TUC Commentary-2
The Brahms was Better
IN the Taper Collection of Seaside Mayors, now on view at Wildenstein's, public attention has naturally been focused upon Alderman Grimble- deston of Blackpool, whose faraway (vacant, even) expression is so admirably caught in Mr. Ben Nicholson's great portrait. But I would strongly recommend visitors to the exhibition not to miss Room 9, where they will find the less striking, but in many ways as interesting, chalk study of Coun- cillor Henry Brown of Bournemouth by Mr. Augustus John. For it was Councillor Brown who opened the Ninetieth Trades Union Congress by roundly declaring that the eyes and ears of the world have turned to Bournemouth,' and anybody who can manage to utter so gigantic an untruth without being struck by lightning, and indeed without even gagging over the words, is clearly a man whom Bournemouth should be proud to have as Mayor. The fact is, if the eyes and ears of the world turned to Bournemouth for the TUC, then the eyes and ears of the world must have had singularly little of interest to occupy their atten- tion. I for one have not spent a week of such stupefying boredom since the 1957 Finance Bill. More than once I was tempted to flee; the only things that kept me at my post (apart from my sense of duty) were the United Steel Company's party—as always the highlight of the TUC—and the concert on Thursday by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, of which I shall have more to say (not all of it irrelevant) in a moment.
The main reason for this trance-like state of the TUC j was indicating a fortnight ago : it is the plump and rounded contours of the delegates. It is extremely difficult to man a barricade if you cannot climb to the top of it without the assistance of a crane, and there is no room for fire in a belly that is with good capon lined. The anxiety of the General Council to do nothing whatever that could possibly be interpreted as a challenge to the Government did not, much as they would like us to believe it, spring entirely from their great sense of constitutional responsibility. It came largely from the General Council's realisation that if they did present a challenge to the Government they would be risking a good deal more than their good name. The reluctance of the Council, for instance, to support Mr. Cousins and his busmen by spreading the strike was not an indication of their distaste for sympathetic strike action but a recognition of the hard fact that Frankie-boy and his cohorts were about to get a fairly thorough clobbering, from which recognition grew the very natural desire to keep the numbers of the clob- bered as low as possible.
Yet even this attitude does not fully explain the cataleptic quality of the TUC these days. The truth is to be found, surprising though it may seem, in that most forbidding of all documents handed around at the TUC, the Statistical State- ment. From this work much charming informa- tion may be gathered, such as that the Amalga- mated Society of Journeymen Felt Hatters has 2,224 members, the Hcalders and Twisters' Trade and Friendly Society (Huddersfield) has 280, and the hugely impressive Federation of Trade Unions of Salt Workers, Alkali Workers, Mechanics and General Labourers only 1,809. But, leaving the realms of the purely picturesque, one may also gather from this booklet the sobering information that if six men—Mr. Cousins, Mr. Carron, Sir Tom Williamson, Mr. Ernest Jones, Mr. Greene and Mr. Alan Birch—are in agreement, everybody else in the TUC can go and join the Amalgamated Union of Running Jumpers, a mass shift of alle- giances that would play hell with the Bridlington Agreement. For the votes wielded by the six unions which they head together make up a very comfortable majority of the entire organised trade union movement. Come the rest of the railwaymen, come the electricians, come the ship- wrights (with their emblem, consisting of two crossed holes and a screwdriver), come the agri- cultural labourers, come the builders and the woodworkers, the steelmen and the printers, the butchers, the bakers and the candlestick-makers- come even Bro. Wigglesworth, who enlivened the discussion on the hydrogen bomb by presenting the only completely honest case for armaments I have ever heard (he said the armaments manufac- turers provided work and wages for thousands)— and it would make no difference; 4,351,311 is more than 3,986,014, and that is all there is to it.
Nor need this fact be interpreted as indicating anything particularly sinister. The situation in which all six of the men I have mentioned are on one side and everybody else on the other never in fact arises; if they are together, almost everybody else will be on their side, anyway. Moreover, the pressure towards a healthy conservatism exerted by the weight of such numbers is considerable, even when there is nothing else driving them in that direction; the greater the ability to make up Congress's mind for it, the less, it seems, the desire to do so in any but the gentlest and most cautious way.
But if the effective control which the Six Against Thebes exert over the proceedings of their 8,337,319 fellow-members of the movement means that the movement is unlikely to lose its collective head, it also means that little but boredom can be expected of its public proceedings. Put it this way : they had one card vote this year, on Mr. Bryn Roberts's call for a drastic cut in Britain's military expenditure. Anybody would think, I may say in passing, that if it had been carried Britain's military expenditure would have been cut; but cruel disillusionment never got a chance to set in. For the motion was in fact defeated, by four or five million votes, and so little likelihood was there of any other result that at the time the figures were announced I was lying on my bed trying to think of a rhyme to 'Tommy Yeardye.' The mono- lithic power of half a dozen unions means that if they are in favour of one course of action there is never the smallest chance of its being rejected, and if they are against it the General Council (in so far as it is not in any case true to say that they are the General Council) would never get within spitting distance of presenting it to Congress. This means that there can never again—or not until there is a considerable change in the line-up of the big unions—be any surprise in anything the annual congress does. As soon as I got my list of motions 1 went through it marking 'Carried' or `Lost' against them, and there was never the slightest possibility of my being proved mistaken when Bro. Yates actually got around to saying `All those in favour.' (Incidentally, Bro. Yates's ineptitude in the chair grew worse as the week went on. There wouldn't even have been a card- vote on Mr. Roberts's motion if Bro. Yates had not first asked for a voice-vote and then blandly announced that it was defeated, despite the fact that the volume of sound for the ayes had far exceeded that for the noes.) The only area of real disagreement left is that of interpretation : clearly Frankie's idea of what is meant by Congress's rejection of wage-restraint is not the same as that of Bro. Webber, and Comrade Haxell's notion of the 'urgent necessity for the nationalisation of Britain's basic industries, with priority for the key sections of the engineering industry,' is not the same as that held by union leaders who do not take their instructions from Comrade Kerrigan; though Congress passed the comrades' motion without a word being said against it.
Now if there is no disagreement there is no real debate, and the TUC is in danger of turning into something almost indistinguishable from the annual conference of the Tory Party. It was pathetic to watch the procession of delegates who came to the microphone to argue for their full ten minutes on behalf of a motion that nobody in the hall opposed. They had to have something to show, I suppose, when they 'reported back,' but if I had heard the phrase 'much could be said in relation to the situation' just once more, there would have been a very ugly scene.
Is it any wonder, then, that on Thursday I took myself to hear the concert? And mighty fine it was, too, with as dashing a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto (by Mr. Denis Matthews) as I have heard this many a day, and a splendidly brassy rendering of the E minor symphony of Brahms. Leaving the hall afterwards I was tapped on the shoulder by a delegate, who asked whether I had not enjoyed this performance more than those down the road. I assured him fervently that I had. We spoke then of Bro. Cousins, whose second (and last) speech c f the Congress we had heard that very afternoon, and we agreed that it had been more interesting than most. Whereupon, `Ah,' said this worthy soul, 'but he can't attack like Brahms.' And that about sums up even Frankie-boy. He can stand, as he did, head and shoulders above anybody else at Bourne- mouth; he can fairly hypnotise at any rate the less sophisticated sections of his audience into thinking that the bus strike had been a howling success; he can bask in the ovations the Ninetieth Congress accorded him; but he, like the rest of the TUC, can't attack like Brahms. The reason is that if they did they might burst the drum; and every child who does just that, in order to find out what makes the noise, knows very well the shock of bewildered disappointment that follows the dis- covery that there is nothing inside at all.
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