Lord Donoughue: Striking difference in Labour's relations with the unions today

Again we see trade union pickets demonstrating fiercely, this time to bring British Airways, the railways and parts of the civil service to a halt, with more industries and services possibly in line for strike action. British Gas workers are the latest to vote for industrial action.

Again we have a national economic crisis, which means there are few resources in the coffers of either business or government to buy off militant claims.

Again we have a long-serving Labour Government limping behind in the polls and trying to avoid the electoral backlash of a public irritated by the inconvenience which union disruption brings.

Yet despite these familiar echoes, to me, as someone who then sat in the centre of Number 10 throughout the 1979 crisis, this year's events are more striking for their differences than for their similarities to the dramas of 30 years ago.

For a start, the central government is much less directly involved with – and therefore held less guilty for – the nation's industrial relations confrontations.

In the 1970s, the Labour Government was hand-in-glove with the trade unions, due to its Social Contract with the TUC. The Government had introduced a pay policy which meant that Whitehall was concerned with almost every detail of all major wage settlements.

The trade union leaders regularly trooped through the big black front door of Number 10 to discuss with ministers – and especially with Prime Minister Callaghan and Chancellor Denis Healey – both the broad pay policy and particular disputes. Consequently, when things went wrong on pay and inflation, the Government was deeply implicated and it shared the public wrath which fell on the unions.

Above all, things did then go wrong on a scale quite different from that which faces Britain today. Nearly every industry, nearly every public service and most of the big trade unions were involved during an intensive five months of industrial conflict.

The chaos started in the private sector over the Christmas and New Year of 1978-9. Union strikes forced high wage capitulations at Ford Motors and the oil tanker employers. Through the breach poured the nationalised industries and the public service workers. The ministers responsible for the latter quailed and surrendered.

The most dramatic (and sometimes exaggerated by the Press) episodes concerned refusals to help the sick in hospitals and to bury the dead. For a time in early 1979, the country's economy ground virtually to a halt. On January 22, as my diaries painfully show, I had to walk to work in Downing Street through the snow and ice because virtually the whole transport system was on strike, while a million and a half public service employees stayed home, and parts of the country were without water supplies.

The militant unions destroyed their own Labour Government and prepared the way for the new Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, virtually to destroy the trade unions in return. It was political lunacy by the left wing. But it should be remembered that their union members had loyally accepted deep cuts in real incomes over the previous two years of pay policy. They now followed their extremist shop stewards in refusing to accept another year of pay restraint.

Nothing like that 1979 situation exists today.

The scale of union militancy is much more limited. It is confined to a few unions (admittedly powerful, as with Unite) with a few

irresponsible and unrepresentative left wing leaders. These, as in 1979, appear not to care if the Labour Government is defeated since, as earlier, they hope to take control of a weakened Labour Party in opposition.

But the majority of British unions and their members are moderate and responsible, even when having genuine grievances. The public sector is admittedly grumbling, but really has little to grumble about. It has better job security, better pensions and conditions, and often better pay than the private sector.

Most workers are much better off than in 1979. No major sector has had to suffer the real cuts in living standards which most workers suffered in 1977-79. Inflation – the scourge which usually transfers wealth from workers' pay to the rich with mobile assets – is around only 2-3 per cent whereas in 1979 it was rapidly rising into double figures and beyond.

Today it could be argued that it is not the unions, but employers such as BA, with a gung-ho chief executive and a weak chairman, which are being provocative – BA even withdrawing offers already on the table, something no responsible employer would have tried in 1979.

Clearly, the similarities with 1979 may strengthen in the weeks ahead leading up to the election. A few more groups of workers may take up the sword. The Labour Government, though looking much more resilient than it did earlier, and with a closing and not widening opinion poll gap, may even so slip into defeat.

But on the industrial relations front – and especially in the public sector – I suspect that the real battles will come not before but after the election. Then the government of whichever party will finally have to grasp the public finance nettles which Gordon Brown and David Cameron have avoided in the 12 months ahead of the election.

Even then, events may not evolve as confrontationally as they did earlier. I am not sure that Gordon Brown, although from a similar background, has the non-conformist convictions of James Callaghan in pursuing national financial probity regardless of electoral consequences. And I fear that David Cameron has none of the clear convictions and essential steel of Margaret Thatcher.

So events may evolve with more of a political fudge than they did in those dramatic times three decades ago.

Lord Donoughue of Ashton – Bernard Donoughue – was a political adviser to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.