A Bridge across the Humber

The radical journalist​ , author and activist Richard Gott died last month at the age of 87. One of the ‘sharpest reporters of revolutionary Latin America’, according to his friend Tariq Ali, he reported for the Guardian on the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and on Che Guevara, whose body he identified, and later wrote for the LRB on Chávez and Venezuela. He resigned from the Guardian in 1994, after he was accused of being an informer for the KGB. Gott maintained that he hadn’t given information, but admitted he had accepted ‘red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses’, for various trips.

Early in his career, Gott stood in the 1966 Hull North by-election. On 7 November 1965, Henry Solomons, the Labour MP for the constituency, died after a short illness. He had won the marginal seat from the Tories at the 1964 general election with a majority of 1181 votes on a turnout of 47,717. His death reduced the parliamentary majority of Harold Wilson’s government to one seat. Labour’s candidate was Kevin McNamara, a lecturer at Hull College of Commerce and a local party activist. The Conservative candidate was the enthusiastic but inexperienced Toby Jessel.

Gott, who had never been to Hull before, had been waiting for a chance to contest a marginal seat. He was a Labour Party member but, like others aligned with the New Left, had become disillusioned with Wilson’s government. He stood in Hull as the candidate of the Radical Alliance, a campaign group with its roots in the Independent Nuclear Disarmament Election Committee, formed in 1962 by CND members who were frustrated with what they saw as the organisation’s cautious strategy, which prioritised lobbying MPs over direct action. Gott’s agenda in Hull was internationalist and anti-nuclear, and he hoped to draw attention to Wilson’s support for America’s war in Vietnam. He didn’t expect to win the seat, but if he could get a thousand votes from Labour, Hull North might return to the Tories, precipitating a general election. Gott was confident that Labour would win that election, but believed that afterwards the New Left would be able to exert greater influence on party policy.

McNamara was seen as a Wilson loyalist, and therefore fair game for a challenge from the left. The constituency included Hull University, which had an active New Left led by academics such as John Saville, a historian and founder with E.P. Thompson of the New Reasoner, a forerunner to New Left Review. Many trade unionists and working-class Labour supporters, who Gott hoped would be responsive to his criticisms of Wilson’s leadership, also lived in the constituency. Announcing his intention to stand, Gott told the Hull Daily Mail that ‘without a doubt I am sure I will spoil Mr McNamara’s chances and let the Conservatives in.’ He arrived in Hull in early January with a small band of supporters. The Radical Alliance printed sixty thousand copies of his election address and distributed leaflets and posters with the slogan ‘Vote Gott for Peace in Vietnam’, linking increasing arms spending to domestic budget cuts. There was little mention of local issues.

‘During the three-week campaign, the media descended on Hull from Europe and the US, and Fleet Street’s finest crowded each morning into our committee rooms,’ Gott recalled in an article for the Guardian in 2006. He even made the front page of the New York Times on 17 January under the headline ‘RADICAL’s campaign threatens MARGIN of labour in britain’. Anthony Lewis, the journalist from the Times, had accompanied Gott one morning as he braved ‘the snow and chill of north-east England’ to knock on doors. With his bushy red beard and beret, Lewis wrote, Gott made a striking contrast with the ‘housewife or … dockworker’ who opened the door. Lewis went with Gott to the first campaign meeting held by Labour, at Endike Lane School on the North Hull Estate. At the end, Gott tried to ask a question about Vietnam but was told by the chairman to sit down. He refused and was eventually dragged from the hall to a mixture of applause and shouts of ‘shame’ and ‘undemocratic’. McNamara and his party seemed worried, Lewis concluded, and ‘Labour tacticians admitted they had made a mistake by giving Mr Gott another headline.’

‘Our intervention in Hull caused chaos on the left,’ Gott claimed. Several Labour MPs called on him to stand down. He hoped that students, academics and disillusioned trade unionists would back him. A handful of Labour members helped his campaign and were expelled from the party; others broadly agreed with his anti-war position but were unwilling to risk a Conservative victory. Others on the left felt patronised by Gott’s stance. The Radical Alliance had met Saville and members of the Hull branch of the CND in early December. One of those at the meeting, a local adult education lecturer called Dan Hussey, wrote in his notes on the occasion that the Radical Alliance ‘are striking moral attitudes rather than putting forward a political strategy. Their programme is more of a rude gesture behind the headmaster’s back than anything more reasoned.’ Hussey wrote an article for Humberside Voice, a monthly left-wing newspaper, called ‘The Vultures Gather’: ‘This unwanted outside intervention (and the local organisations of the left have made it pretty clear that it is unwanted) would be frivolous were it not for the owlish solemnity of their attitude. As it is the whole thing becomes almost indecent.’ The founder and editor of Humberside Voice, Tony Topham, a lecturer at the University of Hull, was another critic. Topham taught courses on industrial democracy and theories of worker control, often to dockers and manufacturing workers who were on study release programmes organised through their trade unions, and went on to found the Institute for Workers’ Control with Ken Coates. Although he thought Wilson was squandering a historic opportunity for the left, in favour of appeasing the City of London and US interests, he disagreed with Gott’s strategy. In Hull, as elsewhere, a split was developing between party members influenced by the New Left and an older generation of often more right-wing Labour councillors and aldermen. Topham mockingly referred to these men – they were almost all men – as the ‘City Fathers’ and criticised their complacency and dismissive attitude towards younger comrades. But he still saw Labour as the only viable electoral vehicle for the left and criticised Gott’s candidacy as ill-thought out and self-indulgent.

As election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara Castle, spoke at a meeting on 18 January. The story that passed into popular memory in Hull is that Castle promised to build a bridge across the Humber without really understanding what she was committing to. One comic embellishment, edged with misogyny, is that she thought she was promising a bridge over the much smaller Ouse. Plans for a road bridge over a relatively narrow point in the Humber Estuary had first been put forward in the early 1930s, only to be shelved after the fall of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. The city had been badly damaged by the Luftwaffe and postwar reconstruction was slow. There was a lingering feeling that the city’s plight had never been properly acknowledged or redressed. The Labour-led Hull Corporation had repeatedly called on central government to fund the bridge, and the sudden backing for the plan when Wilson’s administration needed to preserve its hold on power suggested that the project had always been more feasible than previous governments had claimed.

Gott called Castle’s offer an ‘electoral bribe’. He claimed that the ministers sent to Hull by Labour ‘had been urged to find some special item of interest that would encourage voters to continue supporting Labour. Barbara Castle’s officials in the Ministry of Transport unearthed a plan for a bridge across the Humber.’ It was hardly the case that the plans for the bridge needed to be ‘unearthed’. The Humber Bridge Board had been formed by an Act of Parliament in 1959 and the most recent plans and traffic studies had been drawn up just a couple of years earlier.

At the meeting, Castle, who was flanked by the Hull alderman Frederick Holmes, chairman of the Humber Bridge Board, said: ‘I pledge to Humberside that when the development plans for this region have been worked out and agreed between the planning authorities and the government, then you will have your Humber Bridge.’ The commitment was distinctly open-ended, but there is little to suggest that she did not understand the ramifications of her statement. Castle went on to place the bridge in the context of plans she had approved earlier that day for new motorways north and south of the estuary. She then brought up what had for two decades been the central issue in discussions of the bridge: whether it was a national or regional concern. Successive governments had refused to fund it on the basis that it had only regional significance. Its local backers disputed this, arguing that the distinction wasn’t clear, and that central government should pay either way. ‘A Humber Bridge is a national interest, because balanced regional development is a national interest,’ Castle told the meeting. Her deft reframing of the issue was a way to forestall the obvious charge that her pledge was motivated primarily by a desire to preserve the government.

In any case, Labour did have an interest in regional development. The Yorkshire and Humberside Economic Planning Council was formed after the 1964 election, and the party’s National Plan acknowledged the necessity of rebalancing the country’s productive capacities. The National Plan was drawn up by the new Department for Economic Affairs, which was responsible for long-term economic planning and co-ordination. Later in 1966, work began on the Humberside Feasibility Study, an investigation into the area’s demographic and economic future carried out by the new Central Unit for Environmental Planning. This was what Castle was referring to when she mentioned ‘the development plans for this region’.

The coverage of the meeting in the Hull Daily Mail was headlined ‘Mrs Castle: I Promise You a Bridge.’ The report described her statement as ‘a historic thirty seconds’, but noted that Castle had ‘refused to name the date’ or say how the bridge would be financed. The write-up was on page four of the paper, suggesting perhaps some scepticism. Half of the article was given over to a long description of what happened at the end of the meeting, after Castle had left to catch the train back to London. Topham had repeatedly been denied the chance to ask McNamara a question, and a ‘fantastic ten-minute uproar’ had ensued. Speaking to the Mail reporter afterwards, Topham said he had wanted to ask McNamara whether he would urge Castle ‘to “democratise” the British Transport Docks Board by substituting an elected workers’ council for the businessmen and shipping interests which were at present members’. The Labour councillor who chaired the meeting, Albert Parker, told the reporter that Topham ‘is not an asset, in my opinion, to the Labour Party’, and accused him of attending the meeting just to ‘cause trouble’. If the Mail’s coverage is anything to go by, Castle’s announcement was seen only as one plotline in the by-election drama. With Labour riven by discord, and Gott’s campaign potentially hiving off votes, it wasn’t clear that the party would be in a position to fulfil her pledge.

When the by-election came, McNamara increased Labour’s majority by nearly four thousand, winning 52 per cent of the vote. Gott came a distant fourth with 253 votes. Soon afterwards, Wilson called a snap general election in which Labour increased its majority to 98 seats. Gott went into what he called a kind of ‘exile’ at the University of Chile in Santiago, where he took up a research fellowship part-funded by the British Council. Some Whitehall officials were ‘horrified’ at the ‘modest outlay’ required to send him there; ‘others thought Chile suitably remote.’ McNamara remained the MP for Hull North until he retired in 2005.

In its 1966 election manifesto, Labour vowed to continue ‘the long process of modernising obsolete procedures and institutions, ending the dominance of vested interests, liberating the forces of youth and building a New Britain’. But rather than abandoning the caution of its first two years in government, the months after its second election victory saw a hasty retreat from a radical programme. After the sterling crisis and the devaluation of the pound in November 1967, the International Monetary Fund was brought in to oversee an austerity programme. The National Plan for industry quickly receded from view; the Department for Economic Affairs limped on before being abolished in 1969. The much delayed Humberside Feasibility Study was published at the end of April that year. It contained proposals for new towns and cities, infrastructure and industrial capacity around the Humber. The construction of the bridge was identified as one of four immediate actions through which ‘the area should be prepared for the possibility of major development’. No doubt conscious of the government’s financial plight, the study noted that ‘major growth on Humberside should not be planned to take place before 1980’ and that ‘a final decision … is not needed before 1972, by which time the economic consequences of a decision, both locally and nationally, could be better assessed in the light of new information.’ By then, there would have been another general election.

On 30 April 1969, welcoming the release of the study, the minister for economic affairs, Peter Shore, confirmed in the House of Commons that the Humber Bridge would go ahead. Preparatory work would continue – some test drilling had already taken place – and construction of the bridge itself would start in 1972. The estimated cost was £23 million: £13 million for the bridge and £10 million for the approach roads. The money for the roads would come from the central budget, but the bridge, Shore said, would probably be financed through loans secured against toll charges.

After Ted Heath’s surprise victory in the 1970 general election some thought the project would be shelved. But the new Conservative government confirmed that the work would go ahead as planned. The 1971 Humber Bridge Act finalised the funding model: a 75 per cent loan from the government, with the remaining 25 per cent to be raised through private loan agreements. When the bridge eventually opened in 1981, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world. Margaret Thatcher had been in office for two years. Rather than an important component in a long-term regional plan, it was now clear that the bridge was the only component in that plan. For much of the 1980s, it was seen by critics as a white elephant. It connected the declining city of Hull with the empty expanses of North Lincolnshire: nowhere with nowhere. The rampant inflation of the 1970s meant that its cost had spiralled. In 2006, Gott claimed that ‘it eventually cost £345m,’ but this refers not to the amount the bridge cost to build – around £90 million – but to the total debt when he wrote his piece. If the bridge was an electoral bribe, it was one that the people of Humberside would end up paying themselves, in the form of toll charges that increased every year for decades. In 2012 the government deferred £150 million of the debt and halved the toll to £1.50. Next year the cost for crossings will go up for the first time since then, rising to £2 for a car. At current rates, the debt should be paid off by 2040.