Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
of dispute.
Admittedly, the threatened oil embargo and oil price rises resulting from the Arab-Israeli war that autumn made things far worse. As the effects of the miners’ industrial action bit deeper, the sense that we were no longer in control of events deepened. Somehow we had to break out. This made a quick general election increasingly attractive. Quite what we would have done if we had been re-elected is, of course, problematic. Perhaps Ted would have liked to go further towards a managed economy. Others would probably have liked to find a way to pay the miners their Danegeld. Keith and I and a large part of the Parliamentary Conservative Party would have wanted to discard the corporatist and statist trappings with which the Government was now surrounded and try to get back to the free market approach from which we had allowed ourselves to be diverted in early 1972.
At Cabinet on Tuesday 13 November it was all gloom as the crisis accelerated on every front. Tony Barber told us that the October trade figures that day would show another large deficit.
One shrewd move on Ted’s part at the beginning of December was to bring Willie Whitelaw back from Northern Ireland to become Employment Secretary in place of Maurice Macmillan. Willie was both conciliatory and cunning, a combination of qualities particularly necessary if some way were to be found out of the struggle with the miners. The Government’s hand was also strengthened by the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, the opinion polls were now showing us with a clear lead over Labour as the public reacted indignantly to the miners’ actions. In these circumstances, all but the most militant trade unionists would be fearful of a confrontation precipitating a general election.
On Thursday 13 December Ted announced the introduction of a three-day working week to conserve energy. He also gave a broadcast that evening. This gave an impression of crisis which polarized opinion in the country. At first industrial output remained more or less the same, itself an indication of the inefficiency and overmanning of so much of British industry. But we did not know this at the time. Nor could we know how long even a three-day week would be sustainable. I found strong support among Conservatives for the measures taken. There was also understanding of the need for the £1.2 billion public spending cuts, which were announced a few days later.
At this stage we believed that we could rely on business leaders. Shortly before Christmas, Denis and I went to a party at a friend’s house in Lamberhurst. There was a power cut and so night lights had been put in jam jars to guide people up the steps. There was a touch of wartime spirit about it all. The businessmen there were of one mind: ‘Stand up to them. Fight it out. See them off. We can’t go on like this.’ It was all very heartening. For the moment.
There still seemed no honourable or satisfactory way out of the dispute itself. The Government offer of an immediate inquiry into the future of the mining industry and miners’ pay if the NUM went back to work on the basis of the present offer was turned down flat.
It was clear that, if and when we managed to come through the present crisis, fundamental questions would need to be asked about the Government’s direction. The miners, backed in varying degrees by other trade unions and the Labour Party, were flouting the law made by Parliament. The militants were clearly out to bring down the Government and to demonstrate once and for all that Britain could only be governed with the consent of the trade union movement. This was intolerable not just to me as a Conservative Cabinet minister but to millions of others who saw the fundamental liberties of the country under threat. Denis and I, our friends and most of my Party workers, felt that we now had to pick up the gauntlet and that the only way to do that was by calling and winning a general election. From now on, this was what I urged whenever I had the opportunity.
I was, though, surprised and frustrated by Ted Heath’s attitude. He seemed out of touch with reality, still more interested in the future of Stage 3 and in the oil crisis than he was in the pressing question of the survival of the Government. Cabinet discussions concentrated on tactics and details, never the fundamental strategy. Such discussions were perhaps taking place in some other forum; but I rather doubt it. Certainly, there was a strange lack of urgency. I suspect it was because Ted was secretly desperate to avoid an election and did not seriously wish to think about the possibility of one. In the end, perhaps – as some of us speculated – because his inner circle was split on the issue, Ted finally did ask some of us in to see him, in several small groups, on Monday 14 January in his study at No. 10.
By this stage we were only days away from the deadline for calling a 7 February election – the best and most likely ‘early’ date. At No. 10 in our group John Davies and I did most of the talking. We both strongly urged Ted to face up to the fact that we could not have the unions flouting the law and the policies of a democratically elected government in this way. We should have an early election and fight unashamedly on the issue of ‘Who governs Britain?’ Ted said very little. He seemed to have asked us in for form’s sake. I gathered that he did not agree, though he did not say as much. I went away feeling depressed. I still believe that if he had gone to the country earlier we would have scraped in.
The following Wednesday, 30 January, with the strike ballot still pending, an emergency Cabinet was called. Ted told us that the Pay Board’s report on relativities had now been received. The question was whether we should accept the report and set up new machinery to investigate ‘relativities’ claims. The miners had always claimed to be demanding an improvement in their relative pay – hence their rejection of Ted’s ‘unsocial hours’ provision, which applied to all shift workers. The Pay Board report might provide a basis for them to settle within the incomes policy – all the more so because it specifically endorsed the idea that changes in the relative importance of an industry due to ‘external events’ could also be taken into account when deciding pay. The rapidly rising price of oil was just such an ‘external event’.
We felt that the Government had no choice but to set up the relativities machinery. Not to do so – having commissioned the relativities report in the first place – would make it seem as if we were actively trying to prevent a settlement with the miners. And with an election now likely we had to consider public opinion at every step.
An election became all but certain when, on Tuesday 5 February, we learned that 81 per cent of those voting in the NUM ballot had supported a strike. Election speculation reached fever pitch from which there was no going back. Ted told us at Cabinet two days later that he had decided to go to the country. The general election would take place on Thursday 28 February.
Willie proposed formally to refer the miners’ claim to the Pay Board for a relativities study. He couched his argument for this course entirely in terms of it giving us something to say during the election in reply to the inevitable question: How will you solve the miners’ dispute if you win? Cabinet then made the fateful decision to agree to Willie’s proposal.
Because of the emergency nature of the election, I had not been involved in the early drafts of even the education section of the manifesto, which was now published within days. There was little new to say, and the dominant theme of the document – the need for firm and fair government at a time of crisis – was clear and stark. The main new pledge was to change the system whereby Social Security benefits were paid to strikers’ families.
During most of the campaign I was reasonably confident that we would win. Conservative supporters who had been alienated by the U-turns started drifting back to us. Indeed, their very frustrations at what they saw as our past weaknesses made them all the more determined to back us now that we had decided, as they saw it, to stand up to trade union militancy. Harold Wilson set out Labour’s approach in the context of a ‘social contract’ with the unions. Those who longed for a quiet life could be expected to be seduced by that. But I felt that if we could stick to the central issue summed up by the phrase ‘Who governs?’ we would win the argument, and with it the election.
I felt victory – almost tangibly – slip away from us in the last week. I just could not believe it when I heard on the radio of the leak of evidence taken by the Pay Board which purported to show that the miners could have been paid more within Stage 3, with the implication that the whole general election was unnecessary. The Government’s attempts to deny this – and there did indeed turn out to have been a miscalculation – were stumbling and failed to carry conviction. From now