216 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
smaller workforce engaged in a decreasing number of fires, and with a bigger
role in fire prevention. The government White Paper makes more room for
the terrorist threat, but without altering very much the Bain vision of a fire
service better adapted to the normal emergency. Yet a fire service adapted to
the demands of terrorism is not likely to be as compact or as cheap as a Bain
fire service.
The tensions in the UK government position extend to moral tensions. It
is undoubtedly a leading responsibility of government to protect its citizens
from violent attack and to minimize the after-effects when an attack cannot
be prevented. But the organizations it calls upon to discharge these respon-
sibilities are, by the same token, important for a government not to disable
or demoralize. In the UK the demands of keeping public spending under
control, and the prevailing vision of the fire service as an organization for
dealing with increasingly preventable normal emergencies, may have led to a
demoralization of the fire service during the period of the FBU strike; if so, the
fire service is not well situated to take on new and demanding responsibilities
so soon after that strike. It is not insignificant that, in the very recent industrial
action in Greater Manchester, it was new equipment for dealing with terrorist
incidents that firefighters were refusing to train on.
The UK government’s role in relation to the fire service and terrorism is
more complicated than may first appear. First, the size of the threat from
terrorism is affected by ongoing government policymaking, especially for-
eign policy decisions, to which terrorism is sometimes a reaction. Like the
army, the fire service is sometimes in the front line when government pol-
icy is badly thought out or dangerous. It has to be there to pick up the
pieces when things go wrong in the form of terrorism, and sometimes, as
in New York, it suffers the first casualties. These are new risks, and they
are not likely to be taken on enthusiastically in a cost-cutting climate or
in the face of government commissioned reports that suggest that there are
too many firefighters chasing, so to speak, too few fires. The moral is not
that the government should have agreed to the firefighters’ demands before
November 1992. Nor is it that the FBU strike was justified after all. The FBU
strike was unjustified, and the government’s refusal to pay 40 per cent was
justified—so long as the job of firefighters was normal firefighting. When the
role of the fire service was reconceived, as in the White Paper, there was a
new need to enlist the goodwill of the firefighters by acknowledging, inviting a
discussion of, and perhaps proposing improved pay for, a new role, especially
in major cities. What appears to have happened is that new responsibilities
have been quietly grafted on to the post-Bain fire service, as if terrorism and
natural disasters might naturally fill the free time created by successful fire
prevention. This seems to be a kind of injustice, as well as being politically
inept.