When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  The government wanted wage settlements of 5 per cent, and inflation was just under 10 per cent, but the strikers paid little or no attention to these figures. The truckers demanded more than 20 per cent; the nurses 25 per cent; the tanker drivers 40 per cent. Such demands were, depending on your political perspective or your position in the labour force, either the result of pent-up and justified pay grievances, or a Darwinian workers’ free-for-all.

  The winter weather added to the sense of panic. Heath had been gifted a mild January and February during the three-day week, but Callaghan was much less lucky. November 1978 was warm, while December was a little colder than average. But January and February were Arctic by British standards: barely above freezing, even during the day. In central London, for the first time in years, roads were blocked by snow. Airports, motorways and trains were slowed or brought to a halt; whole towns were isolated; food prices went up. And the weather stayed raw into the spring and beyond. In May, when the day of the general election finally came, Tony Benn reported ‘hail and snow’ in his constituency in normally temperate Bristol.

  In Britain in the seventies, strikes in winter were hardly new. The dark season, every streetwise striker and strike victim knew, was when strikes had teeth. The disruption of everyday life by industrial disputes was also a familiar ritual. But this time the effect of the strikes was more universal and dramatic than before, and all the more so for being presented by a press with anti-union biases and industrial disputes of its own – and which was inclined to be harsh on the Callaghan government after the anticlimax of the autumn. Journalists, like politicians, had cleared their diaries for the election that never was.

  From November to March, the papers, when they came out at all, were full of sudden school closures and struggling hospitals; of queues at petrol stations and panic buying in supermarkets; goods stuck in docks from Hull to Southampton; commuters unable to get to work; south London council tenants without heating or hot water; drivers on the M4 having to cope without de-icing trucks; parks and shopfronts sinking, infamously, beneath accumulations of uncollected rubbish; and, even more infamously, happy rats feeding on it. The right-wing tabloids, in particular, went to great lengths to make all of this look as nightmarish as possible – the rats, near Leicester Square in central London, were only caught by a photographer after hours of waiting – but the consequences of the strikes were painfully real. Over a million people temporarily lost their jobs as a result of the stoppages. And the effects of the strikes even touched the inner sanctums of government and union power. ‘At the TGWU headquarters in Smith Square,’ the Evening Standard reported on 1 February, ‘the side entrance had almost completely disappeared behind a wall of rubbish sacks.’ On the 23rd, Tony Benn wrote in his diary,

  Pickets were standing at the end of Downing Street. One picket looked through my car window and asked if he could speak to me. The driver went on but I stopped him and got out. I assured [the picket] I was not going in [to 10 Downing Street] to do their job or replace their work, and I went in. I sat down at the table outside the Cabinet Room and worked on my papers…

  Despite the months, even years, of warning signals, the strike wave had taken the government largely unawares. The successes of 1977 and 1978, the distracting obsession with an autumn election, the fact that the government had already improvised its way through so many crises, the fact that the unions had grudgingly stayed in line since 1974 – and the belief that with an election unavoidable in the next year they surely would continue to do so now – all of these contributed to the government’s unpreparedness. ‘I don’t think we had really planned for the winter of ’78–’79,’ Gavyn Davies told me. ‘We had no plan for the strikes, no PR approach.’ Donoughue wrote later that the postponed election had left the government ‘flat’. Afterwards, Callaghan had not reshuffled his Cabinet. The Policy Unit, which had been expecting an autumn contest, had few policy ideas left. The hope was to muddle along until a spring election, win it, and then start afresh. There was even press speculation in early 1979 that Denis Healey would replace Callaghan as prime minister soon after Labour won another term. That, it was said, was why the chancellor had recently turned down the job of managing director of the IMF.

  The strike wave put a torch to such hopes. Yet the government’s standing, contrary to the conventional wisdom since – and there is more conventional wisdom about the Winter of Discontent than about any other episode in the British seventies – did not go up in flames immediately. Through November and December, and into the first week of January, some opinion polls continued to show small Labour leads, as they had done since mid-1978.

  ‘The Conservatives don’t seem to be doing all that well,’ said Brian Walden, the ex-Labour MP turned free marketeer who had become a forensic interviewer of British politicians, as he introduced Weekend World on 7 January 1979. ‘This isn’t a happy situation for Mrs Thatcher,’ he went on, over footage of empty supermarket shelves and closed petrol-station forecourts. ‘The public fear the power of the unions,’ but the Conservatives, he reminded viewers, did not have a good record when it came to taming them: Heath had been ‘smashed’. Would Margaret Thatcher, if she ever became prime minister, do any better?

  He turned to his guest. The Conservative leader smiled her calmest, most ready-to-pounce smile. Recently, she said softly, she had been looking at British trade union law, all the way back to the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. Ever since that date, she had concluded, unions had been ‘above the law’. They had had ‘licence to inflict harm, damage, and injury on others’. She paused. ‘This is a problem. We’ve got to meet it… Someone’s got to grasp this nettle.’ Then she made a series of nearly jaw-dropping suggestions: that strikes in ‘essential services’ could be outlawed; that social security benefits paid to strikers could be sharply reduced by making them subject to taxation; that strikers could have their benefits taken away altogether if they acted without a secret ballot in favour of industrial action. None of these radical ideas were Conservative policy yet, but by floating them so publicly and suddenly she knew, as she put it in her memoirs, that anti-union legislation would be instantly ‘higher on the agenda than some of my colleagues really wanted … I had broken ranks. People could see that I was going to fight.’

  The interview continued. Walden, well-briefed and provocative, belittled her proposed reforms as ‘peripheral’ to the union problem. Thatcher became visibly angry – as usual, it was in her eyes – but lost none of her crispness. Unions, she said, should go back to their original ideals of simply looking after their members, not ‘strike against the weakest members of society’. The fact that the former sometimes meant exactly the latter did not detain her. Since the early seventies, when it came to unions, ‘Public opinion has changed tremendously,’ she concluded. ‘It is ready for things which it was not ready for.’

  From this point on, as much as these things can be fixed precisely, the Winter of Discontent and union power in general began to stop being a dilemma for the Tories and started to become their key to office. After years of expressing a vivid but rather impotent outrage at union behaviour – over the mass picket at Grunwick, for example – Thatcher had finally demonstrated that she had the will and the ideas to do something about it. Meanwhile, the unions, too, at last appeared to be behaving with the political self-destructiveness that ‘Stepping Stones’ and countless other union-curbing blueprints produced by the British Right since the fifties had always predicted, and perhaps secretly hoped, they would. ‘Party in grip of mild euphoria,’ wrote Thatcher’s adviser John Hoskyns in his diary on 18 January, ‘because country beset by strikes … Idea of special relationship between Labour and unions a joke.’ The chapter in his memoirs about the Winter of Discontent and the 1979 general election has a frank title: ‘Saved by the Unions’.

  Jamie Morris arrived in London from Fife in Scotland in 1970. He was seventeen, five foot three, and had ‘little formal education’, as the London Evening Standard would later put it. He
liked horses, the Conservative Party and the countryside, but in the capital he had to settle for a flat with his dad in a council tower block. For four years Morris did menial jobs in department stores. He renounced Conservatism for socialism. Then, in 1974, he started working for the state, as a telephonist at Westminster Hospital.

  Five minutes’ walk from the Houses of Parliament, and a street from the Labour and Conservative Party headquarters, Westminster Hospital was a looming thirties fortress, the latest site of a famous institution that had been in the area since the 1700s. It was where MPs were taken if they fell ill in the Commons; and where Westminster journalists, if a politician’s plight was sufficiently compelling, could easily keep an eye on them. A week after starting at the hospital, Morris joined the Labour Party and the National Union of Public Employees, or NUPE. Like the other unions which represented people in state-funded or white-collar jobs, NUPE was expanding and open to new talent in the seventies. Within three weeks, Morris, who was a conscientious organizer and a good talker, had become a shop steward. ‘There were problems to sort out,’ he explained tersely to the Evening Standard later. ‘I was around… People seemed to like my ideas. It was as simple as that. I didn’t want to become a full-time union official.’

  Instead, by the winter of 1978–9, Morris had been promoted by the hospital to domestic supervisor, with responsibility for the cleaners and non-medical care staff. Besides his union duties – he was now branch secretary at the Westminster and looked after NUPE matters at two other nearby hospitals – he was a Labour borough councillor, council-committee member and school governor. He had also spent a year at the LSE studying industrial relations. He sometimes worked seventy or eighty hours a week, but he seemed to have the energy for it: he was still only twenty-six, with puppy fat in his face, flicked and styled longish hair and a handsome young man’s beard. In his little time off, he went back to his council tower block, listened to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, and read horror novels.

  He sometimes talked about becoming a Labour MP. He had a touch of Callaghan’s moralism: speaking about teenage vandals to the East London Advertiser in early 1979, he said, ‘I’d fine the parents and give the kids a bucket of water to clean off the graffiti.’ But in other areas his political stances were less helpful to the government. In 1975, in a dispute over the use of his hospital by private patients, he led a campaign of industrial action so high-profile and provocative that he received a letter bomb. Four years later, he told the Advertiser that the Labour social services secretary ‘[David] Ennals and his minister Roland Moyle… should be on the Muppet Show – they’ve no idea what’s going on in the health service.’ The very picture of a cocky young shop steward, he concluded with a flourish: ‘I’m a rebel and I’ll only shut my mouth when they put the lid on my box.’

  Morris sat out the first few weeks of the Winter of Discontent. Then, in mid-January, his moment came. In 1979, the British welfare state and political status quo contained an often-forgotten weakness and injustice. Despite decades of relatively generous state spending, manual workers in the public sector such as the cleaners and carers Morris supervised were not well paid. A typical weekly wage was between £49 and £54, at a time when the average manual worker in industry earned £90. In 1978, his union, NUPE, decided it wanted a weekly minimum of £60 for its members, an increase, depending on their starting wage, of between 10 per cent and over 20 per cent – smaller than many other pay claims during the Winter of Discontent, but still far in excess of the government’s 5 per cent guideline. The government resisted. From mid-January, NUPE responded with an unpredictable national campaign of overtime bans, strikes and work-to-rules, the severity of the action in each workplace dependent on the attitude of the union’s local officials.

  Hospitals were among the places worst affected. Almost half were suffering disruption by the end of January, the Daily Mail reported. The great brick citadel of the Westminster was one of them: ‘Dirty linen stood in piles around the corridors. Patients ate meals off paper plates.’ On 30 January, the hospital announced that it could not admit any new patients, including emergency cases. Even the patients already in its wards might have to be moved if the dispute went on. Then the hospital would be shut down completely until the pay claim was resolved.

  The next day the Evening Standard identified Morris as the union official leading the industrial action. It was a public role he seemed happy to fulfil. ‘I think the management will find it hard to carry on,’ he told the paper, beside a photo of him coming out of a NUPE meeting at the hospital, wearing an open-necked shirt and dark glasses and with a small crowd of more conventional-looking union members standing behind him, like followers. As well as refusing to do their usual duties, NUPE members at the Westminster were also refusing to allow deliveries of heating oil. ‘I feel sorry for the patients of course,’ Morris went on. ‘It is not that long since I was a patient at the Westminster Hospital myself, suffering from a broken ankle.’ But until his union’s grievances were addressed, nothing could be done for them. ‘The feeling at the [union] meeting’, he summarized melodramatically, ‘was one of anger.’

  The following day, the Standard reported that two hospital delivery vans with their tyres slashed had been found blocking the service entrance to the hospital. NUPE members had refused to unload them: they were now blacking deliveries of sterile medical supplies and fruit and vegetables, as well as oil. The Westminster’s managers had tried and failed to persuade ambulancemen, the police and the Automobile Association to help, and had finally resorted to calling a local army barracks. Soldiers in berets had unloaded the vans. ‘Sabotage Hospital Calls Army’, said the Standard’s front-page headline with equal measures of distaste and excitement. Those responsible for the tyre-slashing were not named by the paper, but a picture of Jamie Morris with the caption ‘He ordered the total walkout’ directly above a photo of the vans unsubtly implied a connection.

  The paper also reported Morris’s reaction to a concession from Alan Fisher, the slightly ineffectual general secretary of NUPE, that his members could, after all, assist hospitals in medical emergencies. ‘Mr Morris said he had been told by NUPE officials that [this concession] did not apply to Westminster Hospital.’ Morris was then asked about a code of conduct for strikers recently issued by NUPE headquarters. ‘I hope it’s been sent in the post to my home address,’ he said with taunting sarcasm, ‘because it won’t get to me here. Our pickets are stopping the mail.’

  Since the early stages of the Winter of Discontent, the right-wing papers had been looking for union ogres, and now the Standard had found one. ‘What is left of the moral capital the miners drew on in 1972 and 1974 has been squandered by the likes of Mr Jamie Morris,’ declared a Standard editorial. Even the Guardian condemned Morris by name, out of the many millions of trade unionists on strike, for his ‘boasting’ and ‘willingness to put patients at risk’. On 31 January, the day that what was happening at the Westminster was first widely reported, Margaret Thatcher appeared on the Jimmy Young Programme on Radio 2, one of her favourite soapboxes. ‘Some of the unions’, she told the show’s large and electorally significant audience, ‘are confronting the sick … If someone is inflicting injury, harm and damage on the sick, my God, I will confront them.’

  But Jamie Morris’s notoriety had not yet peaked. On 6 March, with timing worthy of the blackest satirical novel, as the industrial action Morris was orchestrating at the Westminster continued, the social services secretary David Ennals, who was responsible for the NHS, including its pay disputes, was admitted to the hospital. Ennals was a protégé of Callaghan’s, a slightly soft-hearted, not especially competent minister with vulnerable health who had been shot in the Second World War and left with a crooked right arm and circulatory problems. He had spent a month in hospital in 1978 for a thrombosis in his leg, from which bone had been taken thirty years earlier to rebuild his arm, and in early 1979 the condition painfully recurred. He was advised to go to the Westminster for two days of te
sts. Despite the situation at the hospital, he felt he had no choice, and despite the restrictions there on receiving patients, which alternately tightened and loosened in the general disorder, he managed to get himself admitted, discreetly, via a back entrance. Then his troubles started.

  Morris declared the fifty-six-year-old Ennals ‘a legitimate target for industrial action’. As the minister sat stranded in bed in a public ward, propped up with pillows and wearing green pyjamas, unable to walk without a stick or a wheelchair and with official papers still arriving for him in red boxes, Morris roamed the corridors of the Westminster, young and trim and relishing his power, promising reporters that Ennals’ stay ‘would be made as uncomfortable as possible’. NUPE’s hospital porters, Morris told the Guardian, would not help the minister to the X-ray department. He would not have newspapers or mail brought to him. ‘He won’t get the little extras our members provide patients. He won’t get his locker cleaned or the area around his bed tidied up. He won’t get tea or soup.’ Morris told the Daily Mail: ‘He won’t see a single smile.’

  Morris said he blamed Ennals personally for the pay dispute. ‘Don’t you think he has been mean-minded?’ he asked the Guardian. ‘People who work in hospitals … have to fight for a decent living wage, but the miners can walk into an office and be given 15% just like that.’