Political Commentary
Union-bashing is also an art
Ferdinand Mount
His grandchildren love to climb upon his knee. Senior civil servants are deeply satisfied by his style of decision-making. City boardrooms ring to his praises. His Sussex farming neighbours like the cut of his wellingtons. Cabinet colleagues speak with awed respect of his firm and incisive chairmanship. In Bangladesh the villagers throw garlands round his neck, chanting `BorarjiJim' (which means, roughly speaking, '0 thou great one thrice anointed with sandalwood paste'). 0 good gray head which all men knew. . .influential international bankers. . .not once or twice in our rough island-story. . .Let me stop now. I don't think I can manage much more of this. It is not that I don't admire Mr Callaghan's achievement in bringing the Labour government back from the dead. It's just that I have a nagging feeling that there ought to be some limit to the praise showered on the Prime Minister of a country in which unemployment is higher than for thirty years, and production and the standard of living are lower than they were under the previous government four years earlier.
The slavish admiration of Mr Callaghan within the Establishment is a fact and must be reported. Unfortunately, the reporting has got out of hand and threatens to hinder rational consideration of what is likely to happen over the next few months. Mr Callaghan is a popular politician. He always was, and his popularity has always been especially marked among the upper classes. Inside the Labour Party he might be regarded as a distinctly ambiguous character, not to say slippery and even two-faced, but Top People have always regarded him as 'a sound type'. The touch of Hampshire in his voice evokes thoughts of ale brewed in
the wood, village bobbies and John Arlott (even Mr Ron Hayward cannot quite make Wessex sound sinister). It was of Mr Cal' laghan and not of Mr Roy Jenkins that twenty years ago I heard an academic hos tess say `he's the only Labour man you can really have to dine'. And although Mr Callaghan's reputation in Whitehall fell into eclipse after the devaluation of November 1967, at the time Treasury men had been charmed by his assumption of humility in economic matters. Things only had to go more or less right again for this fund of Establishment goodwill to revive.
Less influential circles, though, do not seem to be so deeply impressed by the brilliance of our leader. While a day's hunt ing in high places may produce a mixed bag of Callaghan fans, ranging from heads of Oxford colleges to newspaper editors and chairmen of large companies, you will find less enthusiasm among, say, building work ers, taxi-drivers, toolsetters or junior executives. Their tax bills are too high, their memory of lost differentials too green to be much impressed by a good set of balance of payments returns. The conventional view is that this scepticism will vanish when real disposable income begins to rise during the year as a result of tax cuts and a temporary dip in the rate of inflation. Real disposable income is now the pundits' favourite guide to what wins elections. It occupies today the same place in political mythology as the rate of unemployment used to. When unemployment rose above 3.4 or 4 per cent or whatever was held to be the norm for the period, then, it was said, the government would lose. There was never much evidence for this.
People will vote for the government, it is said, if they can buy more with what they have left in their pockets after tax — but more than what? Real disposable income in October is at best likely to be no higher than in February 1974. Will voters forget what they once had in the exhilaration of again moving upward? Whether they look back to the standard of living this time last year or to the standard of living under the last Tory government depends on which party comes to dominate the campaign. Political struggle can only rarely be reduced to a crude formula. The combination of impression and reality, of material and psychological factors, the interplay of the personal and the social usually leaves the academic model looking inadequate to the point of futility.
Election campaigning is a two-fold activity of simultaneously discrediting the oppos ition and building up your own credit. The two activities often appear to work against each other, as the opening shots in the Tories' 1978 offensive demonstrate. In their Glasgow speeches this week Mrs Thatcher and Mr Prior took what was seen and meant to be seen as a 'constructive' attitude towards the trade unions. Their criticisms of the closed shop and of the political pretensions of the trade unions are carefully qualified. And such action as they propose will be by co-operation and agreed codes of practice rather than by legislation. Union leaders are not so much to be banished from government as to be restored to their true status and dignity as industrial negotiators. The freedom of the market society includes freedom for trade unionists too (Adam Smith might have been sur prised to find himself invoked by Mrs Thatcher as a patron saint of combination).
This credit-building is a delicate and subtle exercise, for it has to demonstrate not only that a Tory government could 'get on with' the unions but also that it would be able to
bring about a gradual, conflict-free shift in their role and practice. In a mere contest of conciliation the Tories can never hope to outbid a party which was founded and is still permeated and financed by the trade union movement.
How far was this constructive exercise damaged by the unmistakably destructive impact of Sir Geoffrey Howe's speech at Swindon three days earlier? Although Sir Geoffrey protested that 'neither the Conservative Party nor I have any hostility towards the concept of trade unionism as such', there is no doubt about the drift of his references to 'undemocratic' trade union `barons' who are elected for life, who have dominated Labour policy-making since 1969, winning huge extensions of nationalisation, union power and State interference, and whose key figures wish to see us move `along the Soviet road'. This is classic union-bashing.
Well, ought not the unions to be bashed now and then? Are they not widely loathed and feared? And is not what Sir Geoffrey says perfectly true? The objection usually made here is that by reminding people of the horrors of trade union power you also remind them of how powerful the unions are and thereby revive the nightmare of 1974.
Union-bashing, it is said, raises false expectations in the public mind and makes needless enemies inside the unions. And anyway, by now, people don't need to be reminded of what it is that they dislike about the unions. Yet without reminding the voters of the precise connection bet ween the growth of trade union power and the growth of state ownership and control, the Tories cannot demolish the Callaghan facade of a sensible, conservative-minded Labour Party. The presentation of Mrs Thatcher's constructive alternative depends, intimately and indispensably, upon an effective demolition job being done at the same time.
The job can be done with more finesse than Sir Geoffrey Howe displayed. There is an important rhetorical separation to be made between the political and the industrial applications of trade union power. Restrictive practices on the shop-floor may be harmful, but it is a different kind of harm to that brought about by nationalisation and state interference in industry. The closed shop is better dealt with on the constructive side — not because it does not give rise to oppression but because it is a part of industrial life with which most people are familiar and which they know cannot be wiped out overnight — and therefore it should not be lumped together with blanket condemnations of squalid episodes like the Ponomarev visit. Union-bashing is just as much of an art as the construction of a usable policy for industrial relations. But without some judicious measure of unionbashing the Tories will make few dents in that smiling facade. For if it is Mr Callaghan's strength that he is the unions' man, it is also his abiding weakness.
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