The psychopathic unions
Christopher Booker
Without wishing to tread too rudely on Mrs Thatcher's day-dream that her government can sail on through the whole of the next decade, we must bear in mind that it is still possible that in five years time we shall once again have a Labour government. And the question already casting its shadow over all of us is — what sort of Labour government will that he? Will it he a cosy, impotent extension of the last two years of Callaghan-Healey-ism, bankrupt of reforming zeal, simply attempting to prop up the shaky status-quo? Or will it be a Labour government of a wholly new kind, with its chief driving force that new vindictive, totalitarian spirit which 'was so much in evidence at Brighton a fortnight ago?
Obviously a crucial factor in shaping the answers to that question will be the way in which, in the coming months and years, the Thatcher government addresses itself to the most serious problem confronting our society at the moment — the quite astonishing psychic state into which the unions have fallen. On several occasions recently in these columns, I have argued that the only useful way in which to explain what is happening to the unions is to draw on the observations of a psychologist. On the one hand, the unions are displaying the symptoms of infantile regression — expecting a combination of total security with the freedom to indulge their wildest fantasies in terms of wage demands. On the other, such behaviour patterns are not dissimilar to those associated with the psychopath, who takes his ego-demands as the only reality there is, loses any sense of objective or social morality and eventually recognises no external restraints in his efforts to get his way.
The question is — how do you deal with human beings when they have collectively become afflicted by such a condition? Mrs Thatcher's answer appears to be twofold. First, you try to curb the wildest excesses by making a few modest changes in union law, such as those relating to secondary picketing. Secondly, you give the unions their head, while maintaining strict monetary controls, in the hope that they will eventually collide with economic reality and be forced to see sense — ie they will recognise that more money without more productivity must eventually lead to loss of jobs or rampant inflation or both.
But the point about the psychopath (or the infantile regressive — in this context they mean much the same thing) is that he does not learn his lesson, however harshly he runs up against reality. I was surprised the other day, in the light of what has been going on at Times Newspapers, that more attention was not paid to the fate of the Montreal Star. Earlier this year, the management of that oldestablished paper got into a remarkably familiar pickle with the Canadian print unions, over new technology, persistent labour disputes and so forth. Finally, after an eight-month suspension. ending in total deadlock, the management decided to call it a day. The paper was closed and several thousand people found themselves out of work. Again and again we have seen the same pattern — as in the New York newspaper industry in the Sixties, when 13 titles were eventually whittled down to two. The notion that the unions will eventually 'learn their lesson', and be miraculously converted to some grasp on economic reality, is one which could only occur to someone unfamiliar with some of the most basic ground rules. of morbid psychology.
Consider the present industrial scene in Britain, simply as it is reflected — the tip of the iceberg — in our daily news bulletins. Three weeks ago I listed the items in a typical, run-of-the-mill BBC newscast — six out of seven relating to union disputes. In recent days our news has been dominated by: the Times deadlock, the ITV strike, the 24-hour stoppage of British Rail because business at the Paddington parcels office has fallen so sharply in the past ten years that the management wish to cut staff from 176 to 120; the Talbot car company strike, moves by British Leyland unions to take strike action against the closure of hopelessly uneconomic plants; the crippling of the Navy by a strike of maintenance workers in dockyards; Len Murray's intervention in the inter-union row which has held up any work at the £100 million steel ore depot at Hunterston since it was opened. From telephone bills to the Polish ship orders, the trail of other disputes, stoppages, rows and walk-outs stretches to the horizon and beyond. And what lies at the heart of all this picture of chaos and blind negativity is the growing schizophrenia of the unions' desire, on the one hand, for total job security (ie their insistence that 'Mother' must provide and that nothing shall change) and, on the other, the growing recklessness of their demands for wages that have less contact with reality than ever.
The other day I was talking to a highlY intelligent Labour MP, who is not unversed in psychological language, about some of the points I had been recently making on the unions. Privately he admitted to almost complete despair, Precisely because he understands the terrible intractability of the infantile regressive state the unions have got into. One point he made in particular was just how important, In psychological terms, was the idea of the government proclaiming 'pay guidelines — because it at least gives the union leaders some illusory framework to push against. `If the guideline is put at 5 per say, then the union leader can huff and puff and come back to his members saying — look, I have got you 6 percent. He feels a big man, his members feel they've won a great victorY, and everyone is happy. But if, like Mrs Thatcher, you don't believe in having WV guidelines at all, the unions have no. framework within which to operate, and how do you decide what to ask for? The sky's the limit' — which is precisely what is now happening. Alan Sapper and his lads ask for 39 percent, the miners go for 65 percent, NATSOPA gets 53 percent and the NGA claim their differentials have been eroded. Where does it end? What is to stop any union asking for 100 percent, 200 percent„2000 percent? When pay claims no longer have to have anything to do with productivity, the ability of the employer to pay, the inflation rate or anything else, you simply ask for the figure you first thought of and then double it. You are in the realm of the psychopath, for whom ego-demands are reality. It is the only way to look at it.
And to all this, Mrs Thatcher's only answer is that the unions must learn the hard way — when the whole point of all our experience and observation is that, when people get into such a state, they do not learn such lessons, because they have drifted into solipsism. If The Times and the Sunday Times do go under, do we really imagine that Messrs. Dixon, Brady and Co. would say 'oh, what a pity, look what we have done — we have destroyed two of Britain's leading newspapers, and cost thousands of people their jobs'? Of course not — they would simply say that it was all the fault of a greedy, intransigent, inflexible management, who had been so idiotic that they could not see reason when it was staring them in the face. That is the real problem facing us all — that the unions have passed so completely into the looking-glass world in their course of self-destruction that the only way the process can end is by summoning up a totalitarianism, not of the right, but of the left. Which is where we come back to the next Labour government, and the possibility that it will not look much like any Labour government this country has ever seen before.
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