Kinnock’s Bid to Rally Labor Falls Flat

Opposition leader Neil Kinnock attempted to rally Britain’s fractious political left to a common cause Tuesday with a wide-ranging attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s economic and industrial policies, but he ended up deepening existing divisions.

Controversial remarks urging trade unions to participate in a government job-training scheme infuriated many union members and raised further questions about Kinnock’s own judgment as the Labor Party’s leader.

Kinnock’s speech, made in Bournemouth at the annual conference of Britain’s umbrella labor organization, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), came amid signs of accelerating decline and disarray across the spectrum of Britain’s once-powerful political left wing.

On Monday, the TUC suffered what many political analysts assessed as the most serious split in the organization’s 120-year history when it voted to expel about 350,000 electricians after a bitter, prolonged dispute over no-strike contracts.

Meanwhile, the Labor Party enters the final stages of its own acrimonious internal struggle as questions grow about Kinnock’s ability to lead. A recent Gallup Poll found that only 27% of those questioned believe he is doing an effective job as Labor leader, a slump of nearly 20 points since last year.

The developments serve to underscore the totality of Thatcher’s political dominance in this, her 10th year in power.

In his attack on the prime minister and her chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, Kinnock condemned the country’s high unemployment rate and recent increases in interest rates and the balance of payments deficit. He labeled the government’s policies as “clumsy, costly and counterproductive.”

“It is not a policy for strengthening the economy, it is a policy for strangling the economy,” he said.

But comments later in his speech urging support for Thatcher’s job-training scheme merely accentuated differences already existing within the trade union movement.

Recruitment Battles

Monday’s vote by the TUC further damaged organized labor’s unity, raised the prospect of unseemly recruitment battles and further eroded the power of the congress, a body whose combined union membership has fallen from a peak of more than 12 million at the beginning of the Thatcher years in 1979 to less than 9 million today.

“The significance of Britain’s Trades Union Congress is diminishing,” began a Financial Times editorial Tuesday.

“This isn’t the thin end of the wedge that’s going to drive the British trade union movement apart, but the TUC has definitely been weakened,” stated John E. Kelly, an industrial relations specialist at the London School of Economics.

Monday’s vote also constituted a blow to the TUC’s public image.

To much of the British public, the electricians symbolize a new, more moderate face of British trade unionism, one willing to sign no-strike contracts and single-union agreements in return for more open management.

The TUC’s vehement opposition to such concepts has cast its leadership as a group of intransigent, once-powerful individuals desperately clinging to yesterday’s ideas.

Kinnock on Tuesday dismissed speculation that the electricians might also face expulsion from the Labor Party at its annual conference next month.

“Our rules don’t require the exclusion of the (electricians),” he told reporters. “It is highly unlikely.”

As the body that gave birth to the Labor Party in 1900, the TUC’s constituent unions wield powerful blocs of votes at party conferences, and some have feared there could be an attempt by hard-line unions to expel the electricians’ union from the party.

Such a battle would only add to divisions within the party, already beset by an official challenge to Kinnock’s position as leader. That challenge is led by the one-time idol of Labor’s ultra-left, Tony Benn.

While Kinnock is almost certain to win the leadership vote at the conference, the contest itself is an embarrassing sign of discontent within Labor’s ranks.