Political commentary
The noise of the tumbrils
Charles Moore
Blackpool According to Mr Ken Gill (AUEW (TASS)), Mr Tebbit's trade union laws 'cut across custom, practice, tradition and justice'. The note at Blackpool this week is one of elegiac regret for the passing of an ancien regime. The TUC needs an Ed- mund Burke prosing about the age of chivalry being dead and the glory of Europe being extinguished for ever to express its feelings. All the dear old ways of doing things are under attack, and all those dear old gentlemen on the platform (except the ones who are shouting very loudly) can hear the noise of the tumbrils outside.
Like the ancien regime, the TUC does not condescend to justify its habits according to the superficial criterion of reason. Mr Terry Duffy, for example, asserted on Tuesday that the Government White Paper 'Democracy in Trade Unions' would be more accurately entitled 'State Interference in Trade Unions' since it prescribed ways in which unions should run themselves. Yet the freedom of workers to combine surely is to be provided by laws which to some extent regulate what is and is not a combination. Any law on trade unions is 'state inter- ference'. One might as well have com- plained of 'state interference' in local government elections when the franchise was made universal after the War. But the unions' point is that one is dealing with sacred things. One does not labour to prove Divine Right; one asserts it and tries to make sure that it commands obedience. When the sad time comes when people stop believing in it, there is nothing to be done.
We would all feel a greater melancholy • about these changes, a la Burke, if we could remember happy times when a grateful populus doffed its cap and cheered heartily • as union leaders passed in their carriages. ,But we cannot forget how deep, pervasive and enduring is the public hatred of trade unions. As I approached the Winter Gardens on Tuesday for the 'Talking to Tebbit' debate, I was stopped by a man in his twenties (social class E, nicotine-stained 'fingers, dirty clothes). He told me that I 'had made a great mistake coming to Blackpool. (How much I agreed. We were standing by the miserable, plastic, potted- plant infested 'cafe' that has replaced Yeats' glorious Wine Lodge.) Blackpool, he said, was an anti-union town. He looked in- creasingly threatening, until I explained that I was Press, and we parted amicably. A number of Young Socialists were yelling outside the conference against the Youth Training Scheme. 'I wish they'd get Scargill', a kindly old lady came up to tell me.
The unions used to be the people 'who are holding the country to ransom'. Now that is less apparent, but they are still the people who count a stoppage or disruption as a success. Equally important, one associates them with low quality in everything. Unions produce misprints in newspapers; unions stop men turning up to drive trains; unions protect dustmen who throw rubbish all over the road and then ex- tort a Christmas box from the cowed ratepayer. Many people still want to be in unions though for some that 'want' is in the sense in which a man 'wants' to pay protec- tion money, but really we all hate them. I do not quite know whether we are reasonable to do so, but anyway we do.
So when Mr Tebbit says that trade union reform will bring unions more in line with the wishes of their members he is assuming rightly that these wishes are that unions should have less power; not merely that they should be less extreme or less political, but that they should be less important. Peo- ple like Mr Scargill are therefore right in detecting a campaign to destroy 'This Great Movement of Ours' rather than a disinterested atempt to improve existing in- stitutions. The TUC has always seen itself as an essential part of the mass-organisation of the working class for political and economic aims. That is just what is under attack.
It is not easy to see who, from the point of view of the TUC, is right about talking to Tebbit. The great difference between Mr Tebbit and Mr Prior, his predecessor, is that Mr Tebbit has refused to take the union leaders at their own valuation, and so has bypassed them. Now that he offers them consultation, he is not changing his mind. He is calculating that the talks will make him look more reasonable than they. The unions will be asked how they might alter the system of contracting out of the political levy. They will give unsatisfactory. answers, and Mr Tebbit will go ahead. As Ken Gill also said, 'It is possible to overestimate our collective powers of per- suasion'. What will the TUC have gained by it all?
But Scargill, Gill et al are wrong to think that not talking is more likely to work. They claim that they could mobilise the Labour movement to fight. On the ground of no secret ballots, that is obviously silly. Perhaps, nowadays, it is a silly thing to ex- pect on any ground at all. Their concern is to keep their purity. But the purer they are, the smaller and more marginal they become. The TUC had to agree to talk, but the agreement signals its weakness. After all, it has nothing to say.
The change marked by this TUC is that, for the first time since inflation began, the proceedings have not mattered very much. The conference has almost taken on that, reassuring dullness which makes the annual gathering of the CBI so lethal. The changes in the rules about the General Council which made life difficult for pseudo-unions and unions with small memberships, the dialogue with the Government, uni°11 cooperation with the Youth Training Scheme, have got nothing on the old, debates about incomes policy and Soda' Contracts. If all the votes had gone the other way, the differnece for the country would not have been very marked. The TUC has concentrated more on matters which concern itself — a sign of itS diminishing standing and, perhaps, of it5 growing sense. But it must be almost impossible for the union leaders to know how to adjust themselves to being politically inconsequea" tial. In the past, there has been one Labour conference for the price of two, its first leg being at the TUC. The press still expects this. This year the cameras kept rushing UP to Arthur Scargill not, as he claims, because journalism wants to destroy him, bat because it still wants to believe that the miners are on a par with the Cabinet in the government of the country. Len MurraY tries to take politics out of his week; but was only yesterday that the unions arrange' for themselves an even more inexplicable role in the Labour Party. Since unions helP to chose the Leader and the Deputy, Mr Murray's interdiction of the candidates was like the Oxford Union's ban on canvassing (and similar ruses were used to get round it); He and others see the need to get clearer ot the Labour Party, but do they know what the point of a non-Labour TUC would be? And would it include many of them on its General Council? Labour and the unions are inseparable, a fact which now seems t° be involving each in the other's downfall. The debates of the fallen angels in their Pandemonium are unlikely to be very Pra. ductive. It must be pleasant for the Governnlea; to behold old rivals so humbled, but ba.,°, for Mrs Thatcher's character since she vil" imagine that it is all due to her. Really the unions did it themselves, discrediting bY, their own behaviour the mistaken belief 01 Jim Callaghan or Jim Prior that union, bosses are an essential part of the `mutual and respective charities' (Burke again) or 'consensus', by which Britain has to live,: But it is still true that we are saddled it the union's post-war achievement of a sur- ly and unwieldy public sector which has the power to disrupt people's lives and suck uP; their money. We have not heard the last or Len and Moss and Clive and Arthur, but at least we don't have to listen to them atten` Lively.
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