Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (24 page)

But by now we all had other things to worry about. In framing the Industrial Relations Act we had given too much emphasis to achieving the best possible legal framework and not enough to how the attacks on our proposals were to be repelled. The same mentality prevailed as regards the threat which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) posed to the Government and the country. We knew, of course, that the miners and the power workers held an almost unbeatable card in pay negotiations, because they could turn off the electricity supply to industry and people. Industrial action by the power workers in December 1970 had been settled after the setting up of a Court of Inquiry under Lord Wilberforce which recommended a large increase in February the following year. Within the NUM, however, there was a large militant faction at
least as interested in bringing down the Conservative Government as in flexing industrial muscle to increase miners’ earnings. The NUM held a strike ballot in October 1970 and narrowly turned down an offer from the National Coal Board (NCB). Fearing unofficial action, Cabinet authorized the NCB to offer a productivity bonus to be paid in mid-1971. The NUM again turned the offer down, following which Derek Ezra, the NCB Chairman, without consulting ministers, offered to pay the bonus at once and without strings attached to productivity. Cabinet accepted this
fait accompli.
Perhaps John Davies and other ministers continued to monitor events. If they did I heard nothing about it.

Only in early December 1971 did the issue of miners’ pay surface at Cabinet, and then in what seemed a fairly casual way. The NUM’s annual conference that year had significantly revised the rules which provided for an official strike, so that now only a 55 per cent, as opposed to a two-thirds, majority was required. The NUM ballot, which was still going on, had, it was thought, resulted in a 59 per cent majority vote for strike action. Yet nobody seemed too worried. We were all reassured that coal stocks were high.

Such complacency proved unwarranted. At the last Cabinet before Christmas Robert Carr confirmed to us that the NUM was indeed calling a national strike to begin on 9 January 1972. There was more trouble over pay in the gas and electricity industries. And we only needed to glance outside to know that winter was closing in, with all that meant for power consumption. But there was no real discussion and we all left for the Christmas break.

There was still some suggestion over Christmas that the strike might not be solid, but two days after it began it was all too clear that the action was total. There was then discussion in Cabinet about whether we should use the ‘cooling off’ provisions of the Industrial Relations Act. But it was said to be difficult to satisfy the legal tests involved – ‘cooling off’ orders would only be granted by the courts if there was a serious prospect that they would facilitate a settlement, which in this case was doubtful. The possibility of using the ballot provisions of the Act remained. But there was no particular reason to think that a ballot forced on the NUM would lead to anything other than a continuation of the strike. It was an acutely uncomfortable demonstration of the fragility of the principal weapons with which the Act had equipped us. Moreover, important parts of the Act had yet to come into force, and we were also aware that there was a good deal of public sympathy with the miners.

The pressure on the Government to intervene directly now increased. Looking back, and comparing 1972 with the threatened miners’ strike of 1981 and the year-long strike of 1984–85, it is extraordinary how little attention we gave to ‘endurance’ – the period of time we could keep the power stations and the economy running with limited or no coal supplies – and how easily Cabinet was fobbed off by assurances that coal stocks were high, without considering whether those stocks were in the right locations to be usable, i.e. actually at the power stations. The possibility of effective mass picketing, which would prevent coal getting to power stations, was simply not on the agenda. Instead, our response was to discuss the prospects for conciliation by Robert Carr and the use of ‘emergency powers’ which would allow us to conserve power station stocks a few weeks longer by imposing power cuts. There was a great deal of useless talk about ‘keeping public opinion on our side’. But what could public opinion do to end the strike? This was one more thing I learned from the Heath years – and anyway, on the whole public opinion
wasn’t
on our side. A further lesson from this period – when no fewer than five States of Emergency were called – was that for all the sense of urgency and decision that the phrase ‘emergency powers’ conveys they could not be relied upon to change the basic realities of an industrial dispute.

The crunch came on the morning of Thursday 10 February when we were all in Cabinet. A State of Emergency had been declared the previous day. It was John Davies who dropped the bombshell. He told us that picketing had now immobilized a large part of the remaining coal stocks, and that the supplies still available might not even suffice beyond the end of the following week. Electricity output would fall to as little as 25 per cent of normal supply, drastic power cuts were inevitable, and large parts of industry would be laid off. The Attorney-General reported that the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act against secondary boycotts, blacking of supplies and the inducement of other workers to take action resulting in the frustration of a commercial contract, would not come into force until 28 February. He thought that most of the picketing which had taken place was lawful. As regards the criminal law, some arrests had been made but, as he put it, ‘the activities of pickets confronted the police with very difficult and sensitive decisions’.

This was something of an understatement. The left-wing leader of the Yorkshire miners, Arthur Scargill, who was to organize the politically motivated miners’ strike I faced in 1984–85, was already busy winning his militant’s spurs. In the course of Cabinet a message came through to the
Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling. The Chief Constable of Birmingham had asked that the West Midlands Gas Board’s Saltley Coke Depot be closed because lorries were being prevented from entering by 7,000 ‘pickets’ who were facing just 500 police.

There was no disguising that this was a victory for violence.

Ted now sounded the retreat. He appointed a Court of Inquiry under the ubiquitous Lord Wilberforce. By now the power crisis had reached such proportions that we sat in Cabinet debating whether we had time to wait for the NUM to ballot its members on ending a strike; a ballot might take over a week to organize. There was therefore no inclination to quibble when Wilberforce recommended a massive pay increase, way beyond the level allowed for in the ‘n-1’ voluntary pay policy already in force.

But we were stunned when the militant majority on the NUM Executive rejected the court’s recommendation, demanding still more money and a ragbag of other concessions.

Ted summoned us all on the evening of Friday 18 February to decide what to do. The dispute simply had to be ended quickly. If we had to go an additional mile, so be it. Later that night Ted called the NUM and the NCB to No. 10 and persuaded the union to drop the demand for more money, while conceding the rest. The NUM Executive accepted, and just over a week later so did the miners in a ballot. The dispute was over. But the devastation it had inflicted on the Government and indeed on British politics as a whole lived on.

The combination of the rise in unemployment, the events at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and the Government’s humiliation by the miners resulted in a fundamental reassessment of policy. I suspect that this took place in Ted’s own mind first, with other ministers and the Cabinet very much second. It was not so much that he jettisoned the whole Selsdon approach, but rather that he abandoned some aspects of it, emphasized others and added a heavy dose of statism which probably appealed to his temperament and his continental European sympathies.

None of this pleased me. But our inability to resist trade union power was now manifest. The Industrial Relations Act itself already seemed hollow: it was soon to be discredited entirely. Like most Conservatives, I was prepared to give at least a chance to a policy which retained some of the objectives we had set out in 1969/70. I was even prepared to go along with a statutory prices and incomes policy, for a time, to try to limit the damage inflicted by the arrogant misuse of trade union power. But I was
wrong. State intervention in the economy is not ultimately an answer to over-mighty vested interests: for it soon comes to collude with them.

It is unusual to hold Cabinets on a Monday, and I had a long-standing scientific engagement for Monday 20 March 1972, so I was not present at the Cabinet which discussed the budget and the new Industry White Paper. Both of them signalled a change in strategy, each complementing the other. The budget was highly reflationary, comprising large cuts in income tax and purchase tax, increased pensions and social security benefits, and extra investment incentives for industry. It was strongly rumoured that Tony Barber and the Treasury were very unhappy with the budget and that it had been imposed on them by Ted. The fact that the budget speech presented these measures as designed to help Britain meet the challenge opened up by membership of the EEC in a small way confirms this. It was openly designed to provide a large boost to demand, which it was argued would not involve a rise in inflation, in conditions of high unemployment and idle resources. Monetary policy was mentioned, but only to stress its ‘flexibility’; no numerical targets for monetary growth were set.

On Wednesday 22 March John Davies published his White Paper on
Industry and Regional Development
, which was the basis for the 1972 Industry Act. This was seen by our supporters and opponents alike as an obvious U-turn. Keith and I and probably others in the Cabinet were extremely unhappy, and some of this found its way into the press. Should I have resigned? Perhaps so. But those of us who disliked what was happening had not yet worked out an alternative approach. Nor, realistically speaking, would my resignation have made a great deal of difference. I was not senior enough for it to be other than the littlest ‘local difficulty’. All the more reason for me to pay tribute to people like Jock Bruce-Gardyne, John Biffen, Nick Ridley and, of course, Enoch Powell who did expose the folly of what was happening in Commons speeches and newspaper articles.

There is also a direct connection between the policies pursued from March 1972 and the very different approach of my own administration later. A brilliant, but little-known, monetary economist called Alan Walters resigned from the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) and delivered not only scathing criticism of the Government’s approach but also accurate predictions of where it would lead.
*

One more blow to the approach we adopted in 1970 had still to fall. This was the effective destruction of the Industrial Relations Act. It had never been envisaged that the Act would result in individual trade unionists going to jail. Of course, no legal provisions can be proof against some remote possibility of that happening if troublemakers are intent on martyrdom. It was a long-running dispute between employers and dockers about ‘containerization’ which provided the occasion for this to happen. In March 1972 the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) fined the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) £5,000 for defying an order to grant access to Liverpool Docks. The following month the union was fined £50,000 for contempt on the matter of secondary action at the docks. The TGWU maintained that it was not responsible for the action of its shop stewards, but the NIRC ruled against this in May. Then, out of the blue, the Court of Appeal reversed these judgments and ruled that the TGWU was
not
responsible, and so the shop stewards themselves were personally liable. This was extremely disturbing, for it opened up the possibility of trade unionists going to jail. The following month three dockers involved in blacking were threatened with arrest for refusing to appear before the NIRC; 35,000 trade unionists were now on strike. At the last moment the Official Solicitor applied to the Court of Appeal to prevent the dockers’ arrest. But then in July another five dockers were jailed for contempt.

The Left were merciless. Ted was shouted down in the House. Sympathetic strikes spread, involving the closure of national newspapers for five days. The TUC called a one-day general strike. On 26 July, however, the House of Lords reversed the Court of Appeal decision and confirmed that unions were accountable for the conduct of their members. The NIRC then released the five dockers.

This was more or less the end of the Industrial Relations Act, though it was not the end of trouble in the docks. A national dock strike ensued and another State of Emergency was declared. This only ended – very much on the dockers’ terms – in August. In September the TUC General Congress rubbed salt into the wound by expelling thirty-two small unions which had refused, against TUC instructions, to de-register under the Act. Having shared to the full the Party’s enthusiasm for the Act, I was appalled.

In the summer of 1972 the third aspect – after reflation and industrial intervention – of the new economic approach was revealed to us. This was the pursuit of an agreement on prices and incomes through ‘tripartite’
talks with the CBI and the TUC. Although there had been no explicit pay policy, we had been living in a world of ‘norms’ since the autumn of 1970 when the ‘n-1’ was formulated in the hope that there would be deceleration from the ‘going rate’ figure in successive pay rounds. The miners’ settlement had breached that policy spectacularly, but Ted drew the conclusion that we should go further rather than go back. From the summer of 1972 a far more elaborate prices and incomes policy was the aim, and more and more the centre of decision-making moved away from Cabinet and Parliament. I can only, therefore, give a partial account of the way in which matters developed. Cabinet simply received reports from Ted on what policies had effectively been decided elsewhere, though individual ministers became increasingly bogged down in the details of shifting and complicated pay negotiations. This almost obsessive interest in the minutiae of pay awards was matched by a large degree of impotence over the deals finally struck. In fact, the most important result was to distract ministers from the big economic issues and blind us with irrelevant data when we should have been looking ahead to the threats which loomed.