THE UNIONS
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DENIS BROGAN
On 22 January (Ns), 9 January (os) in the year 1905, there occurred in Petersburg one of the most important collapses of the moral authority of the Tsardom. That very ambig- uous leader of the poor, Father Gapon, led a great delegation of men and women and children of the Petersburg slums to appeal to their Little Father the Tsar to remedy a number of serious grievances. In a forcible-feeble gesture, the Guards in the Winter Palace fired on the great demon- stration and dispersed it with ludicrous ease. A Grand Duke, safe in the Palace, com- mented with pleasure, 'Quad erat demon- stranduntl' In little over ten years, that Grand Duke, like other Grand Dukes, was either dead or an exile.
There may be some danger, now, of too much exultation over the defeat of the Post Office workers. There are certainly an ade- quate number of people to whom the vic- tory of the Government is a source of unalloyed joy. I am very glad that the Government has won. But the handling of the victory of the Government will require a great deal of tact as well as a great deal of firmness, and too much exultation will destroy a great deal of the value of the victory. Of course, it is possible to take the line taken by Mr Peregrine Worsthorne who felt the great fault of Baldwin after the collapse of the General Strike in 1926 was that he did not exploit the victory over the revolting unions to the full. Brought up as Mr Worsthorne was in the stern polit- ical and economic orthodoxy of Professor Clarence Skinner (otherwise Montagu Norman), he naturally takes this more than Roman view.
Nevertheless, the victory of the Govern- ment is a very substantial one and was very desirable. Of course it could be said and has been said, perhaps rightly, that the Post Office workers are underpaid com- pared with the exploiters of modern tech- nology in Birmingham and at Dagenham: But in fact neither the railway workers nor the Post Office workers are badly paid com- pared with a great many others of the working population, and they have the advantage of fixity of employment and of inbuilt rights and privileges.
The Post Office workers also have had an interesting lesson of what is meant by solid- arity. It is one thing to shout or sing 'Solid- arity for ever!' It is another to display it in any serious sense. It can hardly be said that the other great Post Office union, headed by that eminent nobleman Lord Delacourt- Smith, has shown any dramatic passion for solidarity.
I may rejoice that the strike has failed, but if I were a member of the unions I would feel that the Movement, as the old militants used to call it, had let them down badly. It was not quite every union for itself, but it was very far from that passion- ate and unselfish devotion to the common cause which Labour orators for so long proclaimed on the First of May. This means simply that the Labour movement is like most political movements: its members are in it for what they can get and are very much annoyed when they don't get what they think they are entitled to, and are more indignant with their leaders than with the Boss Class which they may think, unjustly, is in cahoots with their leadership.
I have a great deal of sympathy with Mr Jackson, but sympathy butters no parsnips, or whatever the metaphor is, and he may find some difficulty in keeping up the morale of union members and, still more, in keep- ing up their confidence in the union of the working class.
Even the demonstration of the spontane- ous discipline of the Post Office workers may turn sour in the mouths of the average Post Office worker who is not a union official. After all, what did it matter that in Ulster the strike was complete although most of the Post Office workers in Ulster must have been devoted Unionists willing to make all kinds of sacrifices for Queen and Province? And I suspect that the leadership of Messrs Scanlon and Jones will not be accepted very enthusiastically by the people who have just lost the first great battle of the class war of 1971. Of course, the fact that the Post Office union was not a militant organisation and had made no attempt to build up a serious fighting fund accounts in part for the completeness of its defeat. It is very hard to build up a fighting spirit which involves high union dues after gen- erations of very low union dues and very low fighting spirit. It may be argued, of course, that having fighting funds opens the union to the assaults of the legal servants of the Boss Class. The late G. D. H. Cole used to tell a story of a subscription got up by some of the more militant British unions before the First War to send funds to sup- port a very militant strike in France. Quite suddenly the French strike collapsed, and on inquiry it was found that the moment the English workers stopped sending funds to support them the French workers went back to work. The confident spirit of the British unions and their high command has all been very impressive but one wonders how far the noisy leaders who talk in quasi-revolu- tionary terms attach any serious meaning to their gasconading oratory.
That union leaders have a good deal to learn about the facts of life is made even more manifest by the war with the Ford Motor Company which is still dragging on. For it has just apparently begun to dawn on the leaders at Dagenham that Ford is a truly international company, far more interna- tionally-minded than any union or feder- ation of unions is. And if Henry Ford it carries out his plans, a great deal of the work of the Ford Motor Corporation will be transferred to Asia or, what is worse from the point of view of the Dagenham mili- tants, to Australia. I fear that the average union leader today, if he believes his own rhetoric, is bound to lead his members up very dusty paths indeed. It is only too obvious that the British working man at the moment, faced with the competition of other countries, other capitalist groups, and faced with his first very serious post-war defeat, will have to re-think a great deal of his strategy and tactics and perhaps make some very serious decisions (for example, to impose on the unions an adequate system of financing the Tuc). For one of the reasons of the success of the greatest of modern Labour leaders, Walter Reuther, of the United Automobile Workers, was his insistence on high union dues to provide very opulent fighting funds.
For the unions this may be the begin- ning of a moment of truth. There is, how- ever, a possible source of salvation for the union militant leaders: the aggressive folly of some Tory MPs and minor businessmen. Even Selsdon Man may be quite a handi- cap now and an attempt to exploit the victory of the employers, public or private, might give a boost to the morale of a rather demoralised TUC. After all, after the defeat of the General Strike in 1926, it was only three years till the Labour party became for the first time the biggest party in the House of Commons! I think it is not only the,union leaders, but many business leaders, many politicians, many journalists even, who have got to re-think the British position in an unkind, sceptical, and in some cases down- right hostile world. The world does not owe Rolls-Royce a living, nor, alas, does it owe the great Clyde shipyards a living, and they may all go down the drain together. Every serious consideration of the difficul- ties of the British position will involve getting rid of a great many illusions, includ- ing the illusions which Churchill held in 1926, and which some of the more foolish young members of the Heath government seem to share today. We are all in a leaky boat, and the rhetoric of the 'Red Flag' or even 'God Save the Queen' will not do us much good in the ominous years ahead. •
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