Benn and the unions
Peter Paterson
The Benn road show is picking up momentum at this year's round of trade union conferences, at such a pace that some previously confident forecasters who held that he has little chance of beating Denis Healey for Labour's deputy leadership are now beginning to waver.
The indefatigable Mr Benn sweeps into Blackpool, or Bournemouth or Brighton — wherever the big unions are having their annual seaside outings — and puts his populist case to the people most likely to be attracted by it, the trade union activists. Rarely invited to address an actual conference, he stages his own brand of revivalist meeting on the conference fringes, providing some relief for delegates from the endless round of drinking and shop-talk which constitute these union events.
Before he arrives, his equally indefatigable allies within his Labour Co-ordinating Committee have done the ground work. The seaside conferences of the unions are not the spontaneous affairs some of the more naive pressure groupists make the mistake of believing. It is no good going along with a banner and some leaflets in the hope that your protest will attract enough support to provoke a debate inside the hall. Agendas are prepared months in advance, and the organisers — harassed full-time union officials petrified at the prospect of meeting their rank-and-file employers for an accounting of their stewardship — have a deep dislike of 'emergency motions' from the floor and do their level best to discourage them.
Whether a union's vote at the Labour Party conference in October goes to Benn or Healey (and, by the way, where is Mr Healey while all this canvassing is going on?), and whether the unions will resign their embarrassing supremacy in the elec toral college devised at Wembley, are not the sort of questions normally decided at these annual union conferences. Small groups, and different electorates, often determine who shall attend the Labour conference and how their votes are to be cast.
The Co-ordinating Committee's workers, however, know precisely how the system works. They have been beavering away within the unions' branch organisations making sure that Bennite policy resolutions reach the order papers for the conferences. It is the ripples from this kind of activity, rather than the Benn fringe meetings, which worry union leaders. They are well aware that, having dragooned the Labour Party into adopting constitutional reforms which give the activists more of a voice, Benn's next target will be `unaccountable' union bosses. But that is still in the making: before they are sacrificed on the altar of participation, these voting oxen must be put to use in hauling Mr Benn to the leadership of the Labour Party. The deputy leadership contest is a marker for the struggle over the succession to Michael Foot after the next general election: possibly in the style of Mr Livingstone's emergence, after the ballot boxes closed, as leader of the GLC.
The anti-Benn forces have a number of advantages which, characteristically, they have not been using to the fullest effect.
They already have the control levers of union organisation in their hands, and with a little effort could have packed the branch meetings from which resolutions and conference delegates spring. Some of them have at least given Mr Foot a platform on which to campaign for Healey, realising that if it was left entirely to fringe meetings at obscure halls, Mr Benn's pulling power would exceed Mr Foot's.
So, outsi.de the small circle of union leaders who wholeheartedly support Mr Benn, the latter's progress around the watering places is causing a great deal of anger among an already irascible breed. On one side they can see the Bennites sub orning their organisations by the timehonoured techniques of unduly prolonged branch meetings and pre-arranged caucus voting, while on the other they hear increasing complaints from less active mem bers that they — the leaders — seem to be spending all their time attending to Labour Party affairs while their unions go to pot.
So the impression gains ground that having no answers to the problems facing trade unions — unemployment, restrictive new laws, falling union membership, chaotic organisation, weak bargaining power and an increasing aggressiveness among managers — the union leaderships are seeking refuge in the playpen of Labour politics.
It is true that most unions, in manufacturing industry and other depressed sectors, do not see this as a time for heroics. Settlements are way behind the rate of inflation and no-one has much idea about the shape of the next pay round, or whether the job and membership losses will soon subside. It is also the case that the Labour Party has been absorbing an increasing share of union energies — and quite a lot of money — ever since Mrs Thatcher came to power. Starting in a somewhat patronising way with the establishment of the disastrous Commission of Inquiry into Labour's constitution and its organisation, union leaders have been drawn deeper and deeper into the quarrels which have wracked the Party. One individual, desperate and wistful, suggested the other day that the only way of halting Mr Benn would be for Mr Foot to resign unless his ambitious colleague agreed to stand down. The Berm challenge would then be seen clearly for what it is, and he would be overwhelmed in a shattering demonstration for unity with the entire Party voting for Mr Foot. Of course, it will not happen.
In the meantime, the union conferences demonstrate just how damaging it was for them to be thrust into the role of kingmakers in Labour's electoral college. With all those bloc votes to gather, it was inevitable that they should be distracted from their proper business by a contest which cannot confine itself to the Labour Party's own annual conference. And the worst is yet to come. The biggest union of all, the Transport and General Workers, has a sensible rule that its conference should meet only once every two years. This happens to be a conference year, and the delegates will assemble in Brighton next month with a million votes to be wooed. This will be the highlight of the Benn campaign: indeed, it has been suggested that the coincidence dictated his decision to run for the deputy leadership. He will certainly hope to be more successful than his former colleague George Brown was, many years ago, when he too hired a hall for a fringe meeting and leafleted the Transport Union's conferences delegates to vote against unilateral disarmament. The then Mr Brown was sent away with a flea in his ear. Ironically, there is one set of union conferences now under way which have been spared the attentions of Mr Benn. They are the conferences of the Civil Service unions, who have to decide whether to continue their trench warfare against the Government, or go over the top by hitting welfare and unemployment payments. They are spared the distraction of Mr Benn's oratory, for the simple historical reason that they are not affiliated to the Labour Party, and thus have no votes worth canvassing.
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