Meanwhile, uncertainties about the direction of American policy and the extent of Soviet ambitions had increasingly focused attention on those countries which were balanced uneasily between the two blocs. Of these, Yugoslavia had a special significance. Since Marshal Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia had been in an anomalous but important position.
The fragility of Yugoslavia was both symbolized by and depended upon the state of Tito’s own health. It was an open question whether the Soviets would try to reassert control in the chaos which was widely expected to follow his death. At eighty-five, he was still in control of events, but ailing. I had wanted to visit Yugoslavia for some time, but my visit was twice postponed because Tito was not well enough to receive me. On a bitter early December day in 1977, however, in the company of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a comrade in arms and old friend of the Yugoslav President from the Second World War, I arrived in Belgrade.
We visited Tito at his Belgrade home. His was a powerful personality, retaining some of the outward panache of his flamboyant partisan past, but leaving no doubt about the inner steel that explained his post-war dominance. We discussed and broadly agreed about the Soviet threat. The looming question of his legacy did not figure in our talks. Perhaps he had already concluded, for all the elaborate constitutional safeguards, that it would indeed be the déluge.
Before I departed for Yugoslavia, Alfred Sherman had asked me to raise with Tito the case of Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former friend and colleague and for many years most insistent domestic critic. Djilas had been one of a number of political prisoners recently freed but was, I understood, the object of continuing harassment. It seemed likely that he would soon disappear back into prison. I decided on a shot across Tito’s bows. I said with studied innocence how pleased I was that Djilas had been released. Tito glowered.
‘Yes, he’s out,’ the President said, ‘but he’s up to his old tricks. And if he goes on upsetting our constitution he will go straight back to jail.’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘a man like Djilas will do you far more harm in prison than out of it.’
Fitzroy Maclean chipped in, ‘She’s right, you know.’ Tito gave me a hard look. There was a pause in the conversation before he turned to other matters. As far as I know, Djilas stayed out of jail – only to suffer more harassment for his independent thinking under the brutal regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
In fact, though I did not know it at the time, three developments were opening up the long-term prospect of turning back the Soviet advance. The first, paradoxically, was that they had become too arrogant. It is a natural and often fatal trait of the totalitarian to despise opponents. The Soviets believed that the failure of western politicians signified that western peoples were resigned to defeat. A little more subtlety and forethought might have secured the Soviet leaders far greater gains. As it was, particularly through the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they provoked a western reaction which finally destroyed the Soviet Union itself.
The second development was the election in September 1978 of a Polish Pope. John Paul II would fire a revolution in eastern Europe which shook the Soviet Empire to its core.
Finally, there was the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a serious contender for the American Presidency. I had met Governor Reagan shortly after my becoming Conservative Leader in 1975. Even before then, I knew something about him because Denis had returned home one evening in the late 1960s full of praise for a remarkable speech Ronald Reagan had just delivered at the Institute of Directors. I read the text myself and quickly saw what Denis meant. When we met in person I was immediately won over by his charm, sense of humour and directness. In the succeeding years I read his speeches, advocating tax cuts as the root to wealth creation and stronger defences as an alternative to détente. I also read many of his fortnightly broadcasts to the people of California, which his Press Secretary sent over regularly for me. I agreed with them all. In November 1978 we met again in my room in the House of Commons.
In the early years Ronald Reagan had been dismissed by much of the American political elite, though not by the American electorate, as a right-wing maverick who could not be taken seriously. (I had heard that before somewhere.) Now he was seen by many thoughtful Republicans as their best ticket back to the White House. Whatever Ronald Reagan had gained in experience, he had not done so at the expense of his beliefs. I found them stronger than ever. When he left my study I reflected on how different things might look if such a man were President of the United States. But in November 1978 such a prospect seemed a long way off.
* Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), p. 717. This is, of course, an oversimplified description of the concept. Diplomacy contains a fuller, masterly account of Dr Kissinger’s thinking.
* Typical of the coverage was an article from the Wall Street Journal (20 August 1975) I found in my briefing papers. It began: ‘Hardly anyone needs to be told now that Great Britain is the sick country of Europe. Everywhere you look the evidence abounds.’ The article described our position – falling output, runaway inflation, declining industries, a falling (and relatively low) standard of living. Its author reflected: ‘It is all very curious. For Britain has not been brought to this state by defeat in war, by earthquakes, plagues, droughts or any natural disasters. Britain’s undoing is its own doing. It has been brought to this by the calculated policies of its Government and by their resigned acceptance by the people.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Apprenticeship for Power
Leader of the Opposition March 1977–March 1979
THE LIB-LAB PACT did none of the things subsequently claimed for it by its exponents. It did not halt, let alone reverse, the advance of socialism: indeed, it kept the Labour Government in office and enabled it to complete the nationalization of the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Nor was it responsible for the frail but real economic recovery which gradually improved the Labour Party’s political standing in 1977/78: that was the result of the financial measures imposed by the IMF several months before the Pact was agreed. It did not help Mr Callaghan to marginalize and defeat the Left; indeed, the Left emerged strong enough to take over the Labour Party within a few years.
The real benefits were quite different and completely unintended. First, the fact that the Liberal Party demonstrated the closeness of its approach to that of Labour gave a salutary warning to potential Conservatives who, for whatever reason, flirted with the idea of voting Liberal as a more civilized alternative to socialism. The Pact therefore hardened our support. Secondly, I can see now that in March 1977 we were not yet ready to form the kind of government which could have achieved a long-term shift away from the policies which had led to Britain’s decline. Neither the Shadow Cabinet, nor the Parliamentary Party, nor in all probability the electorate, would have been prepared to take the necessary but unpalatable medicine, because they had not witnessed how far the disease had spread. It took the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 to change all that. Finally, the Government’s survival was a real, if well-disguised, blessing for me. I benefited greatly from the next two gruelling years as Leader of the Opposition. I learned more about how to achieve what I wanted, even though I always felt in a minority in the Shadow Cabinet. I also became a more effective debater, public speaker and campaigner, all of which would stand me in good stead as Prime Minister. Above all, perhaps, I had the opportunity to demonstrate both to myself and to others that I had that elusive ‘instinct’ for what ordinary people feel – a quality which, I suspect, one is simply born with or not, but which is sharpened and burnished through adversity.
But just as the political reality was never as bad as it seemed at the time of the agreement of the Lib-Lab Pact, so we were now in truth facing far more serious problems than even the commentators understood. Our popularity largely reflected widespread reaction against the Government’s manifest failures. Now that some order was being restored to the public finances, we would be under more pressure to spell out
our own alternative. We would have to set out clearly and persuasively an alternative analysis and set of policies. For my part, I was keen to do just that. But I knew that on such central questions as trade union power, incomes policy and public spending there was still no agreement in Shadow Cabinet between the minority of us who fundamentally rejected the approach pursued between 1970 and 1974 and the majority who more or less wished to continue it. All of the damaging divisions which plagued us over these years, and which we desperately tried to minimize by agreeing on ‘lines to take’, stemmed from that basic problem. Ultimately, it was not one which was amenable to the techniques of political management, only to the infinitely more difficult process of clarifying thoughts and changing minds.
So it was that what came to be known as the ‘Grunwick affair’ burst onto the political scene. This was a clear case of the outrageous abuse of trade union power. Paradoxically, it proved almost as politically damaging to us, whom the unions regarded with undisguised hostility, as to the Labour Party, who were their friends and sometime clients.
Grunwick was a medium-sized photographic processing and printing business in north-west London run by a dynamic Anglo-Indian entrepreneur, George Ward, with a largely immigrant workforce. A dispute in the summer of 1976 resulted in a walkout of a number of workers and their subsequent dismissal. This escalated into a contest between the management and the APEX trade union, which had subsequently signed up the dismissed workers and demanded ‘recognition’. That would have given the union the right to negotiate on behalf of its members working for the company. APEX consequently demanded the reinstatement of those who had been dismissed.
For its part, Grunwick established in the courts that the dismissals had been perfectly legal – even under Labour’s new union legislation, which the unions had virtually written themselves. None of those who had been dismissed could be taken back under existing law unless all were taken back, and in a number of cases there was simply too much bad blood. Grunwick argued too that the behaviour of APEX in other firms suggested that it was out to impose a closed shop. Finally, secret ballots conducted by MORI and Gallup showed that the great majority of the Grunwick workforce – over 80 per cent – did not want to join APEX, or any other union.
A left-wing coalition emerged to support APEX and punish Grunwick. Every part of the socialist world was represented: the local Brent Trades Council, trade union leaders and ‘flying pickets’, the Socialist Workers Party, and leading members of the Labour Party itself, among them Cabinet ministers Shirley Williams and Fred Mulley, and the Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, who dusted off their donkey jackets and joined the Grunwick picket line for a short time, a couple of weeks before the picketing turned violent. Someone called it ‘the Ascot of the Left’.
The National Association for Freedom (NAFF) took up the case of George Ward as part of its campaign against abuses of individual freedom resulting from overweening trade union power. NAFF had been launched in December 1975, shortly after the IRA’s murder of someone who would have been one of its leading lights – Ross McWhirter, whom I had known (along with his twin brother Norris) from Orpington days.* NAFF’s Chairman was Bill De L’Isle and Dudley, the war hero and the MP who had spoken to us at Oxford attacking Yalta when I was an undergraduate.
The mass picketing began at the end of June 1977 and continued day after day with terrifying scenes of mob violence, injuries to police and pickets. At times thousands of demonstrators crowded the narrow suburban streets around the Grunwick factory, to waylay the coaches laid on by the firm to bring their employees through. So I asked my PPS, Adam Butler, and Jim Prior’s number two, Barney Hayhoe, to join the employees on one of their morning coach journeys through the hail of missiles and abuse. Adam reported back to me on the fear – and the courage – of the people he had been with.
During this period a strange reticence gripped the Government. The Shadow Cabinet organized a number of Private Notice Questions to force ministers to declare their position on the violence. We issued a statement demanding that the Prime Minister state categorically that the police had the Government’s backing in carrying out their duties. But as I wrote to John Gouriet, one of NAFF’s directors, at the time: ‘we feel that the scenes of wild violence portrayed on television plus the wild charges and allegations being thrown about in certain quarters, are enough in themselves to put most of the public on the side of right and are doing more than hours of argument’.
Although the scenes outside the factory seemed to symbolize the consequences of giving trade unions virtually unlimited immunity in civil law, it was in fact the criminal law against violence and intimidation which was being breached. No matter how many new legal provisions might be desirable, the first duty of the authorities was to uphold the existing law. All the more so because the violence at Grunwick was part of a wider challenge posed by the far Left to the rule of law; and no one quite knew how far that challenge would ultimately go.
It was also at this time that a new shamelessness on the part of the Left became apparent. Until the early 1970s, Transport House banned members of certain ‘proscribed organizations’ on the far Left from being members of the Labour Party. The lifting of this ban, long sought by the Left, was a very significant landmark in Labour’s drift to extremism. Hard-left Labour MPs saw less reason to conceal their links with communist organizations. The warmth of fraternal relations between trade union leaders and socialist politicians on the one hand and the Soviet bloc on the other was undisguised. High-ranking Soviet visitors were received by both the TUC and the Labour Party. Trotskyist organizations, such as the Militant Tendency, began to gain a grip on Labour Party constituencies. There was an almost tangible sense that, whatever the IMF or Prime Minister Jim Callaghan might think, it was the extreme Left whose programme represented Labour’s future, and that whether the tactics employed to achieve it were violent or peaceful was the only question at issue. In such an atmosphere, the scenes at Grunwick suggested – and not only to the Left itself – that perhaps the revolution had begun.
Grunwick came to symbolize the closed shop, under which employees had effectively been compelled to join a union if they wished to obtain or keep a job. This was because NAFF was also vigorously campaigning against the closed shop. Also APEX clearly wished to coerce Grunwick’s employees, probably with a view ultimately to achieving a closed shop in the industry. More broadly, the closed shop represented a secure redoubt of trade union power from which further assaults on liberty could be mounted.
Yet, for all that, Grunwick was not limited to the closed shop; it was about the sheer power of the unions. Appalled as I was by what was happening at Grunwick, I did not believe that the time was yet ripe to depart from the cautious line about trade union reform (which I had agreed with Jim Prior) in order to mount a radical attack on the closed shop. We had to consider a much wider raft of questions, ranging from the unions’ immunity under civil law, to violence and intimidation which only escaped the criminal law because they came under the guise of lawful picketing. Until we had begun to solve some of these problems, we could not effectively outlaw the closed shop.
For Jim Prior, I suspect, it was a practical question rather than a moral one: the important thing was to be realistic and accept that the trade unions could not be tamed by law. Any reform would need their cooperation. By contrast, Keith Joseph was an unswerving opponent of what he saw as a breach of human rights resulting from collectivist bullying. Jim’s and Keith’s opposing views, expressed in public statements on the Scarman Report on the Grunwick dispute, brought all this out into the open. At the time, I thought that Keith’s criticisms of Lord Scarman were too sharp, though the Scarman Report itself was anything but a judicial document and had no legal force. Moreover Jim, not Keith, was the spokesman on these matters. Either I sacked Jim, or I moved him (neither of which I could afford to do), or I had to go along with his approach.
That was what I did. In retrospect, Jim and I were wrong and Keith was right.
What the whole affair demonstrated was that our careful avoidance of any kind of commitment to changing the law on industrial relations, though it might make sense in normal times, would be weak and unsustainable in a crisis. But I took the decision to support Jim in part because, as yet, the climate was still not right to try to harden our policy. But some time soon the nettle would have to be grasped.
In reflecting on all this, I came back to the idea of a referendum. On my return from America I knew that I would be pressed hard by Brian Walden, who was making his debut as interviewer on the television programme Weekend World, on what a Conservative Government would do if it were faced with an all-out confrontation with the trade unions. I had to have a convincing answer: and there was not much hope that any amount of discussion within Shadow Cabinet would arrive at one. So on the programme I argued that although such a confrontation was unlikely, yet if such an emergency was reached, then a referendum might be necessary. The suggestion was well received both in the press and – most significantly – got public backing from both wings of the Party. (It helped perhaps that Jim was expecting a rough ride at the Conservative Party Conference over the closed shop.) I set up a Party Committee under Nick Edwards to report on referenda and their possible uses. But, of course, though the suggestion of a referendum bought us vital time, it was not in itself an answer to the problem of trade union power. Assuming that we won a referendum, so demonstrating that the general public backed the Government against the militants, it would still be necessary to frame the measures to reduce trade union power. And so far we had not seriously considered what those measures should be.
The argument about trade union power remained linked to that about incomes policies. At this time the Government’s own incomes policy was looking increasingly fragile. No formal policy could be agreed with the unions after the end of the second year of ‘restraint’, though the TUC exhorted its members not to seek more than one increase in the next twelve months and the Chancellor of the Exchequer pleaded for settlements to be below 10 per cent (backed as before with the threat of sanctions against employers who paid more). But, of course, whatever difficulties the Labour Government had in agreeing incomes policy with the trade unions were likely to pale into insignificance by comparison with ours. Unfortunately, we were committed to produce a document on economic policy, including incomes policy, before the 1977 Party Conference. David Howell, an able journalist of monetarist persuasions and also a front-bench spokesman, was the principal draftsman. And Geoffrey Howe, remorselessly seeking some kind of consensus between the conflicting views in his Economic Reconstruction Group, had by now become thoroughly convinced of the merits of German-style ‘concerted action’ within some kind of economic forum.
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 29