Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (145 page)

The Scargill strike of 1984–5 merits examination in some detail because it was, in effect, an attempt to destroy a democratically-elected government, and its failure was an epochal event in British industrial history. It was beaten by a combination of the courts, enacting the new reforms governing union activities, and by effective coordination between the various locally-commanded police forces of Britain. By mid-April 1984 Scargill’s men had shut down 131 out of 174 pits and they planned to ‘picket out’ the rest, using the fear-inspiring methods they had employed so successfully in the 1970s. This time, however, the police were prepared to stop them, with the backing of the law. On 22 October the police won a High Court ruling that they had the right to stop buses carrying militant miners to areas of disturbance with the object of committing a breach of the peace. By road control, and by mass policing at functioning
pit-heads, the police managed to make it possible for miners wishing to work to do so, though some were victimized at home. Thus Scargill’s primary objective of shutting all pits failed. The strike was extremely costly: it added £2,750 million to government expenditure, £1,850 million to the
NCB’S
losses, cost British Steel £300 million, British Rail £250 million and the electricity supply industry £2,200 million.
¹⁰¹
It was also extremely violent, and cost five lives; on 16 May 1985 two South Wales miners were found guilty of murdering a taxi-driver taking non-striking miners to work, though the conviction was reduced to manslaughter on appeal. Between March and end-November 1984, for example, 7,100 striking miners were charged with various offences, and a total of 3,483 cases were eventually heard, with 2,740 convictions; the cost of policing alone rose to £300 million.

But with the government determined on no surrender, the futility of the strike became gradually apparent. Ignoring the lessons of the 1920s, Scargill had struck at the wrong time of year, the spring. The
NCB
and its consumers had long seen the crisis coming, and had built up huge stocks. As a result, there was no need for power-cuts throughout the winter of 1984–5, and on 8 January 1985 the highest peak demand for electricity ever recorded in Britain was met without difficulty. Scargill’s strike funds were augmented by huge subsidies provided by Gadafy’s Libyan government, a fact denied by the
NUM
at the time but subsequently established, beyond doubt, by the
Daily Mirror
in 1990. Despite this, miners began to drift back, and by the end of February 1985, over half the 170,000 employees on the
NCB’S
books were back at work. On 5 March a national miners’ delegate conference assented to what was, in effect, unconditional surrender. Court fines had already cost the
NUM
£1.4 million, and its funds were sequestrated. Some 700 strikers were sacked for ‘gross industrial misconduct’, and 30,000 were made redundant, 10,000 more than the pre-strike planned figure. Indeed, with the creation of the breakaway
UDM
, the
NUM
itself, once the largest union in Europe, soon shrank to a mere 80,000 members, and, from being one of the richest in Britain, became among the poorest.

It was perhaps the most unsuccessful major strike in British history, though by one of the fundamental axioms of British trade unionism – security of tenure for officials – Scargill remained in charge, even if echoes of the dispute rumbled on. In 1990 he was accused of using Libyan-supplied funds to facilitate the purchase of a new home, grand by miners’ standards, and it was said, ‘Scargill started out with a big union and a small house, and ended with a big house and a small union.’ Mrs Thatcher rightly regarded the
defeat of the
NUM
as the most important reversal for militant trade unionism since the General Strike of 1926, rejoicing (6 April 1985), that she had ‘seen off’ what she called ‘the enemy within’. Two days later she added: ‘Despite cruel intimidation, the working miners insisted on their right to continue to work, and they found they had an employer and a government prepared to stand up for them. I hope and believe the lesson will not be lost on others.’
¹⁰²

Nor was it. Perhaps the most strongly entrenched group of workers in British industry were the printers, consisting chiefly of the National Graphical Association (compositors) and the Society of Graphic and Allied Trades ‘82, or
SOGAT
‘82, comprising other manual workers in the industry. In the London area in particular they operated a rigid closed (or union) shop system, underwritten by tight conditions of entry and financed by some of the highest wages in the country. Overmanning and restrictive practices, known in the trade as ‘old Spanish customs’, were uniquely costly, even by the standards of British industry. Moreover, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, work stoppages, involving the non-appearance of national newspapers, were becoming more frequent, and there was a still more disturbing tendency for compositors to censor copy, news stories as well as comment, with which they did not agree. In 1983 the
Financial Times
was shut down by a strike from 1 June to 8 August, and all national newspapers from 25–27 November (two of them did not appear till 30 November).

Next month, however, the print unions suffered their first big defeat under the new union legislation when the
NGA
was fined (9 December 1983) the massive sum of £525,000 for contempt in refusing to obey a court order (plus £150,000 for earlier contempts). They had been trying to stop the appearance of a new daily,
Today
, founded by the Asian-born Eddy Shah, and manned and operated outside the traditional conventions of the industry.
Today
thus continued to appear and the point was not lost on Rupert Murdoch, biggest and most enterprising of the British newspaper proprietors and publisher of the
Times
, the
Sunday Times
, the
News of the World
and the
Sun
, with a combined circulation of about 11 million copies. Having secretly constructed (1984–6) a high-technology printing plant at Wapping in East London, which embodied all the latest developments in electronic setting and makeup, he responded to a shutdown by the
NGA
and
SOGAT
in the traditional Fleet Street area, where his papers were printed, by sacking the entire workforce on 24 January 1986 and transferring his papers to Wapping. There, he had already made arrangements with the independent-minded Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunication and Plumbing Union for its members to operate the new machinery.
Once again, the unions tried to use force, and Wapping was repeatedly the scene of pitched battles. But Murdoch had had the plant constructed with a siege in mind and not for nothing did it become known as Fortress Wapping. Again, a combination of court injunctions, using the new legislation, and efficient policing ensured that force was defeated. The Wapping victory and the ensuing collapse of the power of the print unions ended unofficial censorship of the press in Britain, revitalized an ailing industry, made national newspapers profitable again, and so enabled new ones, such as the
Independent
(1986), to be successfully created. But, together with the defeat of the miners’ strike, it also effectively ended the union threat to the British constitutional and political system. It was the prelude to a new era of peace in British industry, so that in the years 1987–90 the number of working days lost through strikes fell to their lowest level for more than half a century, and the ‘English disease’ appeared cured.

The decline of union restrictive practices and of overmanning in many sectors produced a rise in productivity in Britain which, in several years during the decade, was the highest in Europe; and for much of the 1980s the British economy expanded rapidly: in mid-1988, for instance, it was still growing at 4 per cent after seven years of continuous expansion, a record unique in the post-war period.
¹⁰³
But what particularly struck foreigners about the performance of the Thatcher government was its success in reducing the state sector, by the process known as ‘privatization’. This had two aspects. The first was the transfer of nationalized industries, such as Cable & Wireless, British Steel, British Airways, British Telecommunications, British Gas, and the water and the electricity supply and distribution industry, into private ownership and management. Many of these nationalized bodies were incurring huge losses and were a heavy burden on the taxpayer. Privatization rapidly transformed the loss-makers into profitable companies. British Steel, for instance, had incurred the largest loss in corporate history, some £500 million, the year before it was privatized; by the end of the 1980s it had the highest productivity rates in the European steel industry and was the most profitable steel company in the world. The turnaround at British Airways was scarcely less spectacular. The second aspect was the way in which the privatization was managed by ‘floating’ the companies through the Stock Exchange in ways which encouraged small savers to buy into them. The British Telecom flotation, for example, was the largest public share offer in history. The net effect was that, during the 1980s, the number of individual shareholders in Britain rose from 2.5 million to nearly 10 million, giving some substance to the notion, which came into fashion
as the 1980s advanced, of ‘democratic capitalism’. The rapid reduction of losses in the public sector, plus the proceeds of these sales, enabled the government not merely to reduce direct taxation, the standard rate falling from 37½ to 25 per cent and top rates from 94 and 87 per cent to 40 per cent, but to run big budget surpluses and repay over one-fifth of the entire national debt. Privatization was one of the great success stories of the 1980s and found many imitators abroad, especially in Europe but also in Latin America, Australasia, Africa and Asia. Even Japan, which was teaching the West so much, followed Britain’s example and privatized its rail network on 1 April 1987.

By such means, Mrs Thatcher made herself one of the most consistently successful politicians of her age. On 19 June 1983 she got her party re-elected with a huge overall majority of 144 seats over all other parties, and she repeated her landslide success on 12 June 1987, when the Conservatives won 375 against 229 for the Labour opposition. No British prime minister had ever won three general elections in a row since the Great Reform Bill of 1832. When Mrs Thatcher was finally forced out of office by her own party on 20 November 1990 she had been head of the government for a longer continuous period, eleven and a half years, than any of her predecessors since the Earl of Liverpool (Prime Minister 1812–27). But it was notable that she aroused much hostility as well as enthusiastic support, and in the three elections she won her party never secured as much as 50 per cent of the votes cast. In many ways, she resembled de Gaulle: like him, she was good at saying no, and meaning it; like him, she restored her nation’s self-confidence and pride; she ruled with great authority for almost exactly the same span; and, like de Gaulle, she fell attempting a fundamental reform of local government, in her case seeking to replace the outmoded and inequitable way in which it was financed.

Mrs Thatcher, and ‘Thatcherism’, had a global influence during the 1980s which went well beyond the new fashion for privatization and reducing the state sector. The 1980s was a radical conservative decade, and even in states where socialist or Labour governments were elected, the drift away from Marxism, collectivism and all the traditional ‘isms’ of the Left was marked. The process was particularly notable in France. The election of the socialist François Mitterrand as President in 1981, after twenty-three years of Gaullism and its successors, introduced a brief period of socialist egalitarianism and anti-business policies, which led in rapid succession to three devaluations of the franc; thereafter, the French Socialist Party moved sharply to the Right and to free-market policies; and in the later 1980s and early 1990s, alternations in power
between socialist and Conservative prime ministers appeared to make little difference, in economic policy, defence or foreign affairs. The German Social Democrats had renounced Marxism, or anything approaching it, a generation before. In Portugal, Dr Mário Soares, elected premier for the first time in 1976 and President in 1987, under the new and liberal 1982 constitution, gradually steered Portuguese socialism into the free-market camp during the 1980s. There was a similar movement in Spain, where the Socialist Party, under its moderate leader Felipe Gonzalez, far from exploiting its landslide victory of 1982, reinforced the enterprise culture which had transformed the Spanish economy during the years 1950–75. In Australia Bob Hawke’s Labour Party, which returned to power in March 1983 and was later re-elected three times, moved consistently towards the Right; indeed in March 1991, Hawke himself made a ringing declaration, warning the country that it could no longer afford to impose irksome restraints on business, for socialist, environmental or any other reasons. In New Zealand, the Labour leader David Lange, who became Prime Minister in 1984, took his party and government in the same direction, though evidently not fast enough for some of his colleagues, who in effect forced his resignation in August 1989, as a result of a right-wing caucus
putsch.
In Britain, following the Labour Party’s third successive electoral defeat in 1987, its leader, Neil Kinnock, began the painful process of dropping traditional Labour policies, and by 1990–1 had made Labour, at least in theory, electable again.

In Labour or democratic socialist parties across the world, the term ‘social market’ came into fashion, implying acceptance of market forces subject to certain essential restraints to protect the poor and the underprivileged. But the phase was used on the Right too. ‘I like the expression,’ declared Norman Lamont in March 1991, immediately after delivering his first budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government John Major formed to replace Mrs Thatcher’s.
¹⁰⁴
Another political
cliché
that came into fashion in the early 1990s, reflecting the Left’s acceptance of the market, was ‘the enabling state’, as opposed to Big Government: the state was there, the argument went, not to do things itself, so much as to make it possible for people to do things on their own behalf. Conservatives were equally content to use this formulation of government’s role. To some extent, then, there was a convergence of views in the world’s democracies during the 1980s and early 1990s, but it was a convergence on the terms of the Right. Indeed, the ‘ratchet effect’, a phrase coined by the British Conservative ideologue Sir Keith (later Lord) Joseph in the 1970s, whereby policies initiated by left-wing governments were endorsed by their right-wing successors,
thus replacing the swing of the pendulum by a collectivist ratchet, was now reversed: it was the radicals of the Right who were now moving societies permanently in the direction of economic liberalism.