Political commentary

January in Park Lane

Ferdinand Mount

Past the Allied Arab Bank, past Grosvenor House and Faberge's shimmering window, past the ineffable Hilton Hotel winds the great procession of cleaners and caretakers and gravediggers and nurses. Outside the Dorchester, the man selling Socialist Challenge is doing poor business. Bewildered middle-eastern faces peer down from a suite on the nineteenth floor to be greeted with mock-panicky yells of 'Don't jump' from the marchers. What are these banners waving below? Who are the sinister twins Nupe and Cohse — mad mullahs come to depose the Queen of Buckingham? And what are these mysterious badges denianding Scouse Power — emblems of some ferocious desert tribe which if it ever came to power would cut off blacklegs' hands?

As we approach the Playboy Club, a group of hospital cleaning ladies breaks into We Shall Not Be Moved. But on the whole, it is Park Lane which seems the more unmoved.

Through the slats in the blinds you can see a Bunny listlessly depositing mysterious cocktails, things like Tequilaand-babycham, in front of motionless executives. The liveliest thing about her is the bob of her fluffy scut as she performs the legendary dip. Out in the cold, the marchers celebrate this weird apparition with rude words and gestures. One Scouse Power youth reflects on the confrontation: 'that's what it's all about then, isn't it?'

Monday was not a good day to have a coronary or to try and get buried. Public services of all sorts were grinding to a halt or just scraping by. Sandwiched between a succession of one-day rail strikes and coming on top of the lorry-drivers strike, surely this must qualify as the Blackest Monday since, well, when? The Daily Telegraph says 1939. The Sunday Telegraph says 1926. Sir Hector Laing, the biscuit king, prophesies that the nation will face hunger by the end of the week. Sir John Methven of the CBI prophesies anything you like to mention with an energy that is fearful to behold, adam's apple jumping up and down like a piston in the days when pistons did jump and down.

The inconvenience is intolerable. The dereliction of duty on all sides is worse. The failure of ambulance men to answer 999 calls is the most conspicuously nasty. But the instruction of the National Union of Teachers to their members not to cross the school caretakers' picket lines takes some beating. It was indeed a day of shame.

Yet the abiding political conclusion to be drawn from these events is quite distinct from the proper feeling of moral revulsion which they provoke. For these are the most forceful demonstrations yet of the proposition that Britain is not ungovernable, just ungoverned.

For the first time in this generation it has been shown with unmistakable clarity that it is possible to have appalling strikes right across the country and yet for there to be not a tremor on the Stock Exchange or in the value of sterling. The French and the Americans have been doing this for years. When Paris shuts down for a day or two, people just stay at home and re-read L'Etre et le Neant.

Nor, if Mr Callaghan should take it into his head to start governing, is there any external circumstance to prevent him doing so. He could instruct Mr. Healey tomorrow to draw up a 'lean, austere' Budget, as the much derided Jimmy Carter has just done. Even after making allowances for buying off the present crop of strikes, the Sunday Telegraph 's own business forecasters expect earnings to rise by roughly the same as last year — not brilliant, but manageable by a determined incoming government.

If there is a crash, slump or despond, it will be because, and only because, the government has failed to control factors which nobody denies that it is within the government's power to control — namely public expenditure, taxation and interest rates. The speech being delivered inside Grosvenor House by Mr Joel Barnett, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, as the tail-end of the procession passed by outside, was soaked through with an understanding that the government is now condemned to govern on nakedly monetarist lines.

There are still senior civil servants and even a few right-wing Ministers who hanker for a pay freeze. This persistent longing to try yet again the very remedy which has landed us where we are admits of no rational explanation — except a terror of the mob so intense that it induces simultaneously mental paralysis and daydreams of omnipotence.

As most people now realise, the growing arrogance of the trade unions does have a lot to do with the Labour government's Red Period between 1974 and 1976. It is TUCdictated laws like the Employment Protection Act and the Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts which have given the militants purchase on the minds of ordinary trade unionists. But did the rot start only in 1974?

The ugly scenes on the Grunwick picket lines can indeed be traced back to the provision in the Employment Protection Act which lays on the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service 'the general duty of promoting the improvement of industrial relations and in particular of encouraging the extension of collective bargaining.' It is this provision and the consequent bias of its membership which has led ACAS to favour the trade union side in disputes between employer and union and the big battalions in disputes between rival unions — as Lord Denning made clear in his majestic decision last week in favour of the tiny association of professional engineers against the mighty AUEW.

Yet this bias did not spring from nowhere; it was, if you like, part of the dominant political culture of the time. The Conservatives' luckless 1971 Industrial Relations Act was also intended 'to promote good industrial relations through freely and responsibly conducted collective bargaining' and 'to encourage the free association of workers in independent trade unions and of employers in employers' associations.' The Tories too assumed that in all cases the interests of good relations were identical with the formation of large bargaining units on both sides. How many now would say that the formation of the Road Haulage Association or of the representation of all lorry drivers by a single union was in the interests of the road hauliers or the drivers or the rest of us?

Again, Mr Robin Page, the man who first exposed the abuse of the Welfare State, argues that the now widespread practice of strikers' families drawing supplementary benefit was in some way the fault of Labour's Ministry of Social Security Act 1966. Before then, payments to strikers' families amounted to only a few thousand pounds —£9,327 in 1950, £76,252 in 1960 — granted at the discretion of social security officers to meet 'urgent need'. After 1966, payment became 'a right' and has soared to more than £5 million in 1974 and more than £3 million last year. The Ford strike alone cost £1,267,867 in supplementary benefit. Dick Crossman himself later said that the effects of the 1966 Act were unforeseen and unfortunate.

Richard Needham — alias Lord Newry, Jim Prior's ADC and the rising hope of the moderates — retorts that the principle that strikers' wives should be entitled to benefit goes back to the National Assistance Act of 1948 and even the Elizabethan Poor Law. But the real point is that, although the 1966 Act did not alter the entitlement, it did intentionally alter the atmosphere; everybody, Labour and Tory alike, wanted to 'remove the stigma' of claiming National Assistance by changing the name and by bringing the new Supplementary Benefits Commission under the wing of the Ministry. And the stigma was removed. The trouble is that seemingly irrational, not to say bloody-minded shifts in the way people behave may in reality derive quite logically from a sequence of signals sent by politicians for an entirely different purpose. And that is why politicians should think before they go about 'encouraging' and 'promoting' things which they do not fully understand.