Three-Day Working Week

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 10 January 1974.

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Photo of Mr Tony Benn Mr Tony Benn , Bristol South East 12:00, 10 January 1974

I am sure that the House, including, I hope, the Treasury Bench, will agree that it was right on the part of the Opposition parties to demand the recall of Parliament and right of the Government to assent to its recall. To this extent, I agree with what was said by the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Powell)—that parliamentary debate is an ingredient in a solution to our problems.

Having said that, I think that the House will also accept that the situation today is graver than it was when the House met yesterday and that the reason for the deterioration since yesterday is, first, that the Prime Minister intervened too hastily to write down the value of the TUC offer and, secondly, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, without Cabinet consultation, apparently rejected it out of hand. At any rate, I understand that the talks at No. 10 have now concluded, that further talks are to be held on Monday and therefore that we are in a position at the end of this debate on behalf of the Opposition to ask the Government to respond to what the TUC has put forward.

The Opposition's view may be summarised briefly. It is to invite the Government to take the TUC proposal very seriously ; to allow the National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers the right to negotiate freely and to reach a settlement at which normal working could be resumed ; to set aside the Pay Board—which has been a major complication in the situation—entirely from the mining dispute ; to let the Secretary of State himself decide, as Parliament intended he should in any case where the national interest required Ministers to take responsibility ; and finally to call off the three-day week.

One of the subjects for special emphasis today has been the three-day week. I think that many of my hon. Friends, and most people outside who have experienced it, will agree that anyone who had doubts about the Government's real motives for the three-day week will have had those doubts wholly dispelled after hearing the Prime Minister yesterday.

The Prime Minister's attempt to justify the three-day week was not concerned, as one would expect, were it a genuine proposal, with husbanding the nation's fuel resources and protecting the people at a moment of shortage. It was an act of mobilisation for a long war against the miners.

We in this House have a duty on behalf of our constituents and on behalf of the country—and right hon. and hon. Members on both sides have tried to discharge it—to draw attention to the very high cost of the three-day week. I have asked the Prime Minister for the Government's estimate of the cost of the three-day week. No estimate is forthcoming officially from the Government. Some indication has been given by the National Economic Development Office, but in practice there is no one here tonight who disputes that the three-day week will have a grave effect on production, on exports and on investment.

For those working in industry it means a savage and direct cut in their wages. There will be inevitable bankruptcies among small businessmen—and we bear in mind that the Conservative Party has so often boasted to be their special friends in Government and in Parliament. It will mean higher unemployment in terms not only of lay-offs in the short run but of higher unemployment for a longer period if the bankruptcies mount to the level to which they may mount and, if the grave damage to the steel industry about which many of my hon. Friends spoke in the debate has the effect that we fear. It will also have a very serious effect upon the morale of the nation when people realise, as they are now coming to realise, that this was part of the mobilisation of psychological warfare against the miners by the Government. That is what the people believe, and I will give the House the reasons why they believe it.

First they believe it because the Government have throughout suppressed key figures—no one more than the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry now, thank goodness, stripped of the responsibilities which he discharged so poorly for the nation's energy resources. The Government have suppressed the coal figures. The Government have suppressed the oil figures. The Government have ordered public authorities set up by Parliament not to answer questions put to them by Members of Parliament, which is a complete denial of the duty of a public authority to tell the public how it is discharging its statutory responsibilities.

The Government have implied that 7 million tons is the minimum stock, without telling the public that in the past four years stocks have been below 7 million tons for no fewer than 16 weeks, thus implying that we were on the point of crisis. The Government have pretended that the CEGB ordered the three-day week when the CEGB was operating on the basis of oil supplies that had been cut to 75 per cent. of what they were last winter, an understandable policy following the Rothschild Think Tank's analysis of the need for a stronger coal industry, but not making sense when the Government were faced either with the restoration of 100 per cent. oil supplies or putting the nation on a three-day week.

In his pre-Christmas speech the Prime Minister made great play with the effect of the ASLEF dispute upon coal deliveries from the coal mines to the power stations, although the British Railways Board has made it clear that there has not been the slightest delay in the delivery of coal from the pits to the power stations. Were there time, I could give the House the information that is pouring in from power stations and pits all over the country, giving the lie to the scares that the Cabinet has systematically tried to use to justify its policy.

The fact is that the Government cut oil to the power stations and then ordered the restoration of some of that oil. Because they did not control the multinational oil companies, or have any real power over them, they were unable to get the restoration of the oil to see us through the winter. There was no consultation with the CBI or the TUC. Could anyone seriously believe that management or labour would have opted for a three-day week on this basis, which gives entertainment priority over exports, domestic use of all kinds priority over production, and pleasure motoring priority over oil for power stations? It does not make sense as a management decision.

The right hon. Member the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry said in the new year that the oil problem did not exist, that our only problem was the coal crisis. At that time, he was trying characteristically to get cheap political popularity by saying there would be no petrol rationing. The right hon. Gentleman knows better than most that the three-day week will bankrupt Britain long before the coal runs out.

The Government have done nothing to protect the housewives working a seven-day week on a three-day pay packet. They have done nothing to lift the three-day waiting rule. They have done nothing about family allowances during the crisis. They have given no special help to industry. They have done nothing whatever that one would expect both the CBI and the TUC to require of them to try to see us through this difficulty with the minimum damage to our fundamental strength.

The people do not believe the reasons that the Prime Minister has given. They see this as part of the Prime Minister's obsessive campaign against the miners. They see now the explanation of why the mini-Budget before Christmas contained no tax increases—because the Chancellor of the Exchequer found a way of getting more money out of the pockets of working people by the wage cut than he did and should have done by some redistribution of wealth.

I would only say that watching the Prime Minister I am reminded of his predecessor, Sir Anthony Eden, at the time of Suez obsessively pursuing a policy which would lead to the destruction of a basic national interest and backed up by a group of party supporters hypnotised by his strength into neglecting their duty to defend the country they were elected to represent. It would have taken this Prime Minister to get a ban on overtime by Spitfire pilots during the Battle of Britain—and I believe he could have done that given half a chance.

Perhaps the Prime Minister should think of what Harold Macmillan or Churchill would have done. He might indeed at least use the phrase which equally applies to the miners—"never has so much been owed by so many to so few". There have been 15,000 deaths from pneumoconiosis in the mining industry in the last 15 years, and if the Conservative Party had recognised in its public speeches the debt this country owes to the miners one quarter of their problems would be solved.

Now we come to the Government's reasons for rejecting the miners' claim. First, stage 3 must be upheld. Stage 3 was destroyed by the escalation of oil prices. The outdated calculations upon which it was based are known to all. The Government have themselves directly violated stage 3 by announcing through the Chancellor that there would be substantial increases in coal and electricity prices which were not provided for in the Pay and Prices Code. Ministers have said, which is not true, that stage 3 has the force of law. Stage 3 never had the force of law. It was an advisory document to the Pay Board. And it was for the Pay Board to consider it. The law came in only if there were a settlement on which the Pay Board imposed an order to desist and then there would be a prosecution only under the fiat of the Attorney-General. The law has never been a part of this situation. Ministers have sought to imply that we are upholding our constitution against a lot of law breakers. The Secretary of State for Employment knows full well that Parliament has given him the power to set aside any Pay Board ruling, and that is what he should do.

Another argument is that the settlement is unfair to other workers. That is a most interesting argument. We have heard tonight from many people who have described how private industry has got round stage 3 by regrading, fiddling, sacking and re-engaging, and by reorganising its structure. It is the public sector, with higher standards of management morality, which has observed stage 3, and if anybody thinks that the ordinary workers who have not the organised strength of the miners have a friend in the Government they do not understand what is going on now among the shop workers, the hospital workers or those who lack the muscle of the miners.

We are also told that the offer is generous. The figure of 163½ per cent. has been quoted. Now 16½ per cent. is a good offer for someone on £10,000 a year and the man who reads his Daily Telegraph and hears the figure of 16½ per cent. might well calculate that he would do well. The plain truth is—and it has never been denied—that after taxation, national insurance and the rise in prices the Government offer is worth 60p a week for the miners, compared to what they were earning a year ago. When I hear talk about ransom and blackmail, I must say that I have never heard of a blackmailer being prepared to settle for 60p a week.

These arguments are getting through to the public. The fact is that people understand the miners' case. It will not do to pretend that it is all due to the Communists because, candidly, if the Government believed that, they would have used their own legislation to have a ballot of the miners to establish straight away whether the miners support their executive members or not. I should like to meet the Conservative who inquires whether the coal he burns in his hearth has been dug by a Communist, or whether the train in which he travels as a commuter is driven by a Communist, before we listen to the sort of talk we have had today, which is a warning to the nation what it must expect when the General Election comes.

It is also slightly odd that the Communist Party shared with the Prime Minister in 1970 one thing in common—opposition to a statutory wages policy—and, when the Prime Minister has abandoned his manifesto and the Communist Party still believes in it, that is said to be an undermining of the British constitution. Ministers must find a rather better argument than that.

People in this country now know, even more than they did before the oil price increase, that we need the coal. They see the miners fighting the same battles as they fight, because the miners have to face higher prices and higher rents and have all the difficulties that have been intensified in the past 12 months.

My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West (Mr. Meacher) is good and accurate with a slide rule and he has produced figures—which have never been challenged—to show that real living standards fell last year while trading profits went up by 16 per cent., dividend and interest payments by 28 per cent., and net asset value of property companies by 20 per cent. There has been massive redistribution of wealth and income but it has been in the wrong direction.

I wish to say a word to Ministers as well as to editors and television interviewers about the way in which they treat the miners on television and in the Press. It sickens many people—I am one of them—that when there is a mining disaster and a man is lying trapped in water in a dark underground roadway for days, and newspapers show photographs of grief-stricken widows in a mining village, the miners are the heroes of Britain, but when they put in a wage claim which not a single hon. Member of the House would accept as a basis for his own living wage, they are described as Communists and blackmailers holding the country to ransom.

Ministers, editors and television interviewers get incomes far in excess of those which the miners could ever dream of getting. Ministers, editors and television interviewers get incomes which are secretly arrived at. Their incomes are never discussed on television as to whether they are justified, or whether the person concerned should get the sum proposed. These people are the last who should misrepresent the miners of this country and try to hold them up to public abuse.

If there is a new element entering into the whole argument of incomes policy it is simply this: we have come to the end of the road when the rich and the powerful can expect to get a hearing from working people as they ask them to restrain their incomes in order to preserve the pattern of wealth and property which the rich and powerful use so much to their own advantage.

It is time that we had a new look at the incomes policy question. I put this to the Secretary of State because his mind is bent mainly on this problem. Successive Governments have tried and failed with policies which bore some resemblance to the one which the present Government first thought of introducing. But we must now try to look at this problem from the point of view of those whose consent is essential if any such policy is to work.

I have a word to say here to those commentators and editors who look through every speech and every manifesto for a sentence containing a reference to a tough incomes policy as somehow a test of credibility or of statesmanship. In effect, all that these pompous editorialists and commentators are saying is that they want us here, across the Floor of the House, to agree to tight wage control as the basis for future policy, whichever Government be in power. When we are told that this is the time for straight talking, for plain speaking, for doses of reality and for moments of truth, let us perform our representative function and say to those who put that to us that they must now learn the hard truth, listen to some straight talking and have a dose of reality.

For tight wage control by law will not work, and by consent will never be achieved unless we are able to make a change in our whole approach to the sort of society we have. [HON. MEMBERS: "Ah."] Obviously, what those hon. Member who shouted "Ah" meant was that this House is inextricably linked in its existence and its democratic practice with one form of distribution of wealth and income, and that the people cannot use Parliament democratically to change the distribution of wealth and income. But of course it is just that change that we must have.

Unless and until there is a major social reform to make our society fairer and more nearly equal, workers will not cooperate in wage control where they have bargaining power and if they have the strength to resist. And they are right. They remember what the Prime Minister did to the postmen when he had the big stick, and they know what he has done to the lower-paid workers. When the Government have the power, they use it to keep living standards down.

It is time that the Government, all right hon. and hon. Members and people in Press and television listened more to what the trade union movement is trying to say to us about the problems of an incomes policy. It is no use saying that, unless the trade union movement can overnight convert itself into a corporation which can be accountable for the behaviour of all its members, nothing it says is a bankable guarantee or is worth examining.

The trade union leader, with less backing than a Minister—for he does not have the statute book at his disposal—has to operate by consent. He has to listen to his members. It is not too much to ask that Ministers should listen to what the trade unions say. The Secretary of State had the reputation, no doubt justly, in Ireland of being one to listen. If he has listened, he will have learned that during his Government's period in power the trade union movement has put forward highly constructive proposals about how, given that most trade unionists do not share the present Government's political philosophy, something could be done to create an atmosphere in which co-operation would be possible.

What have the trade unions asked for? They have asked for fairer Budgets so that an incomes policy did not just mean wage control without some re-examination of the distribution of wealth and income at the top. They have asked for food subsidies, which would make a great difference to many millions of families. They have asked for a rent freeze. They have asked for higher pensions—which gives the lie to the argument that the trade union movement is concerned only with its own members' wage claims, for it was the TUC which played a notable part in triggering off and continuing the campaign for a higher pension. They have asked for an end to property speculation. They have asked for the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act, for it to be put on ice, as Stormont was put on ice by the right hon. Gentleman when he assumed his earlier responsibilities.

All these proposals that the trade union movement has put forward represent the beginnings of a basis of cooperation on which something might be achieved. They are all embodied in the programme which the Labour Party will put before the public at the General Election, but they have all also come forward to the present Government in proposals from the TUC. No one thinks that he will get 100 per cent. acceptance of anything in a voluntary society, but if the Government and Fleet Street expect TUC leaders to sign on the dotted line to prop up an unfair society, let me tell them that it will not happen. If they did sign on the dotted line, it would mean nothing whatsoever ; if it did mean something, it would not be just to use the trade union movement to underpin a society so fundamentally unfair in its distribution of rewards.

The basic democratic proposition that the Opposition have put to the House in the last two days is very simple to state. It is that the only policy that will work in our society is a policy that is accepted. The only policy that will be accepted is one that is fair, and a fair policy requires programmes of social reform extending widely over the field of domestic policies. Working people now want that reform to be carried through by Parliament and not by revolution.

What is the alternative to doing it this way? If we reject voluntarism—which has, as a matter of fact, an even older history than democracy—and social justice, we are driven inevitably to authoritarian solutions. The Industrial Relations Act took away the power of the unions, because trade union democracy was not compatible with Government policy. The Housing Finance Act took away the democratic responsibilities of local Labour councillors, because they would not raise the rents of the people they represented. The Pay Board, which is not accountable to the electors—its members have never been elected and are not accountable to Parliament—is another part of this authoritarian structure.

Now the emergency powers, then the three-day working week, then compulsory overtime—for that is what the Government wish the miners to accept—then tonight some speakers, a little ahead of their time, calling for the proscription of political parties that challenge this view. The Prime Minister is moving to 1984 10 years ahead of schedule, and he is doing it with a nightmare of centralised control, under the control not of the Left but of the Right.

I do not believe for a moment that the problems confronting this country are insoluble within the framework of the parliamentary system for which our forefathers fought and won. We do not want a British Stalin or a tinpot Mussolini lecturing us from Lancaster House. The paradox that confronts the House is that in this country today moderate people want radical change. Moderate people want a fair society, when our society is now not fair. They want justice in areas where injustice has been preserved. They want more democracy and not less democracy. They want a sharing of power and an enfranchisement of the community, of industrial workers, of tenants, and of the regions, and not the corporate ideas which are being put before us by the Government.

We cannot hope that a coalition of Ministers and editors, and all those in society who enjoy the power, can any longer expect to lecture working people to make the sacrifices that are required.

To this extent this is the end of an era, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham, North (Mr. Prentice) said. It is not just about the balance of payments, inflation, energy or growth. What are now being questioned are the values of a society which have, in a sense, been tested and found wanting, and whether we can any longer have the House of Commons being told that miners earning £30 a week, or a little more, can be described as selfish, greedy blackmailers, and expect the public to believe that.

At this moment the affairs of the country are in the hands of a man who knows so little about those he was elected to serve, and has so little faith in their capacity, save under the pressure of punishment, to rise to the occasion that he misses three important and what should be non-controversial points.

We cannot expect responsibility unless as a House we are prepared to share power. We cannot expect social justice unless as a House we legislate to dispense justice. We cannot save democracy unless we practise democracy. We cannot win the trust of the people of this country unless we show to the people, and those who create its wealth, the trust and respect that they deserve.