Thatcherism and the Picket Line

Abstract This article explores the relationship between Thatcherism and the picket line. The picket line in late twentieth-century Britain was a space in which ideologies were directly contested, and the power of law, police, courts and trade unionism came into conflict. Reshaping picketing was essential to Thatcherism’s broader goal to restructure industrial relations. The paper first considers the new picketing regulations of the 1980s, focusing on how these directly responded to the often effective strike tactics of the 1970s. The new rules, however, were ignored in several major industrial disputes. The second part of the article shows how the picketing regulations were reinforced in the face of this challenge by intensive state, court and employer action, resistance to which was weakened by the labour movement’s internal divisions. As a result, the third section demonstrates how the new industrial relations regime came to be largely internalised by trade unions and their members in the 1990s. By the end of this period, the picket line had been transformed profoundly, becoming typically smaller, less mobile and more orderly. The history of picketing centres Thatcherism as a political project that used state power to reconfigure industrial relations in Britain, transforming the legal landscape within which trade unions operated and the broader cultural norms in which the power of picket lines was ultimately rooted. It emphasises that the weakening of workers as collective agents was a central, broadly coherent and, in many ways, successful feature of Thatcherism.