“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L.P.Hartley’s celebrated opening line in The Go-Between serves also as a fitting start to a profile of Britain’s trade unions.
The present wave of strikes appears to echo the 1970s, and indeed in some respects does. But before touching on the similarities, we should note the vast differences between the two periods.
In 1972, 23.9 million working days were lost to strikes, more than in any year since the General Strike in 1926.
Edward Heath, who in 1970 had led the Conservatives to victory, brought in an ambitious reform of trade union law, but his efforts ended in failure, as had In Place of Strife, the attempt by his Labour predecessor, Harold Wilson, to bring peace to industrial relations.
The 280,000-strong National Union of Mineworkers defeated Heath in 1972 by holding a seven-week strike, during which Arthur Scargill leapt to fame as a union leader by deploying flying pickets to shut Saltley Coke Depot.
At the end of 1973, when a second miners’ strike began, Heath instituted a three-day week in order to save fuel. The sense of crisis – of living in a country which was going backwards compared to such beacons of progress as West Germany, France, Italy, Japan or the United States – was intensified by frequent power cuts, the nation thrown into darkness relieved by candlelight.
Heath called a general election on the question “Who governs Britain?” and in February 1974 received the answer: “Not you!”
The trade unions had the power to bring the country to a halt. They had toppled an elected government. Not for nothing were their leaders known as barons.
The unions were determinedly old-fashioned. This point was obvious, but was often ignored. There is a kind of pundit who assumes that organisations set up to represent workers’ interests must be progressive in the way that middle-class commentators of a left-liberal disposition are progressive.
But as anyone who was not wilfully blind could see, the unions were small-c conservatives. They paraded under heraldic banners, had no truck with such new-fangled ideas as women’s rights, and wanted to keep every coal mine in the country open.
The same was true in every one of Britain’s great traditional industries: shipbuilding, steel, textiles, engineering, the lot. Each had unions which were determined to preserve it at its fullest extent, with its trades carried on forever as they had been at that moment of supremacy, different skills demarcated from each other by rules which were not strictly logical, but were hallowed by long usage, hereditary right and craftsmanship.
It was, I think, on reading a column by Ferdinand Mount in The Spectator in the late 1970s, in which he remarked in passing that the nationalisations of the late 1940s were essentially a job-preservation scheme, that the scales began to fall from my eyes.
Of course! It all made sense! The horrific unemployment of the years between the First and Second World Wars had shown that to lose your job was the worst thing that could happen to a working man, a passport to hunger and humiliation.
Free-market economists might point out, with impeccable logic, that industries had to be free to modernise, or they would be wiped out by foreign competitors. The trade unions looked to their political wing, the Labour Party, to defend workers’ jobs, whether or not those jobs made economic sense.
The unions had become, during the Second World War, an estate of the realm. Ernest Bevin, who between the wars had built the mighty Transport and General Workers into the largest union in the world and fought off Communist attempts to take it over, saw to it as Minister of Labour in the wartime coalition that British workers were mobilised more effectively than their German counterparts.
There were also, it is true, strikes during the war. W.F.Deedes, deputed to persuade the London dockers to load his regiment’s scout cars as they set off for Normandy, was unable to do so, with the result that half a dozen vehicles were damaged as his riflemen, untrained in the use of cranes, loaded them instead.
But there was too a genuine sense of patriotic solidarity, which the unions, representing as they did the workers, were indispensably involved in expressing.
In 1945 the voters chose Labour, led by Clement Attlee, to make a new and better peace. There must be no return to the mass unemployment of the pre-war period, blamed on the Conservatives.
Bevin the great trade unionist became a great Foreign Secretary, taking the lead in creating NATO and West Germany as bulwarks against Soviet Russia. The welfare state was greatly extended, Nye Bevan launched the National Health Service, rationing became more severe than it had been during the war, and the mines, railways, gas, electricity, road transport, the airlines, the iron and steel industry and the Bank of England were nationalised.
The Conservatives returned to office in 1951 in part because the hair shirt aspect of all this had become wearisome, and in part because they agreed to accept the greater part of it.
In 1956 Tony Crosland, perhaps the most brilliant of the many bright young Labour thinkers, claimed in The Future of Socialism that because of full employment “there has been a decisive movement of power within industry itself from management to labour”, and asserted that “even under a Conservative Government the trade unions remain effective masters of the industrial scene”.
He observed a complete change of mentality among managers:
“The old-style capitalist was by instinct a tyrant and an autocrat, and cared for no one’s approval. The new-style executive prides himself on being a good committee-man; and subconsciously he longs for the approval of the sociologist.”
Crosland defended “the British tradition of trade union autonomy and independence of government control”, and said this was essential, or workers would turn towards the Communist Party.
His optimism, quite widely shared in the mid-1950s, soon became unsustainable. Rising inflation impelled the trade unions to demand large wage rises for their members, and to call strikes when these were refused.
The Labour Government of 1964-70 was carried on amid continuous and humiliating economic difficulties, which became yet more alarming after Wilson scraped back into power in 1974.
In 1975, the rate of inflation reached 24 per cent. James Callaghan succeeded Wilson in 1976, by which time Labour’s Commons majority was evaporating, the party was split, the public finances were collapsing and the Government had to go cap in hand to obtain a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which exacted in return cuts in public spending, only agreed after an exhausting series of nine full Cabinet meetings, at which the arguments of all the different factions were aired.
But what was Callaghan to do about the trade unions? He had received his chance in life thanks to his trade union, which recognised him as a young man of exceptional ability and gave him his political education.
Callaghan, born in 1912 and brought up in straitened circumstances, had at the age of 17 got a job as a clerk in the Inland Revenue, which paid a pound a week, but in 1936 he defeated many other candidates to become Assistant Secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation on a salary of £350 a year.
After war service in the Royal Navy, which he joined as a seaman and left as an officer, in 1945 he won Cardiff South for Labour. He was one of hundreds of Labour MPs who entered politics by way of the trade unions, and having risen on merit to the top (in the leadership election of 1976 he defeated five Oxford-educated contenders, Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Denis Healey and Crosland), he was not going to betray or attack the unions.
He instead persuaded them to observe a degree of pay restraint. By the autumn of 1978, things were going better and Labour had regained its lead in the opinion polls.
But Callaghan, who deserved much of the credit for this recovery, unexpectedly decided to defer the general election until after the winter pay round, in which he had already told the unions to limit their demands to five per cent.
The union barons took this attempt to tell them what to do as an insult. In December 1978, after a three-week strike, the Ford Motor Company conceded a rise of 17 per cent to its workers, and in the public sector the unions launched impossible demands of up to 40 per cent, and went on strike when these were not met.
In the early months of 1979, rubbish accumulated in the streets, hospitals stopped admitting all but emergencies, and in some districts the dead went unburied.
During this Winter of Discontent, the Labour Whips night after night averted defeat by getting even their sickest MPs through the division lobbies, until on the night of 28 March 1979 they lost a motion of no confidence by a single vote.
Callaghan went to the country and lost to the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, who was less popular than him, but had promised to tame the trade unions.
Once again they had precipitated the downfall of a Government, this time a Labour one.
In 1979, 29.5 million working days were lost to strikes, half of these after the Conservatives came into office. Fleet Street was plagued by frequent strikes by print unions who rejected new technology and defended ancient privileges.
These were great days for industrial correspondents, described by Peter Hitchens in a recent piece for The Critic:
“the time of which I write, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, was still a sodden one in much of Fleet Street, and most sodden of all among those who wrote about strikes. Reporters and union men were a deadly combination. Many of the trade unionists themselves drank ferociously, and the annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers was known in the trade as ‘The Intergalactic Drinking Festival’. And so it was. If food was ever consumed on these occasions, it was after an interval for aperitifs lasting several hours.”
Hitchens was introduced to Joe Gormley, leader of the NUM before Scargill:
“Joe was a small tightly-packed man who radiated power more than any other person I have ever met, far more than any British politician I ever encountered. And why not? He could more or less stop the economy, if he wanted to.”
The industrial correspondents have vanished: they are, as one of them, Nick Jones, put it a decade ago, a lost tribe.
And where is the NUM? It too has left the stage, led to perdition by Arthur Scargill in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, a bitter struggle for which Thatcher and her colleagues had prepared with care, and he had not.
More and more Labour people lost patience with the party in the late Seventies and decided the trade unions must be brought under control. Here is John Vaizey, a distinguished academic whom Wilson had put in the House of Lords, explaining why in 1978 he crossed the floor and joined the Conservatives:
“By 1978 there was scarcely a Labour policy that I could support and many seemed actively harmful…The slavish subservience to the trades union leadership handed the country’s government over to a crew of self-satisfied bosses who could neither lead their membership nor agree on an incomes policy.”
With the defeat of the miners in 1985, and of the print workers at Wapping in 1986, the success of the Thatcher Government’s trade union reforms became assured, and an era ended. In only one year since then, 1989, have more than two million working days been lost to strikes.
In October this year, 417,000 days were lost, the highest monthly total since November 2011. The present trouble is on nothing like the scale of the Winter of Discontent, or of the three miners’ strikes in the Seventies and Eighties.
Nor have we yet seen, in the present industrial disputes, anything like the bitterness and suffering engendered by those earlier conflicts.
Nor do we find people like Vaizey leaving the Labour Party in protest at its utter wrong-headedness, including its subservience to the unions.
Nor do the unions matter anything like as much as they did in the days when, as one Labour veteran put it this week to ConHome, Labour leaders felt they had to “genuflect” to the Trades Union Congress.
Union membership has fallen from about 12 million in 1979 to about 5.5 million today, concentrated now in the public sector rather than in blue-collar occupations. The numerous small craft unions have gone to the wall, swallowed up in a few vast amalgams with unmemorable, interchangeable names – Unite, Unison.
But we still feel the need for something to argue about, an issue which inspires hysterical predictions of doom while also serving as an outlet for the disregarded small-c conservatism of the working class. Brexit fitted the bill pretty well.