A worried Tory Cabinet met to review the situation and discuss tactics. Its memorandum of the 18 July 1972 recognised that an “unofficial shop stewards committee still has support from many moderate-minded dockers because they fear for their jobs.” Options were then discussed: a state of emergency, rationing of essential food, and the requisitioning of vehicles to transport food around the country. But as the Cabinet wracked its brains for a solution, events began to overtake them.
The haulage bosses sought a court order to halt picketing at the Chodham Farm container depot, but were turned down by the Court of Appeal. However, the Midland Cold Storage Company, which was also being blockaded, succeeded in bringing its own injunction. On hearing the news, the dispute rapidly spread throughout the London docks. On the evidence of private detectives, five dockers were arrested and imprisoned in Pentonville Prison on 21 July. As the news spread about the “Pentonville Five”, the working class erupted. 44,000 dockers and 130,000 other workers immediately downed tools in protest. Docks were brought to a complete standstill at London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Swansea, Glasgow, Bristol, Felixstowe, Leith, Chatham, Ipswich, Middlesbrough and even King’s Lynn. This was the magnificent spontaneous answer from the working class to a direct attack on their organisations.
The movement spread like wildfire from below. Tommy Hilton, the spokesman for the Swansea dockers said: “People must realise that this is not a dockers’ strike, but a strike in defence of trade union rights against the Industrial Relations Act.” Pressure mounted rapidly on the TUC General Council to act. Belatedly they were forced to call (by 18 votes to 7) a one-day general strike scheduled for 31 July. This was in complete contrast to the platitudes of TUC general secretary Vic Feather, who had some weeks earlier dismissed the idea of a general strike as a complete fantasy: “Such things happen in Italy and France, but not in Britain”, he had said.
The marvellous movement from below had the potential to develop into an all-out general strike. Either the Tories would make big concessions, or the whole situation threatened to spiral out of control. The TUC was reluctantly forced to put itself at the head of this movement. They wished to steer it into safe channels, but this was also extremely risky because if the one-day general strike had gone ahead, there was no guarantee that it would last 24-hours. The whole situation was extremely volatile.
Panicking, the Tory government called in the Official Solicitor, an obscure unknown legal figure, to bail them out of the crisis. The law was now reinterpreted to state that the Courts held the unions, rather than individual pickets, responsible for their actions. The Pentonville Five were immediately released and the general strike, to the utter relief of the TUC leaders, was called off. The Times humorously compared the actions of the Tory government to a “disordered slot-machine, which produced a succession of unforeseen results, mostly raspberry flavoured.”
On 28 July, when dockers struck again over job security, the government declared another state of emergency. The question of sending in the troops to break the strike was raised, then dropped like a hot potato. A few days later, a government contingency group reported, “If troops were used there is a real danger of sympathetic action by lorry drivers and others which would be more damaging than the present situation.” The dockers’ national shop stewards committee stepped up their campaign to close all ports using unregistered labour. By mid-August the Tory government was forced to accept a deal to end the action.
A further skirmish over the Industrial Relations Act occurred when the engineering union, the AUEW, was fined £55,000 on 1 December 1972, for refusing union membership to James Goad, a scab, lay preacher, and crusader for the “freedom of the individual”. The union’s refusal to pay resulted in the fine being sequestrated from the union’s funds by the Courts. In the face of this blatant attack on trade unionism, 750,000 workers struck unofficially. The AUEW leadership, however, confined themselves to verbal protests. In reality, as the dockers had shown, the only effective means of crippling the anti-union laws was through the militant actions of the mass movement. But the leaders of the trade unions, both right and left, did not relish the prospect of a direct challenge to the Tory government, and they recoiled.