Britain’s terrible, useless unions

There was a time when trade unions played a vital part in the lives of working people. Back in the days of heartless factory owners and the “dark Satanic mills”, when workers were treated appallingly, toiling in dangerous conditions, with no paid holidays and no sick pay, unions rode to the rescue. They were legalised with the passing of the Trade Union Act 1871 and things began to change.

But during the course of the following century the trade union movement metamorphosed, moving away from the traditional, legitimate concerns of workers, as represented by the Labour Party (founded by the unions in 1900), and taking a hard left turn. There was a terrible inevitability about this. Under the guidance of the Soviet Union, by the 1930s the trade union movement was being effectively, if covertly, infiltrated by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Never mind that the vast majority of union members were not communists; it only took a minority of hardcore activists to put one of their own into a leadership position for that union to toe the Moscow line.

Stalin’s project worked well. Successive decades showed the extent of the damage this infiltration was to wreak on Britain’s industrial relations, its economy and its society. By the 1970s we were the “sick man of Europe”. My family moved to London at the beginning of that benighted decade and before long there was an electricity workers’ strike, a rubbish collectors’ strike, a postal workers’ strike, a miners’ strike, there were blackouts (leading to a shortage of candles) and the three-day week, militant shop stewards, closed shops and flying pickets.

When a bakery workers’ strike led to bread queues around the block, my father would get up at first light to be at our little local patisserie when it opened, in order to secure a loaf. I remember him grumbling about our having come to a “Third World country”. My mother said that it reminded her of wartime.

For several years from the mid-1970s onwards, I was a staff writer on the weekly Local Government Chronicle and belonged to the National Union of Journalists. It was a very militant union; every week there was a strike at some provincial newspaper or other and all members would be ordered to support it by coughing up a supplementary payment in addition to their annual dues.

I attended a handful of NUJ meetings. I remember one in particular. The famed Fleet Street journalist Bernard Levin — who had established himself as a crusading anti-communist — was also there and at one point got up to argue a case. But he was heckled and jeered by a clique of belligerent hard-left activists who easily dominated the proceedings and in the end Levin gave up in disgust and sat back down. The sight of the greatest journalist of his generation being silenced by a bunch of agitprop-spewing nobodies sickened me. I never went to another meeting.

But what finally made me ditch the union altogether was my experience on the only occasion I asked for its support. Although I had a full-time job on a magazine, being a hardworking and aspirational young thing, in my spare time I also wrote occasional short stories and articles which I submitted hither and yon, usually to some women’s weekly or monthly. (To be honest it was quite refreshing to write about other matters besides local government.) When I had a disagreement with one such women’s magazine over the publication of a story of mine, I phoned the NUJ for advice.

But far from obtaining their help, I was roundly rebuked. Apparently, as a member of the magazine branch I wasn’t entitled to do any freelance writing, because that was to take work away from members of the NUJ’s freelance branch. Indeed, I was stealing the very food from their mouths. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. After all, it wasn’t as if my not writing that humorous little piece about my wedding day for Brides Magazine gave someone else the chance to write about it instead. Well, I wouldn’t let anyone tell me what I was or wasn’t allowed to write in my spare time, so that spelt the end of my trade union days.

Please don’t get me started on the print unions — the worst of all, saturated with hideous “I’m all right, Jack” arrogance, slowly strangling the very industry on which they depended. But thankfully Rupert Murdoch came along to deal with all that and it was beautiful to see.

And of course there was Margaret Thatcher. I didn’t wholeheartedly embrace every one of the Iron Lady’s revolutionary acts, but the one I continue to bless her for is her definitive reining in of the trade unions, limiting the powers of those corrosive behemoths and bringing them to heel.

Workers today are protected by many of our laws, their rights are safeguarded by employment tribunals, and they can no longer be exploited as they once were. The unions know this so they focus their energies elsewhere, such as relentlessly striving to undermine Conservative governments, and propelling their candidates towards leadership of the Labour Party. They always pick the one most likely to kowtow to union demands, no matter how perverse, which was why they supported Jeremy Corbyn. Their strikes nowadays — highly costly to the country and calculated to inflict maximum pain on the public, most obviously on the railways — tend to revolve around confected grievances. But old habits die hard.

Another of their chief pursuits is playing identity politics. We recently witnessed a perfect example of this with the actor Laurence Fox’s now legendary appearance on BBC’s Question Time, when he dared to opine that the Duchess of Sussex had not been the victim of racism, because this is not a racist country, and that he was bored of hearing the charge of racism hurled at people willy-nilly. And he went further. When a mixed-race member of the audience labelled him a “white privileged male”, he told her that she was the racist one for judging him by the colour of his skin.

The actors’ union Equity sprang into action immediately, calling Fox a “disgrace to our industry” and demanding that he be blacklisted. But of course they can’t blacklist him. There are no closed shops anymore (thank you, Maggie!) and Fox doesn’t belong to Equity anyway, because: “they’ve been systematically letting actors down for years; I don’t think they’re a very good union”.

Mr Fox, I salute you. You are a luvvie who possesses both admirable good sense and a backbone enough to stand up to the unions. And in this day and age such a thing is virtually unheard of.