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The Forum > Article Comments > The lion and the ostrich > Comments

The lion and the ostrich : Comments

By Rafe Champion, published 29/1/2008

The mentality of the workers and the toffs made Britain the sick nation of Europe after World War II.

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HenryVIII, making an observation on their ridiculous and self-defeating tactics does not necessarily mean that I disapproved of the Union movement of the 50s and 60s.

Just their stupidity, and failure to see what was productive and what was self-destructive.

They had a job to do, and performed it increasingly poorly.

There were two main reasons why Maggie Thatcher was able to roll the Unions when her turn came. One was the significantly increased prosperity of the seventies over the fifties, and the other was the appalling decisions made by the Unions on which battles to fight and which to walk away from.

Because of the former, Maggie was able to use the latter to drive a wedge between them and their natural constituency, and by extension to lay the blame for the public discomfort caused by miners' strikes etc. squarely at the feet of the Unions.

In the background was of course the generic Union battle for relevancy among an increasingly comfortable workforce. Quite simply, their number one rationale - to protect the weak, and those unable to help themselves - was losing impact.
Posted by Pericles, Tuesday, 29 January 2008 12:47:22 PM
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“Subconsciously, we still seem to resent the industrial revolution.”

How true.

This article identifies not only one source of Britain’s relative post-war stagnation, but also an ongoing strand of though in the reactionary/romantic left that has origins in the 19th century (Dickens, Ruskin etc) but persists even today. The peculiar alliance of the far right and far left at anti-globalisation rallies and in the anti-capitalist movement are direct inheritors of this tradition which despised trade and idealises pre-industrial society.
Posted by Rhian, Tuesday, 29 January 2008 2:19:41 PM
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Britain’s post-WWII economic stagnation was due to the fact that its empire was finally down around its ankles and it had well and truly overreached itself in one imperial war after another (including WWI and II). For centuries its ruling/merchant class had reaped the benefits of dirt-cheap labour and resources from its empire to drive its industries, and dirt-cheap military fodder from its working class to fight its wars.

Both creditors (the colonies and the workers) finally called in their loans. Life’s like that.
Posted by SJF, Tuesday, 29 January 2008 3:02:57 PM
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Candide,

Teachers’ pay has certainly declined relative to average earnings over the last three decades, though that is due to teachers’ industrial weakness. Victorian male average weekly ordinary time earnings were $1107.30 ($57,777 pa) in November last year (ABS 6302.0, November 2006). In 1975, after seven years a teacher reached the top of the scale and was paid 166.6 per cent of that average. That would be $96,256 at the start of last year, compared with an actual $57,775 - a relative cut of $38,481 or 40 per cent. The new top level for most teachers, which now takes eleven years to reach, paid $65,414 – a relative cut of $30,842 or 32 per cent. But these are not CPI-adjusted figures.

Can you post specific figures to show that teacher pay has declined 30 per cent in real terms (i.e., in relation to the CPI), tell us what period that is over and give the actual salaries of Federation officials over the same period so we can judge if they in fact are “as well paid as ever”?
Posted by Chris C, Tuesday, 29 January 2008 10:09:04 PM
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Pericles, the major point of the essay is that classical liberals who believe in free trade and the rule of law have to fight on two fronts, against economically illiterate conservatives and against socialists as well. In Britain that conflict was linked to the class structure and Koestler desribed how the anti-business, anti-productivity ethos was shared by the upper classes (conservatives) and the trade unions (whether socialist or not).

Koestler took on some nutty ideas in his later years but he was a highly skilled journalist and a good observer and reporter. In any case the facts of the British class structure and the attitudes that he described are well known and should not be in dispute.

A second point is the way anti-business attitudes and misperceptions of the industrial revolution were propagated by writers (with Charles Dickens the example) so that they probably exerted more impact on the views of the educated public (rendering them economically illiterate) than the work of any professional economist.

Henry VIII, it is absurd to decribe Margaret Thatcher as a conservative in that context because she had to confront the Tory conservatives (wets) in her own party. You have to think in two dimensions and not just a spectrum where liberals sit somewhere between conservatives and radicals. Interesting to note that the Labor administration that followed did not undo the major reforms that Thatcher put in place to control union power and save the nation from going bust.

It is most likely that the unemployment of the 1930s was caused by a combination of trade union bloody mindedness (Sydney Webb wrote "sabotage" in his private diary to describe the work of the union leadership) and tariff wars that cramped free trade.
Posted by Pericles2, Wednesday, 30 January 2008 11:01:41 PM
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Pericles
‘I recall once being faced with an apparently serious bid for eighty days' paid annual leave, coupled with a further twenty paid sick days, plus - and this is the one I found most jaw-dropping - automatic double pay for public holidays, even if no work was performed./When I consulted with a more savvy colleague, I was told that they didn't really mean it, but would eventually trade them for more moderate demands - but in the meantime, I should not be tempted to laugh, but to deal with them with a straight face.’

What’s the problem? This is typical bargaining practice, commonly known as ‘asking for more in order to settle for less’. It’s a universally respected procedure, with two notable exceptions – (1) when it’s practiced by trade unions and (2) when it’s practiced by female partners in divorce litigations
Posted by SJF, Thursday, 31 January 2008 9:20:47 AM
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