I had originally planned to cover the period up to the end of the twentieth century in one, longer blog, but there is enough of interest in the 1980s and 1990s – including substantial amendments to the EPA, discussion of Chernobyl and oil slicks, and a suggestion that the powers were nearly used in the summer of 1985 – that I will discuss the development of the EPA during the twentieth century in two blogs. In this blog, I discuss the development of the EPA from the 1940s through to the end of the 1970s, and the role of the Big Freeze in extending the EPA from human action to natural disasters.
The 1940s and 1950s.
The passage of the Emergency Powers Act 1936 might have been thought to have been just in time for the national emergency represented by World War Two. In fact, as with World War One, this was treated primarily as an Imperial emergency, not a Manx one. Substantial amounts of Imperial legislation, and orders specific to the Isle of Man, were created under the Defence Regulations and associated legislation. These continued well beyond the end of hostilities, with Tynwald forming a Committee to review them at the end of 1949, but even then the moving Attorney-General noted that some regulations would doubtless be allowed to continue (TC 20 December 1949, at 281). In 1954 the continued existence of powers under the Defence Regulations were lamented as “a remarkable thing … after the war has been over for so many years” (HK 30 March 1954 at p.667), and this led to a long list of the Defence Regulations still in force even at that point in the mid-1950s (ibid, at 668), with Defence Regulations provision still being a live issue into the 1970s (e.g. HK 1 November 1977 at K21; HK 3 April 1973; HK 6 February 1979). The emergency regulations from World War Two lingered for a considerable time after the end of the emergency which led to their creation – food for thought perhaps. In 1973, considering the General Control of the Economy Bill, which I discuss briefly below, the Lord Bishop thought “it is quite right that emergency powers should not turn into regular powers” (LC 12 June 1973 at C244).
The 1960s.
Working from Tynwald Hansard, rather than any confidential correspondence or government files, it appears that the EPA came comparatively close to being invoked only twice in the post-war period up to the end of the 1970s, both times in relation to strikes. In 1966, a National Union of Seamen Strike led to the Attorney General proposing a motion to approve the Lieutenant-Governor setting up a committee to monitor the strike, and take action as necessary. Apart from being a further example of an industrial dispute underpinning thinking around the Emergency Powers Act, the 1966 crisis has one feature of particular interest. The Attorney General, arguing successfully for the creation of the Committee, noted:
“I cannot speak for the committee, but I feel sure that if circumstances permit they will take no such drastic steps without coming to Tynwald because in the end it is Tynwald which has to bear the responsibility for the nation’s welfare …I am quite confident that the committee will not lose its head, that it will not use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but those powers must be there in the case of a very grave emergency arising” (TC 17 May 1966 at 1512).
The idea that the Lieutenant-Governor should involve members of Tynwald in decision making before a proclamation of emergency, a contentious issue in the 1920s which failed to make it into the law in the 1930s, is here underpinning the approach of Tynwald to a crisis where a state of emergency was possible “in such a case as we may find ourselves in, in a relatively short space of time” (ibid, at 1508). On the same day as the Committee was approved, the National Union agreed to a shipment of essential supplies by a volunteer crew (TC 17 May 1966, at 1553), and no state of emergency was proclaimed.
More concretely, the 1960s saw an important amendment made to the Emergency Powers Act 1936. It will be recalled that the 1936 Act originally required action taken or immediately threatened by any person or body of persons, calculated to deprive the community of the essentials of life. The Emergency Powers Act 1964 made two important changes.
Firstly, the trigger allowing the Governor to make an Emergency proclamation ceased to be tied to human action, and instead became that “there have occurred, or are about to occur, events of such a nature”. This change was introduced by the Attorney General as having arisen from a change to the similar legislation in the United Kingdom:
“It occurred to the Home Secretary last winter when the country was getting into a bit of trouble and we were being frozen up that he should have similar powers in the event of matters which are not threatened strikes but nevertheless would interfere with the supply of food, fire, light — something, for example, to cope with a natural phenomena and so on. It is a wise provision to cover a situation which may never happen” (LC 2 June 1964 at 1121).
The UK legislation referred to was the Emergency Powers Act 1964, which made this textual change to the Emergency Powers Act 1920, and received royal assent in June 1964. Introducing the Bill in February 1964, the Home Secretary noted that:
“It was during the prolonged bad weather of last winter that I first started to think about the limitations on our powers to take emergency action in a national emergency … [currently] it must be a serious emergency and a manmade one … The sort of contingency I have in mind is an unforeseen calamity of a wholly exceptional kind. Flooding on an even more serious scale that the grave East Coast Floods of 1953 is a conceivable possibility … Another possibility is a quite abnormally long freeze-up, worse even than we experienced last winter … There is another contingency which the amendment of the law in Clause 1 will cover. The more highly organised life becomes, the more the country depends on a great variety of supplies which come to us from abroad and so, if there is any interruption of those supplies, we are the more vulnerable. Oil is perhaps the most obvious case” (HC Deb 20 February 1964 vol. 689, cc.1409-1412).
Setting the Attorney General’s comment aside, then, the Home Secretary was inspired by the winter of 1962-3, rather than 1963-4. The winter of 1962-3, commonly referred to as The Big Freeze, was exceptionally severe (for memories and archives in a short video, see here). During passage through Legislative Council discussion shifted, slightly oddly, to industrial action and examples when industrial action might pose a threat to the Isle of Man – for instance a strike by pilots (LC 30 June 1964, at 1211), but the Attorney General stressed that the Bill was not altering the existing position insofar as it applied to strikes, but extending the Act to “a natural calamity” (LC 6 October at 7). It also, although this was not the subject of any discussion, changed the wording in relation to imminency of the threat from “has been taken … or immediately threatened” to “occurred or about to occur”. Arguably, a more direct translation from human action to events would have referred to “immediately about to occur”, but this may be reading too much into the change in wording. The Bill also removed explicit reference to “of such a nature and of so extensive a scale” from the Act.
Secondly, the Bill added “or any substantial portion of the community” to the group which needed to be threatened for the emergency powers to be applied. This provision had existed in UK law to deal with, for instance, a regional threat, and the Attorney General argued for its application simply to bring the Manx law in line with the UK provision upon which it was modeled.
The Bill had a quick and easy passage through the Legislative Council, and even quicker through the Keys. The Second Reading, including clauses, took less than three columns of Hansard; the Third Reading less than one column. For contrast, and immediately preceding the Second Reading, the Second and Third Reading of the Public Lavatories (Turnstiles) Bill took 12 columns. There was a brief discussion about the implications of adding “substantial portion” (HK 3 November 1964, at 247), and a request for reassurance about the rights of workers in industrial disputes (ibid, at 248), but no substantive discussion at all about adding “natural calamities” to the circumstances that could allow a proclamation of emergency.
I have already suggested that if it had not been for the Manx strike of June 1935, the Emergency Powers Act 1936 may not exist. Once the Manx statute books had a statute based on a UK model then, during this period in particular, a dynamic followed where adopting changes to the legislation to stay in step with the UK legislation seemed a default position. So, when the UK responded to the Big Freeze of 1962-3, the Isle of Man followed. As a result, the extension of the Emergency Powers regime to “natural calamities”, rather than “manmade” was not the subject of contention in the Legislative Council, or any debate at all in the Keys.
The 1970s.
Generally applicable provisions for future crises were not the subject of debate in Tynwald during the 1970s – instead, three more specific issues were discussed.
Firstly, in an explicit recollection of the 1966 strike, a Select Committee of Tynwald was appointed in relation to a postal strike that had started that evening and, as in 1966, the possibility of the Governor using EPA powers “as the last resort if no other course was open to him” was put on the table (TC 19 January 1971, T324). Secondly, as noted above, the UK Home Secretary had foreseen a dependency on oil as a possible cause of a national emergencies. This was dealt with specifically in discussion of the Energy Bill, which would give the Lieutenant-Governor extraordinary powers in case of this specific sort of emergency (LC 4 December 1979; LC 6 November 1979; HK 23 October 1979). This became law as the Energy Act 1980. Thirdly, the General Control of the Economy Bill, which was put forward as a temporary Act to allow the control of inflation by regulating prices and incomes (HK 13 March 1973, HK 3 April 1973, LC 12 June 1973 HK 6 February 1979). This became law as the General Control of the Economy Act 1975.
In the 1980s, however, the shape of broadly applicable Emergency Powers came back on the political, and legislative, agenda. I will discuss this in a future blog.
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