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
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]
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]
