zones, training schemes and new technology.27 But finding that she could not prevent the numbers of the jobless rising remorselessly, Mrs Thatcher found a way of turning the pain of unemployment to her advantage. Skilfully seizing on one of the most positive role models peculiarly available to a woman Prime Minister, she portrayed herself as a nurse – or sometimes a doctor – administering nasty medicine to cure the country’s self-inflicted illness. ‘Which is the better nurse?’ she asked:
The one who smothers the patient with sympathy and says ‘Never mind, dear, there, there, you just lie back and I’ll bring you all your meals… I’ll look after you.’ Or the nurse who says ‘Now, come on, shake out of it… It’s time you put your feet on the ground and took a few steps…’ Which do you think is the better nurse?… The one who says come on, you can do it. That’s me.28
This was clever presentation, and it worked. After the dismal spiral of inflation, strikes and steadily mounting unemployment through the 1970s, the public was at least half ready to believe that any effective cure for the nation’s sickness was bound to be painful, and was masochistically ready to endure it. The figure of the strict Nurse Thatcher struck a chord in the British psyche. Though the Conservatives had not campaigned on any such prospectus, and opinion polls showed the Government’s popularity sinking ever lower, Labour was increasingly distracted and marginalised by its bitter internal power struggle, which the left was clearly winning. In November 1980, when Callaghan retired, the party abdicated any claim to be a serious opposition by electing the sentimental old left-winger Michael Foot in preference to the robust and realistic Denis Healey. At a level deeper than opinion polls the electorate seemed to accept that there was indeed, as Geoffrey Howe asserted, ‘no alternative’.29 The phrase was originally the Chancellor’s, but the nickname TINA – ‘There Is No Alternative’ – quickly attached itself to the Prime Minister. She declared in a confidence debate just before the House rose in July 1980: ‘We are doing what the country elected us to do. The Government will have the guts to see it through.’30
Three months later, at the party conference in Brighton, she made her most famous retort to the fainthearts who were calling for a U-turn, supplied as usual by Ronnie Millar. ‘You turn if you want to,’ she told the delighted representatives, then paused while they laughed, thinking that was the punchline. ‘The Lady’s not for turning.’31[d] Privately she had already given the same assurance to her staff. ‘She made it absolutely clear,’ John Hoskyns recalled, ‘she would really rather be chucked out than do a U-turn.’32 Whether the policy was economically right or wrong, whether or not it was true that there was no alternative, her resolution conveyed itself to the country and won its grudging admiration. After the Wilson – Heath – Callaghan years of drift and compromise, Mrs Thatcher’s sheer defiance was a bravura performance which deflected – or at least suspended – criticism.
Softly, softly
But the heart of Thatcherism was not in monetarism anyway. Monetarism was merely an economic theory which few ministers, let alone commentators or the public, fully understood.To Mrs Thatcher monetarism was essentially a tool, not a dogma, to be discarded if it did not work. Her real purpose was much more political: purging what she called socialism from the economy by encouraging enterprise in place of subsidy and regulation, cutting overmanning and restrictive practices, particularly in the public sector, and above all curbing the power of the overmighty unions.
Union power was the great symbolic dragon which she had been elected to slay. It was the unions which had humiliated and ultimately destroyed the last Conservative Government in 1972–4, and union-fostered anarchy which had done more than anything else to bring the Conservatives back to power in 1979, with a clear mandate to bring the bully-boys to heel.
Nevertheless this was another area in which Mrs Thatcher proceeded cautiously. Her treatment of trade- union reform, indeed, offers a casebook example of prudence overruling instinct, her head ruling her heart. For one thing she needed Prior in her first Cabinet. He had invested heavily in his consensual approach to industrial relations and enjoyed the support of other old Heathites like Willie Whitelaw and Peter Carrington. Mrs Thatcher had little choice but to confirm him as Employment Secretary in May 1979, and having once appointed him she could not afford to lose him, so she had to go along with his approach, frustrating though it was to her backbench zealots.
At the same time she recognised that Heath had courted disaster in 1971 by trying to reform the whole of industrial relations law in one comprehensive Bill. The political climate was much more propitious now than then. But still there was a shrewd argument for tackling the problem one step at a time, carrying public opinion with the Government and denying the unions a single emotive cause to rally round. Her strategy, therefore, was not to confront the unions but to outflank them by appealing over the heads of the unrepresentative and timewarped leaders to the rank-and-file members who had voted Conservative in unprecedented numbers in May and who – polls showed – overwhelmingly supported reform. Her constant theme was that it was not only the public but ordinary trade unionists who suffered from the abuse of union power. These ordinary members had voted Tory, she believed, because they recognised that ‘our policy represents their ambition for their own future and for their families, for a better standard of living and better jobs’.33 The purpose of the Government’s reform was to encourage those ordinary Tory-voting trade unionists to reclaim their unions from the control of the militants.
She further marginalised the union barons by ignoring them. The TUC Secretary-General, Len Murray, complained that Mrs Thatcher ‘rejected the idea of trade unions as valid institutions within society… which, even if you didn’t like them, you were stuck with and had to come to some sort of agreement’.34 For her part she firmly denied them the role they had come to see as their right by eschewing any form of pay policy, refusing to intervene in industrial disputes and letting economic realities and the rising toll of unemployment educate the workforce and emasculate the militants.
Legislation played only a supporting role in this process. Following a consultation document in July, Prior published his Employment Bill in December 1979. Its scope was modest, proposing only what had been promised in the Tory manifesto. Secondary picketing – that is, picketing workplaces not directly involved in a dispute – was outlawed, but not secondary strike action. Employees who refused to join unions were given increased rights of appeal and compensation against the operation of closed shops; but the closed shop itself was not banned (despite Mrs Thatcher repeating that she was ‘absolutely against the closed shop in principle’).35 Thirdly, Government money was made available to encourage unions to hold secret ballots. There was no mention in the Bill of any of the more draconian measures demanded by the Tory right: cutting strikers’ entitlement to benefits, making union funds liable to action for civil damages, or making members who wished to support the Labour party ‘opt in’ to paying the political levy, instead of requiring those who did not to opt out. All these were more or less explicitly left to further Employment Acts further down the road.
The skill of this approach was demonstrated by the unions’ predictably exaggerated response. By vowing ‘total opposition’ to what Murray called ‘a fundamental attack’ on workers’ rights, the TUC only confirmed its reputation as an unthinking dinosaur.36 Prior’s strategy was perfectly designed to demonstrate that the union leaders were out of touch with their members. When the TUC tried to revive the memory of its successful campaign against Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill by calling a ‘Day of Action’ in May 1980, it failed dismally when no more than a few thousand activists stayed off work. ‘People will have no truck with political strikes,’ Mrs Thatcher asserted in the House of Commons. ‘They would rather get on with the job.’37
Up to the end of January 1980, Mrs Thatcher stoutly defended Prior’s ‘modest and sensible’ Bill as ‘a very good start’. Even after the steel unions began a bitter strike against the British Steel Corporation’s plans to rationalise the industry, she specifically ruled out – ‘for the moment’ – action on secondary strikes and strikers’ benefits. 38 In February, however, the situation was transformed. First, the steel dispute spread, with secondary picketing of private steelmakers leading to violent scenes reminiscent of the previous winter. At the same moment the House of Lords’ judgement in an important test case,
