'The Labour leadership has made a dramatic shift to the right and accepted that attacking trade unions is a good idea for a election manifesto.
THE LABOUR leadership has sharply shifted its ground in the last 12 months. It has come to accept that legislation designed to interfere with the right of trade unions to decide for themselves what's in their rule books is no bad thing. That is the meaning of the joint Labour Party-TUC policy People At Work: New Rights, New Responsibilities, which will be presented to the 1986 congress of the TUC and to Labour Party annual conference.
Although the Labour ship has voted in parliament against the Tory imposition of secret ballots on trade unions, now it seems that same leadership has made a dramatic shift to the right and accepted that attacking trade unions is a good idea for an election manifesto. But we already have a clear example of what happens when the Wally leadership course.
66 People at Work is a Strife. It has built within it the operation of a new legal body not dissimilar to statement, the National Industrial Relations Court of the Heath era, which would result in a minority who refuse to take part in leader- industrial action being able to take their trade union to court. 99 minister Barbara Castle introduced In Place of Strife. That piece of 'The miners strike showed what to expect when the state is unleased on striking workers.
adopts such a rejuvenated In Place of gest ment helped In 1969 the then employment proposed legislation finally ran t ground at a Labour Party nationa executive meeting at which one o the principal opponents was non other than Jim Callaghan. The tr ade unions, by and large, were host ile to it, and eventually the whol ethos that gave birth to In Place o Strife had to be put on one side b the Labour leadership.
Following that, the Labour Par ty opposed the introduction int parliament of the Tory govern ment's Industrial Relations Acts i the early 1970s. The unions and th party participated in one of the big demonstrations London, when the 'Kill the Bill campaign resulted in well ove 100,000 people taking to the streets That resistance by the labour move to destroy the Tor government of Ted Heath in 1974.
Heath's legislation created al industrial relations atmosphere sur