Yet the Tories were in for more than they bargained for! Within a month of coming to power they were forced to introduce a state of emergency to deal with a national dock strike – the first official one since 1926. Although the government threatened the use of troops, the Pearson Inquiry stepped in to recommend an improved pay offer, subsequently accepted by a conference of dockers’ representatives. The second test for the government came in September 1970 when a quarter of a million local authority workers went on strike in pursuit of a wage claim. Bernard Dix, a NUPE leader, later recalled:
Within three days of the strike in 1970 we were called up before the Lord President of the Council, who was William Whitelaw, who said that if we didn’t put people back on sewerage work they would have to call in the troops. We told them they could call in who they liked.
To the consternation of the government, another Committee of Inquiry awarded local authority workers most of their demands.
On the industrial front setbacks for the Tories seemed to pile up. An unofficial miners’ strike secured a £3 a week rise. Electricity supply workers gained around 15 per cent after a state of emergency was declared and the Queen in Buckingham Palace was forced to “take tea by candlelight”. In the private sector Ford workers won an £8 a week rise over two years. The only success for the government was the defeat of the seven-week old postal workers’ strike over pay, led by the extremely moderate Tom Jackson. During the dispute, he threatened to sell every brick of the union’s headquarters before giving in. But he ended up selling out the workers instead. The government was less successful in disputes affecting electricity supply, railworkers and refuse collectors.
The “Holy Grail” of the Tory strategy was, however, the new Industrial Relations Bill, which sought to curtail the power of the trade unions through legislation. Throughout this period the tendency of the trade union apparatus to entwine itself with the capitalist state had broken down. In fact, things were moving in the opposite direction, as the pressures of the union rank and file exerted themselves on the leadership. The Tory legislation, as with In Place of Strife, was aimed at forcing the union leaders to police their own “undisciplined” membership by threatening them with legal penalties. As expected, the main aspects of the legislation went much further than In Place of Strife. These included:
- Outlaw of the closed shop.
- Trade unions to register with a Registrar as a condition for keeping certain legal immunities. Registration would bind trade unions to a code under which strikes could be called. This would impose limits on members to avoid claims against unions for “unfair industrial practices”. Anyone who scabs, even on an official strike, which is deemed “unfair” by the Bill, could not be “expelled, disciplined or discriminated against by the organisation, notwithstanding anything in the rules.”
- To treat all collective agreements as legally binding contracts.
- Compulsory ballots prior to action if a dispute threatened the “life of the nation”. Any employer could apply for compensation against trade unions and unionists for a wide range of supposed offences.
- Allow the Secretary of State the right to order the postponement of strike action (“cooling-off” period) for up to 60 days.
- Grant trade union recognition only after investigation by the Commission on Industrial Relations. The National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) would have such powers as would leave union rulebooks and funds at their mercy.
- Removal of legal immunity from sympathy strikes. Unregistered unions, like shop stewards committees, would have a total absence of protection at law from crippling fines.
Within the Labour movement the Industrial Relations Bill became known as “the scabs charter”. A mass campaign was organised from below, mainly by the CP-inspired Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, to defeat the Tory legislation. Both the TUC and Parliamentary Labour Party came out against the Bill. While the TUC rejected strike action against the government, on 8 December 1970 the LCDTU organised a massive unofficial protest strike of 600,000 workers. On the 12 January, half a million workers took part in a day of protest against the government. On 21 February, 300,000 trade unionists demonstrated in London to “Kill the Bill”.
The doubting Thomases on the TUC General Council, who opposed the demonstration, were utterly gob-smacked. “You know very well, Jack, people won’t take part in that sort of thing unless they’re paid to do it”, stated George Lowthian of the Bricklayers Union. But it proved to be the largest demonstration of the century. As the TUC reported at the time: “It was the biggest demonstration since the Chartists moved working men to demand the right to vote, 130 years earlier.” The left-wing engineering workers’ union, the AUEW, called a series of one-day strikes beginning on 1 March, where more than two million workers took strike action against the Tory government. These were overtly political strikes.
On the day of the TUC special conference in March, three million workers went on strike – until then, the biggest strike since the General Strike of 1926. The conference “strongly advised” a complete boycott of the Tory anti-union legislation. At the September TUC, a resolution submitted from the AUEW and TGWU, was passed instructing unions not to register with the government’s Registrar. A handful of unions hesitated, but went along with the decision, while a few small unions were expelled from the TUC for failing to comply.
Between July 1970 and July 1974, more than three million days were lost in political protest strikes against the Industrial Relations Act, more than one million against the NIRC and 1.6 million against the government’s incomes policy. It was an historic show of militancy, and the high point of working class confidence not seen for generations.
In the summer of 1971, a mass movement had taken place to save the jobs of workers at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), which was threatened by complete closure. Set up by the Labour government in 1966, this artificial conglomerate suffered from the general decline of British shipbuilding over the previous decades. Since its inception, the UCS had staggered from one crisis to another. Instead of nationalising the industry, Labour preferred to dish out public subsidies, and reorganise the industry on a more efficient capitalist basis. Despite a 30 per cent cut in the workforce and an 85 per cent increase in productivity within the yards, within five years UCS once again faced bankruptcy and closure.
The Tories began to break up the industry and the most profitable sections were sold to Yarrow for the nominal sum of £1. In return, Yarrow received a £4.5 million loan as a “sweetener”. Eventually all the taxpayers’ money soon ran out. The Tory government turned down the bosses’ request for new subsidies, and a Committee of Inquiry recommended the closure of two out of the four UCS shipyards with loss of some 6,000 jobs.
The UCS workers – already living in areas of high unemployment – refused to accept this jobs slaughter without a fight. In response to the threatened closures, a “work-in” was organised at the yards and two one-day solidarity strikes were held across Scotland. It was an inspiration to workers everywhere. From one end of Britain to the other messages of support and finance poured in. Nevertheless, despite the heroism of the UCS workers, their leaders Jimmy Airlie and Jimmy Reid, both members of the Communist Party, wanted to limit the protest action to a “work-in”. They fought against the idea of spreading the occupation to other yards nationally. In doing so, the opportunity was lost of safeguarding all shipbuilding jobs through a mass campaign to force the nationalisation of the industry.
The idea of nationalisation was no far-fetched dream. Under intense pressure, the Heath government had already nationalised crisis-ridden Rolls Royce, “at a stroke”, to use Heath’s famous phrase, in February 1971. They could have been forced to do the same for shipbuilding if a massive campaign had been undertaken. The occupations could have been spread to Swan Hunters, Cammell Lairds, Harland and Wolf, and throughout the shipbuilding industry. Unfortunately, the action was limited to UCS. Eventually, an agreement was struck, whereby three of the yards were incorporated into Govan shipbuilders, with a grant of £35 million and the fourth yard was sold off to Marathon with grants of £12 million. In July 1972, John Davies, Minister for Industry, was forced to guarantee Govan support “for five years or until the company is on its feet”. Nevertheless, 2,000 UCS workers still lost their jobs in the deal. Eventually Airlie ended up as a national full-time official of the AEU, while Reid shifted to the right, becoming a journalist and media personality.
The UCS struggle had, however, forced a U-turn in government policy. Up until then the Tories had pursued a policy of no subsidies for “lame duck” industries. Firstly, the Rolls Royce crisis and then the battle at UCS, as Nicholas Ridley subsequently admitted, forced the government to ditch this “lame duck” policy for fear of the social consequences.
The UCS “work-in” was an inspiration to all workers facing redundancies. Unemployment had risen sharply with the shake-out of labour during the recession of 1971. In the winter of 1971-72 unemployment was the highest since 1939 – prompting the TUC to organise a national lobby of Parliament. The response of workers facing closure was a wave of factory occupations and sit-ins across Britain. Following the initial upsurge in 1971, the following years saw no fewer than 200 occupations or “work-ins”. The most prominent were: Plessey in Dunbartonshire, Fisher Bendix, Don Steel Works, Pressed Steel Fisher in Birmingham, Briant Colour, BSA, Norton Villiers Triumph, Thorneycroft in Basingstoke, Allis Chambers, Seiko Time, Scottish Daily Express, amongst many others. This rising curve of class struggle represented an industrial upsurge not seen since possibly the “Great Unrest” of 1910-12.