Class and leadership

67. The past year has continued what, for Marxists, has been a frustrating period on the industrial plane. The possibility of a breakthrough was always there. Take the case of the Post Office. PO management have made it quite clear that they intend to get rid of tens of thousands of Royal Mail workers. The workers took solid official action, supplemented in some areas with up to two weeks' unofficial time on strike. Yet the ‘left' union leadership showed themselves desperate to settle with management, with all the basic issues unresolved and with the threat of mass redundancy still hanging over their members' heads. There was a real prospect of a unified movement of millions of public sector workers against what was clearly signalled to be a co-ordinated policy of cuts in living standards for all of them. That opportunity, which could definitely have seen the government off, was fudged. Different union leaderships called for separate, ineffective one-day actions. The Unison local authority and NHS sell-outs can be given as an example of the failure of leadership. The power for a fightback remains latent. The TU leadership is the problem.

68. How has this relapse happened over the past years? A layer of leaders (especially over the last 20 years since the defeat of the miners' strike, though they have always been there) has come up through the structures of the unions. They have taken the rep's job for a number of reasons, other than political - to get out of work, ‘no-one else wants to do it' etc. These individuals have now made it to the tops of the unions. Any one that shows any ability gets elected. The competition for places has declined. It just reflects the period and the lack of class struggle.

Today, a lot of the present generation of trade union leaders have either not been tested or are manoeuvring before any fight starts. The key issue for them in the last 20 years has been mergers. The decline in union membership has mainly been in the manufacturing industries. The overwhelming majority of the present union leaderships are incapable of recruiting in the service sector because it would mean unionising from the coal face like in the beginning of trade unionism. This job will become the task of new layers of young people either politically motivated or faced with no other choice, who will become political. 

69. Those that were involved in politics in the 1980s have a different leadership style from other trade union lefts. In the past they were from the Communist Party, organised in the trade unions to take positions, and then from Militant in the 1970s and 1980s. There is no organised left wing presence of the same significance now as there has been in the past. This is general: a number of good individual fighters have come through. Not to become part of the union bureaucracy requires being backed by and being a part of a revolutionary organisation, which can explain the bigger picture.

70. The virtual disappearance of the CP as a serious force in the unions is an important development for industrial perspectives. Though never a serious force electorally, in the past the Communist Party has had a significant presence, particularly in the old-established industrial unions. Their influence went far beyond their actual membership. They managed to gain influence within the educational structures of the trade union movement, and acted as the core of the broad lefts. They had a tendency to hide their politics and concentrate on organisational manoeuvring. But their demise has left a vacuum. All that is left are Stalinist sects, of no significance in industry. There is no force at present that can replace them. But that is a task the Marxists must set themselves over time.

71. The last time the Communist Party was able to act as a lever on the mass movement was via the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions in the 1970s. Then they were able to strike a chord to the extent of in effect calling an unofficial general strike (and putting pressure on the TUC to call an official general strike) in order to get the Pentonville Five dockers released from prison.

72. Other means such as overtime are being used to solve individual problems. If workers see no collective solution to their problems, they will look to an individualistic way out. Working class consciousness is based on an awareness of our collective power and underlines the need for collective action. Historically the middle class has been individualistic, convinced that they can improve their lot by their own effort, raising themselves above their fellows. Successive governments have attempted to play on and encourage this individualism in order to break down working class consciousness.

73. With inflation rising along with personal debt, wages will be a key issue in 2008 at the same time as the economy is taking a downturn, and bosses will be least likely to afford higher wage demands. It is worth stating again that, in periods of boom, wages normally rise. This has not happened for all workers in the last period. A lot of jobs are topped up by tax credits - such as those in Tesco etc. Workers have survived because the economy has grown, food and other goods have got cheaper and credit has been easy to get.

74. The power of the working class has not changed. What has changed is that a generation has left education and gone into work where trade unions either do not exist or are weak or have not resolved young workers' problems - low pay, exploitation etc. An individual within a unionised workplace can make all the difference as to how trade unions are perceived.

The last upsurge

Grunwick strike

75. Clearly the past period of almost 30 years has been one of relapse. In the 1970s the trade union movement was officially led from the  left for the only time in its history. Scanlon and Jones were the General Secretaries of the two most important unions the AUEW and TGWU respectively. In 1979 trade union membership peaked at almost 13 million. A series of strikes involved ‘unorganisable' sections such as women workers in action for the first time. Women workers are now a majority in the trade union movement. Most households are totally dependent on both adults working to make ends meet. How far away it seems from the time when we had to argue against the notion that women only worked for ‘pin money.'

76. The strike struggles of  the 1970s demonstrate that service sector workers were working class and knew it. In that decade the shop stewards' movement became a power in the land. A quarter of a million workers were involved, many with 100% facility time. There was even the emergence in some workplaces of elements of workers' control, such as shop stewards' control over whether and how much overtime was to be worked. This powerful shop stewards' movement is now marginalised, banished to some parts of the public sector and long-unionised parts of private sector industry. Facility time was in any case a double-edged sword, as it could serve to separate the stewards away from the rank and file they were supposed to be representing. Life could become cosy away from the pressures of the assembly line. But the movement cannot go forward again without the mass involvement of workers at a rank and file level.

77. Another set of rank and file institutions that have faded over time are the local Trades Councils. In some areas these are still worthwhile bodies. But their influence is much reduced from the 1970s when they were effectively charged with organising the days of action against the Tories and getting the workers out on strike. With an upsurge in militancy, they are likely to regain their vitality together with the trade unions as a whole.

78. There are natural limits to pure industrial action. The movement of the 1970s was undermined by mass unemployment after the election of the Tories, unemployment in part deliberately engineered by Thatcher as a weapon against the trade unions.

79. We draw a basic dividing line, contrasting the present period with the period of the post-War boom, which had relatively full employment, steadily rising living standards, and the working class in a favourable bargaining position on the shop floor. But even within the earlier period, we have to bear in mind the British ruling class was becoming increasingly concerned after World War II about its declining position in the world and more and more determined to settle accounts with the working class as a way of retrieving its former glory.

80. The first serious attempt to take on the working class was provided by the election of the Heath government in 1970, which represented a clear break with the post-War consensus. Of course Heath was ignominiously defeated but, as far as the ruling class was concerned, those tasks remained on the agenda.

81. The defeat of Heath in 1974 coincided with the first generalised capitalist recession since the War, and the beginning of a new era with slower growth and permanently higher unemployment. Throughout this era the ruling class strove might and main to roll back the gains the working class had made in the era of the post-War boom.

82. Though this section of the document is concerned with industrial perspectives, we must never forget that one of the basic features of British working class struggle is the movement from the industrial to the political arena. After the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985, hope was focussed on a Labour government. With the disappointments of New Labour, disaffection has been shown in the first instance by strike action.

Indicators of militancy

83. Membership of trade unions has declined since the 1970s, and has stabilised for the time being at a little above 6 million members. The reasons for this fall are complex. They include the timorousness of the trade union tops, general disillusionment with the leadership in the era of ‘new unionism' and the difficulties posed by the abolition of the closed shop and ‘check-off' (automatic deduction) of trade union subscriptions from the wage packet. But the main reason membership has declined is because workers have lost jobs in highly unionised traditional manufacturing industries, which have gone into decline or disappeared altogether.

84. Miners, steel workers, textile workers and other traditional sectors of the working class have seen their jobs disappear. In the case of the miners, the reason was politically motivated spite. In most cases, it was the ‘natural' making and unmaking of places of work and the accompanying work force under capitalism. Often this decline is associated with the disappearance or scattering of a traditional working class community. These were fortresses of the working class and their loss is important to us. But these are not defeats on the scale of the period after 1926, when miners tore up their union cards and company unionism made its appearance in the pits.

85. In the 1980s these workers (usually)  managed to find alternative employment eventually in new industries that were unorganised. Rather than just naturally slipping into an organised and class conscious workforce the advanced worker would have to start completely from scratch. In the past building and recruitment was much easier because of the existence of extensive closed shops in employment. And, as we know, the trade union movement has not yet succeeded in organising the new sectors of capitalist industry that have emerged or become more important over the past quarter century. A new generation of workers will storm these redoubts of non-unionism and bosses' autocracy.

86.  Strike figures have also been historically low since the defeat of the miners'strike. It is likely that these figures understate the levels of working class discontent. The ways the figures have been collected have changed over recent years to encourage under-reporting. Workers have responded to the legal and other restrictions on strike action by resorting to short stoppages and to industrial action short of a strike. In the case of British Airways, industrial action took the form of a mass ‘sickie'. This shows two things: it shows how the balance of forces has shifted against workers on the shop floor to mount any form of legitimate protest against their conditions; and it shows that the discontent of the working class cannot be suppressed by legal or coercive means.

87.  Still the 1984-85 dispute was a turning point. We did not realise at the time how significant a defeat it represented for the working class as a whole. It is now only older workers who remember the strike. It no longer impacts upon the consciousness of younger workers. We do not hear the argument, ‘If the miners can't win, nobody can win' any more.

 88. The individualistic reaction after a strike defeat means that people are inclined give up on collective endeavour, to work overtime and seek promotion rather than resort to the collective method of increasing rates of pay as long as the economy is on the up. They cannot take this option if the economy fails. Then they draw the conclusion that a collective solution is the only alternative

89. Apart from strike figures, the Tories' anti-union laws have given us another measure of workers' readiness to struggle. That is the results of strike ballots. These have overwhelmingly been positive. It is true that workers who vote ‘yes' may well understand that does not commit them to immediate and all-out action. But it is a useful bargaining chip for the union officials. And the rank and file does understand that, if the chip is to be used in negotiation, it  has to be backed up with action.

90. We have been using strike figures and union membership as proxies for class consciousness. And they are useful indicators of class consciousness. But they are not the whole story. Trade union density (trade union membership as a proportion of the workforce) is often taken as a proxy for the strength of the labour movement. Trade union density is probably lower in France at 8% than in any other major European country. Yet the French workers have displayed the most militant traditions in Europe over recent decades. Militancy and discontent cannot be precisely expressed in figures.

91. Trotsky wrote a pamphlet called Trade unions in the era of imperialistic decay in which he suggested there was a tendency in the 1930s for the union tops to become absorbed into the state machine. He contrasted this to the ‘pure and simple' unionism of an earlier age when capitalism could afford reforms, and unions stuck up for their members. But of course the period after the Second World War was not one of terminal crisis for capitalism. Trade unions in this country remained independent of the state. When the establishment reached out to involve the trade union leadership, it was usually in the form of social democratic politicians offering a corporatist agreement. The successive rounds of ‘incomes policy' in the Wilson and Callaghan years usually involved figleaves such as a special deal for the low paid, in order to try to get the  union barons to co-operate with wage restraint. Since Thatcher came to number 10, no trade union leader had been invited for beer and sandwiches. The Blair/Brown government has maintained this tradition of intransigence, in sharp contrast to the way in which business leaders have virtually been invited in to write government policy.

The structure of British trade unions

92. As we know, the first trade unions in this country were craft-based. This was relatively unusual compared with the normal pattern of union formation on the continent, which was of politically motivated federations setting up factory and industrially based unions. The reason was the early development of British capitalism out of craft traditions in industry. Craft workers regarded themselves as working class, but as the aristocracy of labour. Craft consciousness was thus a distorted form of class consciousness. The craft unions were an electoral prop of the Liberal Party in the nineteenth century. Railway workers such as train drivers, guards and station porters for instance were all on different grades. Defence of grade differentials was progressive against the boss but reactionary within the working class movement.

93. At the end of the nineteenth century the first permanent general unions emerged. Their appearance coincided with new mass production industries, such as car production. They organised the production workers, while the craft unions represented the skilled trades such as engineers and electricians. This is in sharp contrast with the drive for industrial unionism that developed in other countries at around the same time. All the workers in a factory were to be in one big union, though sub-branches could represent craft aspirations. Industrial unionism was deliberately counterposed to craft consciousness, which was seen as divisive.

94. Craft and general unions have persisted side by side in recent decades. More recently unions have tended to collapse into one another. Often the reasons for amalgamation are not ones we support. Our basic aim is industrial unity.  It seems the trade union bureaucracy are concerned above all to preserve the revenue base that provides their salaries. Industrial logic is the last thing on their minds. In many cases, such as the recent super-union UNITE,  the membership has hardly been consulted, with the whole process railroaded through. Amalgamate first, work out the constitution afterwards! The danger of this approach for us is that the battle for democracy in UNITE seems to have been already set back. The super-unions tend to produce super-branches from the amalgamated affiliates, which make it more difficult to hold the bureaucracy to account. But the structure of the unions is not decisive. Bigger unions can provide opportunities as well as difficulties for revolutionaries. In the past even the most corrupt and rotten trade unions have been transformed into instruments of struggle by the movement of the working class. This will happen again

The working class today

95. A determined effort has been made by journalists and other ‘theorists' of the ruling class to prove that the working class as a conscious political entity no longer exists. Of course people still have to work for a living, they admit. But the connection between workers and class consciousness has disappeared altogether. Socialism has been abandoned as the goal of working class struggle. In fact socialists have always been a minority within the working class movement, except perhaps in pre-revolutionary times. Trade union membership ebbs and flows.

96. Those who are not in a union do not avoid membership because they object to what unions stand for. They are not anti-union. They are not in a union because the opportunity for them to join has not arisen. In fact workers in unions are paid more and enjoy better conditions than workers in equivalent work in non-unionised workplaces. And non-union workers know this. For the most part they would like to join a union. Part of the problem is that the effective abolition of the closed shop means that organising has to start from scratch every time an active trade unionist joins a non-union firm. Certainly the old propaganda that unions were ‘holding the country to ransom' that we constantly heard in the 1970s no longer strikes a chord.

97. Another argument we have to combat is that the working class movement has been definitively beaten. They say workers are under the hammer; there seems no protection from the boss class at work; workers have become endlessly ‘flexible' automata. In fact the reality is more complex. It is true that in some of the new industries, such as call centres, they  have managed to tear up the rule book which working class strength has imposed on most contemporary capitalists. There are undoubted cases of paying very low wages to a segmented section of the working class. But for most workers, real wages have risen through most of the past period. But so too has the intensity of work. Without the shield of the union, workers have found an individual way to improve their living standards. Often this involves working long hours, sometimes unpaid overtime. Workers are more and more shackled to their place of work by debt. But if living standards are improving without struggle, why struggle? The period since the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985 is not dominated by defeats, as the early 1930s was, but by lack of struggle.

98. It is worth reviewing  the conclusions of Robert Taylor in Britain's world of work, published by the ESRC. This body, and the author, are completely dedicated to the belief that harmony should exist between labour and capital. His conclusions are utterly at odds with this pious hope. "It is hard not to reach the conclusion that class and occupational differences remain of fundamental importance to any understanding of our world of work....we continue to live in a society and political economy where class differences remain of crucial importance to our understanding of employment."

99. Taylor notes that occupational and social mobility have actually declined since the period of the post-War boom. This is a remarkable finding. The government holds that education is the road to social mobility. It will in effect bring a classless society, a meritocracy. Yet after the Second World War the ruling class was forced to promote people from working class backgrounds through the education system to help them run a modern economy. Now, it seems, the drawbridge has been pulled up. Despite more than 40% of workers having degrees, compared with about 10% graduate workers in the 1960s, this is not a passport to social advancement. The very development of mass higher education has devalued the significance of a degree as the passport to a lucrative career.

100. It is notable that an increased  proportion of the workforce are skilled compared with the past. They may have a formal qualification or some form of in-house training and experience that gives them some bargaining power. Bosses cannnot afford to sack such workers at will. Since these workers enjoy better pay and conditions than the unskilled in Macjobs, they are likely to fight to keep what they've got rather than just collect their cards when things get tough.

101. Taylor also records that job satisfaction has declined across the board over the last ten years, and that long working hours are increasingly the norm. On the other hand he puts paid to the myth of a totally flexible workforce. Gordon Brown and New Labour constantly boast about Anglo-Saxon flexibility which brings us higher employment and economic prosperity. What they mean by ‘flexibility' is management's right to hire and fire at will and the restoration of bosses' autocracy on the shop floor. This may be an effective way of running firms based on unskilled tasks such as flipping burgers. It beggars belief that Britain can earn its living in the world by competing in the world of Macjobs with the poorest and lowest paid economies in the world. It is also startlingly at odds with the government rhetoric about a ‘knowledge economy'. In fact from 1992-99 the fastest growing occupation in Britain was that of hairdressing. It is not obvious how all these hairdressers are going to earn enough foreign exchange to overcome the massive payments gap with other countries.

102. In fact workers in temporary employment have declined since the 1990s. Likewise job tenure has actually increased over the past ten years. So  it is absolutely untrue that fundamental changes in the nature of work have taken place over recent decades, though there is no doubt the pace of work has become more intense.

103. Wilson's study The future of the unions paints a relatively rosy picture of the strength of trade union organisation. He points out that membership is higher than in 1946, which most people would take to be a time of working class self-confidence.

104. Trade union density has fallen from 31% in 1996 to 28% in 2006. But of course most of the membership fall was recorded before that, during the mass unemployment and wave of factory closures of the early 1980s under Thatcher. Wilson observes that the typical trade unionist is likely to be a woman working from an office, rather than a male in an industrial occupation. (Women are now a small majority in the TUs.) The increasingly graduate workforce, in cases where workers have some independence at work, some control over the pace and direction of work and are trying to build careers, encourages the workers to see the advantages of trade union representation at work.

105. What is disappointing is the failure of the TUs to crack the new industries that have grown up - so far at least. Trade union membership is disproportionately concentrated in the public sector and old-established traditional working class workplaces. It will fall to a future generation of trade unionists to draw the workers in these new industries into the ranks of the organised working class.

Immigrant workers

106. A new opportunity and threat opens up on account of the mass immigration into the labour force from eastern Europe in recent years. This is a huge movement, more significant in numbers than the immigration of Asian and Afro-Caribbean workers in the years of the post-War boom. The only possible comparison is with the migration of starving Irish into Britain in the nineteenth century.

107. The danger lies in the appearance of a segmented workforce. We see immigrant labour concentrated in areas such as fruit and vegetable picking, organised by gangmasters in the way described by Marx in Capital. We see them flood into construction. British capitalism has for decades neglected the developing and sharpening of workers's skills in the building industry and elsewhere. Now they overcome their neglect by poaching skilled workers from all over Europe and super-exploiting them in the process. It is clear that some east European workers do not speak much English because they don't work with or mix with British-born workers. They are prepared for the time being to accept worse wages and conditions in different workplaces and occupations.

108. In some ways the alternative is worse. Some immigrant workers are being taken on by agencies to undercut the wages of workers in existing workplaces who are on the books. Agency work is casualisation. This obviously poses the danger of a split in the working class. Organising the new workers is a huge task for the labour movement.

109. As might be expected there are different prospects for different sections of the working class. In London there are huge construction works. There are skyscrapers that will dwarf anything already on the London skyline. Then there are the Olympics. With a deadline to meet, that gives the workers building them enviable bargaining power like those electrical workers employed on the Jubilee Line extension before the millennium. This is a real opportunity for the trade union movement.

110. Another thing to watch out for in the next few years is, if the trade unions fail to organise Eastern European workers, there may be a backlash against them and the bosses could foment racism within the ranks of the working class.

The trade union bureaucracy

111. The trade union leaders argue that their moderation is caused by their concern not to let the members' assets be seized by the state and the ruling class. The problem, they say, is the anti-union laws. There is more than a suspicion that this has become a standing excuse for cowardice and inaction on their part. The Prison Officers' Association defied the law in the form of an injunction and got clean away with it. After all, what were the authorities supposed to do to them - put them in prison?

112. The anti-union laws are an alibi for the trade union leaders. But they are an important shackle on the effectiveness of strike activity by the members. Take the case of the dockers' dispute that led up to the jailing of the Pentonville Five in 1972. The dockers were mass picketing (now illegal) warehouses of firms with whom they were not directly in dispute (secondary picketing -  now illegal). Not only were these activities illegal. They were very effective as a way of winning strikes, and that is why the ruling class responded so strongly by jailing them. The Pentonville Five were released after their imprisonment led to a virtual general strike in protest. But the bosses were determined all the more to make effective industrial action illegal. Under Thatcher they got their way. The changes in the law have shifted the balance of forces in favour of the employers. But the laws only remain on the statute books because of the indecisiveness of the trade union tops in resisting them.

113. After the miners' strike we saw a huge swing to the right among the trade union tops, under the banner of ‘new realism'. The swing went on for a long time, and many took it for a permanent change. Sir Ken Jackson and other trade union leaders went so far as to pioneer a strategy of signing no-strike union deals with employers to get their foot in the door, going so far as to virtually turn their organisations into company unions. USDAW is another guilty party. Tesco is now the largest single employer in the private sector. It is unionised. But that fact means virtually nothing to Tesco workers. The union does not give them a voice at work.

114. The discontent of the ranks with this subservience was not shown by open rebellion and strikes in the first instance, but by the election of one left wing trade union leader after another. The pendulum began to swing back to the left from the mid-1990s. At this distance in time we sometimes do not realise what a huge effort it was to get rid of Sir Ken Jackson and replace him with Derek Simpson as head of AMICUS, for instance. For the most part these left union leaders were untested in struggle. Their leftism was mainly verbal. This is the key to explaining what happened next.

115. The question to answer is, what happened to the ‘awkward squad'? The trajectory of Simpson is probably the clearest case. Elected on a clear repudiation of everything that Jackson stood for, Simpson has taken over Jackson's methods and machinery at the top of the union. Possibly the machinery of the union has rather taken him over.  Whatever, there has been a realignment at the top of the union, and Derek Simpson has now clearly come out as a right winger and witch hunter.

Matt Wrack, FBU General Secretary

116. The left in the trade union leadership is actually split now. There remain a minority of trade union leaders who remain committed class warriors and defenders of their members. Matt Wrack, Jeremy Dear and Mark Serwotka are three. It is not accidental that these leaders were actively involved in the struggles in the last period of industrial upsurge in the 1970s and 1980s. That was a formative experience for them. Their stance is now sharply at odds with the likes of Simpson.

117. This move to the right is not just disappointing for the activists who worked for change. It has been a big setback for the working class. At the end of 2007 we see that there was no general movement of public sector workers against wage restraint. A great opportunity was lost. The government has made it clear that they offer public sector workers years of real wage cuts. At present the Police Federation seems more militant about this than the trade unions!

118. The central problem for the movement is the pathetic dependence of the TUC tops on the Labour government rather than leading independent action. This has given New Labour a whip hand in dictating terms. The trade union leaders have given away their powers over policy-making at Labour Party Conference - for  a cosy deal with Blair and Brown. In doing so they are actually helping right wing Labour lay down policies that could lose the next election. When New Labour rightly stands indicted of institutional corruption, a defence of the democratic framework by which millions of working class people take part in the decision-making process of the Party they founded to defend their interests should not be too difficult.

 119. The bureaucracy have exhausted all the excuses for failing to stand up to the government. Presumably, if asked why they failed to resist the Brown ultimatum on abandoning their democratic decision-making rights, they would plead that a general election was impending in autumn 2007. Now Brown has since backed away from an election, Party democracy should be put right back on the agenda.

120. Whatever happened to the Warwick agreement? The proposal to give equal rights to agency workers, for instance, was actually put in the 2005 Labour Party Election Manifesto. Not only are the Labour leaders ratting on the agreement with the unions, they are ratting on their promise to the British people, and the trade union leaders are letting them get away with it. The demand by the sects that a new working class party be set up based on the trade unions is ridiculous. It is the TU leaders who have let the Labour leaders get away with so much so far.

121. The bureaucracy are absolutely pivotal to our understanding of British perspectives. At present they are the main link betweeen the industrial and political arms of the labour movement. When the sects or frustrated left wingers denounce the Labour leadership as the worst Labour government ever and a continuation of Thatcherism by other means, we have no reason to disagree with them. What we have the duty to point out is that they can only get away with this because the representatives of the unions on the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party (who are officials, of course) have sat on their hands as anti-working class policies, and policies that sometimes mean wholesale sackings of their own members (as in the case of Royal Mail), have been discussed  and nodded through. The undemocratic National Policy Forum has been accepted  as the main policy-making body of the Party because the trade union bureaucracy accepted its setting up and the consequent removal  of decision-making powers from the floor of Party Conference. They have accepted their own castration as a force at Party Conference, giving up using the block vote to defend decisions democratically arrived at by their own members, and denying themselves (and the constituencies) the right to move resolutions that determine Party policy. Finally they connived at the sabotage of the McDonnell leadership challenge, which would have blown the whistle on right wing Labour's undemocratic game. All this they have connived at by squalid behind the scenes deals with New Labour. They are a central prop of this government and its rotten policies.

122. The trade union leadership could not wait for a Labour government to come to power because they did not know what to do against the Tories. They hoped life would be easy under Labour. The Labour government has moderated the extremes of the Tories on GCHQ union recognition, granted a low minimum wage, given legal rights after 12 months working and made other small concessions. But the anti-union legislation is still in place. There is no legal right to strike in this country. Britain still violates international legislation by the ILO on union rights. Today the trade union leaders do not know what to do about the Labour leadership. They don't want to do anything. They do not want to raise their heads above the parapet because they would have to put an alternative. That would either be the Tories or socialism - they want neither. They don't want to oppose the Labour leadership and be blamed for bringing the Tories back. If the Tories did get in, what excuses can the trade union leadership have not to fight?

123. We cannot say when the industrial situation will break. We do know the pressures are building up and the present period of relative calm cannot continue indefinitely.

British Perspectives part 1

British Perspectives part 3