The Observer (England), July 8, 2007, Sunday

Copyright 2007 Guardian Newspapers Limited

All Rights Reserved

The Observer (England)

July 8, 2007

SECTION: OBSERVER COMMENT PAGES; Pg. 12

HEADLINE: Opinion: No Labour man would ever have leapt on this bus

BYLINE: Nick Cohen

BODY:

Labour and Tory politicians used to move in different worlds. The classic career path for a Conservative minister was to accept the relatively low pay of Westminster - low in comparison with what he could have earned in business, that is - as the price of having a say in public life. He would strive to get to the top of the greasy pole and go off to make 'real money' in the City on retirement.

The 20th-century British left watched him with contempt. Trade unionists who had battled the boss class, and middle-class intellectuals with a distaste of spivvery and funny money, had little time for business. Labour politicians found Westminster salaries as good or better than what they could earn as trade union officials or academics. When they left politics many became bureaucrats - Roy Jenkins and Neil Kinnock went to the European Commission - or journalists - Roy Hattersley, Richard Crossman and Harold Wilson's press spokesman Joe Haines - or just retired and wrote their memoirs. These often came in the form of diaries. Crossman's and Barbara Castle's provoked outraged accusations of betrayal and breach of confidence from their contemporaries, and in Crossman's case, government lawyers tried to stop him publishing.

If the same accusations hit Alastair Campbell when his diaries are published, they won't be new, and if his diaries are as shrewd and informative about British government as the diaries of his Seventies predecessors, every historian of the Blair years will thank him. But Campbell isn't just taking publishers' advances; he and his former New Labour colleagues are working for organisations that no 20th-century Labour politician would have gone near.

On Thursday, three days after Campbell's book launch, First Group, who employ him as a 'brand, sports sponsorship and charity consultant', will hold its annual general meeting in Aberdeen. Managers and shareholders will have to pass a picket of low-paid American bus drivers, demanding that the conglomerate respect their human rights. The shareholders may not be as unsympathetic as outsiders might predict - at last year's AGM about 20 per cent voted for a critical motion.

In Britain, First Group is known for running trains and buses. Commuters resent the mediocre performance of the privatised services and taxpayers resent the spending of so much of their money for so little effect on parasitic transport firms. But employees of First Group say it treats them well enough. In the US, however, it is involved in ferocious labour disputes. Unions battle to force the company to recognise them, and have filed dozens of accusations of local managers victimising activists. George Benedict, a bus driver from New York state, will allege to First Group shareholders on Thursday that when he arrived at work with a Teamsters union cap, he was demoted and his hours were cut. Shareholders will get copies of an assessment from Lance Compa, a specialist on international labour law from Cornell University, who says of an American subsidiary that runs yellow school buses: 'It forcefully campaigns against workers who choose union representation, denigrates the union and threatens dire consequences if employees succeed in their organising efforts.'

Campbell isn't the only New Labour supporter working for the conglomerate. Tim Allen, a former colleague in Number 10 who now runs a lobbying firm, advised First Group, although he tells me he has no links with it now. When John Lyons, the Labour MP for Strathkelvin and Bearsden. was thrown out in the 2005 election, he was picked up by First Group and sent to the US to report on its treatment of workers. American unions have learned to be wary of members of the Labour party.

Kim Keller from the Teamsters union described running into Lyons in Baltimore where workers allege that First Group pulled out of a contract to run school buses after they voted to join a union and asked for better health insurance. 'I told him there were many workers who could talk to him. There were rampant violations. He never took us up on it. And he's the guy who's supposed to be monitoring this!'

First Group spokesmen tell me that the unions are always making accusations about its behaviour, but an accusation is not the same as a proven charge. They add that the vote for union recognition had nothing to do with its deci sion to pull out of Baltimore. Meanwhile, Lyons has criticised anti-union behaviour by managers. The point that's worth dwelling on is that in the 20th century no Labour MP or party worker would have cared what First Group spokespersons said. The assurance of their American comrades that this was a union-busting firm that victimised low-paid workers would have been all they needed. Old taboos, not all of them foolish, would have been stirred. Some things weren't done, and this was one of them.

I hope I'm not romanticising the past. Labour voters weren't necessarily better people than Tories. Labour MPs could be just as hypocritical, corrupt, vain, dunderheaded, prejudiced, incompetent, feckless and delusional as their Conservative counterparts - more so on occasion. All I'm saying is that the willingness of Labour people to have anything to do with a company with First Group's reputation shows that the old world is dying.

I talked at the beginning about working-class Labour trade unionists confronting the bosses, but today they rarely do. Trade union membership has collapsed in the private sector. The typical modern trade unionist works for the civil service, NHS or local government and the 'boss' they confront is a fellow bureaucrat. The puritan middle-class academic earnestly peddling his or her plans for social reform also feels like a figure from another age. Although I can't remember ever meeting a lecturer who admitted to voting Conservative, the leftishness of the post-modern academy is an obscurantist and exclusive ideology with few concrete plans for the improvement of the lot of less fortunate citizens here or abroad.

'I am a great admirer of the British sense of fair play and high respect for workers' rights,' said an American union leader as he sent his men off to Aberdeen. He shouldn't count on either.