AFTERTHOUGHTS
As I read these pages, I notice with some disquiet that I seem to have established amicable relations with a number of rulers whose record on human rights will not bear too close an examination. Indeed, if I had been the Leader of the Opposition in some of these countries, I might not have retained my life, let alone my liberty. How, then, did I contrive to be on reasonably good terms with them?
A number of explanations suggest themselves. The first, and most obvious, is that I was a visiting statesman with a fair prospect of exercising political power in my own country within a few years. They therefore put themselves out to deal with, and even be pleasant towards, me. I was under no illusion about that. Equally, I saw that it was my duty to establish terms on which British interests could, then or later, be protected and advanced. Since they were the rulers of their countries, they were the people with whom I had to deal. Also I can see that certain distinctions can and should be maintained: namely, that rulers with blood on their hands should be treated correctly but no more, while democratic statesmen should be eligible for those additional marks of regard, from an honorary knighthood to an official dinner at Downing Street, which Britain has within her gift. Even so, I am not so naive as to think that this would greatly alter the conduct of authoritarian regimes.
My second consideration is that I was able, on some occasions, to obtain the release or emigration of political prisoners as a sort of quid pro quo for my visit. Those released were never as many as I would have liked; but even a handful was better than none. And every prisoner freed meant hope for ten more. Indeed, it told all those remaining that we had not forgotten them.
Third, we must remember that vice, like virtue, comes in many varieties. It is an odd reflection on human nature that a ruler might order the murder of a political opponent in the morning and yet carry out a pledge he had made in a treaty in the afternoon. Some of those with whom I supped with a long spoon nonetheless kept the promises they had made to Britain and, in one instance, materially helped another country to resist and overcome aggression and occupation.
Finally, international relations is a matter of second-best alternatives rather than the ideal. Even if it had been within my power to replace one ruler with another — which it never was — I would rarely have been able to replace a bad one with a better, and often it would have been with a worse. Those, for instance, who rejoiced in the fall of the Shah must reconcile themselves today to the sad truth that the regime of the Mullahs is more oppressive to its own citizens, and abroad promotes terrorism and subversion, where the Shah was a pillar of stability, if in the end a shaky one.
States tend to act upon their own interests rather than the interests of the peoples of other countries. That is all the more reason for people in democratic countries to pressurize not only foreign governments which suppress human rights, but also their own governments to make improvements in human rights one aim of Western diplomacy. I may sometimes have resented this second sort of criticism of my own actions in power; not long afterwards, however, I was usually glad to have had my elbow jogged.
CHAPTER XI
Apprenticeship for Power
Leader of the Opposition March 1977 to March 1979
A PLEASANT INTERLUDE
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. Although I had both good and bad days, 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.
My disappointment with my speech in the No Confidence debate on Wednesday 23 March 1977 was quickly dispelled by a succession of good news. Politicians sagely remark, when questioned on such matters, that they take little notice of opinion polls; but political life is a great deal easier when they are substantially in your favour. It was quickly apparent that the public did not like the deal which had been stitched up between the Labour and Liberal Parties. The polls showed the Conservatives fifteen to twenty percentage points in the lead over Labour and registered a sharp drop in approval for the Liberals. My speech attacking Denis Healey’s Budget the week after the No Confidence debate reassured the Parliamentary Party: I spoke from rapidly scribbled notes, reaching through the statistical smokescreen to draw out the contradictions which lay behind it. Then the following day we won Birmingham Stechford — Roy Jenkins’s old seat — with a swing of 17.4 per cent. Having watched the result on television at Flood Street, I put out a statement, rubbing in the salt, saying: ‘We are the people’s party now.’
On my return from my visit to the Far East in April, I plunged into campaigning at two more by-elections — first in the Nottinghamshire mining seat of Ashfield and then in the Humberside fishing port of Grimsby. In normal times both would have been safe seats for Labour. I was told that we probably would not win Ashfield but that Grimsby was within our grasp. Talking to voters — over fish and chips in Ashfield and haddock and poached egg in Grimsby — I had a rather different impression. Although we had two good candidates, it was the misfortune of our man in Grimsby, who worked in the fishing industry, to follow in the footsteps of the late Tony Crosland. It was clear that even Conservative voters had appreciated having a rather grand socialist to represent them and would have liked someone similar. In fact, I was right. We won at Ashfield, overturning a Government majority of nearly 23,000, and narrowly failed to take Grimsby, where the voters chose the nearest thing to a grand socialist, the television personality Austin Mitchell. Just a week later we secured large gains in the Metropolitan and County Council elections, recapturing the GLC (Greater London Council) — an important prize which would give us an opportunity, so important to any Opposition, to demonstrate at a local level some of the policies, such as the sale of council houses, which we intended to pursue nationally.
This was a good time for me as well as for the Party. I felt able to alter some policies which I had inherited and to set out my own views more clearly on others. I took advantage of the Scottish Party Conference in May effectively to jettison the commitment to devolution, which passed off remarkably quietly.
Then, delivering the Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture in July, I sought to expl
ain how my own personal philosophy fitted in with the Conservative tradition, and indeed with that religious view of the world which is an essential aspect of Toryism. I always put a special effort into such speeches because I regarded it as crucial to show that Conservatives need feel no unease or inhibitions about taking on their opponents on moral just as on practical grounds.
Later that month, before the House rose for the summer recess, I had a good day speaking in the Economic Debate. It was one of those days when every hostile intervention seems designed to trigger a pungent retort. Somewhat to my own surprise, I found myself knocking down opponents like ducks in a shooting gallery. As one friendly journalist wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher’s one-woman mass-acre of both the Government and the Liberals could not have come at a better time.’ The press was, for now at least, full of pleasantly flattering discussion of my qualities and prospects. Still more flattering was the reaction of the Labour benches to my next major appearance: total silence intended to disconcert.
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, which would bring inflation and interest rates down, we would be under more pressure to spell out our own alternative. We would have to win on more than a doctor’s mandate. 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.
GRUNWICK
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 then 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.[49] 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.[50] The organization quickly become nationally known through its support for three British railwaymen, dismissed for refusing to join a union, who successfully took their case to the European Court of Human Rights. It fought (but eventually lost) an equally prominent action to prevent British Post Office unions boycotting mail to South Africa. I gave NAFF as much support as I could, though a number of my colleagues regarded it with deep distaste and made public criticisms of its activities. Without NAFF, Grunwick would almost certainly have gone under. When the postal union illegally blacked Grunwick’s outgoing mail, which contained the developed films on which the firm’s business depended, NAFF volunteers smuggled it through the pickets, distributed it around Britain, and discreetly posted it in thousands of pillarboxes.
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 in north-west London, 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. The attitude of Sam Silkin, the Attorney-General, to law-breaking by trade unions had been revealed as at best ambiguous in the case raised by NAFF in January 1977, when two Post Office unions banned telephone calls, mail and telegrams to South Africa.[51] Later he would coin a memorable phrase which summed up the Labour Government’s shifty attitude to the law and individual rights, when he described certain sorts of picketing as ‘lawful intimidation’.[52]
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 r
eason 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.
As well as the assault on the rule of law and the advance of the extreme Left, however, Grunwick also came to symbolize the closed shop. This was because NAFF, which defended Grunwick’s cause, 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. The Prior line, which we had evolved when opposing elements of the Labour Government’s Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts, was to widen the safeguards and improve the compensation for workers who lost their jobs as a result of the closed shop, without trying to ban it as such. (It was widely argued that it would in practice continue to exist as a result of covert understandings between employers and trade unions, whatever we did; moreover, some groups of employers actually favoured the closed shop because it made their lives easier since they could rely on the trade union to discipline the workforce.) And this was the ground on which we uneasily stood.[53]
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