Britain's Tory Counter-Revolution
KNAPPMAN, EDWARD W.
Britain's Tory Counter-Revolution by EDWARD W. KNAPPMAN London Britain's political and social equilibrium—envied by many Americans just a year ago—has been shaken off-balance by ten months of...
...Heath compounded the blunder by ordering the anxious president of black Zambia to stop "pushing Britain around...
...In more hyperbolic statements, TUC leaders have envisioned unionists thrown in jail by the score, treasuries emptied by fines, and workingmen reduced to cap-tugging serfdom...
...Few Britons either thrilled or trembled in anticipation of bold actions when Edward Heath moved into No...
...But this pretense of moderation by the Conservative leadership lasted for less than a month...
...While these divisive tactics have complicated Heath's economic troubles, they were essential to his political strategy of consolidating Britain's silent majority into a durable Tory coalition...
...It will explode precisely when the Tories will be desperate for an election on any issue other than their dismal economic record and their unpopular decision to enter the Common Market...
...Ironically, Heath's ultra-conservative policies on inflation and industrial relations have made him more vulnerable from the right...
...John Davies, the new minister of trade and industry, gave a harrowing description of the political prisoners in Beethoven's opera Fide lio and then proposed, to vigorous applause, that their situation was analogous to that of British businessmen shackled by socialism...
...He has alienated them by badgering Tory ministers to interpret party doctrines literally...
...In 1969 the Wilson administration, conscious that the public was blaming it for industrial chaos, tried to enact its own statutory reforms, only to back down under pressure from the unions which traditionally fill the Labor Party's campaign coffers...
...Too moderate a line, they fear, would lead to an all-out if unofficial general strike led by the militants...
...This antagonism is often peevish, provoked by the humiliation of having been twice blackballed by France under de Gaulle, and goaded by a fear of Continental meddling with Britain's cozy insularity...
...More man-days—more than eleven million—were lost through strike action in 1970 than in any year since 1926, the year of the general strike...
...protect union organizers from unfair dismissal...
...There was to be an across-the-board tax cut which would put back $450 into the wallets of executives making $24,000 a year but only sixty cents into the pockets of factory workers making $3,744...
...If Wilson's continental-cut clothes became a serious political liability, he would be wrapped in a Union Jack before Callaghan could unfurl one...
...and establish an elaborate national industrial court system to interpret and enforce the law...
...But Heath foreclosed this option by casting the unions as the scapegoats for inflation and by proposing legislation which the unions regard as "the most overt attack on the freedom of British working people since the late Eighteenth Century...
...Confident that no economic policy is a government's best economic policy, Heath's only answer has been to exhort workers to be less extravagant and employers to be less generous...
...More enraged by tepid socialism than afraid of timid conservatism, many Labor Party activists of the new and old left abstained from voting or working for Wilson in the election campaign last June...
...Reginald Maudling, a wild-eyed leftist in the Tory context, took over the Home Office...
...To the average voter, Tory campaign speeches no longer sounded like alibis for midnight evictions of widows and orphans...
...A special TUC conference on March 18 rejected calls for a prolonged general strike against the bill...
...The Tory anti-Marketeers are led by Enoch Powell, a shrewd and ambitious challenger with a talent for puffing a gust of prejudice into gale-force xenophobia...
...for strikes: make most union activity illegal...
...When the patient does not respond to medication, the average Tory MP is more inclined to double the dosage than to change the prescription...
...permit the government to order cooling-off periods in certain disputes...
...But union leaders feel compelled to appease .shop-floor militants with truculent speeches...
...His failure to slow inflation has eroded old values and fostered despair...
...Forecasts for 1971-72 are universally grim...
...The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently described the situation as "probably the most acute faced by any major country...
...It would be a gamble against long odds...
...If the politicians cannot convince the pragmatic opposition to the Common Market with economic logic, electoral logic will soon persuade many of the politicians...
...His article, "Color Crisis in Britain," appeared in the June, 1970 issue...
...The foreign affairs portfolio went to former prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, a repentant grouse-moor aristocrat...
...This dilemma could have been avoided by leaving open the possibility of collaboration with the unions to level off rising wages...
...During the 1950s and early 1960s, Tories and La-borites packed the middle ground so tightly that journalists coined the word "Butskellism" (combining the names of R. A. Butler, the architect of Conservative domestic policy, and the late Hugh Gaitskell, then Labor Party leader) to describe the prevailing ideology...
...Unlike Wilson, Heath could not dispatch his rival by stealing his arguments...
...Most political leaders on both sides now realize that the Common Market Six—France, Belgium, Luxembourg, West Germany, Italy and The Netherlands—need Britain and Britain needs the Six if Europe is to compete with America in the advanced technologies...
...Corporations were promised fat refunds...
...In brief, the proposals are bits and pieces of the Wagner, Taft-Hartley, and Landrum-Griffin Acts scissored out, slightly edited, and then pasted into one comprehensive bill...
...Britain's Tory Counter-Revolution by EDWARD W. KNAPPMAN London Britain's political and social equilibrium—envied by many Americans just a year ago—has been shaken off-balance by ten months of Conservative government...
...Britain has fallen behind its international competitors during the past twenty-five years...
...He went on to pledge "a quiet but total revolution...
...Nevertheless, many Labor MPs fear union propaganda and action only draw attention to Heath's most popular issue...
...American, Canadian, and Australian unions have all learned to live with similar legislation...
...for racial troubles: send colored immigrants back where they came from...
...Like the United States, Britain is in the depths of 'stagflation' . . The British electorate is as hostile to the Market as Britain's leaders are enthusiastic...
...Even a half-effective general strike might give Heath the justification he needs to call a general election on the question, "Who shall rule: the unions or Parliament...
...But there is a more rational case against the Market based on the effect that its protectionist agricultural policy would have on Britain, the world's greatest food importer...
...Compared by his admirers to de Gaulle, Powell seems prepared to take strong action to restore law and order if the country reaches the brink of chaos...
...We were returned to office," Heath himself told the delegates, "to change the course of history in this nation— nothing less...
...his actions and statements on trade unionism have reawakened the class conflict and traded on fears of chaos...
...EDWARD W. KNAPPMAN, a former editor of Facts on File, is currently free lancing in London...
...The political consensus has been shattered...
...Last year the United States, for all its legislation, lost four times as many working days per employe as did Britain...
...the seven per cent rate of inflation is the worst in Western Europe...
...But it has been steadily losing ground since the middle of the last century when the free market was in its prime...
...Day after day the editorial writers for Tory newspapers flog union leaders and strikers for their unpatriotic greed...
...Like the United States, Britain is in the depths of "stagflation": stagnation with inflation...
...British Leyland and a half-dozen other corporate giants are on the verge of bankruptcy...
...The proposed Tory legislation would outlaw jurisdictional strikes, closed shops, and secondary boycotts...
...With the crucial matter of the five-year length of the transition period to full membership in the Market already settled, the remaining differences should be resolved before the end of this year...
...Several pundits have come close to predicting it in their columns...
...The Common Market debate will become as volatile as the trade union issue if the Brussels negotiations on British entry are successful...
...The old order did, indeed, begin to teeter when treasury chief Barber presented the government's interim budget two weeks later...
...Heath's war of words against inflation and the unions has met with skepticism and ridicule among his own partisans...
...10 Downing Street last June...
...Paul's on the road to Damascus...
...If Powell does win, it will not be with the help of the usual party kingmakers...
...The present condition of the British economy is one of those rare topics upon which three economists do not have four opinions: they agree it is a mess...
...The new minister of education's first official action was to inform local authorities that the ministry had junked Labor's plan to relax the rigid examination and track system of schooling which disadvantages children from immigrant and working class families...
...Macleod died in July and was replaced by Anthony Barber, a former Conservative Party chairman who paraphrases Adam Smith and Horatio Alger as often and as fervently as an evangelist borrows from Genesis and Revelations...
...Farm subsidies were to be eliminated, thus assuring a rise in food prices...
...Rolls-Royce has already foundered...
...The last Conservative government had accepted and even, in its tinkering way, improved the half-finished welfare state begun by the postwar Labor administration...
...Especially damaging to the economy and irritating to the public were the many unpredictable wildcat strikes called to protest grievances or enforce jurisdictional claims against rival unions...
...Trade union reform is an ideal wedge to drive between the electorate and the Labor Party coupled to its union allies...
...guarantee elections for bargaining agents...
...With Heath commanding a thirty-member parliamentary majority and deadset on enactment, the bill cannot be defeated, however loudly the unions squawk...
...Whether Britain is led by Powell or Heath, the certainty of a revival of class conflict, social insecurity, and lawless capitalism casts an ominous shadow over the future...
...Enoch Powell, the knight-errant of the Tory romantics, was exiled to the backbenches because of his churlish speeches on race and the Common Market...
...To the TUC, these provisions signal "a fundamental and retrogressive change in the whole basis of industrial relations in Britain...
...Trade union officials and Labor Party leaders concede that unauthorized stoppages are futile and provocative...
...No government," the pro-Labor New Statesman complained, "has made a more radical change in the general direction of our society since the days of Lloyd George...
...The Trades Union Council (TUC), the British equivalent of the AFL-CIO, is cramped in its efforts to discipline strike-happy shop stewards by long-standing traditions of local control...
...Every gauge of opinion from the polls to the contents of parliamentary mailbags, indicates growing and passionate opposition...
...Phrased with diplomatic tact, this was a declaration that Britain is the economic sick man of Europe...
...Labor MPs giggled for a week after Heath summoned workers to emulate a group of twenty-three admirals, generals, and air chief marshals who had agreed to a deferment of salary increases of $2,400 and more—for six months...
...To do so he would be required to repudiate a treaty negotiated on his own terms...
...Heath and his ministers, who in their campaign had agreed that inflation made high wage claims understandable, were soon berating the unions for holding the country for ransom with outrageous demands...
...The Financial Times has warned that inaction now will necessitate drastic action later...
...If the process has recently become more obvious, it is because the country lived off and used up the accumulated fat of its overseas assets during World War II...
...In board room conversations and televised orations, Tory spokesmen admonish employers to stiffen resistance to union wage demands...
...The men Heath chose at the outset to sit beside him on the government's front bench seemed as reassuring as their leader...
...Harold Wilson's skill as a nose-counter, and his grace as a quick-change artist are political legends...
...Investments in new machinery and productivity gains will be almost nil...
...for European integration: ignore it...
...industry has few wildcat strikes it is not because there are legal penalties, as labor mediator Theodore Kheel recently pointed out...
...Before he could read the files or consult with his aides, Home blurted out a promise to sell arms to South Africa, an affront to black Africans and other opponents of racism...
...In one not unusual case, a strike by less than two dozen craftsmen in a Cheshire factory making automobile components resulted in layoffs for thousands of workers from Kent in the Southeast to Scotland...
...make industry-union contracts legally enforceable...
...An anti-Market petition has already been signed by 107 Labor MPs, thirty-eight per cent of the parliamentary Labor Party...
...Powell can exploit such emotions by offering pat solutions for every problem: For inflation: print less money...
...Judging from American experience, even when contracts are legally-binding few employers are foolish enough to jeopardize a strike settlement by suing a union for damages...
...Richard Crossman, a former Labor minister, suspects that Heath has set the fuse on a time bomb by scheduling the bill to become law in 1973...
...There are more jobless than in any year since 1940...
...The prospect of Powell becoming prime minister is unfortunately quite real...
...His theme is that by coddling the inefficient and providing "a haven for scroungers," society has penalized initiative and curbed economic growth...
...Labor Party leaders contend these are only the first consequences of a Tory counter-revolution...
...Opinion polls consistently report that reform measures are favored by at least two-thirds of the general public and a majority of trade unionists...
...A liberal expansionist, Iain Macleod, was named chancellor of the exchequer with responsibility for the nation's economy...
...Few independent experts endorse this assessment by the unions, but almost all say the Tory proposals are irrelevant to Britain's industrial and economic difficulties...
...Counter-revolutions are easily begun but not so easily stopped...
...Commenting on the budget on television, one leading Tory gloated, "We have merely had the hors d'oeuvre" The rest of the menu soon leaked to the press...
...Only Britain is down much deeper...
...The financial press predicts gradual but steady increases in unemployment...
...The solution for "stagflation" baffles and divides the economists...
...class hatreds have been inflamed...
...The comprehensive National Health Service was to be run on a fee-for-service basis for all but the destitute...
...The recent silence on the Market issue of James Callaghan, who would be Home Secretary if Labor were in power, has invited speculation that he is preparing a bid for Labor leadership...
...the keynote of his campaign had been, in effect, a promise to be more boring than Labor's leader, Harold Wilson...
...Commercial radio was to be developed and shielded from competition by silencing the BBC's rock music network...
...Government spending on housing subsidies, school milk and lunch programs, investment incentives for depressed areas, transport subsidies, and other social services were to be pruned or entirely rooted out...
...Wages are expected to climb by nine to eleven per cent this year, which means consumer prices will go up by five to seven per cent...
...some unions have staged nationwide one-day work stoppages...
...it is because there are systematic grievance procedures at the factory level...
...By adding 150 clauses and nearly 100 pages to concise British labor law, the Tory bill certainly would fundamentally change the statute books...
...Even the stodgy elders of the Bank of England and the Treasury have urged Heath to choose between strict wage-price controls and a rigorous squeeze with higher taxes, tighter credit, more unemployment, and more bankruptcies...
...His hopes lie with the rank-and-file MPs who consider him free of any responsibility for Heath's blunders...
...Charges for various health services were to rise and admission fees were to be introduced in traditionally free art galleries and museums...
...Within both parliamentary parties, there are factions attacking their parties' pro-European leadership...
...To appease the right, a few zealots were given the relatively unimportant ministries: technology, public works, and transport...
...For a man of Heath's temperament and in view of his campaign promises, either policy would require a conversion akin to that of St...
...But the changes on the shop floor and in the negotiating suites will be less revolutionary than the TUC fears or Heath hopes...
...on March 1, 100,000 labor demonstrators rallied in London to protest the bill...
...Opposition is too extensive and too hot to be stifled by party discipline...
...Profitable activities of government-owned industries were to be auctioned off to private enterprise...
...The new prime minister's personality remains as lifeless as a leftover Yorkshire pudding...
...To those left frustrated by the crumbling of the old order and in despair because of the shrinking value of their now decimalized pounds, these drastic answers seem more to the point than Heath's laissez faire metaphysics...
...Heath's theory is that Britons have grown flabby and shiftless in an over-protective welfare state and now need to be shoved into the rough-and-tumble of the free market...
...Heath's position is less secure...
...If U.S...
...If the voters remain hostile, these caucuses—on the Labor left and the Tory right—will win over many moderate MPs whose eyes and opinions follow the popularity charts...
...Ladbrokes, Britain's largest chain of bookmakers, sets the odds at one in four...
...welfare programs have been mangled...
...Over the past five years the public has demanded with increasing fury that "something be done about the unions...
...The Economist has written it off as no policy at all...
...No one could doubt Tory intentions after the autumn party conference...
...Some say "slam on the brakes," others say "step on the gas...
...The country's frail economy has been racked with convulsions by overdoses of free enterprise castor oil...
...Almost seven million man-days were lost during the first three months of 1971...
...The Tories insist they will exhilarate Britain's sluggish economy with such actions and plans...
Vol. 35 • May 1971 • No. 5
