The Struggles That Toppled Heath's Union - Bashing Tea

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TUC leader Vic Feather: TUC looked for ways not of sidies from food and rail the dole. fares. In Heath's Thatcher- Heath's milk-snatcher Education Secretary The working class certainly has the strength and confidence to confront and defeat the right wing Thatcher This is the clear lesson from three and a half years of. Tory. misrule under Heath, in which an equally determined group of businessmen and bankers also set out hoping to tame the trade unions and drive up the profitability of crisis-ridden British capitalism.

Having started out with characteristic Tory arrogance and ruthlessness, the Heath government faced a mounting tide of working class opposition on every front-and was forced from office in disgrace in the midst of the miners' pay struggle in early 1974 Pessimism At a time when pessimists will see the 1979 election as a major defeat, and reformists of every stripe are seeking excuses to explain Callaghan's electoral disaster and Thatcher's success, it is particularly important to focus on the continuity of the class arine which in the case LIV VAUV . of the Heath government, vividly refuted the idea that working class involvement in politics revolves around five-yearly elections or the Parliamentary arena.

Only the emergence of the extreme right wing Thatcher leadership in the wake of Heath's defeat, and fading. memories of his period of office, make it possible for Heath to be viewed now as some kind of 'moderate' Tory.

The opposite was the case.

In many ways the Heath government marked an abrupt change from the methods and personnel of the Tory governments during the 'boom' period.the infamous "thirteen years of Tory misrule".

Aggressive

The crisis facing British capitalism in the collapse of the boom was so intense that the most aggressive sections of the British capitalist class were thrust to the forefront of this party of big business, displacing the old layers of landed gentry-the MacMillans, the DouglasHomes, and their fellow tweed-clad gentlefolk.• The bloody pleasures of grouse-shooting were replaced with the frantic hunt for ways of screwing increased profits from the working class.

Forward from the Tory ranks came such business advocates as former CBI chief John Davies, investment tycoon Peter Walker, building boss Sir Keith Joseph, and others with ettensive business interests including Anthony Barber, Edward Du Cann, Reginald Maudling and Robert Carr.

Alongside . these men were retained those aristocratic and landowning elements best suited to co-ordinating the all-round offensive on the working class-Whitelaw, Carrington and Lord Hailsham. (then Quintin Hogg).

Ruthless

The policies this new team wanted were more ruthless, more abrupt, than the traditional anti-working class policies pursued under previous Tory governments.

And they wanted them implemented with an urgency suited to the mounting crisis of British capitalism.

But they did not campaign openly for such policies the 1970 election. Instead, Tory campaign strategy rested on hiding the reality, of their policies behind a barrage of generalities.

These generalities were first spelled out for the benefit of the Tory press in January 1970 at a shadow cabinet meeting at the Selsdon Park Hotel.

Heath's men-much as Thatcher's team has done in the. 1979 campaign-proclaimed themselves advocates of 'law and order' , of reduced taxation, of restricted îmmigration, and of 'reforming the unions'.

Confidence trick

Among their more effective confidence tricks in the run-up to the June 18 1970 election was Heath's vote-catching televised speech two days before the polls promising to "cut prices at a stroke" , supposedly through the abolition of Selective Employment Tax and the introduction of Value Added Tax.

The echo of this farcical pledge was also heard in 1979-in Thatcher's endless cant about the Labour Heath government's record on prices and her repetition of promises to cut direct taxes and substitute indirect taxes.

The reality in either case is of course. that top paid managers and employers receive thumping tax cuts on their already inflated salaries, while working class families pay for them through steep price increases on basic goods in the shops and slashed social services.

Heath's pledge on prices was to become one of the most notorious election promises on record: but in the wake of six years of right wing Labour government under Wilson it helped to secure the votes needed for a 30-seat Tory majority on June 18.

Once safely in office, the Tories' real plans could be set in motion. Prices were to Heath's first 1l months in office-the biggest single increase since the food price index was set up in 1962.

•By October 1970, Chancellor Anthony Barber was ready to present a mini-budget that doubled prescription charges, ended free school milk, raised charges for school meals, spectacles and dental treatremoving but working with Tories pay ended Charges were introduced for admission to museums and art galleries, and sick pay for the first three days of absence was ended. For the rich; however, it was a tax bonanza, with a 6d cut in income tax bringing hefty increases in bosses' take-home pay. It was working class families who found themselves worse off, with school meals increases alone swallowing up their tax cuts.

Abandoned were cynical election pledges to make £30 million available to relieve poverty. Instead, Sir Keith Joseph presided over the miserly £8m funds allocated to «Family Incomes Supplement"-a direct government subsidy for low-wage employers.

Meanwhile within two weeks of taking office Heath had plunged headlong into talks on entry into the Common Market.

This move was designed to forge greater links between Européan and British capitalist industry, at the expense of huge increases in food and other prices, and massive rationalisation of industry, forcing thousands of workers onto view no expense was too great for the working class to bear in solving the desperate problems of British capitalism.

The "negotiations" on EEC entry, headed by Geoffrey Rippon, proved as farcical as Heath's own election pledge on prices.

The Industrial Relations Bill took rather long to get under way-but only because the Tories kept adding to it as it emerged. By December 15 1970 it was • receiving its second reading in the Commons.

Unsuccessful

Based largely on Wilson's unsuccessful 1969 anti-union bill 'In Place of Strife' (which Wilson had withdrawn, : after massive. protests by workers, on the basis of a 'Concordat'-style 'solemn and binding' undertaking by TUC leaders they they would police the actions of their members) the Tory Bill set out to enmesh the trade unions in a straightjacket of legal restrictions.

It set up a compulsory register of 'recognised' trade unions, from which existing unions were forced to de-register in order to withdraw, but which afforded

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PRINT WORKERSsay Demonstrations and token protests fail to kill the bill. In chaige of I.R recognition to a whole number of tame staff assoc¡ations and bosses' house unions as a means of blocking unionisation.

Union rule books were to be vetted by the capitalist state.

The Act made written collective agreements legally enforceable-in step towards US-style three-year contracts, which specifically outlaw strike action even over safety issues.

• Breaches of such agreements would therefore lay unions open to unlimited claims for damages in the As arbiter of the immensely complex Industrial Relations Act a new court-the Vational Industrial Relations Courtwas to be set up, with legal powers to order workers to suspend strike action for a "cooling off period" of up to 60 days and to order the holding of secret ballots. In keeping with the undisguised city-slicker image of the Heath government, the court even abandoned the theatrical pretence of impartial "justice' represented by the wigs and robes of the judiciary: -instead its president, Sir John Donaldson, meted out the arrogant dictates of British capitalism clad in an ordinary, if expensive, suit.

Wigless Judge Donaldson But as was to emerge clearly, this was a real court, with the power to fine unions sequester their LIANIA assets, and jail trade unionists.

The Act itself was immensely long and complex-containing also, for example, provisions to restrict the freedom of the press in industrial reporting.

Much of it was never even discussed in Parliament, as a result of the "guillotine"

Its central thrust, however, was unmistakeable: it was a conscious move to strip away the legal rights won in struggle by the unions and set back the clock to 1901, when the historic Taff Vale judgement had made unions liable for damages arising from industrial disputes.

The objective was to legally blackmail the collaborators in the trade union bureaucracy into acting as policemen over their membership-for fear of penal fines.

accept But, as we shall see, the working class was in no mood to accept such measures trom •Tory government, having already defeated a much milder form of legal attack from Wilson in 1969.

Heath was to have more success however in unforcing Tory, policy on other key issues.

The supporting role played for the Tories in the 1970 election campaign by Enoch Powell was acknowledged in a vicious Immigration Bill, which created second-class citizenship for black immigrants and imposed further restrictions upon them.

Heath himself had posed unconvincingly as a 'liberal' on the race issue during the election campaign, but had refused to separate himself in any way from Powell's viciously racialist and red-baiting election speeches, which went so far .as to implicitly allege that figures on coloured immigration were being manipulated by 'traitors' and 'Maoists' in the main government ministries.

The Tories' commitment to smaller and larger landlords, and their • bitter hostility to council housing which keeps down rents. in the privaté sector was also spelled out unmistakeably in the Housing Finance Act -misnamed "A Fair Deal For Housing" , introduced in 1971.

subsidies the objective oi inis Act m1. 1. 1• was to withdraw housing subsidies to the tune of £500 million per yearwhich could then be handed out to big business and employers in tax concessions.

At the same time councils would be required, in stages, to raise rents on their housing to the prevailing market level-the Tories' idea of a "fair" rentmeaning in many instances more than doubling existing rents.

Council house building would be effectively halted Resistance to this punitive measure was immediate: previously moribund tenants' associations sprang. back to life; new tenants' bodies were formed. Militant demonstrations took place-particularly in the North. West.

But the ignominious retreat of Labour councilsonly a handful of whom offered even verbal resistance to implementing the Act-and the refusal of the trade union bureaucracy to champion the fight, left the struggle in the last analysis at an individual level.

The gallant exception was the Labour council at Clay Cross, which stood firm in its defiance of the Act, and proceeded also to flout Heath's pay laws.

For this the councillors faced legal penalties including JULI including romarol fram office and compulsory repayment of the money they had spent or refused to collect-penalties that were shamefully upheld by the returned Wilson government in 1974.

But if the British working class faced a battery of repressive measures, then so did the Irish people.

Wilson's government had sent troops in 1969 to halt the process of radicalisation of the Irish working class reflected in the Civil Rights campaign.

Far from "protecting" the oppressed Catholic mınonıy in une six counues, the British army had been sent only after the "Battle of the Bogside" had proved the ability of the nationalist population to defend itself and defeat the sectarian loyalist thugs of the B' Specials and the RUC.

But for the Tories this military repression was not enough.

1971 saw the introduction of internment, imprisoning hundreds. of suspected republicans, and of vicious methods of torture of republican prisoners that later became an international scandal, whitewashed in the Compton Report. .

As routine army terror using CS gas and rubber bullets against protestors plainly failed to check growing resistance to imperialism the Tories cold-bloodedly plotted the slaughter of 13 unarmed young demonstrators, shot in the back by the Parachute Regiment in the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 30, 1972.

When these murders actually led to an increase in IRA recruitment, the Tories went even further and through Defence Minister Lord Carrington, plotted a series of provocations carried out by the Littlejohn brothers, Kenneth . and Keith, designed to discredit the IRA and create the climate for still further repression.

And it was the Tories that in April 1973 railroaded in the no-jury Diplock Courts, designed to rubber-stamp convictions on the unsubstantiated word of a concealed police officer, or on the basis of confessions beaten from supposed "suspects"

Throughout this period the scandalous compliance of the Labour leadership to every aspect of Tory military repression in Ireland left opposition restricted to a comparative handful of socialists and internationalists within the labour movement.

LAGERS SPIRIT ST Heath's government massively However, the fact remains that wherever a spark of leadership was offered, the working class showed itself ready and willing to fight tooth 'and nail against the Tories and everything this businessmen's government stood for.

Immediately prior to the 1970 election a strike by SOGAT printworkers had brought the national press to a standstill for five days. And within a month of Tanth Arlier -ff:-- neal raking ounce a aocks strike fighting for an improvement of a 4-7% pay offer brought the government to declare a State of Emergency.

The winter of 1970-71 brought the bitter pay battle by power-workersheaded off by the first of a series of "special case" inquiries into pay and conditions.

Relying on the collaboration of right wing EETPU leader Chapple, the Wilberforce inquiry failed to improve the basic pay offer to the power workers, but offered instead an improvement in fringe benefits.

The Tory moves to legislate the Industrial Relations Bill in late 1970 proved an important testing ground for the leadership of the working class.

The Trotskyists of the Socialist Labour League correctly argued that this frontal attack on the working class and its organisations could be defeated not by parliamentary debate or by protest marches and token strikes, but only by the mobilisation ot General Strike to bring lown the Heath government.

This position-denounced by reformists, Communist Party Stalinists and other left groups as a "sectarian" view, an impossible ultimatum to the working class-was however vindicated by every succeeding event.

their size, did fail completely to so much as hinder the passing of the Act.

January 1971 saw strikes 20.000 and 160.000, and huge 100,000 strong demonstration on the TUC day of action against the bill.

A strike called on March 1 brought an even bigger stoppage by 1.5 million workers as did March 18but the Bill still ground its way relentlessly through stepped up repression in Parliament.

The militancy . of the working class was also reflected in the tenacious pay strikes by postal workers (7 weeks) and what began as an unofficial strike by Ford workers (9 weeks). • Yet far from strengthening these sections of workers in their fight against the Tories, the TUC consciously isolated the postmen, allowing them to become one of the few sections actually defeated by the Heath government.

• wallopig шаноп, Callanina infintian boosted by an almost universal price hike under cover of the February 15 decimalisation, was • gathering pace, however, and with it grew the militancy of important sections of the working class-in particular the miners.

Barber's March 1971 Budget took place under conditions of incipient recession. Rolls Royce, a centrepiece of the engineering industry, had gone bankrupt: other firms including Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and BSA were teetering on the brink; production was actually falling, and unemployment was over the 800,000 mark-an increase of one third since Heath took office.

Unperturbed, Barber simply continued with his previous policy of tax handouts to the rich.

And the TUC continued looking for ways not of removing but of cooperating with the government that was preparing war on the unions.

Collaboration

Nor was this line of collaboration broken in the struggles following the bankruptcy of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in June.

Even while 30,000 Glasgow workers struck and marched in solidarity with the 6,000 threatened workers at UCS and in opposition to a spate of sackings in Scotland Stalinist covenors were looking not to the prospect of building up independent working class action to force out the Tories, but to a seemingly endless succession of negotiations with alternative private employers.

The UCS 'work-in" begun on July 30, 1971, and generously supported by trade unionists throughout Britain, could have been the centrepiece of a campaign for action to remove the Tories.

Instead it began and ended as a monument to Stalinist class collaboration, which eventually wound up with thousands of jobs lost and a wretched deal with the giant Marathon shipbuilders which included vicious speed-up and no-strike clauses.

Puffing clouds of militant' rhetoric, the UCS leaders trekked gamely up and down between millionaire employers and the Tory Industry Minister Sir John Eden.

But all the time the Tories were forging steadily ahead with the preparations for the first sessions of the National Industrial Relations Court.

Continued next week

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