This was a good time for me as well as for the Party. I felt able to alter some policies which I had inherited and to set out my own views more clearly on others. I took advantage of the Scottish Party Conference in May effectively to jettison the commitment to devolution, which passed off remarkably quietly.
Then, delivering the Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture in July, I sought to explain how my own personal philosophy fitted in with the Conservative tradition, and indeed with that religious view of the world which is an essential aspect of Toryism. I always put a special effort into such speeches because I regarded it as crucial to show that Conservatives need feel no unease or inhibitions about taking on their opponents on moral just as on practical grounds.
Later that month, before the House rose for the summer recess, I had a good day speaking in the Economic Debate. It was one of those days when every hostile intervention seems designed to trigger a pungent retort. Somewhat to my own surprise, I found myself knocking down opponents like ducks in a shooting gallery. As one friendly journalist wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher’s one-woman mass-acre of both the Government and the Liberals could not have come at a better time.’ The press was, for now at least, full of pleasantly flattering discussion of my qualities and prospects. Still more flattering was the reaction of the Labour benches to my next major appearance: total silence intended to disconcert.
But just as the political reality was never as bad as it seemed at the time of the agreement of the Lib-Lab Pact, so we were now in truth facing far more serious problems than even the commentators understood. Our popularity largely reflected widespread reaction against the Government’s manifest failures. Now that some order was being restored to the public finances, which would bring inflation and interest rates down, we would be under more pressure to spell out our own alternative. We would have to win on more than a doctor’s mandate. We would have to set out clearly and persuasively an alternative analysis and set of policies. For my part, I was keen to do just that. But I knew that on such central questions as trade union power, incomes policy and public spending there was still no agreement in Shadow Cabinet between the minority of us who fundamentally rejected the approach pursued between 1970 and 1974 and the majority who more or less wished to continue it. All of the damaging divisions which plagued us over these years, and which we desperately tried to minimize by agreeing on ‘lines to take’, stemmed from that basic problem. Ultimately, it was not one which was amenable to the techniques of political management, only to the infinitely more difficult process of clarifying thoughts and changing minds.
GRUNWICK
So it was that what came to be known as the ‘Grunwick affair’ burst onto the political scene. This was a clear case of the outrageous abuse of trade union power. Paradoxically, it proved almost as politically damaging to us, whom the unions regarded with undisguised hostility, as to the Labour Party, who were their friends and sometime clients.
Grunwick was a medium-sized photographic processing and printing business in north-west London run by a dynamic Anglo-Indian entrepreneur, George Ward, with a largely immigrant workforce. A dispute in the summer of 1976 resulted in a walkout of a number of workers and their subsequent dismissal. This then escalated into a contest between the management and the APEX trade union, which had subsequently signed up the dismissed workers and demanded ‘recognition’. That would have given the union the right to negotiate on behalf of its members working for the company. APEX consequently demanded the reinstatement of those who had been dismissed.
For its part, Grunwick established in the courts that the dismissals had been perfectly legal — even under Labour’s new union legislation, which the unions had virtually written themselves. None of those who had been dismissed could be taken back under existing law unless all were taken back, and in a number of cases there was simply too much bad blood. Grunwick argued too that the behaviour of APEX in other firms suggested that it was out to impose a closed shop. Finally, secret ballots conducted by MORI and Gallup showed that the great majority of the Grunwick workforce — over 80 per cent — did not want to join APEX, or any other union.
A left-wing coalition emerged to support APEX and punish Grunwick. Every part of the socialist world was represented: the local Brent Trades Council, trade union leaders and ‘flying pickets’, the Socialist Workers Party, and leading members of the Labour Party itself, among them Cabinet ministers Shirley Williams and Fred Mulley, and the Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, who dusted off their donkey jackets and joined the Grunwick picket line for a short time, a couple of weeks before the picketing turned violent. Someone called it ‘the Ascot of the Left’.
The National Association for Freedom (NAFF), took up the case of George Ward as part of its campaign against abuses of individual freedom resulting from overweening trade union power. NAFF had been launched in December 1975, shortly after the IRA’s murder of someone who would have been one of its leading lights — Ross McWhirter, whom I had known (along with his twin brother Norris) from Orpington days.[49] NAFF’s Chairman was Bill De L’Isle and Dudley, the war hero and the MP who had spoken to us at Oxford attacking Yalta when I was an undergraduate.[50] The organization quickly become nationally known through its support for three British railwaymen, dismissed for refusing to join a union, who successfully took their case to the European Court of Human Rights. It fought (but eventually lost) an equally prominent action to prevent British Post Office unions boycotting mail to South Africa. I gave NAFF as much support as I could, though a number of my colleagues regarded it with deep distaste and made public criticisms of its activities. Without NAFF, Grunwick would almost certainly have gone under. When the postal union illegally blacked Grunwick’s outgoing mail, which contained the developed films on which the firm’s business depended, NAFF volunteers smuggled it through the pickets, distributed it around Britain, and discreetly posted it in thousands of pillarboxes.
The mass picketing began at the end of June 1977 and continued day after day with terrifying scenes of mob violence, injuries to police and pickets. At times thousands of demonstrators crowded the narrow suburban streets around the Grunwick factory in north-west London, to waylay the coaches laid on by the firm to bring their employees through. So I asked my PPS, Adam Butler, and Jim Prior’s number two, Barney Hayhoe, to join the employees on one of their morning coach journeys through the hail of missiles and abuse. Adam reported back to me on the fear — and the courage — of the people he had been with.
During this period a strange reticence gripped the Government. The Shadow Cabinet organized a number of Private Notice Questions to force ministers to declare their position on the violence. We issued a statement demanding that the Prime Minister state categorically that the police had the Government’s backing in carrying out their duties. But as I wrote to John Gouriet, one of NAFF’s directors, at the time: ‘we feel that the scenes of wild violence portrayed on television plus the wild charges and allegations being thrown about in certain quarters, are enough in themselves to put most of the public on the side of right and are doing more than hours of argument’.
Although the scenes outside the factory seemed to symbolize the consequences of giving trade unions virtually unlimited immunity in civil law, it was in fact the criminal law against violence and intimidation which was being breached. No matter how many new legal provisions might be desirable, the first duty of the authorities was to uphold the existing law. All the more so because the violence at Grunwick was part of a wider challenge posed by the far Left to the rule of law; and no one quite knew how far that challenge would ultimately go. The attitude of Sam Silkin, the Attorney-General, to law-breaking by trade unions had been revealed as at best ambiguous in the case raised by NAFF in January 1977, when two Post Office unions banned telephone calls, mail and telegrams to South Africa.[51] Later he would coin a memorable phrase which summed up the Labour Government’s shifty attitude to the law and individual rights, when he described certain sorts of picketing as ‘lawful intimidation’.[52]
49
His death had a particular significance for me, quite apart from the loss of a courageous friend: within days I was assigned a team of personal detectives who have been with me ever since.
51
The Attorney-General attempted unsuccessfully to stop NAFF applying for an injunction to prevent the boycott, claiming that he alone had discretion to decide on applications for injunctions from private citizens without standing in the action. The Court of Appeal found in favour of NAFF, but on appeal to the House of Lords the Attorney’s view was upheld.
52