News from the New Party

The TUC: who cares?

Thirty years ago the Trade Unions were a major force in the land.  The leaders of the big trade unions such as Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon and Joe Gormley were household names on a par with cabinet ministers.  Twice in the 1970s the unions effectively brought down the government.  In 1974, following a miners' strike, Edward Heath called an election asking the question "Who governs Britain?", and subsequently found out that it wasn't him.  And the "Winter of Discontent" of 1978-9 effectively killed off James Callaghan's hopes of reelection in the election which subsequently brought Margaret Thatcher to power.

It was of course the Thatcher government that effectively neutered the trade unions, at least as a political force.  Arthur Scargill - the last of the superstar union leaders, led the National Union of Mineworkers, with close to 200,000 members, in a colossal dispute with the government during 1984 and 1985.  Twenty years later, the union of which Scargill is still Honorary President is reduced to around 3,000 members.  Other unions have responded to changed circumstances by merging into ever larger and more anonymous "super-unions".  These have at least adapted to current circumstances, and offer their members a much broader range of services than ever before.  Most are much less overtly political than in previous years, however, as most realise that they cannot count on their members to act as an industrial army to be deployed against a sitting government.  Strikes still happen occasionally, but they are smaller, and with less impact than industrial disputes of the past.

Against this backdrop, the annual Trades Union Congress is an increasingly strange and irrelevant affair.  David Cuthbertson comments:

Indeed, the only people who seem to show up to TUC conference these days are confused Marxists who use words like 'comrade' and old trade union Barons plotting a new Winter of Discontent with their none existent power; like Hitler in the bunker commanding his phantom armies.

Maybe that's why Gordon Brown's speech yesterday at the TUC yesterday met with the reaction it did. Brown opened with some flattering remarks about the closeness of the TUC and the Labour party before moving on to defending his decision to give the unions absolutely nothing they wanted on public sector pay.

His centre-piece was a promise for '500,000 new jobs' and 'A British job for every British worker'. This boils down to a small training allowance for new employers and a promise to give a kind of 'golden hello' to employees. Single parents will be able to receive benefits for longer, and the tax credits system gets another layer of unfathomable complexity.

So, a rejection of the unions' demands on pay and an employment plan that will do very little for employment dressed up in the kind of nationalistic language that they used to despise and all set against the backdrop of a plan to weaken their political influence. And what was the response, from the delegates? Muted applause. Well, what else could they do?

The answer, of course, is not much.  Brown's bizarre appeal to nationalistic sentiment seems calculated to defuse the row over the European "reform treaty", about which the TUC has since demanded a referendum.  Their objection is to Britain's opt-out to certain EU legislation regarding workers' rights.  The unions have therefore manoevred themselves into a position whereby they are opposing the EU treaty on the grounds of wanting further integration, thereby getting into bed with UKIP and others who want a referendum for precisely the opposite reason.  Confused Marxists, indeed.