Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (5 page)

That the Labour government’s reputation with swing voters was seriously damaged by the sudden outbreak of trade union militancy was the inescapable conclusion from data collected by Gallup
and other market research companies. For Callaghan, the unions’ actions were a personal betrayal. He had built his career in the Labour Party as a union man. He had risked his Cabinet
position in 1969 in order to scupper legislation intended to restrict the unions’ ability to flex their muscles at will. A decade on, they had offered him no reward for his support, made no
attempt to meet his pleas for self-sacrifice. It seemingly counted for nought that his government had passed legislation to increase the unions’ powers to enforce closed shop rules, whereby
union shop stewards enjoying exclusive bargaining rights with a company could legally prevent the company from employing anyone who refused to join their union. The fractious winter of 1978/9
seemed a world away from the bucolic charm of Upper Clayhill Farm in August, when Audrey’s cooking had provided a convivial dinner for the union leaders and her husband had failed to take
their advice to get a move on with the election campaign.

The first sign of trouble came on the opening day of the Labour Party conference on 2 October 1978. In response to Callaghan’s announcement that the pay ‘norm’ for the coming
year would be 5 per cent, delegates (their numbers distorted in the ballot by the union block-voting system) passed a motion calling for the abolition of pay restraint by an emphatic 4 million to
1.9 million votes.

Callaghan intended to ignore the conference vote, but three days later his economics adviser, David Lipsey, tried to persuade him that it was clear the unions would not accept his 5 per cent pay
norm. ‘Abandoning 5 per cent,’ Lipsey wrote, ‘will be embarrassing. But could we win an election after a winter of discontent in which a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour
Party will be sympathizing with the malcontents?’ Callaghan seemed surprisingly unperturbed.
²⁹
Overriding his
Chancellor’s hesitations, he calculated that an incomes policy of just 5 per cent would be anti-inflationary. Augmented by additional emoluments and staggered payments from the previous year,
5 per cent would end up equating to an inflation rate of around 8 per cent. He was not, therefore, asking for a below-inflation wage rise.

With hindsight, Callaghan’s sanguinity seems complacent, an episode of wishful thinking from a prime minister who, without seeking the full range of alternative means of combating
inflation, lacked weapons beyond his personal powers of persuasion with union leaders and the threat that destabilizing a Labour government was not in their long-term interests. Callaghan’s
delusion was, however, built upon recent experience. While many of the images that came to seem representative of the period were of picket lines manned by union officials warming themselves next
to braziers, the actual period of industrial unrest was a short one. Until that winter, Labour had not presided helpless over a strike-bound country. Although there had been a particularly vicious
confrontation at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in the summer of 1977, and a firemen’s strike at the end of that year, most of the strikes since Labour’s return to office in
1974 had been relatively small-scale affairs and did not compare with the serious unrest visited upon the Tory administration of Edward Heath.

Callaghan’s ability to keep the industrial peace had been maintained through the good relations he enjoyed with Len Murray, the TUC general secretary and Jack Jones of the Transport and
General Workers’ Union, which was the country’s biggest union, with two million members. Jones had been one of the kingmakers of the decade. A 1977 Gallup poll suggested that a majority
of Britons believed him more powerful than the prime minister,
³⁰
which, if true, would certainly have added weight to Heath’s ‘Who
Governs?’ election slogan. Born into poverty and wounded fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War (after which, according to one well-informed testimony, he remained a paid Soviet agent
until the 1980s),
³¹
Jones had been Callaghan’s union ally in scuppering Barbara Castle’s
In Place of Strife
proposals in 1969 and
had done as much as anyone to make Heath’s union legislation unworkable. However, in 1978 he finally retired with a triumphant send-off from 2,500 guests assembled at the Royal Festival Hall
and was made a Companion of Honour by the Queen. Rather than impose a deal negotiated in Downing Street, his successor, Moss Evans, along with his union’s national organizer, Ron Todd,
believed in devolved union management, preferring to let the shop stewards on the ground make what they thought were appropriate claims. The ebbing of power from the union high command downwards to
the activists undermined corporatist planning, since on the
shop floor the primary interest was, understandably, in maximizing pay and conditions rather than conforming with
the government’s nationwide anti-inflationary strategy.

In October 1978, 57,000 TGWU members at Ford Motors went out on strike, demanding, with Evans’s endorsement, a 30 per cent pay increase. Concluding that the lengthy disruption to
productivity was more harmful than the cost of raising wages, Ford was keen to reach a deal and, after seven weeks, the strike was called off in return for a 17 per cent pay rise. It was a deal
that shattered the government’s 5 per cent norm. Unable and unwilling to declare war on the TGWU, Callaghan decided to punish the Ford management (among whose executives was numbered his son,
Michael) by withdrawing government subsidies to the firm. This infuriated those Labour MPs who thought it outrageous that financial sanctions should be introduced against generous pay deals in
blue-collar industries. With John Prescott among a group of left-wing MPs refusing to support the measure in the Commons, the vote was duly lost, and Callaghan scurried to regain his parliamentary
authority by calling an immediate vote of confidence.

The episode underlined a fundamental weakness in the government’s position. Not only was it unable to control those unions who were no longer willing to do its bidding, but there was a
conflict of interest – financial as well as ideological – involving a large section of the Parliamentary Labour Party that was sympathetic to union demands and was directly
union-sponsored. An administration with no working majority at Westminster was ill placed to take on the TGWU when so many of its MPs were sponsored by the TGWU. Without union funds, Labour could
not hope properly to finance the forthcoming election campaign. The divided loyalty was personified in Derek Gladwin, who was both Labour’s chief election campaign manager and the southern
regional secretary of the GMWU, a union actively engaged in the coming Winter of Discontent.

The great industrial conflict followed swiftly from the TGWU’s victory in the Ford dispute. Emboldened, the TGWU’s militancy swiftly spread beyond the car makers to the road haulage
drivers, with unofficial strikes in December developing into all-out nationwide action in the New Year in pursuit of a 20 per cent pay rise. In the midst of the season of goodwill, the spectre
presented itself of shops being unable to restock because of the inactivity of the lorry drivers. Nor was everything normal for those seeking entertainment at home. An electricians’ strike
took both BBC 1 and BBC 2 off the air just before Christmas. What caused the government particular alarm was the prospect of renewed power cuts once the 8,500 TGWU drivers of oil tankers heralded
in the New Year by going on strike in pursuit of 25 per cent. Callaghan was presented by the Cabinet Office’s central
contingencies unit with Operation Drumstick, a plan
to cancel the Christmas leave of 9,000 soldiers, who would be redeployed to drive oil tankers which the state would requisition using emergency powers. In the event, the strike was settled before a
final decision on Drumstick was taken. With some petrol supplies beginning to run low, the oil companies awarded their drivers a 13 per cent increase.
³²

On 4 January, Callaghan flew out to a world leaders’ summit in Guadeloupe, where he secured international backing for British arms sales to China and a replacement for Polaris as
Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. Before returning, he stopped off for a few days of talks, rest and relaxation in Barbados. The contrast with the strike-bound British midwinter was
too much for critical newspapers to ignore, and one paper’s photographer managed to accentuate the contrast by persuading some especially lithesome air hostesses to frolic in the pool next to
the prime minister when he went for a dip. The affectionate nickname ‘Sunny Jim’ took on a more irritating connotation. The annoyance was compounded when he decided to call a press
conference upon his arrival back at Heathrow airport on 10 January. As the microphones were thrust towards him, the prime minister made light of his sunbathing, issuing the complacent reproach:
‘If you look at it from outside – and perhaps you’re taking a rather parochial view at the moment – I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view
there is mounting chaos.’
The Sun
’s headline ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ captured the spirit, if not the actual words, of Callaghan’s efforts to lighten the
mood.

The railways followed the road hauliers in coming out on strike. With secondary picketing blockading key ports, the nation’s commercial arteries were ceasing to function. The transport
minister, Bill Rodgers, was especially anxious. His mother was dying of cancer and the chemotherapy drugs she needed were stuck at Hull docks. No union member would move them. But it was not just
medical supplies that were running low. Hospital care itself was crippled when the public sector union NUPE began a series of strikes. Nurses joined picket lines. Ambulance staff downed stretchers.
On 22 January, the TGWU, GMWU, NUPE and COHSE banded together for a ‘day of action’, bringing out 1.5 million workers in a remarkable flexing of their muscles. Strikes, which had
previously afflicted the private sector, like the car workers, or nationalized industries like the mines, now spread across public sector service provision. The casualties were no longer just a
managerial class sitting in their boardrooms and fretting over the consequences of a few more pounds a week to their workers. Instead, the victims were increasingly the helpless and defenceless,
the old, the infirm, the bereaved. Labour’s environment secretary, Peter Shore, later reflected on a time of ‘occupational tribal warfare’ in which ‘every separate group in
the country had no
feeling and no sense of being part of a community but was simply out to get for itself what it could’.
³³
Society appeared to be breaking down.

Schools began closing when their caretakers and dinner ladies walked out, depriving the pupils of heating, eating and safe keeping. Old people’s homes were affected. When refuse collectors
struck, unsightly piles of rat-infested rubbish started piling up in the streets, creating not only a noxious stink but a clear public health hazard. In late January, Liverpool’s gravediggers
went out on strike. Funeral cortèges were blocked, mourners sent back with their coffins by GMWU members picketing cemeteries. Corpses started to be piled in a disused factory. With some of
the remains over ten days old, the city council became increasingly anxious about how to dispose of them. They considered burying them at sea. One government minister’s response when asked by
the Lord Chancellor what could be done was simply: ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’
³⁴
Ultimately, it was easier to give the GMWU
gravediggers the pay rise they wanted, though not before a potent metaphor for Britain’s decay had taken hold in the popular imagination.

On 15 January, the Cabinet discussed calling a state of emergency. Troops would be brought out on to the streets. The soldiers’ main tasks would be to clear the piled-high rubbish before
disease started spreading across cities, to drive ambulances and lorries carrying essential medical supplies, and to grit the frozen roads. It was a desperate option to which there were many
objections: there were not enough troops to do the jobs required, their presence might exacerbate tensions, and it could be seen as an attempt to politicize the armed forces by deploying them as
strike-breakers. A compromise was advocated by the transport secretary, Bill Rodgers, who hoped to avoid a formal state of emergency while nonetheless selectively deploying soldiers to perform
potentially life-saving activities. Troops had, after all, provided emergency cover using their own ‘green goddess’ fire engines during the 1977 firemen’s strike. The problem now
was the sheer scale of the operation. How many troops could be withdrawn from Northern Ireland or West Germany to keep Britain going? How psychologically damaging to Britain’s international
status would be the sight of her legions coming home to prop up civil order? After protracted deliberation, a decision on using troops was deferred. Instead, Moss Evans was warned that if his
members did not start moving essential supplies, the army would be called in.

This, and the accompanying offer of up to 20 per cent pay rises, persuaded the lorry drivers to call off their strike at the end of January. Elsewhere, above-inflation increases helped bring the
other strikes to a close in February and March. In the meantime, Callaghan summoned the TUC General Council to Downing Street and announced a new understanding with Len Murray: the 5 per cent norm
was effectively dropped and the TUC, in return for being brought yet more closely into the government’s economic
counsels, would in future provide guidance to unions on
good strike conduct. Murray thought the accord, announced on St Valentine’s Day, would not work.

Whether its endurance would be counted in weeks or months, the accord manifested the collapse of the Labour government’s efforts to control inflation by a tight incomes policy. During
1979, inflation moved back up into double digits. The problems that afflicted Britain in the desperate months before the IMF bail-out had returned. The experience of the Winter of Discontent and
the return of accelerating price rises also raised an important question. If inflation could not be brought down by a wage-restraint pact with the unions, how else was it to be controlled? Might
monetarism be the answer? Controlling the money supply rather than doing deals with the unions was certainly an intellectually attractive idea to those in the Conservative Party getting ready to
plot an alternative course for Britain in a general election that could only now be months, perhaps weeks, away.