I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Toby Baxendale 25
strike whereupon a period of industrial action took place on a scale of brutality that had
not been seen in the UK before, and, hopefully, will never be seen again.
During this uprising, businesses were burned down, and the practice of intimidating
workers who wanted to work would make any Mafia style protection racket look on with
great admiration. What amazed me was the miners’ only moral case (on their terms) seemed
to be the right to work. Of course, whenever there’s a right there’s a duty—and, following
this logic it became the duty of the rest of us to provide them with money for products we
didn’t require because they were too expensive. This struck me as monstrous unfairness
toward the other workers in the UK at the time. Margaret Thatcher took this view as well,
and proceeded to break the back of the NUM, de-nationalising the coal industry so that
elected governments could govern. The market, not labour hooligans, now determines
energy prices in the UK.
In the early 1980s, an entrepreneur from Manchester, Eddie Shah, launched—using
new technology (computers)—a national newspaper called Today. It was a low-cost newspaper,
taking maximum advantage of technological innovations in printing, and it employed
very few production workers. This gauntlet was thrown down to Fleet Street workers: reform
restrictive practices or other newspaper proprietors will follow the example of Today and
restructure their businesses accordingly, to the detriment of the print unions. Rupert
Murdoch’s News International during this period of dispute did not produce a copy of The
Times or The Sunday Times for many months, due to strike action. Meanwhile, The News
International Corporation had bought land in Wapping in the Docklands area of the East
End of London where it constructed a large, modern, computer-driven printing press. The
new production was started there, and the unions, taking great offence, embarked on a
campaign of brutality and gangsterism, which echoed that of the miners’ strike but was
focussed on a smaller scale in Docklands. The principle printers’ union was The Society
of Graphical and Technical workers (SOGAT). It was led by the particularly pernicious
Brenda Dean, (now a Baroness in the House of Lords and part of the Blair hegemony).
After many months, she came to the negotiating table with Rupert Murdoch. To my great
surprise and delight, News International offered all the Fleet St workers it employed a most
imaginative solution: a very large redundancy package amounting to some fifty million
pounds, plus it would give the whole of The Times’ and The Sunday Times’ printing works
and buildings to the union gratis for them to print their own newspapers if they so wished.
The unions, in a rare moment of wisdom, decided to turn this deal down as they realised
they could never hope to run a newspaper operation for profit with their archaic and restrictive
practices. (Needless to say, they had demanded, with threats of violence and intimidation,
that Murdoch’s News International Corporation do just this.) But once the tables were
turned and they were faced with the choice themselves, the deal was impossible. This action
also summed up to me the madness of trade unionism. In more recent years, I have met
former members of the print workers’ unions who had to retrain and go on to do other
things. One gave me the story of how he used to be in charge of delivering newspapers hot
off the press to news agents, and how there was a restrictive practice ensuring four individuals
always went out in one van: one to drive, one to sit in the passenger seat just in case
there was an accident, one to sit in the back of the van to watch the newspapers and open