OCTOBER 1988 saw a rash of walkouts in hundreds of places where civil servants worked.

Four union members at a little-known government facility, the Government Communications Head Quarters, had been sacked on orders emanating from prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

The four were among a key group of 14 members drawn from the very many specialists working at the state agency responsible for intercepting and analysing electronic and radio communications. 

Following a decision to ban trade unions at the facility and for five years, the employer, Thatcher’s Tory government, had ratcheted up the pressure. Civil Service union leader Leslie Christie wrote in the Civil Service Journal: “Ugly threats became ugly reality. Four men sacked, the rest face further disciplinary charges or forced transfer. Their crime? To stick by the belief that to belong to a trade union is a basic right for every working man or woman.”

As editor of the Civil Service Journal — which, despite its official sounding name was the newspaper published by the newly created National Union of Civil and Public Servants — the case of the GCHQ issue was a running story.

NUCPS, which merged the executive grade union SCPS with the specialist and support grades union CSU, was in a succession of mergers that ended the grade-based structure of public service trade unionism and led eventually to the formation of today’s unified Public and Commercial Services union, PCS.

My editorial following the walkouts said the most significant thing about the October strikes was their spontaneity: “One thing that our rulers cannot understand is that trade unions come into being spontaneously. To them the thought of workers combining is an affront to the natural order of things. But from Capetown to Cheltenham joining a union seems the natural thing to do.”

The editorial went on recount the illuminating tale of a young civil servant in a government office — as they said in wartime radio broadcasts — somewhere in southern England. Why did she come out on strike? She replied — the government sacked some trade unionists, was it the Central Electricity Generating Board? — and everyone just walked out.

Later I heard the story of another young woman, a newly elected shop steward working in a south London social security office, who received a phone call from her full-timer to call a car-park mass meeting over the sacking of the first of the four at GCHQ.

Minutes before the walkout commenced she thought she had better check what on Earth GCHQ was. Not that it mattered much, the principle was the thing.

The late Mike Grindley was chair of the GCHQ Trade Unions organisation, which organised the resistance and led the campaign for the restoration of trade union rights. A linguist and a modest and dedicated trade unionist with a fascinating back story — at one riotous Support Grades conference karaoke I heard him sing the Chinese national anthem in the original — he brought a sharp intelligence to the analysis of the forces at work.

He wrote: “The 14 of us who were sacked in late 1988 and early 1989 for refusing to yield our membership of a free trade union had individually as much as 32 years’ service at GCHQ, and half of us had previously done time in the armed forces as well. After a five-year fight from inside our workplace we now carry on the campaign from outside the razor wire.”

He then went on to castigate the failures of the British legal system and its submission to the security state, excoriate the European Commission of Human Rights and expose the EU’s Social Charter as “fatally flawed on basic trade union rights.”

Over the next decade the dogged campaigning, imaginative tactics and sheer persistence of the GCHQ campaigners, which drew extraordinarily wide support across the trade union movement and encompassed every political and ideological tendency, featured repeatedly. 

Hugh Lanning, the CSU and then NUCPS official with responsibility for the campaign, along with the Guardian’s security specialist Richard Norton-Taylor, wrote the authoritative account of the campaign, A Conflict of Loyalties: GCHQ 1984-1991.

Now republished as an e-book under the Manifesto Press imprint, it is a remarkable account of the campaign, a fascinating insight into the ordinary but extraordinary characters who sustained the struggle and a cool-headed analysis of the political and class forces at play as the security state — soon enough entangled in a series of imperial wars in the Middle East — was compelled to submit to democratic pressure.

They record also the idiocies and ironies that inevitably emerge when an authoritarian government has to deal with workers who, while loyally carrying out their state functions, stick by their trade union principles.

GCHQ management disciplined staff found reading the union campaign’s Warning Signal. And in July 1984 when union member Gerry O’Hagan showed a copy of The Miner to a colleague (the NUM dispute was centre stage at that time) he was ratted out to management: “I am now banned from bringing into the station any paper printed by any trade union and especially prevented from showing these papers to the staff,” O’Hagan told Warning Signal.

On the other hand these supposed “security risks” continued with their responsibilities. The book recounts that Richard Alexander was sent to a conference in Washington, Don Clarke was asked to supervise the installation of a new computer system and Mike Grindley represented GCHQ in Washington DC.

If my judgement that it was the skilful campaigning and the wide support it assembled which compelled Tony Blair’s New Labour administration to lift the anti-union ban seems jaundiced, it is because before that moment, and in the months preceding the election, opposition shadow ministers expended enormous energies in wriggling out of commitments to the unions and campaign groups.

The Blair/Brown decision to maintain Tory spending limits blunted working-class expectations and lifting the ban at GCHQ served to humiliate the Tories while it was a concession to labour movement sentiment free of financial cost. 

The book documents the struggles of a remarkable group of people. Lanning and Norton-Taylor go beyond their authoritative account of the campaign itself to interrogate the myths and hypocrisies which are embedded in the working practices and official ideologies of the security state.

One of the most interesting passages details how political and class power is exercised. Thatcher’s “cavalier attitude” was illustrated by the way she imposed the union ban.

The authors write: “She used what were, in effect, ancient royal powers in the way that a medieval might have done. Like a latter day Henry VIII, she simply told Sir Robert Armstrong — a latter day Cardinal Wolsey — to ban unions at a meeting a few days before Christmas, on December 22 1983.”

The key legal argument centred on the 1982 Civil Service Order in Council, a remnant of the royal prerogative which gives the government of the day executive, discretionary power to act without legislation or even without consulting Parliament — exactly the same prerogative powers that the British imperial state exercised when it bombed Yemen this month without parliamentary sanction. Undoubtedly present-day functions of GCHQ played a part in the execution of these decisions.

Their book is distinguished by a truthful and exacting account of how the call for solidarity action met a mixed response where fine words were revealed to be empty rhetoric by some in the trade union movement while others exceeded expectations.

Grindley summed up the situation: “We’ve found it true that there is a lot of good people in this country, ­we always suspected it but now we know it to be very true. On the other hand, my suspicion of the Establishment has risen tenfold.”

A Conflict of Loyalties: GCHQ 1984-1991 is available as an easily downloadable at www.manifestopress.coop.