Eamonn Butler

This is no time for salami slicing

You can often achieve a lot more by doing things a bit at a time rather than attempting one bold and sweeping reform.

In the 1970s, for example, the trade unions had extraordinary legal privileges; strike votes were done on a show of hands at works meetings (usually late at night when everyone except the Trotskyists had gone to bed); there weren’t even secret ballots for union elections.

Edward Heath took the unions head on with his all-embracing Industrial Relations Act. It was a disaster: there were widespread demonstrations and strikes, and one of these confrontations forced him from office. Margaret Thatcher learnt from this and took things much more slowly. First, the government offered to pay for unions to hold postal strike ballots (which the ordinary, non-Trotskyite members rather liked). Then the same for union elections. Then secret ballots became compulsory. And so it went on, the unions’ special privileges gradually being eroded, but in steps too small to bring everyone out on the barricades.

My colleague Dr Madsen Pirie even coined a name for this approach: micropolitics. And using it, we went on to privatize countless industries, and to reform health, council housing and (partly) schools. So it’s a big turn-around for me when I say that today, our situation is entirely different. Government has become so big and bloated that we need to re-shape the whole thing.

This is not something that you can fix a bit at a time, especially when government spending accounts for more than half of the country’s spending. We all know that government as a whole needs to be pruned back, but equally, we all enjoy at least some of the goodies that it hands out, and we don’t want our particular goodies to be pruned.

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