It’s easy to sneer at the trade unions. Towards the end of his time in office, Tony Blair made an annual ritual of it, with his speeches to the gathered tribes of the TUC becoming ever more snide. The national press, relieved that it no longer has to take the unions seriously, now confines its reports to the latest excesses of the dinosaurs of organised labour (threats of industrial action, sit-down or stand-up protests during ministers’ speeches). Sometimes editors send down their parliamentary sketch-writer to mock some more.
After spending a train journey down to Brighton with a carriage full of bullet-headed, corpulent, hard-man delegates, I was tempted to join in. Why is it that so many male trade unionists still play up to those old macho stereotypes?
Then there is the quaintly old-fashioned rhetoric. I sat through a transport debate where the talk was all of fat-cat profits, the evils of rail privatisation and “monsters like Branson trying to get his grubby hands on the maintenance side”. I call it a debate, but everybody agrees on these things and, when you are involved in the serious work of “driving back the neoliberal agenda”, the votes are unanimous. However, after clearing away a fog of metropolitan cynicism, I had a moment of clarity. Weren’t these speakers right, after all? The language may have been crude, but the unions have been correct about rail sell-off all along. The privatised British rail network is a disgrace. When you examine Transport Motion 41, for example, it is entirely reasonable. “Congress rejects the failed free-market approach to public transport and calls for the General Council to campaign for the benefits of a fully integrated public transport policy.”
I began to look at the conference through new eyes. What’s wrong with heckling the Work and Pensions Secretary, Peter Hain, over the proposed closure of 43 Remploy factories, which provide work for the disabled? Nothing, particularly when the intervention led the minister to reverse, on the spot, a decision by managers to issue redundancy notices to Remploy workers.
And what has ever been wrong with campaigning for a minimum wage, flexible working hours and a fair deal for black, gay and disabled workers? These are all areas where the unions were the pioneers and the Labour government followed. So convincingly did the unions win the argument, that these ideas are now Conservative Party policy, too.
If truth be told, even Blair acknowledged the positive contribution of the trade union movement until he became so bitter that any opposition to his reform agenda was taken as a personal slight. I have kept his speech from the 2001 con ference, the one he never gave because it coincided with the 11 September terror attacks in America. I read it again this past week. The first three pages were a gushing encomium to the unions and the work they had done in helping Labour to a second election victory earlier in the year.
Cold war
In the six years since that undelivered speech, an industrial cold war has been fought. It has not developed into an all-out cataclysmic conflict, but it has always had the potential to do so. Gordon Brown was determined to put an end to this stand-off. For this reason he was bitterly disappointed with his reception at the TUC and angry that a personal message from Nelson Mandela was treated with apparent indifference.
So why did it go so badly wrong? Brown’s determination to stop unions and constituency parties proposing motions at the Labour conference, “contemporary resolutions” that have the potential to challenge the leadership on policy, is deeply unpopular. But no one really believes this is a red-line issue when the conference is already all but neutered.
Matters were not helped by comments to GMTV by the Business Secretary, John Hutton, on the weekend before the TUC gathering, in which he said Labour politicians would no longer be “going into little huddles and smoke-filled rooms” to cut deals with union leaders. I understand Brown and his advisers spent much of their time in Brighton furiously distancing themselves from Hutton’s comments. Although there are no longer any smoke-filled rooms, there were plenty of huddles and if the Prime Minister could have cut a deal, he would have been delighted.
But still this does not get to the heart of Brown’s problem. Looking back at Blair’s six-year-old speech, one phrase stands out: “Public sector wages are rising faster than private sector salaries for the first time in years.” While this was the case, it was always easier for the unions to swallow the more unpalatable aspects of new Labour reform. Now things are different. With the new Prime Minister committed to keeping public sector pay pinned to 2 per cent, even previously loyal union leaders are talking about strike action. I know Brown spent several hours in Brighton in discussion with Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB, who, in the words of one insider, was seen as “a paid-up Brownite helped into the job by Brownite influence”. The talks came to nothing.
These are dark times for Brown, who knows that co-ordinated industrial action by the public sector unions over the winter would cause him considerable political damage. TUC backing for a referendum on the new EU treaty has caused him further frustration.
But if there is something positive to have come out of the past few days it is this: unlike his predecessor, Brown does not see conflict with the unions as an affirmation of his vision. His disappointment is genuine, and despite what Hutton says, the huddles will continue. The time for sneering is over.
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