Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Inside Number 10, Mrs Thatcher’s aides were itching for battle. At a late-night meeting of anti-union hawks, the television interviewer Brian Walden, a former Labour MP and the son of a trade unionist, told Hoskyns that Mrs Thatcher should press for an immediate ban on secondary action and the ‘exposure of trade union funds’. The unions would ‘take [the] Tories apart’, Walden said, ‘unless we act now’. For good measure, Mrs Thatcher ought to sack Prior, ‘who was so disloyal behind Margaret’s back’. The next day, Hoskyns sent Mrs Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe a note suggesting an all-out assault on the unions’ funds and immunities, including giving employers the right to sack people who went on strike. There would, he admitted, ‘inevitably be some uproar’, but it was better to get ‘it over now with solutions which are built to last’. Perhaps unwisely, he nicknamed the likely reaction ‘Havoc ’80’.21

  At this point Howe decided to get involved. Under Heath, he had been in charge of the Industrial Relations Act, which had collapsed in complete chaos in 1972. Yet Howe still seemed to believe that the best approach was to fix bayonets and charge into battle. On 4 February he sent Mrs Thatcher a long paper arguing that Prior must act against the unions’ immunities straight away. They were going to face ‘massive confrontation’ anyway, Howe said, so they might as well go for it now. In any case, if they were not prepared to be radical, ‘we might as well not have fought (and won) the last General Election’. This was the cue for ten days of heated squabbles between Howe and Prior about whether they should seize the chance to attack the unions once and for all. By the time the Cabinet met on the 14th, Prior had decided that unless his fellow ministers backed him, he would resign. Cleverly, however, he had squared enough of them to have a critical mass of supporters, and moderation eventually prevailed. Mrs Thatcher, who had been privately backing her Chancellor, was not pleased. A few hours later, she allowed herself a little jab in revenge, telling the Commons that strikers would have their benefits cut by some £12 a week if they were getting strike pay from their union. Howe was delighted. Prior, taken unawares, was furious.22

  In the meantime, the temperature in Britain’s steel towns, too, was rising. On 11 February, with his characteristic blend of physical courage and extreme foolhardiness, Sir Keith Joseph made a personal expedition to South Wales to explain to the steelworkers the error of their ways. It went as well as could have been predicted. In Swansea he was pelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs, in Port Talbot he was jostled and bombarded with unidentified ‘missiles’ and in Cwmbran, where he had a meeting with Gwent County Council, the police had to fight a pitched battle with pickets just to get him into the building. Among the demonstrators, interestingly, was a local steelworker and Labour councillor called Paul Flynn, armed with a placard that read: ‘You are mad and we hate you.’ Not inappropriately, he later served in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet.23

  A week later, public attention switched from South Wales to South Yorkshire. For days tension had been mounting outside Sheffield’s East Hecla factory, which was owned by a private steel firm, Hadfields. Since Hadfields was too small to sustain heavy losses, its men had voted to go back to work. By Wednesday 13th, however, the steelworkers’ picket was several hundred strong. And when Hadfield’s employees arrived for work on Thursday morning, more than a thousand pickets were waiting, among them hundreds of miners led, inevitably, by Arthur Scargill, the militant Yorkshireman who had masterminded the successful mass picket at Saltley Gate coke depot in 1972. For the next few hours, Hadfields followed the same script: pitched fighting between pickets and policemen, with twenty-two men arrested and dozens injured. In the end, the managers had to shut the factory. ‘Intimidation and anarchy have won a total victory,’ said the plant’s boss, ‘Big Dan’ Norton. ‘Before very long someone is going to get killed.’

  To anyone who remembered the 1970s, all this was very familiar. Even Scargill’s guest appearance strengthened the impression that, once again, sheer muscle had won the day. Yet by now many people, even on the left, had lost patience with the scenes of pushing and fighting. ‘The lads were sickened when they saw Scargill on the bandwagon again,’ one Hadfields convener told the Express. ‘He has no right to poke his nose in. No one asked him to turn up here.’

  The next day’s papers were unanimous in their contempt for Scargill and their horror at the violence. The Times, for example, got hold of police statements written by Hadfields’ female staff, who claimed that they had been ‘spat upon, kicked, sworn at’ and called ‘scabs, bastards and whores’. Even the Mirror, which supported the strike, denounced the ‘steel picket fury’ as a ‘mass demonstration of hate’. As for the Express, it worked itself into a tremendous frenzy even by its own standards. ‘This is why you need to act, Pussyfoot Prior,’ read the caption on a front-page photograph of fighting pickets:

  ANARCHY HAS WON!

  This was Hadfields, Britain’s biggest private steelworks, yesterday.

  One thousand two hundred pickets, many led by Yorkshire miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, frightened the workers back on strike …

  One of Hadfields’ convenors argued: ‘Loss of life has nothing to do with the trade union movement. But after all we have been through today it became obvious lives may be lost … I would challenge anyone to go through that picket line and face what we went through today.’

  His words, Pussyfoot Prior, are a cry for help. His experience, Pussyfoot Prior, is why the people of this country voted you and your party into office.

  They want protection. They want a law to defend them against intimidation … from flying pickets like these. Now!24

  That weekend, Mrs Thatcher retreated to Chequers, where she too worked herself into a state of intense agitation. Sunday’s papers were more apocalyptic than ever, with the Sunday Express claiming that the unions were planning to ‘unleash an army of battling pickets across Britain’ in ‘the worst industrial anarchy yet seen’. ‘Why is Mr Scargill not this weekend behind bars?’ wondered the paper’s editor, John Junor, while the former Labour deputy leader George Brown announced that this would be remembered as ‘The Week British Democracy Died’. Having detected at Hadfields ‘the stench of the rotten state of the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic’, Brown was struck by the similarity between Jim Prior and Hitler’s ally Franz von Papen. Soon, he predicted, Prior would depose Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister, in order to ‘make the physical handover of our democracy’ to ‘Scargill’s stormtroopers’. In the accompanying cartoon, Michael Cummings obligingly drew the Yorkshireman in stormtrooper’s regalia. ‘Hitler’s Blackshirts couldn’t conquer Britain’, reads a placard, ‘but Scargill’s Redshirts can!’25

  Despite her reputation, Mrs Thatcher was no stranger to panic. And as she scoured the papers that morning, she feared the worst. She spent the rest of the day glued to the telephone. First Joseph rang to tell her that Hadfields was a ‘massive breach of common law’, then she called her Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, demanding an ‘emergency one-clause bill’ to ban secondary picketing. Joseph rang back to discuss charging Scargill; then she spoke to the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, who agreed that they could ‘not simply stand by’ in the face of mass unrest. By now she had whipped herself into a gigantic lather. Hadfields was ‘mass intimidation’, she told Whitelaw that evening. ‘It was a public order situation. The Government needed to know where the pickets would turn up the next day and would have to stop pickets before they got there. It was not a civil law issue but one of criminal law.’ Whitelaw pointed out that they could not treat the police like hired enforcers. But she returned to her theme: ‘the need to stop pickets before they arrived at their destination’. She had decided to call an emergency meeting on Monday morning. ‘The police must have guidance over their handling of the criminal offences.’26

  Although Mrs Thatcher got her meeting, the result was not as she had hoped. In the cold light of day, her ministers decided against anything that might look like a vindictive attack on the striking steelworkers. But
although the Prime Minister backed down, the episode had been very revealing. For one thing, it showed just how vividly she remembered Heath’s defeat by the miners in 1972. For all her bullish rhetoric, her political nightmares were still dominated by ‘barons’ and ‘bully-boys’, supposedly poised to topple her at any moment. Even more remarkable is how uncannily all this anticipated the miners’ strike four years later. Almost everything Mrs Thatcher mentioned on the phone that Sunday – the dangers of mass intimidation, the spectacle of street violence, the importance of stiffening chief constables’ resolve, the need to find out where pickets were going and to stop them from getting there – would come up again in 1984. Even Scargill’s cameo was a preview of what was coming.27

  The irony is that for all the hysteria, the steel strike was actually going very well for the government. The timing was perfect: with the economy slowing, demand for steel was low. Stocks were high, imports were getting through and generally the economic life of the nation was continuing as normal. Far from presaging some colossal showdown, the Hadfields crisis soon petered out, and by the end of February the air was seeping out of the strike. Both sides wanted a way out; and, at the end of March, Bill Sirs decided to accept the verdict of a three-man court of inquiry. This recommended a deal worth 11 per cent, with another 4½ per cent dependent on productivity improvements. It fell well short of the union’s demands, but Sirs took it anyway. Thirteen weeks into the strike, with victory nowhere in sight, he effectively had no choice. Afterwards, the Trotskyist filmmaker Ken Loach made a controversial ITV documentary, A Question of Leadership (1980), which argued that Sirs and his colleagues had betrayed their own members. Evidently Loach thought they should have stayed out indefinitely, but of course that was easy for him to say.28

  The steel strike was extremely expensive. By the end of the 1979–80 financial year British Steel’s losses had reached a staggering £1.8 billion, the worst figure in its history. In June, Villiers told the government that he would need another £400 million to keep going, on top of the £450 million they had already given him. But Mrs Thatcher thought the strike had been a battle ‘for the economic well-being of the country as a whole’, because the unions needed to realize that they could no longer ‘ignore commercial reality and the need for higher productivity’. Even more importantly, it had demonstrated her determination to break the habits of her predecessors. From first to last, she had kept out of it, just as she had promised. Of course her supposed neutrality was a bit of an illusion, since everybody knew the government wanted British Steel to win. Even so, the fact that she had allowed the strike to drag on for thirteen weeks was a telling lesson in her new approach. It was a tragedy, Sir Geoffrey Howe wrote later, that ‘so many different groups of workers apparently needed to learn by first-hand experience that the government would not change its mind’.29

  For the steel industry, the strike was a watershed. With the union at bay, Villiers felt emboldened to abandon national bargaining for local deals on pay and conditions, with up to a fifth of a worker’s earnings tied to his factory’s productivity improvements. Closures continued apace: first Consett and Corby, then Scunthorpe, Shotton, Ebbw Vale, Cardiff and Rotherham. But even as the management were laying the foundations for recovery, the government was hunting for a new chairman to accelerate the pace of change. At a cost of almost £2 million, they found him: Ian MacGregor, an Edinburgh-trained metallurgist who had made a fortune in New York. One profile described him as a ‘tough old Scots-American of sixty-seven with thin lips and a deadpan face like a block of granite’. And as chairman, MacGregor proved duly uncompromising. ‘The world’, he once said, ‘goes to people with a sense of individual competition.’ Mrs Thatcher thought he was wonderful: she once told Prior that ‘he was the only man she knew who was her equal’. MacGregor had strong views about her, too. ‘In some ways’, he wrote later, ‘she was like my mother – who always had a clear idea of what she wanted to do.’30

  Under MacGregor, British Steel was transformed. The government still poured in subsidies: some £4½ billion over five years, more than Wilson and Callaghan had spent in the five years after 1974. But the difference was that as MacGregor slashed jobs, making some 90,000 people redundant by the middle of the 1980s, British Steel’s productivity boomed. One analysis found that it now had lower costs, per ton, than any other major steelmaker in the world – a statistic that would have seemed incredible only a few years earlier. By 1988, when the steel industry was privatized, it was setting international records for profitability, quality and customer satisfaction. Pre-tax profits were now some £400 million, a stark contrast with the losses of the late 1970s, while productivity in man-hours per ton had improved threefold. The first line of a Guardian feature, just before the business was floated on the Stock Exchange, captured the changing mood: ‘There was once a very ugly industrial frog called British Steel, which became a shining and profitable prince …’31

  The steel strike was Mrs Thatcher’s first real victory. Yet, when it was all over, there was little jubilation, just a sense of relief that things had not been worse. After the dust had settled, Hoskyns compiled a report on the strike and its lessons. His tone could scarcely have been more downbeat. It was ‘far from an unqualified “victory”’, he told his boss. ‘We should be under no illusions about how badly the strike might have gone … We gained little, probably lost a good deal; but avoided losing everything.’ An uninformed observer might never have guessed that they had won.32

  The truth was that, despite the steelworkers’ defeat, most Conservatives still feared the spectre of trade union power. And even as the steelworkers licked their wounds, the wider union movement seemed to be stirring. At the end of March, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Len Murray, called for a National Day of Action to protest against Mrs Thatcher’s economic and industrial policies. ‘We want all the people out that day that the unions can get out,’ he said: miners and nurses, printers and dockers, engineers, railwaymen, teachers and car workers. As the big day approached, the Conservative papers rolled out their most blood-curdling warnings. ‘Lenin Murray and the Bully Boys of the TUC’, said the Express, had called a ‘strike for anarchy and against democracy’. It would be not merely a ‘Day of Shame’, warned the Conservative MP George Gardiner, but a ‘dress rehearsal for something far bigger – a full General Strike’. ‘Make no mistake,’ the Express concluded, ‘this is the road to dictatorship!’33

  But when, on Wednesday 14 May, the Day of Action dawned, it quickly became obvious that it was not, after all, going to be the first step towards a Soviet Britain. Despite the dire warnings of cancelled trains and deserted hospitals, most people barely noticed it was happening. In Wolverhampton a survey of more than thirty firms found that all but a handful of staff had turned up for work; indeed, some employers said there were ‘fewer absentees than on a normal Wednesday’. ‘Shops, banks, cinemas, public houses, schools and hospitals were open as normal,’ wrote a visiting reporter. ‘Post, bread and milk was delivered and traffic wardens were on duty.’ Indeed, in Wolverhampton the ‘only tangible effect of the Day of Action’ was a desultory rally in the town centre, attended by no more than 500 people. This was hardly the stuff of a workers’ revolution: the ‘most vociferous’, apparently, ‘were a group of punks holding aloft colour pictures of the tax exiled pop singer, Rod Stewart’.

  As Wolverhampton went, so did the nation. A BBC poll beforehand found that 73 per cent of trade union members were dead against the Day of Action, while almost nine out of ten were planning to go to work. ‘The day of action has been exactly that,’ said a gleeful spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry. ‘The action has been on the shop floor, exactly where it belongs.’ ‘Whatever victory the TUC may claim for the Day of Action,’ agreed the usually supportive Daily Mirror, ‘the unions will think twice before they order another one.’34

  Barely a year earlier, all of the talk had been of union power, the images of overflowing bin-bags and
deserted hospital wards seared into the national consciousness. So how could things have changed so quickly? Unemployment certainly had something to do with it: with the dole queues lengthening, many workers were acutely conscious of the danger of losing their jobs. But there had also been a palpable shift in the political temperature. The Winter of Discontent had dealt a shattering blow to trade unionists’ morale. Even at the time, many ordinary members had been shocked by the hospital and gravediggers’ disputes. In five years the proportion of union members themselves who felt the unions were too powerful had risen by 22 per cent. As for the public in general, more than eight out of ten told Gallup at the end of January 1979 that the unions were too powerful, while a poll in early February found that almost half believed the unions’ very existence was a ‘bad thing’. Among young and old, rich and poor, diehard Tories and traditional Labour voters, there had been a marked turn away from the unions.35

  The failure of Len Murray’s Day of Action was a gift to Mrs Thatcher. In the Daily Express (16 May 1980), Michael Cummings drew the inevitable contrast with the Winter of Discontent.

  All of this meant that Mrs Thatcher was swimming with the tide of public opinion. As her strategists reported, polls showed that most union members themselves strongly supported reform, from compulsory strike ballots to a ban on secondary picketing. Indeed, more than four out of ten trade unionists thought their own unions were taking an ‘unreasonable view of the Government’s plans’. Many clearly agreed with Labour’s Denis Healey, who thought the union leaders’ ‘cowardice and irresponsibility’ had not only handed victory to the Tories, but ‘left them with no grounds for complaining about her subsequent actions against them’. The really striking thing, though, is that even in late 1982, after unemployment had risen above 3 million, the public mood had not changed. Two out of three people still said they were unhappy with the trade unions, while almost half wanted to see even more stringent union reforms. ‘To me they just represent different sections of working class people all trying to get the most possible for themselves. My female friends seem to think the same way,’ Mary Richards, herself working-class, told Mass Observation a few months later. ‘In the past Unions did a lot of good, they are still needed but not as they were in the Winter of Discontent. Something went wrong then.’36