The TUC: from the General Strike to the new unionism
Robert Taylor Palgrave, 312pp, £45
ISBN 0333930657
As a lad, I sat at the feet of the greats. Not just Jack Jones and Hughie Scanlon, but the men (they were almost always men) who reported the labour movement: Eric Wigham of the Times, who was so distinguished that he sat on the Royal Commission on the Trade Unions and Employers' Associations; Geoffrey Goodman of the earnest but doomed broadsheet Sun; and Hugh Chevins of the Daily Telegraph, reputedly such a militant atheist that he loudly muttered "f**k Christ" at his daughter's church wedding. Yet even these eminent figures shuffled uneasily in their seats when George Woodcock, the cerebral general secretary of the TUC, asked at his monthly press conference: "What are we here for?" If he doesn't know, I used to wonder, who the hell does?
That was 1968, when workers in France were occupying their factories. The TUC was busy get- ting its annual economic review off the ground, and warning that there was no future in having fights with the government. In those days, labour correspondents commanded acres of newsprint to chronicle the TUC. Today, they have largely vanished, or been banished to the business pages as an optional bolt-on to news about industry.
Fortunately, we still have Robert Taylor, the employment editor (even the title has been changed from labour) of the Financial Times, whose dogged determination to prove that trade unions are relevant and valuable, both to their members and society at large, has survived the locust years of organised labour. His new history of the TUC is timely - perhaps a bit too timely, given that it bears the marks of hasty composition, but welcome all the same. It has become fashionable in certain new Labour circles to sneer at the unions and belittle them as behemoths of a bygone age. Taylor, while certainly no lefty, goes a long way to redress the balance.
In the course of so doing, he has uncovered fascinating material about Harold Wilson's ill-fated attempt of 1969 to force reforms on the unions with his "In Place of Strife" proposals. It comes from unpublished (because potentially libellous) notes of interviews with Vic Feather, the then TUC general secretary, by Eric Silver of the Guardian, from the TUC's archives buried in academia and, most importantly, from Wilson's own hand in minutes of meetings with union bosses specially released by the Public Records Office. Here is Vic, recollecting a dinner with the then prime minister and the then employment secretary, Barbara Castle: "Barbara was round the bend. Hysterical. Not listening. Not discussing. Just wanting to thump down her ideas. When I was talking, she was muttering away with her soup. It was a most astonishing exhibition."
After a weekend at Chequers, Wilson remembered: "Jones had not been shown to his room [the Prison Room], so we all went up to install him there and I left them thinking they would want to talk together. Before I did so, Feather stuffed a piece of folded foolscap in my pocket on which he had written 'I will see you downstairs in ten minutes'." They talked in Wilson's room, where the prime minister formed the conclusion that a settlement might yet be reached. That was what they were there for. Jones and Scanlon were the politicians who made the policy. The TUC was the civil service that delivered it, although generations of Congress House officials have mystifyingly preferred the term "general staff", with its unpleasant military connotations. As with the real Civil Service, with whom they enjoy pay parity, the TUC civil servants were not always convinced of their masters' strategy, and did not strive officiously to implement it. The decision to oppose British membership of the EEC in the 1975 referendum was a case in point.
Taylor captures the pragmatic bureaucracy of Congress House, as well as the nature of general secretaries since 1926. Thus we learn that Woodcock, a textile weaver's son and a devout Catholic who believed that unions "should not appeal to man's worst instincts", was a bit of a ditherer hampered by intellectual conceit. Len Murray, a Methodist, did not believe that Margaret Thatcher would do what she said she would do - a near-fatal error. But we read little of the noisy, vain, well-intentioned figures on the General Council during these years. David Basnett, the gloomy "bishop" who played an important role, is not even mentioned. Nor is Callaghan's suicidal "Waiting at the Church" speech to the 1978 Congress, which helped lose his only general election as Labour leader. This is strictly a history of the TUC as an institution, which limits any appraisal of the union leaders who made the policy. Consequently, it lacks colour.
However, as a historical record of 75 years of labour movement advance, retreat and advance in response to changing circumstances, it is unlikely to be bettered. Nor should its plea for the value of trade unionism be underestimated. Taylor is a believer, and we need more like him.
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