State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  But this did not protect him from the wrath of his opponents when the long-dreaded moment came. The New Year had begun terribly for Heath: locked in a prolonged struggle with the union leaders over his new Industrial Relations Act, he was also faced with a debilitating coal miners’ strike and a bloodbath in Northern Ireland that was sliding rapidly towards outright civil war. But on Thursday, 20 January, a bad month got even worse: at that morning’s Cabinet, Robert Carr reported that the latest figures, as expected, showed unemployment breaking through the one million barrier. Prime Minister’s Questions that afternoon was a bear-pit: even as Heath entered the chamber, Dennis Skinner, the socialist firebrand from Bolsover, planted himself in front of him and shook his fist threateningly in his face, while Labour backbenchers chanted ‘Out! Out!’ Moments later, as he rose to answer his first question, another Derbyshire man, Tom Swain, walked across and slammed down the Evening Standard on the dispatch box, the front page carrying a stark and simple headline: ‘1,023,583’. For the first time in a century, Prime Minister’s Questions had to be suspended. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ Skinner shouted at the shaken Heath. ‘You’re better fitted to cross the Channel and suck President Pompidou’s backside!’53

  As it happened, Heath was indeed due to interact with the Continentals the next day, his schedule taking him to Brussels for the formal signing of the treaty marking Britain’s accession to the Common Market. Like his victory in the Admiral’s Cup, it should have been a moment to savour, but again it was overshadowed, partly by the fact that on his way in a woman threw ink over him (such attacks now traditional elements of Heath’s prime ministerial career), but also by the prospect of defending his record against Harold Wilson in an emergency Commons debate. ‘On behalf of the whole House I should like to welcome the right hon. Gentleman back from his visit to Europe,’ Wilson said with merciless glee, opening the debate two days later:

  Last Friday he left these shores, the first dole queue millionaire to cross the Channel since Neville Chamberlain. I was thinking of him as he went, and I was pleased to read that he conducted a madrigal. I wish he could have been with me meeting the shop stewards of Fisher-Bendix, attempting to avert a further 750 redundancies and the total closure of that factory, following hundreds of redundancies last year … I wish the right hon. Gentleman could have heard the madrigal that my constituents were singing about him … If the right hon. Gentleman had served the cause of the right to work of the British people, a right of which he is custodian, with one-tenth of the energy which he has devoted to wooing the French President, we should not be having this debate today.

  Heath and his ministers, he said bitterly, had

  been proud to tear up even the mild prospectus on full employment of Sir Winston Churchill’s coalition Government, and have destroyed the consensus by which post-war Governments have governed. But, above all, they are a Government who, by a combination of negligence, arrogance and wrongly directed policies, by an obsession with the balance sheet and not human beings, have produced a level of unemployment on which the whole country had thought we had turned our backs for ever.

  Heath answered with his typical stiff stoicism, like some great bear fending off an attack from a polecat. He did not propose to follow Wilson, he said with grumpy dignity, ‘in the personal sneers and jibes he found it necessary to make’, and he agreed that unemployment was ‘a human waste as well as an economic waste’. The brutal truth, he insisted, was that the government faced ‘a combination of a high rate of inflation … with a high level of unemployment’, something ‘unique in British experience’. It was a line that met with some approval in the press; after the Commons had yielded the expected majority, the broadsheets’ coverage of his speech was generally respectful. And yet, beneath the gruff imperturbability, there is no doubt that Heath was seriously worried. Lord Rothschild later recalled that the Prime Minister appeared ‘emotionally very upset’ by the unemployment figures; Jim Prior thought that he seemed ‘very shaken’ and that this had ‘a marked effect’ on his economic decision-making. Within the Cabinet, already exhausted after the battle to secure European entry and stunned by the slaughter in Northern Ireland, there seemed a mood almost of panic, even of apocalyptic fear. Already the political turmoil had seen fighting between policemen and demonstrators on College Green. And with one million out of work, with the violence in Belfast on their screens every night, and with the miners having walked out for higher pay, there seemed no knowing where it might lead.54

  3

  Ghosts of 1926

  The memory of the General Strike in 1926 was still with them … ‘I was only a boy in those days,’ said Dai Evans quietly, remembering the humiliation of the miners’ defeat. ‘I learnt that sometimes you have to give in.’

  ‘Even if it means you are being exploited?’ asked Professor Jones.

  – Malcolm Hulke, Doctor Who and the Green Death (1975)

  In the spring of 1970, the Lancashire town of St Helens seemed to have changed little since its industrial heyday. In the town centre, dominated by the vast, grimy Victorian town hall, chip shops and cafés jostled with cheap shoe shops, greengrocers and the inevitable branches of Boots, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op. From the centre stretched miles of long Victorian streets, paved with cobbles, lit with gas-lamps, and packed with little terraced houses of the kind familiar in every Northern town in the country. At first glance, the streets felt almost untouched by the affluent society. Most homes were rented, a third had only an outside toilet, and many had no bathroom. On almost every street corner stood a Victorian pub, with a betting shop not far away; inside, men clustered around the heavy mahogany bars, while women were directed to a little parlour reserved for their custom. One pub had installed a television, a treat for the elderly men who came in to spend their days over a pint or two; another, in a rare concession to the young, had a jukebox. St Helens was ‘a rugby league town, a man’s town’, wrote two lecturers from Liverpool who visited in the spring of 1970. ‘The Women’s Liberation Movement has not yet arrived: in St Helens the women do as they are told. They play bingo while the men go drinking.’1

  On the afternoon of Friday, 3 April, the workers at St Helens’ biggest employer, Pilkington, a family firm founded in 1826 that had since become one of the world’s major glass manufacturers, walked out on strike. At first the dispute was about a simple wage miscalculation, but it quickly escalated into a demand for higher pay, the strikers demanding a £10 increase in their basic weekly rate and a £5 interim deal as the price for their return to work. Over the weekend, the men’s shop stewards and GMWU officials urged them to go back to work; twice, however, they voted to stay out. Within ten days, the strike had spread to seven more Pilkington factories outside St Helens, affecting more than 10,000 workers. At the end of April the GMWU struck a deal with Pilkington that gave the men a £3 weekly increase. Yet again, however, the strikers defied their leaders and chose to stay out. To widespread incredulity, a minor local grievance had turned into a national issue. When pickets prevented some men from going back to work at the beginning of May, the press had a field day: ‘Siege at Tea Time!’ shrieked the Daily Express, above a report on the ‘Battle of Grove Street’, where ‘eight hundred screaming, punch-throwing pickets … flung themselves at police guarding the factory’. In fact, this was a wild exaggeration: the Financial Times, for example, described the fracas in terms of ‘taunts’ and thrown pennies. But the story captured the sense of national disbelief at a seven-week strike in an industry not known for militancy, which was only settled when Britain’s most eminent trade unionist, Vic Feather, the general secretary of the TUC, stepped in to mediate at the end of May.2

  The events in St Helens reflected in microcosm much of the wider story of trade unions and strikes in Britain in the 1970s. Far from slavishly following their shop stewards, the men consistently defied their entreaties to go back to work. For the GMWU officer responsible for the glass industry, Dave Basnett, later one of the most p
rominent union leaders of the late 1970s, the strike was a humiliation. There were allegations that the men were being provoked by ‘subversive elements’, but when representatives of extreme left-wing groups like the Socialist Labour League and International Socialists tried to contact the strike leaders, they were told to ‘piss off’. Challenged about the alleged influence of Maoists on the strike, one of the men’s leaders commented that if anyone could find six copies of Chairman Mao’s thoughts in the whole of St Helens, ‘I’ll show my backside in Woolworths’ window on Saturday morning. This is a good Catholic town, and good Catholic lads don’t go for Communism.’3

  Among the strikers, there was very little talk of class struggle. Most were Labour voters, though only 13 per cent actually belonged to the party; when interviewed, only three out of 187 voiced any support for more radical parties. Asked if they saw a political dimension to the strike, almost all of them said no. They showed no hostility towards their bosses; nine out of ten said they had nothing against Lord Pilkington, the company chairman. All they wanted, they said, was more money. And yet even eight out of ten admitted that the strike had taken them by surprise, and that they had walked out only reluctantly. Half of them, almost incredibly, admitted that they had walked out before knowing what the strike was actually about. Most were on strike less out of conviction than because of moral pressure from their fellows, and had no clear sense of what they hoped to achieve. And only a tiny minority found the strike exciting or liberating; most said that they found it boring, confusing and highly inconvenient. If this was what strikes were like, one said grumpily, the real impact of the dispute had been ‘to make it likely that it will be another hundred years before a strike occurs at Pilkingtons again’.4

  From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the extraordinary prominence of the trade unions in the cultural and political life of the 1970s seems as alien as the role of the Church in medieval society. At the beginning of the decade, some 11 million people out of a workforce of 23 million belonged to a trade union, and their numbers were swelling all the time. To their admirers, their very existence defended millions of working people from being dragged back into the gruelling hardships of the Victorian age. To their critics, they were selfish and domineering, run by Communists and extremists, and single-handedly responsible for the decline of the British economy. On the right they were often loathed; on the left they were the objects of deep and often unconditional love and respect. ‘You don’t get me I’m part of the union,’ sang the folk-rock band the Strawbs in a single that reached number two in February 1973, its lyrics often taken as a celebration of working-class trade unionism, although they were almost certainly meant sarcastically. Neil Kinnock even had it blaring out of the windows of his car as he toured his South Wales constituency a year later. What the song captured was the fact that, as the Marxist critic Raphael Samuel put it, trade unionism was ‘not only a cause’, it was ‘something approaching a workers’ faith’. Behind the mind-numbing discussions of basic rates and differentials and working-to-rule, he thought, there was ‘a quasi-religious impulse at work’, with the strike as a religious revival, the mass picket ‘a ceremonial demonstration of strength’, the hated scab who defied the picket ‘a category of folk devil’. And when people on the left talked with misty eyes about the unions, they were not just thinking about bulging pay packets; to them, unionism meant ‘a search for self-transcendence; the claim to collective dignity by reference to the past; the joy of a wider belonging’.5

  In an international context, what was unusual about British trade unions was that there were so many of them. In the early 1970s, there were well over 300 different unions (although if tiny workers’ associations were counted, it was more like 500), half of them belonging to the TUC. In fact, more than half of the total TUC membership actually belonged to just eleven major unions, their acronyms familiar to anybody who had ever opened a newspaper, from the TGWU, AUEW and GMWU, time-worn bastions of working-class identity, to NALGO, NUPE and COHSE, strident voices of the new white-collar public employees.* To European observers like the West German social democrat Helmut Schmidt, it beggared belief that Britain still persisted with such a fragmented, fractious union structure, in which employers often had to negotiate with several unions who were busy fighting one another, dozens of unions had fewer than a hundred members, and there were no postal ballots for official positions or secret ballots before a strike. But to talk of reforming the unions, of streamlining their procedures or making them accountable to the law of the land, was a dangerous business. Even to pick a fight with the 875 members of the Felt Hat Trimmers and Wool Formers, or the 114 Military Orchestra Musical Instrument Makers, or the 52 Basket Cane, Wicker and Fibre Furniture Makers, needed more courage and stamina than many politicians could muster, and since the late 1940s, most governments, Conservative as well as Labour, had preferred the path of least resistance. True, in 1969 Harold Wilson had made a stab at reform with Barbara Castle’s White Paper In Place of Strife; but, while the unions had stayed united, he had lost his nerve, and the ensuing furore had almost driven him from office.6

  At the dawn of the 1970s, very few people doubted that the unions would remain enormously successful actors on the political stage. Union membership was buoyant, surging from 44 per cent in 1968 to 56 per cent ten years later, an increase of nearly 3 million people. In particular, the unions found thousands of new recruits among women and white-collar workers. ‘The pace of inflation and the sense of insecurity have galvanised not only office workers but teachers and doctors,’ wrote Anthony Sampson in 1971, remarking on the ‘paler and quieter men, more articulate and coherent in their talk but usually flatter in their speeches’ who now rose to speak at TUC conferences on behalf of public-sector unions like NALGO and NUPE. It was said with some justice of white-collar unions that they were obsessed with their ‘differentials’ – the wage gaps that lifted them above their blue-collar comrades – rather than the wider health of the labour movement. But there was no doubt that they were enormously successful. NALGO, representing local government employees, saw its membership more than double between 1964 and 1979, while that of NUPE, which represented public employees, more than trebled. The most visible success story, though, was ASTMS, which swallowed up smaller unions with the appetite of a starving imperialist, scooping up doctors and technicians, administrators and managers, supervisors and foremen, at a rate of 1,000 new members a week. Its charismatic chief was the famously ebullient and well-paid Clive Jenkins, whom one reporter called ‘an industrial Fluellen with the gift of tongues’. Jenkins owned a sixteenth-century country house, kept a cabin cruiser moored outside his town house on London’s Regent’s Canal, displayed a ‘sensuous nude statuette’ on his office desk, and did all he could to shatter the stereotype that all trade union bosses were grey men in glasses pouring out pompous jargon in heavy Northern accents. He was television’s favourite Welshman, a regular guest on news programmes and chat shows alike, a showman and proud of it.7

  People joined unions like NUPE and ASTMS less out of working-class solidarity (because many members were not working-class at all), but as a reaction to worrying developments such as the decline of the old industries, the rise of inflation or the government’s propensity to impose wage freezes and statutory restraint. If you joined a union, the thinking ran, then at least you would have somebody to fight for you when things were tough. But it was also a vote of confidence in what the unions were best known for: strikes. When the Economist’s labour correspondent Stephen Milligan (later of auto-asphyxiation fame, but who then held a job that spoke volumes about the power of the unions) wrote a book about them in 1976, he noted that one obvious reason for their appeal was the fact that since the late 1960s, workers’ incomes had been squeezed so tightly by high taxes, rising prices and government incomes policies. Yet he also observed that in almost every major national strike since 1965 the unions had got what they had wanted. Between 1970 and 1972, workers who walked out on strike
got bigger pay rises (by 5 per cent) than those who did not. Not only had striking become a familiar, even mundane part of national life, it worked. It was no wonder, he thought, that people who had never struck before, from local government workers and civil servants to gasmen and bakers, were tempted to try it.8

  Strikes loomed very large in the public consciousness at the turn of the 1970s. In 1968, more than 4.6 million working days had been lost in strikes; in 1969, as inflation and wage restraint began to bite, some 6.8 million days were lost. As strikes escalated during the following decade, so they not only lasted longer but involved more and more people, spreading from the docks and the mines to almost every sector of the workforce. And in some industries, the stereotype of strike-happy shop stewards was not far from the truth. The Fleet Street print unions, for example, were infamously militant and self-interested, insisting on vastly expensive over-manning (estimated by The Economist at an eye-watering 34 per cent), and stamping their feet at even the mildest hint of reform. Not only were their members very well paid at £69 a week, but they exercised tremendous power: if they walked out halfway through the evening, for example, there would be no paper on the breakfast table the next day. In September 1971, a pay dispute caused the loss of 9 million papers in just three nights; four years later, more disputes saw The Times lose hundreds of thousands of copies, while the Mirror disappeared from the South of England for ten days in a row. Other industries had similarly abysmal labour relations. Steel was dogged by strikes, which in 1975 delayed the blowing-in of a new blast furnace for months on end. And the car industry’s strike record was justly notorious. Ford’s plants at Dagenham and Halewood became national bywords for unofficial strikes, and by the late 1970s the company was increasingly reliant on its factories in West Germany, where strikes were almost unknown. British Leyland, meanwhile, was plagued by endless shop-floor disputes: in 1969, its Cowley plant reported a staggering 612 stoppages, two per day, costing an estimated 33,000 vehicles.9