All change at Brighton
Peter Paterson
The current Labour obsession with constitutional tinkering — apparent in the introduction of the cumbersome elec- toral college for the choice of the Party's leader, as well as Mr Tony Benn's in- teresting proposal for the backdoor aboli- tion of the monarchy by handing over to the Speaker the vestiges of the Queen's political power — has now spread to the Trades Union Congress.
The topic likely to overwhelm all others at next week's annual TUC congress at Brighton will not be the current extraor- dinary level of unemployment, nor the dif- ficulty of squeezing pay settlements from employers which come anywhere near the present level of the cost of living index, even though the index is coming down. It will not even be the disastrous slump in trade union membership, and therefore in- come, which threatens some unions with an unpalatable choice between marriage with some larger organisation, or bankruptcy. All these will claim their share of time and attention, but they are subjects (mergers apart) over which the unions have very little influence: trade unionism is a fair weather plant which blooms in times of boom and withers when there is a slump — a truth which has been obscured since the last war, and the assertion of which now is an in- dicator of how severe and far-reaching the recession has been. Like everyone, else, especially the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the unions are waiting for something to turn up. And they hope it will not be their own toes.
At such a time it is, perhaps, natural that a venerable organisation like the TUC should start to look inwards. Apart from important but relatively minor changes such as the development of TUC industry com- mittees as a substitute for full-blown in- dustrial unionism (i.e. one union for each industry) there has been little change in the way the trade union movement runs itself during the past 50 to 60 years.
Not that the constitutional change under consideration next week is particularly startling. It will right a considerable un- fairness, but beyond that it is difficult to see that it will have a profound effect. The principle of the change was in fact accepted by the TUC last year, but as we have learn- ed from the Labour Party, opponents or advocates of change no longer have any respect for decisions in principle:' there always remains, even after something has been signed and apparently sealed, a democratic right to re-open it. Hugh Gait- skell's 'fight and fight again ... ' speech has had more spiritual descendents, it would seem, than the late King Sobhuza II of Swaziland had offspring.
There is one curious feature of the pro- posed TUC reform. This time, the impetus for change has come not from the Left, as in the Labour Party's struggles, but from the Right. The object is to end the tradi- tional, and somewhat whimsical, way in which the General Council of the TUC is chosen in order to ensure that any union with over 100,000 members is automatically represented on the governing body of British trade unionism. The Left is opposed to any such reform, largely because they would forfeit the patronage they enjoy under the existing arrangement, but also because it is thought it will produce a more moderate General Council.
The present system allocates each union into its own 'trade group' along with others sharing a similar interest — transport, tex- tiles, mining, and so on. But instead of each trade group choosing its own represen- tative, or representatives, to serve on the General Council, the choice is made by the entire membership of Congress. In practice, this means that the three or four largest unions with their mighty bloc votes deter- mine who shall serve on the General Coun- cil. Thus, if one takes the 'Professional, Clerical and Entertainment' trade group itself a fairly blatant piece of gerrymander- ing since it somehow includes the actors' union Equity and the hardly similar bank clerks — the General Council member is Alan Sapper, the Left wing leader of the small television technicians' union, ACTT, with just 20,000 members. Yet the banking union and the clerical workers, APEX, each have around 140,000, without their leaders having any hope of joining the General Council unless the reform goes through. Mr Sapper owes his election not to the unions in his trade group but to his friends in the Transport & General Workers' Union, and he gathers other bloc votes under a self-protecting convention which more or less obliges each of the big battalions to back the nominations of their fellow big unions. Mr Sapper's predecessor on the General Council for Group 17 was the late Sir Tom O'Brien, general secretary of the even tinier Association of Theatrical, Television and Kine Employees — the back- of-the-liouse workers in theatres, cinema projectionists and the like. He first ac- quired the powerful Right winger Arthur Deakin of the Transport Workers as his patron, and managed by dint of the most extreme personal humiliation to retain that vote even after the TGWU switched to the Left under Mr Frank Cousins, a feat which to most observers cost him more in self- respect than the place was worth.
If the constitutional change is confirmed, Mr Sapper — whom Buggins' turn has
made this year's TUC chairman — will have to leave his General Council seat and hope to be elected to represent a special section confined to small unions without any big- union votes interfering. The same fate will overcome such well-known Left-wingers as Mr Ray Buckton of the train drivers, though it will be balanced by the presence on the General Council as of right of such luminaries as Mr Brian Stanley of the Post Office Engineers (130,000 members) who has hitherto been excluded.
The reform went through in principle last year partly because it received the backing of Mr Clive Jenkins's ASTMS and Mr Alan Fisher's National Union of Public Employees. Both these unions are now reported to be wavering, so the change could be reversed, a voile face which would , gladden the heart of the Communist Party's able and personable Industrial Organiser, Mr Mick Costello. Thanks to his energy, and the CP organisation within the unions, which has always been more effective than the Party's electoral showing, the old Com- munist Party is making a come-back _lust when everyone believed that its role had been taken over by the Militant Tendency. The outcome of the voting is hard to predict, however, if only because the dead, as well as the quick, have an influence in a movement as tradition-bound as the TUC.
Not that the hand of the past will haunt Mr Jenkins, who invented himself, but it could help to decide NUPE's vote. It o happens that a union philosopher who was without honour in the TUC went regularly to the rostrum to plead for a reform of the patronage system in General Council elec- tions throughout the 1950s. He was regard- ed as a nuisance, and year after year those who fixed the agenda consigned him to a spot on Friday morning when many dele- gates had already gone home and the rest were making noisy preparations to do so. His name was Bryn Roberts, and he was general secretary of NUPE. It might well trouble the conscience of NUPE's present leader, Mr Rodney Bickerstaffe, despite his well-known Left wing inclinations, to vote against something his predecessor fought so hard to achieve.
The other TUC talking point is the deci- sion not to invite Mr Michael Foot to ad- dress the brothers, particularly as we are probably within a year of a general election, and Mr Foot would seem to need every bit of help he can get. The truth is that the union bosses were quite ready to invite him, but Mr Foot himself was disinclined to go to Brighton, an extremely odd decision in the circumstances. The conjecture is that Labour's leader is already contemplating retirement and intends to time his departure so that his deputy, Mr Healey, will lead Labour into the election. with no time for Mr Benn's electoral college to be convened. Just the kind of unexpected result which oc- curs when constitutions are changed — 3 thought which might cause the TUC to pause before it unravels the work of its founding fathers.
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