Murdoch, Bruce Matthews, Bill O’Neill and the four News International editors were given round-the-clock protection by bodyguards from a security firm of ex-Royal Marines. Others found the level of security a mixed blessing. Used to filing his column from home, Miles Kington had always given his copy to his near neighbour, Philip Howard, to take into the office. But Howard’s lit. ed. office was temporarily still in Gray’s Inn Road. Undaunted, Kington trekked to Wapping to deliver his copy personally only to be turned away at the security gate for not having a pass. For hours, he tried to contact staff he knew behind the wire, but all telephones were recording ‘out to lunch’ messages (somewhat improbably, since there was nowhere for miles around serving a decent meal). Eventually, Kington whipped up the courage to ask to be put through to the editor. ‘Sorry sir,’ the security officer at the gate replied, ‘I haven’t got the number.’23
Someone who did need better protection was the EETPU’s leader, Eric Hammond. Attending a meeting of the TUC General Council, he was jostled by three hundred abusive protestors outside and, upon reaching the supposed sanctuary of the Congress House foyer, was kicked and punched by several union officials. Verbally, the mugging continued upstairs. Yet, although the General Council voted overwhelmingly to start proceedings for the EETPU’s suspension from the TUC, calmer heads argued for caution in expelling the electricians for fear they would start a rival TUC that would attract those working in the new technologies, leaving the TUC with a membership confined to the shrinking heavy industries. Hammond’s position was also strengthened by what he subsequently described as a ‘trump card’ – News International’s threat to sue if the TUC instructed his members to stop work at Wapping against a company with which they were not in dispute.24 Instead the TUC reached a compromise whereby the EETPU members would not be ordered to stop work at Wapping on the condition their union did not assist in further recruitment there or enter into a formal agreement unless it involved the other print unions too. Hammond accepted this, although he was half-minded to encourage the TUC to demand downing tools at Wapping so that he could have sued his fellow union brothers and ‘been free of all their directives.’25
When the Labour Party’s National Executive (the NEC) met on 29 January they called on ‘all Labour Party bodies, Labour local authorities, members and supporters to boycott The Times’ and the other News International titles. Labour’s director of communications, Peter Mandelson, then asked Times and Sun journalists attending the press conference to leave Labour Party premises immediately. Lobby rules prevented a paper from being specifically blacklisted, so Neil Kinnock called off his weekly briefing with the parliamentary lobby journalists and instituted private meetings with each of the non-News International representatives instead. The Daily Mail and the Yorkshire Post refused to play this game, a stance subsequently taken up by other papers, thereby denying the Labour Party its chance to influence the press.
The Labour Party boycott quickly descended in farce. Nick Raynsford, the party’s by-election candidate in Fulham, found it counter-productive and Larry Whitty, Labour’s general secretary, had to be dispatched to ask the print union’s permission for the purdah to be temporary lifted. Permission was granted, so long as the press conferences did not stray from the strict issue of the by-election. Three Labour MPs threatened to boycott the House of Commons Environment Committee’s visit to York unless the presentation on historic buildings by Dr Norman Hammond of the York Archaeological Trust was cancelled. Dr Hammond’s crime was to be The Times’s archaeological correspondent. Meekly, the Committee agreed. But Labour’s boycott did not catch on behind the Iron Curtain. When George Robertson, a Labour foreign affairs spokesman (and future NATO Secretary-General), attended a Communist-organized conference in his NEC capacity, he awoke each morning in his East Berlin hotel to the choice of the Morning Star or The Times.
The boycott campaign made little appreciable impact on sales. By the third week, Wilson was trumpeting Times daily sales of 485,000 copies, an increase of 13,000 since moving from Gray’s Inn Road.26 Sales of the Sun were also marginally up. But by ensuring that no Labour source was prepared to speak to or write for The Times it hit at the paper’s ability to report comprehensively. Labour MPs like Jack Straw who had written regularly for the paper had to cease doing so. That many of the paper’s refuseniks were left-leaning also harmed its breadth. Particularly grievous was the loss of the paper’s labour relations staff. On the night The Times chapel had debated whether to go to Wapping, Harry Conroy had leaned closer to Don McIntyre and made clear, in broad Glaswegian, that the labour staff would be treated as scabs for the rest of their lives and would never get work elsewhere if they were minded to stay on at The Times. Having fully digested this point, the labour correspondent joined the refuseniks.27 It was easy to see their predicament. The Labour Movement’s refusal to cooperate with News International employees (the NUJ even instructed its members at other newspapers not to supply information to any News International journalist) would have made their task extremely difficult even if they had stayed. But their absence, and the difficulty created in trying to cover labour relations in general and Wapping objectively from the new location was shown up at a time when the Guardian was able to field Patrick Wintour and the Financial Times Raymond Snoddy. Matters were made worse when an article that was partly critical of Murdoch written by the highly regarded centre-left columnist Peter Kellner was spiked. Kellner, the New Statesman’s political editor, had been writing a fortnightly column for The Times and the decision not to run his piece ensured his resignation, compounding the paper’s drain of alternative voices. As some were quick to point out, the episode smacked of crude censorship and reflected poorly on The Times’s objectivity.28
Yet, such defensiveness was mild compared to the attempt to gag The Times. At least thirty-three Labour-controlled local authorities withdrew job advertising from the paper and its siblings. Their decision had a proportionately much more serious effect on the Times Educational Supplement, which was the market leader (by a considerable margin) for advertising education vacancies. As such, the boycott must have been counter-productive to those authorities with teaching vacancies to fill. Undaunted, its advocates also intended to sweep staff common rooms and school libraries of the offending literature. The Labour group controlling the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) wrote to school and college governors instructing them to table resolutions to cancel Times, Times Literary Supplement and Times Educational Supplement subscriptions at their institutions of learning.29
Whether such activity was in the interests of the teaching profession was open to debate, but the prohibition of The Times from public libraries was altogether more serious and illegal. Across the country, Labour-controlled local authorities had interpreted their party’s boycott of News International to include preventing public library users consulting The Times. The socalled paper of record was removed from public scrutiny in more than thirty local authority areas. Such action was in breach of the 1964 Libraries Act. In some cases, the consequences descended into absurdity. When a barrister, John Riley, went to his public library in Staffordshire, the staff told him they had The Times behind the counter but were instructed not to let him look at it. He threatened legal action.
Richard Luce, the Arts Minister, wrote to fifteen councils drawing attention to the illegality of their action. Three responded positively but the rest, including Bradford, Sheffield and a succession of famously left wing London boroughs, refused. Salford did not get round to replying.30 When Luce failed to take the matter further, News International called upon the advocacy of Anthony Lester QC and David Pannick and took the local authorities to court. The eventual judgment was damning: ‘There could hardly be a clearer manifestation of an abuse of power,’ Lord Justice Watkins pronounced, than ‘to see such irresponsible behaviour’ by elected representatives knowingly ignoring the law.31 This brought the councils into line, with the exception of the London Borough of Brent which continued to r
efuse to stock The Times in its libraries. The council cited a succession of increasingly bizarre defences for why the court’s ruling did not apply to it. At one stage, the argument was proposed that the ‘racist and sexist’ material contained within the paper would conflict with the council’s duties under the Race Relations Act. In contrast, the Communist Morning Star remained freely available for consultation. It was not until March 1987 that the council finally bowed to the judgment of the High Court, leading Anthony Lester to declare ‘at the thirteenth hour the white flag has been hoisted alongside the red flag, over Brent Town Hall’.32
Quietly, the Government was delighted by Murdoch’s decision to sack his print union workers although Kenneth Clarke, the Employment Minister, broke cover to say he thought the press baron’s personal public relations required ‘a great deal of continuing attention. He is not an instantly popular figure.’ With John Biffen, the Leader of the Commons, seeking to defer a full-scale debate and the Speaker ruling out Tony Benn’s attempt to get an emergency debate, left wing Labour MPs were reduced to demanding that the Home Secretary declare Murdoch an ‘undesirable alien’ who should be banned from Britain ‘in the interest of decency and public order’. For his part, Neil Kinnock told a print workers’ rally at Wembley that the next Labour Government would curb the monopolistic power of the main newspaper owners and began referring to ‘Stalag Wapping’ and ‘Schloss Murdoch’. He rejected an invitation to discuss the situation with News International management.33 The rhetoric of the Labour leader during the dispute frequently gave the impression he saw it as a fight to resist foreign influence. Not content to lambast Murdoch’s ‘intercontinental ballistic management’ and conjure up Teutonic images, the future Vice-President of the European Commission maintained that when it came to the concentration of media ownership, the rule should be ‘if you’re not British – clear out’.34
III
One aspect of the Wapping strategy that worked particularly effectively was the switch from rail to road distribution. Using lorries gave The Times much greater flexibility in delaying deadlines if late news or a technical glitch needed to be accommodated. Unlike the railways, road freight could wait. It was flexible. It also ensured that there was just one loading period. Forty-foot lorries could drive up the ramp into the loading bay, take the papers on board and be on their way. Previously, the papers had first to be loaded onto vans and unloaded at the station before being reloaded onto trains, offloaded onto vans at the other end and taken to the wholesale depots before being transported to the shops for sale. The decision had been taken to stick with delivering to the existing wholesalers in the provinces but in London TNT handled all aspects of the distribution right down to delivering to the newsagents’ front doors. Brenda Dean had hoped that even if the papers were successfully printed at Wapping her instruction to regional SOGAT members to refuse to handle them would cripple distribution. But the attitude of SOGAT workers in the provinces towards their London brothers was made apparent when only wholesale distributors in Liverpool, Coventry and Glasgow obeyed the executive order to black the titles. WH Smith and John Menzies management made clear that employees refusing to handle the papers would be sacked. Such was the apathy of provincial members towards the Wapping strikers that SOGAT members in Watford even continued to produce the Sunday Times Colour Magazine. One SOGAT victory proved to be Pyrrhic: refusing to print 1.5 million extra News of the World copies done under contract with Express Newspapers in Manchester ensured that the contract was duly cancelled and jobs were lost. Wapping met the extra print run instead. The unions had badly underestimated the new plant’s ability to meet demand.
With the attempt to black distribution in Britain failing, SOGAT tried to broaden the theatres of war by persuading unions at foreign mills to go on strike rather than supply Wapping with newsprint. One firm had the contract for 75 per cent of News International’s purchase and Wapping would thus have nothing to print its journalism on if foreign unions adhered to the boycott. But workers of the world did not unite on this occasion; they proved unwilling to risk unemployment for the sake of a British labour dispute. SOGAT had to make do with messages of support.35
By creating a legally separate entity to handle distribution, News International’s lawyer, Geoffrey Richards, had ensured any blacking campaign would be deemed illegal secondary action.36 Brenda Dean knew that this would be the case and consequently did not bother to hold ballots prior to issuing her order to black the titles. Consequently, the company began recourse to the law. By nightfall on 29 January, High Court injunctions had been placed not only on SOGAT’s blacking tactics but also on the TGWU’s attempts to order members driving the TNT lorries not to cross the Wapping picket line. Dean remained defiant in the face of the injunction, telling a three-hundred-strong rally in Manchester, her home base, on 31 January: ‘If you walk away from your colleagues dismissed in London and their families, you don’t deserve to be called trade unionists.’ ‘Scab newspapers’ should be blacked she told the crowd, adding, ‘If you don’t support your own kind, no one will support you when you need it.’37 It was not surprising she was desperate to strike a quick and overwhelming blow. As she later confided, the siege of Wapping ‘was winnable – or losable – in those first two weeks’.38 The longer the period in which distribution was not seriously disrupted the more certain would be News International’s eventual victory.
On 8 February, three thousand dismissed print workers and activists gathered outside Wapping in a show of strength. Keen to stress the repercussions on the families of those who had lost their jobs, Brenda Dean led a ‘Women’s March’. Advancing in candlelit formation in the manner of a column of medieval pilgrims, the women adapted the drunken sailor refrain to ‘What shall we do with Rupert Murdoch, early in the morning? Burn, burn, burn the bastard …’39 But for all the protesters’ anger, the lorries got through. Two days later, the High Court fined SOGAT £25,000 for contempt of court for failing to obey the injunction prohibiting the ‘blacking’ from the wholesalers. What was more, the union’s £17 million assets were sequestrated until it renounced the ‘blacking’ instruction.
Having stayed silent on the dispute during its first three weeks, The Times’s leader column finally chose the sequestration issue to address the news on its doorstep. ‘When the obstacles between the paper and its readers include darts, drill bits and blackened golf balls as well as illegal attempts to threaten customers and suppliers it should surprise no one that the force of law is our first defence,’ it declared.40 Such sentiments left opponents cold. Proud trade unionists continued to demand defiance. Ron Todd of the TGWU pointed out ‘if the Tolpuddle Martyrs had taken legal advice, they could have saved themselves a trip to Australia’ while Brenda Dean stated ‘our members are more important than money’.41 In fact, many members were far from in agreement with her on this point: the campaign on behalf of the 4500 ex-News International employees was preventing the union’s 213,000 other members from receiving their pensions, injury claims and other benefits provided from its central funds. This became a source of friction.
It was not just SOGAT that refused to retract in front of injunctions and fines. The NGA, which had also been fined for contempt of court, failed to win the support of members in a ballot to black production of the Times supplements (the TLS, TES and THES) printed in Northampton. Regardless of this rebuff, the union’s leadership announced it would black the papers anyway since five NGA members involved in putting the supplements’ pages to camera had voted (in a supposedly secret ballot) to strike. Fortunately the ability of five men to disrupt the entire supplements division was overcome when their employer (working under contract to News International) moved them to a less strategic department. Nonetheless, Tony Dubbins proudly boasted that his union’s initials stood for ‘Not Going Away’.42
News International hoped that the freezing of union funds would lead to a hasty settlement and the calling off not only of the blacking call but also the picketing of the Wapping p
lant. Union activists believed the court action demonstrated the need to intensify efforts while there was time. Three thousand pickets (many of them Kent miners) descended on Wapping on the night of 13 February intent on stopping The Times and Sun from leaving the gates. Five hundred police, including mounted officers, had to be rushed in to keep the exits clear. There were forty-one arrests on that night alone. A month later, tempers were strained further when two pickets were hit and their legs broken by a lorry they were trying to prevent leaving the plant. To misfortune was added bathos: the lorry was carrying copies of the Sun’s ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ edition. Three nights later, the pickets sought to exact their revenge: seven thousand besieged the plant. Iron bars, lead piping, shotgun cartridges and railing spikes were seized by the police from the rioters, who succeeded in tearing down a forty-yard section of the security fence. Fortress Wapping appeared to be on the verge of being overrun and, in scenes worthy of Sergei Eisenstein, it took mounted-police charges to push the surging demonstrators back. The assault managed seriously to delay, but not to prevent, the lorries getting out.
Most evenings passed with incident, but a pattern was emerging in which Saturday nights involved the most serious breakdowns in order with demonstrators attempting to prevent Murdoch’s lucrative Sunday titles from leaving the compound. As weeks passed without the prospect of resolution, the siege became a cause célèbre, attracting the attention of left-wing activists, students, trade unionists and, increasingly, thugs looking for a bit of violent excitement. Banners were held high proclaiming Class War, the Socialist Workers’ Party and the various Trotskyite factions. The Wapping Highway became a major sales venue for the cottage industry of left-wing newspapers. Only the lonely seller of Labour Weekly was made to feel unwelcome. By the end of the third month of the siege, there had been 474 arrests. Among this number was the NGA’s general secretary, Tony Dubbins, who was charged with obstructing lorries. But of the total number of arrests, it was telling that less than a third were ex-printers.
The History of the Times Page 37
