Political commentary

Down on the picket line

Ferdinand Mount

A sullen brazier sits on a wet pavement tended by a girl in a long scarf with frizzy hair. Three mild young men in overcoats warm their hands at the brazier and stamp their feet now and then to keep off the cold.

There is a scarlet banner flopping against the railing so that it is hard to read. A strike is it?

'Yes, social workers. We've been out a month. In Tower Hamlets they've been out four or five months.'

'Haven't read much about it.'

'Nobody has. The Media are ignoring us. The dispute is about regrading. Every other group of local authority workers has the right to re-negotiate when they're regrading,' The mild young man in the brown overcoat trails off into the jargon, but without much enthusiasm. He offers me a soggy green roneoed leaflet urging you to ask your councillors 'to fight on our behalf for what is, after all, a very modest claim.'

'What about your clients?'

'It's unfortunate but .

Outside the steak houses, there are more bedraggled young people. These ones mostly look Mediterranean and so even more bedraggled. Here and there around Fleet Street a few provincial journalists keep watch as their editors clock in and clock out.

Pickets are the last street life left in London. Carol-singers often don't even bother to sing now, just stand there chanting 'we wish you a merry Christmas'; the muffinman doesn't call here any more, although there is an old Irish knifebluntener who knocks at odd hours and makes you feel uncomfortable. But the pickets still go through their ancient ritual of obstructing the highway 'for the purpose only of peacefully obtaining or communicating information or peacefully persuading any person to work or abstain from working.'

These are the bogeymen who make the middle classes shudder. Pickets — men with pickaxes, hand-picked, picket-fence fencing you in, hard men. But how wet and woebegone these particular representatives of the movement militant look. They even seem to be dimly conscious of how futile their efforts are. The steaks continue to be served garnished with dew-fresh mushrooms and morning-picked garden peas.

And the social workers? Well, the management tries to be tactful and talks of the long-term disasters that are building up.. 'The irony will be,' says one social work expert, 'that the disaster will probably happen after the social workers go back and they will be blamed.' One more babybatterer will go too far and another couple of social workers will be pilloried in the press for 'lack of liaison'. But the unspeakable truth is that, on the whole, boroughs can manage without three-quarters of their social workers. Meanwhile, the strike pay — f30-£40 a week, 55 per cent of normal wages— keeps the social workers going, just, and makes a growing dent in the strike fund of the National and Local Government Officers Association. Quite how big a dent is hard to say as NALGO HQ is virtually closed for ten days and the press officer is taking her holiday in France. And no further developments are expected until 26 January. No doubt they are all due for a rest. At the same time the smell of neglect lingers in the damp air.

Ever since February 1974, the trade union bureaucracy has acquired fresh members, funds and prominence by encouraging expectations which, as often as not, it is not and never was in any position to fulfil. Millions now have joined trade unions or have aquiesced in previously unheard of strikes or other disruptions in the belief that by these actions they could somehow magically acquire the 'clout' oft coalminers or tanker-drivers. Now most of them are learning that if the money isn't there, the money isn't there. For some groups of workers these excursions into bloody-mindedness are a welcome break from dreary jobs, combining both the swirl of public events and the pleasure of being off work. But for others there is a severe cost. Old-fashioned people would call it a loss of self-respect; moderns might describe it as damage to one's self-image or the proletarianising of the professional. The firemen, for example, have suffered more than financial loss. But at least their work continues to be skilled, dangerous and highly regarded.

The social workers — children of the Sixties — merely look pathetic. The outside world cruelly rejects their claim to the status of professional healers, but equally cruelly it pays no attention to their claim to be essential workers who can bring the social services to a halt.

For those who thought the world was coming to an end in February 1974, the most significant events of 1978 were the defeat of the firemen's strike by using troops to fight fires and the final failure of the trade unions to gain recognition at Grunwick. Now the troops have been trained to drive tanker lorries; and the unions are agitating for extra legislation to plug the Grunwick 'loophole'. Some senior Tories believe that there are only three unions capable of organising a strike which cannot be resisted — the police, the army and the prison officers. They might have quite a struggle at docks and railheads with their imported coal, to say the least. Nor do I underestimate at all the power of the closed shop to compel the unwilling to join a trade union or the power of all unions to resist technological change. But the belief that any union can always extract substantially higher wages by striking than it could have obtained by negotiating looks very much shakier now — as does the belief that the employers and the government are in the last resort powerless. The only wonder now is that these strange beliefs ever came to gain general acceptance. We can only shake our heads and cut along home to curl up in the warm and switch on the box.

The door opens. And there, nb it can't be, must be a joke, yet it is him though. He looks strangely grey now from head to toe — as though belonging to the Undead — but it is him all right. and he fits into the stichomythia lightly enough.

Ernie: There's a little draught in here. Eric: There's a brown ale in the kitchen. Harold: Why don't you go and join it?

But how sad and shrunk he looks. And there was nothing more awful in this year — not even Jeremy's entry at Southport — than when Ernie opens the cupboard door and there hanging like a mass-produced Shirt of Nessus is the dread Gannex. Eric and Ernie offered to take out that gag, but like a good old trouper — i.e. past caring — Sir Harold said no, leave it in. It was, as Philip Purser says, the most humiliating descent since the Rector of Stiffkey went on show in a lion's cage.

The Rector — unfrocked for playing around with prostitutes he said he was trying to help — pleaded that, 'baulked of every dignified and legitimate way of earning a living, I had no alternative but to fall into the hands of the showman world.' Ditto here? The day after Captain Rye's lions had mauled the poor deranged little man, the Captain put up a placard inviting the Skeg ness holiday-makers to 'See The Lions That Mauled The Ex-Rector' and the ExRector's own last words were 'Am I on the Front Page?'

Sir Harold in the den of the lions corniques evoked much the same mixture of derision and sympathy. His present low straits remind us, with unexpected poignance, of the bounce, enthusiasm and kindness he has shown at his best. Yet they remind us too of his fatal weakness — which was fatal weakness. No-one in British politics has done more, not even Mr Callaghan or Mr Heath, to encourage the belief that the unions can never be resisted; for no-one has so brilliantly advertised the firmness of his intentions or so conspicuously failed to fulfil them. No-one did more to raise false expectations of what trade unions could achieve. And that is why those waifs are still out warming their hands at that brazier. But there we must break off, for it is time to watch Sir Harold paying tribute to Dame Vera Lynn on This Is Your Life.