State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Yet while there is no doubt that Britain’s labour market was highly inefficient and inflexible, hamstrung by low productivity and deep-seated resistance to change, it is worth emphasizing two crucial points. First of all, despite all the publicity given to strikes, and despite the enormous inconvenience they caused the public, they were often more important as political events than economic. As Geoffrey Owen, the former editor of the Financial Times, points out in his magisterial survey of British industry since the war, strikes were a symptom, not a cause, of industrial decline. Even in the most strike-prone industries, such as cars and shipbuilding, they were not the only factor in what went wrong, although they obviously made it more difficult for management to turn struggling companies around. When Harold Wilson was planning In Place of Strife in the late 1960s, his economic adviser Andrew Graham reminded him that more working days a year were lost to illness than to strikes, which accounted for just 0.1 per cent of the 5 billion working days a year. On top of that, it is simply not true that Britain suffered more than any other country from strikes. From the United States to Scandinavia, the rise in worker unrest was a worldwide phenomenon, reflecting the pressure of inflation and the end of runaway post-war growth. People often talked about the ‘British disease’, making unflattering comparisons with the relatively strike-free economies of Japan and West Germany. Actually, Britain’s record was not that bad. In the league table for working days lost per 1,000 workers in the 1970s, Britain finished a mere sixth, with Canada, Italy, Australia, the United States and Ireland all recording more strikes. This was much worse than its record in the 1950s and 1960s, yet not as bad as its record in the 1980s, when Britain finished third (behind Canada and Australia) in a league nobody wanted to win.10

  For that noted political commentator Rupert Rigsby, there was an obvious explanation for the upsurge in strikes in the 1970s. ‘Don’t you know what’s behind these strikes? All this political unrest? Russian gold!’ he tells his lodgers in Rising Damp. This was by no means an eccentric or baseless belief. During the seamen’s strike of 1966, MI5 wiretaps inside the Communist Party’s run-down offices had revealed extensive cooperation between party officials and the seamen’s leaders, provoking Harold Wilson to blame the strike on a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’. And by 1970, as scholarly studies have shown, the Communist Party was ‘the major activist force’ in the engineering industry in Manchester and Sheffield, the shipyards of the Clyde and the coalfields of Wales and Scotland, and had a significant role in the engineering and building trades throughout London. Communist representatives played influential roles in the leadership of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (most famously, through Jimmy Reid) and the National Union of Mineworkers, where the CP controlled one in four members of the national executive by late 1973. Three years later, one estimate suggested that 15 per cent of the national executives of the biggest unions were CP members, with another 15 per cent being Labour Party Marxists who often voted the same way. And Communists were particularly powerful within two factories that became synonymous with workers’ unrest: the Ford plant in Dagenham, and the British Leyland plant at Longbridge, Birmingham, where Dick Etheridge and Derek Robinson (nicknamed ‘Red Robbo’) became the country’s best-known militant shop stewards, credited with leading walk-outs that cost the company tens of millions.11

  And yet even at Longbridge, supposedly such a bastion of Red influence, there were only about twenty Communist shop stewards out of a total of 750. By and large, the Communist Party was a very feeble institution, badly short of funds, members and inspiration. Its headquarters in Covent Garden, wrote Stephen Milligan, was ‘a pathetic sight’, the wallpaper peeling, the floors uncarpeted, the empty rooms lit by bare light bulbs, and only the ringing telephones signalling that the party was still alive. Rather belying the idea of growing Communist influence, its number of workplace branches fell steadily throughout the 1970s, national conferences were abysmally attended (in April 1978, for example, only fifty-two people turned up), and most local branches met infrequently if at all. And although conservative pundits often insisted that strikes must be the work of subversive agitators, MI5 reported to Edward Heath in March 1972 that ‘the Communist Party does not yet control any union or exercise a decisive influence on the TUC. Its attitude to industrial disputes is tactical and it exploits rather than creates them, preferring to work through union leadership where it has a vested interest, than through the shop floor level.’ This was hardly surprising: while many trade unionists were quite happy to dress up their pay claims with the rhetoric of class war and socialist transformation, they were not really interested in socialism at all. As the electricians’ moderate leader Frank Chapple once remarked, ‘you hear people talk about “what the workers think”, but when you go along to a meeting, you’ll find about six of the workers there – two Communists, two Maoists and two Labour councillors’. And although the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party) made some inroads into the unions in the mid-1970s, most unionists remained scornful or indifferent. ‘It’s not a trade-union newspaper,’ a Yorkshire branch official said scornfully of their paper Socialist Worker. ‘It’s run by university students.’12

  The truth is that many Communist shop stewards were successful in spite of, rather than because of, their politics. As one told the academic Richard Clutterbuck in 1977, most men were ‘not so interested in revolutionary doctrine or world history as in better bonus or overtime rates or a decent place for a wash. Get them what they want and you’ll have their loyalty.’ He worked fourteen hours a day, eight at his job and six as an unpaid union official, studying the rulebook so that he could get his men a better deal, visiting families where the man had lost his job, and going round with a consolatory £10 note for men who had been hurt in an accident. His men trusted him to look after their interests, but they did not share his politics: when he stood for Parliament as a Communist, he attracted only a handful of votes. He liked to tell a story about a Trotskyist convener on a building site, whose men were furious at the lack of decent toilets, only a ‘pole and a hole’. Spotting the chance to advance the crisis of capitalism, the convener called his men together and passionately addressed them on the prospects for world revolution, his talk ranging from Portugal to Cambodia, from Angola to Ethiopia. Then the Trotskyist called for a show of hands for a strike, and to his disbelief, the men voted no. As they broke up, one said sadly: ‘If we have to go through all that to get a decent shit, he can keep it.’13

  Shop stewards had a terrible press in the 1970s, represented in the newspapers and on television as exaggerated versions of Fred Kite, Peter Sellers’ ludicrously stiff and self-satisfied shop steward in I’m All Right Jack (1959). Unlike Kite, however, most shop stewards were not interested in Communism or the Soviet Union: indeed, many were downright conservative in their attitudes. Although they were easily satirized for their plodding jargon, thick regional accents and eagerness to brandish the rulebook, most of them, said the Donovan report in the late 1960s, were ‘hard-working and responsible people, who are making a sincere attempt to do a difficult job’. They were certainly not the militant bogeymen portrayed by the Daily Express’s highly conservative cartoonist Michael Cummings: one study found that only 17 per cent belonged to a political party, while in the GMWU only half of the shop stewards paid the political levy. A survey of white-collar shop stewards, meanwhile, found that more than half identified themselves as centre-right or right-wing, a fact that would surely have surprised many conservative commentators. They were increasingly keen to defy their union bosses, to be sure, but their chief priority was the interests of their men. Almost all of their strikes were concerned with better wages and working conditions, and instead of spending their time pontificating on the evils of capitalism, most shop stewards were far more interested in mundane things like toilet facilities, tea breaks and the prevention of accidents at work.14

  At the time, many observers thought that the real problem with the trad
e unions was not so much political militancy as the impact of mass affluence. In his journalistic investigation of trade unionism, The New Militants (1972), Paul Ferris suggested that the driving factor in industrial action was the exaggerated material expectations of the British working classes, fuelled by advertising, films and television, a question not of escaping from poverty but of having ‘butter instead of margarine, cars instead of bicycles’. Their demands had become ‘higher and more insistent’, remarked the Sunday Times in April 1972, thanks to the ‘systematic selling of material opulence just outside your reach’. It was a theme beautifully captured in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Middle Ground (1980), in which a character ponders the feelings of ‘failure and rancour and despair’ that have been created by the vast hoardings showing ‘happy families eating Danish Bacon, glamorous women on tiger skins eating Colman’s mustard, dizzy half-clad girls consuming tots of rum and an ominous new variety of Pink Martini, handsome men standing in the middle of trout streams smoking menthol cigarettes’. Even union officials agreed that their real problem was not militancy or poverty, but a revolution of rising demands. ‘What people speak now is the language of expectation,’ explained a TGWU official. ‘You’ve got a right to earn, let’s say, £40 a week. You don’t need to feel guilty about it.’15

  What this meant, though, was that millions of trade unionists had very different values and expectations from the old men who led them. By and large, noted Anthony Sampson, those who ran the trade unions at the dawn of the 1970s were men who had left school at 14, ‘went to work in the bad years of the thirties’, and took their first steps up the ladders of power during an age when mass affluence was almost unimaginable. Even as general secretaries and national icons, most led quiet and modest lives, ‘an odd mixture of the homely and the high-powered, of suburban gardening and do-it-yourself, and national conferences and international seminars’. They were not rich or well paid: in 1975, most earned between £5,000 and £10,000 a year, a tenth of what their American equivalents were paid. They uncomplainingly worked long hours – eighty hours a week was not uncommon – and were proud of their unpretentious, working-class roots. Vic Feather, the exuberant head of the TUC, was the son of a French-polisher from Bradford and had been working his way up the ladder since the mid-1930s. His successor Len Murray, who took over in 1973, was the son of a Shropshire farm-worker; orphaned at the age of 8, he was brought up by relatives, landed in Normandy on D-Day, worked in a Wolverhampton engineering works, went as a mature student to Oxford (where he got a First in PPE in just two years), and began climbing the ranks of the TUC in 1947. Murray presided over the trade union movement during its greatest struggles with the state, yet he was a pragmatist, not a radical, who believed in cooperation rather than conflict. Like his contemporary Billy Wright, the record-breaking England football captain who was born just a few miles away, he was the very embodiment of the wry good humour, solidity and decency of the West Midlands, yet he often seemed a man out of time, adrift at the head of his own movement.16

  By far the two dominant personalities in the trade union movement were the heads of the two biggest unions: Jack Jones of the TGWU, and Hugh Scanlon of the AUEW. Nicknamed the ‘terrible twins’, they were credited (or debited) with having defeated In Place of Strife in 1969, and were often seen as ruthless Marxist conspirators, grasping for the levers of power. Scanlon, who turned 60 in 1971, was undoubtedly a Marxist, and presented a tough, unyielding face to the world. Brought up in Manchester, he had left school at the age of just 11 to train as an apprentice instrument-maker, became a shop steward in the engineering industry, and was a member of the Communist Party for more than two decades. Scanlon often struck observers as a very dour man, his left-wing rhetoric ‘drab and repetitive’. The role of the trade unions, he once said, was ‘to change society itself, not merely to get the best out of existing society’, and on the right and in business circles he was virtually Public Enemy Number One. ‘He wants to cause chaos. He wants to squeeze industry out of existence, to make capitalism fail,’ said a Manchester personnel director in 1972. But Scanlon claimed he was a pragmatist, not a revolutionary. ‘I certainly want to see socialism, but we’re not going to create it by industrial chaos or by a workers’ or peasants’ revolt,’ he told Paul Ferris. It was revealing that engineering employers, who dealt with him on a daily basis, regarded him as ‘a man who keeps his promises’. And Denis Healey, no unconditional admirer of the trade unions, regarded him as one of the more likeable union bosses, largely because of his ‘cynical good humour’ and fondness for golf. Scanlon was also a great fan of goldfish. It was a source of great regret to him, Healey recalled, that he could never get them to breed; but then goldfish are much harder to handle than engineering bosses.17

  If anything, Jack Jones, the head of the TGWU, was even more of a bogeyman on the right. For a man who was nicknamed the ‘Emperor Jones’ because of the unparalleled sway he supposedly exercised over public life, he cut a surprisingly grey figure, rather like the elderly apparatchiks who in those days reviewed parades in Red Square.* But behind the bullet head, steady gaze and thick glasses was a remarkably colourful personal history. The son of a Liverpool docker, a boyhood Sea Scout and Sunday school regular, Jones became a shipbuilding apprentice at 14, a Labour Party ward secretary at 15 and a TGWU delegate at 17. He read Marx and Engels, took Ruskin College correspondence courses, was elected a Labour councillor in Toxteth and joined the Territorial Army. In 1937, he went off to Spain to fight in the International Brigade, becoming a political commissar in the Major Attlee Company of the British Battalion. Wounded in the Battle of the Ebro, he returned home, became the TGWU’s man in Coventry, left the Communist Party, and finally became his union’s general secretary in 1968. By then, however, he already cut an oddly old-fashioned figure, earnest and austere, apparently the soul of proletarian incorruptibility. At the time, the Guardian remarked that he ‘must be the last trade unionist to wear a cloth cap regularly’. A fellow union leader put it rather differently: ‘Jones has a smile glinting like the sunlight on the brass plate of a coffin.’18

  There is no doubt that Jones was a singularly thick-skinned and dedicated political operator, and, although he had left the Communist Party, his views remained far to the left of the political mainstream. The KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky later claimed that Jones had been a Soviet agent, regularly passing Labour Party and union documents to the KGB until the Prague Spring of 1968, when he broke contact with his handlers in protest at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Although Jones allegedly accepted KGB donations towards his holiday expenses, his motives were almost certainly ideological rather than financial. Colourless, puritanical, a great fan of Clement Attlee, he spent his holidays in a caravan in Devon, although when he took his wife on a package trip to the Algarve in 1976 his fame was such that the Daily Mail made it a two-column story with three pictures. He lived in a little ex-council flat in south-east London and several times turned down lucrative job offers from the private sector, even though, according to Milligan, he ‘could step into the executive class any day he wanted’. And however close his links with the KGB may have been in the 1960s, they were certainly over by the autumn of 1970, when MI5 gave him a clean bill of health. ‘The realities of Jones’s position as General Secretary of the largest trade union in the country’, the Security Service reported to the government, ‘press more heavily on him than any influences the CPGB could bring to bear on him.’ Indeed, by this point his extremist reputation was slightly misleading. Stephen Milligan thought that Jones was becoming ‘a more thoughtful and constructive man; a man who could listen as well as lecture’, while the Financial Times called him a ‘national statesman, devoted to doing what he believes to be best for Britain’s workers and their families’. Even Paul Dacre, the future voice of Middle England, told the readers of the Express that Jones had a ‘blunt, rough-edged Scouse charisma’ and was ‘very far from being a monster’.19

  One of the single biggest miscon
ceptions about the 1970s is that Jones and Scanlon exercised unbridled power, having only to snap their fingers for their men to walk out on strike. Yet the reality was that despite their image of imperial command, their power was ebbing away as their men became more affluent, more individualistic, more focused on their own private goals. Even in 1971, Anthony Sampson thought that the age of ‘unchallenged leadership’ was over, that ‘the members are much more questioning, the aims less certain, so that many general secretaries, while they talk like confident generals, are preoccupied with trying to prevent mutiny or desertion’. What happened at Pilkington’s, where the glass workers defied their shop stewards and insisted on staying out, would become common across Britain in the following decade, as aggressive young workers on the shop floor ignored the entreaties of their elderly, cautious, often frightened and muddled leaders. And although both Conservative and Labour governments persisted in the naive belief that they could control workers’ wages through a partnership with the union bosses, this was never going to work, for the simple reason that the bosses no longer had the power to impose agreements on their men. The old days of obedience and solidarity were over. ‘The trouble is not that the trade unions are too strong,’ one observer had presciently remarked in 1967. ‘It is that they are too weak.’ His name was Edward Heath.20

  One evening in 1969, the Leader of the Opposition invited five of Britain’s leading trade unionists, among them Vic Feather and Jack Jones, to dinner at his Albany flat. As luck would have it, he had first met one of them three decades before, albeit in very different circumstances. It was on the banks of the Ebro, during one of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War, that Ted Heath and Jack Jones had first shaken hands. Then still at Oxford, Heath had been part of a student delegation visiting Spain to express support for the Republican cause, and when he encountered a group of ‘tough, hardened soldiers, burned by the Spanish sun to a dark tan’, Jones was among them. At the time, there had been no great meeting of minds. But now, in the elegant surroundings of Heath’s bachelor pad, the two men talked amiably and freely. ‘There is no doubting Ted Heath’s sympathy for people,’ Jones later recalled, ‘and we quickly established a feeling of camaraderie.’ Later, the conversation turned to Heath’s sailing and musical interests, and to his guests’ delight Heath was persuaded to show off his new piano, and even played a couple of short pieces. ‘Then Vic Feather called out, “Play ‘The Red Flag’ for Jack,” ’ Jones recalled, ‘and the leader of the Tory Party cheerfully played Labour’s national anthem. It put the seal on a jolly evening.’21