Page 192 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

downfall of Edward Heath in 1974, and the ‘winter of discontent’
in 1978–9 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 con-
frontation 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 picketing was outlawed, compul-
sory 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 national-
ised industries, and private capital was encouraged to follow the
example. Thus, the unions became weaker and industrial disputes
more brutal, as the 1984–5 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 communication available. The unions, in
particular, had to learn to use the media to overcome the over-
whelmingly 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

171