The Daily Sweat of Politics - 20 December 2002

For many years I corresponded, often at long intervals, with a friend in England who was renowned as a brilliant philosopher, though he himself rejected the term.

He called himself an historian of ideas, mostly ideas about government.

I doubt there was anyone alive who knew more about theories, about forms of government, than this large, portly, droll man.

He had one topic, one aspect of the government, for which he was always ready to be taunted, twitted, joshed, kidded - it's a sure sign of approaching age that I can't offhand think of a more easy-going piece of slang - kidded indeed sounds like my maiden aunt.

However, whatever you call it, from time to time when some of his theories of the limits of democracy took in more territory and more learned Russian and German names than I'd ever heard of I would needle him - that's better - and I'd suggest he give a practical example in life of the latest theory.

This he was always reluctant to do.

There was a very hot time in Washington when President Lyndon Johnson was wrestling with the Senate over some wracking provision of an historic bill - the enacting into law of the whole idea of Medicare - free comprehensive health service for everyone over 65.

I wrote to my friend and asked him how he felt about it. He replied in effect from the sanctuary of his university study, "Ah it's all beyond me. Here I sit in my tower weaving beautiful theories of an ideal government for ideal human beings and there you are down in the street with politicians squabbling over percentages and distinguishing chronic from acute illnesses and the prices of medicines and other such bothersome details."

This was more than half joking.

The business - the actual act of governing, the daily sweat of politics - did not interest him.

A year or two ago I happened to be breakfasting with a former mayor of New York city who was nothing if not a practical politician.

We were rehearsing the usual grumbles about the traffic problems and guessing how soon certain main thoroughfares of the city would be overtaken by total gridlock.

I had a close friend who was obsessed with the idea of suspending all commercial traffic, all deliveries of goods by day.

"After all," I said, "they've done it in Rome."

"When?" snapped the mayor.

I thought it was something like 25 BC.

"That's better," he said.

He then started to add up the likely immediate consequences of a ban on daytime deliveries.

"All the wholesale houses and shopkeepers up in arms, they too would have to be awake in the middle of the night to receive the stuff - the furniture, the groceries, the fruit, the chemicals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

"The teamsters and other trucking unions would put up impossible demands for double, triple pay.

"There'd be a rush of alienation of affection suits from wives.

"You'd have to think all over again about insurance contracts. Physical liability premiums would leap.

"A revolution in hospital staff schedules, emergency wards especially.

"A strike of interns and residents in training, maybe suddenly required to work not 17 but 22 hours a day.

"Shall I go on?"

"Enough," I said.

I transmitted some of these bothersome details to the lady with the original bright idea.

"They'd manage somehow," she said.

But long before my learned friend died I found myself, as the French say, in a mischief-making mood.

I composed a letter asking what he would do if he were the mayor, the city manager or whoever is the executive running the city of Oxford.

What would he do right away if the city suddenly had a garbage strike?

Who'd get the first telephone call?

Who would have to do what to whom and when?

I never sent the letter. I heard my friend was very ill so I kept it.

I knew very well what under happier circumstances the answer would be: "Haven't a clue."

Well a week ago this ordeal was put to us in 48 anxious hours.

We'd been reading vaguely for some time about the transit workers' union - all the men and women who run the city's subway - the underground - and the city buses.

They were coming to the end of their contract with the municipal transit authority, which runs all public transport in the five boroughs of the city.

However, two weeks ago quite suddenly one morning the transit union president announced that after months, months of negotiating talks the two sides were far apart and he would call a strike for midnight, Saturday 14 December.

By Friday the 13th the two sides were to sit down for a final try at a settlement that gave no hope that it was in sight.

That the union meant business was clear to Mayor Blumberg and his office and what you might call the city managers went into a prolonged dawn to midnight routine to help the 7.2 million New Yorkers and New Jersey and Connecticut commuters who use either a bus or the subway everyday.

I notice there was in the letters to the editor columns of the New York Times a singular absence of advice from economists, liberal leaders, professors of political science, who usually very vocal and opinionated when it comes to terrorism, the preservation of civil rights, Iraq.

Right away the hospitals stated hiring thousands of cots for nurses to stay overnight and the next night and the next.

The hotels were jammed overnight with blue jeans.

Check all supplies of donor blood, of course, all generators. Call healthy patients to make their cars available for the very sick to get to hospital.

The hospital preparations alone would take an hour to recite. Every company that owns a private bus was recruited to carry workers, companies' staffs and city hall workers.

Firemen were ordered to live, for the time being, in their fire houses.

Private cars to carry no fewer than four occupants.

With the probability that the streets would be clogged with cars illegally, parked 200 special police called for overtime.

Thousands of frantic young parents calling backup childcare centres in case their babysitters were stuck at home.

College officials going crazy on devising some way of helping graduating students take their examinations. The ferry companies paid half a million dollars to hire private boats to get people to work across the rivers.

An economist, who's an expert at what he calls back of the envelope calculation, figured that if everyone who works every day in the city gave only one hour to prepare in some way for a strike it would cost the city $68m. In fact the strike preparations cost $140m.

Came suddenly midnight and the dramatic news that the union was holding off the deadline and the two parties would go into the usual unending negotiating session.

All through Monday, never an encouraging or a discouraging word.

First thing Tuesday morning we heard that the union president and the transit authority president were all in, that they'd keeled over and gone flat for an hour or two's recovery.

At that point I was reminded of a great friend of mine and I wished he'd been alive to take over.

He was a slim, dapper, quick-witted, cynical little Irish American who'd loved his job more than anyone I ever knew.

He was a labour arbitrator. He sometimes would elect to take the company's side, sometimes the union's.

He tended to refuse to come to the rescue until the parties were truly deadlocked and within hours of a strike.

And then he would move in. The very pattern of optimism and geniality faced the stupefied delegates, who after two sleepless nights were either gently stewed or nodding off, and he would review all the points in contention, take his time, the fateful clock ticked, he passed the bottle around and he'd say:

"Look fellas, this strike is not going on forever, not for a year or three months or a month, maybe 10 days, by which time the company will have lost about $200m, the union will be half bust by fines against its strike fund and nobody gets all he wants - ever."

He would suggest yielding a point here, add a pinch of salt to the pension fund, forego an immediate 2% rise for a freeze now and a long-term 3%, give husbands three weeks off for a birth instead of two - chipping away here and there he would keep on passing the bottle, make new friends on both sides, tell a shrewd funny story and it was his triumph to announce at 4 am that the strike was off.

At 7 pm last Tuesday evening, blear-eyed, the participants did just that.

Talking about the art of late negotiation - and he was a master - my old friend once told me: "Never get embroiled with professors and ideologues.

"Avoid the right and the left like a plague - they think compromise is failure, they distrust their opponent on sight.

"What they're really saying all along is 'Why aren't you more like me?'

"A plague on both their houses. They're not interested in government.

"They rarely know it but they're interested in their party winning all the time. Benevolent dictatorship is their dream."

Remembering my professor of ideas and the general aloofness of intellectual types from the stuff of government I fondly recall a great line by Clement Atlee - the Labour prime minister who buried Churchill in the post Second War electoral landslide.

He had appointed the eminent scholar Harold Lasky, who'd written more heavy and learned books on the history and practice of democracy than anybody alive.

Fresh into the actual practice of politics he turned into a stumblebum politician. He was dismissed.

"Rum thing about Harold," mused Atlee, wheezing quietly on his pipe, "never seemed to get the hang of things."

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