The Conservative Objection to the Trade Unions Bill
(We publish this article by an exceptionally well-informed cor- respondent, not because we necessarily agree with his views, but because we think it is in the interests of the Unionist Party to clarify our ideas as to the fundamental principles of Unionism.— En. Spectator.) FOR there is a Conservative objection, and nowhere does it seem to have been adequately stated. We have had the Conservative ease for the Bill, and there is in it very little of Conservatism. We have had the lawyers' defence and the politicians' defence. Naturally such advocacy passes over the fact that at a score of points the Bill does violence to what is in fact the Conser- vative philosophy and the Conservative methods of politics. It is an ill service to Conservatism to ignore these objections. They may not be conclusive, although in the view of this present writer they are conclusive. But at least they should be stated. For sooner or later we shall have to take them into account.
Let us review the facts. This country, like every other belligerent country in the years that followed the War, was faced by the danger of revolutionary disorder. Most of the European belligerents have had to face their revolution of one kind or another. Up to twelve months ago, we, almost alone among the European belligerents, had successfully steered between the revolutionary Scylla of Bolshevism and the equally revolutionary Charybdis of Fascism. The working classes had over- whelmingly decided to use the traditional, the consti- tutional, the political means of remedying their grievance or promoting their cause. Which is another way of saying that they had been drawn into Parliament ; that their industrial organizations had come to have a parliamentary and political end. And it was that which saved us. For both forms of revolution which the Continent has had to face are a revolt against parliamentary government. The Communist there made of the workers' organizations, not a means of larger parliamentary or political power, but a substitute for Parliament and for the political method of reform. It is part of the jargon of the Communist creed that the " economic precedes the poli- tical," that industrial action alone counts ; that parlia- mentary flummery must be abolished in favour of prole- tarian dictatorship. So long, says Mr. Trotsky, as the workers are hypnotized by politics and the trap of the vote, they will never achieve the social revolution. The astuter Communists recognize, if the Conservatives do not, that to bring and keep the working classes into the field of parliamentary politics is to keep them out of the field of revolutionary industrial disturbance. That is why the typical Communist hates the Thomases, the MacDonalds, and the Snowdens very much more than he hates the Conservatives.
" The more the workers can be drawn into political action," seem to have argued the authors of the Trade Unions Bill, .‘` the less will be the danger of revo- lutionary industrial disturbance. We will therefore make political action as difficult as possible and push the trade unions back upon industrial. agitation ; keep these Labour leaders out of Parliament and its moderating and educating influence, and confine them to their narrow trade-union jobs ; this will, of course, tend to weld the trade unions together and make for general strikes and so for revolution. But we will meet that by passing a law against revolution, though of course revolu- tion means that all the laws are defied and the Government challenged. We will put the funds of the unions at the mercy of injunctions based on the courts' reading of motives and purposes, which no one can be sure about : still further increasing suspicion of capitalist power, widening the gulf between organized Labour and the constituted authorities. And when the effect of this has been to drive the whole of the working-class order into a revolutionary attitude, we will, through this new Bill, give the police—also secretly members of the revo- lutionary movement—power to arrest the whole lot. Could anything be simpler ? "
Resort to this policy is supposed to be based on the experience of the General Strike of last year. What is that experience ? A dispute in one industry managed to rally the whole forces of organized Labour, and in a twinkling the thing assumed the form of a general attack upon Government.
How, after all, was the General Strike overcome and the movement it represented checked ? By the influence of the very parliamentary and political leaders of Trade Unionism that the new Bill would tend to keep out of Parliament. They stood for reason and were able to exercise the influence that they did because the rank and file had still belief in Parliament and they and the leaders had been won on the whole to the political as opposed to the industrial weapon. The leaders, though carried by the flood into momentary support or acquies- cence, quickly rallied, and by their action reduced the revolutionary strike to nothingness. The nation was saved by the fact that the trade unions had been brought into politics and won to the parliamentary method. This is the great lesson of the strike—a lesson so por- tentous, so outstanding, that hardly anything else about it matters.
Again and again, the point has been made during this dispute that it is not fair or logical that members of trade unions should have to contract out of the political levy ; we are told that they should be compelled to contract in. But if, human nature and inertia being what it is, the effect will be to hold the unions out of politics, then the result of this clause in the event of a General Strike ever again being attempted will be to make it immeasurably more dangerous and less manage- able than it was on the last occasion. And, of course, on the next occasion it won't be called a General Strike. A coal strike plus a transport strike -would be a far more potent weapon, from the Communist point of view. Under the terms of this Bill, it would be dealt with by stretching its terms, and that stretching could be represented by the Labour agitator as illegality. The truth is that you cannot make laws at all about situations like this. Some years ago, a Continental railroad- system was absolutely paralysed by all the employees literally obeying the instructions (" to inspect carefully each door before the departure of the train, to see that it is duly closed . . .," " to admit passengers to the platforms only five minutes before the departure of the train " . . . " and to open the ticket windows ten minutes only before the departure of the train"). There was absolute chaos. The whole system broke down. Yet not a single employee could be indicted for illegality, for refusal to obey orders. When it came to the pinch, many of the provisions of this new Trade Unions Bill would be about as effective as the Volstead Act in Chicago.
We English are one of the few peoples who have realized that there are numberless situations in life which cannot be met by law at all, but only by a willingness on both sides to play the game, a readiness for give and take ; a capacity to apply the rule of thumb to new situations as they arise, and above all to leave well alone and to give our support to that system or compromise which, however unsymmetrical or illogical, does in fact " work."
And the truth is that the relationship which give and take had established between the workers' organ- izations and the Government under the law as it stood, worked. It may not have looked well on paper ; the law, for instance, with reference to the levy for political purposes. But not only did it work ; its tendency, by virtue of the very fact which seems to have disturbed- the authors of the present Bill, was to render the trade unions anti-revolutionary and within its sphere to civilize them and render them manageable.
But why should 'such a plea be deemed the Con- servative case ? Is it not the object of Conservatism to stand for the maintenance of the social and economic status quo?
To which I would reply that it is not ; that in our age Conservatism is certainly not and cannot be a mere insistence that in a changing world nothing shall be changed, that there shall be no adaptations to altered circumstances, to the living and growing thing we call Society. Speaking broadly, politics and politicians do not make the changes which have characterized the life of the world this last century or so : those vast changes, greater in one hundred years than any made in any preceding thousand years, have not been for the most part deliberately willed at all. They have been the result largely of inventions whose ultimate effects were not in the least realized at the time they were made. We wake up to find that some mechanical device—. printing or steam—has altered the world. Canute himself would not be a more fatuous figure than the Conservative who should assume that in the presence of forces of this kind he can just sit still and insist that nothing be altered.
What, then, is the Conservative principle in politics ? It is surely that the methods and means by which the necessary changes are made shall be based upon experience—another name for Tradition ; that the adaptation of old methods with which we are familiar is in politics a far better way than the sudden adoption of tools entirely new, strange, and untried ; that sym- metrical and logically devised constitutions are not necessarily the best, because in government and politics we are dealing with forces so elusive that they are apt to escape the meshes of our most craftily drawn statutes ; that however contradictory and even, absurd a consti- tution or method may appear to the lawyer or logician, just one test, and one test only, should be applied to it ; Does it work ?
Conservatism trusts much more to habit, to custom, to such traditions as those of give and take and " playing the game " and to compromise, than to rigid regulation, to legal formulae ; it looks with suspicion upon " isms," theories, and legalistic considerations.
Its rules seem plain enough : First, work with the grain of the old habit and not against it. This does not mean that there shall be no change, but that the new way shall be a " growth and not a manufacture," shall not be by complicated command and regulation. Second, distrust extremes or the habit of pushing things too far. Thirdly, leave well alone ; if things work it does not matter that they might in some imaginable case be objectionable. Cross that bridge when you come to it. Fourth, human nature is the main thing to be considered, and laws which ignore it, or ask too much of it, will fail and be a mischief. Habit, custom, tradition are better means of regulation than elaborate law. Fifth, distrust ironclad formulae masquerading as " principle."
It is these elements of Conservatism which have made the British Empire ; and they figure quite inadequately in the Trade Unions Bill. CONSERVATIVE.
PosvciuFr.—Why, just when experience is revealing the utter folly of basing all political machinery upon the voting device, and when the universal discredit which has fallen upon that dubious device of democracy is justifying in some measure Conservative doubts about votes, whether for flappers or their grandfathers—why, at this juncture, has the Government chosen to introduce votes as the means of choice into the selection of the House of Lords ? The truth is that if we are to be governed wisely, we shall need again and again the type of mind that does not share the common opinion of the moment, which has managed to do its own thinking and not taken it from the herd. You won't get that type by voting. We ought to have the wisdom to see that what we need, often, is not a legislator who will think just as we do, but one who will not, because he has taken the trouble to know more about the matter and not fall into our fallacies. A group a little removed from the herd, and taught not to care a jot what the public thought, might have a chance of throwing up such a mind occasionally. But that chance will be gone if peers too have to go electioneering for their seats. Why have not Conser- vative governments the courage to stand by at least that element of the Conservative method which the best of modern sociological thought now admits to be sound ?
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