Militant strike action was always a possibility in a system that relied on negotiating agreement between employers and labour. The subjective collaboration of the workforce was what the system was there to engage, so the prospect that it might be withheld was a perennial danger. Institutionalised conflict might break out of its boundaries. The incorporation of the union leadership in the management of British industry put them in the front line of the conflict. They were at once trying to hold the support of the union members, and put forward the case for the terms they had negotiated with management. Opposition to the leadership opened up. In many instances, the local shop stewards became an alternative leadership, leading strikes that were not sought, and often not supported by the convenors and union leaders. On other occasions ad hoc rank-and-file movements challenged the stewards as well as the convenors.
Employers were not surprisingly outraged at what they called ‘unconstitutional’ action. They felt that they had already conceded more authority to unions than they would have liked, and were angry to find that the union leaders could not deliver their members’ support. Employers, though, had provoked the conflicts, driving workers to increase productivity, and trying to hold down wages while putting up their own prices. The workplace relationship was only superficially one of agreement. Agreements and negotiations would hardly be necessary if the workers’ interests truly coincided with their employers’ interests.
Strike for the ‘Pentonville 5’ dockworkers jailed for picketing
Baron Geddes of Epsom had been General Secretary of the Post Office Workers’ union from 1944 to 1957, and President of the Trades Union Congress in 1955. On 18 March 1969 he told the House of Lords that ‘the men who ran the trade union movement… could be called patriots’:
They believed that they supported the Government of the day, not because they were, in the Left-wing words, ‘capitalist lackeys’ but because they believed that the good of the country in the long run, in the long term, was for the good of their members. It seems to me to-day that we cannot be so certain that that is true.57
Women were also taking strike action. In 1968 187 women working as machinists making seat covers at Ford went on strike to get their jobs regraded. Around that time many women were taking part in the workplace disputes that were raging, such as the London night cleaners’ fight for union recognition, the disputes of 20,000 Leeds clothing workers, and women taking part in the teachers’ strike. The Ford machinists’ strike set down the ideal of ‘equal pay for equal work’.
The 1974-79 Labour government pushed the corporate system to its limit. The social contract between organised labour, employers, and government was used yet more forcefully to hold down wages and boost productivity. In its programme of 1973 Labour argued for ‘a great contract between government, industry and trade unions, with all three parties prepared to make sacrifices to achieve agreement on a strategy to deal with the problems’. The trade union leaders agreed a wage rise limit of £6 in 1975, followed by a second phase of limit of 4.5%. The ‘third phase’ was imposed against an all-out strike by firefighters in 1977. The view of the trade union movement was that government had forfeited their trust by its use of legal compulsion in labour organisation.58
The announcement of another 5% limit — ‘Phase 4’ — in 1978 provoked an open rebellion. The low-paid workers of the National Union of Public Employees struck out rubbish collection and even burials; railway workers and road haulage drivers struck. More people were out on strike than in 1972: 4.6 million, with a loss of 29.4 million working days.
Engineers’ leader Reg Birch looked back over the record of Labour’s ‘In Place of Strife’, Health, and Industrial Relations Acts, ‘the various forms of wage restraint and compulsion’: ‘After 33 years of the oppression of the working class by social democracy there is now a bursting out.’59 The feminist Beatrix Campbell took an altogether different view. To her it seemed that the revolt was against the egalitarian pay award under the Social Contract, an across-the-board £6 per week, that was sabotaged when ‘the redoubts of macho Labourism had mutinied and insisted on the “restoration of differentials” — the gap between skilled, unskilled and women’.60
The crisis of the corporate economy was felt sharply by ethnic minorities. Unemployment rose overall, but black unemployment climbed even faster. Black people made up 2.3% of the unemployed in 1973, but by 1982 that number was 4.1%. For a social group that was heavily dependent on manufacturing and the public sector, the contraction of both those spheres was a blow. Unofficially trade union branches often adopted the line ‘last in, first out’, meaning that where there were lay-offs, black workers would be first. Black children were demotivated at school by the limited job prospects of their older peers, and by the low expectations of their teachers. Asian workers were militant in defence of their jobs and conditions. In the Midlands Motor Cylinder Company in 1968, at Mansfield Hosiery Mills in Loughborough in 1973, in the Imperial Typewriters strike in Leicester 1974, and in the strike by photographic processing workers at Grunwick’s in 1977, they took action against employers. These strikes were all provoked by bullying management, and the promotion of white workers over Asians. Often the local union negotiators dismissed the workers, as TGWU negotiator George Bromley did when he complained that the Imperial Typewriters employees ‘have not followed the proper disputes procedure’, and ‘have no legitimate grievance’.61
With greater pressure on household budgets in the later 1970s women were taking on more work, often part-time. Economic pressures, though, were leading to more reactionary ideas. The Sunday Times editorialised that ‘unemployment and inflation have made it imperative to convince women that their place is in the home because the country cannot afford to employ them or pay for the support facilities they need’.62
The strike wave of the low-paid was called a ‘peasant’s revolt’, and also a ‘winter of discontent’, and the widespread disaffection saw Labour lose the 1979 election to a Conservative government committed to dismantling the post-war consensus.
Dismantling the consensus: 1979-92
Soon after winning the election in 1979, Margaret Thatcher signalled that the days when government would broker talks between industry and unions were over, saying there would be ‘no more beer and sandwiches at Number Ten’. The Labour government, she said, had offered ‘the joint oversight of economic policy by a tripartite body representing the Trades Union Congress, the Confederation of British Industry and the Government’. But ‘we were saved from this abomination’, which she called ‘the most radical form of socialism ever contemplated by a British government’; corporatism and the tripartite talks between government were a trap. As Neil Millward et al summarised:
The government’s aim — highly controversial at the time — was to weaken the power of the trade unions, deregulate the labour market and dismantle many of the tripartite institutions of corporatism in which the trade unions played a major part.63
Chancellor Nigel Lawson, limiting the powers of the wage councils, said that in a ‘free society it is plainly a matter for business and industry itself to determine rates of pay’.64 As Linda Dickens and Alan Neal explain, ‘institutional arrangements seen as underpinning… structured collective bargaining and/or imposing rigidities on the operation of the free market were eroded or ended’.65 Employment laws were passed in 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1993 — all limiting the power of trade unions to strike, making them liable for company losses, outlawing the ‘closed shop’ agreements with employers, and enforcing ballots before strike action could be taken.
With the encouragement of the Department of Trade and Industry, British industry set about a marked reorganisation. Not only were 60% of government holdings privatised, but many larger and more established industries were slimmed down — some, like shipbuilding and coalmining, to the point of extinction. Industries were restructured, often contracting out all but their core activities, leaving employees to compete for their old jobs
in new service-sector businesses. Many companies de-layered and down-sized their workforces, taking advantage of anti-union laws. Bypassing union negotiators, employers made their own contracts with individual employees. Workforces were encouraged to agree ‘flexibility’, working hours that suited their life obligations or, more often, the needs of the employers. Many new contracts were for part-time and temporary positions. There would be ‘no more job for life’, workers were told. One change that would prove important for the spread of equal opportunities policies was the growing appeal of the paradigm of ‘Human Resource Management’, ‘the banner under which increasing numbers of employee relations specialists marched’, according to Neil Millward. Human Resource Management would mean a much more individuated relationship between employee and employer, but also one that was all procedure, and so depersonalised.66
Though they claimed to be taking the state out of industry, and out of wider society, the Conservative government used state power extensively. Police power and the law courts were used to prevent workers from striking and protesting, having outlawed ‘secondary’ picketing and mass picketing. Between 1980 and 1988 520 separate acts of parliament were made law, along with 18,893 statutory instruments — around 7000 pages of legislation every year; civil liberties were reined in over everything from horror films on video, to schools’ treatment of homosexuality, dangerous dogs, football fans, and raves.67
Most of all, though, the meaning of trade union reform and the effective end of the tripartite system was that the national consensus that had been established in the post-war period was ended. The end of consensus had profound effects on social attitudes, leading to a marked individuation and even a disaffection from public life. One of the more pointed features of the Conservative governments in the years from 1979 to 1997 was an appeal to a robust patriotism. But in a sense, that appeal to national sentiment was a sign that its substantial basis had been eroded. The post-war consensus bound people to the national project, through a wide span of bodies: trade unions, mass political parties, municipal councils, in addition to the charities, church groups, and women’s institutes that appealed to the more middle-class Britons. Most of those groups and clubs withered as the government tore up the old social contract. As ‘the Nation’ had less and less substance, the establishment appealed to it even more.
Targeting immigrants
One dramatic focus of the stridently national rhetoric that the government adopted in the 1980s was a renewed focus on restricting immigration. Margaret Thatcher had said at the election that many people felt ‘that this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture’. A new Nationality Act of 1981 limited the rights of those citizens of the Commonwealth, and William Whitelaw said the law was ‘to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we used to rule’.68 The immigration police were encouraged to re-double their efforts and in 1980 there were 910 removals and 2,472 deportations, around twice the amount in previous years, and a rate that was kept up through the 1980s. Newspapers sent photographers to the landing gates for flights coming in from India and Pakistan to illustrate headlines like ‘they’re still flooding in’ (Evening Standard). ‘In former times such invasions would have been repelled by armed force’, reported the Daily Mail. When Tamil refugees arrived from Sri Lanka in 1985, Home Secretary Leon Brittan said they were a threat to British workers’ jobs and living standards. The Financial Times trumpeted that ‘the last thing the country needs is a flood of new immigrants’.69 Official sanction for anti-immigrant feeling encouraged a long spasm of race attacks against brown and black people living in Britain.
In March 1986, 36 police officers raided the British Telecom offices in the City of London, interrogating cleaning staff on their legal status, with the collaboration of the BT managers. It was just one of hundreds of ‘fishing raids’.70 Black and Asian people were asked to show their passports at work, and at hospitals and unemployment benefit offices. People deemed ‘illegal’ under the nationality laws were subject to detention and deportation.
It was not just immigrants from the Indian sub-continent who were caught out by the renewed emphasis on Britishness. West Indians stood out as far as the authorities were concerned. Metropolitan Police Chief Kenneth Newman said in 1982 that ‘in the Jamaicans you have people who are constitutionally disorderly… it’s simply in their make-up’.71 The year before, London police had launched a campaign against ‘street crime’ called ‘Swamp 81’, under which they stopped and searched scores of young black men in Brixton in South London. The operation provoked a riot that lasted two days. A sustained campaign to criminalise black people provoked disturbances in Toxteth, Liverpool, and Bristol in that same year. In 1985 police assaulted Cherry Groce in a raid nearby the Broadwater Farm that ended in prolonged rioting in which Police Constable Kenneth Blakelock was killed. Winston Silcott, imprisoned for the killing, was vilified as the face of hatred on the front cover of the newspapers, though later his conviction was quashed.
Britain’s unhappy row about what was and what was not ‘British’ was a sign that the old social compact had broken down. Without many positive gains to engage their citizens, the elite chose to define the nation negatively, targeting foreigners with darker skin. The consequences for equality of opportunity seemed very slim. According to Sociologist Yaojun Li,
in 1981, unemployment rose to 10% for White men, but jumped to 26% for Pakistani/Bangladeshi men. When the recession was at its highest in 1982, Black and Pakistani/Bangladeshi men’s unemployment rate reached nearly 30% as compared with only 12% for White men.72
The impact of a patriotic Britain was destructive, but it was also limited in its appeal to a nation that felt less and less engaged.
Victorian values
Alongside the emphasis on nation, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher thought that her government ought to be ‘concentrating on strengthening the traditional family’, and ‘never felt uneasy about praising “Victorian values”’.73 In 1979 the new Conservative Minister for Health and Social Security, Patrick Jenkin, said that ‘Mothers should be encouraged to look after their children full-time instead of going out to work’. According to Jenkin, ‘the increasing turbulence of modern life, with rising crime, industrial disruption, violence and terrorism is rooted in the separation of children from their parents’.74
Legislation cutting social security entitlements to under-25 year-olds was based on the idea that families would support young people for longer. Cuts in many services assumed and depended upon the work of families — overwhelmingly of wives and mothers — to make up what was taken away. So the limited spending on care for the elderly assumed that women would take up the slack.
In 1988 it seemed to be a real possibility that abortion rights would become more limited. Liberal MP David Alton’s Private Member’s Bill (which was ultimately unsuccessful) would have outlawed late-term abortions. At Dame Jill Knight’s urging a clause was added to the 1988 Local Government Act forbidding teachers from saying that homosexual relations could be ‘a pretended family relation’. The restriction, first demanded by the Parents’ Rights’ Group in Haringey, passed.
Margaret Thatcher
That social compact that had been made in the post-war years between capital and labour, brokered by the state, was breaking down in the 1980s. The circumstances suggested that the times were hostile to equality in the workplace.
The Conservative governments of 1979-83 and 1983-87 kept up a strongly traditionalist and xenophobic rhetoric, backed up with laws hostile to migrants and women. The end of the industrial consensus seemed to signal an even harsher iteration of the gender and racial inequality than before. As things turned out, though, other changes were pulling in an altogether different direction.
— TWO —
The Commission for Racial Equality
‘There are two problems in world politics today which transcend all others’, Sunday Times editor Harry Hodson told the Foreig
n Office audience at Chatham House in 1950: ‘the struggle between Communism and liberal democracy, and the problem of race relations’.1 Hodson called for the founding of the Institute of Race Relations. Back then, race relations were mostly about the colonies, but with the beginnings of Commonwealth migration in the 1950s the question of race relations, and the fear of race conflict, came to be a domestic issue.
Britain’s first race relations law did not cover discrimination at work. The Race Relations Act of 1965 was mostly about public order. When the Houses of Parliament argued over the need for laws on race relations they were mostly worried about the threat of disorder and of Britain’s reputation abroad, in the Commonwealth, and in Washington.
Home Office Minister Frank Soskice told the House of Commons, ‘basically, the Bill is concerned with public order’:
Overt acts of discrimination in public places, intensely wounding to the feelings of those against whom these acts are practised, perhaps in the presence of many onlookers, breed the ill will which, as the accumulative result of several such actions over a period, may disturb the peace.
The Bill was also put through with one eye on Britain’s standing in the world:
It would be a tragedy of the first order if our country, with its unrivalled tradition of tolerance and fair play as between one man or woman and another and perfect respect for the rights and personal worth and dignity of the individual, should see the beginnings of the development of a distinction between first and second class citizens and the disfigurement which can arise from inequality of treatment and incitement to feelings of hatred directed to the origins of particular citizens, something for which they are not responsible.2
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