Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [220]
The earliest indications were that the dock strike would prove extremely difficult. On Monday 16 July I met the General Council of British Shipping for lunch and I found them in defeatist mood. This was an instance of something I came to know well: employers were always advising me to be tough except in their own industry. They told me that the strike was of greater extent than anything they had seen before in the docks.
I had called an ad hoc ministerial meeting that evening to review the overall position and we ran though the options. We recognized that if picketing spread to ‘non-scheme’ ports there was a high probability that civil action would be taken against the TGWU, and that there would be a strong case for activating the NCB’s suspended injunction against the NUM. The conflict seemed to be on the verge of a significant escalation.
My recognition of the importance of presentation, however, did lead me to take a specific initiative, which was to set up a group of junior ministers from the departments concerned to co-ordinate government statements during the crisis, under the chairmanship of Tom King, then Employment Secretary. Peter Walker was not particularly pleased. He always liked to play his cards very close to his chest and although he did so with consummate skill there was a risk that one branch of government would lose confidence or lack proper information about what we were trying to do. In the end it was a great success: for once all of us in government contrived to sing the same song day after day.
In the event the dock strike proved far less of a problem than we had feared. Whatever the views of their leaders, the ordinary dockers were simply not prepared to support action which threatened their jobs: even those at the NDLS ports were less than enthusiastic, fearing that a strike would hasten the demise of the scheme itself. But the decisive role was played by the lorry drivers who had an even greater direct interest in getting goods through and were not prepared to be bullied and threatened. By 20 July the TGWU had no alternative but to call off the strike. It had lasted only ten days.
The end of the dock strike was only one of a number of important developments at this time. Following the fruitless meeting between the NCB and NUM on 23 May, talks had resumed at the beginning of July. Our hope was that they would end quickly and that the NCB would succeed this time in exposing the unreasonableness of Mr Scargill’s position. There would then be a chance that striking miners would realize that they had no hope of winning and a return to work would begin.
However, the talks had drifted on, and there were indications that the NCB was softening its negotiating position. One problem was that each new round of negotiations naturally discouraged a return to work: few would risk going back if a settlement seemed to be in the offing. More troubling still, there was a real danger that the talks would end by fudging the issue on the closure of uneconomic pits: a formula was being developed based upon the proposition that no pit should be closed if it was capable of being ‘beneficially developed’. The NCB was also prepared to give a commitment to keep open five named pits that the NUM had claimed were due for closure. We were very alarmed. Not only were there ambiguities in the detailed wording of the proposals, but (far worse) a settlement on these lines would have given Mr Scargill the chance to claim victory.
But on 18 July, two days before the end of the dock strike, negotiations collapsed. I have to say I was enormously relieved.
A week later we reached