The Strike is like a Bee's Sting - a good threat but a poor weapon

I have been on strike twice in my life. Neither was very serious. Once was a pretty frivolous demand for higher wages among temporary workers cleaning the factory at the old Morris Motors works in Cowley, on the eastern edge of Oxford, during the annual August break, perhaps in 1968 or 1969 when the real workers were away on holiday. I think we knew the job was nearly over and did it for a lark, miming the walk-outs and shows of hands which were actually quite common when the factory was working. As I recall they sacked the lot of us and told us not to come back but my memory of this period is a series of intense and probably inaccurate flashes of recall, amid the darkness of oblivion, and I am no longer sure.

The second was a National Union of Journalists demand to be allowed to make local pay agreements. For the life of me I can���t now see what this justified actually walking off the job. Inflation in those days (I���d guess 1974) was bad, our wages were low and Ted Heath has set up a system where pay went up by a set figure in money each time the Retail Price Index went up by a point. This was a bonanza for the low-paid, whose wages rose much faster than inflation, and a blow to the well-paid, which may have been the idea. In any case, it raised my real pay much more than the NUJ was able to do. I mainly remember going down to the gates of one of the big local factories with colleagues and urging the workers not to buy the paper, which our non-union colleagues had managed to bring out without us.

���Don���t worry!��� our proletarian brothers in struggle cheerily replied. ���We never buy it anyway!���

I later became very familiar with other people���s strikes, first as an active Bolshevik seeking to fan the flames of discord, and then as a labour reporter for local and national newspapers.

Two things became clear to me. One was that almost all industries which became strike battlegrounds were terribly damaged by them. Most railwaymen recognised that the rail strikes of the 1950s had been the making of the road haulage industry, and had made the Beeching/Marples cuts more likely. A postal strike in the early 1970s permanently reduced the use of the mails, and got more people into the habit of using the phone, until then, something we tended to hesitate over unless it was urgent. Strikes at home meant more imports from foreign competitors. Newspaper strikes got people out of the habit of buying papers, and so on.

I also formed an absolute conviction that the weapon was sometimes too powerful for any civilised person to use it. We all know about the Merseyside gravediggers��� strike during the ���Winter of Discontent���. But as I have written elsewhere, it was an ambulance drivers��� strike in the late 1970s which persuaded me that anyone doing any job involving mercy should never strike.

I have been quite badly injured in a road accident myself ( a Potts fracture of the ankle). I know from direct experience the comfort that came as I lay, in some pain, by the roadside,  from the knowledge than an ambulance was on its way.  So when I saw and heard (there was an audible crunch of bone) a woman hit by a car on the Finchley Road in North-West London on a cold late afternoon, I was the first to rush to the phone in the nearby Tube station and call 999.

There was an ambulance drivers��� work-to-rule that week, as I well knew. Now, I had been absolutely assured by union contacts that there would be ���emergency cover��� and that anyone badly hurt would get the same service as normal. But when I reached the operator, she told me there would be a delay of perhaps an hour (this in a busy part of the capital city of a Western nation) before anyone would arrive. This, she said, was the result of ���industrial action���.

I ran back to the scene of the accident and lyingly assured the injured woman that an ambulance was ���on its way��� .  I lied because I was certain that this would help her, whereas the truth would not,  and was already thinking of a way to circumvent the stupid work-to-rule. Then I ran to the nearby office of my own GP, who was just closing up for the evening, and asked him to go to her aid. Which of course he unhesitatingly did (he was a very fine doctor, one of many provided to the British health system by Adolf Hitler, who regarded his parentage and descent as the most important thing about him).   

That did it for me. I would never again believe any promise about emergency cover. And I would never again support any strike by anyone whose job involved mercy to the sick, the injured or the endangered. The strength of the case simply doesn���t matter. The strike weapon is one they cannot use, and remain civilised.

The doctors may well have a good case. I personally suspect that the problem is that a bankrupt and indebted country can no longer support the level of medical services it has come to take for granted, that the NHS as it is now cannot be sustained much longer, that Ministers cannot run health systems and shouldn���t try. Many of the great strikes of the Callaghan-Thatcher era were similarly about clashes between hard reality and the unrealistic desire of the workers to continue as they always had been. IN many cases they made their problems worse by striking. The strike is like the bee���s sting, a good threat but a poor weapon,  and the clever negotiator never actually calls his members out .  

But where lives may be lost and your strike may be blamed for it, it is suicidal and will do you long-term irreparable damage. I have been asked by Doctors ���what else can we do?���, and my reply is ���Think of something. But don���t strike���. One of the most effective industrial actions of modern times was the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders ���work-in��� in the early 1970s, the opposite of a strike, an insistence on staying at work rather being made redundant. That was real leadership, imaginative, highly disciplined and brilliantly led. Think along those lines, and they might get somewhere. But in the end, the NHS,  as it now is,  is getting too expensive for this country to maintain.