Can the Tories tame the unions?

Peter Paterson

While the Prime Minister no doubt emitted a groan on hearing the news that the trade union leaders will appear on as many platforms as possible to support Labour during the general election, the idea that Mr Callaghan's most vulnerable spot is his claim to a special relationship with the unions may not prove to be the easy issue so many Conservatives believe it to be.

Of course, if the current wave of public sector strikes continues right up to election day, and if Mr Len Murray and his colleagues insist on trying to make helpful speeches — rather than confining their assistance to paying for Labour's campaign — Mr Callaghan could be in trouble. The brutality of the winter pay offensive by the unions has been intensely unpopular, as well as proving that in the face of union self-interest and intransigence, the existence of the Government-TUC Liaison Committee, the annual exchanges of fraternal delegates to each other's conferences and all the other organic links between Labour and the unions, count for little.

In the ruthlessness of the tactics, the intractability of the demands and the ineptitude with which the industrial unrest was handled by Ministers, there has been little to choose between Mr Edward Heath's agony in the winter of 1973-74 and Mr Callaghan's in 1978-79. In particular, where the Government is acting as employer it seems to make little difference whether Labour or the Tories are in power.

But before we fall into the sin of indifferentism, we ought to note that, apart from the post-Guadeloupe period, the Government's record on industrial relations has not been at all bad by recent British standards. We can argue whether it was economically right or wrong, or that too many concessions were made in exchange. but the Government did get away with three years of incomes policy before Mr Healey's hubris made him try for an unattainable fourth.

Naturally, since the Tories are still divided on the incomes policy question — Sir Keith Joseph's revolution has not yet seeped right down through the party — they are more likely, when exploiting Labour's embarrassment over such events as the health service strike, to accuse their opponents of having given too much away to the unions through such measures as the Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts and the Employment Protection Act.

But even here, Labour can mount a reasonable defence. Apart from the closed shop, which we shall come to later, those aspects of the pro-union legislation businessmen complain about most vociferously have their origins in earlier Conservative legislation. It was the Tories, for example, who introduced the concept of 'fair' and 'unfair' dismissal, setting up the Industrial Tribunals which hear such cases and empowering them to award compensation to workers who are unfairly dismissed. And it was Mr Robert (now Lord ) Carr's 1971 Industrial Relations Act which afforded special protection against dismissal for trade union activists. Even the restoration of the right of workers in public utilities to strike was a Conservative enactment.

However, it may well be that what sticks in the minds of the voters is not the fact that strikes have, until recent days, been less frequent under Labour, but rather the indelible images of the violence at Grunwick, and the doleful catalogue of Leyland strikes eating up the millions of taxpayers' money poured into that concern. In other words, the Prime Minister is more likely than not to get the raspberry when he arrives at that section of his speeches in which he extols Labour's alliance with the unions.

As likely as not, he will then flourish sections of the recently-signed Concordat between his Government and the TUC to prove that trade union abuses are recognised and will be dealt with. And it is here that the Tories probably see their greatest chance. For what is the Concordat, one can imagine a Tory candidate asking. but an example of a death-bed repentance. a mere Chamberlainesque piece of paper to be flourished before the voters, a sordid deal cobbled up to help Labour through the election, and then to be discarded? Why should we be taken in by such a blatantly cynical exercise?

But in fact, the Concordat presents Mrs Thatcher with a much more subtle problem.

Although it sailed through the test of opin ion of the General Council of the TUC, there were some union leaders who kept their fingers firmly crossed while giving it their consent. Admittedly, they were a left-wing minority, but they could see clearly enough that this was an attempt to restore power to the union head offices and to take it away from the shop floor militants.

The difficulty it creates for the Conservatives is that the Concordat acknowledges almost in its entirety the list of criticisms that Mrs Thatcher herself has made of the unions. It accepts, for instance, that the closed shop is operated too inflex ibly, whereas it 'need not be a rigid arrangement'; urges that such agreements should provide for conscientious objectors (not just religious objectors as present); and recommends that certain categories of workers should not have to join a closed shop.

Of course, the Concordat does not endorse Mrs Thatcher's preferred ways of achieving these reforms, and it thereby focuses once more on the central issue in British politics, and one that makes the voters squirm, and which could yet again be the Tories' undoing. That issue, quite simply, is whether the unions are to be tamed by persuasion, or by confrontation. And Mr Callaghan is by no means out of that game.

For the weakness of Mrs Thatcher's trade union policy is that, while her list of cri ticisms is lengthy, the amount of union legislation she has been proposing is comparatively brief. If, as Mr Prior insists, she does not seek to abolish the closed shop but merely to widen the conscience clause and allow compensation to the victims, why push at a door that is about to be opened?

Similarly on secondary picketing. the TUC itself advises that, save in exceptional cir cumstances, picketing should be confined to the premises of the parties to the dispute or the premises of suppliers and customers of those parties. It is not perfect, but while Arthur Scargill yet lives would a law completely outlawing the secondary picket actually be enforceable? As to strike bal lots, there is complete compatibility between the TUC undertaking to encourage unions to provide for them in their rules, and the Tory pledge to make government money available to meet their cost. Would the Tories dare to compel rule changes by law?

The Prime Minister's main problem is that the Concordat was drawn up in the middle of the local government and health service strikes, when the difference between what was actually happening and the pious resolutions about what should happen in the future was too stark. Since his union allies, to a man, wanted him to call the election last October, they can hardly be blamed if the timing has gone wrong. At least they have tried to bail him out. It is not the case, therefore. that Mr Callaghan goes entirely naked into the election so far as his industrial relations policy is concerned. There will be plenty of scepticism over whether the unions really intend to carry out the Concordat's reforms, but Mrs Thatcher's policies do not come with a guarantee attached, and seem legislatively! inadequate anyway. So the voters may be forgiven for concluding that this time it is not the country, as they were told in 1974, but the unions that are ungovernable, and that neither of the main parties has an adequate answer.