For decades, the social democratic or opportunist left in Britain has told us that the road to building a socialist movement in this country must pass through the trade unions. ‘The trade unions include the most class conscious workers in Britain’, runs the refrain, ‘they are the organised section of the working class’. Sometimes they are presented as the only real working class: outside lies a backward mass of those who cannot be organised. Nothing progressive can happen unless the trade unions take it up, the argument continues, whether it is imposing an arms embargo on the Zionist state, support for Palestine, opposition to war, standing against racism or women’s oppression. But there is no evidence that trade unions in Britain are or will be the foundations for social progress. In fact such an idea is the antithesis of today’s political reality, where trade union membership is made up overwhelmingly of an elderly and privileged section of the working class which continuously undermines or obstructs the development of anything new and progressive. They are, on the contrary, bastions of reaction. ROBERT CLOUGH writes.
Defending British imperialism
The reactionary character of British trade unions has a material basis: their fortunes and those of large sections of their members have always depended on those of British imperialism. More than a century ago, their leaders served as recruiting sergeants for British forces during the 1914-18 imperialist war. They subsequently defended the British Empire throughout the inter-war period while sections such as seafarers operated explicit race bars to keep migrant workers out of jobs. During the Second World War, the ruling class had such confidence in the loyalty of the unions and their members that they were drawn into the organisation of production and distribution, and membership expanded by three million.
Post-war the unions were utterly indifferent to the systematic looting of the colonies and dependencies which helped to restore the fortunes of British imperialism and support the expansion of state welfare and the nationalisation of bankrupt industries. Ernest Bevin, former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and then Labour Foreign Secretary, wanted to ‘use the great resources of our Colonial Empire in Africa’ in 1946, and later said: ‘British interests in the Middle East contribute substantially not only to the interests of the people there but to the wage packets of the workpeople of this country.’
Trade unions, the post-war boom and crisis
The post-war boom gave birth to a new privileged layer of the working class in the state and service sectors which would replace the old labour aristocracy of skilled manual workers as boom turned to crisis. However, the first few years of the post-war boom were favourable for British capitalism: because of the wartime destruction of Europe, British manufacturers faced limited competition during the 1950s and into the 1960s. The unprecedented conditions of full-time employment bought social peace for the ruling class, helped by a massive council house building programme. There emerged the possibility of children of better-off workers going to grammar school and then on to university, with tuition fees and maintenance paid fully by the local authority: the number of universities was to double in the 1960s from 22 to 45. But for migrant workers the experience was very different: they were overwhelmingly recruited into the poorest paid jobs and those involving overnight shift-work, often with the connivance of the trade unions.
However, the logic of capital accumulation – the displacement of workers from the labouring process by the ever-escalating scale of investment in the means of production – constantly threatens unemployment. This hit home during the 1970s as crisis conditions emerged: between 1968 and 1979 the number of workers in manufacturing and industry fell from over 9.5 million to just under 7.6 million. Meanwhile employment in the unproductive sectors associated with the parasitic features of British imperialism (banking, finance and insurance) soared from 674,000 to 1.62 million. The number employed in professional services (which includes education and health) rose from 1.3 million in 1948 to 2.7 million in 1968 and then to 3.4 million in 1979.
Stagflation conditions – the combination of stagnant growth and inflation – that were the manifestation of the crisis, stimulated significant initial resistance from the trade unions, especially the miners who had lost more than 350,000 jobs since nationalisation. In the early 1970s there were huge strikes – by miners in 1972 and again in 1974, building workers in 1972, and low-paid council workers in 1973. In this initial response to the impact of the crisis, the divisions within the trade unions were muted. In 1972, tens of thousands of dock workers struck repeatedly, particularly when five were jailed for contempt of court and the TUC was forced to call a one-day stoppage. The 1974 miners’ strike forced Prime Minister Edward Heath to call a general election in February under the slogan ‘who governs Britain?’ The result was a hung parliament with Labour holding the most seats. The general election that followed in October 1974 saw Labour win with a narrow majority of three.
Inflation, which had run at 16% in 1973/74, rose still further to 24% in 1974/75. This led to an uncontrollable run on the pound which fell from $2.40 to just above $1.60 by September 1976. Labour had to seek an IMF loan to prop up the pound, cut state spending and impose severe wage controls which resulted in a 7% reduction in average wages. Prime Minister James Callaghan told the Labour Party conference in 1976: ‘We must get back to fundamentals…We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession, and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all honesty that that option no longer exists.’ State spending was slashed from 49% of GDP in 1975/76 to 44% in 1978/79.
The working class divides
Trade union membership continued to grow (from 11.2 million in 1970 to 13.2 million by 1979, nearly 50% of all employees and 83% of public sector workers). But the division between the privileged section of the working class and its poorer sections was now apparent as Irish, black and Asian workers openly opposed the Labour government for its regime of undiluted state racism, its support for the South African apartheid state, and its war on the Irish people in the occupied Six Counties. Trade unions lined up with the government: they endorsed immigration controls, did nothing to oppose apartheid, and virulently opposed Irish liberation.
After a brief dip, the inflation rate returned to double figures at the end of 1978 when the Labour government implemented a policy to limit wage rises to 5%. This was impossible for low-paid public sector workers, and widespread strikes took place during the first months of 1979 – the so-called Winter of Discontent. NUPE, the union representing low-paid local government workers, debated disaffiliation from the Labour Party at its 1978 conference. The general election that followed in May 1979 saw the divisions widen as large sections of skilled workers (the so-called C2 layer) defected from Labour to the Tories.
In 1980, the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher jacked up interest rates to support the pound; the result was the devastation of an insufficiently profitable manufacturing sector. The subsequent 1980-82 recession destroyed 25% of manufacturing so that in 1983 there was a net trade deficit in manufactured goods for the first time ever. Unemployment rose to over three million; the trade unions offered hardly any resistance. A 14-week strike by steel workers in nationalised British Steel was defeated as steel poured out of foundries in the private sector. In 1984, the threat of pit closures forced the miners to strike, but the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was split as better-off miners in the more profitable pits, particularly in Nottinghamshire, scabbed by demanding a national ballot. The NUM led by Arthur Scargill responded by turning the strike into a popular struggle in which women’s support groups were to play a vital role. However, steel workers and their union refused to show any solidarity and accepted coal produced by scab pits. The TUC and Labour leaders under Neil Kinnock openly opposed the NUM leadership and campaigned to undermine the strike; after a year’s action, the miners were forced back to work. Following their defeat, the trade unions descended into stagnation, a situation which has not changed 40 years on.
The advent of neoliberalism
Thatcher’s victory was the signal for an unbridled expansion of British imperialism’s overseas assets, led by the most dynamic and aggressive sections of capital. An increasing reliance on super-profits generated by burgeoning capital exports was already evident in the 1970s as private external assets grew from just under 50% of GNP in 1962 to 108% in 1977 and the City of London became the centre of the Eurocurrency market. By 1992, direct and portfolio investment overseas was eight times the investment in manufacturing industry, and in 1997 private external assets totalled £1.97 trillion and stood at 244% of GDP. This was parasitism on an unprecedented scale: by 2005 such investments amounted to £4.8 trillion and were nearly four times British GDP.
The subsequent structural changes in the economy brought further changes in the composition of the working class, accelerating in particular the growth of a new petit bourgeoisie. In the 12 years 1979-91 the number of workers in manufacturing industry fell from 7.1 to 4.6 million but grew in financial services from 1.6 million to 2.6 million and in professional services from 3.4 to 4.1 million. Although strictly speaking the new petit bourgeoisie sold their labour power in order to live, and in that sense were working class, their conditions of work were far different from the typical manual worker, whether skilled or unskilled. For the latter in their vast majority, there was no way out of a dead-end job: for a few there was the possibility of becoming a foreman and thereby crossing a class line. Expectations for graduate entrants to the workforce were quite different: the prospect of promotion into management with a commensurate material improvement in their working and living conditions; in the public sector, eventually an index-linked pension. Key to advancement was not collective action but the individual’s talent, ability and experience in competition with fellow workers. Even if personal progress was slow, there was still the possibility of benefitting from pay bands with automatic annual increments, particularly in the public sector.
The stability engendered by what was popularly described as neoliberalism supported a steady improvement in living standards for the majority of the working class, particularly for its better-off sections, so that average wages grew annually by around 2% between the mid 1980s and 2005. While those dependent on benefits, often on poverty pay and in temporary employment, were subjected to ever more punitive measures, living standards for the majority of the working class and in particular the new petit bourgeoisie rose, helped by the cheapening of consumer goods that followed China’s entry into the world market.
Neoliberal individualism
These developments were bound to have a political impact. When Margaret Thatcher asked in 1987 ‘who is society?’, she had a ready answer: ‘There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.’ Individual choice, consumerism, devil take the hindmost were all expressions of a neoliberal ideology that flourished as the banks and giant monopolies from the imperialist countries looted and plundered the rest of the world. Better-off workers took advantage of cut-price shares as nationalised industries and services were sold off and then bought their council houses with huge discounts, a deliberate incentive to abandon all collective sentiment.
Labour and the trade unions rushed to keep up with these reactionary ideological developments: in the mid-1980s there was Neil Kinnock’s New Realism which under Tony Blair’s leadership in the mid-1990s morphed into New Labour in the mid-1990s. Tens of thousands of lawyers, professionals, lecturers and journalists flooded into the Labour Party with the advent of ‘one member, one vote’, while the influential Peter (now Lord) Mandelson became ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. The pattern of trade union membership changed as millions of members in industry and manufacturing lost their jobs. By 1995, trade union membership had fallen to 7.1 million, 40% of whom were now managers, professionals or associate professionals: a new labour aristocracy which was determined to stamp its authority on the trade unions.
This privileged layer was able to ensure social peace, preventing any serious challenge to the four anti-trade union laws passed by the 1979-97 Tory governments. Under its control, trade union action withered: between 1990 and 2005 the annual number of strike days exceeded one million three times, and by 2005 was just 158,000. The annual average in the 1960s had been 4,350,000 days; in the 1970s, 12,968,800 days; in the 1980s, 6,206,900 days, but in the 1990s and 2000s, just 690,000 days. It was unparalleled stagnation – but then the labour aristocracy had scant need to fight to defend its living standards, such were the scale of the handouts from the ruling class.
Changing white collar unions
Under the guise of building stronger sector-wide unions, those organising management grades in the public sector then took over unions representing manual and low-paid workers as part of a consolidation of control. In 1988 the Civil Service Union (CSU), with a membership mainly of civil service manual workers, was taken over by the middle management union Society of Civil and Public Servants (SCPS). Five years later, Confederation of Health Service Employees, whose membership was mainly NHS ancillary workers, and NUPE merged with the larger National and Local Government Association to form Unison. In 1998 the SCPS/CSU amalgam took over the Civil and Public Services Association, which organised junior clerical workers, to create the PCS of today.
The opportunist left, with its various and competing rank and file trade union fronts, campaigned over many years for mergers which merely reinforced the position of the new labour aristocracy. An article by the SWP’s Chris Harman in 1987 expressed disappointment that ‘again and again socialist activists have found that when these [higher white collar] grades attain trade union position they use them for managerial purposes as much as for the defence of the conditions of other workers.’ (Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman: The changing working class, Bookmarks, 1987, p73) and complained that
‘…the most trade union-conscious white-collar workers are often those with greatest hopes of moving up the career ladder, eventually into jobs in which they will supervise other workers. This explains one of the central peculiarities of white-collar trade unionism: those who are most committed union activists, whose activity leads them to play a key role in union branches, are often those who end up in managerial positions.’ (p78)
But what else could anyone expect of this labour aristocracy whose existence the SWP and the opportunist left deny?
Waving through austerity
That management was central to local union organisation in part explains why there was no opposition to austerity – between 2010 and 2019, after the financial crisis, the level of annual strike action was to fall even further than in the previous decade, to 450,000 days. For those facing the brunt of job losses in local government, the issue was whether redundancies would be compulsory or voluntary. For an aging workforce and membership, 35% of whom were over the age of 50 in 2010, voluntary redundancy opened the door to substantial compensation based on length of service – a quarter of union members had more than 20 years of service – and early retirement for those aged over 55 with index-linked pensions.
Trade union opposition was confined to occasional Sunday national demonstrations whose size diminished over the years, while local anti-austerity campaigns gained little traction as they were always contingent on trade union support. Trade union resistance to cuts by Labour councils in particular was pitiful, despite these being the most substantial. While a significant anti-austerity sentiment emerged, particularly among young people, it did not impel practical action other than the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in September 2015, support he repaid by instructing Labour-run councils three months later to set legal budgets – giving the party’s supine councillors an excuse to cease any appearance of opposing cuts.
It is this combination of age, length of service, professional and management standing that now characterises the labour aristocracy that controls trade unions at both national and local level. Now nearly 40% of trade union members are aged over 50 – up five percentage points since 2010; they now outnumber members aged under 25 by eight to one. This is not a force out of which a new, let alone revolutionary, movement will be created. The ease with which the trade union leadership was able to contain the 2022/23 strike wave and impose below-inflation wage settlements shows the lack of serious organised opposition. Annual pay increments and promotions helped protect many workers, even if individual pay points had fallen by 20% or 30% since the financial crisis.
A blip in activity
Yet for the opportunist left this blip in strike activity was manna from heaven: ‘After many years – and even decades – of quiet on the industrial front, the working class in Britain is once again moving into action en masse. Every day seems to bring with it news about further groups and layers of workers joining the struggle. It is clear that a winter of discontent is well underway’ (Socialist Appeal, 8 December 2022). A few days later, Socialist Worker wrote that ‘Trade union leaders are moving towards calling a unified day of strikes that could involve over a million workers on Wednesday 1 February…The plan is another sign of just how much is changing – and the potential for powerful struggles to transform British politics.’ (20 December 2022). Morning Star, The Socialist and other left publications enthused in a similar fashion.
After the decades of trade union torpor, the opportunist left thought it had something to cheer about. In its view, the working class was on the move. Yet it was evident that from autumn 2022 and throughout 2023, the trade union leadership was able to keep the membership on a tight leash, ensuring that strike activity was confined to occasional days separated by days or even weeks of immobility. Within weeks, the leadership was able to wind up the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign it had established to curtail any political developments. By early 2024, stagnation had returned, to be followed by the election of the Labour government in July.
Tailing the trade unions
Undaunted, the left has continued to preach the necessity of keeping trade unions centre stage on every campaign, regardless of how little they are expected to contribute or mobilise. No demonstration or meeting against war, racism or in support of Palestine is complete without a bevy of trade union leaders on the platform and an insistence from the opportunist left that the issue at hand be taken into the ‘trade union movement’. This is a guarantee that whatever the outcome there will be no challenge to imperialism. The left deliberately glosses over the fact that every trade union statement after 7 October 2023 condemned Hamas unreservedly and supported the Zionist state’s ‘right to defend itself’. When in November 2024 Chris Nineham, Vice Chair of Stop the War and a leading member of Counterfire, claimed that ‘It was a real breakthrough that the TUC voted for an end to arms sales to Israel and backed workplace days of action over Palestine’, the actions the TUC was calling for were risible: they involved little more than emailing MPs, while ‘radical actions’ involved wearing something ‘red, green or black’ to work.
Stop the War, in its promotion of the 28 November day of ‘action’, advised that people could ‘wear a badge or scarf for Palestine day’ or even organise a bake sale, stating that ‘This day of action has been backed by the Trades Union Congress, and we hope it will turn out to be one of the biggest yet…[it] shows that the trade union movement nationally is swinging behind workplace action in order to force the government to stop colluding in genocide.’ In reality, such radical actions as did take place on 28 November were organised outside the trade unions, while the TUC stated ‘We condemn physical attacks, intimidation and threats to UK workers whose activities here are wrongly linked to events in Gaza’.
The trade unions bankroll organisations such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War and CND to ensure that they confine their campaigns to humanitarian or charitable ends. Stand up to Racism ignores the Labour government’s deportation of thousands of migrants and instead focuses the fight against racism on what it describes as the threat of the ‘far-right’, particularly Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, neither of whom are running detention centres or putting migrants on charter deportation flights.
The unions do not want to confront British imperialism, they want to spread the illusion that it can act in a more benevolent way, and they expect the movements they finance to promote that view. The opportunist left, which draws its membership from the new petit bourgeoisie, is willing to promote any fantasy about the possibility of a humane imperialism regardless of what it claims in its newspapers. It will ensure that its campaigns do not break the bounds of acceptability set by the trade unions either in their demands or in their conduct. This means policing the movements on behalf of the trade unions, excluding undesirable speakers from platforms by, for instance, banning open mics, and employing whatever tricks are necessary to block any radical challenge.
This is an entirely reactionary alliance, one which represents the joint interests of the labour aristocracy and the new petit bourgeoisie and their need to defend the source of their material privilege – the super-profits of imperialist plunder. Steering political campaigns into trade unions does not make them reach the mass of the working class as the opportunist left argues: it pushes them into a graveyard by keeping them under the tight control of the labour aristocracy. The lesson is to go out where the real masses are, on the streets. The movement has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 304 February/March 2025
