There’s something terribly nostalgia-inducing about the dispute between British Airways and cabin crew who are members of the Unite union. Here are a bunch of workers in an industry which is on the ropes because of the banking crisis and volcanic ash, who went on strike in March after demanding that the beleaguered behemoth which is unfortunate enough to employ their lardy butts allow them to remain the most overmanned and overpaid blighters doing their jobs anywhere in the world.
Agreement has now been reached on those original issues. But BA is - quite rightly - proceeding with disciplinary action against a number of the strikers, and has withdrawn privileges which allowed employees to buy unsold plane tickets at a discount of up to 90%, depending on how long they’d been with the airline (well, they were warned). This has led the union to schedule another 20 days of strike action.
It’s like living through the 1960s and 1970s (and, probably, the 1950s, but I wasn’t a keen student of industrial disputes during that decade), when brutish, politically-motivated union bosses conned their members into taking utterly unmerited “industrial action” which threatened to bring down the companies or state-owned industries which provided them with a living – often at the expense of the tax-payer.
In the early 1980s, Mrs. Thatcher’s government – disgusted, as were most of us, by decades of communist agitation in the union movement, wildcat strikes and the deployment of flying pickets - destroyed the National Union of Mineworkers and its exceptionally stupid leader, Arthur Scargill, by quietly stockpiling coal ahead of a threatened strike and showing no compunction in using the police to enforce the law against these thuggish Stalinists.
Mrs. T chose her enemy and her time wisely: I remember a committed left-wing TV producer who had spent six months with South Yorkshire coalminers telling me that, although he had started off determined to cover their cause sympathetically, he wound up convinced they were the most horrible people he’d ever encountered. Mind you, its hard to warm to vicious scum who drop breeze blocks onto taxis in an attempt to kill the occupants. Swine!
Labour relations in the UK instantly changed out of all recognition, and Britain became a virtually strike-free country, prospering massively as a result. When I joined TV News in 1985, it was an unwritten rule that no business or economics story could be aired without a contribution from the unions. When I finally left TV News in 1997, no one gave a monkey’s what they thought about anything (although Norman Willis was often shoehorned into reports so we could all have a good laugh).
Now, after thirteen years of Labour governemnet, the malicious, selfish, greedy, myopic brutes are back, doing their damnedest to destroy a major UK company which is already in deep trouble. Well, they managed to destroy coal-mining and car-manufacturing in the UK – and a host of other industries – so why not kill off our major airline as well?
I’m All Right, Jack, a 1959 satirical movie about industrial relations by the right-wing Boulting Brothers (who already had Brighton Rock, Lucky Jim and many other hits on their CV) is one of the funniest films ever made.
Peter Sellers as the ludicrous union leader, Fred Kite, gives one of the great comic performances of 20th century cinema (at one point he imagines the socialist paradise that was Soviet Russia: “All them wheatfields and ballet in the evening”) – I’m not sure he was ever better. A cast which reads like aWho’s Who of British Comedy acting in that era – Ian Carmichael, Terry Thomas, John le Mesurier, Dennis Price, Margaret Rutherford, Irene Handel, Miles Malleson – perform a script that was both razor-sharp and, occasionally, filthy. At one stage, Liz Fraser, Fred Kite’s curvaceous daughter, when asked by their upper-class lodger, Stanley Windrush, what she does at the missile factory where they all work, replies “spindle-polisher” (think about it). Sam Kydd, as a union member, stutters, especially when it comes to “f” and “c”, which produces the funniest moment in the film, when he calls young Windrush, “a sily c-c-c-clot”, almost giving Fred Kite a heart-attack.
This glorious slice of social commentary lashes out in all directions – crooked, upper class business owners (Dennis Price), sleazy little crooks up from the ranks (Richard Attenborough), dim, prole-hating, ex-army management types (Terry Thomas – “they’re an absolute shower!”), corrupt Arabs, and an early dig at TV presenters (Malcolm Muggeridge as himself).
This clip – which features Fred Kite mangling the English language (“jeropardising”) and uttering the truly immortal line, “We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal - that is victimization” – gives a flavour of a film which I recommend the leadership of Unite be made to sit down and watch several times.
If you’ve never seen it, you’re in for a treat – and, perhaps, a useful pointer towards the behaviour of unions when a weak-kneed, left-of-centre Tory government is in power: in 1959 the three main parties were as left-wing as they are now.
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