Tebbit's wins need to be won all over again
It ended many of the legal immunities enjoyed by the unions and exposed them to civil court proceedings for damages brought by the businesses they targeted. Secondary picketing and the closed shop had already been severely curtailed, but the 1982 Act sought to provide specific remedies for real abuses and to redress the imbalance of bargaining power between unions and employers.
It reduced the legal protection of union funds during strikes, enabling the sequestration of the National Union of Mineworkers' assets during its stoppage of 1984-85, and of the print unions' during the Wapping dispute of 1986-87.
The intervening 40 years or so have seen a marked decrease in days lost to strike action. No longer is the country routinely held to ransom by a handful of politically-motivated union bosses.
But while this trend has continued in the private sector, in the public one it is a different matter. Here unions are once again flexing their muscles, especially the increasingly militant British Medical Association (BMA).
Junior doctors, whose industrial action in 2022 caused the cancellation of 1.5 million hospital appointments, have again voted to strike over pay demanding another 29 per cent increase. Now known as resident doctors, they have seen their pay jump by almost 30 per cent in three years yet are prepared to inflict further damage on an already broken NHS.
One of the Tebbit-era reforms was for unions to vote on strike action; but while 90 per cent of those who took part in the BMA ballot favoured more walkouts, they represented less than half of those entitled to vote. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, made much of the Tory failure to settle the last dispute when he was in opposition. Now he is also refusing to negotiate with the BMA, insisting that there is no money available. Yet Labour has also promised to use a new workers' rights Bill to repeal Tory legislation requiring a minimum service to be guaranteed by striking unions. That is a decision ministers are about to regret.
The battle that Norman Tebbit fought 40 years ago will need to be won all over again.
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