David Cameron is absolutely right to avoid at all costs a confrontational tone in ministers’ approach to the coming showdown with the public sector unions.
David Cameron is absolutely right to avoid at all costs a confrontational tone in ministers’ approach to the coming showdown with the public sector unions. Our editor, Fraser Nelson (‘Strike and counterstrike’, 2 July), is absolutely right to insist that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet must not blink. But The Spectator’s and Mr Cameron’s approaches are entirely reconcilable. The bigger the stick you carry, the more softly you can speak.
Implicit in Fraser’s column is a linkage between Cabinet decrees that ministers should avoid aggressive language, and his suspicion that this presages a climbdown by government. Perhaps a serious U-turn is coming, but I should be surprised. There are other very potent reasons for a conciliatory tone, as I shall try to explain.
It is essential that the coalition government avoid looking like the side that wants to pick a fight. Support within the unions for action is flimsy, as Fraser points out. Among the majority of public servants who have not voted, many will not have made up their minds. It would be against human nature for them to be friendly to the pension changes proposed — these leave most of them worse off — so the weak support union leaders receive for industrial action will be because many of their members feel that their ultimate employer, the government, faces a difficult position. They hesitate to strike, uncertain, too, whether their union leaders’ front-foot aggression is the best way to salvage what they can.
Why antagonise these people? It’s desperately important for the employers to get the tone right. Nearly all the arguments are on the government’s side; it isn’t easy for public servants to turn the lights out; strikes look unlikely to bring victory; and millions of public servants are still unconvinced that industrial action is wise. One blustering, ‘C’mon if you’re hard enough’ ministerial speech could blow all that. I wouldn’t just be talking softly if I were Cameron: I’d be tiptoeing too.
What goes for the public sector applies in some measure to the private sector, too. Though they are not threatened by this particular pensions change they are — when it comes to their own provision — beset with anxieties similar to those in the public sector. There will be many whose reaction to public sector worries will be scornful: ‘They don’t know how lucky they are’, etc: you hear it all the time. This will be the opinion most expressed, and certainly most vociferously expressed, by unaffected citizens; and (again) Fraser’s right: these people would be contemptuous if the government backed down.
But the government has not backed down. Nobody’s asking Cameron to rail against the public sector now; just to remain quietly firm. And there will, too, be a quieter element among private sector workers who will sympathise with anybody, including a public sector fellow citizen, who is trying to protect his pension. This sympathy shows quite strongly in the polls. Too much yee-hah-ing by ministers could turn it into open solidarity.
About one fifth — six million — of all workers are employed in the public sector. They are for the most part good people doing often sterling work for wages that are, in most cases, rather on the low side. They are often proud of their role in public service. They include millions of Conservative voters, and include among their friends tens of millions of Conservative voters. They are about to lose a major battle over the provision they have been making for retirement. What possible purpose could be solved by rubbing it in?
Fraser complains about the impression given that 10 Downing Street have sought to avoid this fight. I’d advise Cameron to continue giving such an impression. He complains about Cameron’s ‘strange’ ‘reluctance to attack’. There’s no need to attack. All Cameron need do is stick quietly and politely to his guns. Fraser cites Tory calls for new legislation, making it harder to win strike ballots. I remember just such calls in the first years of Margaret Thatcher’s government: and indeed the legislation came; but bit by bit and often late, the tactic being (as Fraser acknowledges is the case this time) to avoid picking too many big fights at once. Norman Tebbit, who led many of these 1980s battles, is doubtful about the wisdom of trying to change the law now. Boris Johnson is right that the law on strike ballots should be reformed. But not this summer: not until this dispute is won.
Finally, Fraser refers to ‘the Prime Minister’s growing reputation for U-turns’ and the ‘image of an indecisive Prime Minister who seems to take pride in bowing to public opinion’. This image, should it arise, would be damaging, but the evidence is, to say the least, incomplete. The abandonment of some of Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke’s proposals for sentencing changes did alarm me (I’m less sure about The Spectator), but the ‘U-turn’ on forestry sell-offs was widely approved, and the Lansley NHS proposals, unmodified, were looking highly problematical.
For David Cameron and his coalition Cabinet, immense battles lie ahead. The most immediate is over public sector pensions, which (after minor concessions) the government will win. There remain battles with the police, with the military (over the Afghanistan withdrawal), with the EU on a range of issues, and doubtless some unexpected battles too. In all this conflict, Cameron’s reputation for a calm and even emollient approach to his critics and enemies — but for basalt beneath the blancmange — is a priceless asset. Let nobody accuse him of looking for a scrap, and let nobody exhort him to look as if he’s looking for one.
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