Political commentary
For the union dead
Charles Moore
Ifyou believe that it makes sense that people who work in jobs involving na- tional security should have different condi- tions of employment from those who do or- dinary jobs, and if you hate the British trade union movement, you will find it dif- ficult to join in the hue and cry about Cheltenham. One suspects that most people do share that belief and that hatred, so that the Government has not made itself un- popular over GCHQ, even if it has made itself ridiculous. It is not much more than commonsense to observe that ordinary union rights raise problems in security installations. One notices, by their ready concessions, that even the unions agree. And it is also true, even if Mr Alistair Graham and Mr Bill McCall and other civil servant leaders are sweet and reasonable men, that British trade unions, with their political associations and long-proved stupidity raise more of those problems than would unions more closely related to their members' interests.
Mr Neil Kinnock has spoken of 'despot- ism, no more no less' (what would be his 'more' in this context?), and Mr Robin Cook, a Scotch Kinnock in his eloquence, says of the offer of £1,000 to each employee: 'The nation is but a grocer's shop in which even our liberties have their price', which will reflect badly on the employees he is defending if they do in the end agree to be bought across the grocer's counter. Such talk is more ridiculous than Sir Geoffrey Howe. It cannot be a 'basic human right' in all circumstances to be allowed to join a union (nor, pace Mrs Thatcher, to be allowed not to). Nor can there be much in the jibe that the action has been forced upon the Government by the Americans. If Sir Brian Tovey is right that security work was quite often interrupted by recent disruption, then that disruption would have made Britain more dependent on what America chose to tell her.
It probably makes more sense for Labour, like the unions themselves, to con- centrate on the bungling of the episode than on the various large principles which are not really involved. But even here, though one would have to be fanatically loyal not to admit the presence of what that great backbencher, the Hon Charles Morrison (Devizes), fastidiously calls 'banana peel', one cannot help feeling that the errors are generally typical, rather than exceptional, not just of this Government, but of most. They involve the usual elements. There is the failure to 'consult', which partly means the failure of the Government to give its opponents room for manoeuvre. There is the failure of 'presentation', which is something that people complain about every single time that a proposed measure is strongly attacked. Lord Whitelaw may have hit the ground sliding rather than running in his new mission to explain what the Government is doing, but one can only suc- cessfully present something which is coherent, and the Cheltenham plan is not. Then there is the tailure of coordination. It is said that Mr Tom King, the Employment Secretary, was not told much about the scheme before it was made public, which not only seems rather rude, but suggests that the Foreign Office did not make use of the resources of Mr King's Department. It might have helped, for example, if someone had taken the time — the plan, we are told, was plotted for three years — to read the whole of the Employment Protection Act.
And then there is Sir Geoffrey Howe. My impression is that we still like our Foreign Secretaries, though not our Prime Ministers, to have a touch of class. In re- cent times, Lord Home and Lord Carr- ington fitted the bill. They did not wear Hush-puppies, and they looked both grand and at ease as they sat round the polished tables and on the ornate chairs, and Signor this and Doctor that and President so-and- so often looked slightly subfuse beside them. Even if their policies were fundamen- tally mistaken or unpopular, it was difficult not to credit them with semi-miraculous powers and to attribute to that slippery con- cept, 'diplomacy', a significance not borne out by evidence. Sir Geoffrey reflects a less exciting and more accurate picture of inter- national gatherings, a picture of inter- preters and officials in dreary suits and meaningless communiques and working breakfasts. Mrs Thatcher has paid tribute to him as a 'negotiator', and there is no doubt that that tribute is genuine, but it is partly a way of saying that when Geoffrey has a chance for a second to look at the wood, he keeps his eyes firmly on the trees.
There is no point in asking what is Sir Geoffrey's foreign policy, not because he is a cipher of the Prime Minister, but because he is not the sort of person who has things like policies. He has large piles of briefs, and he lugs them about with him on journeys that are now so frequent that, even if his health can stand it, his sense of balance and his contact with British politics cannot. Lord Carrington went to Israel as the Falklands crisis broke because he made a deliberate and characteristically arrogant decision to be grand about it all. Sir Geof- frey just has a great many conferences booked, so he flies to them, occasionally getting a car back from Heathrow to come and be savaged by Denis Healey. It must be
dispiriting, because there is no opportunity to demonstrate the dogged consistency that made him a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer. No one notices him until there is trouble. Sir Geoffrey says that the Cheltenham decision is not part of any government policy to alter the role of trade unions in the public sector generally. The case is supPos- ed to concern security only, and therefore to have no wider implications. The fact that the Foreign Office conceived and executed this daring plan without reference to the people who actually know about Such mat- ters would seem to suggest that Sir Geoffrey is being honest about the Government.s intentions. But implications are not so easi- ly controlled. Because, in Britain, trade unions have long aspired to some say in the running of the country, and, since In Place Of Strife, governments have sought to restrain them, there is no union dispute without implications for that struggle. Of course, the Government's most preS; sing worry is that deadlock over GCHQ *Ili endanger national security just as much or even more than the disruptions of recent years; but the more serious and more long- term problem is whether its humiliation at Cheltenham would begin to reverse its con- quest of political trade unionism. The best solution for the Government and for securi- ty would simply be if a good majority of the employees took their £1,000 making the unions look unwanted yet again. Ther.e must, however, be a good chance that this will not happen. If the Government thinks it will not, it should be prepared to lose the small amount of face involved in accepting the unions' proposals which themselves, after all, represent a union capitulation, even if people tended to jeer at it. For the replacement of Mr Tebbit with Mr King has given new life to the ide, which many Tories love to play with, that most union leaders are the salt of the earth, chaps with whom one can talk business etc They invoke something from Churchill about in victory, magnanimity, in defeat, defiance. That may be a good maxim for war, but it is most unsuitable in ordinary politics, where no victory or defeat is ever obvious or complete. Mr King makes a great mistake if he thinks that the personal decency of many trade union leaders, which is undoubted, makes them safe to strike deals with. It is not the personnel of trade unionism which is the problem, but the con- trol that unions exert over polity and coon" omy. Why is Mr King not boasting loudy about the political effect of Mr Shah's vie- tory at Warrington? Is he ready to introduce legislation within a specified period if unions fail to agree on changing the political levy or fail to to enforce their own agreement? It is certainly possible to be wrongly oppressive of the rights of organ'sed labour, which may be the danger at Cheltenham: it is not possible to be too tin: magnanimous towards the hierarchies ot British trade unionism.
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