Political commentary
Labour and the law
Charles Moore
In industrial disputes, trade unions start with a great psychological advantage they know what they want. As long as their members agree with them on the matter, they are in a very strong position. In the case of Messenger Group Newspapers, the National Graphical Association wants a closed shop. Most of the other parties to the dispute are by no means clear about what they want. This may be the explanation for the lack of conspicuous gallantry on almost all parts of the battlefield.
Mr Eddie Shah himself, though he must be very brave to have endured the siege of his works, does not seem to know exactly what he wants. Sometimes he has spoken of reemploying the sacked NGA members and inventing a special company for them. Sometimes he says that he will agree to a closed shop, at others it appears to be the closed shop to which he objects. But his wavering is at least excusable. As he disarm- ingly admits, he is an innocent in negotia- tions with the NGA.
The newspaper proprietors would pro- bably argue that their doubts and hesita- tions are those of Mr Shah writ large. Cer- tainly they stood to lose a great deal of money very quickly by fighting the union. But the complete shutdown of Fleet Street last Friday night surely did offer one of the very few occasions when the proprietors could coordinate, and use Mr Tebbit's law to their benefit. Mr Le Page, the NPA's not very eloquent spokesman, said that his bosses were not trying to break the power of the NGA, but merely to prevent the repetition of secondary action; yet such a repetition could only be avoided if the NGA's power in Fleet Street were destroyed. That destruction must have been the aim behind the sacking of the workers last Friday night. But the events of Sunday and Monday proved that the proprietors (lid not really know what they wanted and so they settled for money now and trouble later. Since then, few of the papers have even dared to comment on the subject.
' It would involve one of those nice moral judgments in which journalists are not skill- ed to decide whether the NPA was more .cowardly than the TUC. Anyway,the precise shade of yellow does not matter. Is there any point in the new position at which the TUC claimed to have arrived in Blackpool in September? Len Murray was praised at the time for saying that, since the Government had won the election, it should not be ignored, and that laws passed by Parliament should be obeyed. But when an actual case arises, the TUC has nothing to say. There is an attempt to support the NGA's 'industrial case', and not the break- ing of the law, but when Mr Wade calls his
members to make their case by breaking the law, the TUC is silent. If what Mr Murray said in Blackpool meant anything, the General Council would by now have con- demned the NGA several times over. Yet because it is also impotent, with no power over the workers it says it represents, the TUC does not really try to assist the NGA either.
One might at least concede that the TUC, having sunk so low already in public esteem, has not lost much by being feeble yet again. But for the Labour Party, a failure to rise to this occasion is more serious. Until now, Labour has built its op- position on the mistakes of the Govern- ment. In the case of Grenada, where British interests were only very distantly involved, Mr Healey made it seem that all our sacred freedoms had been sacrificed. Now, when a union does actually threaten freedom in this country by trying to bully its way out of the law, Labour manages to avoid taking a view. In the House of Commons on Tues- day, both Mr John Smith, the shadow employment spokesman and a confirmed moderate, and Mr Neil Kinnock avoided anything other than the vaguest platitudes about obeying the law. It was left to a backbencher, Mr Bob Litherland, to claim that it was the law itself which was commit- ting acts of violence on the picket line (as if the devil Tebbit had somehow possessed the otherwise peaceful pickets), but he was only saying what Messrs Smith and Kinnock were hinting. They seemed to have decided that, since the NGA was going ahead anyway, Labour's only role was to help the union weaken the Government without ac- tually joining the pickets.
No doubt it would be naive to expect Labour to have done anything else. About a third of the Labour backbenchers, and a larger proportiontof party workers must be in favour of the NGA breaking the law, and no Labour MP in opposition enjoys the idea of doing anything which makes restraint of trade unions easy. But that only goes to show the extent to which the Labour party is the tool of a particular interest, rather than the natural representative of 'ordinary people'. The hatred of union militancy, especially of the print unions, is common to all classes, and is based much more on a sense of justice than it is on envy. There is nothing necessarily unsocialist about laws which hold unions responsible for some of their actions, nor would Labour compromise its power to oppose by saying clearly that the law must be obeyed (and firmly applying that general principle to this particular case). Mr Kinnock, who is supposed to be appealing to the new Britain where people are young and have mort- gages, has muffed his first big chance.
Labour's position may also be based on a mistaken belief that history is likely to repeat itself. The memory of the Heath In- dustrial Relations Act is a warm one for Labour — the dockers, the Saltley picket, the success of the Triple Alliance, the even- tual collapse of the Act and of the Heath Government. Even moderate Labour politi- cians must want to believe that the Tories will make the same mistakes again. Yet the present dispute has already shown that the Government has learnt the lessons of Heath. This time, there is no special In- dustrial Court to focus the hatred of organised labour. An injunction was granted to Mr Shah under 'Prior-Tebbit', but the fines themselves are for contempt of court, and since they are exacted on an organisation rather than on the six union members directly involved, they provoke no sympathy for those fined. All the normal apparatus for the upholding of the law and for the conduct of industrial disputes is working. Ordinary courts make their deci- sions, policemen try to prevent breaches of the peace and ACAS provides its usual good offices. In these circumstances, Mr Smith's invitation to Mr Tom King, the new Employment Minister, to try to bring the parties together was so far-fetched as not to be able to embarrass the Government at all. Labour does not realise that all is running according to Government plan.
The behaviour of the NGA, the fact that Mr Shah is supported by almost all his workers, and the skills of Messrs Prior and Tebbit in constructing their laws put the Government in its first enviable position since June. Mr King performed extremely well on Tuesday, though of course it would have been more fun to see Mr Tebbit teas- ing the Labour front bench. He was not called upon, or rather, did not have to enter any complicated arguments about the rights of trade unions. He simply had to support the rule of law and display his opponents' equivocations on the subject. The only quandary for the Government has been whether to say anything provocative enough to force all the unions into the camp of extremism or to try to drive a wedge bet- ween extremists and reasonable men. In the event, it has not had to decide, since moderate union leaders have humiliated themselves unaided.
Since the Government is at some distance from these events, it will not even suffer very much if Mr Shah backs down (unless, of course, he does so because, as at Saltley, the police have been too weak to resist brute force). The fine against the union stands, and has been secured by the sequestrators. If Mr Shah decides that he prefers a quiet life, his decision may encourage the Government to go further in controlling the closed shop, but it does not undermine the existing law. But if Mr Shah does win, it will be the best news for the Government since the Falklands, and will start a move- ment against union power which one day might reach even Fleet Street itself.
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