Gormley: prop for state

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YORKSHIRE miners use his photo as a target in darts matches to give an edge to their aim. But Mrs Thatcher knows her own. Lord Gormley dons the ermine as the reward for a lifetime's service to the ruling class.

Offensive

He fought them, of course, reluctantly, when he couldn't avoid it, as in 1972 and 1974 when the miners went on the offensive against Heath's government.

But always he remained on their own ground, a militant right winger and defender of the capitalist system. Always he acted as a brake on the miners and on the labour movement, always he eagerly sought compromises and deals with the status quo.

His recent 'intervention' to sway the vote on the miners' pay claim against the left and for peace with this murderous Tory government was an appropriate last act in the career of a time server.

"Honours"

Even so, that the leader - however inept and reluctant - of the miners' battles against Heath should accept 'honours"

from this most vicious, most anti-working class and most indefensible of governments - that is the measure the crisis of working class leadership in Britain today.

Back in the Trotsky truly said that the British trade union bureaucracy had become a central pillar of the state, without which the state could not survive. Last Sunday in an editorial which was as perceptive as it was candid the Sunday Telegraph said the same thing when it hailed the 'enoblement' of Gormley as a strengthening of the state. From the labour movement's point of view, the editorial, which we reprint below, can serve as an appropriate obituary for the wretched toady, Joe Gormley.

John Cunninhgam "BY accepting a peerage Joe. Gormley has done honour to the House of Lords. It is the reputation of that ancient institution which will be strengthened rather than the reputation of that venerable trade unionist.

As leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Mr Gormley was much more powerful than any member of the House of Lords, and his presence on their benches will raise their prestige far more than his. Such is the strange turnabout of modern times that it is the peerage which increases its status by gaining a trade union leader rather than the trade union leader by gaining a peerage. Lord Gormley with another future Lord As it happens, trade union leaders, even without formal ennoblement, are usually referred to as ''barons" since their behaviour is often much more imperious and swashbuckling, overbearing and lordly, than the grandest and most ancient of hereditary noblemen, most of whom eschew such characteristics, prudently preferring to present a much more modest mien. Far from being tempted into arrogance by his elevation, Mr Gormley may well find himself required to relearn habits of humility wholly alien to the oligarchic world of the TUC.

Even his standard of living may drop, since there is certainly no comparison between the spartan fare served in the Lords and those Lucullan dishes served in the fine London restaurants where Mr Gormley used to hold court.

All in all, Mr Gormley may have made quite a sacrifice, lost much face among some of his old colleagues who will never deign to speak to him Certainly there can be no possible question of his having had to beg, or buy, his title. Quite the contrary, it is likely to have been Mrs Thatcher who had to beg him to accept. For trade union leaders in the Lords are still precious rarities, much to be treasured, their arrival as welcome to that beleaguered body as any Reprinted from Sunday Telegral 13 June 1982.

relieving force.

In the old days some commoners used to turn down a peerage on the grounds that they did not own enough acres to do justice to that high rank.

No such inhibition is likely to have deterred Mr Gormley for a moment. Card votes today mean much more than acres, and in the past Mr Gormley has been the proud owner of one of the finest collections of the former in the land -not to mention a fiefdom stretching over much of England, Scotland and Wales. Shoulders which have borne so many heavier burdens will be more than broad enough to do more than justice to an ermine cape. Cardiff branch of the Cardiff Royal Infirmary