Industrial relations
Left, right and extreme centre
George Gale
The Labour Government of Harold Wilson produced legislation dealing with prices and incomes and set up a statutory Prices and Incomes Board; it also attempted to legislate on industrial relations but was prevented from doing so by the unions and by a substantial number of Labour MPs, among whom the most determined were those belonging to the Tribune group. Mr Heath's Conservative Government came into power determined to legislate on industrial relations, where Wilson and Barbara Castle had Tailed to legislate; and determined also to do away with prices and incomes policy, on the ground, frequently stated by Heath, that such a policy did not and could not work. The Tories' Industrial Relations Act went further than the proposals outlined. in In Place of Strife; but what the Tories did, and the Labour Cabinet wanted but failed to do, went further than the reforms proposed by the Donovan Commission on industrial relations. Now, the Heath Cabinet, in the twelve months since its Industrial Relations Act came into effect, has thrown over all its previous ideas about prices and incomes, and regional and industrial subvention as well, and is carrying through a prices and incomes policy and an industrial policy more extreme, more socialist in content, than anything the Wilson Cabinet ever dreamed of. The opposition to the present Government's policies stems now most fiercely, from the left wing of the Labour Party and from the less powerful, but intellectually more coherent, right wing of the Conservatives.
This is all very odd. The 'extremists ' of left and right are agreed in their opposition to the ' muderates ' of the centre, not, as might be expected, because the ' extremists ' want an extension of state power, but because they suspect and resist the enormously successful demands of the ' moderates' for a great extension of state power. Put in other terms, the threat to democratic practices in this country at this time comes not from the extremes of the parties but from the centre and the elite.
And thus the situation is not only odd, but also most dangerous. The public still believes that 'moderate' and ' central ' positions are much the same as 'democratic' and ' parliamentary ' positions. Because of this belief, and because a consensus of view, supporting this moderate,"central,' elitist position, has been estabkshed throughout press and television, the country is seeing thrust upon it, as if the entire process were both inevitable and desirable, the greatest increase in ministerial and bureaucratic control and the greatest loss of parkamentary and democratic responsibility and authority, that has ever happened in peace. Had this process been brought about by the policies and politics of the Left or the Right it would have been denounced and resisted as totalitarian, and either communist or fascist. As it is, far from being denounced it is almost universally accepted and widely praised.
This has come about in part because of the distortions in our party system brought about by the European policy and by the delayed (and still only partial) recognition that the institutions of the Common Market are profoundly antidemocratic; and in part because the Labour Party when in power attempted to behave like Tories, just as the Conservative Party in power is now trying to behave like Socialists.
A good deal of most useful insight into one aspect of this extremely complex political development is contained in Eric Heifer's The Class Struggte in Parliament, published this week (Gollancz, e3.90). Heifer, one of the ablest of the Tribune group of trade union MPs, tells in much detail the part he and his friends played in getting rid of the policies of Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife and of their subsequent alliance with Mrs Castle in opposing Robert Carr's not dissimilar Industrial Relations Bill. He also describes the growth of opposition within the Labour Party, and within its left wing, to statutory control of pnices and incomes.
Heifer realises, and spells out, very well that trade unionism in this country did not arise out of the law but despite the law; he is not against the law — "If the law operates to assist the working people, then, crudely put, I am for such law. If, on the other hand, law is against their interests, then I am opposed to it. It is a simple test, but surely a fundamental one." Simple it is, and fundamental also; but the moderate centre,' now in the process of putting together something very like a corporate state, continues to assert, as if it were unarguable, the supremacy of 'the Law.' To challenge or resist an unjust law is becoming a disgraceful thing-to do.
Laws are made for men, and not men for laws; and unjust law is bad law. Disobedience to bad law may well be the proper course of public duty. But to make assertions such as these, in the topsyturvy world of present day party politics, when the men of the centre despise and abuse Parliament, yet invoke recent enactments as if they were ex cathedra statements of infallibility, is to run the risk of being called an extremist, by none other than those doctrinaire, elitist, antiParliamentarian, consensual, central extremists of the bureaucratic corporate state, against whose machinations democratic Parliamentarians like Heifer fortunately still fight.
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