TUC Notebook
The momentary expulsion of the mighty Transport and General Workers Union from the TUC on Monday provided one of those uncovenanted thrills that stirs the anarchy of us all. The panic-stricken scramble to reverse the decision incidentally shattered quite a few illusions. Such as, that the trade unions are devoted to constitutionality, rules of procedure and the Proper conduct of meetings. And that all 'unions, great or small, are equal in the eyes Of the TUC. I don't see how after her performance Mrs Marie Patterson, the TUC's Chairperson and a paid official of the Transport and General, can ever look a rule book ,In the eye again. In the inquest that fol*wed, most people formally laid the blame for the whole fiasco at the door of Jack ,Jones's newly elected successor Moss 'vans. His speech defending the Transport and General's failure to carry out a decision of the TUC in favour of the tiny pub managers' union was arrogant, bombastic and Insensitive. It was an inauspicious debut, and I doubt whether Mr Evans will ever recover to inherit the respect accorded to Mr Jones. Nevertheless, the Transport and General had to be readmitted somehow: With a wage explosion to be averted, you can't have a mad dog union running amok outside the TUC. Unity, they say, is strength — but it also enables everyone to keep an eye on each other.
'bo things really ever change at the TUC? rimy do, imperceptibly, but the capacity of trade union movement to go on blindly discussing the same problems year after Year without realising, or acknowledging, that they are making little or no impact, seems infinite. 'We, as a community, ought tO be ashamed of the fact that.. . standing outside the door of this hall have been clung people from all over the country. what are they asking for? They are not asking for charity: they ask for the right to 1?articipate in this affluent society. . . ' In ract, that was Frank Cousins, deploring nernployment at the 1963 TUC. Today we nave three times that number and David Basnett, a union leader of a new generation irlle was not even present as a delegate in i.'63 — still speaks of the movement's intense anger' over unemployment. But 0,,Utside the Winter Gardens in Blackpool IneY are a very different bunch of young °Ple demonstrating for the Socialist ;Yorkers Party 'Right to Work' campaign, ,nd. there is little sympathy expressed on trhe tr behalf inside the hall. For one thing, neY wear their distinctive campaign uniform, a bright orange flak jacket: shades of the Public Order Act, particularly as they are inevitably surrounded by burly Blackpool policemen. They chant slogans in unison, like soccer fans, pausing occasionally to allow the quavering voice of their own Tokyo Rose to be heard singing their anthem, the American union song, 'Solidarity for Ever' to the tune, I think, of 'John Brown's Body'. Their posters are irreverent and up to the minute. After the Engineering Workers' delegation revolt at the weekend, when Hugh Scanlon seemed to have adopted the methods of his predecessor, the late Lord Carron, together with his famous 'Carron's Law' — it is constitutional if I say it is constitutional — the demonstrators were ready: 'Arise Sir Hugh, and stuff you too' screamed their most prominent banner.
Blackpool is emphatically not the kind of place that grows on you with familiarity. I have been coming here, on and off, for the past twenty years, and I believe I like it less each time. If anything, it becomes more gritty, more grimy — more positively joyless — with each visit. I think it has something to do with the astonishing irrelevance, for a seaside resort, of the sea itself, a grey mass safely stemmed by the concrete 'rocks' of Blackpool's treeless, grassless front, its sound blotted oat by the clattering trams and the never-ending stream of cars full of people here to see the illuminations. In Brighton the sea asserts itself by hissing sibilantly through the pebbles on the beach, and there are boats to be seen and people and dogs on the foreshore. In Scarborough, the cliffs and inlets make a wild sea wilder, and it explodes against the land like artillery fire: it is tinglingly dangerous, and it can't, as in Blackpool, be ignored.
Alarmingly, it is not just the sea that is irrelevant. It is happening to people as well. The greatest honour that the burghers of Blackpool can bestow on anyone is to invite them to switch on the illuminations (they are always illuminations: the word lights has quite another context here in the North). Film stars, beauty queens, footballers, comedians — even the cast of Dad's Army have done it. But this year the senatorial task was performed by a horse, the hurdler Red Rum. Ruminating on this over breakfast one morning as I read the Mirror's latest high-minded campaign (as poor Marjorie Proops confessed: 'I have lain awake for several nights worrying about whether or not the Daily Mirror should expose the spread of child pornography'). I came to the conclusion that were he alive today, and in need of a holiday, Caligula would be quite at home in Blackpool. And he'd take the Mirror, of course.
A prophet is without honour. . . the hero of this week's Congress should, I thought, have been Roy Grantham, General Secretary of the clerical workers' union APEX. He is the man in the front line of the Grunwick dispute, George Ward's implacable opponent, the champion of trade union rights, on whose behalf the mass pickets were unleashed. But poor Mr Grantham looks anything but a hero, and indeed his moment of triumph at the rostrum had to be postponed on account of the Transport and General row. His unhappiness is almost physical — an animated Gerald Scarfe cartoon of a man. A quixotic offer to pay the fines of the Grunwick pickets has made him Uncle Roy to his bitterest political opponents, the Trotskyists; a stalwart of the Right, he is being used as a milch-cow by the extreme Left. He is also, I am sad to say, the victim of a whispering campaign by his fellow union leaders. They assert that APEX had no right to organise at Grunwicks in the first place: photo-processing workers should be in the Transport and General, Clive Jenkin's ASTMS, or Alan Sapper's cine-technicians. And they regard it as unethical to recruit non-unionists who go on strike as Mr Grantham did. Many unions discourage that kind of thing with rules that deny any strike benefit until a member has been in the union for six months. Witheringly, nearly every union leader believes that the Grunwick affair should never have been allowed to escalate as it did, and would not have done so had they been in charge. But the real reason for Mr Grantham's unhappiness, I suspect, is the cost of it all. He estimates the bill, so far, at £200,000, and the end is not yet in sight. He could probably have bought the business for that.
One of' my tasks in Blackpool this week has been to write and present a radio documentary on the TUC as seen through the eyes of three rank and file delegates. Someone gave it the title 'Inside the Carthorse', which provoked a BBC colleague, Ray Davies, to observe: 'It represents a new Low in broadcasting.'
Peter Paterson
Previous page
