Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
we had superficially similar backgrounds, Geoffrey and I were never close. It always seemed to me that he tried to overwhelm opponents with the force of his personality rather than with the force of his argument. This may have been because Ted had given him the task of getting the best deal he could in negotiations with the EEC – and that deal was not always in our best long-term interests.
My impression was that the two members of Cabinet Ted trusted most were Jim Prior and Peter Walker. Both had proved their loyalty, Jim as Ted’s PPS in Opposition, and Peter as organizer of his 1965 leadership campaign. Jim was Agriculture minister, a post which his farming background and rubicund features helped him make his own, before becoming Deputy Chairman of the Party under Peter Carrington in April 1972. Peter Walker’s thirst for the ‘modernization’ of British institutions must have helped draw him closer to Ted. He soon became Secretary of State for the huge new Department of the Environment, where he embarked with vigour upon the most unpopular local government reforms until my own Community Charge – and at the cost of far greater bureaucracy. Later he would go to the other conglomerate, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Jim and, still more so, Peter were younger than me, but both had far more influence over the general direction of government. Although their political views were very different from mine, I respected their loyalty to Ted and their political effectiveness.
The other members of Cabinet – Gordon Campbell at Scotland, George Jellicoe as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Lords, Peter Thomas, a close parliamentary neighbour and friend, as Secretary of State for Wales and Party Chairman, and Michael Noble briefly at Trade – did not figure large in discussions. I therefore found myself with just one political friend in Cabinet – Keith.
But for all the difficulties which were quickly upon us that summer and autumn of 1970, such melancholy reflections were still far from our thoughts. Indeed, Ted Heath, Tony Barber, Robert Carr and John Davies set out on the course of radical reform with impressive zeal; and the rest of us in the Cabinet were enthusiastic cheerleaders.
First, the Government embarked with a will on cutting public spending. Discussions began at the end of July. A target was agreed of £1,700 million net reduction in planned spending by 1974/75, and Ted circulated a paper on the economy to show his commitment to the strategy. The cuts were to fall most heavily on industrial spending, though as already noted I had my own departmental spending battles at Education. Investment grants were ended. The Industrial Re-organization Corporation (IRC) would be closed down. Aircraft and space projects would be subject to the closest scrutiny. Even with the reprieve of the hugely expensive Concorde project, largely on European policy grounds, it was an impressive freemarket economic programme. And it made possible a tax-cutting budget in October, which reduced the standard rate of income tax by 6d, down from 8s.3d in the pound (just over 41p), and made reductions in corporation tax to take effect at the beginning of the next financial year.
Nor was there any delay in bringing forward the other key feature of our economic programme – the Industrial Relations Bill. The framework of the Bill was already familiar: this was one of the areas of policy most thoroughly worked out in Opposition and we had published our proposals in 1968. The main principles were that collective bargaining agreements should be legally enforceable unless the parties to them agreed otherwise, and that the unions’ historic immunities from civil action should be significantly narrowed and confined to those whose rule books met certain minimum standards (‘registered unions’).
Cases brought under this legislation would be dealt with by a new system of industrial courts and tribunals, headed by a branch of the High Court – the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC). The Bill also gave new powers to the Secretary of State for Employment, when negotiation had failed, to apply to the NIRC either for an order deferring industrial action for up to sixty days – a ‘cooling off’ period – or for one requiring a secret ballot of the workers involved before a strike.
There was a good deal in the Bill that actively favoured trade unionism, for all the hostility it encountered on the Left. For the first time in English law there would be a legally enforceable right to belong (or not to belong) to a trade union. There would be statutory protection against unfair dismissal. Finally, the Bill would repeal provisions that made it a criminal offence for gas, water and electricity workers to strike during the lifetime of their contracts.
At the time I was a strong supporter of the Bill, although I had doubts about particular parts, such as the measure on essential services. We were all conscious that the previous Labour Government had backed off from its In Place of Strife proposals for trade union reform under a mixture of union and Party pressure. We were, therefore, doubly determined to make the changes required.
In retrospect, the philosophy of the Bill was muddled. It assumed that if the unions were in general confirmed in their powers they would discipline their members industrially, reducing wildcat strikes for instance, and use their industrial strength in a regulated and orderly fashion. But it also contained provisions to strengthen the powers of individuals against the unions. So the Bill was in part corporatist and in part libertarian.
Finally, we naively assumed that our opponents would play by the same rules as we did. In particular, we imagined that there would not be either mass opposition to laws passed by a democratically elected government or mass infringement of the criminal law, as in the miners’ strike of 1972. We did not recognize that we were involved in a struggle with unscrupulous people whose principal objectives lay not in industrial relations but in politics. It was later, as Leader of the Opposition, that I realized how far the extreme Left had penetrated into trade union leaderships and why that ‘giant’s strength’, of which the Tory pamphlet had spoken in the late 1950s, was now being used in such a ruthless manner. The communists knew that they could not be returned to Parliament, so they chose to advance their cause by getting into office in the trade union movement. And the fact that both the Wilson and Heath Governments had stood up to the unions and then lost, increased their influence more than if we had not challenged their power in the first place.
But at this early stage we pressed ahead. The TUC was told by Robert Carr in October 1970 that the central aspects of the Industrial Relations Bill were not negotiable. The Bill had its Second Reading in December. February and March 1971 saw mass protests and strikes against it. Labour used every device to fight the Bill, but in August 1971 it duly reached the Statute Book. The TUC Congress passed a resolution instructing unions to de-register. It therefore remained to be seen, when the Act came into force at the end of February 1972, what its practical effects would be – revolution, reform or business as usual. We were soon to find out.
Meanwhile other problems preoccupied us. It is sometimes suggested – and was at the time by Enoch Powell – that the Government’s decision in February 1971 to take control of the aerospace division of Rolls-Royce marked the first U-turn. This is not so. Shortly before the company told the Government of the impossible financial problems it faced (as a result of the escalating cost of the contract with Lockheed to build the RB-211 engine for its Tri-star aircraft), a constituent of mine had told me that he was worried about the company. So I asked Denis to look at the figures. I arrived home late one evening to find him surrounded by six years’ accounts. He told me that Rolls-Royce had been treating research and development costs as capital, rather than charging it to the profit and loss account. This spelt real trouble.
A few days later I was suddenly called to a Cabinet meeting and found Fred Corfield, the Aviation Minister, waiting in the Cabinet ante-room. ‘What are you here for, Fred?’ I asked. He replied gloomily: ‘Rolls-Royce.’ His expression said it all. At the meeting itself we heard the full story. To the amazement of my colleagues I confirmed the analysis, based on what Denis had told me. We decided without much debate to let the company itself go into liquidation but to nationalize the aerospace division. Over the next few months we renegotiated the original contract with Lockheed, which was then itself in financial difficulties. One could argue – and people did – about the terms and the sum which needed to be provided. But I do not think any of us doubted that on defence grounds it was important to keep an indigenous aircraft engine capability. And in the long term, of course, this was one ‘lame duck’ which eventually found the strength to fly away again into the private sector, when I was Prime Minister.
It was to be a year before