It was also at this time that a new shamelessness on the part of the Left became apparent. Until the early 1970s, Transport House banned members of certain ‘proscribed organizations’ on the far Left from being members of the Labour Party. The lifting of this ban, long sought by the Left, was a very significant landmark in Labour’s drift to extremism. Hard-left Labour MPs saw less reason to conceal their links with communist organizations. The warmth of fraternal relations between trade union leaders and socialist politicians on the one hand and the Soviet bloc on the other was undisguised. High-ranking Soviet visitors were received by both the TUC and the Labour Party. Trotskyist organizations, such as the Militant Tendency, began to gain a grip on Labour Party constituencies. There was an almost tangible sense that, whatever the IMF or Prime Minister Jim Callaghan might think, it was the extreme Left whose programme represented Labour’s future, and that whether the tactics employed to achieve it were violent or peaceful was the only question at issue. In such an atmosphere, the scenes at Grunwick suggested — and not only to the Left itself — that perhaps the revolution had begun.
As well as the assault on the rule of law and the advance of the extreme Left, however, Grunwick also came to symbolize the closed shop. This was because NAFF, which defended Grunwick’s cause, was also vigorously campaigning against the closed shop. Also APEX clearly wished to coerce Grunwick’s employees, probably with a view ultimately to achieving a closed shop in the industry. More broadly, the closed shop represented a secure redoubt of trade union power from which further assaults on liberty could be mounted.
Yet, for all that, Grunwick was not limited to the closed shop; it was about the sheer power of the unions. Appalled as I was by what was happening at Grunwick, I did not believe that the time was yet ripe to depart from the cautious line about trade union reform (which I had agreed with Jim Prior) in order to mount a radical attack on the closed shop. We had to consider a much wider raft of questions, ranging from the unions’ immunity under civil law, to violence and intimidation which only escaped the criminal law because they came under the guise of lawful picketing. Until we had begun to solve some of these problems, we could not effectively outlaw the closed shop. The Prior line, which we had evolved when opposing elements of the Labour Government’s Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts, was to widen the safeguards and improve the compensation for workers who lost their jobs as a result of the closed shop, without trying to ban it as such. (It was widely argued that it would in practice continue to exist as a result of covert understandings between employers and trade unions, whatever we did; moreover, some groups of employers actually favoured the closed shop because it made their lives easier since they could rely on the trade union to discipline the workforce.) And this was the ground on which we uneasily stood.[53]
Jim Prior, himself, stood rather more easily than I did. For him, I suspect, it was a practical question rather than a moral one: the important thing was to be realistic and accept that the trade unions could not be tamed by law. Any reform would need their cooperation. By contrast, Keith Joseph was an unswerving opponent of what he saw as a breach of human rights resulting from collectivist bullying. Jim’s and Keith’s opposing views, expressed in public statements on the Scarman Report on the Grunwick dispute, brought all this out into the open. I have described earlier the problems this caused me on my American visit.[54] At the time, I thought that Keith’s criticisms of Lord Scarman were too sharp, though the Scarman Report itself was anything but a judicial document and had no legal force. Moreover Jim, not Keith, was the spokesman on these matters. Either I sacked Jim, or I moved him (neither of which I could afford to do), or I had to go along with his approach.
That was what I did. In retrospect, Jim and I were wrong and Keith was right. What the whole affair demonstrated was that our careful avoidance of any kind of commitment to changing the law on industrial relations, though it might make sense in normal times, would be weak and unsustainable in a crisis. But I took the decision to support Jim in part because, as yet, the climate was still not right to try to harden our policy. Within the Shadow Cabinet the great majority of my colleagues would not have gone along with me. But some time soon the nettle would have to be grasped.
In reflecting on all this, I came back to the idea of a referendum. On my return from America I knew that I would be pressed hard by Brian Walden, who was making his debut as interviewer on the television programme Weekend World, on what a Conservative Government would do if it were faced with an all-out confrontation with the trade unions. I had to have a convincing answer: and there was not much hope that any amount of discussion within Shadow Cabinet would arrive at one. So on the programme I argued that although such a confrontation was unlikely, yet if such an emergency was reached, then a referendum might be necessary. The suggestion was well received both in the press and — most significantly in the light of the stories of splits and conflicts — got public backing from both wings of the Party. (It helped perhaps that Jim was expecting a rough ride at the Conservative Party Conference over the closed shop.) I set up a Party Committee under Nick Edwards to report on referenda and their possible uses. But, of course, though the suggestion of a referendum bought us vital time, it was not in itself an answer to the problem of trade union power. Assuming that we won a referendum, so demonstrating that the general public backed the Government against the militants, it would still be necessary to frame the measures to reduce trade union power. And so far we had not seriously considered what those measures should be.
EDGING AWAY FROM INCOMES POLICY
The argument about trade union power remained linked to that about incomes policies. At this time the Government’s own incomes policy was looking increasingly fragile. No formal policy could be agreed with the unions after the end of the second year of ‘restraint’, though the TUC exhorted its members not to seek more than one increase in the next twelve months and the Chancellor of the Exchequer pleaded for settlements to be below 10 per cent (backed as before with the threat of sanctions against employers who paid more). But, of course, whatever difficulties the Labour Government had in agreeing incomes policy with the trade unions were likely to pale into insignificance by comparison with ours. Unfortunately, we were committed to produce a document on economic policy, including incomes policy, before the 1977 Party Conference. David Howell, an able journalist of monetarist persuasions and also a front-bench spokesman, was the principal draftsman. And Geoffrey Howe, remorselessly seeking some kind of consensus between the conflicting views in his Economic Reconstruction Group, had by now become thoroughly convinced of the merits of German-style ‘concerted action’ within some kind of economic forum.
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In fact, it was not until 1990 that we passed legislation to end the closed shop, making it unlawful to deny people a job because they are, or are not, members of a union, though we had already significantly tightened the law on the closed shop in earlier legislation.