Mr Heath's dirty linen
Mr Barber's lollipop Budget briefly diverted the nation's attention from the crisis it is going through in industrial relations: a crisis which the Budget did nothing to cool. The railwaymen have given us another of their one-day strikes, together with persistent inconvenience on certain lines. But this dispute, it is becoming clear, is at least as much an inter-union dispute as it is a dispute between men and employer. The one-day strike, and the threatened Sunday stoppages and so forth, are irritations, but no more. Likewise, the national one-day strike determined upon after last Monday's farcical special conference of the Trades Union Congress, will irritate and inconvenience people. Obviously the mood within the unions demanded that a gesture of union solidarity against the Government be made. In effect, the gesture will amount to a" free" or extra bank holiday.
Of far greater importance are the continuing actions being taken by the gas workers, the hospital workers, the teachers. The Government has made much of the ' fairness ' of its industrial policy; but a wages freeze can never be fair; and when food is excepted from price controls, then the specific unfairness of the freeze, towards those groups of workers who are caught in it, is made worse by the general unfairness of the policy towards those worst off, for whom food prices are most critical. It is obvious that the evident sympathy of doctors and nurses for the hospital workers will bring the National Union of Public Employees the support of the public, and with it, victory over the Government. The gas workers' case is likewise formidable, as is that of the London teachers.
It is only a matter of time — and of not much time, at that — before the first ex ceptions are made to the wages freeze. That such exceptions, when they are made, will appear to be governmental defeats is entirely the Government's fault, for choosing to pick a fight in such a stupid way that to lose a battle was to lose the war. "No surrender" they say, these brave Cabinet ministers, as if each one of them thinks he is Churchill in 1940, defying Hitler. Instead, they are rich men defying hospital ancillary workers who do the dishes and clean the soiled linen of the hospital beds. The hospitals' dirty linen is Mr Heath's dirty linen too. He takes delivery of a £40,000 toy, in time to avoid payment of £4,000 in VAT. Good luck to him. Good luck to Sir Frank Figgures and Sir Arthur Co field, in their £16,000 a year jobs as bosses the Incomes Board and the Prices Commission. But better luck to the hospital workers, the gas workers, and the London teachers. They, after all, need some luck, having been unfairly treated.
