The government can be made to change course on the economy but Labour must be bolder, Brendan Barber tells Robert Philpot and Richard Angell
It may not yet be a return to the dark days of the 1980s, but these are difficult times for Britain’s trade unions.
The recession has seen a fall in the number of trade unionists, while the onset of swingeing cuts to the public sector is bound to hit hard a movement which draws only four in 10 of its members from the private sector. At the same time, the anti-union sabre-rattling from the Tory backbenches now appears to be reaching government with business secretary Vince Cable’s warning to the GMB that increased industrial action could lead to tougher labour laws.
The years of Labour government – when unions received new rights to organise in the workplace, public sector employment leapt, and, for a decade, the economy grew strongly – now appear not only distant, but a somewhat missed opportunity. Despite the friendly environment, union membership was a mere 34,000 higher as Britain entered recession in 2008 than it was when Labour came to power in 1997. By the time the party left power, it was lower than when Tony Blair entered No 10.
But despite this bleak picture the TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, appears upbeat. This apparent optimism rests on the hope that, unlike Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron can be made to turn and that the TUC can play a key role in increasing the pressure on him to do so.
Barber’s confidence stems both from the coalition that the TUC assembled for its half-a-million-strong ‘March for the Alternative’ three months ago, and from the number of U-turns that the government has already executed once it scents unpopularity. The march, says Barber, was, ‘a fantastically powerful demonstration of the degree of public disenchantment with the policies this government is pursuing. It really did bring middle Britain together.’
The TUC’s challenge now, says its general secretary, is to ‘build on the momentum that the march established and to intensify the political pressure on the government. This is about putting coalition MPs under real pressure to force the government to rethink their approach’.
While Barber admits that there are not ‘immediate’ signs of this happening, he believes that may yet change if despite the ‘pretty solid recoveries’ taking place in most of the country’s main competitors, Britain continues ‘bumping along the bottom’.
To buttress his argument, Barber also cites the example of the government’s about-turn on NHS reform, arguing that ‘we have to hope that the same will emerge on their approach to
the economy.’
Barber recognises that the coalition’s shift on NHS reform has, in part, been the result of the Liberal Democrats’ attempt to reposition themselves following their disastrous performance in May’s elections. ‘Whether on the broader economy we begin to see that [repositioning] emerging, that is a possibility. It is obviously not there at the moment,’ he admits.
Nonetheless, Barber believes that it is a question of when, and not if, George Osborne is forced to change course and adopt a Plan B: ‘You can never be sure of these things, but what I am sure of is you can certainly build ever-greater political pressure and I think the signs are the government will have to yield to that. How long it will take we’ll have to see.’
The TUC general secretary is, however, willing to admit that while both the unions and the Labour party have made clear their desire for an ‘alternative’ to Osborne’s approach, they have yet to provide clarity about what the alternative is:
‘Yes I think there is an issue there,’ he concedes. ‘There is still a degree of uncertainty about exactly what the approach would be to reducing the deficit. But it seems to me, in a sense the broader challenge is not just about what the alternative is on deficit reduction, it is what is the alternative on building a new economy … with a very different relationship between the financial sector and the rest of the economy than what has prevailed over the recent period.’
But, echoing Ed Miliband’s ‘squeezed middle’ narrative, Barber also believes that the problems of the British economy go deeper than those thrown up by the banking crisis: ‘The proportion of GDP that goes into the salary packs of ordinary workers has been reducing over the last 30 years,’ he says. ‘So this isn’t just a crisis that comes out of the banking collapse in 2008, there is a bigger trend in our economy that we have got to find a way of addressing. Now in all of those areas, we have a job to do in sharpening up our prospectus for an alternative economy, and Labour has, too.’
It is not just a question of ‘sharpening up its prospectus’ that Barber wants to see from Labour. He also calls on the party to be ‘bolder’ in its approach to the economy, arguing for it to break with Alistair Darling’s plan to halve the deficit in four years.
‘I didn’t support Alistair Darling’s proposals,’ Barber says. ‘I thought that it was unnecessarily ridgid to lock yourself into a timetable for deficit reduction with the implications of serious cuts of a big scale when the economy was demonstrably so fragile. The Labour leadership has now taken a view that they should commit themselves to that kind of position. That wasn’t a position I supported; I didn’t think it was right at the time [and] I made it clear at the time.’
But does not such an approach risk opening Labour up to the very charge of financial profligacy that the coalition has had such apparent success in pinning on the party judging by the polls? While the TUC general secretary says he is ‘conscious of the charge that Labour governments face of fiscal irresponsibility and I am conscious that Labour politicians don’t want to walk into that punch,’ he believes that ‘there is another punch to not walk into as well [and that] is of insufficient imagination in articulating a very different type of economy.’
The argument within and between Labour and the unions about how the party restores its reputation for fiscal competence is, of course, very much one that has emerged since the general election. During the party’s time in power, the main fault line between the government and the unions centred on the issue of public service reform.
Barber refutes the notion that the unions’ approach was unconstructive, but argues that its opposition to bringing in new forms of private financing and its market-based approach was justified: ‘Some of the more controversial elements of the reform programme – PFI funding, for example – we are beginning to see the chickens coming home to roost on issues like that.’ He also accuses the former government of having ‘relied on market-based ideas as the engine of reform and improvement, which has obviously been eagerly taken up by the coalition government now’. However, the evidence suggests, he argues, that these particular reforms were not responsible for the improvements which occurred.
Barber also refuses to accept that by constantly levelling the charge of privatisation and breaking-up public services – for instance, in the bitter debate about foundation hospitals – the unions may have damaged their credibility in challenging the coalition’s policies. ‘I don’t think so,’ he counters. ‘I think we have been reasonably consistent and think if we hadn’t been as vigorous in expressing our concerns, I think we would have been accused of double standards if we’d taken a different approach [with] the coalition government to the approach taken with the Labour government.’
While cuts and reforms to public services may trim the unions’ power, a more direct threat appears to have been growing in recent months with Tory backbenchers and London mayor Boris Johnson all suggesting new laws to further restrict the right to strike and organise. Barber says it was ‘disappointing to see Cable echo Cameron’s veiled threats to toughen up what are already some of the toughest laws in any democracy. While his words were more nuanced than some of the spin, this was a clear threat.’
The area is also one that falls directly under the jurisdiction of Liberal Democrat ministers Ed Davey and Cable. Does Barber find that at all reassuring? ‘In parts of the Conservative party there is obviously a pretty visceral hostility [to the unions] and it is certainly not like that in the Liberal Democrats. But they don’t position themselves as obvious or automatic allies of trade unionism. So I won’t rely on a political instinct of that sort if the debate goes off in that direction.’
Judging by Cable’s recent comments, that may be a wise call. The business secretary’s assurances that he does not intend to open up what Barber terms this ‘particular Pandora’s box’ now appear less categorical than they once did. Despite the TUC general secretary’s hopes, however, the chancellor’s apparent determination to prove that there is no alternative to his tough economic medicine may be somewhat longer lasting.
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