Political commentary

One-step Prior?

Ferdinand Mount

As the devil alone knows, there is something alarming about a beautifully dressed individual appearing in your sitting-room and asking for your immortal part. And I doubt whether it was wise for Mrs Thatcher to be quite so well-turned out for all those interviews celebrating her second year in power if she was going to say in the Sunday Times: 'If you change the approach, you really are after the heart and soul of the nation.'

My own fraction of the nation's heart and soul may be a poor, shrivelled thing, but I'd just as soon hang on to it, thank you. And I am dubious, too, about the Prime Minister's belief that 'Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.' Even these days, one's soul has a certain sentimental value. One does not care to trade it in every couple of years like a company car.

Oddly enough, Mrs Thatcher is not alone in her belief that she is running a kind of celestial garage. The Sunday Times itself, norTnally her sternest critic, defined the big question after the government's first two years as: Will this extraordinary period be seen to have revolutionised the attitudes of the British, or just temporarily changed their behaviour?'

But this is not the question at all. Governments cannot make people good, they can only sometimes stop them from behaving badly and even that is bound to be only a temporary effect.

Those who claim that politics is about 'changing attitudes' often make that claim as an excuse for refusing to try the most obvious means to change behaviour. This soul-grabbing can be a reaction born of timidity, not a totalitaraian itch. jim. Prior is a classic soul-grabber. He is out to change attitudes; he is now and always has been reluctant to change the law. Even before the 1979 election, his main efforts were directed to reducing the Tory pledges to the minimum.

All that to-ing and fro-ing created the pleasing effect of a moderate minister, standing up against his party's militants for a moderate bill and wishing to be fair to the trade unions. The correct objection was not that he was 'pussyfooting', as the Daily Express complained, but that in his own mind his step-by-step approach was intended to consist of one step only; the rest would come from the old soul-change.

And over the past year he had apparently convinced Mrs Thatcher that this was the right way; we had to wait and see how the 1980 Act 'settled down'; attitudes needed time to mellow. The Prime Minister would dutifully repeat these sentiments. And in a normal government, that would be that, for • the duration of this Parliament.

But this is not a normal government. For good or ill (sometimes both), Mrs Thatcher does not operate by precedent. She does not, it seems, accept that questions can be settled and stay immune to re-opening. She just reopens them.

So the trade union question refuses to lie down. One hundred Tory MPs sign a motion today. Who can say that the Prime Minister will not start agitating tomorrow? The interesting question is how 'One-step' Prior will respond. Will he concede a fresh list of minimum demands? Or will he prove so stubborn that Mrs Thatcher is forced to move him in the autumn say, to succeed Mr Whitelaw, who is rumoured to be destined for the Lords?

As the summer goes on, Mrs Thatcher may wep see this as an unrepeatable opportunity. The public fear of the trade unions has dwindled as the slump has progressively exposed their powerlessness to resist unemployment; morale is low among the trade union officials; unity is minimal; and if employment picks up as hoped while the bill is passing through parliament, it will be clear to all that the unions can take none of the credit. The intimate connection between the power of the unions and their moral authority has begun to fray. This is the moment to help the fraying process by tugging at the threads a little.

The aim of a 1981 Employment Bill has to be brutally stated if it is not to collapse in self-contradiction. It should not be to 'improve industrial relations' or to 'stop wildcat strikes', let alone to 'strengthen responsible trade unionism.' It should be to chip away at the bogus moral authority which still permits the trade unions to oppress individuals and to blackmail firms in a manner which would be punished by imprisonment, if it were not for the protection the law confers on trade unions alone.

It must be an unashamedly moralistic, not an instrumental Bill. The closed shop must obviously be the target; and the method must be positive and declaratory, fortified by the judgements of the European Court, given popular backing by playing up obvious absurdities like the Joanna Harris case, and ultimately based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.' The three methods of tackling the closed shop, somewhat disingenuously listed in Mr Prior's Green Paper on trade union immunities only to be immediately smothered with objections all aimed at closed shop agreements either by voiding them, or by reviewing them periodically or by granting a statutory right against their unreasonable operation.

A simpler answer would be to define more sharply the rights of the individual who refuses to join a union. The 1980 Act entitles him to compensation from an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal. So far only two cases have cropped up — Joanna Harris sacked by Sandwell council and the six tea ladies sacked by Walsall council this week.

This lack of mad rush is not surprising. The complainant has to satisfy the tribunal that `he genuinely objects on grounds of conscience or other deeply held personal conviction to being a member'; he cannot just say 'I refuse to join' and claim com pensation as of right if sacked; it's as hard as getting out of fighting in a war — and meant to be. The level of compensation is entirely at the discretion of the tribunal and in general, contrary to myth, these tribunals only award a few hundred pounds — not worth risking your livelihood for. Worst of all, there is scarcely any incentive for the union to exercise tolerance, although the 1980 Act tags on a provision for the tribunal to order the union to contribute to the damages if union pressure can be proved.

It would not be difficult to flesh out these rights by: a) counting mere refusal to join as grounds enough, b) a minimum compensa tion of £5,000 plus £1,000 for each year of service, c) an automatic presumption that the bill for damages should be shared equally between employer and trade union, both being to blame for the blackmail.

I am much more dubious about removing the immunities for wildcat strikers or for official strikers who have not exhausted the dispute procedures. Here the balance of public sympathy might work the other way, and in any case it is not the law's business to rescue incompetent employers from the consequences of their bad industrial relations. It is the law's task to protect the individual.

And it is from the closed shop's claim on the individual that the British trade unions, almost alone in the civilised world, derive their ultimate power. The closed shop is quite unneccessary for 'responsible' bargaining; 70 per cent membership easily suffices.

It is the claim that trade union membership is a quasi-religious obligation deriv ing from an (almost wholly false) historical authority that has given British trade unions the power to cripple industry, lower the standard of living of the British working class and warp the personalities of its officials and activists. Why otherwise would the TUC have accepted religious grounds as the only acceptable grounds of conscience for non-membership? It is individuals who are being oppressed. It is individuals who must be rescued, not by changing their souls but by protecting their rights.