Page 179 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 158

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
transformed the environment within which they were pursued. In the period
before Thatcher came to office – sometimes referred to as the era of ‘social
democratic consensus’ – unemployment was relatively low, Labour govern-
ments were a reality, and organised labour enjoyed a certain degree of
economic and hence political power, exemplified by its role in the downfall
of Edward Heath in 1974, and the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–79 which
eventually destroyed the Labour government of James Callaghan. Industrial
relations legislation permitted effective solidarity action, such as mass
picketing, which allowed workers in dispute to believe that they had some
chance of success if confrontation with employers became necessary.
Employers, for their part, had incentives to seek agreement with workers in
dispute, since strikes and other forms of action could be long and costly.
After 1979 all this changed. The Thatcher government pursued a policy
of driving up unemployment to levels not seen in Britain since the 1930s. It
introduced wave after wave of anti-labour legislation, designed to make
effective combined and solidarity action increasingly difficult. Mass picket-
ing was outlawed, compulsory ballots of members before strikes introduced,
and ‘sympathy’ action by one union on behalf of another made illegal, with
sanctions for breach of the law including the ‘sequestration’ (seizure by the
court) of a union’s assets. This shifting of the industrial balance of power
away from the workforce and towards employers was accompanied by an
ideological campaign which encouraged managers to ‘exercise their right
to manage’. Compromise and negotiation with the unions, particularly
those on the Left, was frowned upon by government in its own dealings
with the nationalised industries, and private capital was encouraged to
follow the example. Thus, the unions became weaker and industrial disputes
more brutal, as the 1984–85 miners’ strike and the 1986 Wapping dispute
showed.
In Jones’s view these environmental changes heightened the role of the
media in the pursuit of industrial disputes. As the traditional channels of
negotiation and compromise were closed down, both sides in disputes were
required to compete more actively for the support of public opinion. And in
this competition, the mass media were the main channels of communica-
tion available. The unions, in particular, had to learn to use the media to
overcome the overwhelmingly negative public image they had acquired in the
late 1970s, redefining their social and political role in the context of an
unremittingly hostile government and business community. In this cultural
shift they were prompted by the sophisticated news management techniques
of some key business leaders, such as Michael Edwardes of the nationalised
car manufacturer British Leyland.
In the 1970s British Leyland came to epitomise Britain’s industrial relations
‘problem’, being the site of several bitter disputes, frequently involving strike
action. The GUMG argued in their Bad News and More Bad News studies
that the tendency of the media at the time to ‘blame the workers’ while

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