The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Meanwhile, Scargill had said that opposition of an extra-parliamentary order was legitimate, the government not having had a majority of the vote. In characteristic apocalyptic style, he announced that ‘extra-parliamentary action will be the only course open to the working class’. What he meant was action contrary to his own union’s rule book. He could on his own authority organize a banning of overtime. He could only organize a strike by flouting rules to gain a majority, which he did, in a tradition that went back to Lenin’s own management of the Russian socialists in 1903: ‘Bolshevik’ means ‘majority’, the first, in this case, of many lies. But the government’s intelligence connections were sufficient for a rival union, based on profitable pits with the chance of substantial wages, to challenge Scargill. The Coal Board was now managed, not by comfortable upper-class appeasers of the Carrington class, but by an elderly Scots-man, Ian MacGregor, who had been brought back from America and who knew a great deal about managing such matters: he had already proved his worth at British Steel, though, there, he had had intelligent union leaders to deal with. He announced that loss-making pits would have to be closed, that a third of the miners (70,000) would have to be given compensation, and Scargill responded absurdly, as if he wanted all of his men to continue with their obsolete, filthy and dangerous jobs. He banned overtime in October 1983, and then, with ridiculously inappropriate timing, started a strike on 6 March 1984, at the end of winter. Most productive pits did not follow; attempts to picket and stop the (Nottingham) miners failed, despite a murder, because the police were firm. Scargill, with a baseball cap that went badly with this image of the last Leninist insurrection, failed to break through a police line. Then again, the power stations functioned, because stocks of coal were high, and imports, even from Poland, a supposedly Communist country, went ahead. This time round, government legal action was successful, as it had not been in 1972. In August, for instance, some of the miners took their own union to court over its failure to stage a proper strike ballot. A writ was even delivered at the Labour Party conference. Scargill tried to involve other heavy-industrial unions, the famous ‘triple alliance’ of coal, docks and railways which had been very effective with strikes in the past, back to before the First World War. The government had already managed to privatize some of the docks, and the pockets of dockers who still maintained a local monopoly were isolated and relatively powerless — as well as, in Liverpool, bereft of sense. The railwaymen were simply bought off. This time round, new technology — always an enemy of these old unions, at least if they had an unregenerate leadership — had weakened the old guard. British Steel, for instance, managed with Ro-Ro and free ports; it would no longer be held up by absurd dockland practices, which in the Heath era had involved gangs simply standing, watching other gangs do the work. There was much sentimentality as to the ‘communities’ of the miners, and efforts were made to enlist middle-class sympathies, which had mattered so much in the seventies. But in the end Scargill had a self-destructive urge, and, early in 1985, the strike crumbled. Yes, it had cost a great deal — the Coal Board had losses of over ?2bn. MacGregor himself, who had been less forthright, in private, than Margaret Thatcher would have wished, was dissociated within weeks. Curiously enough (and an echo of earlier patterns) the loyalist miners and civil servants were not rewarded, getting only small pensions. It would have been fitting had they been given decorations, but the honours system in England was for appeasing enemies rather than rewarding friends. Still, the old industrial unions, which had made so much trouble for earlier governments, Labour and Conservative, had in effect been defeated.

Coal and railways were of course the old world. One of these union troubles concerned the new — at that, an immensely important part of the new: the media. The British press had been greatly respected, especially The Times, and it generally managed its affairs with genial informality that somehow, mysteriously, produced results (there was a practice of shutting the leader-writer in a room with a typewriter and two bottles of wine, which went on until one such writer was found slumped over his machine, having typed the word ‘notwithstanding’). Under William Rees-Mogg, in the later seventies, economic journalists such as Peter Jay or Tim Congdon had hard-hitting things to say. However, the paper made severe losses, and there were great economies to be made if new machinery were to be used in printing. The printers’ unions — there were three — resisted and fought each other. After vicissitudes, the newspaper was acquired by a very hard-headed Australian, Rupert Murdoch, who already owned tabloid newspapers that caused some head-shaking as to crudeness, intrusion into private lives and what was soon to be called, in America, ‘dumbing down’. When the Belgrano was sunk in the Falklands War, one headline, ‘GOTCHA’, became famous. However, Murdoch knew how to deal with people, quietly dealt with a rival union altogether, set up a building in the dock areas, which had become derelict because of the dockers’ unions’ ways, and abandoned the original building in central London overnight. The newspapers were instantly produced, by the new methods, without interruption. Early in 1986 there were battles between enraged printers and the electricians or distributors, with police support: not a day’s production was lost, and the printers’ unions came to terms (on television, Murdoch was asked what he would recommend a striking printer now to do, and said, laconically, ‘Find another job’). Some of the journalists took the printers’ part and refused to co-operate, suggesting that a Murdoch Times would betray the newspaper’s status. Others took a different view, and the editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil (like MacGregor a Glaswegian), spoke for many when he took the radical Thatcherite line and advocated an Americanization of the country. Rupert Murdoch astutely used the profits from London to establish an empire all over the globe. He was much hated, but in the end was following an old media pattern: the Manchester Guardian itself had only got away with its moralizing because of the profits made by its sister newspaper, which reported the horseraces. However, here was now an empire based on mountains of debt, with mountains of profit, from media of all sorts which could make or break governments. At around the same time, in London and New York, banks moved into the same world; vast fortunes began to appear from thin air. The Reagan-Thatcher era was associated with a new economy, in which industry of the classic sort meant a degree of backwardness, much as had happened with peasant agriculture in the later nineteenth century. Brazils and Koreas metal-bashed; Turkey produced 90 per cent of the televisions sold in England, and the main road from Istanbul to Kayseri and Antep was choked with container lorries bearing goods to central Europe. London and New York plucked money out of the air.

The tidal change had much to do with technology. Its history proceeds in great leaps. In the middle of the nineteenth century, one of these had involved the railway; electricity had marked another, essentially in the early twentieth century, when it had enabled coal-poor countries such as France and Italy to acquire modern industry (aircraft and motor cars being an obvious instance in both cases). Now came another huge leap, in one view the greatest ever made — electronics, ‘information technology’. In 1980 there was a video cassette recorder in only 1 per cent of American households; by the end of the decade, in three fifths. Cable television, by then, reached half of households — earlier, 15 per cent. Turner Broadcasting survived near collapse and then, by the time of the Gulf War, had become the worldwide network, flattening the old network news programmes. Telephones in 1980 had been very basic, not much beyond the models of fifty years before. Ten years later, there was almost no limit to what they could do, including photography. The old Bell system had encountered some animosity, and in England the national telephone company, like the utilities, was widely regarded as a producer’s conspiracy against the public. Cheap long-distance transmission made for a vast change in this, and the old land-line monopolies were broken (although in some cases they managed to retain a great deal of their power). Cellular phones, fibreoptic cable, flourished, as did the fax machine, which was displacing the, also often despised, earlier methods of post offices. The biggest single item in this technological revolution was the personal computer.

In 1981 there were about 2 million such: seven years later, nearly 50 million — IBM the initial leader, followed by Apple Macintosh in 1984. By 1989 ‘a visiting Russian scientist would be impressed by the computer equipment of his American counterpart, but moved almost to tears by the computer equipment of his counterpart’s secretary’, says Robert Bartley, the Wall Street Journal’s poet in residence, and eighties consumption boomed, to the point at which American clothing or even food styles ran round the entire globe, even, at least for men, in Iran, where there was a forthrightly anti-American regime. The illustrations are endless. The basis was demand from people in new types of jobs — in the USA the participation of women went up from 51 to 57 per cent: almost 60 per cent of families had two earnings (the average family size declining somewhat, to 2.63 members) and the traditional single-earning family now accounted for one quarter of all households (as against nearly one third in 1980). One quarter of the new jobs came from business services and health care; computer and data-processing services led. Some of this followed economic first principles, as they had been established in the nineteenth century. Depression released energy from labour and capital — perhaps women belong in both categories — that had been poorly used. Interest rates, falling, enabled sharp-sighted businessmen to pay for new technology. This process, in the Atlantic world, had been delayed in the 1970s as governments tried to keep the old going — the old now including their own selves — although their unproductiveness was notorious, whether it was bureaucracy or nationalized public utilities. In the USA that process was not as strongly resisted as in western