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Blair Gets Burned

Fan the Flames | 20.11.2002 11:23

However it is resolved, he is the loser in the firefighters' dispute. The only way is down now for New Labour, it's not a matter of if but when. All hands to the pumps!

Blair has been burned already

Kevin Maguire
Wednesday November 20, 2002
The Guardian

The world has turned upside down when a militant seafarer threatens to order troops to cross firefighters' picket lines, prompting warnings from army brigadiers that soldiers do not want to be deployed as strike-breakers.
John Prescott, the only union heavyweight in the cabinet, will have been well aware that by raising the prospect of seizing red engines he was inviting echoes of the general strike. Certainly military commanders, anxious to avoid doing for Labour in 2002 what they did for the Tories in 1926, recognised the danger.

The growing nervousness in No 10 at the course of events should not be underestimated. That a Labour leadership elected to improve public services found themselves unable to provide one of the most vital of those services for 48 hours is bad enough. But there is more. The government is anxious to avoid other unions clambering aboard the Fire Brigades Union bandwagon - and the damage that would do to its reputation in the City for financial caution. And yet the unions remain Labour's biggest single source of party funds and facing down the firefighters would risk tearing the party apart.

This dangerous situation could have been avoided had Tony Blair not been lulled into a false sense of industrial security. Local authority workers ran up their flag during the summer before quickly retreating and, apart from outbursts of industrial action on the railways, relations have been relatively harmonious since 1997. Clear signs from early this year that the firefighters were serious about pressing the strike button were missed and, when the government finally woke up to the threat, it attempted to sideline the problem with a review rather than negotiate a solution.

A government in thrall to newspaper headlines must have believed it was winning the public battle. Its biggest ally in this dispute - Fleet Street - has unleashed wave after wave of incendiary words against Andy Gilchrist and the FBU. Columnists and leader writers in virtually every paper have published thousands of hostile words. The FBU's lone national ally has been the Daily Mirror.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, newspapers have a long tradition of misjudging the mood of their readers and this fire dispute can now be added to that list. The more papers demonised Mr Gilchrist and the firefighters, the more their readers chose to see public servants simply seeking better rewards for doing a dangerous job well. Yesterday's Guardian ICM poll, showing 53% of people supported the firefighters after last week's strike, with 62% critical of the government's handling of the dispute, will have made unhappy reading in Fleet Street as well as Downing Street.

The government's priority is to avoid a second strike and allow both sides to settle with honour which, inevitably, will involve fudged figures and arguments about the value of efficiency savings from "modernisation", formerly know as changes in working practices. After refusing to fund a 16.1% two-year deal floated by local employers in July, the government ordered the review under Sir George Bain. Presented as the key to settling the dispute, Bain has become an obstacle.

The employers have already ditched two central planks of the Bain report: cutting strings imposed on a 4% offer this year and agreeing a new annual pay formula opposed by the review chair. A critical analysis of the Bain report for the FBU by Roger Seifert, a professor of human resources management at Keele university, accuses Bain of muddled thinking. Take the overtime ban, denounced by Bain as a restrictive practice. As Seifert points out, it was the logical outcome of the old pay formula which added any extra earnings to overall earnings, reducing the following year's pay rise.

Bain (male, white) and the government's newspaper cheerleaders (overwhelmingly male, white) have also condemned firefighters for being mainly male and white. Even leaving aside the failure of the employers to recruit women and crew members from minority communities, this is disingenuous. As Seifert points out, Bain's proposed return of overtime in the fire service, a family-unfriendly practice, would only undermine the recruitment of women.

During negotiations over the next few days, as 11% over two years is nudged up, all those involved in the dispute will be looking for a way out. But it will be too late: burning braziers, troops on the streets, double-digit pay demands, threats of secondary action and newspapers raging against trade union leaders have returned to Britain. Tony Blair may still be able to defeat the firefighters but, in a damaging sense, he has already lost this dispute.

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  1. solidarity — union dinosaur