Pleasure to visit the West of Scotland and meet our loyal and devoted supporters here. Conservative Members, councillors, and others here do battle for our party and its principles for years in constituencies where victory may sometimes seem far away. These are our truest friends of all and an example to every part of the U.K.
I hadn't thought to be talking to you under the conditions in our country that exist today. And people are understandably fearful about the future when they see a Government which claimed to have a unique relationship with the Trade Union movement unwilling to rise to the seriousness of the situation.
We Conservatives believe—that Parliament is the supreme forum of the nation; that it represents all our people equally; that the essence of a democracy is that no outside group, however strong, should be more powerful than the elected representatives of the people. —that freedom can only exist under a rule of law, impartially administered; and that no-one can be punished except in a properly authorised court. [end p1]
—that each individual has certain fundamental rights which no government or organisation is entitled to take away, and those include the right to go about one's lawful business without interference. —that democracy flourishes, not only because it represents a majority, but because that majority recognises that we each have a moral obligation to others. Without that, civilised society could not long survive.
We take these things for granted, but look at what is happening today. [end p2] Start of press release: What is happening in Britain today?
Even the James CallaghanPrime Minister has finally concluded that our troubles are serious—a full, long and anxious week after he told us that it was unpatriotic to talk of crisis.
We did not need telling of the crisis. In Scotland you did not need telling; as you saw control pass to the pickets and the “strike committees” , as you saw businessmen queueing up to get “permission” from the strike committee to move their own goods. You did not need telling as you saw men afraid to drive across picket lines or when you saw “flying pickets” in action. You did not need telling as you saw “protection” money extorted as the price of moving essential food supplies, the price of saving starving animals; or as you saw the sick, the elderly and the disabled become the victims of the heartless action of others.
What sort of society is this which breeds such selfish callousness? [end p3]
They seem to know somehow exactly which factories to go to to cause maximum dislocation. They seem to have a speed and efficiency which came not only from—doubtless the belief of many of them—that they have a thoroughly worthy cause. But also, I think, it came from a ruthless determination from a few men to create mounting chaos. Now these few men are the wreckers in our midst. They're not the mass of trade unionists, but there are a few militants who are the wreckers. And I think they do as much damage to the decent name of trade unionism as they do to our economy. They seek to use freedom in order to destroy freedom. End of section checked against BBC Radio News Report 0700 20 January 1979. [end p4]
What sort of a Government is this which sees its authority pass to strike committees?
You will have noted the speed and efficiency with which the pickets went into action. Beginning of section checked against BBC Radio News Report 0700 20 January 1979 [end p5]
Again and again we see sensible Trade Unionists pushed by militants in a way they do not want to go. They know they cannot protect their own families from food shortages, or collapsed public services. They too suffer hardships. So we have Trade Unionist against Trade Unionist. Society against itself. This picture of tyranny and tragedy is not the true Britain.
Let me say what I believe are the rights of lorry drivers and indeed the rights of employees and employers in this dispute.
Those who do not wish to support the lorry-drivers strike have an absolute right to collect or deliver goods of any kind, whether they are essential supplies or not. No picket has a right to stop them, if they don't want to stop, no picket has a right to demand money, and no picket has the right to threaten repercussions. [end p6] Any such action is a flagrant breach of the law. And yet intimidation and blackmail are commonplace events today. Those who do not wish to support the strike are entitled to the protection of the Government in the exercise of their lawful rights.
Private employers can play their part in ensuring that they and their employees can exercise their rights, thereby protecting the jobs of those employees and the supplies of the nation. [end p7]
They are trying to get their goods through. If their drivers are stopped against their will, threatened, blackmailed or intimidated in any way, they should instantly report the matter to the police. If such action continues, they should realise that the law can be invoked within a matter of hours. They should take urgent advice on the possibility of getting an interim injunction or interdict to restrain flagrantly unlawful action. If they do so, they will be acting in the interests of their workforce, their customers and all the people.
It is up to us to proclaim the rights of our fellow citizens and up to our fellow citizens to reassert them wherever they can. [end p8]
How did all this come about? Not suddenly but over the years. Gradually the powers of Unions were increased. Great power requires great responsibility in its use. But as their power grew, something else was happening—the extreme left were gradually getting themselves into more and more influential positions in Trade Unions. Harold Wilson recognised this and introduced a policy called “In Place of Strife” . Mr. Callaghan soon saw that into the wastepaper basket.
When it came to power again, a majority Labour Government pushed through a mass of legislation on industrial relations, including the closed shop, which made up what amounts to a militants charter. [end p9]
The legislation was the price paid for Union cooperation under the “Social Contract” The cooperation has ceased. The legislation remains. The fault lies not in this Government's stars but in its surrenders.
The law on where and when picketing can occur, the Closed Shop, Secret Ballots—these are the things which need action, and I doubt whether a code of practice will be enough. It is strange that when asked to legislate to reduce Union power, the Government argues that these things can't be done by law. But it never hesitates to use the law to increase Union power—indeed that is the source of some of our troubles.
I offered, and the offer stands, to support the Prime Minister if he would introduce legislation on these matters, legislation which I believe the vast majority of our people, including most Trade Unionists, want. [end p10]
But the reforms I put to him would mean changing exactly those laws which this Government has enacted. Would he or the Labour Party make amendments to the Closed Shop legislation which they introduced? Would he or they take away the new legal immunities they gave to Trade Unions? Would he or they really stop secondary picketing? Alas, I doubt it. [end p11] The following section is omitted from the press release
What were the great principles I started with?
Parliament supreme?—Not with the power in the hands of strike committees
Rule of Law?—The rule of lawlessness would be a better description of some of the things we have seen.
Individual rights?—Neither for Trade Unionists in a closed shop nor for those who only want to go about their daily business as they have every right to do.
Moral obligations?—Not when a minority hold to ransom the rest of the community who are in no way involved in their grievance. [end p12]
We have to restore the standards and values in which we passionately believe—or else the way of life we have known will not survive. It is the way of life for which we were renowned. It was we who stood against tyranny. But for us, night would have over-taken civilisation. The enslaved peoples of Europe found in our defiance and in our resistance hope that one day their liberty would be restored to them—and it was.
Now we have to fight and win the conflicts within. And with the same resolution, the same commitment, the same faith in our cause—the cause of liberty under the law in a Parliamentary Democracy.
This task is so great that it overshadows other problems. It is a task which requires dedication to the unity of the Kingdom. If that were at risk, more than unity would be lost. [end p13] Press release resumes
For Scotland, 1979 will be a year of decision.
Within a few weeksyou willgive your verdict on Labour's Devolution Act.
This Act is a measure with far-reaching and most hazardous implications for the future government of Scotland. It threatens the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It is therefore entirely right that you should be asked to pronounce upon it.
On 1st March it will be the people of Scotland who will have their say. But as a politician, and as Leader of the Party which has always stood for the unity of the United Kingdom, I must give you my view. [end p14]
Constitutional change demands a long perspective. The present arrangements for governing Scotland have lasted for 270 years. This should surely give us a sense of humility and caution.
In considering the future government of Scotland, we are not planning for next year or for the next ten years, but for the next two or three centuries—not just for our grandchildren, but for their grandchildren as well.
Also consider carefully the origins of this Act.
It was devised originally to appease Scottish nationalism. In recent months it has been used to gain the votes of the eleven Nationalist MPs; simply to keep this Labour Government in office for a few months longer. [end p15]
We should not be surprised, therefore, that the result is an ill-thought measure, riddled with internal contradictions and fraught with potential for future conflict.
It is an Act which would mean that those you send in future to represent you at Westminster would be entitled to help determine the pattern of housing, and schooling, and local government in England, in Northern Ireland, and possibly in Wales as well; but not in their own constituencies here in Scotland! And their influence at Westminster would be weaker.
An Act which would require one Parliament, at Westminster, to decide how much should be spent by Government in Scotland, and another at Edinburgh, to decide how that sum should be distributed. If that is not a recipe for future conflict, I don't know what is. [end p16]
An Act which would impose yet another costly layer of bureaucracy on the shoulders of the people of Scotland, and make you the most over-governed nation in Western Europe, if not the world.
And who is it that really supports this Act?
It is those who devised it as a method of postponing the verdict of the electorate on their own failures.
It is those who make no secret of their belief that it will hasten the break-up of the United Kingdom—for which they cannot wait. [end p17]
We in the Conservative Party will be campaigning for a decisive “No” to the Government's proposals.
First, because this Party has always been and, I trust, will always remain, the Party of the United Kingdom. That is why we call ourselves Unionists; because we believe in the overriding value of the Union to all its citizens.
How could the erection of artificial barriers between Scotland and England help the Scottish economy, or increase its prosperity? [end p18]
How could barriers benefit great Scottish companies, whose names are household names? Wouldn't those barriers damage the financial institutions of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, which for a hundred years have provided security in old age for millions of private citizens not only in Scotland, but throughout the United Kingdom?
The Nationalists seem to ignore these things. They welcome the Act as a giant step along the road to separatism.
That, for us, is perhaps the strongest of all reasons for voting “No” . [end p19]
The second reason is that the particular form of devolution which is offered is, we believe, indefensible. Conceived in panic, it has been manoeuvred through the Commons against the undisguised hostility of the majority of MPs.
Ten generations of Scotsmen have lived and worked under the Union—lived and worked with great success. An Assembly which weakens that Union cannot help Scotland's future.
We in the Tory Party are advocates of what I would call true devolution. Not the bogus devolution which imposes yet more layers of government. But devolution in the fundamental sense of dispersing power from government to the individual by returning choice and independence to him.
The first step on that path is the transfer of economic power away from Government, back to the people. [end p20]
Let us have faith in the ability of people to spend and save their own earnings more wisely than the politicians, who take away too much in tax.
Let us start to demolish that mass of regulations which is in danger of crushing the natural initiative of the people of these islands.
Wherever I have been in Scotland over the past four years I have heard the same story. Opportunities to open up new markets lost because controls have made it impossible to recruit or hold essential skilled workers. Plans for expansion and more jobs set aside because of legislation passed by the Labour Government. (Employment Protection Act). Precious management time and skills wasted in responding to endless questionnaires and circulars. [end p21]
Give us the mandate to release the people of Scotland from these trammels; and I believe you will surprise yourselves by the vigour of your response.
We need a new generation of entrepreneurs in Scotland. We would much prefer to see them grow up as their predecessors did, independently, individually, scorning state aid or enterference.
But years of over-taxation have taken their toll. The ordinary citizen just hasn't been able to save enough money to back new ventures. The cash resources and the confidence of the private sector have suffered. So, at present there is a gap which Government can fill. In Scotland some of that task is discharged by the Scottish Development Agency. This we see as having two main functions. [end p22]
It must ease the hardships resulting from major industrial change, giving short-term help to companies which have been brought low by the nation's economic weakness—but which have a viable future.
It could also provide infant businesses with support, while they take their first faltering steps.
Both of these roles are of a transitional nature.
But there is no role for the SDA in acquiring shares in profitable businesses. We want to see the SDA doing what it can to help the Scottish economy, not acting as a vehicle for further nationalisation. [end p23]
Scotland also has great potential from her farms and from the sea around her coasts. But what has this Government done about that potential? It published a policy statement bravely entitled “Food from our own resources” —and then produced an environment in which home food output actually shrank, until the weather took a hand, and it followed a prices policy which last year helped to bring about a fall in farmers' real incomes.
It has made a mockery of our membership of the European Economic Community by subsidising the dumping of foodstuffs from our partners on the British market at an artificial price. It has boasted of its defence of the rights of our fishermen to fish the waters around our coasts. But so far all it has accomplished is that the recognition of our legitimate and essential rights in these waters has been withheld. [end p24]
We have the most efficient agricultural industry in Western Europe, and alone among maritime nations of the Community we have preserved our fish stocks from over-exploitation. These are realities which we must expect our European partners to recognise. End of press release.
Britain used to be one of the ‘top nations’. I don't claim we could have stayed ‘top nation’ for ever, or that we can realistically aspire to that position today. But we should be able to hold and develop the place that we used to have before the rise of the Empire—a place once described as that of the smallest of the great powers and the greatest of the small. [end p25]
To get from here to there, to break out from being classified as a less prosperous country, we need to become a less over-governed country.
I'm not laying all the blame for our decline at the feet of the Labour Party. But there are three quite specific ways in which it has made things worse.
First, I would single out the Labour Party's attitude to the creation of wealth. The Labour Left have never accepted the role of profits in a free economy. They have never understood that if you “crib and confine a nation's economic freedoms it cannot produce the wealth on which social progress so largely depends.” [end p26]
How can a country become more prosperous, with a Party in Government some of whose members regard the crippling of free enterprise as their principal political objective and others whose response to success is envy and an attempt to take away the hard-won earnings?
The second way in which Labour have helped to increase the rate of decline is by their attitude to the State and the individual. Year by year the State has interfered more and more. It has interfered in everyone's life from the cradle to the grave, from the class-room to the boardroom to the factory floor. The cost of that interference has grown so immeasurably that today the crushing burden of heavy direct taxes deters equally those at the bottom of the ladder and those at the top. [end p27]
As a result a stagnant and shrinking economy has to carry a larger bureaucracy; businessmen find that it makes more sense to stand still, or to cut back, than to grow; standards in education—on which both the material and spiritual health of the nation so largely depend—are given second place to trying to engineer a spurious equality, preached but seldom practised by Socialist politicians.
The third main Labour contribution to decline has been something to which I have already referred, the way they have fed and nourished the worst instincts in the Trade Union movement so that what originally sprang from deep and genuine fellow-feeling for the brotherhood of man is today disliked and feared throughout the land, and does more damage to our country than ever before in its history. [end p28]
Unless something radical is done, a harsher future lies ahead. For decline feeds on itself. A firm or a country cannot become less competitive year after year without eventually facing the threat not just of decline relative to the performance of others, but of absolute decline.
All those things have happened in Labour Britain. They reflect the sour face of Socialist failure.
Can we do better?
Yes, I believe we can, the Conservative Party believes we can, not because we think we have all the answers, but because we think we have the one answer that matters most—that Britain can and will succeed if we set the British people free to do so. [end p29]
Despite the bleak and barren years of Labour we're not really an “LPC” —a third rate country heading downhill for the scrap-heap. We have great natural riches—the coal beneath our feet, the oil and gas in the sea around our shores.
What a bonus those energy resources give us, faced as we are with increases in the price of oil from abroad. How much more worried we would be about the competition from Japan, Germany and France if they could draw on the natural supplies of energy with which we are blessed.
We also have great human resources. We are the same people who down the years won innumerable commercial, diplomatic and cultural triumphs. We still have engineers, managers, inventors, artists of the highest talent. We still have great firms and industries—from agriculture to high technology—whose workers can perform as well as any in the world. [end p30]
What we do not have is the climate for success. What we do not have is a stable framework within which excellence of every kind is stimulated and rewarded.
The Government promises drift: we need purpose. It promises more Socialism: we need less. It promises restriction: we need liberty.
Do you ever, in a quiet moment, find yourself thinking what your country means to you? Do you ever have in your mind an image of the ideal Britain? The country you would like to live in? I do. Two pages missing. [end p31]
Now is this Britain just an impossible dream? I don't think so. It can be brought about, in time, but the necessary steps will be resisted ruthlessly by those elements in our society who reject my vision of Britain totally, and who are working for the grey and grimy all-powerful state in which the freedom under the law I have described simply will not exist.
When I look back over the roll-call of the Leaders of our great Party—Alec Home, Harold Macmillan, Bonar Law, Arthur Balfour—as a mere Englishwoman I almost begin to feel an interloper. Scotland's genius has been Britain's inspiration for more than two hundred and fifty years. We need you more than ever in the dangerous eighties and nineties. Rather let us work together to build the Britain of our dreams.