POLITICS
A moment of choice for Mrs Thatcher between supply and demand and the Devil
NOEL MALCOLM
The rail strike has rather wiped the smile off the faces of those Conservatives who were looking forward to a nice little dock strike to cheer up a dull summer. With the dockers trying to restore the privileges of the old Dock Labour Scheme, it was obvious who was on the side of progress and the striking dockers were bound to fall victim to their own achievement of decades of creeping failure, which had so hugely reduced their own numbers and the im- portance of their `Scheme' ports. Goods can be stockpiled, and ports circumvented.
Commuters, on the other hand, cannot be stockpiled, and circumvention means Tory voters having to get the car out at dawn. The Government's contingency plans, which made it look so efficient during the miners' strike, have amounted this time round to Mr Channon getting his shoes resoled and heeled. Have they lost the old magic (the Government, I mean, not Mr Channon's shoes)? Or was it never such powerful magic in the first place?
When the 1984 Trade Union Act made balloting obligatory, there was a wide- spread feeling that this measure alone would more or less solve the problem of strikes. Ordinary workers, the theory went, never really want to join a strike: they are dragged into them by unrepre- sentative 'activists'. Mr Scargili did his best to convince people of the truth of this theory during the miners' strike; and in the 1985 NUR dispute over one-man trains (the details of which must be regarded with fond nostalgia by Messrs Channon and Fowler today), a ballot of 10,000 guards produced a majority of 52 per cent against taking industrial action.
But there is no law of nature which says that people never really want to strike. It all depends on what they are striking for, how likely they think they are to get it, and how seriously they judge the consequences of failure. In 1985 the British Rail manage- ment could play as tough as it liked, dismissing more than 200 guards for unoffi- cial action and threatening in national advertisements to close down the entire railway network — because in 1985 UK unemployment stood at more than three and a quarter million. The new wave of industrial unrest is partly a response to the Government's success in getting unem- ployment down, and partly a reaction to its failure in getting down inflation. Workers are simply responding, in other words, to our old friends supply and demand: the supply of jobs on the one hand, and the demand for more money (or at least for the same money in real terms) on the other.
If labour regulations are responding to the reality of market forces, this Govern- ment should be the last body to complain. Ever since the 1979 election campaign, when Mrs Thatcher proclaimed the virtues of free collective bargaining (while Mr Callaghan denounced it as 'free collective vandalism'), the Conservatives have been dedicated to restoring the moral and eco- nomic conditions of a market in industrial relations. By the moral conditions of a market I mean the primacy of contractual justice (the obligation to fulfil all contracts freely entered into), as opposed to so- called social justice (distributive or redis- tributive 'fairness', often based on assump- tions about the good of society as a whole).
The great obstacle to contractual justice here was the special package of privileges accorded to the trade unions, which were able to make their members break con- tracts of employment with impunity. Now those privileges have been whittled down to the point where only one central immun- ity remains: the immunity of a properly balloted official strike confined to the `furtherance of a trade dispute'. In pure contractual theory, a case could be made for eliminating even this immunity; but a good case can also be made for saying that we do not enter Faust-like into contracts of employment for eternity, and that a prop- erly conducted official strike may be a reasonable last-ditch measure in renego- tiating the terms of our contracts.
In terms of market morality, then, the Government has no reason to denounce the railwaymen, any more than it de- nounces Sotheby's for selling paintings to the highest bidder or withdrawing them when they fail to meet their reserve. But alongside these principles of morality the Government has also nurtured a different set of beliefs, a Manichaean theology, in which unions are forces of darkness and strikes are corruptions of the body politic. The short-term political advantages of this are apparent when Mrs Thatcher stands up like a witchfinder-general in Parliament, identifies the 'strikers' friend' on the oppo- site bench and calls on him to renounce the Devil. But the long-term disadvantage is that she assumes a pastoral or spiritual responsibility for all the miseries of the strike; and this is a sort of responsibility which, as Mr Heath found out in 1974, can stick like mud.
When the Prime Minister speaks about changing the employment laws to protect the country's essential services, she is talking the theological language of national salvation. This is at best Heatho- corporatist, and at worst simply hysterical. Either way, it is at odds with the sensible, market-orientated trade union reforms of the last nine years. The language of the market is quite sufficient to explain why railwaymen may be slightly more willing to use the strike weapon than, say, the employees of a high-street bakery. British Rail has a monopoly over rail travel in this country: this gives it quasi-monopolistic powers over many of its users, and it means that the laws of the market are as distorted here as they are by any similar monopoly. This is nothing to do with being 'essential'; if Sotheby's had a monopoly on selling paintings, similar distortions would apply. The solution, therefore, is obvious: break up the monopoly, not by creating regional companies with regional monopolies, but by allowing different operating companies to use the same track.
That is the long-term answer, of course. The short-term in such circumstances is: do nothing. Mrs Thatcher finds this advice hard to follow; but in her Secretary of State for Transport she has found someone ideally suited to the task.
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