HE realities behind Mr. Brown’s declaration of intent on incomes policy
took an ugly little peep at the world, last Friday, in the debate on Peter Shore’s Bill on the Emoluments of Top Maragement (Disclosure and Regulation).
It is very much to be hoped that the leaders of the major unions were carefully watching the proceedings. They had cause to pay attention, for the financial press began to let out discreet moans a fortnight before the debate came due, and these agglomerated and fused into a sustained howl during the last few days. The Financial Times hoped that Mr. Shore would be able to drop his ill-conceived measure. | Harsher words were used about it in some other papers. Clearly, the men of power were alarmed.
What, then, was it all about? Mr. Shore had put down a most moderate proposal, which would have enacted that a special Council be set up to investigate and regulate higher incomes, including expense accounts and ‘perks.’ We of The Week have for a long time stressed that this is a vital matter. An Incomes Policy in which the employers know every detail of the incomes of their workers, but in which top incomes, rentier rewards, and major perquisites which can eat up a significant part of the national revenue are completely concealed from the labour force, cannot possibly enforce the parity of treatment about which the TUC have been rightly concerned from the beginning. Our solution has been to advocate that the employers’ accounts should be opened to their workpeople, who, in alliance with the inland revenue, could see to it that the top people did not make hay from the results of trade union abstinence. Mr. Shore’s measure was considerably less radical than ours. Even so, it was a step in the right direction.
For this reason, his Tory opponents characterised it as a “nosey parkers’ charter.’ The top twenty thousand, upon whose efforts everything depended, were under fierce menace, said their runners in the Conservative parliamentary party.
But what of the Government? [t was from this quarter that the most alarming statement came. Mr. Darling, for the Board of Trade, said he ‘would have to be somewhat discouraging about the future progress of this bill.” _-It would prejudice the incomes policy, he went on. Everything depended on the voluntary co-operation of the employers, who could hardly be expected to swallow such a severe measure, he implied. And so when the vote came to be taken only 53 Labour men went into the aye lobby, and although only one Tory presented himself to vote against, the motion failed to become effective because the total vote was less than one hundred.
Two quesions occur to us. How did the Tories know that it was safe to abstain? And what excuses are on offer from those Labour men who did not support Mr, Shore’s Bill? We earnestly hope that none of them have the gall to make speeches about the imperative need for sacrifices from the unions, in future,
Of course, the lesson of this little affair is that Mr. Brown is not prepared to bite the employers with his new policy. What we fear is that he may not always prove to be so squeamish when it is our own side whose interests are at stake.
The debate on Peter Shore’s Bill should be compulsory reading for every trade unionist who has to cast a vote on the question of incomes policy in the next few crucial months. Its outcome is a serious portent, We should take notice. F
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