POLITICAL COMMENTARY
Some Trouble at the Top
By ALAN WATKINS
LAST Saturday a Labour Member of Parlia- ment was dining at his club. (I am sorry about this slightly Buchanesque beginning, but it happens to be true: a Labour MP really was dining at his club.) He was approached by the head waiter, who said what a fine fellow Mr. Harold Wilson was for having settled the railway strike. It was all the MP could do to contain himself. In his opinion Mr. Wilson had succeeded in deluding the populace yet again. Is this view unfair to the Prime Minister? Well, perhaps. There were plenty of people who this week were prepared, indeed anxious, to say that a settlement was inevitable all along. Last week, however, they had booked rooms in London hotels to tide them over the strike period. They can hardly have it both ways. .
And yet—there is no getting away from it— there is a good deal of justice in the criticisms that have been made of Mr. Wilson's behaviour over the strike. These criticisms, I should emphasise, are Westminster criticisms. There is no evidence that they are being voiced by the voters in general. On the contrary, the voters probably echo the head waiter referred to above and are properly grateful to the Prime Minister for his intervention. However, Mr. Wilson's exer- tions of last Friday and Saturday are being ques- tioned on two broad grounds. The first concerns the effect of the settlement on the economy, the second its effect on Mr. Wilson's colleagues in the Cabinet.
To begin with the first and possibly less inter- esting ground: Mr. Wilson's promised inquiry into the wages of the lower-paid railway workers is, it is said, bound to be inflationary and to be seen by the foreign bankers (whether private or institutional) as such. Or to put the situation in a slightly blunter way, the inquiry must lead to the same trouble all over again in a few months' time. As one member of the NUR Executive put it, 'On the railways there is no such thing as a lower-paid worker. All of us are lower-paid.' And if the forthcoming inquiry decides that such-and- such a category of railwaymen is underpaid, we may confidently expect the higher-paid workers to demand a rise also. Differentials will have to be maintained. Indeed a large proportion of post. war strikes have been on this very issue of differentials. However, all this lies in the future. More immediate, though perhaps not so impor- tant in the longer term, is the effect which the railway settlement has had upon various ministers.
Let us have a look, first of all, at Mr. George Brown. Not even Mr. Brown's most devoted admirers (and they are a substantial though declining band) admit that last Friday he made a political error in taking himself off to Nuffield College, where he had a speaking engagement. It gave the impression that he was having a fit of the sulks—a fairly frequent occurrence with Mr. Brown. Perhaps 'sulks' is not an elevated enough word to apply to Mr. Brown's sombre moods. From time to time he shrugs off this wicked, un- grateful world of politics, and repairs to some convenient refuge—perhaps to Lord Walstonss country house—there to meditate upon the un- fairness of life. Probably the best-known example of this tendency of his took place after his un- successful stand for the Labour leadership, when for some days he disappeared without trace It can be said fairly confidently that Mr. Brown's flight to Oxford on Friday was not quite of this order. He was not sulking. He was never- theless bitterly disappointed that he had not persuaded the railwaymen's union to call off the strike. After all, at around noon on Friday he had come within one vote—the voting was twelve to eleven—of getting the union to give up. But it seems that here Mr. Brown was exceeding his instructions. He was not mean( to settle the strike. That distinction was to be reserved to the Prime Minister. No one expected Mr. Brown to c n- front the brothers from the branches last Friday. It was not in the script. And if he had succeeded in swinging that one vote of theirs, his un- popularity in the Government would conceivably have been greater even than it is today.
Poor Mr. Brown, in other words, was put in position where he could do nothing right—a not uncommon position for Mr. Brown to be in. As he did not actually settle the strike, he is bein criticised for disclosing the terms of the Govern- ment's offer too early (nine days before the settle- ment, in fact). This offer naturally did not include the proposal to institute an inquiry into the wages of the lower-paid workers. This proposal was bfr. Wilson's prerogative. Mr. Brown, however, was authorised to offer an advance in the pay rise from October to September, and the burden of the criticism is that he did this too soon in the negotiations. The criticism seems an unfair on After all, stories about the bringing forward of the rise had appeared in the press before Ir. Brown's first confrontation with the NUR. More- a over, if he was to be allowed to negotiate at all, he had also to be allowed to negotiate in his ovol way.
'If he was to be allowed to negotiate at all ' these words are the crux, and at this point we may conveniently introduce Mr. Ray Gunter into the story. Mr. Gunter is in fact the chief source of the criticisms of Mr. Brown that have been dutifully reproduced in the past week or so. The reason is not far to seek. Though Mr. Gunter's friends say that he, as Minister of Labour, was being left to 'pick up the pieces' and 'clear up the mess after the First Secretary's forays into the delicate world of industrial relations, never- theless the real reason for the complaint was that Mr. Brown was taking over the Minister of Labour's spot in the show. Mr. Gunter was not even picking up the pieces: Mr. Gunter was not in on the act at all. Furthermore, the Ministry of Labour was_extremely irritated by stories (which the Ministry suspected were planted by the DEA) to the effect that it had traditionally been 'soft' and inclined to surrender in industrial disputes.
There are two aspects to the dispute between Mr. Gunter and Mr. Brown. The first is the jurisdictional aspect outlined above; and here it is difficult to say that Mr. Brown is entirely in the wrong; for when the DEA was first set up it was obvious (I pointed this out myself at the time) that it would have to take certain functions from the Ministry of Labour. The second aspect is more personal. It is simply that Mr. Brown is becoming 'impossible' or 'quite impossible' or 'more impossible every day.' The precise phrasing varies, but the word 'impossible' seems to recur. Mr. Gunter's sense of injury is but an illustra- tion produced by current circumstances of a more generalised feeling of irritation at Mr. Brown and his activities. This feeling may in some ways be unfair, but it exists none the less. It does not follow from this that Mr. Brown's future is in peril. What does perhaps follow is that though he will preside over the Cabinet when Mr. Wilson is away in Moscow, Mr. Brown has travelled about as far as he can reasonably expect to go.
We should notice one further thing about Mr. Brown's current troubles. They are described in terms of conflict with Mr. Gunter, not of conflict with Mr. James Callaghan. This is a shift of emphasis. Just over a year ago politicians and journalists would earnestly discuss the conflict between George and Jim. Today the question is no longer thought worth discussing. Put crudely, Mr. Callaghan or rather the Treasury has won hands down. There are still, it is true, minor territorial disputes, but these are settled quickly: Mr. Callaghan will in regal fashion dispatch one of his officials to tell one of Mr. Brown's officials to keep off the grass, and the DEA duly complies with the Treasury's instructions. Mr. Brown and Mr. Callaghan are friendly, but they are friendly in a distant fashion: as the phrase goes, 'they understand each other.'
This is a situation which suits Mr. Wilson well enough. Just as it suits him for Mr. Brown and Mr. Gunter to be in conflict. As Lord Attlee quietly noted the tensions between Bevin, Morrison and Cripps, so Mr. Wilson, like a pipe- smoking Buddha, looks benignly upon Mr. Callaghan, Mr. Gunter and Mr. Brown. There is, however, one significant difference between Lord Attlee's position and Mr. Wilson's. Whereas Lord Attlee stood above the battle, all Mr. Wilson's actions strengthen not only his own hand but also, at the same time, Mr. Callaghan's. At the moment this accretion of influence in Mr. Callaghan is not politically significant. This may not always be so.
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