POLITICS
Mr Hurd and the Praetorian Guard Syndrome
FERDINAND MOU NT
From the start, Hurd shares were clear- ly a speculation, a bit of a punt. I was advised to get into them by a City friend (and part-time junior minister) at the time of the last Party Conference when the new Home Secretary cut such a resolute and reassuring figure in his response to the riots in Handsworth, Tottenham and Brixton. Mr Hurd seemed to embody those Latinate qualities which have been in short supply in modern British politics — auctoritas and gravitas.
Yet at the same time, there was some- thing frothy about the bull market, a touch of wish-fulfilment perhaps. How nice it would be, ran the unspoken thought, if there came along a fresh alternative to Mrs Thatcher, unstained by failure, capable of reconciling all the factions in the party, while in his innermost loyalties unmistak- ably part of the old guard.
With such speculative shares, what goes up has a way of coming down sharply. Over the last fortnight, Hurds have plum- meted; the jobbers have been left with heaps of stock on their hands. Only small investors — widows, orphans and a few of the less nippy Tory backbenchers — would admit to still having any of the wretched things in their portfolios. After all, to lose a major government Bill and to provoke the burning down of the equivalent of one fair-sized prison inside a fortnight does look a little careless.
Yet there are still one or two points to be made in Mr Hurd's defence. I do not include among them the fact that he inherited the Shops Bill from Leon Brittan, a more ideologically zealous predecessor. Inheriting awkward Bills is part of a minister's life; in any case, Mr Hurd was a member of the Cabinet which agreed to present the Bill to Parliament. What I mean is that there is a case for his universally reviled tactic of announcing, in the course of his Second Reading speech, that the government would not curtail debate by imposing a guillotine. By the time he rose to speak, it was clear that the Bill would not pass into law; and it was better murdered then and there than slow- ly strangled over weeks and months at terrible cost to the Government's authority — and better seen to be the victim of immovable fanatics than the casualty of a decaying government.
That may be an over-ingenious defence of what was in reality an old-fashioned cock-up (why does one instinctively speak of cock-ups as old-fashioned? They are surely an enduring feature of public life). There is a slightly more straightforward defence of his conduct in the prison offi- cers' dispute.
The charge is certainly a straightforward one. The Home Secretary and the Home Office were too remote from ordinary life, too stuck up to understand that they were dealing with a highly inflammable subject. Overtime and shift working come very high on the all-time winning topics for Great Bores of Today, beating the football and the weather and finishing close behind East Enders. The last major dispute in the prison service, five years ago, was also about shift working. Ten years ago the Labour government tried, in vain, to curb the abuse of overtime. The Home Office ought to have learnt its lesson.
But what exactly is the lesson? Prison officers now earn on average £15,000 a year. Forty-six officers in Wandsworth jail and 103 in Brixton jail earn over £20,000; some earn more than prison governors; prison officers come second only to Fleet Street printers in the Department of Employment earnings survey. And a large part of those considerable earnings are an unintended consequence of the shift system which results in large amounts of expensive overtime being worked, thus pre-empting millions which could have been spent on building or renovating more prisons, or hiring more prison officers.
Much the same state of affairs exists in the police force. A London constable with two years' experience clocks up about £13,000 before overtime, of which he is liable to work a great deal, what with Wapping, Libya and so on. In the case of the police, the Home Office has chosen to turn a blind eye, after making a few vain efforts in the Whitelaw era to eat away at some of the extras — such as free accom- modation and the London allowances. The 'Edmund-Davies formula', which ties the pay of police and firemen to the upper level of average industrial earnings, en- sures that they shall indefinitely surf along on the crest of the wave.
This is a clear case of the Praetorian Guard Syndrome. In an unsettled and difficult period, the ultimate defenders of the civil peace have to be looked after; under the Roman Empire, the praetorian cohorts were paid about three and a half times as much as the legionaries and served only 16 years as opposed to 25 years. But the point is that still they caused trouble, despite the most instant appeasement of their demands. The temptation is to regard the avoi- dance of strikes in the public services as a success for the minister of the day. But each such avoidance reinforces the union's bargaining position and makes its threats more terrifying. There are times when it must be right for the minister to face out even the 'unthinkable' possibility of a strike and see what happens. This is usuallY not such a bad bet. Either the world carries on unmoved, as it does with a rail strike; or all hell breaks loose, as it did in the jails. But it is the prison officers, not you and me, who have to go back into the jails, just as it was the miners who had to go back to a grimmer landscape of lost wages, lost coalfaces and rampant managers. In the heady days leading up to a strike, the damage looks as if it will all fall elsewhere — on the employers, or the public or the government. The suicidal nature of such action only becomes clear when it happens" While hurriedly calling off their cath- paign, the Prison Officers' Association argued that the explosive reaction to their overtime ban proved their case that prisons are overcrowded and understaffed. In fact, it demonstrated rather that prison officers cannot afford to take industrial action, reasons of their own professional sen; esteem and the safety of the public anu themselves. Their bargaining position is weaker, Ot stronger, as a result. They have forfeit' 8 lot of public sympathy; their highearnings and their old Spanish customs have bean drawn to public attention; and it seas reasonable to most people that prisons should be run by their governors rather than by the local branch of the Fri5°1/t Officers' Association (rather as Flee Street newspapers have been run by tha father of the chapel). Yet unions inflated by years of nil: opposed success simply cannot learn tu contemplate the possibility of defeat cept by experiencing it. These are rougher sort who do not give in without au_ almighty smash-up. There could have been, no amicable, painless solution. Mr may lose a prison or two, but he maY win the war. Praetorian guards cow' simply be left to their own devices.
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