WILLIS IS THE WORST

Peter Paterson on the

failure of the TUC general secretary

Blackpool AS I was saying last week just before. Jimmy Knapp and I were so rudely interrupted by a healthy and quite un- expected expression of democracy on the part of the railway guards, this week's Trades Union Congress was going to be an obsessionally internal affair, and the ade- quacy or otherwise of its new general secretary, Norman Willis, would be closely observed.

In the event, my forecast that Mr Knapp would be the hero of the hour, or the man of the match, acting as a useful counter- weight to the lethal powers of a vengeful Arthur Scargill, proved to be well wide of the mark. Mr Knapp, looking more than ever like a Victorian divine impersonating, Billy Connolly, rather slunk into the pro- ceedings. Those of his members who have been sacked were naturally very much in his mind, so his motion paying tribute to the heroism of the miners did somehow get confused with the fate of those guards who were left high and dry when their col- leagues voted against taking industrial ac- tion on the issue of driver-only trains. Poor Mr Knapp has been turned overnight from being a rampaging industrial tiger into just another victim of the Tory offensive against the working class — a prevailing hard-luck theme this week. And all be- cause of that spectre haunting the trade union world, the 'secret ballot'.

I was here in Blackpool when the news of the guards' decision came through. One leading member of the TUC general coun- cil spat out his judgment: 'That'll teach us to hold f---ing ballots.' Another, more sophisticated, observed: 'Only an idiot calls for a ballot when he doesn't know what the result will be.' Or writes about it for that matter.

Arthur Scargill, who is not renowned as a believer in the ballot box, came to Blackpool exuding defiance, self- justification and that brand of venom that comrades within the movement reserve for each other. The situation did not look particularly auspicious for his cause. The TUC has become rather bored with the miners' strike, and a little shamefaced over its inability to fulfil all the promises of solidarity made during the heady atmos- phere of Brighton a year ago, when Arthur hi-jacked the conference and actually con- vinced some normally hard-headed people that he might even win his strike.

His strategy now is to force the Labour Party to incorporate into its programme a pledge to repay all the money lost by the NUM in fines, sequestration and the re- ceivership imposed on the union by the courts. He also wants a 'review' of the cases of all miners jailed during the strike, and the reinstatement of all those who lost their jobs.

Mr Kinnock finds this a difficult package to swallow, an electoral millstone. So, in advance of Labour's own conference next month, he was relying on the TUC to draw Arthur's fangs.

The General Council did its bit on Monday. By 24 votes to 16 they decided to oppose the miners' motion, while backing the anodyne tribute to their courage tabled in the name of Jimmy Knapp and the National Union of Railwaymen. Unfortu- nately, they put up Norman Willis to make their case.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Mr Willis had shown his mettle. Most of this not unsoph- isticated gathering was aghast. Mr Willis rambles. He digresses. He fails to finish his sentences. He cannot marshal hi! thoughts. He is, in short (though one must be careful of assuming that the will not pull off a triumph before the week is out, difficult though this is to imagine) the worst advo- cate the TUC has ever chosen to be its general secretary.

With friends like Mr Willis, Neil Kin- nock is in grave danger of slipping down to the bottom of the opinion polls again. For if the TUC's chief executive was bad on Monday, by Tuesday he looked and sound- ed an absolute disaster. One could almost see Arthur Scargill sharpening his knife as he listened to the unconvincing and largely incoherent argument put up against his proposals.

Of course it was all grossly unfair, particularly after they had heard Mr Wil- lis's opening speech on Monday, for the General Council to leave him to be con- sumed by Mr Scargill like a weekend swimmer being taken by a hungry shark. Not one of the 24 opponents of the Scargill pay-back was brave enough to attack the pestilent leader of the miners from the rostrum.

Not long ago, a less craven General Council with a disagreeable job to do would put one of its heavyweights to face the music. You might think that in this week of his debut, they would have felt more protective of Mr Willis than to see him destroyed by Mr Scargill.

Unfortunately, the most able of the heavyweights are, in effect, persona non grata at this conference. Eric Hammond of the electricians' union is a real find: inci- sive, abrasive, completely without cant, and extremely funny in a destructive fashion. He dismantled the new boss of the Transport and General, Ron Todd, on Tuesday morning in the course of a memorable exchange of insults. But Mr Hammond, along with his allies in the engineering union, Terry Duffy (who was too ill to attend the conference, but well enough to provide the press with juicy quotations) and Gavin Laird, is on the point of being thrown out of the TUC for accepting Government subsidies for postal balloting.

The drama surrounding this breach of the TUC policy of resistance to the Gov- ernment's trade union laws, naturally per- vaded the entire proceedings. At the time of writing, the engineering union's execu- tive council is meeting to decide on its answer to a TUC 'instruction' to desist from applying for more state funds. If, as expected, they adopt a course of defiance, it looks as though they will be suspended from the TUC, though whether that will be done with full ceremonial on the floor of conference is not yet clear. Indeed, no one around the Blackpool corridors seems to be sure what the correct procedure should be, though Mr Ham- mond has made it clear that if the en- gineers are forced to leave, his delegation will march out with them in sympathy.

A scrutiny of the TUC's constitution suggests that the General Council, most of whose members are great believers in never doing today what can be put off until tomorrow, could simply decide in private to suspend the engineers, and then deliver a report on their action to next year's Congress. On the other hand, they could bring forward an emergency motion en- shrining a decision to suspend or even expel. Or they could leave the whole messy business to be dealt with by the new General Council elected in the course of this week. Or perhaps they will do nothing.

The tragedy behind the comic pandemo- nium of this year's TUC conference is that the whole balloting issue is nothing but a Maginot Line, an indefensible position which does nothing to thwart the Tories.

The exodus of the engineers and the electricians will not deter other unions from applying for ballot subsidies. They are legally bound from October to elect their ruling bodies by postal ballot or secret workplace voting arrangements, and many unions simply cannot afford to meet the cost. To borrow the money from, say, Mr Todd, might swiftly lead to their being swallowed up by his organisation. To raise their subscriptions would be unwise at a time of falling membership rolls, and ex- isting members might well ask why they should be paying when the Government has offered to do so.

By exerting the authority of the TUC as a kind of virility symbol to whip the big right-wing unions into line, the TUC is in fact demonstrating not strength but weak- ness. It has chosen the wrong issue, at the wrong time. The price will be the domina- tion of Mr Todd and his transport workers — the very danger which motivated the recent reforms in the structure of the General Council. Mr Willis has arrived on the scene inauspiciously, and at an inauspi- cious moment.