British Labor Leaders

[Jim heartfield]

In message <368CFAF1.93D44032 at lor.net>, Tom Lehman <TLEHMAN at lor.net>
writes
>
>Now for what I do know.  Arthur Scargill is the president of the British
>mine workers union. 

True, but the National Union of Mineworkers is a shadow of its former
self. Once a quarter of a million mineworkers were members of the NUM.
But following the pit closure programme [another word we spell
differently] the NUM was reduced to a few thousand. This historic
destruction of the mining industry was the background to Scargill's rise
to fame as the representative of the militant Yorkshire rank and file.
But Scargill's activist campaign had its limits. First Scargill refused
to acknowledge that the coal board's running down of the industry was
indeed in the interests of British capitalism, and tried, vainly to
convince the ruling class that, despite the figures, coal was
profitable. Second, Scargill related well to the militants, but not to
the rest of the Union. He was too fond of by-stepping the rank and file,
and putting the strategy into the hands of the activist minority. This
was the strategy that bounced the Union into the strike in 1984 without
a national ballot, using flying pickets from the Yorkshire region to
picket out the moderate pits. Though most NUM members respected a
picket-line, enough didn't, especially in Nottinghamshire to leave the
strike fatally divided (indeed that was the excuse that the rest of the
Trade Union Congress used to scab on the strike).

Scargill, after a brief spell in the Young Communist Party (where he
learnt his politics, and established the miners group that elected him
president in the early eighties) joined the Labour Party where he was
the most left-wing of the Union representatives. The Labour party
conference and leadership election had a 'block vote' exercised by the
Union leaders in proportion to their memberships (though these were
often exaggerated) meaning that Labour's policy was often sown up by the
Union bosses (most of whom were to the right of Scargill). When Tony
Blair sought to "modernise" the Labour Party by abolishing the block
vote at a special conference, Scargill was the main opponent of the
measure, but was roundly defeated. Scargill drew the lesson and left the
Labour Party to form the Socialist Labour Party.

It was not a propitious time to be launching a new party, since the spur
was a succession of defeats for the British working class, first in the
defeat of the 1984-5 strike and then in the modernisation of the Labour
Party that followed it. But worse still the SLP was politically a re-
hash of the Old Labour political programme that had lost its appeal for
most working people - nationalisation and welfarism. Even when the SLP
stood a candidate in the solidly mining constituency of Hemsworth,
Scargill loyalist Ken Capstick failed to get more than a few hundred
votes, leaving him in the marginal fringe. Today the SLP is a rump, that
has had to beat off the rag-bag of far leftists that have gravitated
towards it with the same kind of political witch-hunts that marred
Labour's lurch to the right. Instead of transcending the left
sectarianism, the SLP has just become one more of the far left groups
alongside the Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialist Party (once the
Militant, now expelled from the Labour Party).

>
>Ok, who is Tony Monk?  

I think you mean John Monk. He is head of the Trade Union Congress. He
was responsible for turning the shell of the old TUC into a welfare and
insurance company providing services for workers, but little
representation. A friend of mine, Dave Hallsworth has particularly
bitter memories of Monk. Dave was the chair of the Thameside Trades
Council - a local association of union branches that is affiliated to
the main TUC. Dave organised a conference in 1980 to support the Irish
political prisoners in Britain's concentration camps, under the banner
of the Thameside Trades Council, getting local trade union branches to
commit to solidarity action with Sands and his fellow hunger strikers.
this affront to the petty patriotism of the TUC was the excuse for a
witch-hunt against Dave, in which Thameside Trades Council was
disaffiliated, despite the sponsorship of other trades councils across
the country. Monks was rewarded for his role in the witch-hunt with a
fast-track promotion in the TUC, during which time he went on to abolish
all the trades councils.

> What are the British Steelworkers like.  Are they all doing the
>full monte?

More or less. There isn't much of a steel industry left following the
big shakeout in the early eighties. Then the special links between the
miners, steelworkers and railworkers was called the triple alliance.
After steel leader Bill Sirs (now Sir Bill Sirs, I think) rolled over
before the redundancies, it was re-named the Cripple Alliance.

Last night I was at a New Year's Eve party with an official in one of
the larger unions Unison, which represents municipal workers. He was
pretty sanguine about the state of the Union, saying that it was pretty
much finished, reliant upon the good will of the employers to keep it on
its last legs, since if they wanted to they could have Unison de-
recognised all over the country, so low is their ratio members to
workforce. 

He described a fairly similar political picture to one that is common in
most public sector unions. The full time officers are mostly ex-
communist party, now assimilated into the left-wing of the labour party.
The delegates to the Annual General Meeting are mostly unpaid
representatives, shop stewards, most of whom are members of the smaller
Trotskyist parties, like the Socialist Workers Party or the Workers
Revolutionary Party (or one of its off-shoots). The Officers are
isolated from the shop stewards, who hate them for being sell-outs. The
shop stewards in turn are isolated from the membership mostly holding
the position of workplace representative only because nobody else will
do it. The left wing parties have little sense of building up lasting
relationships and organisation, but press for militant action without
much behind them. The officers hope vainly that the Labour Government
can be pushed to the left, but so far Blair has offered them nothing,
carrying on with the cuts in public services and leaving all of the
Conservative Party's anti-union legislation intact.
-- 
Jim heartfield