Julian Haviland, ITN
… You also said in Parliament that you might have a pay norm under conditions of emergency. Is this an answer to Mr. Heath 's Chelsea speech when he argued that if negotiators are not responsible, if inflation is … tape cuts
MT
Look, we've all lived through incomes policies. George Brown had one—and we opposed it. And Ted had one, and now this government's had one. There are times when just as you have to put up the interest rate, you will have to have pay policies in the sense that you've got to have a freeze and then you've got to have a first phase coming out of the freeze. After that they've all had something in common. They get into difficulty if you try to have a rigid norm. This one's in difficulty. There's a tremendous difference between a rigid norm, which makes no difference between the chaps who've lost all their differentials and the unskilled, and an average. Er, and what we are going for now is an average, not a rigid norm. Of course you have to have an average, because a Chancellor of the Exchequer just has to make his calculations when he makes up his budget, but he does it on average. Now we know that at the end of last year the average increase in pay—and you might think it almost an explosive increase—was in fact 15–16 per cent, er, more than he budgeted for, he budgeted for a good deal less. But you have to take a view right at the beginning of the year.
Julian Haviland, ITN
But are you saying that a government, that a Thatcher government would not stand by, but in a crisis would have to take back—perhaps—the responsibility for pay that you so much want to put on to other people's shoulders?
MT
Er, responsibility for pay, no government can take responsibility for how much each and every person is paid. You couldn't run industry that way. And how absurd that every single decision should have to go up to the centre. Supposing you get a problem that you can sort out between management and people on the shop floor, are you going to have to refer it up to government? Supposing you want more, say maintenance engineers, and you can only get them if you pay them more? What good is it going to do if you can't pay them? It is ridiculous [HAVILAND starts] to assume that you can run any economy by everything going up to the centre. That isn't a free society, that's an East European kind of state.
Julian Haviland, ITN
The free collective bargaining you're offering was tried by the Heath government for two years before they gave up, by the Wilson government for one year before they gave up in 1975. Are you really saying that you can do what they have failed to do? [end p1]
MT
Do you remember that I quoted in the House a letter from Mr Healey, and do you remember that I said he called it just exactly the same as I had, “responsible collective bargaining” , because in the end I don't think you can have freedom without exercising responsibility. There are eleven million people who belong to trade unions, they've got probably eleven million families, you haven't got eleven million irresponsible people, I should think you've got at least ten and three quarter million responsible people wanting to do a decent day's work and wanting reasonable pay for it. And the question is how to see that they make their voices heard.
Julian Haviland, ITN
You questioned the responsibility … of the leaders didn't you?
MT
[MT talking over Haviland] … Can I say just one other thing, can I just say one other thing? Other countries that have had responsible collective bargaining haven't got into anything like the same difficulty as we have. Er, one of the real reasons is that they've always expected extra pay for extra output. One of the defects of an incomes policy is that you expect x percent for nothing, that's a recipe for inflation, not a way of curing it.
Julian Haviland, ITN
Do you agree that Mr Heath, and do you agree with Mr Heath that the opening up of this debate has done your party no harm?
MT
But I went it all in the House of Commons the other day. Wherein did you seek the difference lay? I can only say that I think the debate's been very artificial. It was interesting, last time I gave a television interview, on just exactly this subject, the papers came out with two opposite the next day. One to my great distress said: “Mrs Thatcher says give them the money” . I'd said nothing of the kind. The other one, to my delight, said “Mrs Thatcher tough on pay policies. She insists that you only get more pay because of more output” . That was from the same interview. Any debate that opened up I think was really rather artificial and when we got down to it in the House of Commons I did try to explain everything.
Julian Haviland, ITN
Some of your backbenchers think Mr Heath has deliberately taken a different line from yourself and they blame him for losing you or failing to win you, the by-election in Berwick.
MT
No no no no …
Julian Haviland, ITN
Do you not blame him for that?
MT
No, of course I don't. Of course I don't. I've never blamed anyone for stating their view and if they thought it different from mine, all right, he's said so and now we know that the only possible difference is whether it is an average or a norm. There's no point, there's no point in debating that. By the time we've got to this stage in an incomes policy a rigid norm won't hold, even the government knows that. We had to give police and defence forces more. I was the first to support that. They're the people who can't and won't strike.