THERESA MAY recently warned the Police Federation that “policing by consent” was at risk. 

She told them that “recent revelations” about Hillsborough, police spies, Stephen Lawrence and so on put the “relationship between the public and the police” in danger.

The Home Secretary could be right. But it was a Tory government that pushed the Bobbies as far from “policing by consent” and towards being “Maggie Thatcher’s boot boys” as they could. 

The Tories wanted the police to deal with strikes and urban unrest created by their economic policies with physical force, not consent. That process started long before the miners’ strike. Papers I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showed how Tory Home Secretary Leon Brittan worked to make Cheshire’s police get tough on pickets in a key 1983 strike at the Warrington Messenger newspaper. 

Brittan changed policing at this key testing ground so that the new police strategies could be used at the Wapping strike, on the miners and elsewhere. 

Eddie Shah began printing his regional newspapers with non-union labour, leading to a dispute with the then powerful print unions. 

This was the first real test of strength between Thatcher’s government and the unions, putting a small industrial estate at the centre of a national controversy. 

Tory employment laws were used for the first time to fine and sequestrate the NGA union, while mass pickets surrounded Shah’s presses. 

Union defeat at Warrington opened the door to Rupert Murdoch’s breaking of the Wapping print workers in 1986, entrenched the new anti-union laws and began the shift in power between unions and management that was so central to Conservative plans. 

Leon Brittan’s special adviser, Robin Harris, persuaded the Home Secretary to take up the case. He said right-wing bosses’ group the Institute of Directors (IOD) was complaining that the police were not supporting Shah. Harris wrote to Brittan to say Shah and the IOD thought that “the police should be acting to move further away or to disperse pickets.” 

The Home Office decided to “sound out the police” about the strike. They found the picture “not particularly reassuring… The police clearly do not trust Mister Shah whose reaction they regard as unpredictable.” By contrast, “Police maintain that their relations with the pickets remain good.” 

The Home Office was “not able to persuade the police that any action on their part was called for.” 

A report from David Graham, The Deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire, shows that the Home Office fears were well founded. His 12-page memo on the background to the dispute reveals poor relations with Eddie Shah, particularly after Shah’s lawyer phoned to threaten that they would have to bring in their own “private army’” of security guards to clear pickets. 

Graham also wrote that “relationships between police officers and pickets has been generally good and without acrimony and such force — as opposed to violence — as is used by the pickets tends to be through force of numbers, with a view to making their point and preventing delivery vehicles leaving the plant. The majority of the time between such instances, police and pickets converse without any animosity being shown.” 

The Home Office, then run by Leon Brittan, could not accept the police getting on OK with pickets. It pressed the police both to meet Shah and to take tougher action against pickets. 

A later memo from the Home Office principal private secretary says Cheshire Chief Constable George Fenn “had been informed of the view agreed by legal advisers that the police had the power to stop coaches bringing pickets to the scene and in effect turn them back” and that if “he felt it necessary to scale down numbers at the scene substantially by preventing the arrival of pickets or by dispersing those at the scene he would have the home secretary’s full support.” But the Chief Constable wasn’t keen on this roadblock scheme. 

Home Office anger at Chief Constable Fenn increased. A November 2003 note records Leon Brittan outlining points “to be conveyed to” the Cheshire chief constable. 

Brittan wanted the police to know that he thought it was “essential both in the national interest and in the interests of support for the police service” that “the right of ingress and egress” from Shah’s Warrington plant be preserved. 

The Home Secretary offered the Chief Constable “his complete support” in policing the Warrington dispute, including “anticipatory action” to stop pickets even reaching the area. However, he added that “if, notwithstanding this explicit support, things went badly wrong as a result of the failure of the chief constable to take appropriate action, he would not then be able to support the chief constable publicly.” Brittan also advised the chief constable to make “a personal approach to Mister Shah.” 

The official position, as put to Parliament, was that “it is for the chief constable to judge how to respond to particular circumstances.” However, these stern messages show that the Home Office was trying as hard as it could to change the way police responded to the strike.

By December 2, ministers seemed convinced that the Cheshire police were finally coming round. Brittan’s private secretary records: “From a conversation with the chief constable… it was clear that he had closed off motorway exits and other junctions leading to the site and that some coaches had been stopped.” 

A force of 1,600 police, including those from neighbouring forces, used a “baton charge” to move pickets and an NGA “control van” was captured. Following this show of force and faced with financial sequestration the NGA print union backed away from the Warrington dispute.

And so May’s Tory predecessor began the shift away from “policing by consent.” Leon Brittan introduced the policing we know well from the Tory years — road blocks, baton charges and an unambiguous siding with bosses against unions. May is only complaining because she wants to weaken the Police Federation, not because she wants to undo he damage done by her party.