During December 1983, just months after the Tory victory, came another important test case for the unions. In Warrington a bitter dispute broke out between the print union, the National Graphical Association (NGA), and the Stockport Messenger, a local newspaper owned by small businessman Eddie Shah – an anti-union tin-pot employer and staunch admirer of Margaret Thatcher. The dispute was over the employment of non-union labour. It was a vital dispute for the print industry. If the print unions could be defeated here, then the employers across the industry would be given the green light to smash closed shop agreements and introduce new technology at the expense of jobs. During the dispute, the print bosses and the Tories bankrolled Eddie Shah.
At Warrington the policing methods later used against other strikers, especially the miners, were perfected. It was a dress rehearsal for future industrial battles. At one point, in a departure from “normal” policing, police set up road blocks on M6 motorway exits to stop pickets getting near the newspaper plant. On the picket line riot police were used in the most ferocious manner to attack strikers and keep the plant open. Clearly the use of these new policing techniques was intended to prevent any possibility of a re-enactment of Saltley Gate, where the police were caught completely off guard.
As soon as the NGA instructed all its members to boycott the Stockport Messenger Group and began mass picketing of the Warrington Plant, Eddie Shah was granted an injunction against the union for breaching the 1980 Employment Act – which forbade secondary action – as well as the 1982 Employment Act – limiting the closed shop. When the union ignored the injunction it was first fined £50,000. When it still refused to obey the court, further fines of £100,000, and eventually £250,000 were imposed. At the end of November 1983, the High Court ordered the sequestration of the total assets of the NGA.
This was a declaration of all-out war by the Tory government. Under the circumstances, the printworkers looked to the TUC for solidarity action. In December, the Employment Committee of the General Council voted to support the NGA’s stance. However, Len Murray, who was subsequently backed by the full General Council, publicly repudiated this stand. This sabotage by the TUC right wing left the NGA isolated. The union went down to defeat. To rub salt into the wound, at the full legal hearing in 1984, Eddie Shah was awarded a further £250,000 damages against the NGA. This represented a major defeat for the trade union movement.
This signalled the beginning of an offensive in the print industry that was to effectively break the strength of the print unions and tear up all terms and conditions. A decade later, after the rout of the print unions at Warrington and Wapping, a centralised deal was eventually agreed between the employers and the GPMU (which was an amalgamation of the NGA and SOGAT). Complete “flexibility” was introduced into the industry between all occupations and grades, effectively sweeping away all demarcation lines between skills. Both unions and employers agreed that “the industry’s workforce, plant and equipment” would be “deployed fully and effectively in order to increase efficiency, provide a quick and flexible response to customers’ requirements and improve profitability.”[9]
In January 1984, Thatcher personally stepped in to ban 7,000 staff at GCHQ communications centre in Cheltenham from holding union membership. Trade unionists, it was implied, could no longer be trusted with national security. This was another blatant attack on democratic rights and a further affront to the trade union movement. However, the TUC gave a docile response, offering Thatcher a feeble “no-disruption” deal at GCHQ. Predictably, the Prime Minister rejected the offer “with disdain”, to quote the moderate Alistair Graham, who took his “New Realism” very seriously and, not surprisingly, ended up on the other side of the class divide. He later resigned from the CPSA to become head of the Industrial Society.
After the 1983 general election victory, with a thumping 141-seat majority behind her, Thatcher appointed Peter Walker as Energy Secretary. “Peter, I want you to go to Energy,” Walker is said to have been told by Thatcher. “We’re going to have a miners’ strike.”[10]