This blog continues the discussion of the British currency crisis in 1976. It traces the growing anti-government influence on key players within the British Labour government as the pressures on the exchange rate were mounting in the early part of 1976. While the Chancellor was clearly influenced by the growing dominance of Monetarist thought, he also fell under the influence of the so-called Bacon-Eltis thesis, which argued that the growth of the public sector in the 1960s and early 1970s in Britain had starved the private sector of resources, which had led, directly, to the declining growth, high inflation and elevated unemployment. The conservative mainstream used this thesis to call for harsh cut backs in public spending and the British Labour government were increasingly cowed into submission by the vehemence of this mounting opposition. The problem is that the ‘thesis’ didn’t stand up to critical scrutiny, although that fact didn’t seem to bother those who used it to advance their anti-government ideological agenda. This blog is longer than usual because I felt it important to put this part of the story into one continuous narrative rather than break it up into two or three separate, shorter blogs.

When the Labour Party resumed minority government in March 1974 after a close victory over the Tories in the February election, which had delivered a hung parliament, the British economy was in recession and inflation was running at 12.9 per cent. To resolve the political impasse, he called a further election on October 10, 1974 and gained a majority. The contraction in real GDP began in the third-quarter 1973 under the Tories as the Dash for Growth ended badly and Britain recorded three consecutive quarters of negative growth. Thus, British Labour was on the back foot from day one as a result of inheriting an economy that was in decline as a result of declining investment in best-practice technology as British capital sought lucrative speculative investments abroad. Productivity was falling and the scope for rising standards of living were becoming limited, thus intensifying the struggle over the distribution of income. Many coalmines, a major source of employment and growth, were also reaching the end of their economic life. However, key figures in the Labour government (such as the Chancellor Denis Healey) had fallen into the sway of the emerging Monetarist thinking, which had the consequence of elevating the fraught Monetarist causality to centre stage at the neglect of policies that might have actually addressed the underlying issues. The IMF entered the fray and made matters worse, as usual. Today, we trace the events leading up to this turning point.

The Bank of England’s failure in the early 1970s to control the money supply under the Competition and Credit Control (CCC) policy should have discouraged the Monetarist support base. However, while the monetary targets were abandoned, the Monetarist infestation was firmly alive among economists in the British Treasury and the Bank of England and the junior ministers in Edward Heath’s government. The City was also a hotbed of Monetarist support, with the likes of Gordon Pepper, an economist in the private sector who edited the Greenwell Monetary Bulletin prominent. Pepper, was very vocal and very influential within government circles. The ‘Greenwell Monetary Bulletin’ became a vehicle for the monetarist views to penetrate the highest levels of government. The British Labour Party was struggling with its factions. On the one hand, the Left was becoming more powerful within the Party and deeply rejected the attempts to diminish union operations. They formulated a new and far reaching industrial policy, which was light years away from the approach adopted by Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s. But there was also a significant rump of Labour Monetarists, mostly concentrated in the Parliamentary party who were closer to the Tories on macroeconomic policy than their colleagues on the Left. Major tensions developed and would, ultimately lead to the famous 1976 surrender to Monetarism by James Callaghan at the National Conference. We trace this evolution in this blog so that we can understand the next instalment, which analyses the 1976 IMF loan arrangement that the British government entered into. This arrangement is a significant turning point in the way that social democratic governments have been captured by the neo-liberal myths.

In the previous instalment of this series of blogs I am writing, which will form the input to my next book on globalisation and the capacities of the nation-state, which I am working on with Italian journalist Thomas Fazi, I covered the role of trade unions in a capitalist system where class conflict is a major dynamic. One of the characteristics of the post-modern Left is the denial of the role trade unions play in inflationary episodes. However, once we accept that the unions are creatures of capitalism and embody of the conflictual nature of income distribution within that mode of production, then it is clear that as a countervailing force against capital, unions can precipitate economic crisis if they are ‘too successful’. Too successful in this context refers to the use of their power to control the supply of labour which negative impacts on the rate of profit earned by capital and leads to a decline in investment and a rise in unemployment. Trade unions are a problem for capital. Today, we consider the way in which this ‘problem’ manifested in the inflation in Britain in the early to mid-1970s and the failure by the British Labour Party to fully understand the causation involved. By the mid-1970s, the British Labour government had surrendered to the growing dominance of the Monetarist school of thought, which diverted its gaze from the true nature of the economic crisis. They unnecessarily called in the IMF as a result of this blindness.