Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  This in turn reflected a wider picture. In the mid-1970s only a quarter of the products sold on the high street had been made abroad. A decade later, half were imports. By the mid-1980s some 95 per cent of the cutlery, 85 per cent of the leather handbags, 84 per cent of the stereos, 83 per cent of the men’s trousers, 81 per cent of the luggage and 74 per cent of the sports equipment sold in Britain, as well as almost half of the vacuum cleaners, fridges and colour televisions, had been imported, usually from Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Given that Britain prided itself on being the workshop of the world, many people found these figures deeply embarrassing. Sometimes people said the British were work-shy, but this was not true. In fact, the typical working week at the turn of the 1980s was an hour longer in Britain than it was in France or West Germany. The real problems were much harder to sort out. When The Times compared thirty-six industrial groups across the Common Market, Britain came bottom of all but two. A Japanese steelworker made five and a half tons of steel for every ton produced by his British counterpart. Even a Pan Am employee handled three times the traffic of her British Airways equivalent. It was, the paper remarked, now a ‘wearily familiar’ story.14

  Even in the 1970s the consequences were devastatingly clear: the collapse of textile jobs in Lancashire, the disappearance of shipbuilding on the Clyde, the slow death of steelmaking in South Wales. And this, of course, was what Mrs Thatcher had promised to fix. In a New Year message to the nation, published in the News of the World on the last Sunday in 1979, she addressed herself directly to the challenges facing British manufacturing:

  You are probably reading this sitting at home, maybe with your family around you. In the living room there is almost certainly a television set, probably a colour model.

  In the kitchen there is more than likely to be a washing machine and almost definitely a fridge. And there is about an even chance you will have a car outside.

  First: How many of these items were made in Britain?

  And second: How many of them or their equivalent did you or your parents have 20 years ago? …

  Once we were the best. We built well and sold well. We delivered on time, people bought British because British was best …

  Then we started to slip. In the last 15 years it became a disastrous slide. But now it is time to tackle the problems which have been neglected for years.

  Few people would have disagreed with the diagnosis. But what Mrs Thatcher did not say, apart from a few anodyne remarks about ending strikes, was what she proposed to do about it. Even as she invited her readers to ‘raise a glass to the eighties’ and ‘drink with me to the awakening of Britain’, that question hung in the air.15

  By the time Mrs Thatcher arrived in Downing Street, British Leyland had a new chairman. After leaving South Africa, Michael Edwardes had soared through the ranks of the battery-maker Chloride, winning the Guardian’s Young Businessman of the Year award. Living in a solar-heated house in Richmond, renowned for his competitiveness on the squash court, he seemed more like an American businessman than a British one. He made his colleagues take psychological tests and memorized their IQs; he wrote letters to The Times complaining that high taxes were driving the best people overseas; he told conferences that talk of industrial democracy was ‘nonsense’. Short and combative, a man of great charisma and self-belief, Edwardes was often painted as Mrs Thatcher’s hitman, the embodiment of the union-bashing climate of the 1980s. In fact, it was Harold Wilson who had appointed Edwardes to the National Enterprise Board and Jim Callaghan who had picked him to run British Leyland. When he got the call in the autumn of 1977, it had taken him just thirty seconds to say yes. He knew turning BL around would be an ‘enormous, some might say impossible’ task. But he was determined to try.16

  Edwardes’s arrival was like the coming of a tornado. Within six months he had purged all but two of the board, redeployed 200 managers and sacked ninety more. By the end of 1978 he had slashed 12,000 jobs and closed plants in Speke, Abingdon and Coventry. But he was more than just a hatchet man. He wanted more modern technology, more flexible workers and a calmer shopfloor culture. But he could have none of that if his men were always on strike. Contrary to myth, Edwardes was not automatically hostile to the trade unions, and was keen to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of BL’s workers. But, like many union leaders, he believed the 1970s had seen a catastrophic breakdown in the unions’ authority over their own members. It was the shop stewards who ruled at Longbridge and Cowley, not the national union leaders and certainly not BL’s managers. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it,’ he wrote, ‘we needed to take on the militants.’17

  On paper, Edwardes seemed a natural ally for the new government. Before the 1979 election he had joined Sir Geoffrey Howe, Sir Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson at an all-day seminar on ‘turning Britain around’. But he was not partisan, and preferred Callaghan (‘firm, friendly but personable’) to Mrs Thatcher (‘the exact opposite’). He first met her in January 1979, when she came for lunch at British Leyland’s headquarters. In typically abrasive style, she opened with the words: ‘Well, Michael Edwardes, and why should we pour further funds into British Leyland?’ At that, he recalled, ‘she glared stonily around the table at each of us in turn’, while his colleagues gaped for ‘a good ten seconds’. That set the tone for the next few years.

  In public, Mrs Thatcher was never less than effusive about Edwardes’s qualities. In private, she saw him as just another nationalized industry boss pestering her for money. ‘I was told by those who knew her better that she admired what she saw as my persistence and courage in tackling BL’s problems,’ he wrote, ‘but was not at all pleased when these qualities were applied to the task of extracting money from her Government.’ Indeed, when her new economic adviser, Professor Alan Walters, visited BL for lunch in 1981 he was even less encouraging. The best thing, Walters told his hosts, would be to close the entire firm down straight away. The cost, he said blithely, would ‘soon be offset … by the beneficial effect of the shock of closure on trades union and employee attitudes across the country’, which would have a ‘positive effect on the British economy within six months’. Edwardes later claimed that he admired Walters’s ‘audacity and intellectual integrity’ in telling them that he wanted to close them down. But it seems unlikely that he thought that at the time.18

  Edwardes’s priority was to win over the new Industry Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph. On the face of it, Joseph was the least likely person imaginable to look kindly on British Leyland. The son of a Jewish construction tycoon, he was an immensely serious, gaunt and sickly man, crippled by ‘an exaggerated feeling of underachievement and a vague sense of guilt’. After serving as Health and Social Services Secretary under Heath, he had undergone a spectacular conversion, becoming the chief advocate of radical surgery to slash the state and restore free-market values. Some people saw Joseph as a hero. According to the original treatment for the ITV series Minder (1979–94), the wheeler-dealer Arthur Daley (George Cole), who fancies himself as an entrepreneur, especially ‘admires Sir Keith Joseph’. But unlike the irrepressible Arthur, who dodges and cadges his way across London without an atom of shame, Joseph cut an extraordinarily tortured figure. As the Conservatives headed for victory in 1979, he was seen smacking his own head in desperation. ‘Oh God,’ he groaned, ‘what I’m worried about is all the mistakes we’re going to make. I know we are going to make mistakes. I lie awake worrying about them.’

  No sooner had Joseph arrived at the Department of Industry than Whitehall was buzzing about his eccentric behaviour. He began by giving his officials a reading list, which included nine books he had written himself. His admirers claimed this was a sign of his intellectual vision, but it was really a symptom of his childlike naivety. It is hard to think of any other minister who, on visiting an electrical factory in the early 1980s, would seriously ask his hosts if they thought television was ‘here to stay’. Similarly, it is very difficult to think of any other minister who, having been interviewed live
on television, refused to believe that he could not simply record the answers again.19

  When the young Tory adviser Chris Patten nicknamed Joseph the ‘Mad Monk’, it seemed to capture an essential truth about the unworldly Industry Secretary. He appeared gripped by nervous tension, his brow shining with sweat, a vein at his temple throbbing ominously. Even his diet seemed to reflect his underlying oddness. Because of his terrible digestion, he subsisted on ‘tea, chocolate, British Rail cake and hard-boiled eggs, preferably chopped’. The author of those words, Ferdinand Mount, recalled that Joseph was the only man he had ever met who could be seen genuinely slapping his brow in frustration or groaning with his head in his hands. At dinner he clutched a little black notebook in which ‘he would without warning make notes’. Sometimes he jotted down a book title, but ‘often something quite banal would appear to be completely new to him’. To Mount, the most unsettling thing was when Joseph just sat there, pen in hand, waiting for somebody to say something interesting.20

  Four years earlier, the Department of Industry had laboured under the direction of Tony Benn. Now it found itself with another eccentric master inspired by a radical vision of Britain’s political future. Like Benn, Joseph saw himself as a political evangelist, and, like Benn, he struggled with the stark realities of industrial life. It was all very well to condemn wasteful subsidies in opposition, but if Joseph turned off the tap, hundreds of thousands of people would find themselves on the dole overnight. So almost at once he found himself making choices – a stay of execution here, a subsidy there – that he would once have deplored. His critics loved to paint him as a lunatic slashing away at British industry. Yet, by the summer of 1980, he had not only persuaded Mrs Thatcher to support the British micro-electronics industry, but had handed out £66 million to the shipbuilder Harland and Wolff, £6 million to the tyre manufacturer Dunlop and even £14 million to the almost comically unsuccessful car maker John DeLorean. If Joseph really wanted to roll back the frontiers of the state, this was a strange way to start.21

  The real test, though, was British Leyland. In July 1979 Joseph visited BL’s Warwickshire research centre. There Edwardes told him that the surging pound had had ‘traumatic consequences for BL’, making ‘our exports more expensive, and our competitors’ imports a lot cheaper’. Without a huge cash injection, Edwardes said, ‘the whole of our mid-car sector programme over four years will have to go’. So the government faced a stark choice: either give BL enough money to keep going, or close it down now. And when, two months later, Edwardes sent Joseph his official corporate plan, the prognosis was even worse. Just to keep production going for another year, Edwardes wanted a staggering £300 million. But if the government preferred to close the doors, BL reckoned it would cost the Treasury £4,000 a head in redundancy money for 160,000 workers in the first year alone. And when BL calculated the impact of closure on the West Midlands in general, the cost ballooned to some £1 billion.22

  When Joseph showed these figures to Mrs Thatcher, she thought the implications ‘appalling’. Handing out so much money to a struggling nationalized industry offended all her instincts. Most of her advisers thought British Leyland was doomed anyway. On the other hand, she knew that shutting it down would not only be extraordinarily expensive, it would define her time in office. Even John Hoskyns, who thought BL had ‘virtually no chance of success’, told her that ‘public support for Edwardes and what he is trying to do would make it extremely difficult for Government to refuse to back him at this point’.

  The only sensible course was to give Edwardes the money on the explicit condition that ‘BL as a whole will not be bailed out again’. The launch of the Metro was still almost a year away; perhaps that would transform the car giant’s fortunes. At the same time, Hoskyns wrote, ‘since we know that BL is likely to fail in the long run, we must set the stage for that as well’. They must tell the public that it was ‘the result of years of appalling labour relations, in which union militants have all but destroyed the company’. And when British Leyland collapsed, they must ensure the unions’ fingerprints were on the dagger.23

  At that very moment, events on the edge of Birmingham seemed to be playing into the government’s hands. In September 1979 Edwardes had unveiled his ‘Recovery Plan’, envisaging the loss of 25,000 jobs and the closure or part-closure of thirteen more plants. Under normal circumstances, the chances of the unions accepting it would have been non-existent. But Edwardes had decided to appeal to the workers over the heads of their shop stewards, by holding a ballot organized by the Electoral Reform Society. When the results were released on 1 November, almost nine out of ten employees had voted in favour of his plan. The shop stewards grumbled about ‘blackmail’, but Edwardes was delighted. ‘If any manager, shop steward or employee does not like the heat of the kitchen,’ he declared, ‘now is the time to get out.’24

  Among Longbridge’s radical shop stewards, however, discontent continued to fester. Within a couple of weeks Edwardes became aware that a little green pamphlet was circulating inside the Austin Morris factory, calling for strikes and occupations to bring the management to heel. What was more, the pamphlet bore a striking similarity to the record of a meeting between some shop stewards and officials of the local Communist Party, which had come into Edwardes’s possession (‘anonymously, through the mail’, he claimed) at around the same time. He did not hesitate. By the third week in November, Austin Morris had decided to give formal warnings to three shop stewards and to dismiss a fourth, Derek Robinson, convener of Longbridge’s combined shop stewards’ committee.

  On 19 November the Longbridge works director called Robinson into his office and ordered him to withdraw his name from the pamphlet. When Robinson refused, he was sacked. The news travelled fast. Within hours thousands of men were streaming out of Longbridge. By late afternoon, production was at a standstill. ‘Nothing goes in or out,’ one picket said ominously. ‘The management won’t get away with this,’ added another. And in the hours after Robinson’s dismissal, it seemed they were right. By the evening of the 20th, more than 30,000 men were on strike. At Longbridge all Mini and Allegro production had stopped; so had all Jaguar, Daimler and Triumph work at nearby Coventry, as well as Marina production at Cowley. ‘OUT! OUT!’ shrieked the front page of the Mirror. ‘Red Derek’s Fury’, gasped the Express: ‘Trouble-torn British Leyland was last night tottering on the brink of complete shutdown as it felt the full fury of the shopfloor …’25

  All this, for just one man? But Derek Robinson was not your ordinary shop steward. In the autumn of 1979, the six-foot toolmaker was one of the best-known trade unionists in Britain, which meant he was more widely recognized than most government ministers. To millions watching the evening news, the sound of his Black Country accent was an unmistakeable sign that there was trouble at Longbridge again. To the press, he was ‘Red Robbo’, the Bolshevik bogeyman who could bring British Leyland to its knees with a click of his fingers. Four times Robinson had stood as the Communist candidate for Birmingham Northfield, never winning more than a thousand votes. But his self-confidence, physical presence and shopfloor credibility could not be ignored. His mantra was always the same: ‘Not a job is to be lost, no work is to be transferred. Under no circumstances will the unions allow plant closures, part shutdowns or any redundancies.’

  Michael Edwardes claimed that since Robinson had taken over as convener of the combined shop stewards’ committee, he had been responsible for 523 stoppages and the loss of 62,000 cars and 113,000 engines, at a total cost of some £200 million. And to conservative columnists, Red Robbo embodied everything wrong with British trade unionism. The headline on George Gale’s confession that he was planning to buy a foreign car, for example, read simply ‘Damn You, Mr Robinson’. It was Red Robbo, Gale explained, who had made up his mind for him. ‘Mr Robinson isn’t interested in me buying a Leyland car. All he is interested in is keeping jobs at Leylands at the public’s expense … Thank you, Mr Robinson. You have lifted a kind of patriotic b
urden off my back. I no longer feel obliged to buy British.’26

  Although the press painted Red Robbo as a Stone Age bully, there was clearly more to him than that. Having left school at 14, the son and grandson of Black Country chain-makers, he had joined Austin as an apprentice toolmaker in 1941. As a young man he came under the influence of Dick Etheridge, an AUEW shop steward and a member of the Communist Party. Having introduced Robinson to Marxism, Etheridge watched with fatherly pride as his protégé rose up the union hierarchy. And at last, in 1974, Robinson succeeded his mentor as head of the unofficial shop stewards’ combine, which covered workers across more than forty-two factories and insisted on handling all negotiations with the management.

  Robinson’s Communism was absolutely heartfelt: in an interview with Marxism Today in 1980, he talked enthusiastically about sharing Marxist ideas with his fellow car workers. But, as the same interview showed, he was an intelligent, often pragmatic man who was well aware of the challenges facing British Leyland. His solutions, though, were always the same: no job losses, no closures and, above all, more government money. That inevitably brought him into conflict with Michael Edwardes. The difficulty for Robinson, however, lay in judging his comrades’ appetite for battle. For as one of his colleagues explained, Robinson’s 800 shop stewards and 18,000 members followed him despite, not because of, his Communist politics. ‘He just wants to get the maximum money he can for his car workers,’ the shop steward said. ‘His analysis is right; it is just that he sometimes picks the wrong fights.’27

  Whether Robinson’s analysis was right is very dubious. He told Marxism Today that both Labour and the Conservatives had ‘conspired on every possible occasion’ to undermine British Leyland, and claimed that Edwardes was openly colluding with the Thatcher government to ‘run Leyland to an uncompetitive position’. This was not true. In fact, Labour had given BL hundreds of millions of pounds in public money, while the Conservatives were poised to follow suit. As for Edwardes, he was fighting like a tiger to get more money for the firm and restore its international competitiveness.