The 1987 general election witnessed a third election victory for the Tories. They managed to take 43 per cent of the vote compared to Labour’s humiliating 32 per cent. The shift to the right of the Labour Party under Kinnock had ended in electoral failure. While the continuing economic boom assisted Thatcher, Labour’s right-wing stance sealed its fate. Given this situation, pundits again pontificated over whether Labour could ever win another general election. The empirical Peter Kellner, the political editor of the New Statesman, stated: “The Party would have to abandon all hope of ever governing again… is that not merely an abrupt way of saying what many of us feel in our bones to be true, but are reluctant to admit?”
As always, the conclusions drawn by the trade union and Labour leaders were that Labour was not right-wing enough! Accordingly, the Labour Party had to move even further to the right and fully embrace the “market economy”. The TUC had shifted so far to the right that Arthur Scargill lost his seat on the General Council. For the first time since their affiliation to the TUC more than a hundred years ago, the mineworkers had no representative on the leading body of British trade unionism. It was a sign of the times.
From November 1987, the Tory government turned its attention to the problem of the docks, a continuing bastion of trade unionism. With the miners defeated and the opportunity of a Triple Alliance lost for the time being, the Tory offensive could begin in earnest against this outpost of union militancy. On 7 April 1989, the Tories announced a Bill to abolish the Dock Labour Scheme. Both Tilbury and Liverpool docks struck work in protest. The TGWU national docks committee voted to ballot its members for a strike, but to the utter dismay and disgust of the rank and file, the national executive committee of the union overturned this decision. Unfortunately, they had learned nothing from the debacle of 1984.
With the full backing of the government, the port employers bared their teeth. They threatened legal action against the union if it dared launch a dock strike. The assets of the TGWU were in danger of being sequestrated unless they capitulated. They were being forced into a corner. The question was whether or not they would come out fighting. As the deadline for the abolition of the scheme approached, the union leaders prevaricated and looked for a legal loophole out of their dilemma. In the meantime, the port employers had categorically refused the union’s demand for a new national agreement.
With their backs to the wall, the TGWU executive committee eventually called a strike ballot of the 9,000 registered dockers. But unfortunately once again they left the unregistered workforce out of the fight. In face of this attack by the Tories, the dockers decisively answered the challenge. With no perspective being offered by the leadership, the dockers voted 74.3 per cent for industrial action in defence of the Dock Labour Scheme. It was an overwhelming display of defiance.
After a pantomime at the High Court, the Appeal Judges, in collusion with government and bosses, granted an injunction restraining the TGWU from taking action. In response to this blatant class judgement, the National Port Shop Stewards Committee called for an immediate strike. Dockers in Liverpool, Tilbury, Bristol, Newport and Lowestoft answered the call to action. Now was the time for action! But Ron Todd, the general secretary of the union, called for an immediate return to work pending a legal appeal in the House of Lords. This broke the momentum of the strike and undermined the resolve of the men and there was, as was to be expected, a drift back to work. Once the workers were on the move, the dispute could have spread throughout the industry. But the leadership acted as firefighters dowsing the flames of militancy.
The TGWU’s legal appeal at the High Court was belatedly upheld. But the wind had been taken out of the struggle. The national committee then organised a further ballot for strike action. Astonishingly, even under these conditions the result was a three to one majority in favour of strike action – but crucially – the decision came after the Dock Scheme had already been abolished. The union leadership had decided to fight under the most unfavourable conditions possible.
As the strike took place, the employers put in the boot, threatening to sack all strikers. With the balance of forces tilting in their favour, the bosses decided to sack the leading shop stewards in the Tilbury docks. These sackings constituted a blatant attack on all dockers, and a challenge to the whole union, but the TGWU leadership steadfastly avoided “secondary action” that would mean the sequestration of the union’s assets. But what was at stake was not assets, but the functioning of the TGWU as a union.
In the face of confusion and vacillation at the top, the strike began to crumble and was eventually called off three weeks later. “I basically agree that we should remain on strike but I have no confidence that the union will support us”, said a Tilbury docker. “Why should we expect any different treatment than that meted out to the miners, printers and seafarers? They were all sold down the river.”[6]
If ever there was a union that could defeat the government, it was the TGWU. But the leadership refused to use its strength. The collapse of the strike was a demoralising setback. The Broad Left formally controlled the union, but it had no clear strategy of how to take on the government and build the necessary solidarity. They stumbled into a strike without the necessary foresight or planning. As a consequence, the dockers suffered the same tragic isolation and defeat as the miners had done five years earlier.
The Tories had succeeded in isolating and defeating one section of workers after another. It was a clear case of salami tactics. In fact, nothing could be clearer. This should have been recognised by the trade union leaders and the appropriate action taken on the time-honoured principle “an injury to one is an injury to all.” But this was not done. As a result, the sixteen sacked Tilbury shop stewards never got their jobs back, the union was derecognised and redundancies were brought in across the board. With the abolition of the Dock Labour Scheme casual labour returned to the docks with a vengeance, in an industry that by this time had shrunk to only 12,000 workers. By 1993, there were less than 500 dockworkers left on Merseyside alone – down from 17,000 just after the war.
The failure to fight had catastrophic consequences. Dockers were now on call round the clock. As a dockers’ wife described it, “They call it work to finish the job, but it became ‘work to finish’ our men – 12 or 14 hour shifts, constant phone calls changing their shifts, no social life.” As another docker explained when casualisation was reintroduced,
After I became full-time my wages were £170 top line with pension, no sick pay, no work clothing. They’d call us out to work at any time for up to 80 hours a week. You can go in at 7.45 am and if there’s no work in they send you home at 12 o’clock, tell you to get eight hours’ sleep and come back and do the night shift.
These heavy defeats served to further strengthen the grip of the right-wing union bureaucracy. Strike figures fell to an all-time low by the end of the decade, as the union leadership acted even more as a barrier to struggle. The employers took advantage of mass unemployment and the compliance of the union leaders to relentlessly push through drastic changes in working practices, terms and conditions. Compulsory Competitive Tendering was introduced into local authorities, forcing down established conditions and wage levels. Personal contracts, part-time working and short-term contracts were also brought in across the board. Thus, the economic boom from 1982 onwards, was a boom at the expense of the working class. Under these conditions, workers had their heads down, hoping to survive, many hoping to see the election of a Labour government as a solution to their problems.
The earlier Tory anti-union laws of 1980 and 1982 introduced a battery of changes to industrial relations. It limited picketing, banned secondary action, effectively outlawed the closed shop, watered down unfair dismissal procedures, repealed the 1975 Employment Protection Act, provided money for union postal ballots, and removed the legal immunity covering unions. The Tories introduced further anti-union legislation in 1984, 1988, 1989, 1990, and then later in 1993. These forced unions to hold regular secret ballots for union posts, ballots for political funds, secret ballots for strikes, abolished the post-entry closed shop, union officials were forced to repudiate unofficial strikes, the check-off system was undermined, the Bridlington Agreement was effectively scrapped as workers were allowed to join a union of their choice, rules governing pre-strike ballots were further tightened, wages councils were abolished, and employers were allowed to offer workers financial inducements to leave their trade unions.
Over a fifteen-year period from 1980, seven separate pieces of Tory legislation were introduced to break the back of the trade unions and undermine collective bargaining. The restrictions governing strikes were so strict that the effective right to strike, with the necessary solidarity (“secondary action”), was largely undermined. As with much of the nineteenth century, after the repeal of the Combination Acts, legal trade unions existed but with either one or both hands tied behind their backs. These laws all added up to a “counter-revolution” against the trade union movement. They constituted the most important challenge to trade unionism for more than a century.
Despite this, the TUC leaders refused to break the law, preferring a cosy chat and deal with the Tories. They were terrified of losing their trade union funds through sequestration, and with them their nice cars, their plush offices and their comfortable lifestyles. This they could not afford to jeopardise! At the same time, they would have the gall to pay tribute to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the early pioneers of trade unionism. Whereas these pioneers fought uncompromisingly against unjust laws, regardless of personal cost, the union leaders, with some notable exceptions, acquiesced to the anti-union laws.
There were astonishing similarities between the current Tory legislation and the clauses of the Trades Disputes Act of 1927. This onslaught against the unions arose not from a desire for revenge (although this played a part) but from the needs of the ruling class to reduce costs – just as in 1926. The defeat of the General Strike was, however, on an altogether greater scale. It was a catastrophic bludgeoning that, combined with the economic depression, knocked the guts out of the British working class for a whole period. It took decades for the workers to recover. The defeat of the miners in 1985 created wounds and scars – but not nearly as severe and deep as the ones inflicted after the defeat in 1926. Thus, in the years following the miners’ strike there were important industrial battles, which were entirely absent in the 1930s.
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Quoted by Hunter, They Knew Why They Fought, pp.111-2, London