Soul-searching by T.U.C.

Press, 6 September 1983, Page 8

Soul-searching by T.U.C.

NZPA-Reuter Blackpool

The British Trades Union Congress opens its annual conference at Blackpool, north-west England, today still reeling from the shock of political defeat which accompanied the landslide re-election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government.

In the current political climate delegates are expected to take a comparatively moderate line. The election dealt the union movement’s political voice, the Labour Party, its worst defeat in more than 50 years and left union leaders facing five more years of Government by an Administration bent on further curbing their powers. Left-wingers such as Arthur Scargill, of the Coal Miners’ Union, believe that they have no choice but head-on confrontation with Mrs Thatcher and her tough Employment Secretary, Mr Norman TebbiL , Mr Scargill has repeatedly vowed that he will go to jail rather than co-oper-

ate with some of the laws already passed or with others which the Government plans. But informed sources said that delegates representing a solid majority of the country’s 10.5 million union members were ready to back a less adamant line, denouncing the Government’s policies but ending the T.U.C.’s 18-month-old refusal to even discuss them

with Mr Tebbit. Right-wingers in the movement were also likely to gain the upper hand in elections for the T.U.C.’s general council, which will be held tomorrow. During the five-day conference moderate union, leaders are likely to urge a deep re-examination of the movement’s future. They are acutely aware that fewer than half the

union members in the country voted for the Labour Party in June, and will give warnings that the unions must regain the confidence of the people they are meant to represent. In the movement Rightwingers tend to blame Labour’s policies for its defeat, which included withdrawal from the European Common Market and the scrapping of Britain’s nuclear arms and were, according to opinion polls, too Left-wing for most voters.

Left-wingers, by contrast, say that Labour failed to present the policies effectively and put much of the blame on the country’s generally Conservative press.

The main motion on the subject will ask the T.U.C.’s 51-member general council to assess objectively Labour’s policies and its tactics and come back to next year’s conference with an answer to the question: Why d$ so many trade,*, union members help to reelect Margaret Thatcher?