by Andy Beckett
But one of them, a shepherd, had ignored the order. The foreman gave me his number, and the shepherd, too, agreed to talk – as long as he could remain anonymous: ‘I’m still renting from them.’ Then he told his story. ‘My dad went up to the farm on the Friday night,’ he began, ‘and a security man stopped him, told him to keep away. But I had to drive through the farm to get to the fields at eight o’clock on the Saturday morning. There was a lorry there, and all these different vehicles, and loads of people about. And those bits you get down the edges of sheets of stamps – there were dustbins full of those. I couldn’t believe it. I was just ignored as I drove through. Later, I was told it was none of my business what had been going on. But we knew the postal strike was on [in Cricklewood]. We saw the [Grunwick] pickets on TV. We weren’t that thick. We guessed.’ Was it a shock? ‘It made us all realize at the time that when the working man was striking, how much was engineered against him. My cousin was a miner, and it didn’t surprise me that Mr Bob was involved. He was very Tory and against the unions.’ Another former Broadfield Farm employee told me: ‘Mr Bob used to say to us, “If I knew any of you voted Labour, I’d sack you.”’
To the NAFF activists who had converged on the farm on that warm July night, however, a more daring, idealistic conservatism was in the air. Half a century earlier, during the 1926 General Strike, large numbers of anti-union students had come forward as strike-breakers. They had been organized with some fanfare by retired military officers, and had used hired trucks and private cars to distribute food and other essential supplies. Now, after years of the Left making the running in British street politics, a radical right-wing volunteer network had finally been activated again. ‘It was revolution,’ remembered Graham Smith, suddenly reverent, looking up from the table in his law firm’s conference room. ‘There was a lot of shared excitement. People were very talkative.’
The trucks were driven into the barn. Long tables and chairs were set up. Other volunteers sat in groups on the floor. ‘It started off a bit chaotic,’ said Smith, ‘but then we divided up tasks.’ The hundred thousand parcels had to be unloaded, individually weighed and stamped, then sorted by address and put back into mailbags for posting. There were 250 volunteers altogether: Smith, with his Jesus beard and a sweatshirt; a young woman with an Alice band and a tank top, heaving mailsacks, almost like a Second World War Land Girl; and lots of older men in shirtsleeves like Gouriet. It was hot in the barn, even with the door open. There was the odd Thermos of soup, tea or coffee, and an atmosphere like a particularly eager election count. ‘It was revolting licking thousands of stamps,’ Smith remembered, ‘but there was a very strong sense that we had to get it all done. The mail had to be out in the postboxes the next morning.’
During the early hours of Saturday, the finished sacks were loaded into the smaller vehicles in the farmyard. ‘Then the horseboxes and shooting brakes were despatched,’ recalled Gouriet. They went down the long drive of Broadfield Farm, with instructions to deposit Grunwick’s mail in modest, hopefully not-too-noticeable quantities at postboxes from Manchester to Truro. ‘We were euphoric,’ he said. ‘It was the same spirit as in the war. I drove a load myself before heading home. I remember stopping in Burbage to post the last bundle. Then I had a very large whisky.’ He looked wistful: ‘They didn’t have as many breathalyzers in those days.’
For the rest of the weekend he and the other NAFF volunteers kept quiet about what they had done. The Grunwick mail, now sitting in thousands of postboxes a safe distance from London, still needed to be collected, sorted and delivered by postal workers who were in the same union, the UPW, as the Cricklewood militants. And the mail was all in branded Grunwick envelopes; it was still possible that a national blacking of it could be organized if the existence of Pony Express got out too soon. On Sunday, a BBC film crew visited the Chapter Road plant and were puzzled and suspicious to find the factory no longer piled with mailbags, but they did not work out what had happened. It was not until the Monday, when postmen began to find postboxes jammed with Grunwick mail, and sorting-office workers began receiving it in vast, unusual quantities, often incorrectly stamped, that the penny began to drop. Dozens of UPW branches outside London now refused to touch the Grunwick envelopes, but the union’s national executive, more politically cautious than many of its members, narrowly voted against supporting the blacking or extending it to every sorting office. In the Commons, Gorst made a gloating announcement: ‘Is the Secretary of State [for Industry] aware that over 1,000 bags of backlog mail… were posted last weekend? Will he agree that the action of the Post Office workers at Cricklewood is [now] completely irrelevant?’
‘To be frank, we were stunned,’ Dromey recalled. ‘We thought there was no way out for George Ward, and then suddenly… we were in serious difficulties. We hoped Operation Pony Express would be a one-off. But it was a huge morale boost for the forces of reaction in Britain.’ In his living room in Somerset, over coffee and chocolates, Gouriet savoured the memory. ‘We outwitted them. We outfoxed them. We ran rings around them.’ In 1977, his favourite British politician, described with a wink as ‘one NAFF enthusiast’, even gave an anonymous quote to The Free Nation, comparing Pony Express to a famous recent hostage rescue by Israeli commandos. ‘Margaret,’ remembered Gouriet, ‘said it was “the best thing since Entebbe”.’
The Grunwick strike was not over. On the same day as Gorst’s announcement, the company endured the biggest mass picket so far. Around 20,000 strike supporters, unaware of Pony Express, swamped Willesden and succeeded, for once, in preventing the Grunwick bus from reaching the factories for several hours. ‘We stopped the bloody plant,’ Scargill told me. Mass pickets continued into the autumn. In August, the Court of Inquiry published its report and recommended the reinstatement of all the strikers who had held full-time jobs at the plants. The report also recommended that the company should let APEX represent its workers. In addition, during the autumn, ‘There was still a hope that we could somehow resuscitate the postal blacking,’ said Dromey. ‘And a simple defiance, a determination to carry on.’ Through the winter and the following spring, and into the summer of 1978, Desai and the hardcore of strikers maintained their picket. ‘I lost my health. I had a gallstone operation after the strike,’ she told me. ‘But during the mass pickets – oh my god – the spirit was very high.’
After Operation Pony Express, the momentum of the dispute had altered, however. ‘We were never able to regain the initiative,’ Dromey admitted. Grunwick’s mail was not blacked again. Ward, confidence restored, simply rejected Scarman’s recommendations; he had already rejected a similar conclusion from the government conciliation service ACAS. Such consensus-seeking bodies, with their carefully balanced panels of trade unionists, business leaders and thoughtful liberal lawyers like Scarman, had no place in his concept of industrial relations. He did not reinstate the strikers or recognize a union. Grunwick survived and grew, and established new brands such as Bonusprint and other London premises. It survives to this day. Ward is still in charge but no longer grants interviews.
‘Ward was the vanguard,’ said Dromey. ‘Others followed: Murdoch, Eddy Shah, Thatcher herself during the [1984–5] miners’ strike.’ Dromey made a final attempt in the autumn of 1977 to orchestrate the cutting off of Grunwick’s essential services – not just its post but also its water, telephones and electricity – but failed. By early 1978, he wrote, ‘The “loyal” workers were no longer being bussed in … They walked through the picket lines and many talked to the strikers as if nothing had ever happened.’ After ‘some really difficult discussions’ with the strike committee, Dromey decided that ending the action would be ‘the dignified thing to do’. Desai and a handful of others disagreed. They went on hunger strike, were suspended by APEX for refusing to wind up their campaign, and ended up demonstrating outside the TUC headquarters against what they saw as their abandonment by the unions. A visiting Jack Jones shook hands respectfully with Desai and her comrades. The TUC genera
l secretary went a step further: ‘[Len] Murray called us inside,’ she told me. ‘He said, “Who is asking you to do this?” I said, “It is my tradition. And now you hang us on the wire.”’ By 14 July 1978, her defiance and her memorable plain-speaking were no longer enough. After almost two years, the strike committee declared that its action was at an end.
In the TGWU meeting room twenty-eight years later, Dromey looked for a silver lining. ‘You never really lost a dispute like Grunwick,’ he said in his flat Brent tone. ‘Did we achieve our objectives? No. Was it a landmark event? Yes. There’s not been a month since when I haven’t met Asian workers who mention 1976–1978.’ The argument seemed a bit rehearsed.
When I heard him speak at the Grunwick thirtieth anniversary celebration a few months later, however, he was more convincing. He was not wearing a suit, and there was a touch of the old leather-jacketed Dromey in his stage manner. With a lift in his voice, he pointed out that in 1977 London dockers had joined the mass pickets in support of Desai and the others. ‘Nine years earlier,’ he added, after a pause for the audience make the connection themselves, ‘dockers had marched in support of Enoch Powell.’
After I interviewed Dromey, I put an advertisement in The Miner, the journal of the NUM, or what was left of it, asking to talk to miners about their experiences at Grunwick. A few weeks later, an ex-miner called Glyn phoned.
‘I was seventeen then,’ he began. ‘Born and bred in a mining village. I was at a union meeting when they asked for volunteers to go down. We met up in Rotherham. It was a jolly. I think that were my first time in London.’ He spent a day on a mass picket. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. There were students, women demonstrators shouting … an actual gay group, who we got talking to. A group of guys standing there who were obviously gay. Standing there in unity with the sacked workers. I’d never met people like that. There were good feelings there. There were working-class people regardless of race, age, colour …’
For the British Left, such coalitions would become commonplace in the decade to come. And so would charging policemen.
16
Getting Away with It?
In some ways Grunwick was a deceptive political event. Away from Willesden and its acrid controversies, 1977 and 1978 proved to be a surprisingly good time for the British Left, or at least the milder parts of it. The Labour government suddenly found itself in a more benign economic and political climate than had been the case for years. ‘The stock markets came roaring back,’ remembered Gavyn Davies of the Downing Street Policy Unit. ‘North Sea oil was about to arrive. The social contract seemed to be working well. We had got rid of the IMF. We were optimistic that we had turned a very big corner.’ This optimism was not just private. ‘The pendulum has swung our way,’ Jim Callaghan told a BBC interviewer on The World This Weekend in late 1977. And it even affected the government’s more downbeat members, such as Bernard Donoughue. ‘In the summer of 1978, there was quite a good atmosphere,’ he told me. ‘I thought it was just possible that … we’d got away with it.’
There were a surprising number of reasons to come to this conclusion. Some of them, as Davies suggested, were economic. Most obviously, inflation finally seemed to be coming under control: in January 1978, it dropped below 10 per cent for the first time since October 1973, when the oil crisis and the whole mid-seventies economic meltdown had begun. In early 1978, too, unemployment began to fall, after rising continuously over the previous four years. Working days lost to industrial action – almost 6.5 million in the most turbulent quarter of 1974 – were down to barely 1.5 million, despite Grunwick, by the second quarter of 1978. And the average Briton’s real disposable income, often an equally potent political influence, having shrunk during 1975 and 1976, started to grow again in late 1977. By the following year, it was expanding once more at the comfortable rate to which Britons had been accustomed in calmer post-war decades.
The opinion polls registered this sense of a storm passing. During the IMF crisis, the Conservative lead over Labour recorded by Gallup had surged to 20 per cent. But then it steadily receded: to 10 per cent in mid-1977, 5 per cent in early 1978, 1 per cent that spring. By the autumn, with possibly as much as a year of the government left to run – a phase of the electoral cycle in which governments usually gained in popularity – Labour were narrowly ahead. This trend was confirmed by actual elections. In 1976 and 1977, the party had lost by-elections in seats it had held since the Second World War. In 1978, in more vulnerable constituencies, it won. In October, in Berwick and East Lothian, it even increased its support, the first time a government had managed this in a by-election for a dozen years. In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher summed up her feelings about the state of British politics in late 1978:
So a difficult year approached its end. We were behind in the polls and seemed all too willing to behave like a permanent Opposition rather than a potential Government, a failing on which the actual Government readily capitalized … We had made some progress towards converting the Party and public opinion in the direction I knew was required. Events too had contributed – the scenes at Grunwick … What mattered far more was that our programme lacked the clear commitment to changes, particularly in trade union law, which I believed were necessary … We still had a long way to go.
Another major obstacle was Callaghan. ‘Jim Callaghan had been dealt a bad hand by history and Harold Wilson in 1976,’ Thatcher wrote. Despite this, ‘He was a formidable opponent … He adopted in the House [of Commons] a manner that appeared avuncular, was in fact patronizing and made it hard for me to advance serious criticism of Government policy without appearing to nag … He proved extremely talented as a party manager; he had a real feel for public opinion.’ She also considered the prime minister ‘brave’ for supporting a new, post-Keynesian economic policy; and ‘tactically brilliant’ – a ‘poker player’ who ‘employed skill, gamesmanship and simple bluff’. Her shadow chancellor and close ally Geoffrey Howe was even more admiring. ‘Callaghan was a much more confident creature than Wilson had become,’ he told me. ‘He did begin addressing the real problems of the country.’
During 1977 and 1978, ‘Sunny Jim’, or ‘Steady Jim’, or ‘Uncle Jim’, or ‘Farmer Jim’ – the public nicknames all suggesting the valuable political qualities of likeability or shrewdness – oversaw a skilful balancing act. His government continued the curbing of state spending which had begun in the final, more sober phase of the Wilson administration. Callaghan justified the policy with a cunning mixture of priggishness and party point-scoring: contrasting his government’s financial prudence not with the profligacy of the Wilson Cabinet – in which he and his chancellor Denis Healey had, after all, both served – but with the almost equally free-spending administration of Edward Heath, one of whose most extravagant ministers had been its education secretary, Thatcher herself.
In the late seventies, Callaghan and Healey also both sensed that voters were turning against state spending. Voters in Healey’s Leeds constituency complained to him in blunt West Yorkshire terms about what they saw as the overgenerosity of welfare benefits. In the country as a whole, the proportion of people who took this view increased from 34 per cent in 1974 to 50 per cent in 1979. Meanwhile, the balance of public opinion between those who preferred cuts in spending and taxation as the broad aim of government and those who preferred increases was also shifting rightwards: from a 16 per cent margin in favour of the spenders in 1978 to parity in 1979.
For this reason, and to stimulate the economy, the Callaghan government reduced taxes from the notorious peaks they had reached under Wilson. For those on ten times average earnings – the rich – the proportion paid in income tax and national insurance fell from 70 per cent to 65 per cent; for those on one and a half times average earnings – the middle class – it fell from 35 per cent to 32 per cent; for those on half average earnings – the poor – from 22 per cent to 18 per cent, proportionally the biggest drop. In 1978, the government further asserted its distance from s
ocialist orthodoxy by selling some of its shares in BP, a partial privatization which the Conservatives favoured but had been too cautious to argue for in public.
On other issues, Callaghan challenged current liberal thinking. In October 1976, in a famous speech at Ruskin College in Oxford – six years earlier the venue for the first National Women’s Liberation Conference – he questioned the value of the ‘new informal methods of teaching’ and argued for ‘a basic curriculum with universal standards’ of numeracy and literacy. When it came to personal morality, he was even more traditional. ‘In the [Policy] Unit we produced a paper for his first Easter holiday reading about the restoration of responsible values in our society,’ wrote Donoughue later. ‘He telephoned me from his farm to say how much he liked it and asked me to join in the writing of his future speeches to incorporate this dimension. Sometimes these “values” emerged as a touchingly old-fashioned prudery. He once cautioned Tom McNally and me not to tell bawdy stories in front of [his wife] Audrey … and he told me that he had been totally unaware of homosexuality until well into adult life …’ The prime minister, Donoughue recorded, hummed hymns to himself as he walked stooping down the corridors to crucial meetings.
Callaghan, as much the son of a naval officer as of a Baptist mother, also increased the share of state spending that went on defence. Unlike his successor as prime minister, and despite opposition from the Ministry of Defence, he insisted on maintaining a permanent naval presence in the South Atlantic: a small, soon-to-beinfamous vessel armed with missiles and helicopters called HMS Endurance. The Argentinian government had repeatedly suggested it might invade the Falkland Islands during the mid-to late seventies, and Callaghan wanted to deter them. In December 1977, during a period of particular tension between Buenos Aires and London, ‘A force was despatched’ to support Endurance, Callaghan recalls in his memoirs, including frigates and ‘a nuclear-powered submarine’. The British government made sure that Argentina learned of its deployments, and sought legal advice about establishing an exclusion zone around the islands. The Argentinian government backed down, and the episode was quickly forgotten. ‘The force was able to return, the only misfortune being that the ships’ companies missed Christmas with their families,’ writes Callaghan with some restraint, given the consequences for British politics the next time a London government sent a task force to the Falklands.
