Norman Tebbit: Thatcher’s boot boy

Norman Tebbit in 2020

Just about every newspaper and politicians from all parties are celebrating the life and achievements of Norman Tebbit, the Tory party MP.

The Sun newspaper even proclaimed him the “working class hero” who smashed the unions and “opened the door to privatisation”.

It is worth remembering that throughout the 1980s the Sun newspaper regularly celebrated scabs in its pages. Tebbit wholeheartedly endorsed this line.

Even the Guardian newspaper described him as articulating “the views of an aspirant working class”.

The Tories are, of course, most enthusiastic in their remembering of his life and crimes. But Reform UK leader Nigel Farage does not seem too far off in thinking that Tebbit in his prime might well have been more at home with the bigotry and prejudice preached by Reform UK today.

And former prime minister Boris Johnson hilariously praised Tebbit for rejecting “a culture of easy entitlement” and believing instead in “thrift and energy and self-reliance”. The man’s hypocrisy still amazes. Even Keir Starmer has praised his “great strength” and remarked that he “will be missed by many”.

His vicious homophobia, his racism and his hostility to immigrants have all been played down. And the tens of thousands of us dancing on his grave have been completely ignored.

First of all, was Tebbit a working class hero? Certainly he did not have a posh public school background, but his father had been the manager of a pawnbrokers, making a living out of working class poverty.

And famously, when the pawnbrokers shut down in the 1930s, instead of whining about it and blaming the government and the rich for mass unemployment, his father, in Tebbit’s words, “got on his bike” to look for work.

What Tebbit’s working class background seems to have amounted to is that he was brought up with the mentality of a bosses’ man, was always ferociously anti-trade union and thought scabs were the heroes of the working class.

This certainly seems to have been the thread running through his political career. As far as he was concerned, unionised workers defending themselves were behaving like fascists—he actually said this, while employers sacking and victimising union members was libertarianism. They were freeing the working class from trade union tyranny, from what he described as “the Marxist collectivist totalitarians”.

Tebbit joined the Royal Air Force in the 1949, training as a pilot and eventually in 1953 he became an airline pilot. He joined the Conservative Party and was very much on the hard right, eventually being elected to the Commons as a MP in June 1970.

As far as he was concerned, the Edward Heath government that took on the unions in the early 1970s was not determined and tough enough to see the fight through to victory. The miners’ victory over the Tory government in early 1974 left him determined to do his best to ensure that next time the Tories were in power the unions would be broken.

With the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister in May 1979, Tebbit was involved in preparing the ground for a decisive attack on the trade unions. In 1981, he was appointed Employment Secretary, introducing Thatcher’s anti-trade union legislation and getting ready for the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike.

The Tories were determined to break the power of the trade unions no matter what and Tebbit was there urging Thatcher to stand firm, not to make any concessions and to continue the fight until a decisive victory was achieved. The Tories assembled a massive strike-breaking apparatus, including the setting up of scab unions, and unleashed unprecedented police brutality, defeating the miners.

Tebbit himself boasted of the secret police reports he got from agents and informers inside the trade union movement, although to be fair these same reports had been given to Labour ministers ever since the first Labour government in 1924. For some reason Labour has never closed down secret police surveillance of the unions.

One last point worth remembering here is that the Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, who took office in 1997, in his memoir A Journey stated that he wholeheartedly supported Thatcher’s attack on the unions and had no intention of repealing Tebbit’s anti-trade union legislation.

Tebbit remained in the Thatcher government up until 1987, although he seems to have become increasingly critical of her for not being tough and right-wing enough. He had hoped to succeed her as party leader, indeed she suspected him of plotting against her.

When it became clear that his leadership hopes were not going to be realised, he left the Commons ostensibly to look after his wife. He did, however accept a peerage and as Baron Tebbit continued to mouth his vile opinions and prejudices. Good riddance.