Jones and the unions
The Colossus of roads
Jim Higgins
Just recently a senior civil servant, heavily involved with Treasury and Downing Street matters, made the interesting observation: "Every day we wake up and read our newspapers to see if the Colossus is still holding Up the system single-handed." It will not take YOU ten minutes to decide that he was not talking about James Harold Wilson but James Larkin Jones, better known to his many fans as Jack Jones.
Mr Jones is the beneficiary of a situation that he helped in large measure to create. The strongly held conviction that no conceivable government can administer the nation's affairs Without reaching some sort of accommodation With the trade unions derives directly from the unpleasantness of the recent past.
Mr Wilson, during the fag end of his last administration, attempted to govern without, and against, the trade unions. His headlong retreat, in face of the displeasure of the trade union heavyweights, was, for him, both humiliating and chastening. Mr Heath, in his abrasive Selsdon ,phase, knowing even less about trade unions than Mr Wilson, presented the tough image of a man who had a short way With trade union dissent. But the absurd Industrial Relations Act lamentably failed on the few occasions it was tried, and alienated almost everybody. Having established this hard image, Mr Heath gave inflation a sharp twist Upward through the threshold policy and then fell flat on his face trying to sit on the miners. Whatever else can be said in his favour he was a disaster for British capitalism. Incidentally, despite the joyous reception which our American cousins gave to Mrs Thatcher's stern prescription for more inequality, she is storing Up some future trouble at the TUC, where memories are long and catchwords have a certain repercussive effect.
But all of that is in the past — or the future. Suffice it to say that today Mr Jones, together with Messrs Foot and Healey, forms the troika that largely governs our affairs. He is courted and consulted. Every effort is made to keep in with old Jack. Nobody was at all surprised when Mr Jones's call for measures to alleviate unemployment were immediately answered by a promise of a statement on the question by Mr Healey. Mr Jones it was who fathered the idea of a Conciliation and Arbitration Service. Mr Jones it was who masterminded the campaign for the Social Contract, a splendid amalgam of imprecision and economic nonsense. Mr Jones it was also who first raised the proposal for flat-rate increases for us all. Now, in his role as surrogate for ten million trade unionists, he is also the Government's substitute for an incomes policy. It is a heavy burden. Nevertheless we cannot say that he is markedly less successful than earlier attempts at wage restraint.
Naturally enough a price has to be paid for all this attention and Mr Jones is paying it gladly. He did steer the £6 limit through the TUC conference, with the minimum trouble. Alone among trade union leaders he has welcomed the Government's sparse measures to alleviate unemployment. At this week's Labour Party • Conference he will be a pillar of strength for the Government and nobly assist Mr Wilson to a few more months' breathing space.
Of course, the General Secretaries of the Transport Union have always been powerful figures in the councils of the Labour Party. Governments, of all stripes, have found it prudent to listen to them. Ernest Bevin, who for some unaccountable reason is considered to have been the best Foreign Secretary since Palmerston, was a clever, tricky and tough man. He once destroyed a leader of the Labour Party by telling him "to stop hawking his conscience around from conference to conference." But even Bevin,had to vacate his union job before he could realise his full power. His Successor, Arthur Deakin, was a somewhat brutish autocrat and noted hammer of the left. His contribution to the gaiety of the nation was as a mainstay of the Gaitskellites in their struggle with Nye Bevan and his supporters. Deakin got no further; he was more qualified for control of the Military Police than for statesmanship. The quaintly named Jock Tiffin died too soon to impose his personality on the union and merely provided a breathing space between Deakin and Frank Cousins. Mr Cousins, a disarmingly bumbling man, a sort of left-wing Ramsay MacDonald, was just the same, though Wilson thought enough of him to offer him a senior department in his first government. He was very unhappy in the Commons, where he made no impression and returned quickly to the familiar comfort of the T&G.
Without leaving Transport House, Mr Jones has managed to achieve a powei not accorded to his predecessors. Like Bevan he has a brain in his head and a capacity for analysis not common among trade union leaders. He is not a tiresome bully like Deakin, although he did display certain symptoms of droit de seigneur at the TUC this year. If not a great orator he is much clearer than Mr Cousins and just as forceful. All in all a man to be reckoned with.
Within his union, whatever checks on his conduct the rules may theoretically impose, he is very much master of his and everyone else's fate. Two examples may suffice. At the end of the Common Market referendum two issues were discussed at the Finance and General Purposes Committee of the union — a kind of inner cabinet of the T&G. The first was the expected removal of Wedgwood Benn from the Industry Department. The other was an ancillary resolution indicating that the union would not countenance any change in the Social Contract. Mr Jones accepted the need to defend Mr Benn and pledged his full-hearted commitment to the spirit and letter of the Contract. The very next day Mr Jones revealed his plan for limited, flat-rate increases — a policy that could by no stretch of the imagination be forced into the words or the spirit of the Contract. Immediately after, Mr Berm was unceremoniously shifted to the Energy Department, and the lack of protest from Mr Jones was exactly comparable to that of Mr Wedgwood Benn himself.
Or, yet again, there is the case of a more . recent meeting of the union's General Executive Board, a thirty-nine-man lay body elected
by the members, in theory controlling the union between delegate conferences. At this gathering Mr Neil Kinnock, a TGWU spon sored MP for Bedwelty, gave it as his opinion that support for the £6 pay limit should be conditional on a drastic reduction in unemployment. Mr Jones opined, heatedly, that this was a disloyal suggestion. Such is the power of Mr Jones's personality that a subsequent motion, suggesting the union should put an emergency resolution to the Labour Conference insisting without any conditions that unemployment should be reduced to threequarters of a million within twelve months, could not even get a seconder. Bear in mind that the TGWU General Executive has its fair share of Communists and Labour left-wingers. None would go against the Jones view that the passage of such a resolution would wreck the Government.
Mr Jones's total commitment to the Labour Government and its continuance in power is fiercely held and actively pursued. He is as convinced as Mr Healey and Mr Foot that any attempt significantly to lower unemployment will require so much reflation as completely to destroy whatever remains of international confidence. With the collapse of sterling will go the Labour Government. Those heady days, when they saw every difficulty for capitalism as a bright harbinger of the socialist millennium, are gone forever. The sight of Michael Foot and Jack Jones, those erstwhile demons of the left, straining every sinew to prop up the system is not without a certain irony. For make no mistake. Among the unemployed we have got, and the others we are going to get, there is, and will be, a due proportion of Mr Jones's own members. Greater love hath no General Secretary than that he gives his own members to save Harold Wilson.
At the end of the day will it all have been in vain? Will the loss of the left-wing image and tarnished charisma be rewarded with success? In the short term there can be little doubt that success, or what passes for it, has attended and will attend his endeavours. Most unions are ready, willing and anxious to settle for £6, more from fear of the dole than the imperative mandate of the TUC. During the current Labour Party conference, unwillingly and with some protest at the inadequacy of the Healey unemployment package, the Government will survive and its policy be grudgingly endorsed. In the vanguard of the support troops will be Jack Jones.
The long term is a different matter. Whatever his power Mr Jones is no surrogate for the movement as a whole, no trade union leader could be that. Even within his own union he has had his little difficulties with dockers and the Scottish transport drivers, to name but a few. The danger is that he will be driven beyond his capacity to ,deliver if the long-expected economic recovery is delayed or does not come at all. All that, however, is the music of the future, a score where harmony may .1reak down into Uncontrolled dissonance. At this stage, though, right-wing critics should not shoot the pianist; he really is doing his best.
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