The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (41 page)

Caroline and I got back to Stansgate about I am, both pretty tired.

Sunday 28 September – Labour Party Conference, Brighton

Conference, and a late lie-in and after lunch we had the NEC. I moved that the press be admitted because everything had been leaked. This was very nearly carried.

I got as near as I could to proposing that there should be a referendum on our decision to go into the EEC. I had almost got it out when Harold realised what I was going to say, and stopped it I didn’t fight the issue. But I know perfectly well that no government will agree to go into the EEC if there isn’t more enthusiasm than there is at the moment.

Saturday 4 October

To Number 10, where of course Ministers affected by the reshuffle had been coming and going all day. Harold told me he wanted me to remain Minister of Technology and take over the whole Ministry of Power, all the industry divisions from the Board of Trade and their industrial location work, and the industrial side of the DEA. I called Otto in and he knew exactly what it involved. This evening I had just a bit of time to think it all over. It is an enormous job that I have effectively been given and I must say I was staggered to find the whole Ministry of Power coming over to me but I couldn’t ring anybody up to talk about it.

Sunday 5 October

I planned what I was going to do with this new huge department and at 6 the announcement was made on TV. The growth of the Ministry of Technology was
the
news; there was no question this was the main story of the day. Crosland has been given the job of Secretary of State for England, co-ordinating transport and housing and he is obviously very sick about it because he doesn’t think there is anything in the job. I have been effectively given the Ministry of Industry job which is what I really wanted.

Wednesday 5 November

Came home for fireworks and worked late. Gradually emerging from a couple of weeks of real exhaustion.

I only had one bit of business at home tonight. I have been trying to put my oar in to be sure that the British don’t join in the American underground tests of nuclear weapons without, at least, a meeting of Ministers to discuss it.
Denis Healey has been determined to get British nuclear weapons tested underground in the US, and since I put my foot down, he has been trying to get at me. In the end I decided to ring Number 10, and I put the points to a Private Secretary to pass on to the Prime Minister; I said I would abide by his decision, but I don’t know whether Harold cares one way or the other.

Monday 17 November

At 11, I went to the Campaign Committee, where David Kingsley presented a report on the first round of the advertising campaign for the next Election, ‘Labour has Life and Soul’ and ‘When it Comes Down to it Aren’t Their Ideals Yours as Well?’

Denis Healey said we must present ourselves as a government that could govern. Jim Callaghan warned that people might not like change and might want a quieter life, which I thought was a bit of a dig at the dynamic Ministry of Technology! Generally there was a consensus and it was agreed we would do a television programme before Christmas and a party political broadcast at the end of the year, in which I would be the party spokesman.

Incidentally,
The Times
had an amusing two-column article by David Wood called ‘Sandwiches with Benn’. It began by mocking me about my sandwich lunches, then said how industrialists were working happily with me and that the Tories were worried about it.

We had the Mintech board lunch. Harold Lever responded to
The Times
by producing some smoked salmon, freshly baked bread and cheese and some other things. It has become a bit of a joke. Next week I am going to take my sandwiches in a red handkerchief and see whether I can’t lower our standards still further.

We discussed the need to ensure that there was adequate supply of stocks of fuel for the winter: corrosion in the bolts in the Magnox power stations has led to a 25 per cent cutback in their utilisation, and it is potentially a great tragedy if corrosion prevents these nuclear power stations from being used at all.

Wednesday 19 November

The Apollo 12 landed this morning and there was a moon walk, which, unfortunately, we weren’t able to see because the television set had broken down.

Wednesday 26 November

To the Economic Policy Committee, where the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders problem came up. They have got into serious difficulty and want a substantial sum of money, and Jack Diamond was in favour of liquidating. In my paper I said we couldn’t justify any more money on industrial grounds, but Harold chipped in and said that on political grounds, we couldn’t have 8.5 per cent male unemployment on the Clyde – which I
agree with absolutely. So we decided to set up a committee to see what was the minimum we could give to keep them going.

Monday 1 December

I had a very sad and painful meeting with Peter Masefield and the board of Beagle to tell them that the Government was not prepared to continue to support them and there was no alternative but to ask the bank to set up a receiver and manager.

At the House of Commons for an all-night sitting.

Thursday 25 December

Melissa and Joshua woke up at 4.30 am and exchanged their presents. We had ours in the bedroom. It was a wonderful Christmas, Caroline having done all the work. After lunch Stephen, Hilary and Melissa played a madrigal, and we had the usual call from Cincinnati. In the evening Stephen and I took a bottle of whisky to the Mintech night guard, finished up with Mother and Buddy and finally got to bed about 1 am.

Wednesday 31 December

Went to Bradwell Power Station today and Sir Stanley Brown, and Mr Weeks, head of the CEGB study group on the Magnox corrosion, were there. I was met by the Station Superintendent and accompanied by people who had come straight down from London – Jack Rampton, who is the Deputy Secretary in charge, Trevor Griffiths, the Chief Nuclear Inspector, and John Bowder, my Assistant Private Secretary. I spent about an hour and a half with the working model, seeing exactly what the problem was, then went to have a look at the refuelling operation by closed-circuit colour TV, and to the control room. I saw a film of the removal of the sample basket which had taken place last year, and had lunch with the group.

I’m very glad I went because it indicated the real nature of the problem, which is seen by the CEGB not so much as a safety problem but as a problem that might affect the economics of the power station. The danger is that the very high temperature CO2 gas which goes through the fuel elements has had the effect of oxidising or corroding the bolts holding the core restraint, and corroding all the other bolts in the reactor.

If, by any chance, there were any displacement of the graphite blocks in which the fuel elements run or, even more serious, of the channels into which the control rods drop, you might lose control of the reactor and it is possible that one of the fuel elements might melt. If there was at the same time a rupture in the head exchanger circuit you could get a tremendously overheated reactor with the fuel elements melting, causing a major nuclear accident that would kill many thousands of people in the area of Bradwell and would create a radioactive cloud that might kill people in London.

The real question is, do the control rods go in and out easily and could this
be affected by further corrosion? They currently drop in 100 of them in 1.2 seconds and there’s no reason to believe at the moment that this will change. But the position is being watched very carefully.

Mr Griffiths told me that he would keep an eye on the situation in order to lay down the rules about a shutdown for further inspection if he thought that the temperatures being operated were too high. The temperatue has risen progressively since the station’s inception in the early Sixties, although recently it was reduced from 390 degrees Centigrade to 360 degrees. But in view of the problem of the fuel situation this winter, the fear of a power strike and the cold weather, the GEGB has decided to increase the temperature to 380 degrees, with the result that the old rate of corrosion, about twice the rate of corrosion at 360 degrees, has resumed. This is taking a calculated risk, so as not to dislocate industry.

I wrote a brief report on this and I am now trying to get an independent engineer to take on the job of reading all the documents and advising me.

Tuesday 6 January 1970

I went to the Campaign Committee this morning. Mark Abrams, chairman of Research Services Ltd, reported on the attitude of younger voters. I found one or two things interesting but also discouraging. For example, young people were not interested in education, that is to say they were against the raising of the school leaving age. This made a big impact on the Prime Minister and Jim Callaghan and one or two others who don’t want to raise the school leaving age. All of a sudden one could see how very big decisions could be taken by government on the basis of the most inadequate evidence which confirms their prejudices. I realise we will have to fight very hard on that.

In the evening Caroline, Stephen and I went to Peter Townsend’s party. Peter teaches at Essex and I was surrounded by three of his young sociology students who just called me a Fascist and called me it so often I got rather angry. A dull German professor linked me with a lot of other Fascists and when I said to him, ‘Could you give me the names of any world politicians who disagree with you but are not Fascists?’, he said, ‘That is a Fascist’s sort of question.’ He defined Fascism as a belief in technology, and technology as a belief in the use of machines to change social values. Altogether I thought he was very poor stuff, of the kind you get among sociologists who don’t study technology or industry or what is happening in the world. We very foolishly stayed till about 2, and I had to work on my boxes till 4.

Tuesday 17 February

There was a very significant development over UCS. In my diary last week, I referred to the fact that Jack Diamond went up to Upper Clyde. He found himself confronted by six chartered accountants and was very impressed by their figures so he agreed to pay the full £7 million to UCS, as authorised by
the Cabinet, Harold Lever having asked for £4 million and Jack previously being prepared to give only £2.5 million. In addition he has decided to dismantle the monitoring system because he is afraid that if you monitor you would have to pay the creditors.

Tuesday 24 February

Ivor said to me today, ‘You are getting too many “Noes” from Number 10’, which had a profound effect on me. I
have
had a lot of noes, so I tried to work out what they had been about; usually broadcasting proposals that Number 10 had turned down, my paper on government information services and another on persuasion in industrial disputes, and Ivor made the point that no Minister should have proposals turned down as often as that. So in the light of this, I didn’t, for the time being, pursue another issue I had in mind.

Wednesday 25 February

Meeting with Yugoslav Prime Minister, Mr Ribicic, at Number 10. He said he was glad to see more and more people becoming involved in the problems of world peace and he hoped the interests of the superpowers would not dominate the world. He had got better relations with the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union needed Mediterranean friends and access to warm waters, and there were now closer economic and industrial links with the other Eastern Europe countries, except for Bulgaria whose claim for Macedonia had created a great problem. He also said he had good economic relations with America, but was critical of their policy in Vietnam, and their support of Israel.

He was afraid of great-power influence disturbing the Balkans, which was why he had opposed Israeli aggression and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Relations with China were normalising because he thought the Chinese were settling down; he believed that Soviet–Chinese conflict was not really ideological but more a clash of interests and China was now actually preparing for a war with the Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia just wanted to be a European country, he added, but was not getting on very well with, for example, the Germans because of the problem of reparation and Yugoslavian émigré terrorism in Germany.

Harold then said he was glad relations with Russia were improving but we couldn’t accept the Brezhnev doctrine. Michael Stewart made his usual negative speech, saying that we didn’t really like the European conference proposal because our security was bound up with NATO, and this would have helped East Germany and underwritten the Brezhnev doctrine, though we hadn’t rejected the idea outright.

To the Royal Society where I made my speech to the Manchester Technology Association on technology and the quality of life. I had worked hard on it and it got a very enthusiastic reception.

Thursday 26 February

To the Commons, where we held Auntie Rene’s eighty-eighth birthday party and about fifty Benns of various ages turned up; Stephen came back from Keele and I had arranged for a cake. Margaret Rutherford – very depressed with two broken hips – was there. But Auntie Rene made a marvellous speech about how enjoyable life was as you got older. She had first been inside the House of Commons in 1892 when my grandfather was elected and she was a girl of ten, and Gladstone was Prime Minister – quite remarkable.

I had to go back to my office to meet Henry Ford II, who had come over from America at my request, following the announcement that Ford Cortina exports to America were to discontinue and the Capri was to be manufactured and exported from their German factory. Stanley Gillen, Bill Batty and Walter Hayes, Vice-President of Ford of Europe, were present. I put the case as strongly as I could, that this was an extremely important decision. We welcomed the size of the Ford operation in Britain and their investment and export record, but a decision made in Detroit which had led to the blanking out of certain British car exports to America was very serious, with damaging consequences for the British balance of payments and for Britain’s reputation for exports.