by Andy Beckett
However, for the national media and the public the result of the survey was easier to absorb and remember than its questionable context. For the rest of the dispute, Ward’s anti-union stance had at least the appearance of democratic legitimacy; the Grunwick workforce was assumed to be utterly divided; and Ward was able solemnly and repeatedly to invoke as an argument ‘a worker’s right … not to join’ a union, as he put it in his autobiography – despite the fact that compulsory union membership at his factories was not a goal of the Grunwick strikers and, he had to admit in his book, only a distant and possible consequence if they won. ‘Granting an official status to the union by “recognition”’, he wrote, ‘in practice … means the union is likely to seek to negotiate not just for its own members but for the whole workforce, and eventually it may try to impose a closed shop, excluding from employment all those who refuse to join.’
In these slightly stiff, paranoid sentences, as in the fortifications at Chapter Road, was embedded a whole new right-wing approach to strikes and unions. In time, it would come to dominate Conservative Party thinking. But in 1976 and 1977, with Margaret Thatcher and her free-market allies not yet in full command of the Tories, let alone in government, it was left to Ward and, most dramatically, an unexpected group of Ward backers to put the new approach into practice.
In September 1976, the APEX general secretary Roy Grantham made a speech at the TUC conference alerting other unions to what was happening in Willesden and urging that they make a contribution. The delegates from one other union in particular paid Grantham’s speech close attention. Grunwick, as a company with a thriving mail-order business, was highly vulnerable to any action taken against it by the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW), the main postal union and, at local level at least, a more radical organization than APEX. By September, members of the UPW branch that dealt with Grunwick were already refusing to cross the picket line to deliver the company’s mail. On 1 November, UPW members at the sorting office in nearby Cricklewood began refusing to receive the Grunwick mail as well, or to let the company come and collect mail that had already arrived at the sorting office.
‘This was a threat to our jugular,’ Ward wrote later. ‘Eighty-four per cent of our trade depended on mail order.’ But help was at hand. On the evening before the postal boycott of Grunwick began,
I … heard a programme on BBC [radio] 4 about the closed shop. The man who was leading the debate against compulsory unionisation was a Roger Webster, who had been sacked some time before by British Rail for refusing to join a union … He argued with spirit, but also with a dry humour … I found myself in total agreement … He was described on the radio as the National Branch Organiser for the National Association for Freedom … After hearing Roger Webster talk I decide to get in touch with NAFF.
While Ward was trying to find a phone number or an address, NAFF’s director, John Gouriet, had by coincidence just found out about the threatened postal blacking at Grunwick. ‘I had read a tiny little style column item, hardly an inch, on the back of the [London] Evening Standard,’ he told me in 2006. ‘It was one little company that was being bullied. I rang up George Ward and said, “Can we help?”’ Roger Webster completes the anecdote in his memoirs: ‘“Answer to prayer!” was George’s reply. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you since I heard your man on the radio. How soon can we meet?”
‘“I’ll be with you in an hour,” replied Gouriet.’
During the late sixties and early to mid-seventies, a certain feverishness seized some of those involved in British right-wing politics. The fever, which intermittently infected the Conservative Party itself, started during Harold Wilson’s sixties government, hit a peak with the defeat of Ted Heath by the unions, continued at a high level throughout Wilson’s second, crisis-hit administration, and only slowly abated as Callaghan began to run the country with relative competence and moderation – and, more importantly from an anxious right-wing point of view, Thatcher began to look like a radical and electable alternative. Some of the preoccupations of this feverish right-wing politics were relatively short-lived: whether Prime Minister Wilson was a Russian spy; the threat to true Conservatism represented by Prime Minister Heath. But others were enduring: the belief that British decline had worsened into national crisis; the need for a strong, quite possibly authoritarian right-wing government to stop the slide; and, above all, the need to take on the trade unions, which were at best, the argument went, a working-class interest group that had grown too powerful or, at worst, part of a global left-wing conspiracy that led all the way back to Moscow.
The holders of this world view were a mixed bunch. There were City grandees, and restless Tory MPs such as Nicholas Ridley and Airey Neave; new bourgeois pressure groups such as the Middle Class Association, and members of MI5; and distinguished former soldiers, such as the founder of the SAS Colonel David Stirling and General Sir Walter Walker, until 1972 head of NATO’s northern command. There were also the less distinguished tycoons and landowners who gambled and plotted at the Clermont Club; and even survivors from previous busy periods on the far-right fringe of British politics, such as the veteran anti-Semite and anti-immigration campaigner Lady Jane Birdwood. The organizations these people formed came and went. The Middle Class Association had 5,000 members at its peak and existed from 1974 to 1976. Stirling’s GB75 and Walker’s Civil Assistance were both intended to be larger, country-wide networks of volunteers, ready to ‘act’, in Walker’s usually undefined terms – interpretations of his intentions varied from helping the government maintain essential services to mounting a military coup – ‘in the event of a breakdown of law and order’. These organizations attracted national attention: Labour politicians warned about ‘private armies’, and letter-writers to right-wing newspapers expressed rare excitement.
But such publicity always seemed to lure the likes of Walker into overconfidence and the other vices of hastily assembled political crusades: claiming vast but unconvincing memberships, splitting and merging, impatiently adjusting their names and aims. It was one thing to airily plan the counter-revolution in a gentlemen’s club, it seemed; quite another actually to do something concrete in the Britain of the late sixties and the seventies, which was preoccupied by the state of its economy and still had a strong Left.
The National Association for Freedom was the one right-wing fringe group with a practical mindset and genuinely potent political connections. It had been officially launched in December 1975, and Margaret Thatcher attended its first subscription dinner in January 1977. But NAFF’s roots ran much deeper, back to the forties, when Norris McWhirter, one of the identical twin sons of a right-wing Fleet Street editor, had campaigned against Clement Attlee as a teenager. At Oxford, Norris was taught by Tony Crosland and found the future Labour philosopher ‘able’ but ‘quite unconvincing’, he wrote later; after university, Norris and his brother Ross established a precocious, abrasive double act as entrepreneurs, journalists and political and legal campaigners, specializing in dogged court actions against unions and the state which made successful use of obscure parts of the law and were accompanied by a fierce rhetoric about defending the individual against the collective. In the late sixties, the brothers fought against the introduction of comprehensive education to the prosperous north London suburb of Enfield and formed a lasting alliance with one notable local right-winger, Ralph Harris of the Institute of Economic Affairs. By the mid-seventies, the McWhirters’ less overtly political activities, as the co-editors of The Guinness Book of Records and the cold but compelling stars of its television spin-off Record Breakers – both of which put an anti-egalitarian emphasis on ranking individual achievement – had made them rich enough to set up their own right-wing organization.
It started in 1975 with a publishing company for anti-union tracts, the Current Affairs Press, and a news-sheet, Majority, which stood up for the ‘free’ capitalist economy and suggested that private citizens should husband food and set up ‘self-help’ groups to counter s
trikes. In October, Ross McWhirter successfully intervened against members of the National Union of Seamen when they refused to let passengers’ cars off a strike-bound ferry in Southampton, by using legal writs and despatching Gouriet to the port as his envoy. In November, the Current Affairs Press was renamed Self-Help. The same month, plans were drawn up to turn Self-Help into NAFF, and Ross McWhirter, a vocal opponent of the IRA, broadened his organization’s remit further by offering a £50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the notorious Republican cell, later known as the Balcombe Street Gang, then at work in the capital. The IRA gang travelled to McWhirter’s house in Enfield, waited for darkness, and shot and killed him beside his doorstep. In the Commons the next morning, Margaret Thatcher said, ‘We on this side of the House … knew Ross McWhirter well and admired him a great deal. He was one of the finest people of his generation … He was active each and every day in protecting and preserving individual liberty.’ A week later, still in the glare of publicity sparked by McWhirter’s murder, NAFF was launched by his brother.
From the start, the Association had close links with the Conservatives, from Thatcher right down to the party membership, which was NAFF’s main recruiting ground. It had money: membership was £5 a year, high for a political organization in the seventies, and wealthy supporters were prepared to donate much larger sums – a 1978 appeal for £90,000 to pay for some of NAFF’s activities at Grunwick raised the cash in three weeks. It had a vigorous newspaper, The Free Nation, with articles about the Tory leader (‘Mrs Thatcher, Please Don’t Sell Out to the Union Left’) and the policies she should adopt (‘Council Houses: Give ’Em Away!’), and others by some of her more radical advisers (Ralph Harris and Alfred Sherman). It had articles about the socialist threat abroad as well as at home (‘Why the Zambezi Is OUR Front Line’). It featured appeals from NAFF for information about bullying by unions (‘Are you fed up with blackmail and intimidation from militant minority groups in your place of work? … Do you want to take action but don’t know how? WHY NOT GET IN TOUCH WITH US FAST? 01-8368553 Ansaphone in operation. WE WILL HELP IF WE CAN’). For light relief, and perhaps revealing of its readers’ income and location, The Free Nation also had ‘Stable Talk’, a column about racehorses.
NAFF’s other high-profile publication was a Charter of Rights and Liberties. Reflecting the mixture of libertarian thinking and traditional right-wing fixations found in The Free Nation, these included:
The Right to be defended against the country’s enemies.
Freedom of speech and publication.
Freedom to withdraw one’s labour, other than contrary to public safety.
Freedom to belong or not to belong to a trade union …
The Right to private ownership.
Freedom to exercise personal choice … in spending, and from oppressive, unnecessary or confiscatory taxation.
Freedom from all coercive monopolies.
Freedom to engage in private enterprise …
In the spring of 1976, Graham Smith had just finished a law degree when he came across the first issue of The Free Nation in WHSmith in Leicester. He had not been involved in student politics but was considering joining the Conservatives and, he told me, ‘I’d always been interested in libertarianism. I was intrigued by Free Nation. I wrote off to them: “I’ve got six months free. Would you be interested in me doing a summer job?”’ He started as ‘a gofer’ for NAFF, before becoming its first research officer. ‘The offices were in Upper Berkeley Street [in Marble Arch]. Couple of smallish rooms. There was a mixture of young people like me and older figures like Norris McWhirter – a delightful character, quietly spoken, great integrity. It had a sense of something completely different. We felt like radicals.’
At first, much of this radicalism boiled down to selling papers in shopping streets in other parts of London. It was something left-wing sects like the Socialist Workers Party did all the time, but a brave initiative for a right-wing organization – an indication of where Britain’s political centre of gravity still lay. Unlike their left-wing counterparts, the NAFF paper-sellers worked in groups. ‘We went to Brixton once,’ Smith remembered. ‘The local SWP got unhappy. We beat a retreat … We even went up to one TUC conference. Sold the papers outside the front door. Dromey was there, over on the other side of the road, with a bunch of his Grunwick pickets. He started shouting with his loudhailer, and a great bunch of people started coming over, and the police suggested we beat a retreat …’
The junior NAFF activists tended to be middle-class and clean-cut but less conventional than the typical young Conservative. Instead, they looked like hippy-ish young Christians. Smith had a Jesus beard and wore tight T-shirts over his lanky frame. Thirty years on, he had naturally broadened a little. Like Dromey, he was clean-shaven and wearing a suit when I interviewed him, in another corporate-style meeting room, and like Dromey he had done well since Grunwick: he was a partner in the international law firm Bird & Bird. It was an uncomfortably close London summer evening but that did not completely account for his initial jumpiness. ‘I haven’t been active in any of this stuff for years, really,’ he told me, looking at the table. Getting him to agree to meet had taken months.
John Gouriet was a different matter entirely. Since his time as NAFF director in the seventies, without ever entering conventional politics, he had never stopped fighting for right-wing causes. He was much older than Smith, ex-army, and he lived in rural Somerset. When I rang him in 2006, he invited me down for lunch without hesitation.
In a winding valley north of Taunton, the slow bus from the station got stuck in a traffic jam. When I called Gouriet to say I would try to carry on by foot, he immediately offered to drive and intercept me. ‘Red Peugeot 406,’ he added crisply, as if we were embarking on a minor military operation. ‘Number plate ending in FYB.’
Gouriet was wearing an old-fashioned check farmer’s shirt when he picked me up. He had side-parted hair like Prince Charles, a proud nose like Edward Heath and an intermittent excitement in his eyes. In the car, he talked about where he went shooting, about the pointlessness of speed limits – ‘people, if left to their own devices, will do the right thing’ – and about ‘the hoi polloi in Minehead’ on the nearby coast. Then we turned off into a sweet village, where a white house stood, looking out over the valley, full of dogs, antiques and prints with imperial themes, and with its front door wide open in March. ‘We’re having pheasant,’ Gouriet announced.
‘I came out of the army in January ’73,’ he began as we sat in his bracing kitchen. ‘Armoured-car regiment. Converted to tanks. Started in Malaya, active service ’56–’57. It didn’t interfere with our polo and racing, but I’d never seen a dead body until I’d seen one strung up on a tree, looking like a sieve. A Chinese informer.’ Gouriet paused over his cream sauce. ‘I was in Aden. Borneo in ’65, one of two intelligence officers. One was looking at the enemy, listening to the enemy. I put it to good use at Grunwick. I was in Northern Ireland for a year. I went briefly to Saigon – I was cadging a lift to Hong Kong with the RAF. It was the most extraordinary scene, several huge runways, aircraft landing, taking off, at the same time as mortar attacks …’
Like a significant number of British army officers who had witnessed the advance of communism and Irish republicanism at first hand, Major Gouriet entered civilian life in Britain in the mid-seventies with a sense that the world was tilting dangerously towards leftism and anarchy. ‘I went into the City. I was there watching the FTSE fall to that ghastly figure of 146 [in 1974]. Too many people were wringing their hands. I joined the [Conservatives’ hard right] Monday Club. I became chair of its economic committee. I was by then a good friend of Ralph Harris [of the IEA] …’ Gouriet smiled. ‘It’s not what you know but who you know … And I joined what would become NAFF – I discussed it all with him. I originally called it Link. I wanted to link everything up, to pull the right-wing fringe groups together, build up substantial pressure points to persuade the government of
the day …’
There was a division in the NAFF hierarchy between the young libertarians like Smith, who were opposed to authoritarianism of all kinds, and some older members like Gouriet, who had army backgrounds or right-wing intelligence connections and did sometimes think of British politics in military terms. ‘There’s a clip of Dromey addressing his troops at Grunwick,’ Gouriet volunteered as we finished the pheasant, ‘and he says, “Gouriet may look like Colonel Blimp but he’s a General Pinochet.”’ Gouriet laughed: ‘High praise indeed!’ After we had finished pudding and covered numerous other subjects, he volunteered again: ‘Going back to that comment about me and Pinochet’ – he smiled almost wistfully – ‘perhaps Dromey had a point.’
At Grunwick, the assistance NAFF gave George Ward was at first behind the scenes and narrowly legal. In response to the November 1976 postal boycott, or ‘blacking’ as such union actions were often called, ‘They recommended solicitors,’ Ward wrote. ‘After consulting Counsel [the solicitors] advised me that legal action [against the Union of Post Office Workers] would prove effective.’ Following the usual McWhirter method of using forgotten parts of the law as political levers, NAFF and the solicitors drew Ward’s attention to the 1953 Post Office Act, which made it a criminal offence for ‘any officer of the Post Office’ to ‘wilfully detain or delay’ the mail. ‘They suggested that we should apply at once for an injunction to stop the blacking,’ Ward wrote. An injunction was obtained and served, and the UPW called off their boycott. It had lasted for only four days.
