What is true, though, is that Edwardes was determined to break the power of the shop stewards, which meant bringing down Derek Robinson. Despite the furore over the inflammatory pamphlet, the sacking had been long prepared. In the run-up to the launch of the Metro, Edwardes was planning to make radical changes to BL’s working practices, smashing the old demarcation lines and introducing more flexible arrangements to improve productivity. But that would be impossible with Robinson leading the opposition. ‘We simply had to change all that in 1980,’ Edwardes wrote, ‘and the Communist challenge to the Recovery Plan could not therefore go unanswered.’ He knew sacking Robinson would provoke a firestorm. But if he prevailed, he would prove that the days of ‘weak management bowing to shop floor militancy’ were over.28
There was another dimension to Robinson’s dismissal. In his autobiography, Edwardes claimed that he had received the minutes of the meeting between the local Communist activists and BL shop stewards in the post. This was untrue. In a twist worthy of conspiracy thrillers such as Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup (1982), he had been given them by MI5. The minutes had been obtained by one of their agents, a senior official in the AUEW who knew Derek Robinson well and had the code-number 910. (As it happens, the agent’s MI5 handler later told the journalist Peter Taylor that 910 had been very easy to run. All he wanted in return for his efforts was a couple of pints and some fish and chips on the way home.) MI5 gave the minutes to a new Cabinet Office unit, set up at Mrs Thatcher’s behest to ‘forestall industrial subversion’ and run by John Deverell, a young MI5 high-flier. Deverell showed them to Mrs Thatcher, and she agreed that he could pass them to Edwardes, in a brown envelope with a Birmingham postmark. In turn, Edwardes showed them to the AUEW’s general secretary, Terry Duffy, a moderate who was keen to bring his shop stewards to heel. And this explains what happened next.29
Despite all these machinations, Edwardes was taking a tremendous gamble. If Robinson’s men walked out en masse, then Mrs Thatcher would almost certainly turn down his request for money. In that case, British Leyland would be finished. Indeed, on Wednesday 21 November, two days after Robinson had been dismissed, more than 30,000 men were still out at fifteen different plants. Robinson himself was in typically belligerent form, calling for a ‘National Day of Action’ and warning that his dismissal was merely the first shot in a ‘determined attack on the whole trade union movement’. Yet by Thursday there were the first signs that his campaign was losing momentum. At more moderate plants, such as Solihull, thousands of men were working normally, while neither of BL’s two major unions, the TGWU and the AUEW, had made the strike official. The Mirror tracked down Robinson’s brother Ben, who worked night shifts at Longbridge and had ignored calls to join the strike. ‘Derek obviously thinks what he is doing is right,’ Ben Robinson said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with him. Like a lot of other people at Longbridge I get fed up with strikes and disputes.’30
A few days later, Edwardes turned the screw. On Monday 26th he announced that if the unions made the strike official, BL’s senior management would resign, which would almost certainly mean the firm’s complete collapse. And as the union leaders hesitated, Robinson’s support continued to evaporate. His much-trailed ‘Day of Action’ was a total non-event, while at Longbridge hundreds of men were drifting back to work. But everything depended on the AUEW leadership, who were due to meet Edwardes for make-or-break talks on Tuesday. ‘High Noon at Leyland’, began an apocalyptic editorial in that day’s Daily Express, urging the union bosses not to ‘let a company go down the drain because of a fanatic’. The Times even thought this was a showdown ‘without parallel in our industrial history’. If the unions insisted on Robinson’s reinstatement, there was no way the government could bail out British Leyland. Did the unions really want to ‘risk the virtual extinction of BL? … Will they opt to save one job – or 100,000?’31
The answer came within hours. When the AUEW met Edwardes on Tuesday morning, they found him in uncompromising form. If their members refused to go back to work, he would terminate their contracts and find replacements. If that did not work, he would ‘close the doors once and for all’. This was strong stuff, but since Edwardes had already shared MI5’s brown envelope with Terry Duffy, he knew the odds were in his favour. And by mid-afternoon the AUEW had agreed to a compromise. Robinson was still sacked, pending a union inquiry, while Edwardes agreed to pay his wages until the union published its report. As Duffy told the press, the decisive factor had been Edwardes’s warning that, if he lost, ‘that would be the end for British Leyland’. There was no point, Duffy said, in fighting ‘stark reality’. So for the time being, at least, Edwardes had won. ‘SANITY!’ rejoiced the Express. ‘Everybody Back! (Except Red Derek.)’32
In Downing Street, Edwardes’s gamble provoked very mixed feelings. On the one hand, Mrs Thatcher loved the thought of somebody standing up to the unions. On the other, it was now very hard for her to deny him the money he wanted. The irony was that Joseph’s officials had already concluded that there was ‘no hope for BL in its present form’, and that ‘continued run-down and break-up [were] inevitable’. But as Joseph gloomily told Mrs Thatcher, public opinion would not let them pull the plug ‘without giving Sir Michael Edwardes a chance’. Edwardes, John Hosykns reluctantly agreed, had become a symbol of ‘the possible renaissance of British management – straight, tough, determined, competent, etc … To reward [his] efforts and his work force backing with closure would seem to be a deliberate blow against everything the Government is trying to encourage.’33
On 20 December the Cabinet agreed to give Edwardes his £300 million. In private, Mrs Thatcher seethed with frustration. But Edwardes did not waste much time in celebrating. After all, Derek Robinson had not gone away. The AUEW still had to produce its report, while Robinson seemed certain he would be vindicated. Even as Mrs Thatcher’s ministers were approving the bailout, he was addressing the National Union of Students. ‘Of course I’m going to get my job back,’ he told them. ‘I hope the students will give us physical assistance on the picket lines … We intend Longbridge to come to a stop. Nothing will move in or out of any Leyland plant. We will seal the ports so that no Leyland product will leave the country.’ A sceptic might have told him that anybody hoping to seal the ports with the ‘physical assistance’ of Britain’s student population was on a hiding to nothing.
Even so, when the AUEW produced its report on 6 February 1980, Robinson had a glimmer of hope. Although it had stern words for his ‘dominant and forceful’ behaviour, the union thought he should get his job back. This was not, of course, what Edwardes wanted to hear, although he could hardly have been very surprised. So would British Leyland take Robinson back? The next day’s headlines – ‘No Surrender, Say Bosses: It’s Him or Us!’ – gave the answer. So BL’s future was back in the balance. Now everything depended on Longbridge’s 8,000 AUEW members, the men beside whom Robinson had worked for the previous four decades. If they voted to walk out, Austin Morris executives warned that it would mean the end of production at Longbridge and the immediate loss of some 20,000 jobs. It would also mean the end for Edwardes, although the stakes were now far bigger than the career of one chairman – or even one convener.34
But if anybody believed the British working classes were itching to throw off the yoke of Thatcherite capitalism, the mood at Longbridge would have come as a shock. When local television reporters conducted a straw poll of 250 men at the gates, they found that two-thirds were against a strike, while other journalists found plenty of men determined to carry on working. ‘The men don’t want him back,’ remarked one maintenance worker. ‘They have no trust in him now. Anyway, they are more worried about the pay deal than about his job.’ ‘People have made up their minds and 85 per cent are against Robbo,’ an assembly worker told the Mirror. ‘We don’t want to lose any more money. I have got no intention of striking, even if there is an official stoppage.’ ‘There shouldn’t be a strike and I won’t come
out if I can help it,’ agreed a TGWU member. ‘Nobody wants Robbo back.’ Even in Robinson’s old stamping ground, the toolroom, many men shook their heads. ‘We’ve already made bloody fools of ourselves over him once,’ one said. ‘We’re not daft enough to do it again.’35
Even so, the atmosphere as the men prepared to vote could scarcely have been more febrile. Outside Robinson’s semi-detached house in suburban Rubery, a television crew camped on the pavement, while journalists rang every half-hour. The Birmingham newspapers kept up a drumbeat of invective: the Evening Mail told its readers, ‘The choice is your job or Red Robbo’, while one local columnist thought they should send him to Moscow, where he could spend the rest of his days exchanging ‘Commie cant with his Marxist mates’. Yet although many men told the press that they did not want to strike, most said they would find it hard to cross a picket line. ‘If we go in,’ one said, ‘we shall lose our union cards.’
As the decisive day, 20 February, dawned, not even Michael Edwardes felt entirely sure that that the vote would go his way. As it happened, he had a long-standing engagement to address the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, just after the men had voted. As Edwardes was getting ready at his hotel, the men were gathering at Cofton Park, near Longbridge. In his hotel room, Edwardes laid out two speeches, one praising the men for their realism and good sense, the other announcing the death of Austin Morris as a national car maker. Then, moments before he went down to his chauffeur-driven car, a call came through. It was Longbridge. When Edwardes put down the phone, he tore one of the speeches into tiny pieces.36
Edwardes had won, and the margin was greater than he had dared to imagine. Despite the bitterly cold and misty weather, at least 12,000 men had turned up to vote, and from the start it was obvious Robinson was in trouble. Instead of being dispersed throughout the crowd, where they might have been shouted down, his critics were packed tightly together. Some carried placards – ‘Out with Robbo’, ‘Knickers to Robbo’, ‘On Your Bike, Robbo’ – while others had erected a gallows, from which an effigy of their old convener dangled in the breeze. And as soon as the first union representatives climbed up on the makeshift platform, urging their men to show solidarity and stand up to the bosses, the booing started. ‘When Jesus Christ was condemned,’ a speaker from the TGWU shouted, ‘they threw him to the crowd and then they crucified him. Michael Edwardes has carried out a campaign to crucify Derek Robinson. He wants you to nail him to the cross!’
But it was no good; the jeering redoubled. At last, Robinson himself, a big, balding man in a tweed suit, took the microphone. At that point missiles began to rain down – mud, rotten fruit, even metal washers. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ yelled the crowd. The union men called for a vote on a strike, and the hands went up: a few hundred, some said, though others thought there might have been a thousand. Either way, it was a stunning humiliation. As a great roar went up from the crowd, Derek Robinson just sat there, a man alone, shaking his head in shock. For years he had revelled in his role in front of the cameras. Now, for perhaps the first time in his life, he had nothing to say. ‘I never expected the vote to go this way,’ he said quietly, his voice trembling. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’37
To Robinson’s foes, the result was a glorious victory, a sign that the British people had turned their backs on the militancy of the Winter of Discontent. In the Commons, Mrs Thatcher hailed a ‘triumph for common sense’. In The Times, an editorial declared that Robinson had become ‘an awful example of what happens to powerful shop stewards who abuse the interests and lose the mood of the people they represent’. ‘Out You Go!’ jeered the front page of the Express, which declared that ‘the workers of Longbridge have struck a blow for common sense and genuine industrial democracy’. Only the Mirror had a crumb of sympathy for the beaten man, pointing out that Robinson had not been responsible for the out-dated models that had done so much damage to British Leyland’s reputation, nor for the ‘managerial incompetence’ that had pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. He had become a scapegoat, the paper thought, a symbol of all the sins of the ‘bloody-minded BL worker. And as a symbol he has been sacrificed. By the ex-bloody-minded BL workers.’38
A few days later, when the Observer caught up with Robinson at home in Rubery, he still seemed stunned by what had happened. What was he going to do next? He had no idea. ‘I suppose I shall have to sign on in the next few days,’ he said mournfully. He did not blame his old workmates; they had been tricked by the management and the media. But the scars took longer to heal than Robinson expected. A year later, he was still suffering from nightmares, had been diagnosed with depression and feared he was becoming addicted to tranquillizers. Yet not for a moment did he reconsider his politics, or the strategy he had pursued for so long. That autumn he tried to make a comeback, standing as a divisional organizer in the local AUEW. But he lost to Terry Duffy’s brother Denis, who won more than twice as many votes. Robinson claimed he had been the victim of fraud, but nobody listened.39
By now with more than 2 million people out of work, the days when thousands cheered Robinson at the Longbridge gates were a very distant memory. In 1983 he even lost his place on the executive committee of the Communist Party, after a bitter struggle between his ‘pro-Moscow’ wing and a younger group of self-styled modernizers. What made it even worse was that, in reporting the story, The Times told its readers that he had once been known as ‘Red Ronnie’. The fact that they had not even got his nickname right was the greatest indignity of all.40
Robinson was gone, then, and Edwardes had his money. The underlying picture, however, could scarcely have been bleaker. To many observers, the spectacle of British Leyland dicing with closure was a sign of the terminal sickness afflicting British manufacturing. And with the economy heading into recession, any prospect of recovery seemed vanishingly remote.
‘British Leyland now promises to become the most serious industrial crisis facing this country since the war,’ began an apocalyptic Times editorial on 14 February 1980. ‘It will also be a test of fire for the industrial policies of the Government in general and of Sir Keith Joseph in particular.’ Far from being addressed, all BL’s weaknesses – ‘thin management, poor labour relations, inadequate product range and the rest’ – had been magnified by the economic downturn. Even Edwardes’s much-vaunted ‘Recovery Plan’ was in tatters, superseded by the surge in the pound and the collapse of BL’s market share. Against that background, remarked The Times, the ‘problem with Mr Robinson’ was only part of the story. The ‘more fundamental issue’ was ‘whether British Leyland as the group we know today has any future at all’.41
Edwardes believed it did. By getting rid of Robinson, he had bought himself the freedom to push through his blueprint for radical reform. ‘It calls for the most sweeping changes ever attempted in zealously guarded working practices,’ wrote one reporter. ‘It seeks to introduce full mobility of labour, the end of inter-union demarcation boundaries, free access for time and motion men and the creation of a new breed of worker retrained as an all-rounder.’ As an inducement, Edwardes promised a 5 per cent increase in the basic wage, as well as an incentive scheme offering an additional £15 a week. And when, in April 1980, he put his blueprint into effect, there was barely a peep of protest. As Robinson’s fate had demonstrated, the workforce’s enthusiasm for conflict had evaporated, partly because so many people were frightened of losing their jobs, but also because, deep down, many agreed with Edwardes’s diagnosis. And with the successful launch of the Metro, Longbridge’s place in the public imagination was transformed. Once the embodiment of resistance to change, it now became a symbol of ‘management’s right to manage’.42
In public, Mrs Thatcher still claimed to be Edwardes’s most fervent supporter. She even had warm words for the Metro, telling the BBC that it was a ‘really super car. Super in design, super in petrol consumption.’ But when the microphones were off, her views were very different. As she later recalled, she was ‘increasingly unhappy’ about BL
’s losses and infuriated by Edwardes’s habit of blaming the exchange rate. Above all, she dreaded the thought of once again having to choose between letting the firm collapse, at the cost of at least 150,000 jobs, and pouring more money down the Longbridge plughole. As she told Joseph in April 1980, ‘we couldn’t risk hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money out of loyalty to Edwardes’. John Hoskyns even recorded that she had a ‘paranoid obsession about Edwardes’, whom she accused of having ‘contractually undertaken to deliver BL success and then defaulted’.43
On 21 May 1980 Edwardes visited Downing Street for dinner. The food struck him as ‘frugal’, the atmosphere ‘frosty’ and Mrs Thatcher’s conversational style ‘somewhat reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition’. Once again her opening words set the tone: ‘Now, what’s all this about? You’re not going to ask us for more money?’ In fact, this was precisely what Edwardes was going to do. With the surging pound destroying his firm’s already feeble foreign sales, the government would need to pump ‘more vast sums into BL to keep it going’. What was worse, he could not guarantee that the firm would ever make a profit. Mrs Thatcher asked why he could not just sell the entire business off, to which Edwardes replied that ‘no company in the world’ wanted to buy it. At best they might be able to sell bits of it, such as Land Rover, but that would leave the rest severely weakened. All of this went down very badly, and Mrs Thatcher’s mood was not improved when an aide came in to whisper the latest currency figures, which showed the pound still moving upwards. That, of course, was more bad news for British Leyland.44
Who Dares Wins Page 47