Spoiling for a Fight

You

might not think so looking at his graying, thinning hair and lined face that now sports reading glasses, but Tony Blair has led, as British Prime Ministers go, a charmed life: two massive election victories, a strong British economy, and a hapless opposition. When crises erupt that are clearly outside government control, such as the foot-and-mouth epidemic last year, he has somehow managed to maintain his balance and authority. But the stagnant quality of British public services has dogged him at home. And now a threatened strike by a key public union threatens to devastate those services and undermine his leadership. Let’s watch Tony wriggle out of this one.

He’s wriggling. Blair’s immediate sparring partners are Britain’s firefighters, who have voted 88% to 12% to start next week a series of strikes lasting through Christmas unless they receive a 40% pay hike. Firefighters are always popular with the public, never more so since Sept. 11. Last month an ICM poll found 68% of voters backed their goal of higher wages. If Blair gives in to their full demand—a raise from $33,370 per year for a full-time firefighter with four years’ experience to $46,500—the floodgates will open for budget-busting claims across the public sector. Even more dangerous for Blair is that other unions, spoiling for a fight, are poised to piggyback their own demands onto the hook and ladder heroes, threatening to shut down the London tube, railroads, nuclear power plants and other key services if the firefighters go out.

For New Labour, that prospect rouses a memory of primal agony, the Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, when rolling public sector strikes—causing garbage to go uncollected and corpses to go unburied—sparked public revulsion that swept Margaret Thatcher into 10 Downing Street. This winter, just keeping fires under control could be a big challenge. Compared to the 56,500 firefighters normally available to work on some 3,000 modern fire engines, the government’s contingency plans call for some 10,000 military personnel to operate 827 fire trucks half a century old—so-called “Green Goddesses.” This will create, acknowledges one Blair aide, a “sense of disorder” harmful to the government. The Goddesses don’t go as fast and aren’t as well equipped as modern trucks, nor will the crews be as well trained. It will not do Blair’s reputation for competence any good when, as is statistically inevitable, people burn to death during the 36 days of strikes being planned.

More importantly, Blair must also head off spreading sympathy strikes, which could paralyze the country and sully Britain’s recent record of relatively serene labour relations. Secondary strikes are illegal, but some union leaders argue their members can properly request to work elsewhere if they feel unsafe. Though London Underground plans to shut 19 of its deepest stations during a strike, safety officials have not acknowledged any reason for other firms or workers to change their normal routine.

A new, more militant generation of union leaders will want to exploit any loophole they can find to bloody Blair. They consider him a sellout for pushing privatization and other heresies. The tube drivers’ leader, Bob Crow, once belonged to the Socialist Labour Party formed by the famous miners’ union firebrand Arthur Scargill and keeps a bust of Lenin in his office. He said that a firefighters strike “could very well escalate into a national rail dispute. It could be the most serious industrial dispute since the ’70s.”

After trading denunciations earlier this week, Fire Brigades Union head Andy Gilchrist started face-to-face talks on Thursday with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who pressed the FBU to wait for the outcome of an independent review that’s expected to boost firefighters’ incomes in return for changes in working practices. At the Manchester Square Fire Station in central London, Tony Collis, a 26-year veteran, was paying close attention to the talks, which both sides described as “positive” when they broke for the weekend Friday afternoon. Collis lives 90 km away because he can’t afford London housing on his $33,000 per year, often sleeps on a mattress on the firehouse floor and works as an upholsterer on his days off. “We want a living wage, and if M.P.s can get themselves a 40% pay rise, we should be able to do the same,” he says quietly.

John Kelly, professor of industrial relations at the London School of Economics, notes that when local governments “have tried to close stations or cut numbers [of firefighters] in the past five years, the firefighters have always won their strikes. These are very serious, tough guys who won’t be messed around.” But Collis knows they are playing with fire: “Deaths will turn the public against us.” That fear is at least one thing he shares with Tony Blair.