Gunter gives his Orders (1967)

From the December 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scratch beneath the skin of any complacently Right Wing Labour Minister and in nine cases out of ten you will find he has a history of Left Wing militancy. Minister of Labour Ray Gunter is the tenth case—the man who has always defended the official party line, who has always infuriated the firebrands by his unrepentant stance way out on the right.

Stumpy, thick-necked, with a coarsely drawn face, Gunter can look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. At times he sounds like one, frothing out cliches and platitudes like an unconscious satire on a trade union official eager to let the world know he has recently mastered the use of words like “auspices”, “context”, “relevant.”

Perhaps Gunter is living out of his time; many of his public outbursts sound as if the ventriloquist had cast him in the role of a Dickensian workhouse master, dishing out strong doses of brimstone and treacle to the boys and fiercely crushing any tendency to ask for more:

“The economy of this nation has to be put right.. . with a measure of harsh government”. (Scottish TUC, Glasgow, 12/2/67.)

“We as a nation are living beyond our means.. . too many people drifting and dreaming that all is well” (Ilford, 8/1/66.)

Gunter may infuriate those who think that Labour lost its soul somewhere on the road from Scarborough 1964, but apart from that he cannot be described as an exciting man. His background is undeviating to the point of tedium; trade union branch officer, Divisional Labour Party secretary and agent, joined the Army in the war, rose from private to captain, Labour M.P. after the war, President of his union, member of the Labour Party National Executive and finally Minister of Labour in 1964. Now, he is said to have reached the peak of his ambitions; according to one political correspondent Gunter has no desire to move on to greater things and does not think of himself as a future Prime Minister.

Of course they said the same thing, long ago, when the colourless Major Attlee became Postmaster General in the 1929/31 Labour government— and they kept saying it about him, almost to the day when he took over at Number Ten. Has there ever been a politician who has not seen himself as a future Premier? It is hardly in Gunter’s make-up to be that unique.

Indeed, there is some evidence that his rise in the Labour hierarchy was anything but unconsidered. Gunter first won fame by his spirited defence of the platform at Labour Conferences during the early Sixties, when the long period in opposition had them frustratedly and constantly chewing their own tails. It was temptingly easy, then, for a rising star to rise still further by making attacks on the leadership and by speaking in the wild, airy manner so beloved by the Left Wing. Not a few of the present government did just that— but not Gunter. His stand at the Conferences was enough for the newspapers to decide that here was a man of the future, who could be relied on to do capitalism’s dirty work with never a qualm.

Very soon, Gunter was building up his reputation for preaching what he calls hard facts:

“He said there was nothing sacred in the present methods of collective bargaining, and he could not accept that the rewards must inevitably go to those who could, because of the nature of their work and the power of their organisation, command the greatest economic power.” (The Guardian, 17/9/62.)

I am persuaded that unless the unions face the facts of life as they are in the late 1960s, then in seven to 10 years’ time the State will have to intervene.” (Socialist Commentary, April 1964.)

Gunter was not alone in this; other Labour leaders, among them Callaghan and Wilson, had said roughly the same. Those were the days when the Incomes Policy was being drawn up, for action when Wilson’s honeyed words on the scientific revolution won power for Labour. The unions were being given due warning—and a lot of voters were being convinced that a Labour government would be anything but a tool in the unions’ hands. Prominent among the graspers of this particular nettle, one of the readiest to throw a gauntlet before the unions, was Ray Gunter.

Of course this went down very well with the newspapers, who always seem tremendously impressed by any evidence that a politician may be honest. Gunter, they decided, was a candid man of the people, who could always be relied on to speak his mind. Perhaps that was why, when Labour’s day of victory dawned at last, the television interviewers made a point of asking him what he thought of Gordon Walker’s notorious defeat at Smethwick. Gunter was obligingly blunt; this, he said, was a victory of which the Conservative Party should be thoroughly ashamed.

A lot of people looking in that night must have decided, approvingly or not, that this reply meant Gunter was opposed to the electoral exploitation of racism. But Smethwick, and the later result at Leyton, left their scars; when the Labour government outdid the Tories in their restrictions on coloured immigration, one of the two Ministers to submit memoranda pressing for drastic cuts was Gunter. (The Guardian, 31/5/65.)

But this change of policy did not dent the new Minister of Labour’s reputation for common sense. Nothing, it seems, can do that; even when he is so rash as to say, as he did at Blackburn on 5 January 1966, that there were signs the coming year would be industrially more peaceful than 1965. That risky prediction turned out to be right. In 1966 the number of stoppages of work through disputes, the numbers of workers involved, and the number of working days lost, were all lower than in 1965. But that can hardly be called an achievement of Gunter’s; by recent standards 1965 was a bad year—many more working days lost than in 1964, nearly twice as many as in 1963 although much lower than any year between 1958 and 1962. And 1966 was the year when the railwaymen came within an ace of striking and when the seamen had their first official stoppage for over fifty years—incited, said Wilson, not by any desire to improve conditions but by “politically motivated men”.

But right or wrong, Ray Gunter has kept stolidly on, preaching, bullying (“. . . the conference this week has been … roughly handled by Mr. Gunter.” The Guardian report on the Labour Party conference, 30/9/65) sometimes giving way to self-pity (“Sometimes I felt a bit grim under the skin. Some of you seem to think that blokes like myself, when we have arrived at positions of authority, somehow have deserted all the things we stood for. I resent that.” Scottish TUC, 12/2/67.)

Last summer he won new fame by wishing aloud that not so many Labour Party members would equate the Means Test and profit with original sin (who said they did?). Then a rash of publicity on unofficial strikes—the Cameron Report on the Barbican dispute, the stoppage at the London and Liverpool docks—had Gunter at it again.

First he returned to an old theme of his: discipline. (“Mr. Gunter, the Minister of Labour, said yesterday that the prevalence of unofficial strikes was indicative of a state of indiscipline in industry which we should have to tackle. The Times, 17/10/67.) He has plugged this one before: “There is far too much indiscipline in every part of this nation” (Co-operative Congress, Edinburgh, 7/6/65.) “If, perchance, inner disciplines and voluntary contributions are not forthcoming in a short time, this nation must look to other means to prevent the ultimate disaster” (TUC, Brighton, 6/9/65.)

Then from the very bottom of the rag bag of excuses which all politicians keep handy, Gunter produced the tatty old Red Bogy:

“There is now little doubt that the Communist Party are plotting to make this a winter of disruption. They now, unhappily for the well-being of the nation, have entered into an unholy alliance with elements of the Trotskyist Party. Their aim is to destroy our hopes of economic recovery and thereby they hope to bring ruin to the social democratic movement.” (Gillingham, 18/10/67.)

If it was clear from this that the government were getting desperate, it also seemed that Gunter was living in a nightmare world peopled with wildly undisciplined workers—overpaid, underworked, striking at the first word from Communist Party headquarters.

Now one of the Oxford Dictionary’s definitions of discipline is “. . . order maintained among schoolboys, soldiers, prisoners etc.” Perhaps this is what Gunter thinks is lacking among workers—perhaps he, the ex-officer, would like to have us all recruited into some sort of school, or army, or prison, where there would never be any nonsense about struggling to improve our conditions; disciplined, we would take what was coming to us and be thankful.

In any case, workers are subject to all sorts of discipline, whether they recognise it or not. There is the discipline of relying on a job for a living, and of this job existing only so long as it is profitable. There is the discipline—or perhaps degradation is a better word—of producing goods for sale, which usually means a debasement of skill and knowledge in making a shoddy imitation of the real thing. There is the discipline of living two lives—the workaday life of tongue in the cheek, judging everything in terms of our employer’s profits, the job, the wishes of the boss; and the other life at home, when a worker can judge things, as far as possible, in terms of human comfort and welfare.

This is not all that employment means. Because a worker sells his working ability to an employer, employment means that the interests of both are opposed. This opposition is bound to break out into disputes—over wages, conditions of work, security of employment and so on. Gunter prides himself on being a realist but it is highly unrealistic to expect these disputes to be gentle, disciplined affairs confined to the agreed lines of official action. When it suits the employers’ interests they close down a factory or a mine or a railway line and dismiss their workers and Gunter sees no sinister plot behind it. But when workers decided that their economic interests demand something more militant than lining up like soldiers, or schoolboys, or prisoners, for what their employer likes to give them, Gunter sees red.

It is true that at times (the present, for example) it is Communist Party policy to involve themselves in industrial disputes. Gunter takes this as proof that the disputes are caused by the Communists, which is something like the Communist claim that troubles in Russia and eastern Europe are the work of the CIA. In any case, what about the time, during the war, when the Communist Party were opposed to strikes? Who caused the disputes then? The fact is that industrial trouble is bound to happen and workers become involved in it because they work for wages and not because of any political affiliation.

Let us be blunt with Gunter. He is a member of a government which came into power on a wave of optimism and warm promises. So far their most spectacular achievement is their failure to deliver the goods, and the ebb wave of disillusion which is losing them one by-election after another. The reaction of Gunter, and others, has been to blame outside influences—the gnomes of Zurich, the storm which blew them off course, the alleged laziness and indiscipline of the workers.

This is typical of all governments and typical, too, of Dickens’ workhouse masters, who always said the boys’ hunger was really their undisciplined greed, and had nothing to do with the thin and meagre gruel.

Ivan