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Bernard Ingham: A step back in time with Neanderthal brothers
NEANDEARTHAL man is alive and well in Britain. He looks like union leaders Derek Simpson and Bob Crow. These primitives have learned nothing since Arthur Scargill led his miners to defeat in 1985.
Indeed, their only desire is apparently to inhabit the wasteland their essentially terrorist regime was making of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.
Crow may be losing his touch since it is ASLEF not RMT drivers who were beaten by the weather in trying to sabotage the Christmas Eurostar service to the Continent. It is unusual to find that he is not behind a holiday strike.
As for Simpson, we have a man who by all accounts felt a 12-day strike of British Airways' cabin crew over Christmas and the New Year was a bit "over the top" though necessary "to bring some sense to the situation".
Never mind that up to one million people would be denied the family Christmases they had paid for. BA's management must be taught a lesson never ever to act in the interests of a company losing money hand over fist without securing his approval.
The arrogance of the man.
I am not saying that BA has the most gifted management in Christendom, given the number of industrial relations scrapes it gets into, though it clearly does not inhabit a constructive environment. After all, baggage handlers and check-in staff threatened to do to others what the courts have prevented cabin crew from doing to BA passengers over the holiday period.
You have to feel some sympathy for Willie Walsh, its chief executive, when he is only marginally trying to cut the generous manning on BA planes to offset the crippling losses being caused to aviation by the recession.
I find it impossible to rank BA cabin crew with the lumpen proletariat, though clearly their pay, as distinct from their lifestyle, does not quite put them in the same league as bankers.
At this juncture, I should perhaps explain my position as a former junior shop steward on this newspaper, circa 1960. I went on to join the Department of Employment and Productivity to help Barbara Castle launch her monumentally misnamed White Paper In Place of Strife.
Between 1968-73, I spent much of my time as a member of the team trying to conciliate an endless stream of strikes and on the Tories' ill-fated Industrial Relations Act and Ted Heath's fruitless talks with the TUC.
In 1974, I moved to the newly formed Department of Energy in the midst of an oil, coal and political crisis partly caused by another miners' dispute and finally ended up with Margaret Thatcher as Scargill tried to bring down the elected government in 1984-85.
Let us leave aside all this talk by historians that trade union leaders of the time were far too close to the Kremlin. I learned several other things from this experience.
The first was the unions' absolute determination to use the poor bloody customer as a pawn in their power games. They were at their most powerful, as in the BA strike, when they were disrupting the lives of millions of people. Their hypocrisy in putting on a passable imitation of regret was wonderful to behold. It was as if they had been denied God's gift of free will.
The second was their single-minded pursuit not necessarily of better terms and conditions for their members but the perpetuation of the heroic struggle between labour and capital. The fight was all – and to hell with the company, jobs and economy.
The third was their flexible approach to democracy. Before Thatcher's crackdown, militants played fast and loose with votes or, in the case of Scargill, avoided them if they were likely to get in the way of the desired stoppage. The closed shop was as bad a deal for the terrorised shopfloor worker as for the firm and its customers.
Union leaders were affronted at the very idea of any interference with "free collective bargaining". It was somehow offside for Thatcher, on behalf of the suffering populace, to bring it within a framework of law. Hence, Simpson's view 15 years later that the BA court injunction was "a bad day for democracy".
Even allowing for the insenitivities of many managers, Neandearthal man has learned nothing in the interim. He longs atavistically for the bad old days. Hence reports that his concept of democracy is to build up a "war chest" to "bash hell" out of an incoming Tory Government. You have been warned.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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