The firemen's hopeless case?
Peter Paterson
'Toot your horn if you support us,' reads the sign chalked on a board outside our local fire station, and I duly salute the huddled pickets standing waif-like in the cold. At the same time I wonder whether my small gesture, while perhaps helping their morale, might not actually be doing their cause some harm.
It is difficult, certainly, not to feel sympathy for the firemen. Like a great many of society's drudges, their existence is normally scarcely noticed. An occasional feeling of irritation if one is held up in a traffic jam while the cumbersome fire engines are manoeuvred across the narrow street and back into position in the station; that fleeting stab of fear at the sound of their banshee sirens that is enshrined as folklore in the ladybird rhyme.
But why should I have any qualms about sounding my horn as I drive past the fire station? The reason is that the fireman seem to hold the dangerous belief that a favourable climate of public opinion can win their strike for them, and that every blast on a car horn is a demonstration that the public is indeed on their side.
Alas, it is probably not so, and the error could prolong the strike. Opinion polls may not be scientifically accurate, but they are a lot less fickle than the effortless whims of passing motorists. And the polls indicate that public opinion is solidly on the side of the government's efforts to keep wage increases down to 10 per cent — at least in the public sector where, as paymasters, they have most say. Public opinion, of course, may swing over to the firemen in the event of some ghastly tragedy like an old people's home, a hospital or an orphanage going up in flames. But it could easily blame the firemen rather than the unhappy Merlyn Rees, or our stolid Prime Minister, as the soldiers remove the charred bodies. The best that it can do for the firemen is to get them an inquiry. But that is now not enough.
The government's handling of the dispute has certainly been insensitive. Taken in, perhaps, by the fact that the firemen's leader, Terry Parry, and his executive were against a strike, they underestimated the feelings of the rank and file delegates who voted down the executive's advice. The promise of 10 per cent, plus an enquiry on the same lines as the one offered to the police obviously directed at getting them a substantial rise as soon as the coast is clear — would have strengthened Mr Parry's hand and probably enabled him to avert the strike.
Mr Rees's disclosure in the House of Commons that other, unnamed, union leaders had told him that they would expect equal treatment if any concession were to be made to the firemen sounded extremely feeble. Everyone knows that there are powerful groups waiting to burst through the 10 per cent guideline. They will do so — or attempt to do so — irrespective of whatever happens to the firemen. Does anyone believe that Frank Chapple will be either hindered or spurred on by their fate when his power station workers come up for their increase next March? In fact, we have had it in the most breathtakingly brutal fashion from Chapple himself that he will exceed the norm, and that his men are capable of reducing the country to a condition in twenty four hours that would take the miners three or four months to achieve.
The firemen do not possess this kind of industrial power. But if they are relying on the public to soften the hearts of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, they should cast their minds back to 1971, when the postmen — enjoying much public goodwill, if only because the telephones remained working — had to hold out for seven weeks before they went back to work with the promise of an inquiry.
That was against the background of Edward Heath's unpopular 'N minus one' policy, which sought to defuse inflationary public sector wage claims by insisting that each group should receive one per cent less than its previous settlement. With a Conservative government in office, the trade union movement still left the postmen to sweat it out on their own. Why should the story be any different for the firemen? Well, there is one significant difference. Supervisors, telephone engineers and clerical workers all walked with complete impunity across the postmen's picket lines six years ago. Today, the picket line has mysteriously acquired a sanctity that is challenged only by the very brave. Senior fire officers who have crossed it have been threatened with dire consequences once the strike is over. The government has discouraged the removal of equipment from the fire stations, although it would help the troops in their fire-fighting efforts, because they believe it would embitter the strikers and make a settlement more difficult. Tougher picketing at military depots has even been hinted at in some areas.
Personal unpleasantness may be one reason why people respect picket lines more strictly than they did in 1971, but it is not the whole answer. A more ominous cause may be that the spectre of Arthur Scargill and his mobile pickets loOms over the scene. The firemen would hardly need public opinion — indeed they would be bound to forfeit it completely as part of the bargain — if they could organise mass picketing on the lines of such famous engagements as Saltley Depot and Grunwick. Even assuming that rentacrowd would be available in this cause, such tactics might well split the ranks of the firemen themselves. The willingness of some firemen to help out the troops at serious fires is itself an indication that they would scarcely be willing to stand by while mass pickets prevented the troops from even getting to a fire.
The firemen are now boxed in. The government is unlikely, with the prospect of humiliations of its own to come, to give in to their demands. The Sunday Times and the Daily Express can demonstrate that great minds think alike by advocing an extra rise for the firemen if they will only agree to surrender the strike weapon. The correspondence columns of The Times are full of equally impractical solutions.
Everyone, presumably, agrees that firemen should be decently paid, and that they shouldn't have been allowed to slip so far behind. But special cases need muscle if they are to convince the government — the power to make everyone's life intolerable, like Mr Chapple's power workers and the miners possess, or — as with Ford's — the power of a multinational corporation to barter the siting of a new factory against the Nelson treatment from Mr cahagharl towards their wage settlement. What should surprise us, in their joint hour of need, is that the insurance companies have not come up with some constructive suggestion that would aid the firemen who in strike-free days do so much to safeguard their profits. As the flames consume the offices and the warehouses, contemptuous of the amateurish efforts of the soldiers, and the assessors tot up the losses, the old-fashioned fire bells on the Green Goddesses are tolling for them.
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