Angela rayner: the acceptable face of union militancy | thearticle

Nobody has ever accused Angela Rayner, Labour’s fiery-haired Deputy Leader, of being bashful. But this week she gave us a first glimpse of what she and her union comrades have in mind for

the country. Speaking at the Liverpool TUC Congress on Tuesday, she gave the most militant speech by a senior Labour politician since Sir Keir Starmer took over as leader from Jeremy Corbyn

three years ago. Ms Rayner was there to tell the unions that they would have everything they wanted under a Labour government — as long as they continue to cough up for the party’s election

campaign. Under Ms Rayner’s “New Deal”, Conservative laws limiting strikes and ensuring minimum levels of public service would be repealed within 100 days of Labour taking office. Under a

new Employment Rights Bill, Labour would enshrine union demands in law, including a ban on zero hours contracts, a higher living wage and a range of new rights for employees. Unions would

have a legal right to organise in the workplace. But Ms Rayner’s New Deal would only be the first instalment in a wider programme of laws designed to turn the clock back to the 1970s, before

Margaret Thatcher curbed trade union power. Already the public sector unions are flexing their muscles. In the year to August, four million working days were lost. More than a million NHS

operations and appointments were cancelled due to strikes by doctors and nurses; the victims include 30,000 patients with cancer. Railway workers’ strikes have left parts of the country

feeling isolated. Civil servants and teachers have penalised pensioners, parents and children. The sheer human misery caused by this mass disruption of people’s lives is incalculable. Yet

what we have witnessed is a small fraction of the chaos imposed by union militancy in the 1970s. During that decade, the annual number of working days lost to “industrial action” (then a

neologism) seldom fell below ten million. In the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-79, the figure rose to 29 million. In Liverpool, where Ms Rayner enthused union officials this week, the

gravediggers (members of the GMWU) went on strike that winter and the authorities seriously considered burying corpses at sea. Leicester Square was used as a giant rubbish dump when refuse

workers withdrew labour. The long term effects of 1970s union militancy affected entire cities. Birmingham, the heart of motor manufacturing, saw its prosperity destroyed for a generation by

the antics of “Red Robbo” and other Communist shop stewards at the state-owned British Leyland plant at Longbridge. By 1976 Britain had ceased to be a net exporter of cars and the industry

has never fully recovered. The combination of a weak Labour government, loose monetary policy and trade union strongmen produced high inflation, peaking at over 20 per cent per annum, and

stagnant growth — the notorious “stagflation”. The long-term consequences of overmighty unions also include the proletarianisation of the bourgeoisie. White collar unions learned to have as

sharp elbows as blue collar ones, as the middle class virtues of self-restraint and public duty were eroded in the desperate struggle for survival. This is the root of the unedifying

willingness of the medical and nursing professions to sacrifice their duty of care to patients, or of teachers to deny pupils their education, or of the civil service to serve their own

purposes rather than the public’s. It was Margaret Thatcher who called a halt to the age of union domination, though it took a decade of gruelling battles to do it. Significantly, none of

the industrial legislation she passed was reversed in 13 years of New Labour. So when Angela Rayner promised to repeal “Tory anti-Union laws” and explicitly revisit the Thatcher era by

holding an inquiry into the “Battle of Orgreave” during the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, we know that the next Labour government will be quite different from those of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Sir Keir Starmer is in awe of Ms Rayner — so much so that he did not dare sack her, despite her frequent challenges to his authority. Instead, he has just promoted her to be Shadow

Levelling Up Secretary. The Labour leader is obsequious in his dealings with the unions. The fact that he dined with them on Monday night but left it to his firebrand deputy to address the

comrades in front of the cameras on Tuesday speaks volumes. A Labour government under Keir Starmer will turn the workplace into the playground of union bullies — not unlike the 1970s. This

time it won’t all be about pickets and demarcation disputes, but about the “right” to work from home, identity politics and an anti-business regulatory environment. Productivity and profits

will be sidelined by political considerations and an unholy alliance of bureaucrats and unions. Ambitious entrepreneurs will go abroad, while foreign investors will look elsewhere. The

global opportunities and comparative advantages of the post-Brexit economy will be lost forever. Ms Rayner is indulged by the media as Labour’s _la Pasionaria_ — though many forget that the

heroine of the Spanish Civil War was a hardline Stalinist. But this week we saw who Angela Rayner really is: the poster girl of an increasingly militant trades union movement that longs to

turn back the clock by half a century. Let nobody say that we have not been warned.