Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  None of this was lost on the union leaders themselves. As the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins had pointed out in January 1979, the lesson of the Winter of Discontent was ‘their powerlessness to govern their own members. Their national leaders have lost control. I have never known them to be more alarmed.’ Six months later, the CBI’s chief, John Methven, told Hoskyns that the union leaders were ‘on the defensive, well aware that they had lost a great deal of their authority and moral credibility’. And although Hoskyns remained obsessed with union power, some senior ministers drew different conclusions. After the failure of the Day of Action, Sir Geoffrey Howe told Mrs Thatcher that the so-called ‘union barons’ had never been weaker. ‘Their influence with their own membership seems to have waned’, he wrote, ‘and disputes among themselves have weakened their authority further … There is a good deal of evidence of the unpopularity of the national trade union leadership amongst ordinary members.’ Perhaps surprisingly, Howe wondered whether it might soon be time ‘for the Government to show magnanimity and make a new move to establish better relations with the TUC’. But magnanimity never came naturally to Mrs Thatcher.37

  At the top of the union movement, there was little appetite for a showdown. The nation’s most senior trade unionist, Len Murray, disliked conflict and shunned the limelight. A Shropshire farm worker’s son and Methodist lay preacher, he had been to grammar school, took part in the Normandy landings and got a first at Oxford before working his way up the TUC ranks to become general secretary in 1973. A palpably decent and serious man, he had suffered two stress-related heart attacks already, and interviewers found him increasingly withdrawn. ‘His sad face’, reported Louis Heren, ‘suggested an infinite capacity for absorbing pain.’ That was just as well, for there was a lot more pain to come. ‘The Government has declared war on the unions. Mrs Thatcher really hates us, you know,’ one of Murray’s officials told the Observer. ‘We know Prior believes in a consensus, in one nation,’ another said despairingly. ‘But what do you do when others don’t want your advice, and you are continually insulted in public?’38

  To critics on the left, Murray seemed unforgivably defeatist. Yet his resigned pragmatism chimed with the instincts of the new generation of leaders who had emerged in the last years of the Callaghan premiership. At the largest union in the country, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), the autocratic Jack Jones, a former Communist, had been succeeded by the quieter, humbler Moss Evans. A miner’s son from the Welsh valleys, Evans saw his job as representing his members rather than leading them. When, in September 1980, an interviewer asked him what he had achieved so far, he said that his officials now had ‘access to video recorders and Ceefax’. ‘Not’, the interviewer thought, ‘the kind of issues Mr Jones would have mentioned.’39

  It was a similar story at the other leviathan of the labour movement, the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. Until 1978 the AUEW had been run by another formidable Marxist, Hugh Scanlon. But he had given way to the Wolverhampton-born Terry Duffy, a pugnacious pragmatist with a strong appeal to the skilled workers of the West Midlands. In almost every particular, Duffy offended radical instincts. He vigorously supported the anti-Communist Solidarity campaign in Poland, happily accepted government funds for union ballots and even pledged to stop ‘frittering away union funds in strikes’. His critics denounced him as a conservative sell-out. But when, in November 1980, Duffy stood for re-election on a platform of ‘no confrontation’ with Mrs Thatcher, he won on the first ballot.40

  What lay behind this turn to the right? Unemployment made a difference, certainly. It was hard to walk out on strike when benefits were being cut, factories were closing and there were hundreds of applicants for every vacancy. ‘These days,’ says one character in Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), ‘y’ go out on strike, before y’ can get out of the gates, management are havin’ sing songs and wearin’ party hats.’ Paradoxically, therefore, as the job losses mounted, the unions found themselves with less to do. Enthusiasm dried up; attendance declined; meetings were cancelled for lack of interest. When the journalist Beatrix Campbell visited union offices in the Midlands, people told her that they just sat around reading ‘novels waiting for someone to call’. And though there were still occasional demonstrations, they never came close to matching the vast turnout of the early 1970s. ‘I think that the unions stand indicted for what they’ve failed to do. The boilermakers, my union, don’t cater for the unemployed,’ one Bolton shop steward told the journalist Jeremy Seabrook. He had tried to fire his members up, but the older ones just laughed and said he was naive. ‘OK, they had a march, Liverpool, Glasgow, the March for Jobs,’ he said angrily. ‘But what’s come of it? In the future, people will look at the trade unions and say, “What the fuck did they do?”’41

  But the jobless figures were not the whole story. What is often forgotten is that for most people in the early 1980s living standards steadily went up. Even during the recession real earnings actually went up by 8 per cent, a stark contrast with the stagnant wages of the late 1970s. And when a TGWU official told Anthony Sampson that his union was full of Tories (‘and many of them aren’t just Tories, they’re Alf Garnett Tories’), he was not far wrong. One in three trade union members had voted for Mrs Thatcher in 1979; half thought she had the best tax policies, and more than a third preferred her approach to inflation and unemployment. To radical activists, these figures were genuinely shocking. But the unions had changed since the days of Ernest Bevin and Jack Jones. Despite the donkey-jacket clichés, almost half of all trade union members had white-collar jobs, and there were more immigrants, women and homeowners than ever. Younger members, in particular, had grown up in an increasingly individualistic and anti-deferential age. When their elders invoked the struggles of the past, many just shrugged.42

  In Coventry, one shop steward reported that when he asked members to join the Right to Work campaign, ‘the young chaps were saying they didn’t want to because they had jobs. They’d have a collection and chuck a quid in, but they didn’t want to strike and lose a day’s pay.’ And although left-wing activists liked to appeal to collective solidarity, many workers treated the idea with derision. ‘People who don’t work in industry don’t understand what it’s like,’ said another Coventry man, a machine-tools engineer who had lost his job. ‘Every time redundancies were declared in our firm’s other plant, we all should’ve gone out to fight for them. But they cared about us as much as we did about them, which is nowt.’43

  By the autumn of 1980, Prior’s Employment Act had become law. After all the squabbling and plotting, after all the accusations of appeasement and surrender, he had got precisely what he wanted. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher grumbled that he ought to have been tougher. Yet his approach proved an unqualified success, and when Norman Tebbit became Employment Secretary in the autumn of 1981, he followed Prior’s pragmatic formula to the letter.

  Like Prior, Tebbit thought it best to be ‘always just a little behind’ public opinion. His own Employment Act, passed a year later, tightened the restrictions on closed shops, made it easier for firms to sack disruptive workers and made the unions liable for civil actions if they pursued an unlawful dispute. But he did not ban the closed shop outright, nor did he make it compulsory to have ballots before strike action – a decision that was to have immense consequences in the miners’ strike two years later. As before, there was a lot of grumbling on the Tory right. The Daily Express, almost incredibly, branded him ‘Tiptoe Tebbit’ and laid into his ‘anaemic’ package as ‘too little and too tentative’. But like Prior, he held firm. ‘I don’t believe in miracles’, Tebbit told a Financial Times conference in April 1982, ‘or that it is possible to transform industrial relations overnight.’44

  Later, Mrs Thatcher’s critics suggested that it was the shock of unemployment, rather than the effect of her reforms, that really changed the unions. Sir Ian Gilmour, for example, saw the new laws as a symptom, not a cause, of their decline. There
is a degree of truth in this. If unemployment had been lower and the union leadership more assertive, she would surely have faced greater opposition. Even so, her strategy – or rather, Prior’s strategy – was impeccably judged. Both Wilson and Heath had gone all-out for change and failed completely. By contrast, Mrs Thatcher’s government moved slowly but steadily, never allowing the union leaders to arouse popular sympathy, never offering opportunities for martyrdom, always slightly behind the national mood. All in all, it was an object lesson in the merits of patience, timing and tactical caution.45

  By the spring of 1982, it was obvious that the unions’ glory days belonged to history. In just twelve months the TUC had lost half a million members. The TGWU had lost 411,000 members in two years; the AUEW had lost 200,000 and the General and Municipal Workers’ Union had lost a further 101,000. ‘Ten years ago the unions were on the peak of a wave,’ wrote the Observer’s labour correspondent Robert Taylor. ‘Now it is hard to mobilise the rank and file for any major offensive, even on pay.’ The political mood, too, had changed completely. Now nobody talked about beer and sandwiches, ‘barons’ and ‘concordats’. For the union leaders, there were no more late-night summits at Number 10, no more cosy chats about the future of the economy over smoked mackerel and Black Forest gateau. The worst thing was not that Mrs Thatcher was rude about them. It was that she barely acknowledged their existence at all.46

  On the factory floor, shop stewards talked of a new insecurity, a terrible dread of redundancies which tempered men’s militancy and robbed them of control over their own working lives. But managers told a different story. When the Guardian’s industrial correspondent John Torode spoke to a group of managers at a Manchester Business School seminar, they said they had recovered the confidence they had lost in the 1970s. The recession had sharpened their sense of urgency, while the unions’ crisis of confidence meant shop stewards were hesitating to call their men out. With the threat of the dole queue never far away, swift single-figure pay settlements had replaced the protracted wrangling of the past, and at the infamously strike-plagued Ford and British Leyland factories the men themselves had agreed to new working practices and gleaming new technology.fn3 Indeed, the managers told Torode that the details of the government’s reforms had been much less important than the message. ‘It helped boost morale,’ they said. ‘It was a psychological indication that the Government supported management’s right to manage.’47

  By this point, few people still talked of the ‘British disease’. In 1979 some 1,270 working days had been lost to strikes for every 1,000 workers in Britain, at least five times more than in France or the United States. But in 1980 this fell to 520 and by 1981 it was down to just 190. And although it rose again during the miners’ strike, it remained below 200 for the rest of the decade. The headlines were no longer full of strikes and go-slows; the front pages were no longer dominated by pictures of angry crowds at factory gates or bespectacled union leaders trooping into Downing Street. Even on the left there were those who marvelled at the transformation. Nobody, wrote the economist John Wells in Marxism Today in 1989, could deny that Mrs Thatcher had restored a sense of ‘realism and responsibility’ to the factory floor. Once ridiculed as stagnant and sclerotic, Britain had one of the most flexible labour markets in the world.48

  There was another obvious benefit. For years commentators had wrung their hands at Britain’s atrocious productivity, which had fallen so far behind its major competitors that, in 1979, hourly output was at least a third lower in Britain than in France and West Germany. But under Mrs Thatcher, for the first time in living memory, Britain began to close the gap. By the early twenty-first century it had drawn level, something unimaginable in the days of Wilson and Heath. Nobody now called Britain the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Of course Mrs Thatcher had not done it single-handedly; it was countless managers who introduced the new technology and working habits that made such a difference to Britain’s productivity. But would it have been possible without the new political climate of the early 1980s? Would so many Japanese firms have followed Nissan into Britain if the headlines had still been dominated by wildcat strikes, secondary picketing and the closed shop? It seems very unlikely. Many years later, the Oxford economics professor Simon Wren-Lewis, an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, wrote that it had become ‘taboo on the left’ to admit that there had been anything wrong with industrial relations in the 1970s. But there had. And whatever else economists thought of Mrs Thatcher, most of them agreed that she had fixed it.49

  None of this, though, came without a cost. In Corby, talk of an economic renaissance seemed like a black joke. The steel factory’s closure in the spring of 1980 had brought an even greater surge in alcoholism, vandalism and mental illness. The government declared the town an Enterprise Zone, with tax breaks for new businesses. Meanwhile, local councillors worked overtime to attract new jobs, luring Oxford University Press, Allied Mills, Golden Wonder and even, briefly, the computer giant Commodore. But by early 1981 unemployment was rocketing past 30 per cent. Visiting Corby that summer, one reporter was struck by the sight of so many ‘shamefaced’ men with Scottish accents helping their wives with the shopping. Three years later, Corby’s plight inspired the Scottish group Big Country’s number one album Steeltown, a paean to the town’s lost factory, resounding to the ‘call of the steel that would never stop’. And the scars never faded. Even in the early twenty-first century Corby still had some of Britain’s highest levels of obesity, smoking, alcoholism and drug abuse. It was a proud place, and life went on. But a man from rural south Northamptonshire was likely to live more than five years longer than his neighbour from Corby.50

  Yet in some ways Corby was relatively lucky. With its central location, between the M1 and A1, it had an obvious appeal to employers wanting cheap labour. Other steel towns were less fortunate. For decades, Consett, in County Durham, had been similarly dependent on its steelworks, which employed some 8,000 people, directly or indirectly. But in December 1979 British Steel announced that Consett, too, would have to close. As in Corby, Mrs Thatcher got the blame, and Consett became another symbol of her assault on the industrial working class. Once again, though, the rot went deeper. According to British Steel’s figures, Consett had lost more than £13 million in 1978–9 and another £8 million in 1979–80. The archives show that the government tried to find a private buyer, but none was forthcoming. As the Department of Industry reported to Number 10, it was simply too far from raw materials or major markets. In public, the steelworkers’ union made a fuss. In private, as the same report noted, they accepted that Consett was doomed.51

  In Consett, as in Corby, closure seemed a total catastrophe. ‘I just can’t imagine it. I’m 60. All my life the works have loomed over this town,’ said the chairman of the factory’s shop stewards. ‘My Dad worked there; his dad before him. As a kid I went to sleep with the sound of those mills running. I just can’t imagine this town without a steel works.’ In July 1980 hundreds of steelworkers marched through London to deliver a petition to Number 10. But it was no good. After more than a century, the last steel was cast on 12 September, each worker taking home a little ingot. That weekend, wrote one visitor, ‘the pubs and clubs were bursting’, the atmosphere heavy with nostalgia. Of the 2,900 men who had left the factory for the last time, just three had found jobs. That summer, there were just eight jobs for Consett’s 1,400 school-leavers. Some estimates put the local jobless rate at more than 40 per cent.

  Seven years later, as the government prepared to sell British Steel to private investors, one in four adults in Consett was out of work. Among young men and women under the age of 25, unemployment stood at almost 80 per cent. Faced with such a staggering waste of potential, such a colossal sacrifice of youth and energy, visiting journalists often searched for the positives, hailing the solidarity and spirit of ‘the ghost town that held on to life’. ‘Almost overnight’, wrote the Guardian’s Anne McElvoy, Consett had been ‘turned from a red-dust industrial town into a clean, wi
ndswept one.’ But that was no consolation to the men and women who found themselves on the scrapheap, with little hope of ever finding a job or escaping the daily pangs of anxiety and hunger. ‘We’ve paid a bloody high price’, one of them said, ‘for clean air.’52

  7

  Who Needs Enemies?

  Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe … We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing.

  Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), in Yes Minister, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, 24 March 1980

  Personally, I think the most effective wheeze would be to send the entire British [Olympic] team to Moscow with instructions to deliberately come last in every event.

  James Murray, Daily Express, 30 June 1980

  The year is 1959, and we are in a holiday camp in Crimpton-on-Sea, Essex. The camp belongs to the all-conquering Maplin group, but its new entertainments manager is a Cambridge archaeologist, Jeffrey Fairbrother, who has packed in his old job because he was sick of academia. Among his new employees, the Yellowcoats, are the camp host, Ted Bovis, with a colourful line in Teddy Boy suits; the nervous young comedian Spike Dixon, whose routines typically end in disaster; and the hapless Lancastrian chalet maid Peggy, the butt of every joke. The dominant personality, though, is the chief Yellowcoat, Gladys Pugh, driven, humourless and exceptionally Welsh, a man-eater with a burning passion for her new boss. Yet despite the staff’s tragicomic tribulations, life is good. The war has been won; austerity has been consigned to history. Class barriers are falling; rock and roll has crossed the Atlantic. And no matter how joylessly Gladys delivers her call to arms – ‘Hello campers. Hi-de-hi!’ – there is no mistaking the guests’ contentment, as they roar back as one: ‘Ho-de-ho!’