One part of my presentation was immediately singled out for irritated criticism by Ken Gill, a member of the TUC General Council and perhaps the leading CP trade union leader, namely my comments on the sharp increase of sectionalism in the industrial movement. I had pointed out that the trade unions’ militancy, so plain in the 1970s, was essentially for their members’ narrow economic benefits, and that even under left leadership this did not necessarily indicate a resumption of the forward march of labour. On the contrary, ‘it seems to me that we now see a growing division of workers into sections and groups, each pursuing its own economic interest irrespective of the rest’. Given the new mixed economy, the group relied not on the potential loss strikes caused to employers, but on the inconvenience they might cause to the public, that is on putting pressure on the government to settle. In the nature of things this not only increased potential friction between groups of workers, but risked weakening the hold of the labour movement as a whole. Nobody could live through the strike-happy 1970s in Britain without being aware of union militancy and the tensions between unions and governments. It reached its peak in the autumn and winter of 1978–9. However, I was sufficiently remote from the political scene on the industrial labour left to be surprised to find that my lecture led to an intense and politically charged controversy in Marxism Today over the next year. Without particularly intending to, I had touched several very raw nerves. The fact that within a few months of my article the weak and struggling Labour government had been comprehensively defeated in a General Election by the Conservatives under their new militantly class-warrior leader, Margaret Thatcher, made the pain even more intolerable. By the time the last criticism of my paper appeared in Marxism Today the Thatcher era had already begun. By the time the post-electoral debate on my paper was added to the pre-electoral, and both were published in 1981 in a book jointly sponsored by Marxism Today and Verso Editions,1 the Labour Party itself had been split by the secession of the so-called social democrats, and the remaining rump of the party was struggling to survive.
In retrospect, the illusions of the mixed coalition of lefts which almost destroyed the Labour Party between 1978 and 1981 are harder to understand than the trade union leaders’ illusions of power which had undermined it since the late 1960s. Since the General Strike of 1926 the British ruling class had been careful not to seek a head-on confrontation with the unions, i.e. with the 70 per cent or so of Britons who saw themselves as workers. The golden age of the post-1945 economy had even taken the edge off the built-in anti-unionism of industrialists. For twenty years giving in to union demands had not put pressure on profits. The seventies had begun to worry both politicians and economists, but they were a triumphant period for trade union leaders, who had blocked a Labour government’s plans to limit their power, and who had twice defeated a Conservative government by national miners’ strikes. Even those union leaders who realized that there had to be some limit on uncontrolled free market bargaining, saw themselves as negotiating a ‘wages policy’ with governments from a position of impressive strength.
As it happened, the glory years of seventies unionism were also those of the trade union left. For though the CP was small, declining, politically divided between Moscow hardliners and a ‘Eurocommunist’ leadership, and harassed on the left by younger Trotskyist militants, it probably played a larger part on the national trade union scene in the 1970s than ever before, under the leadership of its formidably able industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson, whose remarkable wife Marian, a Yorkshire textile worker, had been an amateur historian herself and an active supporter of the Historians’ Group. The CP was not merely part of the 1970s militancy. With the blessing (not unqualified) of the two figures closest to national Godfathers in the TUC, Hugh Scanlon, of the Engineering Union, and Jack Jones, the former International Brigader, of the Transport and General Workers, the TUC left, largely marshalled by Ramelson and Ken Gill, co-ordinated the unions’ fight against the two Wilson governments’ attempts to clip their wings. Moreover, the long-hoped-for shift in the balance of the (still) great National Mineworkers’ Union had happened in the 1960s. Yorkshire had swung left, bringing to national prominence a – then – CP protégé, the young Arthur Scargill. Together with the always solid and Party-led bastions of Wales and Scotland, the left now outvoted the equally reliable moderate bastions of northeast England. The fifteen years after 1970 were the era of the great national miners’ strikes – victorious in 1972 and 1974, disastrous in 1984–5, thanks to the combination of Mrs Thatcher’s determination to destroy the union and the delusions of the union’s by then national leader, Arthur Scargill. By chance my lecture in the autumn of 1978 coincided with the tensest moment in relations between the unions and the Labour Party.
The illusion of trade union power under left-wing leaders and activists fuelled the even greater illusion of a conquest of the Labour Party, and hence of future Labour governments, by the socialist left. A mixed coalition of lefts within the Labour Party and ‘entryist’ revolutionaries who had joined it, had increasingly come together behind the project of winning control of the party under the banner of the increasingly radical ex-minister Tony Benn. Unlike the industrial militancy, which had substantial backing from the members of the unions, then at the peak of their numbers, the political militants reflected the decline in the political interest, votes and party membership among workers. In fact their strategy relied on the ability of small groups of militants among a largely inactive membership to capture Labour Party branches and, reinforced by the politically decisive ‘block vote’ of left-led unions at party conferences, to impose a more radical leadership and policy on the party. This was an entirely practicable strategy. Indeed, it almost succeeded. The illusion lay in the belief that the Labour Party thus captured by a mixed minority of sectarian leftwingers would somehow remain united, gain in electoral force, and would have a policy capable of standing up to the attack of Mrs Thatcher’s class warriors, whose force they systematically failed to grasp.
Consequently this illusion led to disaster. Many traditional voters – one third of the actual self-described working-class electors – were in any case abandoning Labour and voting for the Conservatives. The party split, and for some years the alliance between the new Social Democratic Party and the Liberals actually came close to gaining more votes than the Labour Party. Two and a half years after the victory of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives Labour had lost another one in five of its voters and no longer had majority support in any group of the working class, even the unskilled and unemployed. And this at a time when the Conservative government itself had lost votes since the election of 1979. As I wrote at the time, ‘The triumph of Thatcher is a by-product of the defeat of Labour.’ What made things worse was what I then described as ‘the sheer refusal of some of the left to look unwelcome facts in the face’.2