Nevertheless, within seven months, to the utter astonishment of the Labour movement, the Labour Minister, Barbara Castle, produced a white paper entitled In Place of Strife. This paper went far beyond Donovan’s recommendations and embraced many of the proposals contained in Fair Deal at Work. Castle for instance recommended the creation of a Registrar of Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations and the setting up of Industrial Courts. It envisaged “cooling-off” periods and fines on trade unions. According to the government the legislation would “enable the Secretary of State by order to require those involved to desist for up to 28 days from a strike or lockout which is unconstitutional…” And further, “The Board will have the power to impose financial penalties on an employer, union or individual striker as it found appropriate”.[8]
Here was a Labour government attempting to introduce anti-union legislation! As expected, In Place of Strife itself created massive strife throughout the Labour movement. Angry protests were raised in all quarters, both in the trade unions and the Labour Party. “The White Paper In Place of Strife caused much division and bitterness. It shook the Labour movement”, stated Jack Jones. Special meetings of Constituency Labour Parties were called to which the Members of Parliament were summoned to explain themselves. Protests came in thick and fast to Transport House, Labour’s headquarters. Miners’ lodges in South Wales even threatened to disaffiliate from the Labour Party if the “Castle Bill” ever became law.
“Harold Wilson backed them [the proposals] enthusiastically but the unions were outraged”, admitted Barbara Castle in her Diaries. “They claimed – with some justification as it turned out – that the Conservatives would use my proposals as an alibi for the very different legal constraints they were proposing to place on the unions. Labour MPs mobilized in protest. So did the party’s National Executive Committee [NEC], of which I was a member. Some Cabinet Ministers opposed me openly. Others, who had supported me, began to get cold feet… But the bitterness remained. My own standing in the party was damaged…”[9]
The AEU and the TGWU demanded a recall conference of the TUC to discuss the anti-union attack. But the main thrust came from below. Under the initiative of the Communist Party, an ad-hoc body was established to fight the new proposals, the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU). This body drew behind it a wide layer of trade union activists and militants across industry. The LCDTU conference in November 1969 put out the call for a national Day of Action on 8 December, which was answered by over one million striking workers. This was the first political strike since the General Strike, and opened up a new period for British trade unionism.
Jack Jones recalls a meeting at Chequers where Barbara Castle was present. “Barbara was rather shrewish, trying to put Hughie [Scanlon] and me in our place. We were told once again that ‘the public is looking for action against unofficial strikers. Action must be taken by the government; you’ve had your chance, boys!’ The nearest thing to a conciliatory tone was adopted when they explained their attitude to ‘criminal sanctions’, as we called them. ‘No,’ said Barbara, ‘people will not go to prison. Fines could be imposed but they would be collected as civil debts.’”[10] But this fine detail did not fool anyone, least of all the trade unions, which were in no mood to have their rights curtailed.
Under growing pressure from below, the TUC came out in opposition to the proposed Bill. On 1 May 1969, some one-and-a-quarter million workers took strike action, combined with mass protests and marches throughout the country. A recalled TUC Congress in June – the first such special Congress for over 50 years – met to draw up plans for action. By April 1970, the anti-trade union Bill had been carried in the Commons with 55 Labour MPs voting against and around 40 MPs abstaining. This proved to be the last straw. The pressure on the Labour government from trade unions, Trades Councils, shop stewards committees, and local Labour Parties became so intense that the government was forced to back down and abandon the legislation. This struggle against In Place of Strife resulted in a considerable radicalisation in the Labour movement that was to prove a dress rehearsal for the campaign against the Tory anti-union legislation over the five years that followed.
Between 1967 and 1968, the National Coal Board had closed 62 pits, the largest number in any single year. The workforce had now shrunk from 692,700 in 1959 to 365,000 in 1968. From almost a thousand pits at the time of nationalisation, they had been reduced by closures to 317 collieries. Between 1964 and 1968 the number of pits fell by 40 per cent and the workforce was cut by almost the same percentage. This change was prompted by the increased use of oil as a source of power and the rapid introduction of mechanisation in the pits. The proportion of coal that was power-loaded rose from 23 per cent in 1957 to 92 per cent in 1968. With fewer miners needed to produce more coal, they were simply told that ‘uneconomic’ pits would close. Those made redundant had the option of taking redundancy or transferring to another pit, like “industrial gypsies”, as they became known, driven by closures from one pit to another.
The destruction of miners’ jobs was a poor reflection on the then NUM leadership – not only the right wing but also the Communist Party. For many years they had pursued a policy of moderation, as Vic Allen, a historian of the miners explained, “Communist Party members, such as Will Paynter, the general secretary from 1959, Bill Whitehead, who succeeded Paynter as the president of the South Wales miners, Abe Moffat the president of the Scottish miners and his brother Alex who succeeded him as well as others in official positions around the coalfields continued to advocate continuity in the union’s policy of co-operation with the NCB.” Allen continued:
They were in agreement on this issue with those who were their political antagonists, such as Sidney Ford, the union president, Sam Bullough, the president of the Yorkshire Area and Jack Lally, President of the Midlands Area. The union revealed no significant sectional differences over the important issues, which faced it. On the question of contraction it insisted that the decisions to close which pits, when and where, were the prerogative of the management. The union intervened only to facilitate the closures by assisting to alleviate the hardships which might result from them.[11]
From 1962 onwards there had been virtually no national protests against pit closures, despite the lack of alternative work in mining areas. Strikes in the mining industry were at an all-time low. The NCB Report of 1967-68 recorded a “sharp reduction in output lost through disputes.” There was not one recorded industrial dispute over redundancies. A consequence of this union-NCB collaboration over decades had also pushed miners from the top of the wages league table after the war, to twelfth place by 1970. These factors were to produce a new militancy in the British coalfields.