Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [61]
But by far the most contested issue was that of trade union immunities. Our proposals on secondary picketing had already begun to address it. But we now took a further step. We had received the report of the enquiry set up earlier into the recruitment activities of the printing union SLADE, undertaken by Mr Andrew Leggatt QC* In response, we decided to remove the immunity where industrial disruption was called or threatened by people other than those directly working for a particular firm with the intention of coercing its employees into joining a trade union.
We decided to go further, following the House of Lords decision in the MacShane case on 13 December. The MacShane case was important because it confirmed the wide scope of existing immunities in the case of secondary action. Most of the immunities then enjoyed by trade unions had their origin in the Trade Disputes Act (1906), which Labour extended significantly after its narrow election victory in October 1974. The MacShane case arose from a dispute that began in 1978 between the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and a number of provincial newspapers. The provincial papers managed to keep going during the dispute by publishing stories supplied to them by the Press Association. The NUJ unsuccessfully attempted to prevent this, first, by direct appeal to NUJ members working for the Press Association and then, when that failed, by instructing its people on national newspapers to black Press Association material altogether. In response the Daily Express applied for an injunction against the NUJ. The Court of Appeal in December 1978 ruled in favour of the Express that the NUJ secondary action had exceeded that which could be regarded as furthering the objectives of the dispute and therefore did not enjoy immunity. As a result of this decision, injunctions could be and were granted. However, when the case went to the House of Lords, the Appeal Court’s ruling was overturned. Essentially, the Lords decided that for purposes of law an industrial action was ‘in furtherance of a trade dispute’, and therefore immune, if trade union officials genuinely believed it to be so. This subjective test had the most disturbing implications. It meant that henceforth there would be virtually unlimited immunity for secondary industrial action.
The position was complicated by the outcome of two other court cases. One of these — N. W. L. Limited v. Nelson & Wood, or the ‘Nawala Case’ — resulted from the attempts of the International Transport Workers’ Federation to prevent the employment by a British shipping company of overseas seamen in British registered ships. The Federation’s action threatened the future of the British shipping industry. Still more important, however, was the second case, which widened the scope for secondary action in the steel strike. The Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (ISTC) had called out its members in the private steel sector as part of its dispute with the British Steel Corporation which had begun on 2 January 1980. Duport Steels, a private steel company, was granted an injunction by the Court of Appeal against Bill Sirs, General Secretary of the ISTC. The Court of Appeal ruled that immunity did not apply in this case because the ISTC’s argument was essentially with the Government rather than BSC itself. But again,