22.05.1997

Union leaders bite their tongues

Earlier this week the government announced the appointment of Martin Taylor, chief executive of Barclays Bank, as chair of its ‘task force’ on tax and benefits. This follows hard on the heels of the recruitment of Sir David Simon, chairman of British Petroleum, as minister for trade and competitiveness in Europe and dispels any possible doubts about Labour’s big business orientation.

These appointments symbolise the government’s commitment to do all in its power in two key areas at the service of British capital. Its major strategic task is to complete an irreversible orientation towards the European Union and ever closer integration. But to do that the drive to further austerity at home must go on relentlessly, not least in order to meet the Maastricht criteria.

Taylor’s main job will therefore be to target the £95 billion annual welfare budget, which accounts for one third of all government spending. As part of this drive, Gordon Brown will confirm his planned attacks on the unemployed, along with subsidies for employers to take on more staff. But, as the Daily Telegraph points out, “The most likely result is that employers will pocket the subsidy, employ those whom they intended to employ anyway - or else swap one lot of workers for another” (‘City comment’, May 17).

The Telegraph concludes that the number of unemployed can only be reduced when the economy grows. However, “another good way is to make it harder to collect benefits”, and so it advises the chancellor to employ less carrot and even more stick to “scare enough idlers into looking for work”. The sum conclusion is that the unemployed can be made to ‘disappear’ from the official statistics and left to fend for themselves - a growing consensus which underlies Brown’s ‘welfare to work’ sham.

As part of the squeeze on public sector spending Brown is stressing the need to keep within the Tories’ projected spending limits - a disaster for the health service in particular. And the prime minister’s office announced that “there will be a very tough line on public sector pay”. This follows health secretary Frank Dobson’s warning to health workers that Labour had not been elected in order to improve their pay. Very true. New Labour is certainly carrying out its election promises to hammer workers on all fronts.

Over the last two years average pay for public sector workers has fallen in real terms and, despite its pathetic ‘minimum wage’ sop, Labour will attempt to enforce further cuts on millions of the lowest paid in the coming period.

According to The Independent, union leaders are “privately dismayed”, but are stoically biting their tongues (May 16). Apparently even the meekest of objections might so upset New Labour that it will spitefully refuse to repeal some of the Tories’ industrial relations legislation. The “big prizes” for the union bureaucrats, says The Independent, are a law on union recognition and easier deduction of union dues from wages.

Those naive workers who believe that they join a union in order to defend and improve their pay and conditions are clearly sadly mistaken. For the bureaucrats the existence of unions is an aim in itself, and an easy life for their officials comes way ahead of the members’ interests in their list of priorities.

This was illustrated by union leaders’ delight at foreign secretary Robin Cook’s lifting of the union ban at the GCHQ spy centre. Far from being won through workers’ own struggle, the right to belong to a trade union has been magnanimously ‘granted’ in this case. That ensures that, in line with government intentions to keep the whole union movement neutered, GCHQ workers will remain powerless - union or not - to achieve any worthwhile advances. Strikes, in practice suppressed in every workplace in the country, will be explicitly banned at the Cheltenham centre.

An indication that Labour’s honeymoon - both with the establishment and large sections of the whole population - will not continue indefinitely came with the first allegations of sleaze against one of its MPs. Mohammad Sarwar, the member for Glasgow Govan, was accused of offering bribes to opponents in the general election campaign. This self-seeking millionaire businessman likes to portray himself as a tireless campaigner for the ordinary man and woman and is fond of promoting himself in populist causes.

Bourgeois politicians, by the very nature of the system they serve, are inevitably sucked towards corruption the nearer they come to power. And Tony Blair’s viciously anti-working class Labour government will not be an exception.

Alan Fox