BOOK REVIEW / Brussels sprouts to the defence of unions?: The future of the trade unions - Robert Taylor: Andre Deutsch, pounds 9.99

LAST YEAR Robert Taylor published a book which remains the definitive study of the conflict between our ill-organised union movement and the needs of a modern industrial state.

In The Trade Union Question in British Politics, Taylor's aim was to destroy the myth that between, say, 1945 and the winter of discontent (1978- 79), unrepresentative, undemocratic and overmighty union barons attempted to impose their will on acquiescent governments and supine employers. On the contrary, Taylor argued, successive governments made over-ambitious demands of inadequate union bosses who lacked control of ramshackle empires. It was, he stressed, the state, not the unions, which wanted wage planning, economic development councils and the rest of the corporatist paraphernalia.

The author, an academic and the labour correspondent of the Financial Times, concluded that British unions were simply not 'equipped to become the centralised, corporatist institutions capable of introducing jointly regulated employer-worker cooperation that seemed to work so well in West Germany, Austria and Sweden'.

This year Mr Taylor has come up with a slighter, and in many ways contradictory, sequel to his magnum opus. His new work is sponsored by the TUC, and although the author writes that he was given 'the freedom to express my own views', it turns out that they are pretty much those of the TUC's reformist general secretary John Monks and his Europe-minded assistant general secretary, David Lea.

This is, then, a sanitised view of the trade union movement. The index gives 10 mentions to Mr Monks and not one to Arthur Scargill or Jimmy Knapp, the TUC's chairman-elect. There are more references to sexual discrimination and harassment at work than there are to strikes.

The book's thesis is that the unions will be rescued from their current decline by the bureaucrats of Brussels. The TUC's affiliates must, it argues, turn their attention to social affairs directives issued by the European Commission to 'restrict the scope of the British government's 'flexible' labour strategy'.

Mr Taylor goes on to condemn 'the wholly negative attitude taken by the CBI to much of the European Union's social affairs agenda'. He slams into British employers who have failed, he says, to develop 'a sense of social and ethical responsibility for the well-being of their employees'.

This is superficial stuff, and Mr Taylor must know it. You do not have to be Michael Portillo to look a bit sideways at the over-regulated labour markets Brussels is designing. And you do not have to be Howard Davies, the innovative new director-general of the CBI, to be angry at the suggestion that British employers are a uniformly bad lot, while their Continental counterparts are pillars of social responsibility. Moreover (to hark back to Mr Taylor's previous work) how is is that, over the past 12 months, British unions have suddenly become equipped to play in the European social market with its 'jointly-regulated, employer-worker co-operation'?

Where the book does come alive is in its final pages. Here Taylor talks of this country's 'increasingly insecure and socially polarised labour market where fear of losing one's job is widespread, and the gap between the level of workers' earnings has grown dramatically'. He mentions the 'harsh and insecure conditions' endured by many who are in work, and he is right. There is indeed a sense of resentment and anger among workers, white-collar as well as manual, and it is this, rather than European social chapters, which will ensure the future of trade unionism.