POLITICS
The right reasons for being in the wrong
NOEL MALCOLM
H
Bournemouth
a giant slogan, painted in the sort of designer colours (pink, grey and orange) which are nowadays associated, for some reason, with New Realism. It says: 'Your union working for you'.
This choice of phrase, with its thumping choice of emphasis, says perhaps more than it means to. It sounds both defensive and assertive and unctuously pleading. They could have said, 'Your TUC working for you'. Or they could have said, 'Work for your union'. Instead, they came up with an appeal to naked self-interest which, by a splendid irony, more or less sums up the spirit of Mr Eric Hammond's historic statement of 10 May 1988:
The first requirement for an organisation or an individual is survival — self-preservation. It would, therefore, seem reasonable to make it clear in the EETPU rules that membership of the TUC is not our prime objective but maintenance of our union and service to our members most certainly is.
Mr Norman Willis was therefore at a disadvantage, I felt, ejecting Mr Ham- mond's union while the central message of the gospel according to Eric was suspended over his head. Given this and other dis- advantages (among which must be counted Mr Willis's extraordinary facial resembl- ance to one of the drawings in Edward Lear's Nonsense Botany), he coped admir- ably. There was nothing vindictive or aggressive about him; indeed, there were moments when one felt that the whimsical smile which hovered at the corners of his mouth might take over completely, or that he might give up his speech and start humming a little tune instead. Mr Willis was, in some sense, a contented man secure in the knowledge that the rules were on his side.
And they were. The electricians were expelled not (as many headlines have suggested) because they had signed single- union deals with employers, but because they had refused to obey the Disputes Committee of the TUC when that commit- tee decided that two of their deals involved poaching members from another union or supplanting agreements which other un- ions had already made.
Anyone who reads the details of the Disputes Committee's deliberations can come to his own conclusions about whether it decided rightly. (My own verdict is: right in the case of the Orion factory at Port Talbot, where the TGWU had already signed up 38 workers out of 100 before the EETPU stepped in to make its deal; wrong in the case of the Salstream depot at Warrington, where the TGWU argument rested on its claims over other employees of Salstream's parent company at other depots.) But the principle remains that if you join any association which has a procedure for judging disputes between its members, you cannot refuse to accept its judgments and still expect to remain a member of it. If Mr Hammond had been sufficiently confident of his claim that the procedure was biased or improper (a claim which rests mainly on the fact that an officer of the Furniture and Timber Union sat on the committee when that union had itself lodged a complaint against the elec- tricians), he could have demanded redress in the courts. But he didn't. The fact is that Mr Hammond was asking to leave the TUC, and by rejecting the Disputes Com- mittee's rulings he was simply making it impossible for the TUC to refuse his request.
And the other fact is that he was right. Justice, narrowly defined, may be on Mr Willis's side; history is on Mr Hammond's. Members of a club have a duty to obey its rules. Yet there is no duty which requires you to belong to a club in the first place. As a reply to the committee, Mr Harnmond's thundering denunciation of his enemies on Monday was magnificently wide of the mark; but as an historical judgment on the irrelevance of the TUC to the desires and beliefs of ordinary workers, it scored one direct hit after another.
The opposition of our members to unilateral disarmament finds no echo among your conference decisions. Our members' atti- tudes to strike ballots, law in society, vio- lence in disputes, are disregarded. Above all, our members reveal an enthusiasm for the market system and its values which infuriates the sherry-party revolutionaries with their model resolutions and conference hall rhe- toric.
Defenders of the TUC will point out that it is already taking some steps in the direction of market values. The 'Special Review Body' set up last year has pro- duced a report recommending image- improvement and new recruiting drives; and, as the Daily Telegraph has observed, on the day when Mr Kinnock denounced Nigel Lawson's credit boom to the TUC conference, the TUC revealed plans to launch its own credit card.
But you do not have to look very hard at the new thinking of the TUC in order to see the old thoughts breaking through. The Special Review Body accepts single-union schemes, but then rejects the 'strike-free' arbitration deals which many single-union schemes exist to bring about. The debates at this year's conference have often been filled with a hankering for the good old days when trade unions enjoyed special legal immunities and privileges (known here as 'rights' or, if you are Mr Scargill talking on automatic pilot, 'democratic rights'). One of the most impassioned debates, for example, was on the Govern- ment's oppressive, undemocratic etc deci- sion to refei restrictive practices in the television industry to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. And meanwhile the TUC's annual report is full of discussions of Namibia, world disarmament, Spycatch- er, shotguns, Nicaragua, and fraternal con- tacts with the 'trade unions' of East Ger- many, Hungary and the USSR. History is on the electricians' side as they turn their backs on all this. But that does not mean that their action will bring about any suddpn historical changes in the TUC. Think of what happened to Labour in 1981, for example. Mr Hammond will not go the way of the Gang of Four, of course, because the electricians do not have to fight general elections. But it is worth pointing out that when the Gang of Four left the Labour Party, some observers similarly predicted that in a short time Labour would either self-destruct or force itself to imitate the Social Democrats. In the event it has done a little of precisely both those things; but this has taken, and is still taking, a very long time indeed.
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