Instead, the unions persisted in believing they could defeat Murdoch through a unified campaign of picket lines, blackings and boycotts. Most wholesale workers were SOGAT members, who were
instructed by Brenda Dean to ‘black’ – to refuse to handle – all Murdoch titles. Only those in Glasgow, Coventry and Liverpool obeyed her command. Worse, the blacking call
to those not directly employed by News International was a clear breach of secondary picketing legislation, and when Dean persisted her contempt of court caused SOGAT’s £17 million of
assets to be sequestered. This caused hardship – and resentment – among the union’s 213,000 provincial members, who could not receive pensions and other benefits because of the
union’s action in defence of the 4,500 members demanding ‘jobs for life’ in London. The courts released the money in May when Dean purged her contempt. Other efforts to black
Murdoch titles also fell flat. In order to prevent the National Union of Railwaymen refusing to transport his newspapers, Murdoch switched to road haulage. When the TGWU’s general secretary,
Ron Todd, ordered his members not to drive the lorries, he was met with the same response that Dean had received from the wholesalers. Regardless of appeals for union solidarity, the majority of
SOGAT and TGWU members showed no desire to imperil their own jobs for the sake of printers in London, most of whom had long enjoyed far higher pay than themselves. The least successful blacking
campaign was
launched by Neil Kinnock, who called for a boycott of all of Murdoch’s newspapers – only to find that their circulation increased during the period
of his
fatwa
. Even less satisfactorily, the Labour leader’s announcement that neither he nor his colleagues would have any dealings whatsoever with papers that accounted for a quarter
of national circulation – including refusing to brief them or to give them stories – made it even more difficult for Labour to get its point across.
In rejecting Murdoch’s £58 million redundancy package (offering them between £2,000 and £30,000 each, depending on length of employment), and with the failure of the
boycotts and the secondary action, the strikers’ options narrowed and the picketing of ‘Fortress Wapping’ intensified. On the night of 2 June, News International’s warehouse
in Deptford, where newsprint for its papers was being stored, was fire-bombed, incinerating the building and causing the biggest fire London had witnessed since the Blitz. It took a fireboat
pumping 26,000 gallons of water from the Thames every three minutes to prevent the flames spreading to a nearby housing estate. The culprits were never identified. Throughout the summer and across
the country, depots for lorries engaged in conveying the newspapers were repeatedly broken into and the trucks and vans smashed up.
Tempers were also fraying within the two main unions. Aged only forty-four when the strike started, Brenda Dean was the first woman to run a major British trade union. Sporting a bouffant
hair-do which resembled that of the prime minister (though she might have preferred comparison to Barbara Castle), Dean was softly spoken and well dressed, and the antithesis of the right-wing
press’s caricature of a female Labour activist. By sex, background (she was from Greater Manchester) and temperament, she was equally far removed from the London print chapels, which failed
to conceal their resentment at some woman from outside their area running their union. Her priority was the low-paid SOGAT members, often female cleaners and junior office staff, who were the clear
victims of the dispute – another reason for the suspicion and animosity shown towards her by the more misogynistically minded chapel fathers. As the dispute reached its first anniversary,
Dean could see the battle was lost. The majority of her sacked members had found new jobs – which, paradoxically, made them more resistant to agreeing a deal, believing there was nothing to
be lost by holding out for more. In the meantime, the Wapping picket line was attracting political activists and hooligans who were not directly involved in the dispute but who saw it as a cause
over which to attack a Tory-supporting newspaper company and its guardians, the police force. The conflict’s worst night of violence came on 24 January 1987, which saw 12,500 demonstrators
descend upon Wapping, many throwing petrol bombs and hurling sharpened railings, stringing wire across the road to maim the police horses,
and almost succeeding in smashing
down the gates to the plant. There were seventy injuries and sixty-seven arrests (of which, tellingly, only thirteen were of print workers).
For Dean, it was the final straw. She booked a flight on Concorde and met Murdoch’s negotiator in New York. There they agreed that because the scale of the protests exceeded the legal
stipulation of no more than six pickets at an entrance, News International should take SOGAT to court and, under threat of massive fines and the sequestration once again of its assets, Dean would
then be in a position to persuade the union’s national executive to call off the strike. This she achieved on 5 February. It was pointless the NGA continuing without its nominal ally, so it,
too, came to heel, calling off the strike two days later. There was little to show for the struggle. The print unions’ defeat proved as protracted and emphatic as that suffered by the NUM.
The final audit included one death, almost 1,500 arrests, 574 injured police officers and over one thousand violent attacks on drivers and vehicles. Not a single edition of any of Murdoch’s
papers printed at Wapping had been stopped. Nor, in the succeeding quarter-century, did industrial action prevent a single edition of any of his papers reaching the news-stands. ‘Collective
action’ had been smashed.
The subsequent absence of strikes was only one manifestation of the ‘Wapping revolution’. Management had gained a hitherto unknown level of flexibility, being finally free to employ
whoever it liked, to deploy whatever technology it could afford, and to make whatever changes it wished to the size, style and print-runs of its papers without tortuous and potentially unsuccessful
negotiations with truculent chapel fathers. More pages were added, production quality improved markedly and colour photography became common by the decade’s end. It was Murdoch’s gamble
that made these changes possible and he was the first to reap the rewards, his British newspapers’ operating income increasing from £38.4 million in 1985 to £150.2 million two
years later.
52
His company, News International, was the London Stock Exchange’s best-performing major listing in 1987, and the revenue
helped fund his expansion into the American film and television market, turning him into a global media presence and providing funds for his next big idea for Britain – Sky TV.
The benefits were also reaped by Murdoch’s competitors. As even the celebrated
Guardian
journalist Hugo Young felt compelled to concede: ‘What [Murdoch] did for the economics
of newspaper publishing, by killing the power of the worst-led trade unions in modern history, has benefited every journalist, advertiser and reader.’
53
In the post-Wapping euphoria, a range of new national newspapers started, including the unashamedly vulgar and unserious tabloid
Sunday Sport
, the earnest left-wing
tabloid
News on Sunday
(pre-launch slogan: ‘No tits, but a lot of balls’) and the highbrow
broadsheet, the
Sunday Correspondent
. The last two
quickly folded. However, in October 1986, former journalists from the
Daily Telegraph
launched the
Independent
, which was quickly perceived as a rival to
The Times
. They had
begun planning the new broadsheet before Murdoch’s Wapping experiment commenced and their paper would have launched regardless of it. Nevertheless, it was hard to envisage how the
Independent
could have survived if it had been subjected to the union culture that Wapping helpfully blew away. Long-established competitors reaped the same advantages. Using money made from
the flotation of Reuters (in which all the newspapers had shares), they, too, expanded, building new press halls and enjoying their new-found managerial freedom. Those that kept unions were now
able to bind them to agreements, including no-strike clauses, that restricted their actions in ways that would have been unimaginable without the ability to invoke the salutary warning of Wapping.
Most of them de-recognized the National Union of Journalists.
Besides the print and journalists’ unions, there were three losers in this process. The first was the
Daily Telegraph
’s elderly and rather reticent owner, Lord Hartwell, who
miscalculated the cost of a massive new print hall in Docklands and, finding himself overstretched, was forced to sell his newspaper inheritance to a new buccaneering style of Conservative –
a Canadian called Conrad Black. The second was Eric Hammond, whose vital early help for Murdoch was not repaid by a deal recognizing EETPU bargaining rights at Wapping, News International having
come to the conclusion that it could operate perfectly happily without deals with unions. The third was old Fleet Street itself. The move to bigger premises in new locations, mostly in
London’s Docklands, ended forever the press’s geographical association with ‘the street of adventure’ (or, pejoratively, ‘the street of shame’) in a severing of
historic ties that aroused sentimental feelings among those who remembered with fondness its cosy cheek-by-jowl collegiality, clubbishness and heavy drinking – a culture that soon came to be
deemed unprofessional in the new media world of blinking computer screens, corporate presentations, audited expense accounts and employee–management relations conducted through a department
of human resources.
On the Waterfront
The newspaper companies were among the first major businesses to relocate to Docklands, an area of London’s East End which in 1981 – when the last of the Port of
London’s up-river docks closed – looked more devastated and derelict than it had done after seventy-six consecutive nights of bombing by the Luftwaffe in 1941. Indeed, ‘the
world’s busiest inland port’ had recovered remarkably quickly from its wartime pummelling and in 1964 had
recorded its highest-ever volume of trade, its wharves
and cranes lining the Thames as far up-river as St Paul’s Cathedral. From that pinnacle, the descent was swift. Docklands was not suitable for newly designed large container ships which
necessitated deep-water terminals like those constructed at Tilbury and Felixstowe. In 1969, the basin of London Docks was filled in, eventually becoming the Wapping site of Murdoch’s
newspapers. In 1980, the piling up of barrels of rum and crates of bananas on the quayside at Canary Wharf ceased with the shutting of the West India Dock, a closure that effectively ended economic
activity on the formerly bustling Isle of Dogs. In the space of sixteen years, the tidal approach to one of the world’s great cities was transformed from a hive of activity into a desolate
wasteland.
What was to be done with this bleak prospect? ‘I believe that this is the decade that London will become Europe’s capital,’ prophesied Harold Shand, the fictional East End
gangster with hopes of becoming a serious property entrepreneur in the 1980 film
The Long Good Friday
. ‘Having cleared away the outdated, we’ve got mile after mile, acre after
acre of land for our future prosperity.’
54
Shand’s big idea was to bring in American mafia money to transform the Docklands as the
site for a future Olympic Games. He was rather ahead of his time in suggesting the ultimate sporting event could pay its way by driving urban regeneration given the contemporary examples of
Montreal (1976) and Moscow (1980). Nevertheless, the government shared Shand’s optimism that the sheer scale of desolation actually created an opportunity to build afresh and in doing so to
showcase an entirely different vision for Britain’s future prosperity. In 1981, the environment secretary, Michael Heseltine, set up the London Docklands Development Corporation with a brief
to spearhead regeneration, and the following year the area was designated one of several new ‘enterprise zones’, where private enterprise was lured with minimal planning restrictions, a
100 per cent capital allowance against corporation tax and ten years’ exemption from paying local business rates.
In addition to these
laissez-faire
efforts to unfetter capitalism, considerable public money was also committed. There was, after all, little hope of turning the area into a new financial
centre to rival the City without an efficient transport link between the two. A start was made with the Docklands Light Railway, which began taking fares in 1987, only three years after
construction had begun. Newspapers were not the only media companies to decamp along its route. At Canary Wharf, Limehouse Studios became home to one of the decade’s major independent
television studios. The sheer pace of change sealed its fate, however, for it fell victim, a mere five years after opening, to the wrecking ball because its location lay in the way of a far grander
project. This was the vast new financial district funded by the
Canadian property developer Olympia & York. The project featured what became the tallest skyscraper in
Europe. At fifty floors, One Canada Square (more generally known as the Canary Wharf Tower) was visible from thirty miles away and, after much internal debate, was clad in steel as an
acknowledgement of Britain’s industrial past. The future it offered was very different: international investment funding an entirely speculative development in the belief that international
financial and media institutions, attracted by Thatcherism’s lighter regulatory touch, could be enticed to move in. Thatcher was among the dignitaries who braved its summit for the
topping-out ceremony on 8 November 1990. Though she did not know it, she had only another twenty days left as prime minister. Indeed, the immediate fate of the obelisk-shaped tower appeared to mock
all the hopes that she, as well as Canary Wharf’s promoters, had placed in financial and property-based speculation. When the tower opened the following year, almost all its floors remained
un-let and Olympia & York went bankrupt with debts of $20 billion. It was not until 1999 (when the extension of the Jubilee line improved accessibility) that the tower became fully occupied,
and it was only in the first decade of the twenty-first century that Canary Wharf was recognized as one of the great success stories of the eighties – even if the financial institutions it
housed would prove no more immune to risk than the generations of seafaring enterprises that had connected the old Port of London to the sinews of global trade.