State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  If Heath thought that the end of the miners’ strike would banish the dark clouds of winter and bring a return to consensus, he was greatly mistaken. Within a matter of weeks a new and equally bitter confrontation had captured public attention. For years, discontent had been simmering in the docks over the introduction of new working practices, notably ‘containerization’, which threatened the jobs of the notoriously militant, tough and clannish dockers. In an attempt to avoid clashes with the unions, cargo-handling firms were increasingly trying to avoid employing them, but in March 1972 an unofficial shop stewards’ committee in Liverpool began blacking lorries whose drivers refused to sign a pledge to abide by union rules. One family-run haulage business, Heaton’s, promptly took the matter to the new National Industrial Relations Court, claiming that the dockers were trying to force their drivers to break their contracts. It seemed a clear-cut case: the NIRC handed down a £5,000 fine, and then a further £50,000 fine in April. Under the terms of the Industrial Relations Act, the dockers themselves were spared the burden of paying up; instead, it was their union, the TGWU, who had to foot the bill. This put the union leadership in a dilemma, since technically they did not recognize the court, and had refused to be represented at its hearings. But the TGWU boss Jack Jones, supported by the TUC, successfully argued that it would be better to pay the fine rather than risk having their assets seized for contempt of court; and so on 2 May, two days before the deadline, the union paid up.22

  Complicated as it already was, however, the case did not end there. By this point, the dock strike had spread. Even though Jones appealed to the dockers to stop, a national shop stewards’ committee now urged workers in ports across the country, from Hull to Tilbury, to join the blacking action. The NIRC promptly ordered Jones to discipline his members within three weeks or face further penalties, but he refused, arguing that it was union policy to defend ‘the right of shop stewards to exercise their responsibilities’, even when that meant defying his instructions. And if this gave the impression that the unions were out of control, then other events seemed to confirm it, for by now the government was facing yet another, completely unrelated strike. On 13 April, the three rail unions rejected an 11 per cent pay offer from British Rail and declared a work-to-rule, which inevitably meant severe disruptions and cancellations, especially on commuter lines around London. Disastrously, Heath decided to make this a point of confrontation, perhaps out of desperation to show his mettle after defeat by the miners, and that very evening Anthony Barber pledged that the government would not be ‘blackmailed by sectional groups seeking their own interest’. One Tory backbencher even told The Times excitedly that ‘if the railwaymen bring the nation to a standstill the Government will challenge Labour to a general election’ – a preview of things to come, although nobody knew it at the time.

  In the meantime, this seemed an excellent opportunity to show off the powers of the Industrial Relations Act, and Heath’s new Employment Secretary, Harold Macmillan’s rather ineffectual son Maurice, applied to the NIRC for a compulsory cooling-off period. This was granted; the railwaymen duly cooled off, and two weeks later returned to the fray more determined than ever, resuming their work-to-rule and imposing an overtime ban. By Saturday, 13 May, an unlucky day for travellers, the railways were facing massive shutdowns and the government had decided to fire its second barrel, as John Campbell puts it, by ordering a compulsory ballot as laid down in the new Act. Obeying the law, the railwaymen went away and voted, returning a 5–1 margin in favour of further action. Now the government really did look ridiculous. After all that effort, the Industrial Relations Act had made no difference whatsoever, much to the fury of commuters. At last, the unions accepted a 13 per cent pay deal, less than they had wanted, but making a mockery of Heath’s initial insistence that he would never give in. The Times spoke for many in its withering verdict that it was ‘not political strength but political obstinacy to fight to a finish for a principle in a policy that is not going to work’. Heath must write off the dispute as ‘the last twitch of an expiring policy’, the paper solemnly said, and look for ‘more effective ways of countering wage inflation’.23

  But it was the dockers who finally reduced the Industrial Relations Act from failure to farce. On 13 June, the morning after Heath had surrendered to the railwaymen, the Court of Appeal, chaired by Lord Denning, ruled that the NIRC had been wrong to impose fines on the TGWU. Jack Jones could have his money back; instead, the individual shop stewards would have to settle the fines. This was a catastrophe for the government: not only did it completely undercut the Industrial Relations Act, which was supposed to make unions responsible for the behaviour of their members, but it opened the way for shop stewards to defy the court and get themselves sent to prison, turning themselves into martyrs to the cause of the trade unions. Robert Carr was so depressed he felt he ‘might as well jump off Westminster Bridge’, while Heath was aghast that, as he put it, ‘even though [the dockers] had been using their strength to bully and blackmail the nation, they could now pose as the underdogs’.24

  As it happened, three London dockers were already before the NIRC, accused of leading an illegal picket of the Chobham Farm container depot on Hackney Marshes. One was the chairman of the National Port Shop Stewards’ Committee; another, the secretary, was a member of the Communist Party. All three could hardly contain their excitement at the thought of being sent to prison and turned into working-class heroes: when the news that the NIRC had charged them with contempt of court reached the picket lines, one shop steward remembered, the mood was ‘like a holiday, a bank holiday. They were sitting on the roofs, on the balconies. All the traffic was stopped. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.’ Almost overnight, a relatively minor case had turned into a major national crisis. By Friday, 16 June, the NIRC had signed arrest warrants for the three men, tens of thousands of dockers had walked out and Britain’s ports were at a standstill. On the front page of The Times, the faces of the three men, weather-beaten, bushy-whiskered and defiant, glared out from beneath a headline reporting that the dockers had called on the miners and railwaymen to join them on the picket lines. Inside, the High Court official delegated to arrest the three men admitted to feeling ‘a little bit scared’ at the prospect. Standing just over five feet tall, James Dorling, the ‘Tipstaff’, said nervously: ‘I hope there won’t be any trouble and that they’ll come out of the picket line quietly. I’ll get them in the car and be away to Pentonville.’ But others were less sanguine. ‘The Government does not seem to realise’, noted the former Mirror boss Cecil King, ‘that, as has been shown in the case of the miners and the railwaymen, this is all a trial of strength and the unions are stronger than the Government.’25

  What happened next, however, defied all predictions. On Friday morning, just minutes before the three self-declared martyrs were about to be arrested, the Dickensian figure of the Official Solicitor, whom few people had even known existed, applied for the prison orders to be quashed on the basis that there had not been enough evidence to convict them. Legally speaking, this was very sharp practice indeed, and most people assumed that the government had simply come up with an arcane ruse to escape from a tight spot. But the truth was that one of the prime movers was none other than Jack Jones, who had no desire to turn his rebellious shop stewards into left-wing heroes, or to make Edward Heath’s life even worse than it already was, and had instructed the TGWU’s lawyers to get the dockers out. Meanwhile, Lord Denning was under similar pressure to find a solution. ‘We were influenced perhaps by the state of the country, by the realisation that there would be a general strike, which would paralyse the whole nation,’ he admitted later. Hilariously, the dockers were furious at missing out on a spell behind bars, and their reactions were irresistibly reminiscent of, say, Leeds United’s footballers after yet another Cup Final defeat. ‘It’s a bloody liberty. They had no right to do it,’ said Vic Turner. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace,’ agreed Alan Williams, at 29 the youngest of the three. �
��If they had let us be arrested by the weekend there would have been a general strike. I am absolutely choked.’26

  Two of the men, however, eventually got what they wanted. Defying both the NIRC and their own union, the dockers continued to mount their pickets, and at last, on 21 July, the court ordered the arrest of five shop stewards for picketing the Midland Cold Storage depot in East London. Four were taken that day to Pentonville prison; almost unbelievably, the only one to avoid capture, Vic Turner, turned up outside the prison the next day to protest against the arrest of his friends, and was promptly taken inside himself. By this time, industrial relations across the country were sliding into chaos. Already the capital’s lorry drivers, mounting an action against the dockers, had brought all roads out of the Port of London to a total standstill, but the arrest of the ‘Pentonville Five’ brought matters to a climax. By the next day, not only had every major docks in Britain fallen silent as the workforce walked out, but thousands of electricians, bus drivers, printers and even meat porters joined the strike, claiming that the government had launched an unparalleled assault on the nation’s working people. ‘Exports worth millions of dollars a day to the country’s fragile economy piled up on idle piers,’ reported the American magazine Time, ‘while thousands of tons of Guernsey tomatoes, grapes from Cyprus and Australian apples rotted in the ships’ holds or were destroyed.’ Fleet Street was brought to its knees; for five days there were no national newspapers. In the Commons, Labour MPs chanted ‘Heil Hitler’ and gave mocking Nazi salutes as Heath desperately insisted that the Industrial Relations Act was still working, while Tony Benn rather absurdly claimed that the Pentonville Five would go down in history beside the Tolpuddle Martyrs. On 24 July, Heath refused Vic Feather’s entreaties to suspend the hated act. The next day, Hugh Scanlon persuaded the TUC to vote for a one-day general strike, the first since 1926.27

  Given the circumstances, it seemed odd that Heath was not more worried. The Economist remarked that the government appeared ‘remarkably relaxed and it was plain that Mr Heath had decided that this was not going to be his general strike week’. The reason became clear in the late morning of Wednesday, 26 July, when the Law Lords unexpectedly delivered their ruling in the original case of the lorry drivers at Heaton’s. Since their decision had not been expected for weeks, many people suspected that they had come under political pressure, but it seems more likely that they speeded up the timetable themselves, conscious of the threat to public order if they delayed. In the event, their decision could hardly have been better timed, for they threw out Lord Denning’s decision in the Appeal Court and declared that the TGWU was liable for prosecution after all, rather than its shop stewards. The NIRC immediately ordered the Pentonville Five set free, and that evening they were out, carried on the shoulders of a cheering crowd like conquering heroes. As numerous experts pointed out, this was a very strange decision: given that the men had been imprisoned for contempt of court, not for blacking, the Law Lords’ decision should really have made no difference. Since the men showed no contrition, and continued to voice their scorn for the court, the case could hardly have been said to have strengthened respect for the law; indeed, since it so obviously smacked of political convenience, it destroyed any last shreds of respectability that still clung to the NIRC. But the government hardly cared: the Pentonville Five were out, the TGWU quietly paid the fines, and the sympathy strikes petered out.28

  With the Pentonville case resolved, the dock strike dragged on for another two weeks, the government having to declare yet another state of emergency at one stage to guarantee food supplies. In the end, the dockers grudgingly agreed to the terms of a report drawn up by Jack Jones and Lord Aldington, chairman of the Port of London Authority, which provided for ports to charge extra for containers not packed by dockers, and effectively guaranteed them a job for life, hardly a very good way of modernizing Britain’s creaking and painfully old-fashioned ports. What was most revealing, however, was the way in which the strike ended. After delegates voted at Transport House on 16 August to approve the terms, they were jostled and punched by dozens of dockers waiting angrily outside. Some two dozen men, meanwhile, forced their way into the building and angrily confronted Jack Jones while he was trying to hold a press conference. He had sold them out, they insisted; and as he tried to explain, some threw water, ripped-up union cards and even a metal ash-can at him. Outside, more dockers confronted television reporters trying to get their side of the story, smashing their cameras and kicking one man to the ground. ‘Smash the fucking lot up,’ one said bluntly, ‘that’s what we want to do.’29

  If the turbulent events of the summer hinted at the widening gulf between the union bosses and the men they led, they also marked the final disintegration of Edward Heath’s plans for industrial relations. Not only did polls show that one out of two people now saw the Industrial Relations Act as a threat to order in the workplace, but employers themselves had lost confidence in it, many refusing to invoke it or even adding clauses to collective agreements specifying that they were not legally enforceable. Above all, the dockers’ and railwaymen’s strikes had made an utter mockery of the National Industrial Relations Court, which in the public mind had been reduced to a meaningless arm of the government. Even Heath himself quietly dropped mentions of the legislation from his speeches, and although it remained on the statute book, it ceased to be a meaningful presence. Whether it could ever have worked, given the unions’ determination to break it, is very doubtful; certainly its massive, unwieldy bureaucracy did it no favours. In the long run, it was probably a necessary prelude to the reforms carried out in the early 1980s, with the Thatcher government learning from Heath’s mistakes and introducing legislation more slowly and carefully, building a new structure brick by brick. In the short run, however, its failure seemed to confirm a growing sense that authority was breaking down, from soldiers being murdered in the back-streets of Belfast and the Law Lords bending over backwards to neutralize the threat of a general strike, to the police turning a blind eye to a new wave of pornography and muggers supposedly running riot on Britain’s streets. In Whitehall, there was a pervasive sense that the state had lost control of public order; in the polls, the government lagged thirteen percentage points behind even Harold Wilson’s ageing, disorganized and faction-ridden Labour Party. And it was little wonder that two out of three people told the Harris organization that summer that the unions were more powerful than the government, or that the same number thought that Britain was doomed to permanent industrial unrest.30

  Yet while some Tories were already muttering that Heath ought to ask the electorate for a new mandate to crush the unions, the Prime Minister himself remained surprisingly upbeat, presenting an unusually relaxed image on Panorama at the end of July and appearing ‘extremely confident’ when he welcomed a group of industrialists for whisky at Downing Street ten days later. The truth was that, with Barber unleashing a dash for growth and the Industry Act giving the government unprecedented power to bail out struggling businesses, Heath was confident that the coming economic boom would utterly transform his prospects. In particular, he was increasingly hopeful that despite the terrible headlines about strikes and class warfare, his charm offensive with the union leaders was about to pay off. In a series of secret meetings over the summer of 1972, he had tried to persuade Vic Feather that the future lay in a ‘tripartite’ partnership between the government, the employers and the unions. As always, he believed that simply by sitting down and talking, reasonable men would be able to come up with rational, consensual solutions, with no need for confrontation, and in July he told the TUC General Council that ‘the government, the CBI and the TUC had a common interest’ and should work together to build a ‘sensible consensus’. This was a very different Heath from the callous reactionary of left-wing propaganda, but he was being absolutely sincere; indeed, some of his Conservative colleagues began to worry that he was rather too keen on the union leaders. ‘He became infatuated with them. Insisted on
meeting after meeting,’ Douglas Hurd later told the journalist Hugo Young. ‘Was the only member of the Cabinet who actually enjoyed the meetings. Of course the union men loved them too; this was their way of life.’31

  From the middle of July onwards, Heath arranged a series of ten tripartite meetings with the CBI and the TUC, taking up a total of fifty-two hours and demanding vast amounts of effort and paperwork from his Employment and Treasury ministers. The business representatives did not impress him very much: they were ‘under-prepared and inexperienced’, he grumbled later, noting that his ministers sometimes had to help them with their own arguments. On the other hand, he had nothing but admiration for the TUC men: ‘widely experienced, immensely knowledgeable … and skilled in persuasively putting their side of an argument’. This came through to everyone who saw him in action: the CBI chief Campbell Adamson later complained that Heath clearly ‘loved the trade unionists more than he loved the industrialists’, and seemed ‘much more able to agree with them than with his own kind, as it were’. Coming from a Conservative Prime Minister, however, this was a risky approach. However much Heath liked to hark back to the 1930s and 1940s, seeing himself as the incarnation of One Nation patriotism, many party activists were itching for a fight with the unions and distinctly uneasy with the thought of a partnership with them. More seriously, Heath never seems to have realized that the union leaders were deeply political animals, subject to pressure from below and marked by social loyalties and ideological convictions he never really understood. Even if they wanted to work with him, it was very doubtful whether they could persuade their members to go along with it. But then Heath would not be the last Prime Minister to make the mistake of overestimating the union bosses’ power, the discipline and solidarity of their members, and their chances of delivering the orderly settlement he craved.32