20. “Close the Gates!”¶
Core Argument¶
20. “Close the Gates!”
The election of Ted Heath’s Conservative government in June 1970 marked the ruling class’s abandonment of the post-war consensus and the opening of a declared war on the British working class. The offensive was driven not by Heath’s personal temperament but by the deepening crisis of British capitalism. Between 1945 and 1970, productivity growth had limped along at 1.5 per cent annually, compared to three per cent in the United States and West Germany, while Britain’s share of world manufacturing exports collapsed from 25 to ten per cent. The rate of profit had fallen from 12 to 6.8 per cent between 1964 and 1970. The employers and the state, blaming workers and their unions for this relative decline, moved to cut costs at labour’s expense.
Resistance was immediate and explosive. Within a month of Heath taking office, a national dock strike forced a state of emergency, and a quarter of a million local authority workers struck in September. The government’s Industrial Relations Bill sought to cripple union power by outlawing the closed shop, making collective agreements legally binding, imposing compulsory ballots, and stripping sympathy strikes of legal immunity. The response was a mass campaign of defiance: 600,000 workers struck unofficially on 8 December 1970; 300,000 demonstrated in London on 21 February 1971; and three million struck on the day of the TUC special conference in March. Between July 1970 and July 1974, over three million days were lost in political protest strikes against the Act.
The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in during the summer of 1971, led by Communist Party members Jimmy Airlie and Jimmy Reid, forced the government into a humiliating U-turn on its policy towards “lame duck” industries. But the decisive confrontation came with the 1972 miners’ strike — the first official national strike since 1926. Some 280,000 miners demanded a 47 per cent wage increase. Flying pickets halted coal supplies across the country. On 10 February, 10,000 engineering workers marched on Saltley Gate in Birmingham, joining 2,000 miners to close the coke depot. The Chief Constable ordered the gates closed. The government, facing a potential social explosion, backed down.
Alarmed by the mass picketing, the government rapidly established the Wilberforce Court of Inquiry, which declared the miners a “special case” and recommended a 20 per cent pay award. The NUM executive voted 14–11 to suspend picketing, and further concessions were exacted in Downing Street talks. The miners ultimately gained a 21 per cent total increase, with new minimums of £34.50 for face workers, £23.00 for surface workers, and £25.00 for underground workers, plus concessions on overtime, transport, and shift payments. The Times argued that resisting wage inflation required accepting major strikes, but the defeat was widely seen as a humiliation for the Heath government. Though the miners could have achieved their full claim, the strike was a significant victory. It revived a fighting tradition, inspired other workers, and proved a historic turning point after the long defeat of 1926.