Direct action gets things done: so why don't the trade unions try it?

'Today's trade union leaders have lost the fire in their bellies. But a tougher generation is coming'

A penny for the thoughts of a sacked Liverpool docker, or those of a Llanwern steelworker facing an uncertain future in the globalised economy. Or a unionised Halifax textile worker, powerless to affect the waves of recent mass redundancies.

A penny for the thoughts of a sacked Liverpool docker, or those of a Llanwern steelworker facing an uncertain future in the globalised economy. Or a unionised Halifax textile worker, powerless to affect the waves of recent mass redundancies.

All three might have spent the last week listening to the deliberations of the TUC, whose annual conference has just ended in Glasgow. More likely, they spent it scrabbling around for petrol, marvelling at the bravura of the un-unionised truckers and small farmers - and also at the seeming impotence of their own unions.

And pity the ex-miner tending his allotment in a half-forgotten pit village in south Yorkshire. Hindsight tells him that Arthur Scargill got it wrong back in 1984 in not balloting the Nottinghamshire miners. Yet, surveying the still vacant plot where the winding towers once stood, he could be forgiven for thinking that Scargill's big mistake was not to have sent flying pickets to the oil refineries. Britain would have shut down in a week.

Ironies abound in blockaded Britain. In November 1981, Tony Blair struck out against Tory anti-secondary picketing legislation in the New Statesman, with a particularly ringing condemnation of the then Employment Secretary, Jim Prior.

"This is a draconian limitation on effective industrial action which involves anyone other than the immediate parties," wrote the young barrister. "These proposals are not moderate. They are a concerted attempt to destroy the effectiveness of industrial action."

Barely two years on, and now MP for Sedgefield, Blair was pictured beaming at a rally as the flailing arms of an animated Arthur Scargill stabbed the air. Today, politically light years away, the same Mr Blair - along with Ministerial colleagues Alan Milburn and Gus Macdonald, who once dreamed of insurrection in their youth - condemn the truckers for "holding the country to ransom". Not so very long ago Michael Portillo and William Hague were happy to see picketing miners arrested in their hundreds under the conveniently revived medieval law of "be-setting". They happily acquiesced as the police mounted illegal roadblocks to prevent striking Kent miners from crossing the Dartford bridge. Today the emollient Portillo and Hague evince a measured support for the new militants. These same protesters have spent the last week deciding which tankers can leave the refineries and which must stay. A privilege never accorded Arthur's "army" when the might of the state was wielded against them.

Yet the most surreal sight of the past week has been that of trade union leaders in Glasgow urging drivers and farmers to go back to work. True, some unionised tanker drivers may have felt intimidated, although more likely their sympathies were with the protesters. That some of the hauliers now demonstrating had once happily driven through miners' picket lines, there can be no denying either. But the exhortations for a return to work seem only to have drawn attention to the impotence of Britain's still bruised trade union movement.

A battery of Tory anti-trade union legislation, religiously preserved by New Labour, has ensured that the trade unions would be sequestrated out of existence if they attempted any mass picket. Ask those Mersey dockers why they lost out to casual labour, and they will explain that their union, the Transport & General Workers Union, was unable - or unwilling - to risk the wrath of the courts. The American Longshoremen's union came out in solidarity. Dockers as far away as Australia downed tools. Every British port carried on as normal.

Unlike their continental partners, the British trade unions have tended to invest their political hopes in the Labour Party. This relationship not only provided leverage, it enabled workers from the shop floor to be elected to Parliament. Today that relationship is a cause for union weakness.

Four years ago, Labour's then Trade and Industry spokesman, Stephen Byers, suggested that Tony Blair would break the link with the unions. In Government, the Prime Minister has discovered the usefulness of the union vote in policing the Labour Party. Without the assistance of some compliant unions, horror of horrors, party members might even have elected Rhodri Morgan or Ken Livingstone! Union officials have told me that they have seen off the threat to break the link. But this has come at some price. New Labour is a party of the flexible labour market. Its spokespeople talk Left, but act Right. There is a crisis of representation that goes beyond the massive impediments put in the way of working-class trade unionists being elected to Parliament. It is reflected in the mass action that has paralysed the country. It may be the shape of things to come.

The charismatic leader of the French Peasants Confederation, José Bové, has been imprisoned for his part in attacking that potent symbol of globalisation, McDonald's, or rather a branch of the chain in a region famous for its pungent Roquefort cheese. Bové is a modern Poujadist, whose anti-capitalism is rooted in a deeper nationalism. The failures of the traditional labour movement are opening the way for a new generation of populist leaders like him. Some may emerge populist and xenophobic. Others will see direct action, Seattle-style, as an alternative to docility.

The British union leaders argue that their pressure has secured a new Employment Act. But in comparison to the new rights secured by New Zealand's unions, their achievements are small fry. I recently watched a British union official's jaw drop as she listened to the list of "can do's" from an antipodean colleague. A measure of union impotence can be gleaned from the preface to the original White Paper written by Tony Blair. "Even after the changes we propose," wrote Blair, with the Institute of Directors no doubt in mind, "Britain will have the most lightly regulated labour market of any leading economy in the world."

Our trade union leaders have largely lost the fire in their bellies. Years of defeats have lowered their expectations. In a couple of years, many of the current general secretaries will have retired. Some familiar faces will give way to a tough-minded new generation, less sentimental for a Labour Party that has gone. Tony Blair, or his successor, will find life much harder - especially if recession follows in the wake of an oil price hike. The balmy days of blank cheques from the unions are over.

The writer is editor of 'Tribune' and a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party