Book review: Law and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75: ‘Rather Peculiar Things’

One man and his court

Studying labour law at university made me want to practise law. My first steps as a barrister were cases in the Industrial Tribunal. Although my career started much too late for me to visit the National Industrial Relations Court, even by the late 1980s ‘the NIRC’ remained fresh in practitioners’ minds, and its successor the Employment Appeal Tribunal retained the air of a court which, even if no longer on the industrial relations front line, was still a place where law and politics lived side-by-side, sometimes too closely. And even then, labour law (as it was still called) continued to evolve under the gaze of Sir John Donaldson, then the Master of the Rolls, but between 1971 and 1974 the first and only President of the NIRC.

Peter Oldham’s history of the NIRC is a fascinating read, both for the law and the politics. The Industrial Relations Act 1971 took industrial relations policy firmly by the scruff of the neck, establishing a system for trade union registration backed by court-imposed sanctions for ‘unfair industrial practices’. The NIRC, which that Act created, was a bold experiment – an attempt at corporatism that used a court to regulate collective trade union action, the single most controversial topic of its day. By putting the NIRC front and centre as the proposed ‘cure’ for industrial strife, the Act served, inadvertently, to find (and then exceed) the acceptable limits of using law as an instrument of social policy and economic policy. The experiment was short-lived: the NIRC came into existence on 1 December 1971 but by 31 July 1974 was gone. The period was defined by larger-than-life characters, not only the politicians and the trade union leaders, but also the judges who included Lords Hailsham and Denning. The original sources this book mines bring that period and those characters to life, and make it clear that Sir John Donaldson was more than a match for any of them.

The hopes and ambitions of all these men, and the harsh realities that ultimately laid the NIRC low, are revealed in the author’s telling of two epic sagas that came to entangle both the NIRC and its President. The first, in the summer of 1972, involved the litigation in Heatons Transport v TGWU, Churchman v Shop Stewards of the Port of London and Midland Cold Storage v Turner. In all these cases dock workers’ jobs were threatened by the ‘new technology’ of containerisation. In Heatons the NIRC’s attempt to hold unions liable for their shop stewards’ actions was overturned by the Court of Appeal; Churchman found the NIRC caught in the middle of a dispute between union members and a union that refused to comply with the NIRC’s ruling; and in Midland Cold Storage the pigeons released by the Court of Appeal’s judgment in Heatons came home to roost when, unable to hold the union to account, the NIRC imprisoned trade unionists for contempt, making modern martyrs of the ‘Pentonville Five’. Only a speedy ruling by the House of Lords restoring the NIRC’s judgment in Heatons provided Donaldson the opportunity to reverse away from the contempt decisions, release the unionists and avert a national strike. The second saga, caused by the Con-Mech litigation in November 1973, was little more than political confection, but signalled that the NIRC would not survive a change of government.

The author is to be commended. His subject is carefully researched and his writing well-paced. Legal history written as political thriller. Not to be missed.