Remember the futility of strikes

The language of industrial strife is back. After almost two decades of peace in industrial relations, which saw Britain's strike record change from being one of the worst to one of the best in the developed world, there is a new militancy in the air and confrontation on the platforms. In December and January London's commuters were harassed by a series of two-day strikes on South West Trains. In February Arriva trains were hit by strikes in the North of England. London was threatened with a Tube drivers' strike. Then, on the first day of March, the Financial Times reported the possibility of the first national strike for over 20 years to be called by public sector workers. Three unions, Unison, the GMB and the Transport and General Workers, which between them represent 1.2 million local government employees from bin men to social workers, are urging rejection of a three per cent pay offer. They will then press for a ballot on industrial action.

They are not alone. The Post Office faces likely disruption as it sheds jobs to compete with the private sector. British Airways tiptoes on a knife-edge as management seeks to cut costs without provoking another cabin crew uprising like the one that crippled the airline five years ago. The banking and insurance staffs are in a constant state of feuding with their employers over mergers and closures. Teachers regularly threaten to take to the barricades rather than the classrooms, and even the police seem sufficiently angry and upset to strike if they were allowed to, having rejected a pay and reform package from the Home Office. All that is before we even start to mention what is going on in the health service.

We have been here before and it was no fun at all. Back in 1978-9, the last Labour government of Jim Callaghan was finally humiliated and discredited by what became known as the "winter of discontent". The rubbish piled high in the streets and the dead waiting to be buried provoked a voter backlash of such ferocity that incoming Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a mandate to pass draconian anti-strike legislation, including compulsory ballots and a ban on secondary picketing. That in turn led to Thatcher's victory over the miners and Rupert Murdoch's victory at Wapping. The winter of discontent became eventually a glorious summer of industrial relations harmony.

The ensuing labour market flexibility has transformed Britain's economic prospects over the past 20 years, but it appears now, as the memory of the depressing 1970s fades, that the lessons are being forgotten.

But a few apocalyptic headlines do not mean all the gains have been lost. Things are different now in all sorts of ways. The traditional battlegrounds of heavy industry no longer exist. Deep mine coal production has virtually ceased in this country and there are fewer than 20,000 miners today, as opposed to almost 200,000 at the time of the strike. We barely have a shipbuilding industry. Docks and dock workers have been replaced by container terminals and freight through the Channel Tunnel. Companies like ICI and GEC which used to employ 150,000 people, now have a third or less of that number. The big beasts of 1970s motor production, Ford, British Leyland and Vauxhall and Chrysler, have shrunk almost to extinction in the UK and their Japanese replacements, Nissan, Honda and Toyota employ mostly robots, which being Japanese most certainly do not go on strike. Industrial confrontation won't come back to this country because we no longer have enough industry to confront.

People are different too and now have much more to lose. Brian Souter, the chairman of Stagecoach who defeated the newly elected railway union militant Bob Crowe in the recent South West Trains dispute, says modern trade union leaders need to understand that strikes don't pay. It may lead to a higher pay offer, but that will never be enough to make up for what has been lost by staying away from work. He points out that even unskilled workers no longer live in council houses with subsidised rents where they could hold out for weeks. Even the lowest paid have mortgages and credit card bills and families who want holidays.

Having said that, the lowest unemployment for 30 years does give the unions a stronger hand, and militancy is much more attractive when there is not a queue of unemployed at the gate. Tactics have also been modified, taking Souter's point, to minimise the damage to the pay packet and maximise the inconvenience to the public. Hence the switch to one-day and twoday strikes starting and ending at midday, rather than the set-piece confrontations that closed the railways, docks or car plants down for six to ten weeks.

None of this will be any comfort for the Government which, whether it likes it or not, is right in the firing line. Ministers from Byers to Milburn, to say nothing of Brown and Blair, are more than a bit responsible for the souring of the mood. They say they believe in the market economy, but this Government's approach to management is unashamedly Stalinist.

It believes in command and control from the centre with government plucking targets from the air and demanding they are met regardless of whether they make sense or not. There is no understanding of the distortions, the lies and the evasions which take place as managers cook the books to justify another ministerial sound bite. But the employees see this, and even the saints are getting cynical. There is a general loss of patience with the Labour government, and a growing feeling that there is nothing to be lost by taking it on.

It is not just that voters are an ungrateful lot - though they are. The frustration and discontent is also an inevitable consequence of too much heavy-handed control from the centre. But whereas Stalin could see to it that complainers were exiled, imprisoned or shot, all Tony Blair can do is harangue the discontents for being wreckers. It is nowhere near as effective. If we are to avoid a deeply unpleasant and wasteful slide back to the strike-torn Britain of the 1970s, the unions need to understand too how working practices need to change, and the Prime Minister has to persuade them the change is worthwhile. That will require real discussion of substance though, not spin, and he does not have much time.