Empire strikes back? Watt explained, Heseltine had been out- with the Pentagon, were really with the big
The Heseltine affair What lies behind the Westland imbroglio? Heseltine's challenge for leadership of the Tories and also Star Wars, argues OLIVER MACDONALD. And behind Star Wars lies the British state's client relationship to the US. Any left strategy that fails to break the Washington connection will be nugatory. THERE Is NoW overwhelming evidence that what ended as a Heseltine exocet square amidships of the Thatcher faction, began as a Thatcher Goose Green against a beseiged Heseltine, aided, as so often, by Reaganite logistic support. And the real source of this winter war was not Westlands at all but Star Wars.
In the autumn, the Thatcherite faction knew they faced a growing threat within the Tory party and the capitalist class. The devastated industrial base, big city wasteland, growing electoral threat and the beginning of the decline in oil output pointed towards a Tory assault on Thatcherism in the name of state-led domestic capital accumulation and technological regeneration. The heavy defeat inflicted on the trade union movement removed a key obstacle to such an assault. Who would lead it or be ready to profit from it? There was an obvious answer: Mr State Capitalism himself, son of Heath over at the Ministry of Defence, otherwise known as Goldilocks.
Heseltine made no secret of his loathing of Thatcher's anti-industrial, anti-Europe policy, pro-banker, retailer and rentier policy. In all these fields Thatcher fitted perfectly with US interests. Heseltine did not. He made his disagreements clear at the Tory conference. But contrary to subsequent myth, he is not a rash politician. He was moving cautiously. Only something that would put his entire career at risk could have made him engage in the all out war that he launched in December.
That something was not Westlands - a minor issue — but Star Wars. We now know (thanks to an article in the Times by David Watt, former chief of the Royal Institute of International Affairs) that Goldilocks was strongly opposed to Star Wars. So was the Foreign Office, in the spring at least. Leaving aside the military and political objections, the hostility from pro-European technological and industrial nationalists like Heseltine was all too obvious. But the last thing you do in the Tory leadership these days is flatly oppose the central plank of
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Heseltine inspects the troops. Reagan's foreign policy. Even Howe's everso mealy-mouthed attempt to pose a question mark on SDI last Spring brought a holocaust of abuse, much of it public, down upon him from Washington and the Reaganite group here. So instead Heseltine put a condition on any Star Wars deal, a condition he knew Washington would never accept: he demanded a billion dollars on the table before he would put pen to paper.
'...the last thing you do in the Tory leadership these
days is flatly oppose the central plank of Reagan's
foreign policy. '
That was where matters stood in late November as the Geneva summit came: no deal. But as soon as the summit was over, the Reaganites turned nasty and started putting the heat on. Continued MoD stubbornness led them to cast diplomatic niceties aside and ridicule Heseltine in London's Anglo-American press. Meanwhile Thatcher got a briefing from Reagan on the summit.
from Schultz. Then another from Weinberger and no doubt
And then lo and behold, Goldilocks was sitting there next to Weinberger signing the Star Wars deal he had been fighting. As
Philip Gordon/Refley manoeuvred by Thatcher: she had done her own deal with the Americans and then used the cabinet committee system to defeat Heseltine.
This must have seemed to Thatcher like one of her most brilliant operations; she had offered her enemy only two options, one crippling, the other suicidal. To resign, rather than sign the deal, was suicidal. This would have meant public opposition to Washington's central plank at the Geneva summit, an opposition using language similar to much of what Gorbachev was saying. A Tory Minister of Defence wobbling towards the enemy! How about a joint press conference with E.P. Thompson? Yet not to have resigned here would cut Heseltine off from many of his allies in Europe and underminde his credentials as a future champion of technological and industrial nationalism in the fight for the Tory leadership.
What Thatcher overlooked in that triumphant second weck of December, was Heseltine's third option, namely all out war against part of her Star Wars deal with the US — the Westland part of the package.
This is where we come to the real core of Downing Street's cover-up operation, the inner secret that paralysed Thatcher in the face of the Heseltine offensive. Because the facts are hidden we can rely only on circumstantial evidence. Yet the case is overwhelming:
One, Thatcher was centrally involved, on
against Heseltine, in the
Two, these negotiations, though formally
US corporations doing the Star Wars work. One of the biggest of these corporations involved in Star Wars is United Technologies (UT), the seventh-largest company in the USA. When the Star Wars talks were going on, UT' had already put in a bid to get hold of Westland.
Three, after the Star Wars deal was signed, it emerged that UT was offering Westland Star Wars work
Four, it was not the Department of Trade and Industry which was championing the UT link-up with Westland and opposing a European bid, it was Thatcher who Intervened in the second week of December to block the European option.
All this points in one clear direction: during her Star Wars talks with Washington, Thatcher committed herself to the UT bid for Westland.
This gave Heseltine his opening, for he already had unambigunus MoD policy that ruled out any deal with UT, the government was expressly committed to buying its next three types of military helicopters from West European design and production When Kohl was in London for a routine meeting with Thatcher, he took the opportunity to pop in and see Heseltine. decided to strengthen the line against UT by arranging for the National Armaments Directors to meet and recommend no West European purchase of American helicopters.
"Thatcher was centrally involved, on her own
behalf, against Heseltine, in
the Star Wars negotiations.'
Thus was Thatcher paralysed: she could not oppose the European bid that Goldilocks put together, yet she was already committed to the American link up. In this way she was led into the morass of publicly insisting she was neutral while working behind the scenes for the American deal. The more Heseltine made the struggle public, the more difficult her position became, until the blow-out of 9
Thus the so-called Westland affair sprang from the mixing together of US pressure over Star Wars and the struggle between the Thatcher faction and its enemies within the Tory party and within the wider institutions of the ruling class. This may seem like a random combination of factors, but there is nothing random about them at all. For in fact both the rise and the crisis of the Thatcher faction has been the story of a very special kind of politics, still too little debated and analysed on the left. To grasp its nature: we must return to the origins of the British state's transformation into client status.
The British political establishment, Labour as well as Tory, sought client status piecemeal, often in the face of US reluctance to get involved in some British ruling class project. We can briefly summarise some of the main stages:
One, terrified of the strength of the mass
Communist parties on the continent, Labour
Thatcher: Atlanticist above all else. wanted to drag US military power back across the Atlantic. So it gave Washington an open door for military bases in Britain in the late 1940s.
Two, after the Suce debarle, Macmillan reversed Eden's efforts to defend the Empire (sterling arca) against US encroachments, and turned it into a British controlled subsystem within the American sphere. This obviated! the need for empire-based British capital to painfully restructure.
Three, the failure of the British rocket programme in the late 1950s, led Marmillan to turn to Washington for 'British' missiles
Four, in the 1960s British efforts to protect the Sterling arca militarily from internal threats and from budget crisis at home collapsed and led to the sterling area's demise British capital operating this arca, however, simply adapted to living under the
Tand sought to ensure that British domestic and foreign policy did not involve steps that could anger Washington and lead to reprisals against their own interests.
Five, partly as a by-product of the imperial orientation, the domestic economy declined steadily to the point where the state was far weaker cconomically than either the West German state or France and its ability to operate as a political force in Europe depended increasingly on its military status, above all its possession of American nukes. This international status, as a nuclear power, was also vital for the idcology of the Tory party domestically as the party of 'Great' Britain.
The trade off for succumbing to client status to the US was that Washington would pretend that the British state was a mighty and much respected partner. This fiction increasingly evaporated as London could not be an important clement even in the ceremonial side of US diplomacy. The domestic legitimacy of the British state still requires the US not demonstrate just how impotent and subordinate the state is in the face of US muscie.
'...international status as a
nuclear power was vital for
the ideology of the Tory Party domestically'
'The one serious attempt to reverse the drift towards ever closer dependence on Washington came not from the left but the right, and from within the state bureaucracy - the Heath-William Armstrong partnership at the start of the seventies. It was the catastrophic defeat of that effort which produced Thatcherism. The replacement of Heath by the semi-Poujadist Thatcherites is usually seen on the left as a move towards all-out onslaught on the trade union movement by revanchistes in the Tory party. This is right, but only part of the story. Thatcher's victory in 1975 was also used by those in the capitalist class who loathed and feared aspects of Heath's policies to stage a comcback. What these people hated was Heath's switch from the US connection towards a new close alliance with France. his switch from sterling stability to all-out efforts at domestic industrial and his readiness to dragoon industry into corporatist structures while ignoring City interests. All those forces that had blocked rapid domestic capital accumulation in the past and who had been pushed aside by Heath were ready under Thatcher in 1979, to rebuild Anglo-American capitalist links, to re-assert City interests, the interests of the large importing retailers. 'They have made a killing in the last seven years, hammering the industrial base harder than ever they had done in the fifties and sixties. And their economic interests fitted perfectly with the political frenzy of small business people wanting war against labour the more they were hit by big capital
By the late 1970s, the US was taking its post-war gloves off in its relations with Western Europe. The US wanted to restructure Western Europe so that it would fit into America's planned new global international division of labour and social system. The
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Ernest Bevin, Labour's Foreign Secretary. After the war, he allied with Washington against the stincts, fueled by welfare state constituencies workers from trade union dictatorship. The
Soviet Union and established the Atlanticist framework for future British governments enemies of these US plans were the cor. poratist bureaucrats of Western Europe with their penchant for nationalised industries and protectionism as well the social democratic parties with their similar in- and links with unions worried about jobs. Here was the basis for a beautiful friend- International, No. 3, March/April 1986
ship betweren Thatcherism and Reaganism - down with British protectionism, free the capital markets, free the people from nationalised industries and from local government bureaucrary, fre the City, free the National Westminster Barik Quarterly Review sounded the clarion call in 1979 with a warn-
ing of 'how far Britain has slipped from liberty towards totalitarian dictatorship'. Thatcher picked its boss, Leigh-Pemberton to take over the Bank of England. (He, by the way, is the person responsible for picking Cuckney to run Westland, last summer).
Now Thatcher's winter crisis over Westland and more recently BL has arrived, in the wake of the devastation of the lives of millions and with the prospect of a horrendous and explosive economic and social crisis as the oil money runs out, in the next few years.
The history of the transformation of the British state into a client imperialist apparatus shows that its source has lain in deliberate action by factions within the British ruling class and today its effects are to hamstring any attempt at reconciling the interests of working class people with the requirements of capital. Thus, any attempts to follow a serious full employment policy will involve taking measures which will bring Labour into conflict not just with the City but with Washington and attempts to follow a policy of strengthening the welfare state will mean a struggle not just with the British military-industrial complex but with Washington. The same is true even in fields such as civil liberties, and of course in all aspects of foreign policy.
'...any attempts to follow a
serious full employment policy will bring Labour into conflict not just with the City but with Washington'
What the Labour leadership hope is that they can find a way of reconciling class interests despite everything by finding support from two types of people: a national industria! bourgeoisie here, ready to go with Labour against the groups of capitalists that have made a packet out of Thatcherism; and secondly a grouping of people within Washington which is at least not actively hostile to social democratic government in countries like Britain and West Germany.
There are, of course, sections of industrial capital hostile to Thatcherism. But they are with Heseltine and all he represents: corporatism of the right, anti-trade unionism, expelling workers from production and removing Labour from its post-war position as a key pillar in the political system. As for people in Washington ready to live with social democracy in NATO Europe — who can come up with a single name anywhere near the centres of power in the US? For the capitalists of the 1980s Labour's only role is
prevent the labour movement from fighting effectively in defence of its interests. The power of the American state within British politics is a key instrument for protecting the British ruling class from unwelcome efforts by Labour to protect workers' interests. A policy for jobs and for welfare has 1o be an anti-capitalist policy and a policy challenging the American connection.