Mr Cable’s speech, made widely available in advance and trailed on the news beforehand, somewhat predictably appeared to serve only to harden the resolve of union delegates and provoke its leader to threaten a campaign of civil disobedience unlike any seen before.
GMB general secretary Paul Kenny, whose union has 700,000 members, responded to the Business Secretary’s threat by saying that any attempt to make it even harder would be met by fierce opposition by all trades unionists who are already planning further protests to government spending cuts.
Addressing GMB delegates, Mr Kenny, who received a standing ovation, said: “Cameron and Clegg and the other fella, I promise you this. You try to stifle the basic rights of working people to go on strike and we will give you the biggest civil disobedience campaign your tiny little minds have dreamt of.”
Mr Cable, on the other hand, was jeered, booed and heckled by delegates when he actually delivered his already reported speech to say that so long as the number of strikes was low there would not be pressure to introduce even more laws making it harder to take industrial action.
What his handlers had originally tried to characterise as an attempt to rebuild bridges between government and the unions was seen by many, if not most, to be counterproductive.
Mr Cable had tried to pre-empt a strike ballot by hundreds of thousands of teachers, civil servants and other workers ahead of a planned day of action by three quarters of a million workers on June 30 over cuts to pensions, pay, jobs and services.
He told delegates: “Later this month, we may very well witness a day of industrial action across significant parts of the public sector. The usual suspects will call for general strikes and widespread disruption. This will excite the usual media comments about ‘a summer’ or ‘an autumn’ of discontent, and another group of the usual suspects will exploit the situation to call for the tightening of strike law. We are undoubtedly entering a difficult period. Cool heads will be required all round. Despite occasional blips, I know that strike levels remain historically low, especially in the private sector. On that basis, and assuming this pattern continues, the case for changing strike law is not compelling. However, should the position change, and should strikes impose serious damage to our economic and social fabric, the pressure on us to act would ratchet up. That is something which both you, and certainly I, would wish to avoid.”
RMT general secretary Bob Crow was swift to react, even though it was not his union’s conference, and his remarks did appear to catch the mood of many GMB delegates.
Mr Crow said: “Cable is effectively telling us that the right to strike is something we can have only if we choose not to use it… he wants us to sit back and watch as his Government destroys our jobs and wrecks our services. Working people are under attack as never before and if it takes co-ordinated strike action and civil disobedience to stop it then so be it.”
