One of my really early memories is playing with a toy tank on the living room floor. 1974. The Two Ronnies on the telly. It always was. Suddenly, the lights go out. I remember pushing the tank across the carpet in the dark. You got used to it. The strikes. The three-day week. The power cuts. It was the decade of discontent, and semi-darkness.
And then, of course, Margaret Thatcher happened. Then Blair. Then the austerity government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg and the impression grew that a return to the politics of the 70s – economic stagnancy, super inflation, powerful unions and weak governments – was inconceivable, impossible even. There was a new consensus built around seemingly immutable political basics. Call it centrism. Call it neo-liberalism. Call it what you like.
But now this. A hundred quid to fill up your car. Two thousand quid – and rising – to heat your house. The threat of strikes. An SNP government seemingly caving in over pay and a Tory government complaining about the power of the unions and threatening to crack down. It has the feel, doesn’t it, of something we’ve been through before. I can see it all again: that little toy tank on the living room floor.
Certainly, for anyone who was actually there back in the ‘70s, the recent furore over the trains will feel familiar. The RMT had been in talks about pay and redundancies, but it’s now threatening a strike that could shut down or severely impact train services across the country. The UK government says it’s irresponsible and reckless (like having parties in a pandemic, some might say) while the union claims all they want is some job security and decent pay.
The responses to it all by the two governments at Westminster and Holyrood has been interesting, and revealing. The UK transport secretary Grant Shapps was out and about at the weekend warning he was prepared to change the law to make it harder for the unions, including allowing agency staff to fill in for the strikers. In Scotland, on the other hand, our state-run train operator said it would give drivers a five per cent pay rise after their union played a game of hardball that led to hundreds of services going missing from the timetable.
You may think the Scottish Government did the right thing. You may think the Tory Government has always hated the unions and the last few days prove it. But whatever your view, we’re surely at a critical point in deciding what happens next. Plenty of people – teachers, police officers, you name it – will think that if it's good enough for the train drivers, it’s good enough for them. In other words, the five per cent deal is going to make it very hard indeed for other public employers to resolve their own pay talks without offering big rises.
The fear then, of course, is that you have a kind of intensification effect – more strike threats, more pay rises, more inflation – and it’s interesting to note that Boris Johnson was also reportedly thinking about offering five per cent to the transport unions to see off the strikes. But I still wonder how real the effect is likely to be. Should we be panicking about a return to the chaos of the 70s? I think a number of factors suggest we shouldn’t.
The first is the curious position of the Labour party. Go back a few years and Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell would be right in there supporting the unions. But Keir Starmer and his front bench have been much more circumspect. Labour supports the right of workers to strike, they say, but they also say that the rail strikes shouldn’t go ahead. Why do they take this position? Because they know the political realities have changed.
They also know that the realities of trade unionism have changed – utterly. In the early ‘70s – when I was watching The Two Ronnies and playing with tanks – over half of workers would have been a member of a union. Fifty years on, it’s now a fraction of that and we know the reasons. Deindustrialisation. Privatisation. The taming, or demonisation, of the unions depending on your point of view. And the fact that lots of young people just don’t see the value of being a member anymore.
The unions that do survive are also very different. The big majority of them represent workers in the public sector, clustered mainly in schools, trains and hospitals – while in the private sector, it’s much lower and in some sectors non-existent. Not only does that work against a sympathetic hearing for the unions – how do you think people in the private sector feel when they see people in the public sector getting big pay rises? – it makes it much harder to pull off any kind of large-scale or national strike action. Basically, it means the unions are nowhere near as powerful as they were seen to be in the 1970s.
I know this has both good and bad consequences. I remember in the early 90s for example a shop steward pressuring me to join USDAW when I worked in a shop. But I knew the law had been changed to outlaw enforced membership (one of Mrs Thatcher’s final achievements, in 1990). I didn’t want to join the union and I couldn’t be forced to, and that was a good thing.
But I also remember my former colleague, the late Joe Owens. Joe was a journalist, but before that he was a miner who took part in the strike in the 80s. If asked, he would talk about the effect that time had on communities. I also remember him writing a piece for The Herald in which he said the union made mistakes and got their tactics wrong but that the principle of fighting for the lives of communities stood the test of time. “We were miners then,” he said, “And we still are.”
The lesson here is that people like me, and Joe, and everyone else who lived through the 80s and 90s, have seen a profound and radical transformation in the place of unions in public life and it isn’t going back. I remember speaking to one trade unionist recently who told me he’d seen a small recovery in membership of late but that it was nowhere near what it was. There are tiny embers of some kind of flame, he said, but you wouldn’t get much heat out of it.
This is the reality we’re dealing with here. Unions are generally weak. Support for them from traditional places, like the Labour leadership, is also weak. And the unions themselves know that, despite their threats, prolonged strikes quickly undermine what sympathy there is for them among the public. All of this combines to make Britain a very different place to the one it was in the 70s. It cannot happen again. We are not going back.
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