Political Commentary
Unions and governments
Patrick Cosgrave
There will, no doubt, be a Tory government again in Britain, at some time in the future; and it behoves those who would wish that event to come about, and who are working for it, to consider the tactics such a government should adopt towards the trade unions, particularly in the week of a TUC conference. Before doing so, however, we must retrace a little history.
Let us take first the narrower perspective. Mr Heath and those closest to him insist now as they did throughout the last general election campaign that there was no desire on their part for a confrontation with the trade union movement, such as led to their humiliating rebuff at the hands of the electorate. Bruised by his first defeat at the hands of the miners, the then Prime Minister had no desire for a repeat performance, but the fundamental principle of the hour — that the government could not beat the miners — was lost to view in a tangle of incompetence which began when Mr Derek Ezra of the National Coal Board making a ridiculously generous offer at the outset of negotiations. Mr Heath and his men had rude things to say about Mr Ezra because of that, but they omitted two considerations — he was their appointment, and his failure in a measure theirs also; and, when you have an incomes policy stating a stipulated maximum percentage award, everybody will ask for that maximum, and not something less. Once the nature of Mr Heath's incomes policy was clear, the confrontation was inevitable.
Whether we like it or not, therefore, incomes policies do not work: there are numerous reasons why they do not work, but my concern now is to emphasise that they cannot work' politically. No government is strong enough to ensure that they do; and if politicians are convinced — as Mr Heath and may of his colleagues are, rightly in my view — that the trade union movement must be disciplined in the interests of the nation at large, then another method must be found.
There is no doubt, I think, ot the genuineness of Mr Heath's determination to avoid a confrontation with the miners earlier this year: since a confrontation nonetheless took place it must have been due either to some strategic error in Mr Heath's policy, or through some quite exceptional stupidity on his part. Both existed in full measure: there was error in the incomes policy itself; and there was stupidity in the early assumption that, among the miners, Mr Gormley's voice counted for very much. By the beginning of this year the Conservative government were ludicrously out of touch with the trade union movement.
And, although no confrontation was sought this year, confrontation of a particularly brutal kind was a large part of the essence of Mr Heath's policy in the early period after the 1970 general election. There were two consequences of the Tory victories over the local authority workers and the postmen: the government got a very exaggerated idea of its power and the strength of its muscle; and the trade union movement as a whole, and especially the big and rich unions, felt, quite rightly, a singular sense of .guilt at their failure to sustain their weaker brothers in the early battles. No sensitive human being, let alone a trade union member, could have watched on television the agonised face of so gifted and humane a union leader as Mr Tom Jackson, in the moment of his humiliation by Mr Heath, and not feel that here was a man betrayed by his fellow workers. Out of trade union guilt born then was created a sense of solidarity that vastly increased union power in the months that followed.
There is, however, a larger perspective to all this. It is undoubtedly true that, over a period of more than a generation, the organised working classes have gained in power within the British economy, at the expense of other classes, and of the state itself. For a time that power was dormant; and the leaders of trade unions saw the interests of both their members and their class as being best furthered by co-operation with the existing institutions of the nation. No one can tell how long sucn a state of affairs might have persisted. However, with the White Paper, In Place of Strife, Mr Wilson and Mrs Castle and a rump of the Parliamentary Labour Party offered a challenge to the unions. Mr Wilson and Mrs Castle were crushed in the struggle that followed and, in that struggle, and in the subsequent struggle with the Conservatives, the unions began to realise just how much power they had.
Another consequence of these events has been that the unions have learned to trust no politician, not even a Labour politician. Dislike of and contempt for Mrs Castle is, for example, almost endemic among trade union leaders. At the same time the hamfistedness of the last Conservative government's approach to the unions further embittered Labour leaders and extended their willingness for conflict in which they knew they would be triumphant.
The question that must be asked now is whether any other result was ever possible. Again and again the Tories seemed to think that the inner feelings of rank and file union members were more inclined towards government and order than they were towards the regimented loyalties of trade union bureaucracy: they were right in their judgement, but wrong in the strength they attributed to those feelings. Yet; from time to time union leaders worked closely and constructively with the last Conservative government: Mr Clive Jenkins took a long time before he de-registered his union under the Industrial Relations Act; and Mr Jack Jones could not have worked more closely or fruitfully than he did with Lord Aldington over the problems of the docks. The question that must be asked, but which is difficult to answer because of inherent trade union distrust of Mr Wilson, and the ever recurring hamfistedness of Mr Heath, is whether it is at all possible for any government to work with the trade unions without allowing union leaders to exaggerate their conception of their members' interests over every other definition in sight. The answer must depend on some kind of assessment of the two most powerful union leaders, Mr Jones and Mr Hugh Scanlon. Even then, some understanding of their different problems must enter into the answer. Mr Jones is a successful, and Mr Scanlon an unsuccessful, union leader. That may seem an extraordinary remark to make when Mr Scanlon is still basking in the after-glow of success against Sir John Donaldson, but it is true nonetheless. Membership of Mr Scanlon's union is steadilY declining, and the amalgamation of various engineering labour interests which he strove to weld into one great organisation — for the creation of which he would even have, himself, resigned — is visibly tailing, not least because Mr Jones has managed to pinch the vehicle builders for himself. Mr Scanlon's activism is thus somewhat close to desperation, while Mr Jones's is that of success. None of which is to suggest that either man is other than a dedicated left-winger, determined to change the character and structure of British society. But there are instructive distinctions between them. One trade union leader of great standing and repute once described it to me thus: "Hughie is a doctrinaire left-winger. He got it from the books. But Jack is ,a working-class leader from experience. Ana' when the time comes, Hughie will be the one to take his peerage, because of the guilt he has, and the guilt his wife has, about betraying ,a Catholic background for socialism. Jac" though, will wear his cloth cap to the grave. , There has always been a distinction, in British trade union 'socialism' at least, between, the Labour movement and its character, an the doctrinaire tenets and gospels of Marxisil The middle-class amelioration and faddism 0; Hampstead and the Fabians no longer need detain for very long any serious politician or commentator, for its driving force passed With the death of Hugh Gaitskell. Any member of the Labour Party, and any trade unionist 1.0° expects to be powerful, must have at least a nodding acquaintance with the theories of a certain German who once abused the hospitality of the British Museum for a long period. But the driving and passionate reformism of British unions and of the British Labour Party comes from the felt experience of the British working class, not from any textbooks. But what has been happening in the last few years is that experience and theory have begun to be sloviY blended together, in the face of successive governments unable either to satisfy or to outface theestablished strength of trade It may be that everything has gone on too long for any resolution to be arrived at which will both satisfy the big trade unions and, preserve the authority of Parliament and government; in which case we can merely sit in our trenches and await the greatest crisis cif British political life in living memory. It may br, that a magician of politics can emerge who wit' see ways of working with some, if not all trade union leaders. It may be that a government of immense courage will emerge which will see and act on the analysis, that the only way to discipline over-mighty trade unions is througn unemployment, as the only way to discipline over-mighty or over-subsidised business is through bankruptcy. All these 'maybes' are, however, ho more than that: it is unlikely that any one of them will happen. In that case, as politicians and unionists pursue their squabbles the rest of us will have to watch the continuing erosion of inflation, and await the time when the forces of economic reality impose the inevitable disciplines of unemployment and bankruptcy alike.
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