SIR –In response to Mr Boyes’s letter (October 28) and others who constantly allude to a jaundiced and highly-inaccurate view of the industrial unrest in the 1970s, the right wing press, to this day, serve up reams of subjective nonsense about an ‘ultra-left-wing government’ and ‘greedy trades unionists’. While it is true there was a lot of industrial action, as is so often the case, the issue of cause and effect is never high on the agenda of facts to be presented, not surprisingly.
Harold Wilson scared the pants off the British establishment. Harold was a highly-personable politician who could play the media like a violin, and he was a committed socialist. He had to go.
The ‘establishment’ (the Tories, the banks, industrialists and the CBI) simply orchestrated an effective ‘money strike’ by curtailing inward UK investment.
Inflation went through the roof and, not unnaturally, workers demanded above-inflation pay rises (as a young fireman at the time, I was one of them). Had this financial coupe d’etat failed, there was a parallel plot to bring down the government with military means.
So tell me, who were the real ‘enemy within’?
Christopher Hindle, Osterley Grove, Bradford
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