We need trade, not trade unions

by IFT

Originally published by IFT.

Burnham meets trade union leaders ahead of expected premiership to chat migrant care workers, wealth taxes and tariff-induced reindustrialisation

Every PM of the post-war consensus, handed the keys to Downing Street, celebrates by locking himself in a room full of union general secretaries. Andy Burnham – the “King in the North” – has started even before his coronation. Before he has so much as signed the visitors’ book at No. 10, he has been taking counsel from the FBU, the RMT and Unison, whose modest requests range from a wealth tax to the wholesale renationalisation of gas, water and energy. One imagines the meetings run long. Union leaders are not celebrated for their brevity, even if Burnham has a reputation for being a yes-man.

It would be churlish not to congratulate the man. He returned to Parliament through a by-election his own party’s machine had spent months trying to deny him, and he won it handsomely. He is, we are endlessly reminded, the only politician in Britain with a positive approval rating. (Big disclaimer: amongst 2024 Labour voters).

In Burham’s ‘Manchesterism’ the free trade of Cobden is to be replaced by the trade unionism of Scargill. What a disservice to the city. Trade is the oldest and most reliable prosperity machine ever devised. David Ricardo worked out its mechanics two centuries ago, and two centuries of evidence have stubbornly declined to prove him wrong.

A trade union exists to do the opposite of trade. Its business is to restrict, to ballot, to withhold – to make labour scarcer and therefore dearer. There is nothing sinister in this; it is what unions are for, and in their place they have their uses. But it is a producer’s philosophy, not a consumer’s, and Mr Burnham’s entire economic worldview is a producer’s philosophy which seems compassionate only to the economically illiterate. Insourcing. Renationalisation. “Making work pay” by heaping regulation onto the very firms expected to pay for it.

It’s his producer-focused mercantilism at the heart of his ambiguous rejoin position. “I would want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union.” Here, at least, is a man who says what he means. “I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The European Union, and the benefits it brought this country. Trade unions… People prosper more when they’re part of unions. That’s my belief, and I’ll say it clearly.”

Still, this is the tragedy of the producer’s mind. It sees the steelworker and the docker – visible, photogenic, easy to admire from a safe distance – and never sees the consumer, who is you, dear reader. It tallies the job a tariff “saves” and never the three jobs it quietly executes in the less fashionable industry.

Free trade has never had a photogenic constituency. Burnham should recall that Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League tore down tariffs not to flatter manufacturers but to feed the poor – and that openness does not merely enrich nations but unites and pacifies them. Everything he claims to want. From his hometown.

He is a decent, likeable man with a genuine feel for the towns Westminster wrote off, and I doubt his sincerity not at all. That is rather the problem. Sincerity in the service of a bad idea is more dangerous than cynicism, because it cannot be embarrassed out of it.