The disease of the unions
Christopher Booker
Listening to a run-of-the-mill BBC 6 pm news broadcast the other day, I could not help being struck by the bizarre picture of contemporary life in Britain it presented. After an opening report on the Zimbabwe conference, the remaining items were as follows: 1. A speech by Mrs Thatcher on the demarcation dispute between two unions Which has completely paralysed the £100 million steel mill at Hunterston in Scotland since it was opened a few months ago (an installation, it is worth recalling, which was only built in response to demands from the unions in the first place).
2. A warning from the head of the Engineering Employers' Federation that the Present crippling series of stoppages may soon force hundreds of small firms out of business, losing thousands of jobs.
3. A report on the closure of Manchester Airport through a strike by half-a-dozen firemen, forcing thousands of passengers to travel to Liverpool and Birmingham for alternative flights. 4. The closure of Reveille, following the loss of three editions through union action, Putting 325 people out of their jobs. 5. What was laughably described as the Prospect of 'fresh talks' which might bring an end to the six-week-old ITV strike.
6. A report on the last day of the TUC conference at Blackpool, a remarkably bland summing up of the fine week's work Put in by the industrious delegates who, While not exactly giving their attention to anything so boring as the country's economic plight, had managed to work themselves up into a consolingly unified state of collective indignation over the government's 'cuts'.
Over the past ten years, we have all become so conditioned to this kind of thing, that we scarcely any longer notice how extraordinary it is that so much of our news' (in this by no means untypical case, out rive with just of six items) is taken up this one topic. As Chesterton once Observed, in a different context: 'There are commonwealths, plainly to be distingilished here and there in history, which pass from prosperity to squalor, or from glory to insignificance, or from freedom to slavery, not only in silence but with serenity • „ these are people who have lost the power of astonislunent at their own actions • • • they do not stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used to t heir own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse one of these countries is modern England.' Although we may take comfort from the fact that Chesterton wrote his essay, `The Mad Official', 70 years ago (we are still, after all, here), I cannot restrain, myself from a few further reflections on the state of the unions because it is quite simply the most astonishing thing going on in this country at the moment, and not the least astonishing thing about it, as I say, is how much we take it for granted.
What does it mean, for a start, that such an enormously influential part has come to be played in our society by a group of men who, not to put too fine a point on it, are in such a complete state of mental bewilderment? Societies have been dominated in the past by stupid men, also by irrational men — but rarely have the two qualities been so fatally combined as in the present union leadership. If you think 1 am being unkind to our worthy and 'democratically elected' union leaders, then just consider these remarks made on another BBC 6 pm news broadcast the other day by Mr Terry Duffy, whose engineering union is at present bringing British industry to its knees in a cause (the minimum wage of £80) which even a large part of his own membership apparently considers irrelevant. Mr Duffy was speaking on his union's decision to fight the proposed British Leyland closures (1 reprint them from a BBC transcript exactly as spoken): 'We don't believe that redundancies are the best way out of the solution. What we are lookin' for is a motor manufacturer who can produce, we believe, a British motor manufacturer can produce a million cars per year. Now! We're convinced of this. There is a demand for cars. We'll admit there is a diminishing demand for cars, but there's a demand for cars. Why aren't they, that demand British, for British cars. What we want to do is to prevail on people to purchase, well, first of all, to, first, purchase a good reliable car, and then to prevail on people to purchase a British Leyland car. That's the real way out of the problem.' The BBC reporter, Peter Smith, added, it was perhaps ironic that Mr Duffy was speaking on a day when virtually the whole of BL was closed down by a strike of engineering workers.'
As I observed a couple of weeks ago, what we are talking about here no longer has anything to do with politics or economics — we are confronted by a phenomenon which can only significantly be discussed in terms of human psychology. It is no good any longer pretending that the union leaders are rational men of goodwill, consciously in touch with their own motives. They are in the grip of a kind of collective mental illness, the symptoms of which are only too familiar.
Take, for instance, the way union leaders so arrange their view of the world that they are always right, and that it is always the 'others' (the government, employers, the media etc.) who are wrong. Like any individual who gets into such a state of 'onesidedness', they project onto these 'others' precisely the negative qualities which most obviously characterise themselves (as when Mr Duffy, for instance, accuses the engineering employers of being 'rigid and inflexible').
Or take that equally familiar, allied characteristic of so many strike leaders which is to project onto 'others' all responsibility for the unpleasant consequences of their own actions. If NUPE decides to close down a hospital, or the NUT decides to close down schools, it is always the fault of the employers that these regrettable things have to happen. 'We have no alternative', say the union spokesmen, 'the last thing our members want to do is to inconvenience the public' (when, as I have pointed out before, it is the very first thing their members wish to do, or the strike becomes pointless).
Now what we are seeing here, in a state of mind where all moral responsibility is shuf fled off, all evil exists in the 'others' and ego-demands are taken to be reality, are the all-too familiar symptoms of a psychopathic condition. It is still in a comparatively early stage, in that the unions have so far not resorted to open violence to gratify their demands (although there have already been signs, as last winter, of things going that way).
But if the country's economic decline continues further, the consequences of that psychic disintegration which are at present only highly inconvenient could well become tragic. And the most alarming thing of all is how reluctant we are, as a nation, even to make a proper diagnosis of the disease.
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