[A-List] UK labour militancy & public order

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

Hugo Young, the Guardian's chief political columnist and founder member of
the SDP, reverts to type to remind us of the "horrors" of the 1970s.
Dreadful stuff, but significant given the battle lines currently being drawn
in this increasingly ugly dispute.


Why we must not give the firefighters what they want

This strike is a nakedly political attempt to re-establish trade union power

Hugo Young
Tuesday November 26, 2002
The Guardian

Tony Blair looked quite calm yesterday. This is not, evidently, a rerun of
the fuel protests in 2000, or foot and mouth in 2001, when he seemed
horribly unnerved by the prospect of the country collapsing round his ears.
The firefighters' contest with the government doesn't rouse the same
apprehension, and for a good reason. This is a struggle in which the
ramifications may be messy but the case is pretty simple. It is much clearer
than in those previous crises what the government has to do. Mr Blair is
seldom rattled when most of the arguments are on his side. There may have
been some cock-ups in the handling, with ministers saying slightly different
things over the past few days. But these are a distraction from the
blindingly obvious fact that the firefighters cannot have what they want.

This is for political as much as economic reasons. What's going on is a
political as well as an economic battle. Portrayed as a traditional, if
currently unfashionable, battle between workers and employers over pay, the
fire dispute has elements of a political action as well. It may not be a
political strike, but it's about power not just money, and its origins go
back to the earliest days of the Blair government. It's the firefighters'
attempt to overturn the way Mr Blair has governed from the beginning.

This way did not assign trade unions a corporate role. Here was the first
Labour government governing without the unions, and being allowed to do so.
A social compact of union acquiescence prevailed, as Blair and Gordon Brown
set about realigning the country after 18 years of Tory rule. Their gestures
to the workers were not enormous, but the accretion of minimum wage, working
families' tax credit, welfare-to-work programmes and other products of the
Treasury engine room elicited enough gratitude to make for a manageable
governing life. The economy at large grew stronger. These were years of
relative industrial tranquillity. When the second term hove into view, trade
unions were virtually written out of the prospectus.

The strategy carried risks. When times grew harder, and the government's
failures more palpable, there would be a reckoning. To whom, after all, did
the Labour party belong? In the good times, after Blair had assembled a
progressive coalition extending far beyond the party, one could say the
question did not matter. But, with the shrinking of the coalition and the
draining of enthusiasm for Blairism in the country, it was bound to return,
and was likely to be answered by a quest for the old proprietorial roots.
What the firefighters, along with the union leaders gathered in their
support, are saying is that the party, and with it the government, should in
substantial part, at this defining moment, be returned to them.

There are differences from previous politico-industrial struggles. This is
not 1974, when the Heath government put its survival on the line against a
miners' union that wanted compliant Labour and Harold Wilson brought to
power. It's not 1978-79, when the majority-less Callaghan government had
nothing like the strength to fend off a winter of discontent. It is
certainly not 1984, when Margaret Thatcher engineered her confrontation with
Arthur Scargill. The idea that Blair, riding high on political dominance,
should actually be seeking a battle with the Fire Brigades Union to show the
macho hair on his chest, in the middle of a war on terrorism and facing
potential bloody horror in Iraq, is the least credible of explanations for
what is now happening.

The politics comes from the other side. A union makes a grotesquely
excessive claim. It thinks it can push this through by virtue of the
indispensable work it sees firefighters as doing, and the sentimental esteem
in which they are held. The coherence and mild-mannered decency of its
leaders seem to make a popular case. They climb down a little from the
stratospheric heights of their first demand, but it's quite apparent what
the trade union movement wants. John Monks, John Edmonds and Bill Morris
weigh in with an unqualified support that derives not from a serious belief
that firefighters have a special case - which they do not - but a sense that
this is the moment to contest the government's determination to keep all
public sector workers' pay in some kind of non-inflationary check.

We absorb more than a sniff here of the FBU as the leading edge, the
vanguard element, of a generalised assault on pay patterns throughout public
service. This is not a movement seeking, in the seductive phrase, benign
renewal of a dialogue with government, based on Edmonds' incredible
assurance that other unions would treat any special FBU award as a one-off
case they promised not to emulate. Trade unions look more like a movement
seizing, after the sidelined years, an occasion to recapture sectional
power. This is the first reason the claim has to be resisted.

Any doubt about that should be dispelled, secondly, by a study of the claim
and its implications. Firefighters are no more valuable than many other
public service workers. They are vital, but not uniquely so, and already
better paid than many public professions - nurses, soldiers, teachers -
where empty posts are much harder to fill. Everyone, it seems, would like to
be a firefighter. We admire them, but not to the extent of favouring them
above all others, or setting in train a pattern of pay rises that would lead
to the wreckage of the economic stability that, from a rather meagre set of
achievements, is one of the government's unequivocal successes.

There are related areas where a negligent govern ment has been less
successful. It hasn't paid nearly enough attention to pay disparities
between public and private sectors. Unaddressed anomalies, from MPs' own fat
rises to the golden injustices afforded corporate executives, produce a
country rife with deep and manifest unfairness. On matters of reward, there
never will be an anomaly-free world. One way of easing that sting has always
been via progressive income tax. I no longer see any case, for example,
against a 50% tax on earnings over £100,000. It might be gestural, but it
would declare a priority, and alleviate some of the pain of a public sector
that feels done down.

Meanwhile, the worst way to succour the public service is to meet the
firefighters' demand. Anyone who denies the imitative potential of such a
cave-in is not living in the real world. These are struggles the government
decided how to conductbefore it came to power, and the case for its policy
then remains as correct as ever. A strong union, bent on self-interest and
rejecting all self-reform, is an enemy of political order and economic
truth. After ministers' initial bumbling, it looks as though they are quite
determined not to humour Andy Gilchrist or the other union bosses urging him
on. Happily they have the means with which to support this position. The
choice may not be for ever. But right now it is an acute and telling one. It
seems a lot less contentious to use the army to defend the home economy than
send it off to make war in Iraq.