Playing Politics
Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, had arguably his finest hour when he launched into a no-holds-barred, full frontal attack on the politics of Militant - a highly organised Trotskyite group, a party within a party if you like, which held quite some sway in the Labour Party in the 1980s.
In his leader's speech to the 1985 Labour Party conference in Bournemouth - Kinnock gave Militant both barrels for its stewardship of Liverpool City Council famously denouncing one of its popular and populist figures at the time - Derek Hatton (the council's deputy leader) - that "you can't play politics with people's jobs."
In fact here's the relevant extract of Neil Kinnock's speech delivered with the great passion and eloquence which he was capable of at times:
"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council—a Labour council—hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services. The people will not abide posturing."
I was reminded of Neil Kinnock's speech while thinking about the goings on at Grangemouth these past couple of weeks - and the behaviour Unite, the trade union.
To my mind the union's 'leadership' has been appalling and bears comparison with the Grand Old Duke of York - notwithstanding the behaviour of the site's owners, Ineos, which has questions to answer as well.
Unite's decision to call a strike over the 'treatment' of a local union really was a dumb thing to do - and politically motivated, as far as I can see, by an ill-judged desire to poke the company in the eye and achieved absolutely nothing.
As it happened, the whole business backfired very badly and it's the workforce and Unite members who are paying the price for the reckless behaviour of their union leaders which has resulted in Len McCluskey (Unite's UK boss) visiting Grangemouth - in a desperate last minute effort to sue for peace - with Pat Rafferty, the union's Scottish secretary, being quietly pushed aside.
The point about Ineos is that it has to do business in a competitive marketplace - which means making a reasonable profit if the company is to survive - whereas Unite has been filling the airwaves with wild talk and angry words - raising the stakes instead of calming things down.
So, I hope the change of heart is genuine - for the sake of everyone involved, especially the Grangemouth workers and their families.
