The press
Art there, old mole?
Paul Johnson
The whole of history, and especially recent history, teaches us never to underestimate the destructive element in human nature. Do people in responsible Positions start wars just for the hell of it? Yes they do: witness Colonel Gaddafi of Africa. With a tiny population and a per caPila income from oil of over $10,000 a Year, Libya might have become a region of solid prosperity and stability in that benighted continent. Instead its living stan- dards are falling and it has accumulated foreign debts of $25 billion. According to an illuminating map in the Sunday Times, Gaddafi has used the money to promote, Prolong or extend wars and civil strife in thirteen African and two Asian countries.
Do people, at a time when more than three million people are unemployed, deliberately seek jobs in order to disrupt British factories and damage our industrial Performance — so causing more unemploy- ment? Yes they do: witness the Cowley con- sPiracy. Fleet Street was unable to decide which cliché-metaphor to concentrate on — raoles or tips of icebergs — and eventually settled for both. Of course it was instantly accused by the unions of 'hysteria', a term More frequently on left-wing lips than any other four-syllabled word. But the facts are grim enough in all conscience. Macaulay used to say that the future of mankind depended on the race between democracy and education, but what is so deeply depressing about our century is that educa- tion has a tendency to make people more, not less, destructive. According to the Times, six of the 13 Cowley moles were university graduates. The infiltration docu- ment handed by angry workers to BL management was not the work of horny- 'landed sons of toil, nor yet of Shirley Williams's comprehensive school paragons'. The Times printed it in full, and it bears the
stigmata of a graduate in politics, sociology or psychology, the three favourites among the Visigoth intelligentsia.
The Observer reported that TGWU of- ficials are `concerned' at the 'hysterical at- mosphere' surrounding the moles. It added: `Both the government and the media are likely to be criticised by the union this week for the way they have dealt with the affair'. No doubt. But the chief point which emerges from it is not only the ease with which the ultra-left can get highly-prized, well-paid jobs, but the speed with which they can obtain office as shop stewards, with all the power and privileges that im- plies. According to the Times, though only one of the 13 had.already been recognised by the TGWU as a shop steward, he would have been joined by five others but for the investigation. A union official told the Tunes: 'They took us in just like they took the company in. These were professionals, not bloody amateurs. You should have heard them argue points of union law and economics'. Indeed, the union has just as much to lose as the management from suc- cessful penetration by well-read and glib saboteurs. 'Privately and unofficially', the Sunday Express wrote, 'union officials have thanked the Cowley management, normally their sworn enemy, for exposing the Socialist League plot to gain control of their members'.
Of course ordinary rank-and-file workers, with mortgages and cars on the never-never, have most of all to lose. It was not private security police paid by the com- pany and obsessed by infiltration — if in- deed there are such people — who discovered the conspiracy. As the News of the World pointed out, 'It was fellow workers, sensible characters, not rabid politicoes, who tipped off the Company. They didn't like Red Steph or what she and her comrades were about'. Moreover, peo- ple who enter a factory with the deliberate intention of creating strife are likely to be dangerous in other spheres of life. The Sun- day Telegraph had a sad story based on an interview with the 58-year-old father of one of the BA-moles, a woman of 25 from Bir- mingham University, with a degree in child psychology. He said 'he was very upset about the possible effects his daughter's political activities would have on his other two daughters, Rosemary 21, April 17, and his son ... there had been problems in the family and his daughter's involvement at Cowley was not helping the situation'. He was 'absolutely embittered' with the ex- treme Left. I daresay this story could be repeated in many households, once,proud of a bright son or daughter who has gone on to university and has then been trapped in a Marxist intellectual prison.
In legal terms, our society now leans over backwards to protect the troublemakers in our midst and to expose ourselves to their destructive activities. The 1975 Employ- ment Protection Act and industrial tribunals have proved a godsend to them. So have soft-left journalists willing to raise the howl of `McCarthyism', 'Witch hunt', 'Inquisition', the second any hard-left ac- tivist gets his (or her) comeuppance. The Sunday Times had a soggy and confused leader, warning of the risk of a 'political in- quisition' and comparing Cowley moles to Soviet dissidents. It feared that freedom- loving Britain might be about to lose 'the right to be militant'. With all this unemployment about, it warned, 'the truly discriminating industrial relations director might be tempted to impose very stringent tests indeed'.
Tempted? It is his positive duty to do so. Workers in industry, management, share- holders and, not least, those who buy its products — the public — expect industrial relations directors to impose the most strin- gent tests possible, in order to eliminate the idle, the inefficient, the careless, the creatively criminal who build themselves cavities in the wall-space for night-shift slumber, but most of all those whose aim in life is to incite others to do poor work or no work at all. It is in everyone's interest to prevent these people exercising their per- nicious skills. In order to do this, no one's civil liberties need suffer. As the Standard put it, 'Intrusive witch hunts are not necessary. BL has shown it is possible to in- vestigate stealthily and is rightly doing its best to keep the support of the work-force by informing them all directly in an unsen- sational manner of the factual reasons for the dismissals'. Once a mole is inside, especially with shop steward status, he is notoriously difficult to shift. The Daily Telegraph pointed out: 'It is the first step, the act of recruitment, which counts'. In short, managements must do their home- work right at the beginning. Unfortunately, this is a lesson which Fleet Street cannot learn since, under its monopoly supply-of- labour system, it is the unions, not manage- ment, which recruit labour.
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