Political Commentary
The privilege of the worker
Patrick Cosgrave
It seems almost inevitable nowadays — and may continue to be inevitable, given the present indifferent calibre of most British political leadership — that all modern governments in this country will, during their (at most) five year lives, have to face two major crises, one involving the reversal of the major principles of economic policy on which they were elected, the other involving a failed incomes policy. Were Mr Wilson, for example to be re elcted next month, one could predict with reasonable certainty that he would have a period in which he tried to operate without wages controls and in which he began to prepare policies to implement the socialisation of industry to which his party is now committed. One could further predict with reasonable certainty that, at some point in his second year of office, he would abandon his socialisation policies and adopt wages controls. There would be a couple or more phases of controls, each one weaker than the last and, in due course, he would be contemplating a winter with trepidation. Essentially the critic can say, the cycle operates in this way because most politicians lack the will to follow intelligence through: they know incomes policies do not work, but they are over-influenced, once in power, by the siren voices of conventional opinion, in the Treasury and in the economists' profession, to believe, first, that incomes policies are unavoidable, and second, that radical economic policies — whether Socialist or Tory
cannot be implemented.
This being the case, those of us who believe the country can be saved, but who doubt that our political leaders have the strength to save it, must cut our coat according to the amount of cloth we have available — that is, we must think of altering the system to allow for the weakness of political leadership. The best way of doing that is, without taking away from the electorate the right every so often to decide that another party should administer the same cycle, to ensure that a party or government sees the cycle through to the end and beyond. That is, we should again have seven-year parliaments. The five-year parliament neither allows time for a strong government to implement radical measures and avoid defeat as a consequence of that implementation, nor time for a weak government — and every government since 1945 has been weak on the central question of economic management — to realise the consequences of its weakness and perhaps throw off the influence of those siren voices 1 mentioned earlier. Nor would the return to power at a general election held at the end of five years of a weak or unsatisfactory government perform the same educative function, partly because a second defeat for an opposition party seriously weakens its capacity, for some time at any rate, to oppose; party because the weak or unsatisfactory government would gain through victory an added injection of complacency. Ten years, moreover, is too long an experimental period: seven would be about right. Seven-year parliaments we must eventually, therefore, have.
-There is another reason why some future government will have to be given quite a lot of time to play with, and this brings us to the coming winter's prospects for industrial relations. Sooner or later, if the domestic economy of Britain is to achieve anything remotely approaching a healthy stability, a British government is going to have to take on, beat and break the monopoly power of the
large trade unions. The present government never really set its mind to doing that, partly because its objectives in passing the 1971 Act were confused in the minds of its members, just as the lessons to be learned from its abortive attempt are now lost to sight in a murky intellectual swirl of self-justification. But the task must nonetheless be undertaken, sooner or later, whatever the carnage.
This winter we can look forward with reasonable certainty to two industrial crises, the first arising from Mr Scanlon's defiance of Sir John Donaldson and the National Industrial Relations Court, the second from the discontent of the miners with their last pay award. There is every indication that ministers fear both possibilities intensely, and dearly wish that some magic fairy (the Official Solicitor?) could conjure out of existence Sir John's power if necessary financially to destroy Mr Scanlon's union, without loss of face on the part of the government.
There were a lot of things wrong with the 1971 Act, and most of what was wrong with it can be put down to a conviction on the part of ministers, first, that union members would not, if given a choice by secret ballot, follow their leaders — a conviction destroyed by the railwaymen — and, second, that a really serious confrontation 'with the unions could be avoided if enough palliatives were inserted in the Act. The nettle to be grasped was, nonetheless, the question of trade union privilege under the law. The system of privilege was, as is argued in a brilliant new pamphlet on the subject by Dr C. G. Hanson (Trade Unions: A Century of Privilege, Institute of Economic Affairs 40p), deliberately created by parliaments and governments over the years since the Trade Union Act 'of 1871. It was not an accidental or casual growth: it was something carefully constructed and built on, in the assumption that workers who were members of trade unions were weak, victimised creatures, incapable of defending themselves unless they were given special legal rights. If that ever had any justification as a proposition, the justification has long vanished. The 1971 Act — which repealed the charter of 1871 — in principle ended the system of privilege, but that principle was so hedged about by other provisions and sops,
that it was never seen clearly, nor acted upon. All this is, however, essentially tactical. The real problem with the 1971 Act was that ministers saw it as an extension of incomes
policy. Those right-wing commentators who have made justified fun of the Prime Minister's reversals on the subject of incomes policy have, generally, forgotten that he once said he would accept even a very tough incomes policy if it were accompanied by an attack on the unions. " I am quite prepared 'S said Mr Heath in the House of Commons on March 19, 1968, in a debate on Labour's incomes policy, 'for a tough incomes policy to ensure that costs do not outrun productivity, but it must be achieved by using all the aspects of economic policy in a complete economic context .. . The Government really want these powers because ... they cannot or will not tackle the monopolistic powers of certain trade unions ... "
And now—plus -ca change—Mr Heath is in exactly the same position: he is trying to enforce an incomes policy despite the fact that he has to all intents and purposes abandoned his assault on the monopolistic power of the unions. The fact that Mr Scanlon and his colleagues are too stupid to realise that, if they took their present case before the NIRC they would almost certainly win it, and that they prefer to go on bankrupting themselves rather than do so, makes no difference to this analysis. Our real fear must be that, contemplating the possibility of industrial disruption by the AUEW, which would endanger their election prospects, the Government will find some way to rescue Mr Scanlon.
The miners are in altogether a different case: they simply want more money, and they are in a union which has demonstrated, over the years, exceptional moderation and responsibility. However, the only relationship between government action and union, wage demands lies in the willingness of governments to finance uneconomic wage increases, either through industrial subventions or through money supply expansion. Of course it is silly to pretend that excessive wage increases (and the miners are not asking for such) do not have an economically damaging effect. They do; but they do because the government of the day finances them from public resources, even when a given industry cannot afford itself to do so. All this has nothing whatever to do with trade union legislation designed to reduce privilege, though it has something to do with another consequence of monopolistic unions — the increase in unemployment which anY uneconomic wage increase inevitably causes through a subsequent reduction in the labour force designed to reduce the impact of a given increase in a given industry.
The real purpose of ending the unions' century of privilege, is, after what would undoubtedly be a bitter period of confrontation — hence the probable necessity of a guaranteed long term for any government willing .to undertake the task — to reduce the Incidence of the typical short British strike. Alas, once upon a time the men who now form a Conservative administration said as much: they denied that the total number of days lost per year was a true guide to the effect of industrial action on the economy. I say, alas, because at this year's Tory conference the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less proudly proclaimed that the Government had reduced the number of days lost, forgetting his own earlier insight into 'the irrelevance of this statistic. It is its incidence which necessitates union reform. It is to be hoped that the Government, despite Mr Scanlon, will stand firm over the tatterecl shreds of its 1971 Act, so that those shreds will remain to inspire a future administratiofl. to stitch the pieces together again, and fashion them into the flag of trade union reform.
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