State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Given that Heath’s premiership became notorious for industrial strife, it is remarkable how well he got on with the union bosses. In his memoirs, he wrote that the TUC chief Vic Feather was ‘inherently decent’ and ‘a delightful man in many ways’, while he found the dreaded Hugh Scanlon ‘the clearest, firmest and most persuasive’ of all the trade union leaders, never producing ‘an argument that could be easily dismissed’. And whatever their members might think of the new Prime Minister, the general secretaries had great respect and even affection for him. Feather said later that Heath was a good man to do business with, while Scanlon praised his fairness and decency. Perhaps his greatest admirer, though, was the Communist soldier he had met on the Ebro. ‘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 and to offer an attractive package which might satisfy large numbers of work-people,’ Jack Jones later recorded. Heath, he thought, ‘revealed the human face of Toryism, at least to the trade union members who met him frequently … Amazingly, he gained more personal respect from union leaders than they seemed to have for Harold Wilson, or even Jim Callaghan.’22

  As a Conservative politician, Heath was naturally under pressure from his rank and file to take a hard line with the unions. Local activists’ unease with the post-war consensus had been growing since at least the late 1950s, when a surge in the number of strikes, coupled with the first signs of anxiety about Britain’s competitive decline, had produced a bout of soul-searching about the extent of union power. One reason that I’m All Right Jack had struck a chord was that it chimed so successfully with public discontent at the alleged abuses of the unions. And as strikes increased in the late 1960s, so too did middle-class hostility to trade unionism: by 1967, NOP found that 72 per cent thought unofficial strikes should be banned outright, while 82 per cent thought that industrial unrest was either planned or exploited by the Communist Party. ‘The middle classes have a nightmare,’ wrote Paul Ferris at the beginning of the 1970s. ‘Workers with cars and jeering expressions swarm through the land, snatching new handfuls of the national cake. Governments whimper and retreat.’ This was no exaggeration: during the local authority workers’ strike of autumn 1970, the letters pages of The Times were full of complaints from middle-class homeowners distraught at the mounting piles of rubbish outside their front doors. The excellently named leader of Kensington and Chelsea council, Sir Malby Crofton, even complained that dustmen earned so much in tips that they would soon be ‘in the £2,000 a year class’, which suggested either that he was a very big tipper, or that he did not know many dustmen. A year later, a Norfolk haulage firm issued a blackly ironic death notice after succumbing to a seven-month strike. ‘The funeral will take place on November 10 of Tina Transport which died of strangulation by the Transport & General Workers’ Union,’ it read. ‘The immediate mourners are Miss Christine Brown, aged 11, and Miss Beverley Brown, aged 3, whose future depended on Tina Transport. The TGWU choir will render “The fight is o’er, the battle won”.’23

  The most remarkable expression of discontent with the unions in 1971, though, came from a very unexpected source. In Carry On at Your Convenience, the family-run toilet makers W. C. Boggs is plagued by strikes, largely thanks to the presence of the militant, self-interested and thoroughly unpleasant shop steward Vic Spanner (played by Kenneth Cope, channelling Peter Sellers), whose Zapata moustache is an immediate sign that he is up to no good. Spanner’s attitude to industrial relations is not exactly constructive: when his men complain about a planned strike, he retorts: ‘If you’ll pardon me, you don’t have a say. This is union business.’ ‘But it’s our union, isn’t it?’ another man objects. ‘Exactly,’ Spanner says. ‘And for that reason you’ll do as I bloody well tell you.’ Much less subtle than I’m All Right Jack, this was not likely to go down well with cinema-loving trade unionists, who made up a good deal of the Carry On films’ target audience, and they were even less likely to be pleased by scenes showing Spanner and his henchman, Bernard Bresslaw, wielding baseball bats on the picket line. As the writer Alwyn Turner points out, though, it could have been worse. Originally the film was entitled Carry On Comrade, and a segment with Terry Scott playing an inept union boss called Mr Allcock was cut from the finished pro-duct in a vain attempt to avoid hurting unionists’ feelings. Even the cast themselves were uneasy with the film’s overt message: Richard O’Callaghan, who played the young company man Lewis Boggs, lamented that it was ‘all so right-wing, presenting the unions as complete asses’, when he thought they were ‘protecting millions of people’s security in this country’. It was surely no coincidence that despite fine performances from the usual suspects, it became the first Carry On flop, taking five years to recoup its costs when most Carry On films took three days. ‘There has been a ripe and earthy working-class slant to the series which has given it special appeal – and phenomenal box-office returns,’ wrote the Morning Star’s critic Nina Hibbin, usually a great fan of the films. ‘But now it has turned round and bitten the hand that has been feeding it all these years. It has betrayed its own roots.’24

  While Heath may not have shared Carry On at Your Convenience’s highly jaundiced vision of the unions, he had no intention of ignoring the demands for change. Henry Ford II, chairman and chief executive of the American car giant, even told him that he was seriously thinking about pulling out of Britain because Ford was suffering so many problems with strikes. By this stage, however, much of the groundwork for the proposed reform of industrial relations had already been laid. Although Heath had refused to back In Place of Strife – a short-sighted decision guaranteeing that he would get no support in turn from Harold Wilson – he was well aware that it had been broadly popular with the general public. Even 60 per cent of trade unionists themselves, according to polls, agreed that unofficial strikes should be made illegal, while 77 per cent backed secret strike ballots, 65 per cent liked the idea of compulsory ‘cooling-off’ periods, and 58 per cent thought that agreements between unions and employers should be legally binding. In electoral terms, union reform seemed to be a winner. In opposition, Heath’s team had spent years poring over different policy proposals, and he was confident that the fruit of their labour, published in 1968 as A Fair Deal at Work, would command popular support.25

  Calling for a national register of trade unions, a new system of industrial courts, a code of good industrial practices, and legal enforcement of collective agreements, Heath’s plan was a classic example of his thirst for modernization. He had little feel for the unions’ jealously guarded traditions; instead, his goal was to make them disciplined, efficient partners in the search for higher growth. He recognized that one of their problems was that they were so fragmented, but he thought the answer was for the state to strengthen the hand of the union leaders, effectively co-opting them as allies against their rebellious shop stewards. As Heath’s employment spokesman Robert Carr later explained, the problem was not ‘too much trade union power, but really too little constitutional trade union power’, and so the plan tried ‘to bring a greater degree of stability and orderliness’ into industrial relations. Carr himself was a mild, emollient man who went to great efforts to consult union leaders in the late 1960s so that the plan would be absolutely right. ‘All I wanted,’ he said, ‘was to be an old-fashioned Minister of Labour, provided that there was a proper framework of laws around industrial relations.’ And once installed as Secretary of State, Carr was confident that the government would soon reap the reward of all his hard work in opposition. His relations with union leaders were good, he had an electoral mandate from the people, and he could point to polls showing massive public support for union reform. When he briefed the Cabinet about his proposed Industrial Relations Bill in September 1970, it was hard to mistake the sense of complacency. Several union leaders, he reported, had already told him that they supported the bill, even if they dared not say so publicly. There was certainly no sense at this stage
that it would become one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in modern British history.26

  The battle over the Industrial Relations Bill opened at the beginning of October 1970, when Carr published a consultative document summarizing the provisions of his plan: compulsory secret ballots, a sixty-day cooling-off period, legally binding collective agreements, and most controversially, a National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC), with which unions would have to register, and whose decisions would have the force of High Court rulings. Registration, Carr thought, would be a smooth process. Unregistered unions would miss out on tax concessions; if they registered, however, they would be protected against being sued by firms and individuals. Meanwhile, workers’ rights to join trade unions were enshrined in law; but so were their rights not to join, which struck at the cherished principle of the closed shop. Vic Feather had already warned him that the unions would not stand for it, but Carr did not listen. The wheels of legislative procedure turned swiftly: by 3 December the bill had been published, and within a fortnight it had been given its Second Reading in the Commons. As Heath told the House at the beginning of the Second Reading debate, he was convinced that its new rules would ‘secure growing support from the majority of employers and trade unionists’. Polls certainly showed large public support: while 76 per cent backed the right of workers not to join a union, 73 per cent endorsed the cooling-off period, 69 per cent approved of the secret ballot, and 65 per cent supported fines for unions who broke the new rules. Even among trade union members themselves, no less than 83 per cent approved of the new National Industrial Relations Court. Faced with the force of public opinion, Heath thought, even the most intransigent union loyalists would eventually come round.27

  The Industrial Relations Bill was Heath at his best and worst. Farsighted and ambitious, it was also absurdly complicated: Carr’s consultative document took up fifty pages of close-typed text, while the published bill had 193 clauses, 8 schedules and 97 amendments. Even Carr had to have a brief to explain what it all meant. ‘What it seemed to other people’, he mused, ‘I dread to think.’ In typical Heath fashion, it took no account of the political traditions, pressures and passions of other people. Jim Prior remarked later that the bill had ‘no appreciation of what made the unions tick or the real world of the shop floor’, which reflected the fact that apart from Carr, none of the Cabinet ‘understood industrial relations or knew industrialists, let alone any trade unionists’. A more adept politician, drawing the lesson from the failure of In Place of Strife, might have introduced reform gradually, building the new structures piece by piece, as Prior and Mrs Thatcher did in the 1980s. But Heath wanted it all, and he wanted it immediately. On top of that, it was madness not to make a great public show of consulting the TUC, perhaps offering a few token concessions so that the union bosses could tell their members that they had fought the good fight. For Heath and Carr to slam the bill on the table, telling the TUC to take it or leave it, was very foolish indeed. As The Economist had tried to tell them, the whole point of the bill was to improve industrial relations: it was a ‘major public relations exercise as much as a parliamentary battle’. But then Heath was never very good at public relations.28

  Since the TUC had already opposed Labour’s attempts at reform, they were always bound to make at least a show of opposing Heath’s initiative, and of course they were infuriated by his failure to consult them publicly. But it was also bad luck that the Industrial Relations Bill coincided with a period of controversy over workers’ pay, with the government making a great show of its determination to face down big wage claims. Threatened by the ‘N–1’ pay policy, and under pressure from their members to stand up to the government, the TUC bosses found themselves prisoners of their own position: even if they had wanted to support Heath, they would have found it very difficult. When Carr presented the bill to the General Council of the TUC in October 1970, they were stunned to hear that the government would not under any circumstances compromise on its central elements, and the meeting broke up acrimoniously. And with the TUC issuing a statement that it would refuse to negotiate with the government, the Labour leadership fell into line. In Place of Strife was conveniently forgotten as Labour MPs did all they could to frustrate the bill’s passage. In the end, it took Heath a gruelling 100 hours of parliamentary time to get it through – a record for any non-finance bill since the war – and at one point MPs had to vote continuously for almost twelve hours on sixty-three successive divisions.29

  By 21 January 1971, when the government wearily brought down the parliamentary guillotine, the mood had soured almost beyond repair. When Willie Whitelaw announced the government’s decision to bring debate to a premature end, there was an explosion of rage from the Labour benches. ‘Fascist!’ the Opposition yelled at him. ‘Dictator!’ Twenty-five times the Speaker, Selwyn Lloyd, tried to call for order, while Whitelaw stood at the dispatch box, ‘roaring like the stag at bay’, as The Times colourfully put it. Four days later, when the guillotine motion was actually debated, the atmosphere was even worse, with speeches on both sides frequently interrupted by jeers and abuse while Lloyd and his deputy, Sir Robert Grant-Ferris, struggled vainly to keep order. At the centre of the disturbances was a young Welsh MP called Neil Kinnock, who savagely denounced the government’s ‘class-directed legislation’, and at ten o’clock led an extraordinary demonstration in which thirty Labour MPs gathered shouting in front of the Speaker’s table, refusing all entreaties to sit down, some calling Lloyd a ‘bloody hypocrite’ and ‘bloody twister’. Even after the session resumed, the abuse continued. ‘It appears to me, Mr Deputy Speaker,’ said Labour’s Tom Swain, ‘that when a man becomes a right hon. Gentleman on the Tory benches he changes biologically from a man to a pig,’ at which his neighbour Arthur Lewis yelled out: ‘That is an insult to pigs. Shame on you!’30

  At last, on the night of 28 January, the House voted to guillotine the bill, trooping time after time through the lobbies, voting on clause after clause. ‘We must have spent five hours actually locked in the lobby,’ recorded Tony Benn, who saw some members wearily playing chess to keep awake, and others reading old copies of Hansard. ‘In the final division as we went through the lobbies, we sang the “Red Flag”, “Cwm Rhondda” and “We Shall Overcome”,’ he wrote, ‘and we filed back into the Chamber and stood and sang … Anybody from outside would have thought we were mad but the Tories were very dispirited and we were encouraged.’31

  For Heath, however, securing the bill’s passage was not even half the battle. By the spring of 1971, the TUC had spent £120,000 to organize marches and circulate petitions opposing the bill, with its member unions putting in another £125,000. In January, the unions held a ‘day of protest’ at the Albert Hall, with speeches by Harold Wilson and Vic Feather, and in February they organized the biggest union demonstration in living memory, with Feather, Jones and Scanlon leading an estimated 140,000 workers from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, chanting ‘Kill the Bill’. In March, Scanlon’s engineering workers held two day-long stoppages in protest against the bill, and on 18 March a special TUC Congress met in Croydon to discuss the next step. ‘It was full of melodrama,’ one journalist wrote. ‘Outside the hall in pouring rain the shop stewards were chanting “Kill the Bill”; left-wing girls were handing out passionate pamphlets; Welsh miners huddled under their Victorian embroidered banners; Dundee painters, British Leyland workers, Radio Times warehousemen held up their scrawled protests: FEATHER DON’T BE CHICKEN. THE HUNGRY YEARS ARE COMING. YANKEE STYLES STOP WORKERS’ SMILES.’ Inside, the general secretaries agreed that the TUC should advise unions not to register under the terms of the bill, even though it put them in danger of being sued and losing their tax breaks. At the time, this was seen as a victory for the moderates, who had defeated Scanlon’s suggestion that unions should be instructed not to register. But if it was a moderate victory, it was only a temporary one. For at the national congress in September the radicals carried the day, securing a majority for S
canlon’s motion instructing unions to deregister and boycott the National Industrial Relations Court, or risk being kicked out of the TUC entirely.32

  Since deregistering seemed so risky, it had never occurred to the government that the unions would try it. Carr said later that he ‘certainly had a blind spot’ about it, but recognized that ‘it was a damnably effective tactic’. Although it meant that the unions lost the rights and immunities guaranteed by the Industrial Relations Act, it also meant that they made a mockery of the government’s new framework for collective bargaining. It was a brilliantly simple way of killing the bill, especially because many employers promised to respect the unions’ existing arrangements, thereby lessening the risk. By the end of November, Carr’s figures showed that 28 unions had refused to register from the start, 61 had cancelled their registrations, and only 52 were still playing along, although many of them had already applied to cancel. To his colleagues, he still put on a brave face, hoping that the TUC would come round to a more ‘pragmatic, realistic’ stance, with white-collar unions leading the way. But the fact was that if the TUC held firm, and the unions refused to register, then there was very little the government could do. All that effort, it seemed, had been for nothing.33