Notebook
Mackpoo/ When you consider how electorally valuable an asset is Labour's alliance with the trade unions — for all the brave talk from the new Conservatives about individualism versus collectivism, the average voter is probably Still more scared of a repetition of the 1974 miners' strike than of the tyranny of the Closed shop — it's extraordinary how casu ally it was placed in jeopardy at Labour's conference this week. Indeed, some at least of its power as a vote-gatherer has probably disappeared for good, and the rest will vanish if the Prime Minister and Denis Healey cannot patch up some kind of agreement With the unions when they get back to London. Yet everyone here in Blackpool during the conference preliminaries behaved as though in a dream-state, as if the TUC had not met a month ago in Brighton to demand a return to free collective bargaining, and that Denis Healey's bleak five Per cent limit for wages had suddenly PoPPed up at the weekend instead of appearing many weeks back in a White Paper. It seems incredible, for example, that the unions, whose votes, of course, dominate the Labour conference, do not ensure that it is their resolutions that form the core of debate and policy-making on issues so vital to themselves rather than those cobbled up in some Trotskyist coven.
Tactically, the Prime Minister made a grave error in spending most of his time over the weekend arguing the toss with second or third ranking union leaders inside the National Executive Committee when he should have been reaching an accommodation with the real bosses who drifted into Blackpool on Saturday and Sunday. In Particular, he locked horns with the very left-wing Alex Kitson, the number three Man in the TGWU, who cheekily demanded to know whether Uncle Jim was even now preparing to call the troops out to deal with a strike by dustmen as he had done I n Glasgow a couple of years ago. It wasn't until late on Sunday night that Mr Callaghan went into conclave with the T & G's number one man, Moss Evans, and David Basnett of the General and Municipal. By then most of the union delegations had already met and decided to back a resolution sponsored by the Liverpo...,1 Wavertree constituency Labour party, which actually instructed the party to organise a cam paign against the policy of the govi he leads. enrnent The Government's desperate hope, of Course, was that the once persuasive but new sadly reduced oratory of Michael Foot could persuade the big unions to remit the contentious pay resolution and thus avoid a vote. (Once you depart from the infinitive, by the way, this constitutional device presents certain verbal difficulties: you can hardly say that a resolution is subject to 'remittance' —Mr Foot would not like to be thought of as a remittance man — or `remission', with its echoes of temporary recovery from a terminal illness. `Remittal' would seem to be all that is left, and it is ugly.) In any case, that way out was not available to the unions: under the rules of the Labour conference a resolution is regarded for this purpose as the 'property' of the mover, and Mr Terry Duffy (no relation to the Terry Duffy who is the new president of the Engineering Union) was certainly not prepared to part with this valuable piece of what I believe nowadays is called intellectual property.
Personally, I was sorry to see Ian Mikardo lose his seat on the National Executive Committee. I know that he is a regulation hate figure on the Right, that he makes his money out of trading with Communist bloc countries (as do many respected captains of industry) and that Churchill is supposed to have said of him, `He's not as nice as he looks'. However, I have always found him unfailingly helpful and courteous, as politicians go. And now, so far as the NEC is concerned, he's gone. One thing his career does teach us, though, is never to judge a man's politics by the school he went to: Ian Mikardo and James Callaghan were both at Portsmouth Grammar.
I strongly dislike the puritanical tone of the current Labour party slogan, which festooned the stage of the opera house this week: Labour's Good For Britain. Given our current productivity record, the pres sure for a thirty-five hour week, plus the spate of strikes threatening to hit us, labour is clearly not what people want. Thinking back, it seems to me that this work ethic theme, suggesting that the toiling masses must forever keep on toiling, started to creep in with the 1970 slogan: You Know Labour Government Works, a slogan that failed to work as Ted Heath got in. He was ousted by the three-day week and the appropriate Back To Work With Labour. I much prefer the slogans of the more optimistic Wilson years, when everything was going to come right with the help of the white heat of aluminium smelters: Lets Go With Labour and Let's Get Britain Moving Again.
Neil Klima, the agreeable MP for Bedwelty, certainly didn't win his place on the NEC for his tact. Appearing on Monday's re-vamped PM Programme on Radio 4, which now has the sacked England women's cricket captain, Rachel Heyhoe Flint as a presenter, he was answering a question about James Callaghan's resignation threats. `Prime Ministers, like cricket captains, shouldn't talk of resigning without doing it,' he said. That same evening, at a Tribune meeting, he warned the Prime Minister, apropos of the sins of his predecessors, that lightning can indeed strike twice. `If he doubts it,' said the brash Mr Kinnock, `he need only take a trip to Rome.' Then he realised that he was speaking at the Catholic Club.
I was tempted to indulge in my usual snobbishly metropolitan hymn of hate against Blackpool, its hideous architecture, its miles of treeless concrete promenades, its Colditz hotels, its awful restaurants (with the hon ourable exception of that wonderful Black pool beacon Robert's Oyster Bar), its ghastly illuminations and its foul weather, but I happened to come up by car, which enabled me to experience something far worse. I stopped at the Motor-Chef `service area' on the M6 motorway at Keele. The WCs were stopped up and overflowing inches deep all over the floor, the elderly lady at the cash desk in the shop was clearly exhausted and complaining loudly to each customer that she was having to work on her day off, it took half an hour to get to the head of the queue in the cafeteria, and the petrol pumps, besieged by cars and an entire squadron of Hells Angels, were operated by a solitary attendant. A packet of cigarettes, a cup of tea and four gallons of petrol thus added more than an hour to my journey. The Motor-Chef chain, of course, is part of the Trust House Forte group. It makes a certain amount of sense that Lord Thorneycroft, chairman of the Tory Party, is also Chairman of THF. While anyone going North to the Labour conference by car had to run the gauntlet of his appalling Keele service area, the Conservatives will wisely be holding their conference in Brighton.
Peter Paterson
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