When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
Page 7
In Britain, starting in the late sixties, Samuel records,
The incidence of strikes increased dramatically; by the time of the ‘pay explosion’ of 1969–72, they were more frequent than at any time since 1919, and more successful in attaining their immediate objectives than any since the ‘strike explosion’ of 1871–73.
Many of these strikes were ‘unofficial’ – often initiated at very short notice, without the permission, or in open defiance of, the relevant union’s chain of command. By 1968, the Wilson government was already sufficiently concerned to set up a Royal Commission to examine industrial relations in Britain, and then to task one of its most able ministers, Barbara Castle, with toughening the Commission’s extremely cautious suggestions for restricting strikers’ freedoms into something much more fundamental. The result was 1969’s ‘In Place of Strife’, a White Paper proposing that the government should have the power to require a ballot of workers and a four-week ‘cooling-off period’ before a strike could begin. Within five months of publication, after opposition from the unions and their closest allies among Labour MPs and the Cabinet, in particular Jim Callaghan, the White Paper was abandoned.
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To the Conservatives, what seemed the increasingly impregnable position of the unions was an even greater and more long-standing worry than it was to Labour industrial-relations reformers like Castle. ‘Many of us on the right of the Party – and not just on the right – were becoming very concerned about the abuse of trade union power,’ writes Margaret Thatcher of her first years as an MP in the late fifties and early sixties. The first post-war Conservative scheme for curbing the unions was a pamphlet entitled ‘A Giant’s Strength’. It was written by – Thatcher’s description – ‘a brilliant young Tory barrister called Geoffrey Howe’ and published in 1958. The following year Heath became minister of labour.
However, his feelings about unions were, and remained, more complicated – you could say contradictory – than those of Tories like Howe and Thatcher. Unlike them, Heath had grown up in an era when unions were weak rather than domineering. He had had his encounter with Jack Jones, who became TGWU general secretary in 1968, in Spain decades earlier. In theory and sometimes in practice, Heath thought unions were a good thing. ‘The unions were an estate of the realm with whom cooperation was both desirable and necessary, if the nation was to remain united,’ is how he summarizes his philosophy as minister of labour in his autobiography. ‘Most union leaders were ultimately responsible people who could be reasoned with.’ His success in halting the threatened strike by the National Union of Railwaymen in 1959 through negotiation strengthened this conviction.
Heath’s respect for unions was sometimes reciprocated. ‘No Prime Minister, either before or since, could compare with Ted Heath in the efforts he made to establish a spirit of camaraderie with trade unions,’ Jones wrote in his memoirs. ‘Over the years he revealed the human face of Toryism, at least to the trade union leaders who met him frequently.’ Taylor notes that while he was prime minister, ‘Employers’ leaders in the Confederation of British Industry often gained the impression Heath much preferred the social company of the TUC [Trades Union Congress] establishment to their own.’
Yet Heath’s conciliatory attitude to unions depended on their remaining ‘responsible’ and ‘reasonable’ in his eyes. When they did not, he responded with the intemperance of a thin-skinned person whose strenuous patience has been exhausted. In Salisbury, I asked him about the behaviour of the NUM during his government. Heath’s voice instantly clotted with distaste: ‘Oh, they wanted to bust up the whole thing.’ In the Conservatives’ private policy discussions at Selsdon Park in 1970, he was already showing signs of impatience with British industrial relations. ‘Up to 1939 the balance was on the side of the employer,’ the minutes record him saying. ‘After 1945 the balance was on the side of the unions and it is still on the side of the unions … Employers have to be free to … get rid of men … The trouble at the moment is they cannot.’
In 1971, the Heath government produced a characteristically ambitious blueprint for transforming industrial relations. The Industrial Relations Bill was a mixture of both the consensual and the confrontational Heath approaches to unions. On the one hand, it recognized the right of workers to what the employment secretary Robert Carr called ‘strong trade union representation’ and compelled employers by law to do the same. On the other, the bill attempted to regulate virtually every aspect of union conduct, with potentially heavy legal penalties for non-compliance. The whole legislative package was so long and fussily written that even Carr himself later admitted he did not fully understand its provisions. It quickly proved even more politically indigestible than ‘In Place of Strife’.
Most unions were horrified at the prospect of their activities being tightly controlled by law. Many also felt a degree of discomfort at having damaged the Wilson government by opposing Castle’s reforms, and were keen to make up for it by taking on the Conservatives. Labour, meanwhile, saw an opportunity to hurt the Tories – Wilson remained a master of such manoeuvres – and to exact revenge for the Conservatives’ own, equally cynical refusal to support ‘In Place of Strife’. In the late sixties and early seventies, the possibility that obstructing trade union reform for short-term political advantage might be storing up trouble for the long term was not a decisive consideration for either party.
For much of 1971, the Industrial Relations Bill met major resistance: in Parliament, where debates on it took up more time than those on any non-financial legislation since 1945; at the TUC, where unions devised the effective strategy of simply refusing to register with the legal bodies the bill intended to set up; and on the streets, where between 120,000 and 250,000 ‘Kill the Bill’ protesters, said to constitute the largest ever British trade union demonstration, chanted their way through central London. Yet the bill survived. In August 1971, it became law. ‘It felt like there were going to be big battles with the unions, but that the reforms and strong government would sort them out,’ remembers Brendon Sewill. ‘And if those battles were won, one would come out all right on the other side.’ But he and the rest of the Heath government had not thought enough about the miners.
I met Charlie McLaren on a bright September weekday in 2004. He was a stout man of sixty-two, with a wheeze behind his easy laugh. He lived in a neat new bungalow in a suburb of Stoke-on-Trent, between a branch of the budget supermarket Lidl and a lumpy ex-industrial hillside. In the clear, unforgiving sunshine, there were a lot of middle-aged men about. They did not seem to be working. There was a sense of premature retirements being eked out.
It was midday but McLaren still had his slippers on. We sat in his living room while his grandchildren played outside the open windows. He told me he had not worked as a miner for over twenty years. ‘I got sacked during the ’84–5 strike,’ he said. He looked at his slippers. ‘They said I hit a scab. But I didn’t.’ He had had one job since, as a trade union lecturer in Wolverhampton, but his health had ended that: ‘I couldn’t run for a bus or anything.’ He looked up again, eyebrows black and bristling but the gaze neutral beneath them. ‘My chest,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘From the pit.’
He had started as a miner in 1958, at the age of sixteen. His father had been a miner and NUM activist before him. The melancholy twentieth-century history of the British coal industry ran through their lives. The presence of coal in accessible locations had been central to the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s rise to global pre-eminence. But by the Edwardian era, the mining business, like the national economy, faced unbeatable international competition and the beginnings of decline. British coal output peaked in 1913; subsequent innovations – rationalizing the number of pits, nationalizing them all in 1947, securing preferential financial treatment from the government – were often simply ways of postponing the industry’s fate. In 1955, McLaren’s father gave up on the shrinking Lanarkshire coalfields in Scotland and moved to England with his family to find more secure
mining work. Three years later, the teenage McLaren joined a pit in Staffordshire. ‘I was a face-worker,’ he said. ‘It was better paid but the hardest job. All bloody pick and shovel until mechanization in the late sixties.’
Because of the historic significance of their industry and the grim struggle of their working lives, miners continued to be revered, even romanticized, long after such feelings had dwindled, if they ever existed, for the rest of the industrial working class. ‘The men who work in the coal industry rightly evoke our sympathy and admiration,’ declared Heath’s trade and industry secretary John Davies in the Commons in January 1972. The government’s former adviser Brendon Sewill remembers: ‘I went down a coal mine while I was studying economics at Cambridge. I reckoned it was part of my education. I was totally aware of what a bloody awful job it was.’
Another element of the miners’ mid-twentieth-century mystique was their unusual politics: a mixture of militancy and reticence. From the earliest days of the industry in the eighteenth century, British miners had been the pioneers of strikes and other forms of workplace activism. ‘Coalmining had a tradition,’ wrote the mining historian William Ashworth in 1986, ‘so old as to be apparently ineradicable, of quick resort to small-scale [industrial] action in cases of disagreement.’ By the twentieth century, the importance of coal to the economy as a whole had established a widespread fear of miners’ rebellions. Yet their militancy tended to follow an unusual cycle, with insurrectionary periods – for example, the succession of major strikes in 1912, 1920, 1921 and 1926 – followed by long stretches of relative inaction, when remembering past struggles seemed more of a priority than launching new ones. The miners were also strongly divided along political and regional lines. The Yorkshire NUM, for example, had a reputation between 1940 and 1970 for being right-wing by trade union standards and for acting virtually as a union within a union. When Heath took office, there had not been a national miners’ strike for almost half a century.
In Staffordshire at the start of the seventies, McLaren’s NUM activism involved no more than attending union branch meetings. ‘It was a pretty moderate area. There had been only one short strike in the sixties.’ But elsewhere the union’s placidity was at best superficial. During the sixties, the chairman of the National Coal Board had been Lord Robens, an ex-miner, NUM member and Guardian reader. Despite these credentials, his memoirs are shrill with warnings about an upsurge in ‘subversive’ miners’ behaviour. During a strike in Yorkshire in 1960, he records, ‘Agitators toured the coalfield in flying columns.’ In 1970, again in Yorkshire, Robens had an encounter with a ‘yarling mob’ of rebellious miners. He found them ‘crude, vulgar and unfit to lead the decent men I know in the pits. How in heaven’s name men like this can possibly be elected as leaders of good Yorkshire miners, I cannot understand … But for the presence of the police I believe they would cheerfully have murdered me.’
This return to militancy had many sources. The mechanization of the industry required changes in work practices, and the precise shape of the miner’s working day had long led to disputes and tricky negotiations. In 1971, a new NUM president, Joe Gormley, had been elected. He was a self-styled ‘realist’ who sensed a more abrasive kind of leadership was required by his members. Miners’ pay had fallen behind that of comparable workers during the sixties: ‘We were looking at what other people were earning,’ remembers McLaren, ‘and even Staffordshire miners had begun to realize we weren’t getting paid what we should.’ There was also a sense that the time for militancy might be running out. In September 1971, oil overtook coal as the leading fuel consumed in Britain for the first time. The number of miners had already shrunk by more than half during the previous decade, and of those who remained twice as many were in their fifties as in their twenties. In addition, there was an ancient score for the NUM to settle. The miners’ last national strike, in 1926, had not been won and had not been forgotten.
Finally, there was the Communist Party of Great Britain’s involvement in the NUM. The CP’s peak of popularity had been decades before, in the forties, when half a million Britons regularly voted Communist and the party could count its local councillors in the hundreds. Since then, the CP had faced growing difficulties. The Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 had cost it members and sympathy: while the CP strongly criticized the latter, it remained closely associated with the Soviet Union. Between 1957 and 1979, the British CP received a secret subsidy from the Russian embassy in London, dispensed in cash in large leather holdalls. Meanwhile, the CP’s austere and disciplined political style left it ill-suited, in many ways, to the looser Britain of these years: the party was uncomfortable with the libertarian, hard-to-control character of many of the period’s radical movements and campus rebellions. The CP was even sometimes uncomfortable with its members having long hair. Its Trotskyite rivals – the International Socialists, the International Marxist Group – took advantage.
The one area of British political life where the CP was still making progress was in the unions. Like the party, they were still full of middle-aged men who believed in the class struggle. From the late fifties, the party’s highly effective ‘industrial organizer’ Baruch (‘Bert’) Ramelson, a Ukrainian immigrant of considerable charm, worked quietly to secure the election of party members as senior union officials. Ramelson astutely realized that CP men would only achieve influence in unions if they showed themselves to be good union men first. He encouraged them to be low-key, at least in public, about their involvement in the party, and discouraged the party from keeping them on too tight a rein. He also encouraged the CP to form alliances with left-wing union leaders such as the TGWU general secretary Jack Jones who were not communists but shared some of the party’s broad goals.
Yet it was in the NUM that Ramelson’s strategy paid the the most dramatic dividends. By the early seventies, one of the CP’s ruling committee, Mick McGahey, was the leader of the Scottish miners. Five other members of the twenty-six-strong NUM executive were also communists. Even the once-conservative Yorkshire NUM had moved strongly leftwards. In the summer of 1971, the union embarked on a national campaign that would enter NUM mythology – and the collective memory of British politics.
In July, the union’s annual conference voted unanimously that miners should receive an average pay increase of 25 per cent. In October, the union’s national executive rejected a Coal Board offer of 7.5 per cent. The Heath government had imposed a ceiling of 8 per cent on pay increases across the economy in an attempt to control inflation. In November, miners throughout Britain stopped doing any overtime. The same month, a strike ballot was held, and 58.8 per cent voted in favour. On 9 January 1972, the strike began.
It was widely expected to fail. The vote for a stoppage had not been overwhelming; the NUM did not have enough money for strike pay; the winter had been mild so far, so coal stocks were high; and the government had made preparations. ‘During the past months,’ explained a secret memo written by a civil servant two days before the strike started, ‘measures have been taken … to maximise the level of [coal] consumers’ stocks and ensure that as far as possible these were reasonably distributed throughout the country.’ In the Cabinet a day earlier, the mood was quietly confident: ‘The Home Secretary’, the minutes record, ‘said that the general arrangements to deal with the initial effects of the strike appeared satisfactory.’
The media were less guarded in their assessments. ‘Rarely have strikers advanced to the barricades with less enthusiasm or hope of success,’ wrote the columnist Woodrow Wyatt in the Daily Mirror. ‘It will hurt them more than it hurts us,’ forecast the Daily Mail. ‘Few believe that the miners will stay out long enough to inconvenience the public.’ The Financial Times delivered a stern lecture to the miners about ‘the futility of taking on a determined government’, especially given ‘the apparent inability of the unions to unite together in battle’. A Thames Television documentary about the build-up to the strike summed up the prevailing mood:
it was titled The Miners’ Last Stand.
Yet the NUM quickly upset all these predictions. The union made a virtue of its weaknesses. Lacking the funds and the support from his members for a drawn-out stoppage, Gormley and his strategists devised a brief, aggressive campaign. Instead of simply shutting down the pits and other coal-mining facilities in the traditional attritional NUM style, the union went for the ‘pressure points’ of the coal-dependent economy: power stations, coal depots, anywhere coal was consumed or distributed in significant quantities. Each regional NUM organization was assigned a non-mining area to cover as well as its own backyard. Kent miners watched the grey Thames Estuary for coal ships and patrolled its muddy inlets and wharves in motor boats provided by sympathizers. Yorkshire miners recruited students from the University of Essex in Colchester to act as auxiliary pickets and lookouts. Power stations everywhere were blockaded. Where they had adequate reserves of coal, out of reach behind their perimeter fences, the miners cut off other vital supplies instead: ‘lighting-up oil’, which kept the coal-combustion process stable – and which had not been stockpiled by the government – and even food for the power-station canteens. Power-station managers tried to counter by bringing in oil at night, or by helicopter, or by smuggling it in in containers disguised as engineering components. But by only the third week of the strike, sections of power stations were having to be shut down.