POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Disputatious dominies

JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE, MP

It seems to be one of the unwritten con- ventions of the House of Commons that a special deference should be shown towards the learned professions. When one of our solicitors is in the full flood of his denun- ciation of a blatant example of a restrictive practice by a trade union it would be con- sidered in the worst of taste to draw atten- tion to the activities of the lawyers, and I can well remember the shocked response of a Labour minister when I was unwise enough to suggest that a learned law lord had delivered himself of an opinion flag- rantly designed to protect the privileges of his own profession. So I suppose I ought not to be surprised at the universal conni- vance which the House of Commons has shown towards a glaring case of profes- sional intolerance, verging on persecution, to which the Government has given legal backing on behalf of the teaching profession in Scotland. But I am.

For years the leading teachers' trade unions in Scotland have been campaigning for the establishment of a professional council to control the conditions of entry to, and employment in, Scottish schools. Eventually they persuaded the last Tory government, in 1961, to set up the Wheatley Committee to enquire into the desirability of the establishment of such a council. Pre- dictably the committee recommended the setting up of a General Teaching Council, and in due course it fell to the Labour gov- ernment to legislate accordingly.

What was to follow was an Order in Council laying down that henceforth all teachers in Scotland were to pay, once a year, a fee of £1 for the privilege of being `registered' with the General Teaching Council, on pain of instant dismissal. Now it so happens that there are three teachers' trade unions in Scotland, and one of them, the Scottish Schoolmasters Association— roughly the equivalent of England's National Association of Schoolmasters— has a reputation both for militancy and for its bitter hostility towards the two other unions (which represent the large majority of the teachers). The SSA argued that the arc should consist exclusively of teachers, whereas the Government had decided— quite properly—that the Council should also contain representatives of the employers (the local authorities) and the taxpayers. When it failed to get its way, it urged its members to refuse to register. But objec- tion to the 'signing on' requirement also came from another quarter, for a quite dif- ferent reason: a number of senior teachers who were not members of the SSA objected to the fact that the certificates which had entitled them to teach generations of school- children were in effect to be annulled by a stroke of the pen.

These arguments fell on deaf ears. The Government's Order in Council was approved by Parliament, and local author- ities were told to issue dismissal notices to teachers who persisted in refusing to regis- ter. Some local authorities resisted, where- upon they had 'default orders' served against them, which meant that if they failed to issue the dismissal notices they were liable to be fined.

So eventually all the local authorities bowed the knee, and issued dismissal notices to the teachers who had held out. This had the desired effect: the numbers who re- fused to register gradually shrank until by the end of March 1969 only twenty-one were left. So the Government felt brave enough to act, and they were sacked. Not only were they sacked: because they were held to have 'voluntarily withdrawn their labour' they were even denied unemploy- ment benefit, and learned that while the families of men who had gone on strike over a 'who does what' dispute costing mil- lions of pounds of exports were entitled to a subsidy from the taxpayer, their families were not. Let that be a lesson to those who dare flout the orders of a Labour govern- ment—always providing, of course, that they are not the leaders of one of the big national trade unions.

Events then followed a wholly predic- table course. Some of the sacked teachers packed their bags for better-paid jobs in Canada, and persuaded a number of their colleagues to go with them. And when the period for re-registration for the second year of the GTC, 1-30 April of this year, had elapsed, it was found that more than five thousand teachers—or about one in eight of all teachers employed in Scottish schools —had not got round to renewing their reg- istrations.

For a while the Government endeavoured to turn a blind eye. Obviously the teachers, careless souls, had forgotten. Or perhaps the postal service, which left something to be desired, had failed to deliver their letters of re-registration. But by the middle of June ministers at the Scottish Office were forced grudgingly to admit that they were in trouble again. Finally at the end of the month the Government gritted its teeth and issued a public reminder to the local auth- orities that after persuading as many as pos- sible reluctantly to register, they must do their duty and sack the recalcitrants.

But this time the number is very much more formidable: over two thousand teachers at the latest count were still hold- ing out. If the local authorities really had to dispense with their services a good many schools would collapse. Fortunately for the Government the schools are now closed for the summer holidays, and it is clearly the hope of the Secretary of State for Scotland, himself a former dominie well endowed with the obstinacy of his profession, that the local authorities will bustle to and issue dismissal notices which will once again force all save the sort of minority he can outface to come into line before the schools return.

It may work again, but I rather doubt it. I wonder whether all the local authorities

will be prepared to go through all over again a ritual which, understandably, they intensely dislike. Even if they do, I suspect that this time the hard core of teachers will be substantially larger: several hundred, perhaps. If it is, then the Government will probably have to admit defeat, and aban- don the GTC to its fate.

Meanwhile every single local authority in Scotland has been in theoretical breach of the law in continuing to employ unregis- tered teachers since 1 May. And while twenty-one teachers have been hounded out of employment in a profession which they have served blamelessly for years, thousands of others who have committed precisely the same technical 'offence' have continued to teach. In addition, several hundred teachers who have no qualifications and, in many cases, no hope of attaining such qual- ifications, are employed quite legally be- cause they are 'conditionally registered'. Yet I am told that unless one supports the Government in enforcing this travesty of the law one is 'condoning illegality'.

Of course if the mu now collapses be- cause the Government fails to bully a suf- ficient number of rebel teachers into obedi- ence to enable it to sack the rest, those of us who have attacked the folly of its pro- ceedings will be blamed for frustrating what we are told constitutes 'an historic advance in the status and quality of the teaching pro- fession'. This does not cause me very much loss of sleep, for I cannot help wondering whether we might not be better off without a body which has confirmed the employ- ment of a substantial number of unqualified teachers and sacked others who are both qualified and experienced.

But what does worry me is the way Parli- ament has treated this affair. I have always believed that one of the prime duties of Ml's was to stand up for the rights of minor- ities, however small, and however appar- ently misguided. Of course I know that this is not the Labour party's ethos: one of their members once explained to me, very frankly (and in a quite different context), that oppression of a minority by a majority was all right; it was oppression of a majority by a minority which could not be tolerated. Yet the Government has enjoyed all party support.

The explanation, I fear, is that we all tend to assume that full-time professional organisers are entitled to speak for the professions they purport to represent. Are they not elected by their colleagues? In a democratic society, who dares to question their credentials? And if one recognises their credentials, then clearly to doubt the wis- dom of a course which they urge upon Government is to risk incurring the wrath of all their colleagues.

In reality, I suspect, the leaders of the Scottish teachers' organisations are like any other trade union leaders. They are elected by the votes of the minority of their col- leagues who actually bother to vote at all. They become full-time professional organ- isers who rapidly develop the characteristics of organisation man which distinguish them fundamentally from the people they are supposed to represent. Their members are interested in professional advancement; but they are interested in enhancing the import- ance of their particular organisation and the size of its block vote.

Well, good luck to them. But it is not time that we at Westminster decided to take them at our estimation of their merits and importance, rather than at their own?