We are all in debt to Andrew Brady for providing us with fresh insight into what has sometimes been a tortuous and, at times, even tormented relationship between the British Labour Party and the British trades union movement over the last half-century. His story starts in the 1960s, with the efforts of the Wilson administration to bring order to British factories through the Donovan Commission and the ill-fated White Paper In Place of Strife, and ends with the Warwick Agreement of 2004, New Labour’s effort, in the wake of Blair’s disastrous war in Iraq, to revive some intimacy with its trades union partners. Along the way, we are taken through the key episodes in Labour’s relations with the trades unions in the Social Contract of the 1970s, and those unions’ attempts to roll back the employment ‘reforms’ of the Thatcher administration of the 1980s, culminating in the introduction of the National Minimum Wage in 1998, and the Employment Relations Act in the following year.
During this time, the trades union movement changed, as also, and more visibly, did its political partner. The informal system of shop stewards or locally elected union leaders in the post-war years was outside the control of the national union leaderships that talked to Labour Ministers. The shop steward system proved to be a thorn in the side of the Labour administration, not just because of shop stewards’ ability to foment local strikes but also because of employers’ ability to provoke such strikes as an alternative to costly shutdowns of production if orders fell below full capacity production. Efforts by Harold Wilson to discipline local action failed, and Edward Heath’s attempts only created martyrs. Margaret Thatcher hobbled trades union representation and industrial action but, paradoxically, strengthened national leaderships who now had to win a mandate from their members rather than their activists. At the same time, mass unemployment and deindustrialisation halved trades union membership in Britain from its peak of around 12 million in 1979 to the present day.
From the point of view of the topic of this book, Brady points to another feature of the trades union movement that influenced the course of its relationship with the Labour Party. In addition to ancient divisions between representatives of unskilled workers and craft unions, the British trades union movement is divided into those unions that are affiliated to the Labour Party and those that remain unaffiliated. Notable among the unaffiliated ones are white-collar unions, especially in the Civil Service, who have regarded themselves as non-party political. One of the largest of these unions that was affiliated to the Labour Party was the National and Local Government Officers’ Association, which combined with two other Labour affiliates, the Confederation of Health Service Employees and the National Union of Public Employees, to form the UNISON trades union in 1993. But the position of the unaffiliated unions was not an enviable one. As Brady shows, public sector employees were the first to be affected by policies designed to show how the Government thought that employers should conduct their industrial relations, for better (for instance, the superior record, overall, of the public sector in matters concerning equal opportunities) as well as to the disadvantage of public sector workers, for example, when their pay increases have been capped below the rate of inflation in the cost of living.
These divisions have clearly complicated the coordination between the two industrial and the political branches of the British Labour Movement. One result of this has been an alphabet soup of coordinating bodies, from the Trade Union Group of the Parliamentary Labour Party (the group of trades union sponsored Labour MPs) to the Trade Union Coordinating Committee, established in 1984 to assist trades unions to preserve their political funds, which had been made subject to periodic ballots of members by Conservative legislation to reduce the political influence of unions. By the 1990s, discontent with Conservative governments was so widespread among trades unions that the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation was established in 1994 as a way of broadening coordination with the Labour Party beyond those unions affiliated to the Party. Deindustrialisation concentrated union membership increasingly in the segments of the public sector that survived privatisation. But, with exceptions like firefighters and health service workers, those were precisely the segments where unions were unaffiliated. This made broader coordination more urgent.
At the same time, New Labour increased its reliance on affiliated trades unions to assist in keeping control over the Party’s activists, while publicly denying the influence of its industrial arm. Brady, who is more concerned with what the unions wanted from the Labour Party, than what the Party leadership wanted from its unions, skips over this aspect of their relationship. But the Labour leadership’s use of union votes to suppress inconvenient internal opposition transcends traditional political divisions, as is apparent in Jeremy Corbyn’s use of union block votes to prevent an activists’ revolt over his Brexit policy.
Andrew Brady takes us through these events with a narrative that relies mostly on published sources, reinforced by the author’s lengthy interviews with some of the participants in key decisions. Inevitably, the interviews suffer from a certain ‘survivor’s bias’ in that there are fewer people around who were in senior positions in the earliest period under review. This makes the interviews with Jack Jones, Geoffrey Goodman and Jack Dromey especially interesting. In places, the book’s origins as a PhD thesis become apparent, as the text ploughs into thickets of Chicago-style references and acronyms. The acronyms multiply as unions combined in the face of falling memberships and informal coordination between their leaders and the Labour Party spawned a turnstile of bodies designed to cement that coordination, only for the next change of leadership or government policy to make some other coordination necessary. Here, I think, the relationship between the Labour Party and unaffiliated unions and the Trades Union Congress (representing affiliated and unaffiliated unions) played a bigger part than is apparent in Brady’s book.
Some of this inner tension in the relationship between the two branches of the British Labour Movement might have been revealed with a more careful examination of the differing political agendas of particular unions. Even before the Labour Party was born, the American Labour economist Robert Hoxie attempted to show how unions were by no means driven by the same goals, let alone similar ways of organising workers in pursuit of their welfare. This kind of institutionally informed industrial sociology can provide insights into the role of unions in our political economy. However, Brady takes his political economy from the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach of Hall and Soskice, identifying different types of capitalism in different countries. Unfortunately, this is more of a classification than a theory specifying how these apparent differences arise. The distinction is crucial because making a classification into a theory facilitates liberties with the underlying social structures and processes. In this case, Britain is deemed to be a ‘Liberal Market Economy’ borne of ‘neo-liberalism’ (‘a macro-economic strategy involving trade and financial liberalisation, fiscal discipline and the promotion of deflationary tactics’, p. 6). But this raises the mental categories that we use for understanding social circumstances into causal factors, in place of a more careful analysis of social processes. The industrial relations legislation that faced British trades unions with political predicaments in the 1980s was certainly neo-liberal. But it was not caused by neo-liberalism. Rather it was caused by the internationalisation of the British capital market, restricting the scope for industrial policy. Successive governments, in thrall to international finance and foreign owners of British industry, could only flagellate those diminishing industrial remnants with fiscal prudence and flexible labour markets to make up for a sorry record of under-investment. This, together with the backwardness of Britain’s ruling classes, who have never forgiven industry for creating their ‘servant problem’, is the political economy that drives the British obsession with labour market liberalisation.
Brexit has presented the British Labour Movement with fresh challenges over what internationalism means for trades unions organised to negotiate with British employers, and a Labour Party dedicated to winning power in the national legislature. Even if internationalism is beyond the scope of this book, the institutions through which unions and the Party will overcome its challenges are the ones the Andrew Brady examines. This is a timely and thoughtful book.
