The ludicrously inaccurate “Red Ed” tag stuck on Edward Miliband by his right-wing enemies, a label about as appropriate as calling David Cameron “Commie Cam”, is worrying trade union leaders who mobilised workers to crown the Labour leader. I’ve spoken to a number of nervous general secretaries who wonder if Miliband’s eagerness to shed the description means he will push aside the people who were instrumental in his election.
Gordon Brown, and to an extent even Tony Blair, tried to navigate a difficult middle way in industrial disputes, expressing regret at the disruption to the lives of other voters while calling on both sides to sit around a table and discuss a settlement.
It was a high wire act and occasionally both Prime Ministers fell off. Blair abandoned neutrality in the long, fractious 2002-3 national fire dispute when he denounced crews with the fury of a reactionary employer. Brown tried harder to play disputes down the middle. The intensive efforts made by Brown to mediate during the Shell tanker drivers’ pay dispute and a pensions conflict at the Grangemouth oil refinery in 2008, both disputes won by Unite,have never been fully publicly acknowledged . The then PM, the union’s most prominent member, privately pressured the firms involved not to wave a big stick.
Equally during the British Airways cabin crew dispute – a dispute which isn’t yet settled, Brown sidestepped the Conservative Party leader’s challenges to condemn the groundings. The BA strikes quickly became unpopular with the wider electorate after the airline exploited what smacked of a political judgement by the courts to order a re-ballot, the company using the delay to unleash a smear campaign against its own staff. The Labour Government’s Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis, sided with Willie Walsh, BA’s union-busting boss, by labelling the stoppages “totally unjustified”. It was a sign of Brown’s weakness in Downing Street that he was unable to rein in the Cabinet peer.
Cameron tried repeatedly to pressure Brown to do the same, taunting him for refusing to praise stand-in stewards and stewardesses. Cameron was so confident he was onto an electoral winner that for a moment I half-wondered if the Conservatives would organise a general strike-style band of bankers and students to serve coffee and demonstrate how to put on a life jacket. The Tory leader knew, as did Brown, that a Labour leader attacking strikers in lurid terms may win approval from the likes of the Daily Mail, but it would have fractured the Labour Party. I like to think, too, that principle played a part in Brown’s calculations when he declared : “We want BA workers to be back at work, so we’ve said we don’t want this strike. But we also want to make it possible for arbitration and negotiation to take place.”
Which brings me back to Ed Miliband, whose first instinct in disputes, union general secretaries are beginning to fear, appears to be criticism of the action and the union involved instead of recognising it takes two to strike. The evidence is sketchy and far from conclusive, but there is no smoke without fire.
In the London fire dispute ahead of the threatened Bonfire Night strike later abandoned after a sack threat was suspended, a Miliband spokeswoman was quoted as saying he “won’t back” the walkouts because it was a “dangerous situation”. Then there was the threat by BBC unions in a pensions dispute to pull the plug on Cameron’s oration to the Tory conference. “Whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute, they should not be blacking out the Prime Minister’s speech”, said Miliband. “My speech was seen and heard on the BBC and in the interests of impartiality and fairness, so the Prime Minister’s should be.”
In the BBC dispute, I happen to agree with Miliband that it would have been wrong for a public broadcaster with a mandate to be politically neutral to black out Cameron’s speech after carrying those by Nick Clegg and Miliband himself, although I concede the media unions the NUJ and BECTU played management beautifully and won pension concessions. If it would have been an error for staff to keep Cameron off the air, it would have been a bigger mistake by BBC executives to let it happen.
Yet in the London fire dispute Miliband showed no appreciation of the authority’s provocative position which, a leaked document reveals, would end with night cover cut – the union defending not only shift patters preferred by crews but services to the public.
These interventions follow Miliband’s dig at “irresponsible strikes” in his leader’s speech to the Labour conference, a passage which irritated even mild-mannered TUC general secretary Brendan Barber. Who is in favour of “irresponsible strikes”? Not the FBU or BBC unions. I have it on good authority that Miliband intended to denounce the BA dispute during the leadership election until he as advised he would kiss goodbye to the Unite endorsement crucial to his victory.
I’d love Miliband to be “Red Ed”. But he’s not. Miliband is a likable, intelligent, decent social democrat with great potential. His task is to renew Labour, reviving the party with progressive policies rooted in fairness and social justice. It isn’t an easy job and when the Cut-servatives and Liberal Democrats are destroying services and livelihoods, the inevitable strikes to be denounced in lurid language by the Con-Dems and their Fleet Street cheerleaders. The only strikes I can recall right-wing rags endorsing were by Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s.
Let Miliband call for negotiated settlements. But please don’t let him fall into the trap of attacking workers and unions involved in those strikes.
