Political Commentary
The hiccup in the structure
Ferdinand Mount
The Evening Standard billboard was arrestingly, reassuringly dull: JIM'S NEW STRUCTURE. The mixture of the homely and bureaucratic suggested some process at once intimate and carried out for your own good: 'Our Jim's a different man since he got his new structure; he can really chew now.' The Prime Minister himself spoke of 'building bridges' although he had to admit that a 'spasm' had taken place within the trade union movement. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the other hand, diagnosed a 'hiccup' in the Labour government's record of successful co-operation with the trade unions. A third opinion in the form of Bill Rodgers, the Transport Secretary, agreed on the hiccup but located it elsewhere, in the 'emergency machinery' which was working 'remarkably well if with the odd inevitable hiccup'. This nonchalance with regard to hiccups seems medically unsound; hiccups, after all, characteristically recur; the last Pope but one is said to have died of them.
Such a confusion of metaphors is, as Mr Enoch Powell says in that meaningfully lowered voice, `no accident'. For the government invites us to believe — as Gilbert Ryle said the old philosophers invited us to believe—in 'the ghost in the machine'. There is, we are led to understand, a series of inexplicable accidents — doors slamming without a draught, tables upset, sudden biffs in the face, horrible mocking laughter — which occur within an otherwise perfectly regulated universe. Secondary pickets are at work — terrifying, brutal, unaccountable poltergeists.
There was and is, Mr Callaghan said, no legal distinction to be drawn between primary and secondary picketing, but 'the plain man can draw such a distinction and I do.' Historically, according to Plain Man, primary picketing was designed todeter blacklegs and so was acceptable; secondary picketing was designed to stop other men doing the work they normally did and was 'indefensible.' Cries of 'well, why don't you do something about it?' Ah, it seemed there were difficulties; if only Tory MPs had Plain Man's long experience in these matters they would know better than to resort to 'illconsidered legal measures'; Plain Man remembered Arthur Scargill and his secondary pickets at the Saltley coke depot; Plain Man remembered how the Tories' Industrial Relations Act had landed five dockers in Pentonville Gaol until they and the government had to be rescued by the 'Official Receiver'; Plain Man remembered Baldwin's Trade Disputes Act and how ineffective that was in curbing strikes. In fact, Plain Man had memories of positively elephantine proportions — all of them reasons for doing nothing very much.
Yet if the Labourgovernment's changes in trade union law are not responsible for the increase in the frequency, numbers and violence of these poltergeists, what is responsible? After all, one of the things that Plain Man remembers is a time — vaguely described as 'my younger days' — when workers did not exhibit this universal reluctance to cross picket lines. It is nice to think that there was a period when one drove one's lorry down to the docks and, if confronted by half-a-dozen characters of somewhat menacing appearance no doubt wielding at that epoch starting-handles rather than heavy-duty jacks, one paused momentarily for the purpose of having information peacefully communicated to one and then passed on one's way with a courteous 'Sorry lads, can't disappoint the guvnor.' But Sophisticated Man cannot immediately locate this period in recent trade union history. However, if people did use to cross picket lines without a finger laid on them, why don't they any more, or why do they now fear that they will not be allowed to?
The Prime Minister was deft and cool in his improvisation. Yet it was the improvisation less of Napoleon's chef inventing Poulet Marengo after the Battle of same out of a couple of chickens, a few onions and so on than of a wartime housewife pluckily knocking up a meat tea after a devasting air raid. Mrs Thatcher's speech was not merely her best performance as Leader of the Opposition; it was one of the finest demolition jobs of recent years, worthy to be ranked with lain Macleod's destruction of Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson's assaults on the flagging Macmillan government. She articulated national outrage with a passion which was both genuine and controlled.
After destroying, with a daunting catalogue of class, the government's claim to be in control of events, she developed a magnificant indignation at the pretensions of strikers' committees to 'allow' vehicles through the picket line. The public loathing of trade union arrogance was for the first time brought to full expression in Parliament. One after another, Labour backbenchers stumble to their feet —Eric Heffer, Sid Bidwell, Tom Swain — these heavy, slow men dutifully but uneasily defending the folk from-whence they came, and are flattened. Even Shirley Williams is denounced for joining the Grunwick picket line. Shirley indignant jumps to her feet; she had never condoned violence. No, but she had added to the numbers on the picket line and numbers were of themselves intimidatory; and she was not in dispute with Grunwick, so she had been a secondary picket.
Mrs Thatcher did not even have to destroy Joe Ashton, the normally quick, cocky MP for Bassetlaw but here auto-destructing with dreadful imprudence. Had Mrs Thatcher still not learnt the lesson of the Saltley picketing 'which may have been illegal but which worked from the union point of view?' Gales of righteous Conservative glee. 'What's written on a piece does not guarantee that it will prevent picketing.' Tory MPs crowed and beckoned more victims to their feet: 'next one, next one.' At one stroke, the drooping morale of the Parliamentary party is restored.
But we cannot leave the argument to the applause meter. Something has to be said very clearly about the reform of the trade union law in general and the reform of the law on picketing in particular. The government — or rather, the government's legal advisers, for most Ministers have not the foggiest clue about these niceties — are quite right to say that the law on picketing has scarcely changed since the 1906 Trade Disputes Act. Mrs Thatcher insistence that Tories should have the credit for the one restriction imposed, on picketing a person's home, is accurate but revealingly trivial; in these days of hired managers, trade unionists don't usually want or need to picket the boss's home.
But what is crucial here is not so much what the law is as what people in general imagine it to be. Trade union legislation matters less for its own sake than as an index of the growth or diminution of trade union influence and confidence — which itself stimulates further growth or diminution. What the Tories have to do therefore is not so much to reduce the power of trade unions as to reduce the fear of trade unions. For the less we all, including trade unionists, fear trade unions, the less they will be inclined to try to secure their aims by terrifying us.
What follows? To pass into law only those reforms which you can be certain that trade unions will observe and not to worry too much about how far the reforms will alter trade union behaviour. And not to entangle yourself in structures, bridges or other contraptions which commit you to control of wages and so to eventual conflict with the trade unions. Again, as Enoch said in the third memorable speech of a memorable evening, it is no accident that the October 1974 Parliament should end in a similar fashion to the 1970 Parliament — in a welter of strikes and relativities boards. The crucial difference is that this time the government has so far financed inflation in only a modest way; hence no City panic, no sterling crisis. And so long as Mr Healey raises the money to buy off the strikers in an honest fashion, there need be no economic disaster. But that is cold comfort for politicians who want to be re-elected. Those who pretend to live by incomes policies are doomed to perish by them.
Previous page
