POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Robert Carr's inheritance _

PETER PATERSON

There is one area of government where tradi- tional Conservative philosophy clashes with traditional Conservative political practice, where the idea of non-intervention in the affairs of industry gives way to a policy of continuous intervention, and where the free play of market forces must not be allowed to operate. I refer to the Ministry of Labour, now of course called the Department of Employment and Productivity and presided over by the most able of the new men among the Tories, Mr Robert Carr. The Conservative party was deeply scarred by its pre-war record as the party of the dole queues, the means test and the hunger marches. Influenced by that special fear that the powerful have towards those they have wronged, and noting the political hostage those events presented to their opponents (Labour speakers still habitually harked back to the years of the Depression, blaming the Tories for unemployment, right up to the 1959 general election) the post-war Conser- vatives adopted a special attitude to labour- management strife. Its main characteristic was to damp down conflict by using the Ministry of Labour as an industrial peace- keeping department, charged with the task of preventing or halting strikes at almost any price. The process became known as Monck- tonism, after the most successful practitioner Sir Walter Monckton, whose four years as Minister of Labour marked the policy's high water mark. The general method of approach was to allow a labour dispute to reach the point where the union or unions involved threatened a strike, and then to call them, and the employers, to the Ministry to discuss their differences. At first the warring parties were kept apart, like fighting cocks before a contest, while officials conveyed messages between them until the Minister was satisfied that it was safe for them to assemble under his chairmanship. Amid general rejoicing a communiqué would then be issued an- nouncing that the strike had been called off and a mutually acceptable agreement reached between masters and men. Nine times out of ten, the settlement amounted to a fairly pre- cise mathematical formula half way between tht unions' claim and the employers' offer.

Sir Walter was not the first or the only conciliator at the Ministry of Labour, but he was the one who elevated this peacekeeping role above every other activity of the de- partment until it dominated government thinking and policy in this field.

The first Minister to play the game rough by ignoring the ground rules, was Mr lain Macleod (and this column salutes his memory), whose handling of the London bus strike of 1958 deeply affronted the trade union movement. Mr Macleod did not do a Monckton. Instead he allowed the strike to go on for seven weeks in a trial of strength which, because of the invention of the motor-car, the union could not win. It was a strategy particularly admired by his successor as Minister of Labour, Mr Edward Heath, whose tenure of office was too brief for him to win his union-bashing spurs.

. But it was really the arrival of incomes policy which turned the Ministry of Labour, in Mr Ray Gunter's celebrated phrase, into a bed of nails. Once it became government policy to try to restrict wage increases to the growth of productivity the old split-the- difference philosophy became impossible, and no one could rely on the conciliation machinery any more.

This is what made Mrs Barbara Castle's role such an impossible one. She had to be the guardian of incomes policy and the in- dustrial conciliator, and even if she had not attempted trade union reform as well, she was bound to have found the two tasks in- compatible. In the end she virtually handed over the peacekeeping task to the 'roc, a gesture of despair which might well have proved successful against the background of a corporate state but could hardly be ex- pected to work in our free-for-all society.

Robert Carr is built, psychologically, like a conciliator. No shadow minister worked more assiduously to know his ministerial role in advance than he did. He got around, met all the people who make decisions,

worked out policies and tried them out on these same people, and eventually arrived in office as the best informed man who has ever held the job. And, when the docks strike proved to be the first major issue confront- ing him, he went through all the motions of a more seasoned minister in grappling with it. People staggered out of long sessions at the DEP gasping with admiration for him, contrasting his manner and attitude with Barbara's as if she had run the thing as an extension of the Spanish inquisition while he had ushered in the Age of Reason.

But it would be premature to assess Mr Carr's performance as anything more than beginner's luck. He was—and at the time of writing still is—confronted with the product of another beginner's mistakes. Mr Jack Jones, Mr Cousins's successor as general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union is still—like Mr Cousins at the time of the bus strike—enjoying some- thing of a honeymoon with the activist mili- tants who keep things going down in the grassroots of his union. They are the people who attend meetings, formulate resolutions and—during this honeymoon period at any rate—decide the union's policy.

The fact that this is a dispute of the most arcane, origins which will benefit a mere fraction of dockers, even if it is settled to the union's satisfaction, matters very little. We have a tyro union leader and a tyro Minister of Labour (to revert to the tradi- tional title), and each of them is trying out his theories on the other. Mr Jones's lesson, which he is learning fast, is far more difficult than Mr Carr's, since the power our system now gives to a Cabinet minister is consider- ably less, in terms of the effect that other people's arguments can have on him, and the amount of 'outside', i.e. Treasury, pres- sure that can be exerted on him, than the restraints affecting the conduct of the leader of a great union like the TGWU. Even so, the lesson Mr Jones will have to swallow is much more bitter and long-lasting than Mr Carr's.

Mr Jones, on the other hand, is coming up against the right-wing imperative which seems to have influenced every major union leader in this country since the war. He appeals for democratic decision-making within his union, and honestly tries to abide by the decisions that result—as in the case of the docks strike. But what use is democ- racy when the delegates who take the de- cisions come from a narrow group of activists within the union? What machinery exists for a debate on the issues, rather than an appeal to the traditional and praiseworthy loyalties, of the dockers? And how much weight does Mr Jones's democracy give to his own responsibilities as a member of the National Economic Development Council, the general council of the laic and all the rest of the system of which he is a part?

The impact of strikes, on the economy and on the moral fibre of the nation, if it comes to that, is grossly exaggerated. It was not the seamen's strike of 1966 but the government's delay in devaluing the that drove the country off course. The docks strike will not settle the future pattern of economic recovery—or continued slide—but the policies the government adopts towards expansion and economic growth. Trade unions are not very well equipped to put their case across, and in this instance, par- ticularly, their customary suspicion of the mass media has probably led to an under- estimate of the plight of those dock workers who do not have the opportunity to join in productivity and modernisation deals, and who therefore depend upon the basic time rate the unions are trying to get raised. But the case against Mr Jones, surely, is that in spite of his frequently-stated dedication to democracy, an incredible amount of ignor- ance still exists among his own members over the issue on which they have now been told to take a stand.

Mr Carr's task—and it may not be the one he has prepared himself for—is to appreciate the predicament that the new-style union leaders find themselves in. They are adjured to promote plant bargaining—to take one example—yet expected to keep their shop stewards in line. They have to be more demo- cratic than their predecessors, but when their members are on strike, the government, if not the country, expects them to behave like autocrats. They are embedded in the system, because that is what governments have worked for for years, yet they become out- casts as soon as there is a strike.

And Mr Carr's plans for trade union re- form must, surely, have been influenced by the docks strike. To take only one aspect, the futility of a cooling-off period must now occur to him. The talks he himself sponsored, when a settlement was almost reached, would merely have been postponed for fifty- nine days and twenty-three hours, probably without affecting the outcome. And the activists would have had an additional three months in which to work on the emotions and fears of the dockers, perhaps decisively affecting the result of a state-ordered ballot.

There are lessons to be learned from the docks strike: whether Mr eau will discern them or whether he will succumb to nostalgia for the John Hares and the Walter Monck- tons of less stressful days for labour relations remains to be seen. But if he has enough wit and enough insight, he can at least help the unions to recover from the results of the inbreeding which so weakened them from 1964 to 1970, and perhaps even persuade his party that employers are big boys now and must learn to look after themselves. What would then remain for his Department to do? Its other functions could easily go back to the Board of Trade, of which the Ministry was once a part. After all, it would only be fulfilling a directive of a previous Minister of Labour by returning to the folks from whence they came.