The pressure on the Government to intervene directly to try to end the dispute now increased. Looking back, and comparing 1972 with the threatened miners’ strike of 1981 and the year-long strike of 1984—85, it is extraordinary how little attention we gave to ‘endurance’ — the period of time we could keep the power stations and the economy running with limited or no coal supplies — and how easily Cabinet was fobbed off by assurances that coal stocks were high, without considering whether those stocks were in the right locations to be usable, i.e. actually at the power stations. The possibility of effective mass picketing, which would prevent oil and coal getting to power stations, was simply not on the agenda. Instead, our response was to discuss the prospects for conciliation by Robert Carr and the use of ‘emergency powers’ which would allow us to conserve power station stocks a few weeks longer by imposing power cuts. There was a great deal of useless talk about ‘keeping public opinion on our side’. But what could public opinion do to end the strike? This was one more thing I learned from the Heath years — and anyway, on the whole public opinion wasn’t on our side. A further lesson from this period — when no fewer than five States of Emergency were called — was that for all the sense of urgency and decision that the phrase ‘emergency powers’ conveys they could not be relied upon to change the basic realities of an industrial dispute.
The situation steadily worsened. The crunch came on the morning of Thursday 10 February when we were all in Cabinet. A State of Emergency had been declared the previous day. By now Robert Carr was directly involved with the NCB and the NUM in trying to find a way out. But it was John Davies who dropped the bombshell. He told us that picketing had now immobilized a large part of the remaining coal stocks, and that the supplies still available might not even suffice beyond the end of the following week. Thereafter electricity output would fall to as little as 25 per cent of normal supply. Drastic power cuts were inevitable, and large parts of industry would be laid off. The Attorney-General reported that the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act against secondary boycotts, blacking of supplies and the inducement of other workers to take action resulting in the frustration of a commercial contract, would not come into force until 28 February. He thought that most of the picketing which had taken place during the strike was lawful. As regards the criminal law, some arrests had been made but, as he put it, ‘the activities of pickets confronted the police with very difficult and sensitive decisions’.
This was something of an understatement. The left-wing leader of the Yorkshire miners, Arthur Scargill, who was to organize the politically motivated miners’ strike I faced in 1984–85, was already busy winning his militant’s spurs. In the course of Cabinet a message came through to the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, which he read out. The Chief Constable of Birmingham had asked that the West Midlands Gas Board’s Saltley Coke Depot be closed because lorries were being prevented from entering by 7,000 ‘pickets’ who were facing just 500 police.
There was no disguising that this was a victory for violence. To the Left it came to assume legendary proportions. To large numbers of politicians and commentators it proved that no one could hope to stand up to the miners. Police self-confidence was shattered. From now on many senior policemen put greater emphasis on maintaining ‘order’ than on upholding the law. In practice, that meant failing to uphold the rights of individuals against the rule of the mob — though to be fair the police lacked the equipment as much as the stomach for the action required. For me, what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left. I understood, as they did, that the struggle to bring trade unions properly within the rule of law would be decided not in the debating chamber of the House of Commons, nor even on the hustings, but in and around the pits and factories where intimidation had been allowed to prevail.
Ted now sounded the retreat. He appointed a Court of Inquiry under the ubiquitous Lord Wilberforce. By now the power crisis had reached such proportions that we sat in Cabinet debating whether we had time to wait for the NUM to ballot its members on ending a strike; a ballot might take over a week to organize. There was therefore no inclination to quibble when Wilberforce recommended a massive pay increase, way beyond the level allowed for in the ‘n—1’ voluntary pay policy already in force.
But we were stunned when the militant majority on the NUM Executive rejected the court’s recommendation, demanding still more money and a ragbag of other concessions — ‘a list as long as your arm’, in the words of the miners’ President, Joe Gormley.
Ted summoned us all together on the evening of Friday 18 February to decide what to do. The dispute simply had to be ended quickly. If we had to go an additional mile, so be it. Later that night Ted called the NUM and the NCB to No. 10 and persuaded the union to drop the demand for more money, while conceding the rest. The NUM Executive accepted, and just over a week later so did the miners in a ballot. The dispute was over. But the devastation it had inflicted on the Government and indeed on British politics as a whole lived on.
The immediate effect was to convince bien pensant opinion that in a country like Britain there was simply no alternative to corporatism. The Sunday Times leader of 20 February put the point crisply:
After the Wilberforce settlement, there is only one course for the Government to adopt if it is to derive any profit from the ruin of its wages policy. It must open formal and serious talks with the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress to plot a way forward towards an organized policy for incomes. This will involve all sides of industry, but above all the Government itself, in the liquidation of old nostrums. But far from losing face, the Government would thereby seize the best chance to rebuild its economic policy.
Such a message found a ready hearing from shocked and bewildered ministers. The combination of the rise in unemployment, the events at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and the Government’s humiliation by the miners resulted in a fundamental reassessment of policy. I suspect that this took place in Ted’s own mind first, with other ministers and the Cabinet very much second. It was not so much that he jettisoned the whole Selsdon approach, but rather that he abandoned some aspects of it, emphasized others and added a heavy dose of statism which probably appealed to his temperament and his Continental European sympathies. We had always been keen advocates of economic growth: but now we promoted growth at the expense of sound finance. We had always been in favour of industrial and technological modernization: but now we relied on government intervention rather than competition to ensure it. We had always entertained a basic confusion between a ‘monetarist’ and a wage-push theory of inflation: we now ignored the first and swallowed the second to such an extent that we introduced the most comprehensively regulated system of wages and prices that peacetime Britain has known.
None of this pleased me. But our inability to resist trade union power, whether exerted through irresponsible wage demands which forced companies into liquidation and workers out of jobs, or through strikes which brought the country to a halt, was now manifest. The Industrial Relations Act itself already seemed hollow: it was soon to be discredited entirely. Like most Conservatives, I was prepared to give at least a chance to a policy which retained some of the objectives we had set out in 1969/70. I was even prepared to go along with a statutory prices and incomes policy, for a time, to try to limit the damage inflicted by the arrogant misuse of trade union power. But I was wrong. State intervention in the economy is not ultimately an answer to over-mighty vested interests: for it soon comes to collude with them.
It is unusual to hold Cabinets on a Monday, and I had arranged a long-standing scientific engagement for Monday 20 March 1972, so I was not present at the Cabinet which discussed the Budget and the new Industry White Paper on that day. Both of them signalled a change in strategy, each complementing the other. The Budget was highly reflationary, comprising large cuts in income tax and purchase tax, increased pensions and social security benefits and extra investment incentives for industry, It was strongly rumoured that Tony Barber and the Treasury were very unhappy with the Budget and that it had been imposed on them by Ted. The fact that the Budget speech presented these measures as designed to help Britain meet the challenge opened up by membership of the EEC in a small way confirms this. It was openly designed to provide a large boost to demand, which it was argued would not involve a rise in inflation, in conditions of high unemployment and idle resources. Monetary policy was mentioned, but only to stress its ‘flexibility’; no numerical targets for monetary growth were set.
On Wednesday 22 March John Davies published his White Paper on Industry and Regional Development, which was the basis for the 1972 Industry Act. Even more than the Budget, this was seen by our supporters and opponents alike as an obvious U-turn. Keith and I and probably others in the Cabinet were extremely unhappy, and some of this found its way into the press. As far as I can recall there had been no prior discussion of the White Paper in Cabinet: it was presented to the Commons in the Budget statement and its preparation within Government was subject to all the secrecy usually applied to Budget measures. From this point on I was conscious that on the Labour benches enmity had been transformed into contempt. I was not in the House at the time, but I read The Times report which sums up the reaction to John Davies’s speech on the Bilclass="underline"