A Party With Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left by Simon Hannah

Author:Simon Hannah [Hannah, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745337487
Google: X-_sAQAACAAJ
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2018-09-15T21:37:49+00:00

Strife in Place of Unity

After offering limited resistance in Parliament, the left reacted more strongly to the industrial strategy developed by Barbara Castle in the White Paper In Place of Strife, designed to deal with shop-floor militancy. With over 2 million days lost every year through strike action since 1964, Wilson had to prove he could tame wild trade unionists, in particular their unofficial wildcat strikes. Over 50 per cent of the strikes took place in just a handful of industries – car factories, shipyards, the mines and docks21 – and most of these were organised through shop-floor militancy. Many years of full employment and the closed shop gave workers an industrial strength they had rarely possessed before, allowing shop stewards to act independently of any official sanction from their union. While the union chiefs fought to try and keep the wage limits intact, the grassroots of the union had other ideas.

The solution developed by Wilson and Castle was a corporatist one, to further integrate the unions into the affairs of state, and giving them power as bureaucratic institutions rather than workers’ movements. Castle believed this was a socialist response to the constant wage claims, but as one contemporary noted ‘the trouble with Barbara is that she thinks anything she does is socialism’.22 The proposals involved requiring official ballots and a ‘cooling-off’ period for strikes. The hope was that the cooling-off period would give union officials time to step in and placate the workforce or for a deal to be worked out without the need for a strike. In this way, In Place of Strife acted as the blueprint for all future anti-strike legislation as it undermined militancy by making the union bureaucracies more responsible for workers’ actions, thus allowing them to act as brakes on rank-and-file activity.

At this time, however, the trade union leaders were willing to take action against such legislation. The intensification of the class struggle across industry had produced a leftward shift in the unions. A new vanguard formed around the TGWU and AEU (led by left-wingers Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon) were furious at the intervention of Wilson and his Cabinet into the movement in such a way. At Labour conference level, this meant millions of affiliated member’s votes were now in alliance with the left – the stranglehold of the right over conference was finally ended. Jones and Scanlon were not consistently on the left, reflecting their trade union interests and positions in the bureaucracy, but they were certainly an awkward ally for the Labour Party and hostile to swathes of integrationist policies.

Foot led the opposition in Parliament, attacking Wilson and Castle for having ‘been persuaded that the way to establish themselves as big, brave men and women capable of government; the way to prove they have hair on their chest; the way to show they don’t give a damn for anybody, except of course the New Mirror or the Daily Statesman [sic] and, last but by no means least, the public opinion polls, is to declare war on the trade unions’.

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