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ERRATIC BEHAVIOUR
"I believe it's very important that the TUC should not be seen to be in the pocket of a Labour Government." (Gormley, p.l93). But on the other hand: "By 1967, 1 was getting extremely worried about the way the Trade Union Movement was losing control of the Labour Party. After all, the unions set up the Party in order to give themselves a voice for their aspirations in the House of Commons. And...we were, and are, the paymasters of the Party, and in many ways its custodians. So far as I was concerned, the unions had to be in control of the Party" (p.71; the 1967 issue was Barbara Castle's proposed Bill to bring the trade unions within the law: "In Place Of Strife". The Bill was scotched under trade union pressure, which was represented within the Cabinet by Callaghan.)
Those two statements by Gormley are in contradiction. If the trade unions control the Party, then they must be responsible for the actions of a Labour Government. They can hardly oppose the policies of a party which they control. The two are one, and you can describe the relationship as the trade unions being in the Government's pocket or as the Government being in the trade unions' pocket. And trade union leaders all know very well that it is much easier to criticise a Labour government than to operate one.
The trade unions were able to have it both ways through the device of making the Parliamentary Party autonomous. If they could agree on a policy they could easily make it Party policy. If it was implementable they could make sure that it was implemented. And if it was not implementable, they could lay the blame for failure to implement it on the timidity or subservience of the Party leader who was elected by the PLP.
Gormley understood all of this, and therefore he opposed any change in the method of electing the leader. But trade union instincts had been eroded by ideology, and in 1980 the trade unions took to themselves the major say in the election of the Party leader, who would be Prime Minister in the case of a general election being won. This change, combined with the adoption of mandatory re-selection of candidates, means that the distinction between Government and trade unions will not be sustainable with regard to a future Labour Government. The PLP now has only a 30% say in the choice of leader, so it is no longer serviceable as a scapegoat. And the same failure of instinct which caused the unions to assume direct control of the Party, also caused them to fight last year's election with policies which were widely considered to be utterly foolish. Thatcher got her second term because a large body of working class opinion decided that the Labour Party had become unfit to govern.
MANAGEMENT RESTORED
"I was pretty sceptical of the Bullock Report, and the idea of workers being involved in management... How, for instance, could I honestly sit down as a member of the Coal Board? But workers' participation.. .is quite a different matter...
"When I was a young man, it was easy to be led to believe that the working class starts and finishes at a certain level, and then came the middle class and the intelligentsia and so on. And it may still be very easy for people in the capitalist part of the economy... But now that the mines are part of a nationalised industry, I look around me and ask 'Where does it start and where does it finish?'
"For me Derek Ezra is a worker. Coal Board managers are workers. I didn't stop being a worker when I first became a union official... But that still doesn't mean that one should ignore the distinction between workers, or whatever you call them, and management. They are different roles, and it's just as important, if not more so, that managers should manage, and manage efficiently , as for the man at the coal face to extract the last possible lump of coal." (Gormley, p205).
Gormley worked in the mines under the old mine-owners, so he sees the difference, and values it. Scargill didn't work in the private mines, and he cultivates an attitude towards the Coal Board which obliterates the distinction between it and the mine-owners. Denis Skinner, MP, a worker who has blossomed into an entertaining caricature of the proletariat, rejoices in the fact that, whereas the miners had to buy their own implements under the mine-owners, and these rotted away during the 1926 strike, it is the property of the Coal Board which is rotting away down the mines now. To the Scargill/Skinner outlook, the Coal Board is a sort of gullible capitalist, with unlimited funds, whom it is easy to beat.
For over thirty years there have been close relations between the Coal Board and the NUM. Both the Board and the Union are the products of nationalisation. The Union pre-dates the Board by a couple of years, but both developed within the movement organised and dominated by Ernest Bevin, which transformed British society after 1945. They ran the industry jointly, and they engaged in conflict only over wages. And, short of allowing the Union to decide wage rates unilaterally, that conflict was unavoidable.
Benn offered Gormley the Chairmanship of the Coal Board in 1976. Gormley saw no advantage to the miners in his becoming Chairman, so he asked that Derek Ezra's contract be renewed. He thereby deprived Scargill of an unimaginable ecstasy - a strike against Gormley would have caused his cup of happiness to overflow.
It was a stroke of genius on Thatcher's part to bring in MacGregor. Seeing that Scargill was intent on treating the NCB as if it were a confederation of the old mine-owners, this move provided him with a credibly capitalist Chairman of the Board. Derek Ezra would never have done for the part. Thatcher was determined that in future disputes within nationalised industries would not be direct disputes between union and Government, as they had been in the past, therefore she appointed a Chairman who had the stature to function as a managerial opposition to Scargill.
The appointment of McGregor has been widely condemned as a mischievous provocation. But it is only the working out of the trade union decision to shoot down the Bullock proposals on the ground that "it is the business of management to manage".