considered 'wet" by his colleagues. The hawks' in not go tar enough.
public on these proposals, now it appears peace has been restored and an agreed package will soon see the light of day. The Fleet Street press is divided on whether the 'hawks' or 'doves' debate. But we should be clear on one thing — whoever won, trade unionists were the losers. and described how doveish' the 'doves' are:
of on secondary picketing, could swiftly find himself in jail. Immunity It seems that the refuses to handle "blacked' goods, IT SEEMS the Tories' Employment Secretary is the cabinet led by Keith Joseph and Geoffrey Howe believe his proposals on shackling trade unions do For weeks now the Tories have been arguing in won the cabinet This is evident from what the right wing Daily Telegraph's editorial said last Wednesday which Mr Prior has frequently asserted that the Employment Bill already contains drastic restraints and he is right. The secondary picket who defied a court order to desist Such, in a sentence, is the meaning of Prior's proposals. The lifting of legal immunity on what the Tories define as 'secondary pickets' will mean, inevitably, that trades unionists will end up in jail. like?
secondary pickets category is now to be extended to include any worker who Extending the attack on unions, Thatcher announced at the end of last week that the government plans to reduce strikers social security payments by the amount they would be 'deemed' to have been paid out of union funds. Only last month Thatcher was declaring that such a policy would be "very, very difficult to implement. Indeed even Keith Joseph was against such a scheme in 1971 when in a Heath cabinet diseussion he was reported to have said, 'Beware, we shall have the television hunting hungry families'.
If such proposals are spearheading the biggest attack on trade union rights since the start of the century, it is some comfort that they are being launched by a government which looks neither so secure nor so confident as it did a couple of months ago. The public divisions, the changes of policy, the hesitation in carrying them out hardly the 'smack of firm associated with the Tories.
Credit for this lies overwhelmingly with the steel strikers. At the start of the year they were seen as easy piekings by the Tories. colleagues must now be wondering whether if these are 'easy' pickings, what will the difficult ones look The damage the steel strikers have inflicted on the Tories they have done largely at a rank and file level. Bill Sirs, the union's general secretary, must case of all troops and no general.
last few working day would have. government Militancy Thatcher and her other opportune as well. be as surprised as Thatcher at the militancy of his union members. Certainly he has done his best to curb it: first by instructing that Denning must be obeyed, then by suggesting there should be no picketing of private steel, even after Denning was overturned, finally by entering into talks with the steel bosses until his negotiating committee forced him to walk out. The steel strike has been a The same thing can be said for trade union movement as a whole. The role of the TUC in the months has been negligible. A few occasional warnings to the government is all its resistance has amounted to. True, they have called a national demonstration against Prior for 9 March, but that being a Sunday it will have nothing like the effect a national demonstration during a Whafall this amounts to, and what needs to be argued now on the factory floor, in offices, at trade union branches, is that both because of the government's weakness and because of the militaney shown by hundreds of thousands of workers in the steel strike, in South Wales and in areas and industries, is that a full-scale TUC-led offensive is not only necessary, but it is