POLITICAL COMMENTARY

What are they there for?

PETER PATERSON

There comes a moment for all professional conference watchers when the tangible, public business of the gathering, the speeches, the presentation, the votes, be- come so utterly soporific that sleep can only be kept at bay by concentrating on the behind-the-scenes politics, the private rows, the cover ups, the hidden meaning of the affair. It extends credibility to believe that all these indispensable people can spend a week at the seaside locked in a stuffy hall simply listening to tedious speeches while they wait to make their own equally tedious contributions to the pro- ceedings: what are they really doing? Or, as Mr George Woodcock once put it at a Trades Union Congress (and thereby unac- countably enhanced his reputation for sagacity), 'What are we here for?'

Alas, so far as the -ruc is concerned, the evidence at Brighton this week has been that the primary purpose of this annual talking shop is, really and truly, talk. One after another the delegates pop up on the rostrum like marionettes operated by a proudly smiling Mr Victor Feather on the platform just above them, to deliver their inter-galactically boring speeches on topics which are at best of specialist interest and at worst have been mauled over so many times in the past that there is no life left in them.

Although, as a life-long syndicalist, it pains me to say it, the Trades Union Con- gress in its public service manifestation in the conference hall is quite the most diffi- cult gathering I know in which to stay awake. To do so requires certain techniques which I have perfected over the years, but which still need so much concentration that the strain necessitates frequent trips to the bar. There is, for example, the 'from whence they came' diversion in which one has to guess the origin of the orators. For the TUC remains supreme in the range of British accents its speakers display : although while 1 am recovering in the bar I never hear delegates, who also need breaks, talk- ing off-duty in the same patois they use at the microphone.

There is, however, a survival instinct about any conference that has been going for as long as the 102 years that the -rtic has been in business. Aware that unanimity is repellent to the mass media, and having to compete with the hijacking story for coverage, all the elements of a great drama, Tuc-style, were assembled for Thursday's Common Market debate. The 'villain' in Mr Clive Jenkins was on hand to put some beef into Mr Douglas Jay's ailing anti- Market campaign and the race was on for him to secure in four days, without, so far as I am aware, consulting the view of a single rank and file worker, the millions of block votes necessary to swing Britain's

workers against the Market. (Is there any better reason than this kind of arithmetical fantasy for holding, when the time comes, a national referendum so that the workers themselves and everyone else can register approval or disapproval for themselves?) But waiting for the Common Market debate involved witnessing a great deal of the dreaded unanimity. On Monday every- one except the lovable Mr Tom Jackson of the Post Office Workers seemed to think the I'm was doing a great job reforming itself: Mr Jackson's observation that a child of ten could do better was not well

received. On Tuesday Mr Edward Heath, Mr Robert Carr and various monolioty

capitalists (unnamed) were in the firing line for daring to think that they can do what Mr Harold Wilson and Mrs Barbara Castle shied away from last year and introduce legislation to reform trade union law. Since, according to the rather exclusive tradition, no one was invited to put the opposition case, it made it a lot easier to con- demn such ideas, root and branch.

Wednesday was reserved for unanimity over the wages explosion, and was the day chosen by Mr Wilson to pay a visit to his old jailors, and all one can say is that it must have been one of the few occasions since 18 June when he has felt delighted that he is no longer Prime Minister. As he gathered during the final melancholy month of his administration (and it was still ap- parent this week), the motives of the union leaders are extremely confused between their desire for bigger and bigger wage increases and their dislike of being branded as public enemies for strikes they often have nothing to do with calling. The philo- sophy behind the drive to push up wages is simple enough at pay packet level. Prices are increasing so fast that the last rise you gained seems already to have disappeared and, anyway, everyone else is claiming 25 or 30 per cent so why should you be left behind?

But among the top brass of the unions the situation is more complex. In public they seem a determined, angry bunch of men set only on obtaining justice for the underpaid; selfless, patriotic leaders of a movement concerned only with the poor and downtrodden and unaware, apparently, of any such concept as the British worker's determination to maintain his differentials over all comers. Hear the arguments in private and you gain a vastly differerent impression. Gone is the platform confidence and aggression. Instead you have a worried apprehensive leadership which senses that unless it gets in on the act it will be left marooned by a flood tide of shop floor militancy. Ever since the three local gov- ernment unions last year experienced the trauma of having the increase they nego- tiated for the dustmen contemptuously vetoed by the beneficiaries, they have tried to be more militant than their folldwers. This time round some of them are worried that they might be too far ahead and that the response to their calls for strikes in local government from the end of this month will be less than enthusiastic.

The point is that the old pattern which allowed union leaders to get on with their high powered NEDDY meetings while turn- ing a blind eye to unofficial strikes has

changed. The Pilkington Glass strike at St Helen's and the current dispute at Sankey in Shropshire have seen the members howling down and humiliating the official

representatives of the union as if they were old party officials being re-indoctrinated by Red Guards. ('Trade. unions are not some- thing separate from workpeople,' Mr Victor Feather said without much conviction on Tuesday. 'Trade unions are workpeople.) And the members now demand strike pay even if they are not qualified under the old rules. The trend is proving expensive: it was an interesting revelation last week- end that the most moderate, right wing and un-strike happy of the big unions, Lord Cooper's General and Municipal Workers, has had to sanction the record number of seventeen official strikes in the past month, each representing an expensive drain on union funds. Even the wealthy engineering union is becoming alarmed over the out- pouring-of its funds since its leaders foolishly carried out their own precepts of devolution and handed over powers to disburse strike pay to local committees.

Although the sums look large on paper. a lot of the unions' money is tied up in pension funds and property and the unions are not rich. It is no wonder that they are apprehensive over reports that the Gov-

ernment might reduce welfare benefits now paid to the dependants of strikers—the consequence could be that unions would

have to move away from their present

nineteenth century provident 'society scale of benefits, involving very large increases in contribution levels and probably laree scale defections, particularly by lower paid workers. Mr Feather's advice to the unions on the subject of strikes to 'cool it' had a fine bank-managerial ring about it.

The dilemma for the union leaders is that to retain the allegiance of their followers

they must be more militant about wage claims than they have customarily been in the past, and where they are successful they

create rising and possibly unfulfillable expectations elsewhere. The strain on the TUC as the governing body of British trade union-

ism also increases in direct proportion to the

intensity of the pay scramble. Mr Feather and his colleagues are looking less and less credible to the Government as partners in consultation, and thus decades of 'ruc insist- ence on the right to be in on the running of the economy are now in danger. The Govern- ment no longer believe they can deliver the goods either in terms of reducing the number of strikes or moderating the pace of wage inflation.

This is why the surface mood of unanimity at Brighton this week was so suspect,and why the atmosphere away from the television lights and the set speeches, even allowing for the usual enjoyable back slapping and man- oeuvring over the composition of the TUC General Council, was one of confused dejection.

Not all the rhetoric of Mr Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, who combines but can never quite reconcile the heavy-handed authoritarian heritage of Arthur Deakin and Frank Cousins witha belief in workers' con- trol of industry, nor the selective economics of Mr Hugh Scanlon, the bogey-man of the late government, nor even the soothing sin- cerity and homely knockabout humour of Mr Feather, brought us any closer this week to an answer to Mr Woodcock's curious ques- tion. Having suffered in the cause of dis- covery, I will suggest a tentative answer, all we can expect from Brighton,: 'We're here because we're here because we're here.'