by Owen Jones
Tony Benn was a minister in the Labour Cabinet during the Winter of Discontent. 'It was a conflict, an economic conflict bejween working people on the one hand and their employers on the other, and the government supported the employers, in effect,' he recalls. 'And it led to a great deal of disillusionment.'
There is no doubting that the Winter of Discontent fuelled popular frustration with unions. Right-wing tabloids went into overdrive, making it look like Britain was descending into chaos. Members of the public faced inconvenience because of cancelled services. The increasingly impoverished workers who had been forced to strike did not get a hearing.
Thatcher's government relentlessly manipulated these memories. Its goal was to crush the unions forever. New laws allowed employers to sack strikers, reduced dismissal compensation, forbade workers to strike in support of others, repealed protections preventing courts seizing union funds, and made unions liable for huge financial penalties. Changing the law was not, however, enough: examples had to be made. As industrial relations expert Professor Gregor Gall puts it, the government inflicted 'a series of defeats on unions in set-piece battles with the public sector, and encouraged private sector employers to take on the unions'. The first to face Thatcher's iron fist were the steelworkers in 1980, who lost a thirteen-week strike battle and would pay the price with thousands of jobs. Three years later, striking workers on picket lines at the Stockport Messenger were charged by 3,000 riot police and beaten up in neighbouring fields. Their union, the National G raphical Association, had its assets seized by the government.
In the face of this onslaught, you might have expected the trade unions to rally together and fight back. But they didn't. Unions--and the Labour Party for that matter-were hopelessly divided. Their leaders were caught disastrously off-balance by the determination and ferocity of the Thatcherite crusade. The government took note of the weakness of its enemies, and picked off those workers who dared to fight back. But all the laws and set-piece battles combined did not have the same crushing effect as another of Thatcher's weapons: Britain's ever-growing dole queues.
The Tories had made a big deal out of the fact that unemployment had reached a million under Labour in 1979, employing ad firm Saatchi & Saatchi to design their famous 'Labour Isn't Working' poster. But under Thatcher, some estimates put the number out of work as peaking at four million. The terror oflosing your job suppresses any temptation to fight back. 'The major catalyst for Thatcher's alterations in labour law was unemployment,' says former Labour leader Neil Kinnock. 'Stupid bourgeois people, like the ones who write the newspapers, say that four million unemployed means an angry, assertive workforce. It doesn't. Itmeans at least four million other very frightened people. And people threatened with unemployment don't jeopardize their jobs by undertaking various acts oflabour militancy-they just don't do it.'
When I asked Thatcher's first chancellor of the exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, if mass unemployment had a role in restraining union power, he agreed. '1 think it had in demonstrating the emptiness of continuing to behave as they were behaving.' But, he was quick to add, his policies were not 'a conscious medicine to achieve that'. Even so, one of the great achievements of Thatcherism, as far as Howe was concerned, was crushing 'trade union tyranny'.
Others involved with the Tory governments put it rather more bluntly. When Sir Alan Budd was the Treasury's chief economist in the early 1990s, he suspected that the government 'never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.'
Regardless of the government's motives, 'the legacy of Geoffrey Howe is the de-industrialization of our economy,' in the words of economist Graham Turner. Within three months of sweeping to power in 1979, the Tories dramatically abolished exchange controls, allowing financial companies to make huge profits from currency speculation. This allowed the City to thrive at the expense of other parts of the economy, like manufacturing. But above all, it was allowing the value of the pound to soar that did for industry, making its exports far more expensive than overseas competitors. By 1983--after just five years-nearly a third of manufacturing had vanished from Britain's shores. Once-thriving working-class communities lay in ruin.
Now, at a time of economic crisis caused by overdependence on the City and a depleted manufacturing base, even leading Tory figures today are talking about the need for Britain to start making things again. Many of the old industrial communities remain in pieces. But remorse for Thatcherism's scorched-earth policies is difficult to come by. I asked Thatcher's chancellor if he regretted the use of a blunt instrument like raising interest rates. 'Itwas inescapable,' says Geoffrey Howe. 'Most things we were grappling with were part of unconscious, suicidal management ... So it was uncomfortable for industry-but no one was really arguing for an escape route. It would have been nice. But then there were other things that would have gone wrong: As far as Howe is concerned, manufacturing only has itself to blame. 'Everyone regrets it, yes. It was so much caused by the behaviour of industry itself ... I've often questioned the suicide note of much of British industry at that time.'
Senior Tory MP and one-time Conservative leadership contender David Davis is less repentant still. 'Well, was it avoidable?' he demands, visibly agitated. 'What would you have done? Tell me what you would have done. Put money into manufacturing? That's what stuffed it up in the first place! What could they have done]" He goes as far as to argue that Thatcher's government' did quite a lot for the communities, in terms of, you know, sorts of schemes to try and retrain and so on. No, no, I think they did a lot there. The truth of the matter is it just may not work, that's the problem ... the truth of most public policy is that you've got about a 50 per cent success rate if you're lucky in economic areas of public policy.' Even Howe admits that many of their initiatives in that regard, like 'Business Start-Up Schemes and things like that ... turned out to be tax avoidance societies.'
As far as Davis is concerned, manufacturing had been kept alive by 'props' which Thatcher had no option but to kick away. 'And also, there is an extent to which you are acting like King Canute, trying to stop the tide, trying to stop manufacturing going to China,' he argues. 'Ironically, since it's very often socialists who argue against this-s-it's actually a part of material redistribution going on. The market redistributing income from the wealthy West to the poor East. And in many ways I approve of that.' He is quick to add that this' doesn't mean I want us to give away jobs' -though it is difficult to see any other conclusion to what he is arguing.
'I think that's a grotesque rewriting of history " retorts Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott. 'The Tories carne into power and made a series of catastrophic economic blunders, sending the pound shooting up on the foreign exchanges, which made our exports highly uncompetitive, They allowed inflation to get to 20 per cent, and pushed interest rates up to 17 per cent, which made borrowing expensivewhich was crucial for manufacturing.' He dismisses out of hand the idea that the 15 per cent of British industry that went to the wall in the early Thatcher years was 'ripe for the kill'.
In other words, industry had been stripped from Britain because of government policy, not because of the onward march of history. No other Western European nation saw the obliteration of manufacturing in such a brutally short period. Just consider the contrast with the response to the financial crisis that exploded in 2008. While Thatcherism left manufacturing to bleed to death in the 1980s, the New Labour government pumped billions of pounds of taxpayers' money into banks whose greed and stupidity had left them teetering on the edge of collapse. The reason? The banks could say the same about manufacturing,' were too big to fail. 'You says Graham Turner. 'The world eventually recovered, and had you supported manufacturing more, we might not have lost so many manufacturing jobs.'
All of this prompts the question: did the Tories have any interest in saving man
ufacturing, crocodile tears or nor As far as Thatcher and her acolytes were concerned, finance and services were the future; making things belonged to the past. In his memoirs John Cole, a former BBC political correspondent, recalls asking Thatcher how this 'service' or 'post-industrial' economy would work. 'She cited an entrepreneur she had met the previous week, who wished to take over Battersea power station and tum it into what we both knew as a "Disneyland", but sub- sequently learned to call a theme park.' The following day, he put this anecdote to the economic attache at the United States Embassy. 'He looked at me in genuine astonishment, thoughtfully laid down his fork, and exclaimed: "But gee, John, you can't all make a living opening doors for each other!" ,5 However, an economy based on everyone 'opening doors for each other' was exactly what Thatcher had in mind.
Thatcher's attacks on unions and industry dealt body blows to the old, industrial working class. Well-paid, secure, skilled jobs that people were proud of, which had been a linchpin of working-class identity, were eradicated. All the things people associated with working-class Britain were disappearing. But even after Thatcher won again in 1983, Britain's working class was not quite dead as a political and social force. The decisive battle was still to come.
and social force.
'The interesting thing people haven't recognized quite,' observes Geoffrey Howe, 'is that the Thatcher government is in fact the Heath government given a second chance, with very much the same person- neL' It is a point worth underlining. The Tories under Ted Heath had been swept from office by a national miners' strike in 1974. Heath had asked the electorate: 'Who governs Britain?' The answer came back: 'Not you, mate!' It was a humiliating defeat, and the first time that unions had effectively overthrown a government. Thatcher had not forgotten it. Her response must rank as one of the most callous acts of revenge in British history.
Retribution wasn't the only motive. The miners had been the vanguard of the union movement in Britain throughout the twentieth century. Britain's only general strike had been called in support of the miners in 1926. They had the capacity to single-handedly bring the country to a standstill by cutting off its energy supply, as they had demonstrated in the 1970s. If you could see off the miners, what other group of workers could stop you? That's why the defeat of the Miners' Strike was the turning point in the history of modem working-class Britain.
'Mining communities were vibrant communities, but they were built around the pit. The pit was the heart of the community, it was the pit that bound everyone together,' recalls one National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader, Chris Kitchen. 'The code of honour that existed underground was part of the fabric of the community as well. You didn't get young lads going off the rails at the weekend. You wouldn't upset an old guy because he would be the same one you'd rely on in the pit to protect your life at work, so why would you upset him at the weekend over a few pints?'
When Thatcher's government unveiled its pits closure programme in 1984, many of these tightly knit communities faced oblivion. Strikes spontaneously broke out in the Yorkshire coalfields and spread across the country. NUM leader Arthur Scargill declared these strikes a national strike and called all miners out, a decision ratified by a national Conference in April that year. of the major pits, only the Nottinghamshire miners-a-who wrongly, as it turned out, thought their jobs were saferefused to strike, a cause of great bitterness among the wider mining community.
As Tony Benn recalls, the struggle 'electrified the labour movement. I did 299 public meetings in a year, and wherever you went there was tremendous support and activity.' But in the national media and among Thatcher's supporters, Scargill became a hate figure. There was also fear, not least at the excitement When I discussed it with Simon generated by the miners' struggle. Heffer, the arch- Thatcherite Daily Telegraph journalist, he was moved to make parallels with the Nazis:
I think Scargill's mentally ill,actually. I was present at the 1984Labour Party Conference when Scargill made this speech, which was devastating in its impact. I mean, I'd never before been in a room where he has spoken, or where anyone has spoken with such effect. And it was his orthodox Stalinist critique. I think it included the phrase--and I'm remembering this from twenty-five years ago--'Margaret Thatcher is fighting for her class, I am here fighting for my class: I've seen Hitler on television, and it reminded me of the sort of demagoguery that Hitler engaged in. It was terrifying, because while I was able to stand removed from it, there were people in there who were all getting incredibly excited about it, and probably do get excited about it to this day.
Unlike most Nottinghamshire miners, Adrian Gilfoyle went on strike until the bitter end. Above all, he remembers the comradeship of working down the pit. 'The strike were important because of saving jobs,' he says. 'I've got two lads--obviously I wouldn't have wanted them to go down pit if they could get another job, but at least, when they grew up, there was that opportunity if there weren't any otherjobs, to go there, and it was a good apprenticeship. It was worth fighting for.'
At times, the struggle felt like class war in the most literal sense. 'You used to wake up at around five 0'clock in morning, and there were these police from London, and they were banging their shields at five in the morning, waking everybody up,' Gilfoyle recalls. 'You wouldn't have believed it, honestly. Horrible, it was. But it made me even more determined, when you got all that, you see.'
Yet all that was nothing compared to the Battle of Orgreave. On 18 June 1984, up to 6,000 miners attempted to blockade a coking plant in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. Adrian Gilfoyle was among them. They were met by thousands of police officers, including several on horseback, from ten counties across Britain. Suddenly, the police charged.
That day, when the trouble started, they all made out it was the miners responsible ... There were all the pickets, doing nothing, and all of a sudden the police just charged with horses, and that's when all the trouble started. And I remember, me and my brother stood there watching and couldn't believe it, and next thing, this copper was chasing us on a horse, and we just managed to get out his way, and he hit this other lad straight across the back of head with a truncheon and split his head open ... We ran and got into Asda, and the manager stopped police coming in, and he said to us; 'Just get a basket, put in what you want, and get off and I'll support you.' It was horrible, though.
All the trials of the picketers arrested by the police collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of pounds were paid out in compensation.
Like many striking miners, Gilfoyle depended on the support of his wife. 'She was in the Women's Action Group and all sorts. She went to marches all over the place, and she went to allerton when that lad got killed [twenty-three-year-old Yorkshire miner David Jones who died on a picket line in suspicious circumstances], she went to his funeral. I've got a photograph of her stood round the grave.' One day he told her, 'Oh, I'm going back to work tomorrow, duck.' 'You go back to work and I'll break your legs!' she responded. Itwas not only miners like Adrian Gilfoyle making sacrifices: his wife came back one day 'sobbing her heart out' after losing her job as a primary school assistant, following a complaint by a miner who had returned to work.
Not long after the strike ended, she came home feeling unwell. 'She said "phone the doctors for me", and I'd cancelled my phone inthe strike, so I had to go to a neighbour's, and she collapsed and had a heart attack and died within a few minutes.' She was only thirty-three, leaving him with two sons aged five and ten.
The Miners' Strike collapsed on 3 March 1985, after a titanic yearlong struggle. Brass bands and union banners accompanied the miners as they marched defiantly back to work. 'Maggie had her way, didn't she?' says Gilfoyle. 'And we went back with our tails between our legs, really.' Unlike in 1974, the government had made detailed preparations. It had stuck by the Ridley Plan, a Conservative Party document leaked in 1978which was a blueprint for taking on the unions, and the miners in particular, including the stockpiling of coal.
Other unions and the Labour leadership refused to
back the miners, because they had not held a national ballot. 'Itdivided the labour movement from the Labour leadership really, because the Labour leadership was giving virtually no support to the miners,' says Tony Benn. Whatever the reasons adduced to avoid backing the miners, the fate of the labour movement was bound up with the Strike. The defeat was a crippling blow from which it never recovered. The miners had been the strongest unionized force in the country: if they could be routed, what hope for anyone else?
Scargill was denounced for his supposedly hysterical claims that the government was determined to destroy the mining industry. Today, virtually nothing remains of it. As even Thatcher's lieutenant, Norman Tebbit, recently admitted: 'Many of these [mining] communities were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs and no real man's work because all the jobs had gone. There is no doubt that this led to a breakdown in these communities with families breaking up and youths going out of control. The scale of the closures went too far.'
The one thing that both supporters and opponents of the Strike agree on is that ittaught the unions a lesson they would not forget. 'Itwas the turning point of the government,' says Robert Forsythe, a retired miner in West Lothian. 'When they beat the miners, they could beat anyone.' Simon Heffer concurs. 'I think that the miners' strike remains a wet dream for various leftists ... I think the only legacy it's had really has been to say to other great forces of organized labour, you take on the government at your peril.' Even today, a quarter of a century later, trade union leaders still feel haunted by the Strike. Trade union leader Mark Serwotka says that its 'legacy was years of despondency and defeatism' . .
Many miners and their supporters vilified Neil Kinnock for refusing to support the Strike. Today, he sticks to his 'plague on both your houses' attitude towards Scargill and Thatcher, but reserves most of his vitriol for the miners' leadership. But even he is under no illusions as to the consequences, describing it as a 'salutary' defeat for the labour movement. Trade unions 'saw that if the Tory government could pul- verize the coal mining industry, they could do it to anybody. And that changed the mentality of organized labour, understandably. I couldn't blame anyhody!' He adds: