Politics
Law comes to the unions
Conservative Central Office is about to N.,–,bring out one of its little explanatory pamphlets. The pamphlet in question is called 'The facts on the new trade union laws'. The back of the pamphlet will probably be blank. This is because the enthusiastic designer chose to illustrate the document. The picture he hit upon was of some winding gear, a pile of coal and some miners fighting policemen. At a stage too late to find a substitute, someone thought better of this exciting picture and it was withdrawn.
Those who wish will see this petty affair as confirmation that the purpose of all Government policy towards trade unions is 'confrontation', that the Government is determined to defeat and enslave the trade union movement. The story suggests that some official Tory minds among the lower ranks, at least, may tend to think this way. But if they do, they are victims of a strange, though widespread delusion about the actual laws in question.
Take that creature popular in the Eng- lish law, but seldom to be found elsewhere — the Reasonable Man. Set out to him the position of trade unions in Britain before 1979. Do not use the words 'trade unions' since they may disturb his reason- ableness in one direction or the other. Use some phrase like 'mass organisations'. In 1979, mass organisations were allowed to deny jobs to people who were not mem- bers of them. They were allowed to dam- age third parties not concerned with their disputes without those third parties having any redress. They were able to force their members to do no work or neglect the normal duties of their work without having to consult those members and without any legal consequences. They did not have to ask their members whether or not they wanted to have a fund which paid those members' money to a political party. They could prevent workers who were not their members from working, and no one could stop them. It is hard to believe that the Reasonable Man would think this a reason- able state of affairs.
The new Government of 1979 had come to power largely on the votes of people who thought of themselves as reasonable men and women and who were outraged by the privileges and behaviour of the unions. (I should perhaps have added that those mass organisations were also invited by the previous Government to run the economic policy of the country — but I did not want to shock the Reasonable Man too much.) Considering that the support and views of these people were about as un- ambiguous as public opinion can ever be, the Government was remarkably hesitant. Mr James Prior hesitated, of course, but then he was to the manner born. It was more interesting that Mr Norman Tebbit hesitated too, and introduced nothing more savage than Mr Prior. It has taken six years, three Acts and three ministers (now it is the benevolent, domesticated Mr Tom King) to answer the demand of 1979. If this is the iron fist, it has never once emerged from the thickest of velvet gloves. If it is the jackboot, it is a jackboot permanently on tiptoe. Indeed, the perpetrators of the new laws were so nervous about them that they have quite often tried to discourage their use. They provided the lion, trained him to open his jaws, but resolutely re- fused to put their own heads in his mouth.
And yet the laws themselves are suc- ceeding, 'though tossed about, with many a conflict, many a doubt' in their making. Mr Eddie Shah was able to stop secondary picketing. Austin Rover and now Solihull Council have been able to insist on strike ballots, although the Government itself was particularly nervous of making rules in this field: it is an anomaly of the 1984 Act that only injured employers and custom- ers, and not union members themselves, can get redress for the failure to hold a ballot. Closed shops have lost their legal status (though not, admittedly, all of their force). Executive officers of unions now have to be properly elected, and, better still when one thinks of Mr Scargill, prop- erly re-elected every five years.
Not only do most of the laws seem to be working: they seem to be capable of pulling the unions along in their wake. You might not think it from the noise of protest and the calls for resistance, but most unions are disposed to obey the law (they have noticed some of the consequences of disobedience), and even to modify their practices as the law would like before the law actually forces them to do so. For some time now, the Government has made money available for unions to conduct postal ballots. For a couple of years, no one took the bait, and the Government was mocked. Now the Electricians and the Engineers would like the money. If Mr Scargill ever again thinks that it would be nice to have a strike without asking his members about it, the law now ensures that he will not be able to begin. As a result, even he is that much less likely to try.
In fact, without Mr Scargill it might have taken longer for union members to get hold of the idea that they had rights which the law protected. The trouble with Mr Heath's industrial relations laws was that they could only be wielded by a heavy governmental hand. The PrioriTebbit laws mostly have to be triggered by employers, but it is best of alL when they are operated by trade unionists themselves. Over the past year, working miners have become as litigious as American companies. If union members develop a taste for the courts and the protection of the new laws, it is hard to see how a Labour Government would be able to repeal the Vicious Tory Anti-union Laws as promised. No secret ballots? No strike ballots? No re-elections? Plenty of secondary picketing? Would these look well in a Labour manifesto? Would they be popular with 'our people'? As the miners' strike ebbs, and Mr Scargill is washed up, it becomes clearer that the year's great conflict has not been between trade unionism and a government bent on breaking it, but a wider reaching battle about obedience to the law and the authority of government. It was not a fight for which Mr Norman Willis had the stomach — and Mr Willis's is the biggest stomach in the business. Despite a year in which the Government's unspeakable harshness was the subject of every public utterance, no sooper did the Government allow the TUC to think that it could deliver a settlement than the 'Magnificent Seven' with Mr Willis as Yul Brynner were round to Number Ten; and not just the softies of the Right, but men like Mr Ray Buckton and Mr Moss Evans whom Mr Scargill keeps calling 'magnificently solid'. The gleam of renewed respectability and im- portance was in their eyes, and the dis- appointment when Mr Scargill double- crossed them was correspondingly bitter. If the TUC is proud to parley with Mrs Thatcher after all that has happened, is there any reason to doubt that it will adjust to her laws in the end? Whether it enjoys doing so or not does not really matter. Now comes the final test of patience. Under Mr King's 1984 Act, all unions with a political fund have to vote in the next 12 months to decide whether it should con- ' tinue. If the members of the three or four biggest unions vote against their fund, the Labour Party will receive a letter fron'i its bank manager and that, almost, will be that. There might still be a Socialist Party, but the Party of Labour would be broken. Yet the dog has not barked, or rather, the carthorse has not neighed, in the night. The unions are co-operating with the bal- lots, doing their best to arrange the order in which different unions vote to get a momentum of support for the political funds (a pity that they thought the NUM would be the right people to set the ball rolling), hoping that activists will be able to achieve majorities on low polls. There will not be Days of Action and rallies and concerts, let alone the 'guerrilla resistance' about which the NUM now fantasises; They will be adopting a 'step-by-step , 'softly, softly', low profile' approach. Now who could have taught them that?
Charles Moore
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