escort until his death, would have been able to carry out acts of child abuse under the noses of the British police is just one question-raising feature of the case.  Whether the promise of substantial pay-outs in compensation for anyone who claims to have suffered at the hands of Heath became a factor here is something we may never get to the bottom of.

The British media have splashed this development with the news that the police would have interviewed Heath under caution – were he still alive.  Buried in their reporting is the too-late police reminder that:

‘It is clearly inappropriate to speculate what Heath’s response would have been in relation to the allegations put to him under caution in an interview. His account would have informed the next stages of the investigation strategy and investigators would have looked to check and test his account against the other available evidence.’

Indeed. But since Heath is dead that next stage is impossible. And so the police – who routinely complain about being so under-resourced that they cannot even monitor potential terrorists – have used their resourcing priorities to rampage across the reputation of a dead politician.

Who knows. Perhaps there is some cosmic justice.  If not, then perhaps after his own death, a similar process of destruction can be carried out against the reputation of the current head of Wiltshire police? Or any of the numerous other people who have found this process agreeable and easy even while unjust. But meantime the manner in which a difficult man’s reputation has been destroyed should shock anybody for whom justice matters more than ease.

You do not need to have liked Edward Heath to hate the way in which this injustice has been meted out.