Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

On 25 April the British retook South Georgia, along with a particularly vicious Argentinian officer. The Chileans gave considerable help as well, in radar intelligence and efforts to divert Argentinian strength. The Argentinians’ chief weapon, the French-made Exocets, proved to be less deadly and accurate than expected — on three occasions they did not explode, and the Argentinian pilots were operating at the extreme end of their fuel range, so that they could not manoeuvre easily. In any case the French gave covert help to the British. On 21 May came the landings, and the shivering Argentinian conscripts were no match for professional soldiers; after three weeks, on 14 June, they surrendered, as a celebrated British journalist, Max Hastings, spear-headed the advance into Port Stanley by marching into the local pub and ordering a beer. Margaret Thatcher’s gamble had succeeded, and as her biographer writes, ‘it was an event of stunning political impact all over the world’. Quite accurately, she said, ‘we have ceased to be a nation in retreat’. The junta in Buenos Aires fell, its victims liberated in great numbers. After Margaret Thatcher’s loss of office, there was a gathering of representatives of peoples in whose liberation she had had a hand — central Europeans, Slavs, for the greater part, who each sang a national song. She was very touched and grateful when a representative also came from Argentina. She herself of course shot up in popularity at all measure: why was ‘that woman’ getting away with successes that had escaped her supposed betters? In Scotland the Secretary of State thought that it was all like a ‘Nuremberg rally’ of vulgar triumphant nationalism, and a particularly lugubrious Foreign Secretary remarked that instead of having a cavalry officer, they had ‘a corporal’. Visits by Pope John Paul II and Reagan, within weeks, became part of the picture. As she told an interviewer, rightly, ‘there was a feeling of colossal pride, of relief that we could still do the things for which we were renowned’. But in some ways it marked the high point of the Thatcher period: a courageous budget was associated with economic recovery, and the Falklands campaign with a great sea-change in international affairs.

The ‘high eighties’ were under way. At the time, only a few people sensed the breakthrough to come. Arthur Seldon of the IEA did, but academe was almost solidly refractory, and the dead hand of Edward Heath still lay upon much of the Conservative Party itself — so much so that the creative thinkers of the first Thatcherite hour tended to despair, as, returning to Downing Street from a good lunch on strategy, they were confronted by committees and devil-in-detail agendas. The election of 1983 was an easy win: as with the Democrats in the United States, the main opposition party had talked itself into a corner, had split, and anyway offered nothing more than a rerun of the later 1970s. Considerably less than half of the working classes voted Labour, which became almost a regional party, as a north-south gap opened up. There was only one Conservative seat left in Scotland — aptly, at Bearsden outside Glasgow, the northernmost outpost, once upon a time, of the Roman Empire, which was commemorated by a piece of wall and the first recorded Scottish utterance, to the effect that Rome created devastation and called it peace. That sentiment was expressed, less pithily, by its author’s descendants, as the impetus came from southern England, in the accents of which the Prime Minister spoke. And southern England boomed. This should have given prosperity to the north as well, but there were formidable difficulties, especially to do with a system of ‘social’ housing that stopped labour mobility.

Later on, Mrs Thatcher did admit that she wished she had handled some of the real, longer-term problems earlier. This was right: Britain became a country where local government, education, health and transport were sometimes lamentably behind those of other European countries. However, there was always the excuse, a perfectly fair one, that major enemies had to be disposed of first. ‘The conflict between good and evil’ was what Mrs Thatcher saw at work in British politics. Nationalized industries, an absence of competition, parasitical trade unions, inflationary finance and taxation which destroyed the most valuable habits and institutions: these had to be defeated. She had already chipped at the unions’ privileges — the right to picket had been limited, and in 1982 individuals’ rights as against their unions were greatly increased (union funds became liable for damages in the event of unlawful action). Public service strikes had occurred, and perhaps, through calculation, had been allowed to last longer than they needed to do before being settled: inconvenience or worse to the public from transport or civil service unions was a great help to the government. But early in 1984 the challenge came from what had been the most troublesome element of all, the National Union of Miners. There was some play-acting involved in this: attitudes being struck. Arthur Scargill was an extraordinary fellow, who thought that he could overthrow the Thatcher government as other miners’ leaders had defeated Heath’s. This was to mistake the enemy. The Thatcher government (in this case, Nicholas Ridley and Nigel Lawson) had made sure that there were reserve stocks of coal, for energy and heating. The police were better paid so that their loyalty could be rewarded. A sustained effort was also made to persuade the trade unions of ‘a new realism’ (the phrase used by their general secretary, Lionel Murray — characteristically in the new England, ‘Sir Len’). Some — the electricians, who understood what could be done with computers — were to be easily persuaded. Scargill, and some old-fashioned unions, had to be defeated. At the time, this appeared to be an all-important cause if England were not to sink into the ‘Third World’ status that so many people predicted for her.

Meanwhile, Scargill had said that opposition of an extra-parliamentary order was legitimate, the government not having had a majority of the vote. In characteristic apocalyptic style, he announced that ‘extra-parliamentary action will be the only course open to the working class’. What he meant was action contrary to his own union’s rule book. He could on his own authority organize a banning of overtime. He could only organize a strike by flouting rules to gain a majority, which he did, in a tradition that went back to Lenin’s own management of the Russian socialists in 1903: ‘Bolshevik’ means ‘majority’, the first, in this case, of many lies. But the government’s intelligence connections were sufficient for a rival union, based on profitable pits with the chance of substantial wages, to challenge Scargill. The Coal Board was now managed, not by comfortable upper-class appeasers of the Carrington class, but by an elderly Scots-man, Ian MacGregor, who had been brought back from America and who knew a great deal about managing such matters: he had already proved his worth at British Steel, though, there, he had had intelligent union leaders to deal with. He announced that loss-making pits would have to be closed, that a third of the miners (70,000) would have to be given compensation, and Scargill responded absurdly, as if he wanted all of his men to continue with their obsolete, filthy and dangerous jobs. He banned overtime in October 1983, and then, with ridiculously inappropriate timing, started a strike on 6 March 1984, at the end of winter. Most productive pits did not follow; attempts to picket and stop the (Nottingham) miners failed, despite a murder, because the police were firm. Scargill, with a baseball cap that went badly with this image of the last Leninist insurrection, failed to break through a police line. Then again, the power stations functioned, because stocks of coal were high, and imports, even from Poland, a supposedly Communist country, went ahead. This time round, government legal action was successful, as it had not been in 1972. In August, for instance, some of the miners took their own union to court over its failure to stage a proper strike ballot. A writ was even delivered at the Labour Party conference. Scargill tried to involve other heavy-industrial unions, the famous ‘triple alliance’ of coal, docks and railways which had been very effective with strikes in the past, back to before the First World War. The government had already managed to privatize some of the docks, and the pockets of dockers who still maintained a local monopoly were isolated and relatively powerless — as well as, in Liverpool, bereft of sense. The railwaymen were simply bought off. This time round, new technology — always an enemy of these old unions, at least if they had an unregenerate leadership — had weakened the old guard. British Steel, for instance, managed with Ro-Ro and free ports; it would no longer be held up by absurd dockland practices, which in the Heath era had involved gangs simply standing, watching other gangs do the work. There was much sentimentality as to the ‘communities’ of the miners, and efforts were made to enlist middle-class sympathies, which had mattered so much in the seventies. But in the end Scargill had a self-destructive urge, and, early in 1985, the strike crumbled. Yes, it had cost a great deal — the Coal Board had losses of over £2bn. MacGregor himself, who had been less forthright, in private, than Margaret Thatcher would have wished, was dissociated within weeks. Curiously enough (and an echo of earlier patterns) the loyalist miners and civil servants were not rewarded, getting only small pensions. It would have been fitting had they been given decorations, but the honours system in England was for appeasing enemies rather than rewarding friends. Still, the old industrial unions, which had made so much trouble for earlier governments, Labour and Conservative, had in effect been defeated.