Rawsthorne Phil
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P a g e | 1 PhD Submission PhD THESIS TITLE: Thatcher’s Culture of Conformity: The Disintegration of Party/State Distinctions and the Weaponisation of the State in Response to the Miners’ Strike 1984/85. AUTHOR: Phil Rawsthorne. STUDENT NUMBER: 22014306. AUTHOR’S DEPARTMENT: Department of English, History and Creative Writing, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Edge Hill University. AUTHOR’S SUPERVISORY TEAM: Roger Spalding and Professor Alyson Brown. WORD COUNT: 77,886. SUMBISSION DATE: August 2019. P a g e | 2 Thesis Acknowledgement I would like to thank the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH). This research is based on files which were released in batches at the National Archives between January 2014 and July 2018. The SSLH issued me with a grant to cover some of the costs for repeated trips between Skelmersdale and Kew, West London. Much of the data collection was carried-out with their kind donation. My sincere gratitude is expressed toward my advisory team, Roger Spalding and Professor Alyson Brown. Their support, immense knowledge and continued encouragement were key factors in the completion of this research. Every set of suggested revisions made the thesis recognisably stronger and it would not have been completed without their help and guidance. Because I studied for both my undergraduate and masters’ degrees at Edge Hill, the completion of this thesis ends a seven-year period at the university. I would like to thank James Renton, Charlie Whitham, Dan Gordon and Bob Nicholson for their invaluable support. My fellow PhD researchers, Pat Soulsby and Quintus van Galen, both deserve a mention for their valued input and friendship. I would also like to thank Paul Hogan of West Lancashire College, who continues to do a fine job of introducing working-class people to their own history – often for the first time. Last but not least – my family. I would like to sincerely thank my mum, Helen Rawsthorne and my brother Ste Rawsthorne. Back when I was on the dole in 2011, it was those two who encouraged me to do the Access to HE Course and go on to university – something almost unheard of on the estates on which we grew up. They believed in me when no one else did and I dedicate this thesis to them. Added thanks to my dad, Debbie, Charlotte, Joey, Leon and Freya. P a g e | 3 Abstract This research highlights the existence and examines the culture and practices of three secretive groups within the Thatcherite state which operated between 1984 and 1989. Primarily involved with the state’s responses to the miners’ strike, the groups were also involved in government initiatives concerning four other areas of the public sector. The new data is used to answer significant questions surrounding the Thatcherite state during the period. The research investigates existing ideological mores within the state and gauges the development of new cultural norms peculiar to the Thatcher era. New evidence, only recently made available to the public, is used to examine Thatcher’s personal relationship with members of the permanent state and measure the Prime Minister’s level of involvement in directing policy. The research uses the new data to add to existing debates in two key areas. Firstly, Stuart Hall’s theory of authoritarian populism is tested by examining the activities of the three secretive agencies in relation to Thatcherism’s ideological discrepancy concerning that ideology’s authoritarian and anti-statist strands. Secondly, the research attempts to unite two competing historiographical arguments. On the one hand, that the British state has always been authoritarian and conservative. On the other, that Thatcher and Thatcherism offered something different and more extreme than anything that went before. P a g e | 4 Acronyms • ACPO –Association of Chief Police Officers • CIU – Central Intelligence Unit. Official name of the Leicester Unit. • CND – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament • COHSE – Confederation of Health Service Employees • COU – Cabinet Office Unit • CPAP – Crime Patterns Analysis Program • CPGB – Communist Party of Great Britain • CPS – Centre for Policy Studies • CPSA – Civil and Public Services Association • DSPU – Downing Street Policy Unit • ERG – Economic Reconstruction Group • ILEA – Inner London Education Authority • MI5 – Security Service • MI6 – Secret Intelligence Service • MISC101 – Ministerial Group on Coal • MT – Militant Tendency • NACODS - National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers • NCB – National Coal Board • NHS – National Health Service • NUM - National Union of Mineworkers • NUPE – National Union of Public Employees • NUT – National Union of Teachers • NWMC – National Working Miners’ Committee • PSU – Police Support Unit • OTJC – Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign • SHC – Subversion Home Committee • SPL – Subversion in Public Life • UDM – Union of Democratic Mineworkers P a g e | 5 Thatcher’s Culture of Conformity: The Disintegration of Party/State Distinctions and the Weaponisation of the State in Response to the Miners’ Strike 1984/85. Introduction 7 Chapter 1: An Introduction to the Research, the Primary Sources and the Theoretical Framework. 7 Part 1: The Existing Framework: 1972-1983 30 Chapter 2: The Subversion Home Committee and the Economic League 1972-74. 31 Chapter 3: Private-Sector Loyalists and the Ridley Report 1974-79. 40 Chapter 4: Polarisation and Preparation 1979-83. 49 Part 2: The Downing Street Policy Unit 57 Chapter 5: ‘The Unique Opportunity’: The DSPU in the Early Months of the Strike. 58 Chapter 6: ‘A Word to the Wise’: The DSPU, the Police and the Judiciary. 70 Chapter 7: ‘The Enemy Within is so Much Harder to Conquer’: The DSPU, the NACODS Dispute and the Sequestrators. 80 Part 3: The Central Intelligence Unit (Leicester Unit) 93 Chapter 8: ‘A Thoroughly Thatcherised Satrapy’: The Home Office and MI5. 94 Chapter 9: ‘National Picketing Coordinators’: The Home Office, ACPO and Special Branch. 108 Chapter 10: ‘Activities Which Transcend Police Boundaries’: The Leicester Unit 120 P a g e | 6 Part 4: Subversion in Public Life 131 Chapter 11: ‘Persistent Troublemakers’: The Civil Service Blacklist. 132 Chapter 12: ‘Obliged to Dismiss’: Targeting London’s Schoolteachers. 146 Chapter 13: ‘The Position Becomes Less Clear Cut’: The NHS, Local Government and the end of the Culture of Conformity. 156 Conclusion Chapter 14: Culture of Conformity Revisited 171 Appendices 180 Bibliography 184 P a g e | 7 Chapter 1: Introduction to the Research In 1985 shortly after the end of the miners’ strike, the historian John Saville highlighted the existence of the ‘Ridley Report.’1 Written by a Tory think-tank in 1977, the Report recommended that once the Conservative Party was back in power, Britain’s nationalised industries and the trade unions which protected them should be attacked, and the unions ‘destroy[ed].’2 Once that was done, the industries could be fully privatised.3 The report highlighted the National Union of Mineworkers as a future target and proposed that the miners’ union should be goaded into a strike.4 The report argued that the targeted sectors should be attacked ‘by stealth,’ therefore avoiding a full- on confrontation and allowing the government to feign political neutrality in any coming industrial dispute.5 In his 1985 article, Saville argued that the Thatcher government went about implementing the Ridley Report from 1983 onwards. Saville could not test his claim against any primary documentation produced by state agencies involved in the running of the strike – that data was secret and withheld from public view. However, that situation changed between 2014 and 2018 as a plethora of departmental files were made public at the National Archives. For the first time, this research was able to gauge state responses to the miners’ strike using that new evidence. The focus of the thesis is not on the strike itself, but rather the Thatcherite state. Clive Bloom and Seamus Milne both wrote seminal works concerning the Thatcherite state during the strike. Both argued that the Thatcherite state was different to what went before. According to those authors, certain elements of the British state behaved differently, due to the authoritarian manner of both Thatcher personally and ideological Thatcherism.6 However, Ralph Miliband argued that the British state, like any state in a western democracy, was necessarily conservative, biased toward conservative parties and hostile toward organised labour, and that this had always been the case.7 One of the things that the research investigates is that discrepancy between those two positions. A second discrepancy exists in an ideological context - concerning Stuart Hall’s description of Thatcherism as ‘authoritarian populism.’8 Hall contrasted the Thatcherites’ public pronouncements of neoliberalism and anti- 1 John Saville. ‘An Open Conspiracy: Conservative Politics and the Miners’ Strike 1984-5,’ Socialist Register 22 (August 1985), pp.295-329. 2 Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group 1978 (the Ridley Report), Margaret Thatcher Foundation Online, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110795, p15. (Accessed 24th April 2018). 3 Ibid 4 Ibid, Confidential Annex p24. 5 Ibid, p15. 6 Seamus Milne. The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners (London: Verso 2014), and Clive Bloom. Thatcher’s Secret War: Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government 1974-90 (Stroud: The History Press 2015). 7 Ralph Miliband. The State in Capitalist Society: The Analysis of the Western System of Power (Aylesbury: Quartet Books 1974), p76. 8 Stuart Hall. Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left: The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso 1990). P a g e | 8 statism with those apparent strands of authoritarianism within the state during Thatcher’s tenure.9 This research interprets the new evidence in order to add to that debate. Much of the new evidence takes the form of three case studies, each one revealing the existence and activities of a secretive part of the state during the Thatcher tenure. The first case study focuses on the Downing Street Policy Unit (DSPU).