Wake up, unions: there will be no Prime Minister Corbyn
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Version 0 of 1. Whatever happened to that post-election stuff about “one nation”? It is clear that David Cameron and some of his ministers genuinely believe in the Disraelian ideal of social cohesion at some important level. Yet in the wake of the government’s latest move against trade unions, the commitment will look to many like mere hypocrisy. Part of the essence of any kind of one-nation politics, whether from the left or the right, must be an effort to reconcile old antagonisms. But these new measures to make it more difficult to join a union are only designed to provoke this antagonism still further. They are a petty and partisan poke in the unions’ eye, timed to coincide with the London tube strike, and intended to extract a primal response from the Labour leadership candidates, in which they will probably succeed. Related: Tories accused of 'mean-spirited' attack on trade union funding The trade unions have barely mattered in British politics for a generation. That’s a big loss to civil society, though it would be even more of one if the unions were less set in their industrial and political ways. The reality of the unions in 2015 is still that they are overwhelmingly weak, not strong, an industrial factor not an industrial problem. It’s not just wrong for the government to attack the unions, it’s also pathetic. Yet the unions and their tormentors are in many respects as bad as each other. Tory strategists have not had an original idea about industrial relations since the era of Margaret Thatcher. This week’s plan to prevent public sector workers from having their union fees deducted in their payroll, and instead to make the effort to set up direct debits, is being spun on cost-saving-to-employers grounds. Pull the other one. This is simply about bashing unions and crippling Labour. But the unions are almost as culpable. As Talleyrand said of the restored Bourbons after the French revolution, the unions seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Young utopians may be in the frontline of the movement that may carry Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, but old union machine politicians are there in force in the background, fighting the same zero-sum game as the Tories, acting as though Britain was still a nation based on factories, coal mines and engineering, and in which the world hung on the result of votes at the TUC. Why are we still refighting old battles? Why have we not moved on? Doubtless if Corbyn were ever to become prime minister – which he will not – he would try to carry out much of the union left’s enduring dream. He would repeal all the supposedly anti-union laws brought in since 1979. We would be back with abolition of tort liability, reintroduction of the closed shop, fewer ballots before strikes, a restored right of secondary picketing and an end to the controls over union funding of the Labour party. This, too, is a project that has not been rethought in any way for a generation. They are two sides of the same worn old penny. It is long overdue to ask why Britain has failed so notably to reimagine its industrial democracy and its corporate governance ever since the de-industrialisation of the 1980s and amid the rise of the service and financial sectors that replaced the old industries. Why are we still refighting old battles? Why have we not moved on? Perhaps the failure is explained by the sheer weight of antagonistic history. Both sides are simply set in their ways, approaching the problem only to do the other down. Perhaps it is also because, once the Thatcher and Major governments had brought the unions to heel within a network of law, New Labour had no interest in reopening the subject of workplace democracy, corporate values and industrial co-determination. But the deindustrialisation of Britain did not just end the big industries and the big industrial unions. It also ended a tradition of liberal, often local, management, corporate responsibility, works councils and industrial cooperation that, from the Mond-Turner talks in the aftermath of the general strike of 1926 right up to the Bullock report on industrial democracy in 1977, were always an important part of British industrial relations. One may not regret the demise of the lawless union baronies of the 1970s and the anachronistic Scargillite syndicalism of the 1980s. But the loss of the co-operative tradition between the two sides of industry has been a kind of national tragedy that has affected Britain badly in the run-up to and emergence from the financial collapse of 2008. In the 1960s, cooperation and co-determination was a path not taken here, though it was fundamental to the economic prosperity of postwar Germany. But it is a path that should be remade and retaken now. Few now remember the Bullock report, in which the majority proposed worker representation on the boards of companies employing more than 2,000 people. The report was far from perfect, largely because it presupposed that workers’ representatives would come from the unions rather than the workforce as a whole. In this respect it was a report of its undemocratic era, just as its rejection by many unions represented an old tradition of believing that workers’ organisations should not be collaborators. The phrase “management’s right to manage”, so often heard in employers’ mouths then and later, was also endorsed by leftwing union leaders such as Hugh Scanlon, who believed that unions should not prop up capitalists with whom they were ultimately at war. Though the Bullock report was killed off, it remains a tantalising might-have-been for the way British companies are run and think. It also, more topically, still offers a starting-point for a long overdue re-examination of UK corporate thinking and structures, and the place of employees within them, in the post-crash era. It is an indictment of New Labour that it never dared to reapply the idea of industrial democracy to the 21st-century economy. But it is also an indictment of Cameronian Conservatism that it is equally hesitant on the subject, in a way that earlier liberal Tories would not have been. In the end, the unions have to bear a large share of the blame for the failure to recast British companies in a more cooperative mould. They could and should have made the case for shared employer-employee responsibility in British corporate governance. This would have been, and still could be, a genuinely democratic response to the trauma of the crash. But the left is too hidebound and the right is too scared. Until that changes, the two sides are fated to go on fighting old battles that have little to do with modern companies and the modern economy, when they could, with a bit of imagination and daring, rediscover the one-nation path not taken in 1977 and neglected ever since. |