The English Crisis: II. The Unions

...Needless to say, this is not a universal view...

...trying to explain why the trade unions today are riding so high in Britain...

...Their purity of heart, like that of the Victorian maiden, simply has to be assumed, even if this involves artistic non-senses which will seem to succeeding generations no less incredible than the Victorian habit of covering up the legs of pianos does to us...

...To the best of my knowledge, there have been no mass desertions from the trade union movement in protest of the obscene attempt to canonize these two thugs, or from the Labour Party for failing to anathematize this attempt...

...The easy explanation is that nowadays in Britain the trade union leaders, even the gentlest of them, are so powerful that they can afford to snap their fingers at public opinion, rather in the manner of Marie Antoinette telling the French people to eat cake in the absence of bread...

...But it is not whole-hearted indignation, because however immoral some of the methods used by the trade unions are felt to be, their basic aim—improving the lot of working people—is still felt to be work of almost religious significance...

...But much more than in any other country, this reality is disguised by a misleading image which suggests that little has changed, since the new non-hereditary ruling few are surrounded by the same symbols as were the old hereditary ruling few, thus fating "them to share in the inhibitions and defensiveness which, nowadays, are the inevitable accompaniment of anything which smacks of privilege...

...This trade union power is common to all advanced economies where the right to strike is recognized...

...My God...

...The unions have serious faults but I still believe...

...It is recognized, reluctantly and grudgingly, that their function requires resource to physical force...

...Yet even this paragon, this most statesmanlike of trade union spokesmen, does not hesitate to use this kind of arrogant language...

...still less to expect or demand that Conservative Ministers of the Crown should assist them in doing so...

...In no respect is this more obvious than in the confrontations between the two sides of industry, between management and labor...

...That is his artistic right, and he made the most of it...

...But given the contemporary obsession with social justice, nobody ever replies with equal bluntness, telling the workers to go and get stuffed...

...Alone among the leaders of contemporary Britain they are totally unweighed down by a sense of guilt, which enables them to display a truly aristocratic disregard for public disapproval—a disregard so spectacularly provocative as to be literally awe-inspiring...

...If they are to be acceptable to the "powers that be," soldiers and policemen must approach their tasks with reluctant disdain and mournful apology, as if they were ashamed of being caught up in such savage pursuits...

...In the bad old days of capitalistic exploitation, such a civilizing injection of a feudal sense of responsibility was thoroughly desirable, vastly and valuably moderating the ruthless inhumanity of class warfare...

...To suggest that it is approved of, or even tolerated, would be going too far...

...As a result, their heirs today find themselves locked in a chivalrous tradition wholly unsuited to the new reality of class war created by trade union militancy, rather as the medieval knights, accustomed to the romantic tournaments of Arthurian legend, were gravely inhibited when it came to fighting pitched battles against peasant armies...

...However much they may struggle to escape the fatal appearance of inherited privilege, something of its patina still settles upon them...

...As a result, the social balance in Britain has been dangerously upset, with organized labor discovering the full extent of its power—which in any advanced technological society is almost limitless—without any countervailing spirit of comparably aggressive purposefulness animating the other side of industry...

...The "progressive" ways of the English have bee pointed to throughout this century by Americans intent on conducing America along the English path, and so successful have these 'Progressive" Americans been that today most of our government expenditures go toward the support of institutions very similar to the social democratic institutions of England...

...Herr Hitler was not a gentleman...

...There are some right-wingers who would like to see trade unionists hung, drawn, and quartered...

...The lads need more money and they are bloody well going to get it...

...Although management, in the last decade or so, has in fact been vastly democratized, in the sense of being largely made up now of self-made men, it still does not give this impression, since its spokesmen sound and look posh, appearing in speech and dress much like gentlemen...

...so strong as to be, at any rate for the time being, irresistible...

...It is, in a word, authority...

...they are more powerful because they dare to talk so unashamedly...

...But more inequality of lifestyles, manners, language, accents, appearances, habits...

...Not necessarily more inequality of wealth...

...We saw a young soldier deserter coming to the aid of a Yorkshire mining village during the 1921 coal strike, when the government of the day declared a national emergency and sent up the troops to maintain "law and order...

...What follows is the second essay in this series...

...But the problem today is not one of moderating the excesses of capitalism, at a time of pitiful proletarian weakness, for which purpose the English public school education, with its contempt for hard industrial efficiency and romantic idealization of knightly chivalry, was so admirably suited...

...Take, for another example, the recent furor about two building site pickets, known as the "Shrewsbury Two," who were sent to prison for using violence against non-union workers, because they had refused to lay down tools during an industrial dispute—violence so extreme that one of their victims lost an eye...

...But the most basic reason, which I have tried to describe, is that their rise to a position of economic ascendancy, brought about largely through the accidents of technological development, has coincided with social and cultural developments which enable them to use their strength with a clear conscience, while those who would resist them lack the will to do so uninhibitedly...

...The problem today is one of resisting ruthless trade union power, of fighting for bourgeois values against overwhelming odds...

...What the viewer sees are spokesmen for the working class confidently clenching their Left fists, resisted by nothing more impressive than the soft underbelly of the bourgeoisie, quivering with guilt, and apologizing for being rich...

...The trade unions, by ruthless use of the strike weapon for a few weeks, can reduce a country like Britain to chaos far more effectively than the Luftwaffe was ever able to do...

...The Unions • Editor's Note Since—roughly speaking—the first quarter of the last century, a powerful sense of cultural inferiority has crept into American realms of influence...

...In fact, as revisionist historians will presumably soon get round to showing, the trade union leaders, even in the early days, were very far from being the heroic fighters for human rights that they are supposed to have been...

...Joe Gormley, president of the National Union of Miners, in response to a recent national appeal by Britain's socialist government for common sacrifices in the fight against inflation...

...A writer in the Sunday Times caught an aspect of this truth recently when he observed, after attending the 1975 trade union annual conference, that "trade unionists now wear the sort of ties and blazers that once marked out the public school man...

...They are, in Britain, the embodiment of a commanding idea which has become, in recent years, invincible: the idea of social justice...

...Sending workers, qua workers, to prison is felt to be slightly shocking, unnatural, almost blasphemous, rather as in older times it would have seemed shocking and unnatural for the law to lay its hands on members of the nobility...

...Butit has not changed yet, and because it has not changed, contemporary public opinion is indoctrinated in a wholly idealized and glamorized picture of trade unionism, as an earlier public was indoctrinated in a wholly idealized and glamorized picture of, say, the aristocracy...

...There have been critical articles in the liberal press, true, but no sense of national outrage as would certainly be provoked if any other power group were to behave with the same kind of shameless indecency...

...Not long ago, there was a splendid illustration of what I have in mind, in a BBC series, "Days of Hope," which purported to dramatize the social conditions of England during and immediately after the First World War...

...A class system as deeply entrenched as Britain's has a momentum that carries on long after the engine has been switched off, and however much the new type of managers may spring from the same family background as the trade union leaders, the different educational and social experiences through which they have passed, on the way to the boardroom, molds them into -the traditional boss-class shape: which is a shape that in modern times subtracts from, rather than adds to, their authority and confidence...

...More significant, in my view, is the deep-seated feeling by all members of the Labour Party that there is something indecent about sending workers to prison for any acts undertaken in pursuit of industrial disputes, however lawless or brutal the acts may have been...

...But that is not the whole explanation...

...All we ask is another L25 a week...

...Even so, the trade union movement was and is indignant about the convictions, and there have been mass marches and demonstrations appealing for the release of the two ihugs who now enjoy martyr status in the eyes of their fellow trade unionists...

...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976...

...And just as the idea of the aristocracy as a kind of divinely ordained topdog, held sway over the imagination of Englishmen long after it had ceased to have any real basis in social or economic reality—long after, that is, aristocrats had ceased to fulfill the function from which their glamour originally sprang—so today the glamour of the trade unions, as a kind of divinely ordained defender of bottom dogs, continues to hold a comparable place, although it, too, has no longer any basis in reality...

...A deeply disturbing parallel can be drawn between the way this problem is affecting us domestically now and the way it bedeviled foreign affairs in the twenties and thirties, when the then ruling class proved pitifully unwilling to recognize the ruthless nature of the powers arrayed against it: the extent to which the new rulers in Japan, Germany, and Italy were fighting for supremacy in earnest, inhabiting a world which owed nothing to Christian pieties instilled in the classrooms and chapels of the English public school...

...far nicer than their counterparts on the Continent or in the United States...

...Let a police chief talk about the fight against crime with even so much as a hint of brutal determination, and there would be an outcry of indignation from polite opinion...

...Educated opinion does not approve of trade union language or behavior, or of the extent to which they bully society at large...

...He stands out from his peers as being eminently reasonable, moderate, and responsible, a perfect model of a modern trade union leader, much respected, even loved, by the public at large for his human decency and earthy, Yorkshire common sense...

...How this came about I shall go into in a moment...

...At a time, as I say, when all the other British institutions have had theirmyths and legends stripped away, only the trade unions are still allowed to enjoy the benefit of brazen historical propaganda, in which they always appear as David fighting Goliath...

...But this is not the view taught in schools...

...The article is filled with the joy of battle, and positively glories in trade union power, physical power ruthlessly deployed...

...Edward Heath's, was destroyed by it...

...I have dwelt at some length on what must be called the psychological background to trade union power since it seems to me absolutely central to an understanding of the problem, at any rate as it affects Britain...

...Very far from it, as I shall seek to show...

...Just as clergymen today always apologize for believing in God...

...Alas, today England's social democratic institutions appear to be terminally ill and before ours fall into a similar condition, we at The Alternative decided to publish a book on the "Crisis of Social Democracy in England" with especial concern for the lessons that decline holds for England's prodigal son...

...Liberal papers, like the Times and the Guardian, would yell for his resignation...

...In the heyday of high capitalism this was a great disadvantage, since it meant that the Continental bosses ground the faces of the poor with a primitive, single-minded savagery which the older aristocratic influence greatly helped to dilute in Britain...

...Britain has made enormous strides in the last quarter of a century towards the ideal of genuine equality of opportunity...

...Trade unions have a cause which excuses excess, or at any rate seems to render it understandable and even tolerable...

...But today, with the balance of power having switched overwhelmingly to the side of organized labor, these gentlemanly inhibitions, these anachronistic scruples born out of a world of green lawns and dreaming spires, are proving an appalling handicap in the new cycle of class war about to reach its climax, since the trade union generals of the opposing armies—Jones, Scanlon, McGahey, Scargill—have learnt their ethics of combat in an entirely different and more serious school where no holds are barred, no Marquis of Queensberry rules observed...

...But it is more true in Britain than elsewhere, which is why the problem is so much worse there and will take so much longer to solve...

...12 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 197( tied a long article by another miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, boasting of how, in the last miners' strike, in 1974, he led a mass picketing operation against a power station which was so militant, so numerous, so passionately violent, that it literally overpowered the police who sought to control it...

...Take the most obvious example of a country house...

...How could it be otherwise...

...The cult of equality currently sweeping the Western world hit this country far harder than it did any other country, because there was so much more to hit: that is to say, so much more inequality...

...They-are, quite simply, much too nice...

...A few of the present members of the Labour Government have publicly disassociated themselves from this trade union agitation, but most have not...

...In the event, he went on keeping his counsel, as a later entry shows: "I am not going to cave in now...

...But I am writing of the present, not the future...

...But more of an embodiment of this commanding idea than any other institution, and in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King...

...But social attitudes never keep pace with reality, and it is really rather naive to expect them to do so...

...While not lending it their overt support, they have been careful to avoid actually denouncing it...

...The message, of course, makes no economic sense...

...Nor is this just a working-class or Labour Party view...

...Think if...

...It is impossible to imagine, for example, the BBC commissioning a television series on the history of trade unionism which approached that subject in the same knocking spirit as the recent BBC series which dealt with the history of the British Empire...

...Not, needless to say, the perfect embodiment...

...Britain, in this respect, suffers from a unique disadvantage...

...Only the trade union leaders, so far, have escaped this albatross and are therefore in a position to exercise power without apology, since they look and sound as men of power should look and sound in an age when privilege is a mark, not of divine grace—as it used to be—but of the devil's handiwork...

...This, as it turned out, was the general view of the Royal Commission, which produced majority and minority reports showing great sympathy and understanding of the union cause...

...If on a Monday the Communists get 100,000 parading down the ChampsElys6es, hands clenched in menace, on a The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 15 Tuesday the Right will do the same...

...But until this happens, until the breach is made between the wielders of physical power and the cultural legitimizers of that power, there is not much that can be done by those who would wish to reverse this trend...

...I am well aware of how absurd this is in present circumstances, since so many trade unionists are now the nouveaux riches and take home wage packets that make them the envy of professional people...

...All this is true, as Conservatives try to point out...

...They are more powerful because they aretalking like this...

...There is no reason to complain about director Ken Loach's extreme bias in favor of the miners and against the coal-owner, the army, and the police...

...Nor are the Communists in the unions, who are fighting to win...

...better, that is, at least in terms of social peace if not in terms of maintaining Britain's industrial supremacy...

...The cult of equality has unsettled Britain more than any other country because its institutions were so inherently associated with the idea of inequality, with a class system rooted in inegalitarian ideas and values...

...On television it is always they who arc on the defensive, having to justify their actions, even to apologize for them, and the tiniest example of excessive severity is certain to lead to their instant dismissal and disgrace...

...But liberal opinion reacts to violence in this area with ambivalence, with a desire to understand, even with a certain sympathy, since fighting for workers' rights, albeit occasionally with excessive zeal, has come to seem more respectable, more glorious, more in keeping with the spirit of the age, than upholding the law or defending the realm...

...The history of trade unionism is still told in reverential tones, with ail the myths and legends of how the unions were oppressed and persecuted faithfully preserved...

...RET "The miners are going to be at the top of the tree, and if that hurts somebody, I am sorry...

...As a result, they are particularly susceptible to being made to look provocatively out of keeping with the spirit of the times...

...That is the point...

...It is even more inconceivable that, in the event of such an agitation ever getting under way, a Conservative Government would refuse to condemn it and some Ministers would even lend it their support...

...For this wholly different purpose the public school ethic is disastrously inappropriate, deplorably inhibiting...

...Mythologically speaking, they are still the underdogs, the underprivileged, with all the benefits :hat such a status bestows in an age dedicated to the cause of social justice...

...There can be no understanding of the position of hegemony recently won by the trade unions in Britain which does not start with this central insight: that their strength springs from a profound sense of moral legitimacy, the like of which is no longer shared by any other institution...

...There can be no doubt that the most impressive personages to appear on the box nowadays aretrade union leaders, since they are the only people who do not apologize for what they are doing, who do not seem to be embarrassed or ashamed by their role and purpose, and are actually prepared to admit that, if necessary, they will exert their full strength to get what they want...

...Yet only in Britain has this weapon been exploited to the full in recent years, to the point where an elected government, Mr...

...he is prepared, quite unashamedly, to admit to being brazenly and ruthlessly concerned about promoting a sectional interest, however this may "hurt" anybody else...

...Such madness would spell the death of capitalism and the total discrediting of the Tory Party, since all sections of public opinion would be aghast, horrified, and totally repelled...

...It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the trade unions of this moral legitimacy which no other major organized group enjoys to anything like the same extent, since moral legitimacy, paradoxically enough, enables the trade unions tc get away with immoral behavior—racketeering, corruption, violence, intimidation, and things which come clost to bloody insurrection...

...No doubt this too will change, in time...

...by understanding the factors making for high working-class morale and low middle-class morale, even though such an analysis runs the risk of gross simplication...

...If he did he would be dismissed as a figure of fun...

...because they dare to talk like this...

...If a successful self-made tycoon wishes to indulge in such a purchase—or a successful Labour politician for that matter—it is likely to involve him in the process of beginning to seem like a country gentleman or squire, with all the upper-class associations that go with such a status...

...Don't tell us the firm can't pay, since so long as the bosses drive around in Rolls Royces that excuse is a lot of damned nonsense...

...These questions, it seems to me, have to be answered in terms, so to speak, of class morale...

...Trade unionists, in the present climate, enjoy a special dispensation, a unique exculpatory glamour that takes much of the sting out of public criticism...

...On the European Continent, the Indus, trial climate is notably different from what it is in Britain, because management is backed by a middle class no less prone to explosions of militant anger, no more reluctant to takes to the streets—yes, and to the barricades too, if necessary—than are the workers...

...yet they still hanker after sitting on the fence, as if the fence itself had not been turned into a barricade...

...Result: Red revolution in France, from which Britain was spared...

...There is a lot of tut-tutting and even indignation...

...But this kind of hostility is regarded as rather disreputable by the reigning liberal middle-class establishment which today shows the same unmistakable signs of snobbishness toward, and deferential indulgence of, lower-class bad behavior as once it did of the bad behavior of the upper class...

...It is not, properly speaking, power at all...

...What strikes one now, in looking back at the experience of British trade unionism in the nineteenth century, is not how hard it had to struggle against prejudice in high places, but how relatively quickly and easily it won its place in the sun...

...Just as Popes in the Middle Ages got away with murder, claiming to be doing God's work, so today do trade union deaders enjoy a cornparable kind of immunity and protection, because they, too, are doing the modern equivalent of God's work...

...But I keep my counsel as yet...

...The successful self-made man, when he makes it, cannot avoid moving into a style of life which associates him with a past social system that was rooted in inherited privilege, since the pattern of life at the top still dates from those days...

...Yet these kinds of extraordinary goings-on do take place in the event of trade unions thugs being sent to jail, and public opinion is not aghast, horrified, and totally repelled, or at any rate not remotely to the extent that it would be by comparable behavior on the part of any other power group...

...day newspaper, for example, has just carThe union leaders do not talk so unashamedly because they are more powerful...

...The backs of British management are up against the wall...

...Much more so than Labour Party leaders who are increasingly indistinguishable, in social and educational background, from their Conservative counterparts...

...To some extent...

...This sense of inferiority (combined with shared customs) allowed Europe, specifically England, a powerful influence over-American life...

...One of the disadvantages of Britain is that, because of its record of continuity, its avoidance of political and social upheaval or revolution, all its institutions give the fatal impression of being far more stamped with a privileged style, 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 with, if you like, the manners and appearances of the ancien regime, than do those of, say, France or West Germany, or, even more obviously, those of the United States...

...To some extent this is sheer political expediency, not wanting to annoy the trade union movement at the time when its co-operation in wage restraint is being so actively courted...

...Rather the opposite...

...So deeply drenched in liberal squeamishness is respectable contemporary opinion-in Britain that soldiers and policemen are expected to talk like Quaker brethren...

...But what is so interesting is that an artist of his high stature should have so absolutely uncritical an idea about a mining village...

...No reputable contemporary artist would allow himself to be so naively indulgent about any other group in society, or expect his public to tolerate such a false perception...

...But that is because the bourgeoisie thinks like a bourgeoisie, with its values rooted in a proper understanding of what the class struggle entails, without its range of vision interrupted by the mirage of gentlemanly, turn-the-other-cheek behavior...

...It is fascinating to note, for example, that the union nominee, Frederic Harrison, on the first Royal Commission set up to look into trade unionism in 1876, himself extremely well-disposed towards their cause, could not refrain from expressing his doubts in his private diary: "If the unions cannot get over it [violence against non-union-members], some of them, and certainly the masons, deserve all that was said of them and are as mere organs of Class tyranny...

...Rather the reverse...

...If a British general were to write such an article about, say, the battle against the IRA in Ulster, with a comparably uninhibited display of pride and pleasure in the business of suppressing terrorism, or were to use the same kind of boastfully aggressive language about some successful military operation, he would be dismissed as a pathological case, a throwback to an age of barbaric imperialism...

...This, in itself, is a fascinating phenomenon—the extent to which the trade The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 13 union movement, of all the institutions which flowered in the Victorian era, is the only one so far to have escaped the attention of historians bent on destroying favorable misconceptions: the only one which has not yet had its feet of clay exposed and its heroes demythologized...

...Television illustrates this process almost every night...

...It is shared, to a lesser degree, by many middle-class Conservatives as well...

...In any case, those who do wish to reverse this trend—let us call them, for want of a better description, the conservative bourgeoisie—suffer from another disadvantage in launching such a struggle, also peculiar to Britain...

...Nor was their struggle for recognition nearly so uphill or so stony as they like to pretend...

...or a single prestigious film maker choosing to send up the language, customs, and rituals of, say, a mining village with the same derisory enthusiasm as a whole host of them regularly apply to the language, customs, and rituals of, say, a middle-class suburb or a stately home...

...Needless to say, the fundamental fact, the concrete cause of increased trade union power, has to do with the vulnerability of the advanced, interdependent post-industrial society to the withdrawal of labor from certain vital industries, like energy...

...There are many other reasons than those on which I have touched here...

...It was a horrible business...

...This again is another hangover of the British class system which, through the public schools, taught the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie to think like country gentlemen...

...They are exceptionally strong, therefore, both physically and morally...

...Thus spake Mr...

...But they are not talking like this because they are more powerful...

...I say "for the time being," since it is only a matter of time before the cultural worm begins to turn and start eating away at working-class power and authority, as it has eaten away at the moral base of earlier power groups...

...Yet Ken Loach is taken very seriously indeed, since the public does not want to be shown the naked truth about working people...

...In every walk of life the top prizes are increasingly open to men of talent...

...Needless to say, even the most purblind supporter of the capitalist cause would not fed prepared, let alone compelled, to defend thuggery or lawlessness of this kind...

...Another posh Sun...

...because they doubt—or feel guilty about—the virtue of their cause...

...them capable of improvement...

...The reason, of course, is very obvious...

...There is a real and chastening balance of mutual deterrence...

...Imperialism, militarism, evangelicalism, whiggism, toryism, liberalism, capitalism, have all been debunked, but not trade unionism and its leaders...

...Or if he joins a London club, it is likely to be a club that was originally a gentlemanly preserve full of echoes of the old ruling class...

...Not only, in short, do they have the increased economic power which, as I say, is a factor common to all trade union movements today in a free society—but also this intangible advantage of embodying the one style of leadership in Britain today which avoids appearing both anachronistic and illegitimate...

...The Gentlemen of England would prefer to die rather than demonstrate, and a stiff upper lip, or, if driven to extremity, perhaps a rolled umbrella, is the nearest thing io an offensive weapon they would think of brandishing against the massed muscle of organized labor...

...It is, after all, only within the last quarter of a century that trade unionists have begun to exploit their economic strength to the full, and most of the adult British population had its attitudes formed during a period when the unions were the underdogs...

...Trade union violence, on the other hand, enjoys a much wider degree of tolerance, provokes a much less absolutely hostile response...

...I were to publish a formal recantation...

...Gormley is not a militant or an extremist, still less a Marxist...

...The question that has to be answered is why the British trade unions feel so much more militant than do their counterparts in other Western countries and, equally interesting, why the rest of society show such a strange apathy and weakness in the face of this challenge...

...should want to portray it in this sugary, sentimental, chocolate-box, and totally unrealistic way and see nothing absurd in doing so, rather as, in an earlier age, writers like G.A...

...Of course this will change in time...

...Up to a point, of course, the trade unions are much stronger than they have ever been before...

...Noblesse oblige and all the other anachronistic hangovers of an aristocratic age, which only make sense against a background of secure privilege and unchallenged strength, still debilitate the boardrooms of Britain, inducing in them a wholly inappropriate reluctance to recognize that the paternalistic days of benevolent goodwill have long since passed into history...

...No Lytton Strachey, for example, has got to work on the great trade union leaders of the nineteenth century, showing them to be frauds and hypocrites, as has been done for the great soldiers, churchmen, statesmen, tycoons, etc...

...all this is true of other capitalist so icties...

...If anybody doubts this, reflect for a moment on how inconceivable it would be for a great capitalist corporation, like ICI or Unilever, to seek to organize a national campaign for the release of two of its directors caught red-handed in some comparable piece of thuggery to that for which the "Shrewsbury Two" were convicted—bursting into a rival boardroom, say, and beating into a pulp a group of competitor directors who had refused to join in some cartel arrangement...

...Nobody denies that extreme and extensive violence did takeplace...

...Take France, for example, where the middle class is fully prepared to march, demonstrate, and break windows, even heads if need be, rather than allow itself to be pushed around or dictated to by the Left...

...It was all to the good then that the bourgeois boss should have married into the landed gentry, been educated at an Anglican public school, and generally merged his identity in a way of life rooted more in the cricket fields of Eton than in the jungle of the marketplace...

...The language and the mood of the Right are still redolent of a vanished age when the middle class, unlike its Continentalcounterparts, felt so impregnably secure as to indulge in a kind of psychological disarmament which has now left it perilously vulnerable...

...But it is difficult to doubt, on the evidence, that it has come about...

...Quite the opposite...

...As the middle classes let their hair grow and knot multicolored ties about their necks, the trade unionists keep their hair short and sport the stripes and badges of their union—a sure sign, of a diminishing sense of identity in one group and an increasing assertiveness in the other...

...We shall be publishing this book with Doubleday later this year, and the essays within it will appear in -the New York Times Magazine, Encounter, and other magazines as well as The Alternative...

...These two aspects of the problem seem to me integrally connected, the increasing assertiveness of the trade unions being caused, or, if not altogether caused, certainly aggravated and encouraged, by the decreasing sense of identity among all the countervailing power groups in the land...

...Henty and Jeffrey Farnol saw nothing absurd in idealizing the British army or in romanticizing the British nobility...

...But on no account must they be seen to enjoy it, or be engaging in it with zest and enthusiasm...

...And they dare to talk like this because, unlike the leaders of every other institution in Britain, they, and they alone, have a clear sense of their own value and an unshaken faith in their own function...

...Each side knows the other's strength, and potential nastiness, and respects it...

...In reality, they are, for the most part, very far from being underdogs...

...This is still the impression which any British schoolboy or schoolgirl would get from such historical lessons as he has at school, since this is how the trade unions are made to appear...