[A-List] UK labour militancy: state sector

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

This winter we'll finally see New Labour's true colours

Public sector workers have lost patience. Blair must show he's on their side

Jackie Ashley
Wednesday October 30, 2002
The Guardian

Governing Britain has not been easy for Tony Blair since he first arrived as
prime minister - the painfully slow progress in public services, the
traumatic resignations of key lieutenants, the agonising decisions over
Kosovo, the inch-by-inch struggle to achieve an Irish peace process, and the
post-September 11 agenda, including Iraq. It has hardly been a smooth ride.
But in one key area, traditionally the most important one, it has been a
breeze: after the difficulties and brutal decisions of the John Major years,
New Labour inherited an era of strong, stable economic growth. For the
economy, these have been fat years.

Much credit goes, inevitably, to Gordon Brown and his early decisions on the
Bank of England and holding down spending; his repayment of debt; his
relentless rhetoric of prudence. As a result, he has been able to raise
taxes substantially and to start to squirt real sums of money at the
frontline of public services without a massive revolt by the middle classes.
And that has been something no Labour chancellor before him could have hoped
to do. On the back of that, Blair has been able to push the idea of a
reformed, modernised, pliant Labour movement - the very model of a modern
"flexible" economy, a little America.

Now, though, all of that is up for grabs. The economy is "well-placed"
according to the Treasury, but times are harder and growth is weak; there is
talk of a £7bn gap to be filled by new taxes. If the non-Westminster people
I talk to are anything to go by, the middle classes are starting to chafe
about taxes again, looking at their dodgy pensions and no longer being quite
so smug about their wealth in bricks and mortar. A passing squall, not a
murderous hurricane? Probably, but now we have the return of something
harder for the government, our old 70s friend, inflationary wage demands.

Many of the public sector workers who want to grab as much as they can can
while the Treasury's taps are open have a case. The firefighters do far more
today than they used to, from organising the nation's flood defences to
safeguarding our football matches. The mood of the country is with them - if
not for the full 40%, then certainly for a whacking increase. John Prescott
has been sent in to negotiate, and the Fire Brigades Union leader, Andy
Gilchrist, has already proved himself to be far from the Scargillite No 10
wanted to portray him as. The hard negotiating has only just begun, but it
would be amazing if, despite all the tough talk from ministers, the FBU did
not win a very substantial award, however phased in and disguised by talk of
"radical modernisation".

Hard on the heels of the firefighters come the hospital consultants, who are
expected to turn down a 15% pay increase, because it would involve an
increase in the hours worked for the NHS, and therefore the loss of some
highly lucrative private work. The consultants - who deserve much less
sympathy than the firefighters - increasingly seem to see themselves not as
NHS staff but as powerful professionals in a booming market who, along with
lawyers and City types, have every right to rake in as much as they possibly
can. This is hardly new in the history of medicine, but the consultants'
behaviour threatens the government's hopes for a revitalised NHS. They are
like the firefighters in this, at least - the public needs them and the
public knows it.

It only starts with healers and dousers, though. There is a large array of
public service staff, from paramedics to specialist teachers, from
librarians to care workers who feel left behind. It is true that public
sector pay increases are now outstripping the struggling private sector; but
it is also true that this follows decades of relative decline.

How much of this pressure on pay can be put down to the arrival of a new
cohort of militant and anti-New Labour trade union leaders? Certainly it has
taken years for the generation of pro-Blair trade unionists - delighted to
see Labour back in power again and ready to urge patience on their members -
to be eased aside by more independent and aggressive union leaders. True,
too, that some of them - the RMT's Bob Crow, for example - display utter
contempt for New Labour. But to dismiss the rising militancy of the public
sector as a return of Scargillism is glib and wrong. Mostly, as with Andy
Gilchrist, they have a wages and hours agenda, not a programme of political
insurrection.

No, the real political problem is that New Labour does not know how to
respond. Should it intervene, or pull back? Should it buy off some public
sector workers, but not others - and if so, which ones? The Treasury can,
and does, growl that the new money is for reformed and more efficient
services, in order to allow the welfare state to survive, not for
inflationary wage demands. But after the grand rhetoric of the last Budget
and the general election campaign, the government can hardly pretend that
the coffers are bare.

The post-Thatcher dogma that politicians shouldn't intervene in disputes
does not hold when the disputes are with government employees. The problem
is worsened by Labour's ambiguous attitude to devolution of power. Local
authorities, hospitals and schools do have greater freedoms but the buck
still stops in Whitehall. Perhaps nothing could have prevented that - but a
more vigorous and whole-hearted attitude to passing management power down
from the beginning would have helped now. Too late: instead we will get
defiant language and back-room deals. Anyone who thinks that the FBU is
being dealt with in a clinical, apolitical manner by Sir George Bain is
simply naive. Wherever groups have some public sympathy and a direct role in
our welfare, ministers will quietly intervene. And money so carefully
hoarded and gathered by the Treasury to convince voters that we would have a
Rolls-Royce health and education service will go, instead, into pay
increases - many of which, to repeat, are thoroughly justified.

The only way for the government to keep its programme on track is therefore
a political offensive - a far more urgent attempt to persuade public sector
workers that they share the same agenda, namely to build high quality public
services. Both sides have to convince a sceptical electorate that paying
higher taxes is worthwhile. If they don't, the political price will be high,
with the government's domestic agenda collapsing into recrimination and
chaos. New Labour will arrive at the next election having failed to deliver
and the voters will, one way or another, exact their revenge.

To prevent that happening, the government has to start to sound like a
completely committed Labour government, one on the same side as public
sector workers, not determined to crush them. For this time, Labour is
struggling to protect not one service or another, but a whole culture of
public service which is still in retreat from the me-first, market-driven
society of modern Britain. Five years on, the battle is only beginning.