Notebook
Blackpool Having been brought up to believe that unity is one of the great virtues, alongside cleanliness, godliness, thrift and sobriety, I was a little stunned to realise this week that What the great British trade union movement is suffering from is a surfeit of unity. As displayed at the Trades Union Congress, unity is cloying, conservative, stultifying 'and ennervating. It crushes originality, stifles ideas and encourages mediocrity. It induces fear and robs the best of the trade union orators — and there are some left — of sPontaneity and wit. Unity is the last refuge Qf People who do not know which way to turn, and all the evidence here at Blackpool snggests that the sudden transformation in their political fortunes has left the union leadership stunned, if not actually dumbstruck. The ghost that is haunting them all, Of course, is the memory of last winter's strikes, and their part in Labour's electoral downfall. But the wounds are too painful to exPe'se: hence chairman Toni Jackson's veiled warning in his keynote speech that there was too much to be done in defending the interests of 'the nation and our memh„et's' — a distinction not usually made in these circles — to spend valuable time on tecriminations. In my experience it is the nocent who normally welcome recriminatMns. Indeed, Jackson took his own warn:Ile so seriously that, instead of delivering e expected after dinner speech at a union celebration where he was guest of honour during the week, he burst into song, urging the embarrassed and slightly astonished company to join him in the refrain of the Union American labour hymn 'Roll the 'Ilion On'.
The need for unity at all costs, except oi er,o,lirse in the distressing matter of Mr Frank flaPPle's agreement for private medical insurance for his members, was taken so s eriously that any semblance of debate !ended to disappear, with speaker after e'raker in debate after debate taking preelY the same line. Mr Jackson, a most Courteous s and effective chairman, having ased any possibility of an inquest into the tilost interesting events since the TUC last in_ et, was scarcely convincing when he to for people to come to the rostrum oPpose one of the propositions. With no PPosition to be found, he mercifully applied the closure. In private, however, it General different story. One member of the !eneral Council not noted for his moderaLt.O n told me that the TUC's tactics were 4antil(le wrong. 'Someone should get up there vo,. say to the Tories, "OK , we'll cooperate t0.1 Yob in the interests of the country." If "ey accepted, the country would give a Sigh of relief, and we would be popular tor a change. But my bet is that Thatcher, Prior and Joseph would run a mile.' Why don't you try it? I suggested. 'Are you kidding?' he said, 'if I got up there and said that this week, I'd be lynched.' So we continued to suffer a rerun of the losing speeches from the last general election, although I was impressed by a comment from the irrepressible Clive Jenkins that seemed to carry a sting for Labour as well as the Tories, that the unions are 'a democratic alternative government for the British people.' Moss Evans for Chancellor? Frank Chapple as Secretary of State for Health?
Beneath the unity, however, there are signs of a San Andreas fault beneath this conference, a subterranean rumbling of dissatisfaction with the way the TUC is organised and runs its affairs. There was a brief public discussion on Monday, with Roy Grantham of the clerical union, APEX, arguing that the College of Cardinals' methods that produce the General Council needs urgent reform — if only to ensure that Grantham's union, with 151,000 members, is no longer excluded. How strange that so many union leaders in Blackpool are obsessed with having an inquiry into the Labour Party, when the TUC seems equally in need of some scrutiny. Not the kind of private inquiry accepted by Len Murray, with his promise to promise to report back next year, but a thoroughly independent and high-poivered study, possibly by some august judicial figure.
Arthur Scargill, the Yorkshire miners' leader and would-be boss of a European, if not a world, energy union has a new cause which will somewhat reduce his potential membership. Last week, in conditions of some secrecy, he chaired the first meeting in London of all the anti-nuclear groups in. Britain — including Green Peace, Environment 2000, the Ecology Party, the Conservation Society and, for all I know, the Society for the Preservation of Rural England. He persuaded them to convene the first national anti-nuclear conference, to be held in London on 10 November. 'If it meant sacrificing the mining industry to prevent nuclear energy development, I'd do it,' he told me as he emerged from a Blackpool cinema showing Jane Fonda's nuclear horror story The China Syndrome: That's how sincere I am about this,' The resourceful Mr Scargill is already thinking in terms of civil disobedience, and the occupation of nuclear installations as part of a campaign to halt nuclear power. And it can't do him any harm at all with his miners.
It is inevitable, I suppose, given their allotted role as the villains of our society, that the amiable side of our union leaders seldom comes across. Like any conference, the TUC's annual outing to the seaside is a great deal more pleasant for the principals before the mass of the delegates arrives — and there are also plenty of parties and dinners to mark out a social round which is paid for, no doubt, by the workers' pennies. But a serpent or two interrupted this Eden for the General Council this year. Comparing their diaries in solemn conclave, they realised that it just wouldn't do to attend the usual bunfights thrown by Granada television and Independent Television News, what with the ongoing commercial television strike situation. But years of past hospitality count for something with the union men, so the TUC's deputy general secretary, Norman Willis — a sociable, jokey man who is sometimes seen as a kindof Claudius to Step one day into Len Murray's job, though I am not comparing Mr Murray to Caligula — was instructed gently to convey the necessary apologies. He need not have bothered, Granada and ITN were certainly not prepared to pour drinks down the throats of union bosses while their screens remain darkened, and they had already cancelled their parties.
There is something particularly ghastly about being in Blackpool of all places to hear the sad news of the death of Philip Hope-Wallace, at whose feet I have often sat. And to be attending a conference of trade unions — institutions he particularly disliked — in a so called 'opera house' where a real opera is as likely to be heard as a madrigal on a pub juke-box. But Philip liked to have news of such alien worlds brought to him in his familiar corner at El Vino, clucking sympathetically over horror stories of the service at Blackpool hotels, capping them with much funnier accounts of his own travels with unspeakable foreigners on Nile cruises, or guiding uncomprehending and accident-prone Americans around the Greek islands. He was one of the cleverest and friendliest men I ever met.
Peter Paterson
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