For Old Labour’s left and right, the 1945 Attlee government
is enshrined in the party’s folklore. But was it socialist? The Attlee
government upheld rather than challenged inequalities of power and wealth. At
the hands of what many workers believed to be ‘their’ government, striking
dockers, gas workers, miners and lorry drivers were denounced, spied upon and
prosecuted. Two States of Emergency were proclaimed against them and two more
were narrowly averted. Above all, the government used blacklegs against these
strikes, often with the connivance of the strikers’ own trade union leaders. On
18 different occasions between 1945 and 1951, the government sent troops,
sometimes 20,000 of them, across picket lines to take over strikers’ jobs. By
1948, it has been argued, ‘strike-breaking had become almost second nature to
the Cabinet’ according to K. Jeffery and P. Hennessy author of How Attlee Stood Up to Strikers, in The Times
of 21 November 1979. The 1945 Atlee government revived the Supply and Transport
Organisation which the Tories of 1926 had used to help crush the General
Strike. And it did so with the active involvement of two of the most famous
left-wing leaders Labour has produced – Aneurin Bevan and Sir Stafford Cripps.
It was a Tory, Rab Butler, who re-shaped education. Labour
Party Conference policy on comprehensive schooling was shunned in favour of
Butler’s inegalitarian system of selection. It was a Liberal, Lord Beveridge, who outlined
what became the Welfare State. In foreign policy, Labour helped to crush
risings in, for example, Vietnam, Malaya and Greece; it took the initiative in
establishing NATO. In secret (most
Ministers were kept in the dark) it spent millions on developing an atomic
weapons programme, cooking the government books to hide the fact.
Even a number of
Tories, Churchill among them, were willing to countenance a degree of
nationalisation. The nationalisation of the mines and civil airlines went
through parliament in 1946; followed by road, rail and canal transport, and
electricity in 1947; gas in 1948; and iron and steel in 1949. Labour offered an
extraordinarily generous compensation to the former owners of nationalised
concerns. George Bernard Shaw had once suggested that nationalisation need not
affect the workers in the slightest: to them it ‘would only be a change of
masters’. So it proved. By 1951, a mere nine of the 47 full-time members and
seven of the 48 part-time members of the Boards of the nationalised industries
were trade unionists, and five of the Boards had no trade unionist among their
full-time members at all. Most directors were simply drawn from the existing
managerial hierarchies. Nor was it any different outside the boardrooms: in the
mines, for example, the same old faces remained in charge at every level. The
previous theory that nationalisation was a step to-wards achieving socialism
and workers’ control became in effect a means to-wards technical rationalization,
an improved method of administration and management. Sir Stafford Cripps
declared there was ‘not as yet a very large number of workers in Britain
capable of taking over large enterprises ...”
Labour and strike-breaking were hardly strangers. The 1924
government, Labour’s first, re-activated the Supply and Transport Committee in
the face of a dock strike and declared a State of Emergency over a strike by
London bus and tram workers. Bevin, then leader of the TGWU. told a Labour
Party Conference:
‘I know something about emergency powers. The first Labour
Government rushed down to Windsor to get them signed in order to operate on me,
and I have a vivid recollection of it, and we were only striking to restore a
cut – not a very serious crime. I do not like emergency powers, not even when
they are operated by my friends.’ How his attitude changed.
Dockers had been given a guaranteed minimum wage and an end
to the worst features of the casual labour system, but on terms which imposed
an industrial discipline, often exercised by their own trade union officials. An
eruption of anger against such conditions had led in March 1945 to a one week
strike by 13,000 London and Tilbury dockers. The strikers went back to work
after being promised an inquiry into the working of the National Dock Labour
Corporation. Their anger could hardly have been assuaged when the inquiry sat
under the chairmanship of Corporation chief Lord Ammon and proceeded to rebuke
the dockers in terms that endless, subsequent docks inquiries would echo –
their strike was wrong and they should use the agreed negotiating machinery. Within
weeks, the dockers found themselves under attack again.
In the London Docks on 28 May, a special piecework agreement
was abruptly scrapped. Dockers found themselves working on the same ship and
the same cargo, and earning considerably lower rates of pay. The dockers
responded with a ‘go slow’, and a demand for an increase in basic pay from 16
shillings (80p) to 25 shillings (£1.25) a day, only to find full-time officials
of the largest docks’ union, the Transport and General Workers, denouncing the
dispute’s unofficial leaders as irresponsible elements and urging a return to
work and acceptance of what some felt to be an insulting offer by the
employers. Similar demands led to strikes by dockers in Glasgow, Grimsby,
Immingham, Swansea, Cardiff and Plymouth. As in London in March, troops were
sent into each port to unload ships. In London, the ‘go slow’ was already
faltering when, on 31 July, about 300 troops moved into the Surrey Docks, the
last major centre of resistance. Two weeks later, the dockers admitted defeat,
an experience further embittered by the suspension of 900 men and the failure
of the Labour government to answer the locked-out dockers’ appeal to intervene.
But discontent continued to simmer until it re-ignited once
more. On 9 October the Cabinet sent in troops to unload strike-bound food at
Liverpool Docks. A relatively small
affair of a lighting strike two weeks earlier by 60 dockers at Bidston had
brought out all 15,000 dockers on Merseyside and many more elsewhere in a
spontaneous demand for the 25 shilling claim. The strike was spread to London,
Middlesbrough and South Shields. By 11 October, roughly 40,000 dockers were out
and almost every port was at a standstill. A mass meeting on Merseyside passed
a vote of no confidence in the union’s leading docks’ official, Jack Donovan,
while another at Manchester gave the same thumbs-down to all the union’s dock
officials ‘For 20 years we have been dictated to by them’, said one striker.
‘They have become our masters instead of our servants’, claimed another. As a strike leaflet complained:
‘We have pleaded, begged aid for the unions to fight for
better conditions. The unions have pledged us that they are going forward, that
the official machinery has been set in motion. It has been set in motion round
and round, getting nowhere, nothing happening. This has been going on for
years. And the dockers decided to take the matter into their own hands and
demand government intervention. We don’t want the moon, just a little comfort
and security.’
The dockers’ repeated appeals to ‘their’ government to step
in went unheeded. Minister of Labour George Isaacs again and again gave the
Commons his stock Ministerial response to strikes – ‘that the strikers and not
the employers were to blame’.
Some 21,000 troops were drafted into eight different ports
before the strike collapsed in early November. It proved a hollow victory. The
strike eventually won the dockers an increase of three shillings a day, the
biggest in their history.
On 6 January 1947, anger over the rejection, after nine
months of talks, of a London lorry drivers’ claim for a 44-hour week led to an
unofficial strike. In many respects, the dispute bore the hallmarks of the
explosion in the docks: the exasperation with the negotiating machinery and
TGWU officialdom, the emergence of a central rank and file strike committee,
the rapid spreading of the strike throughout the country, and, of course, the
use of troops. The strike threatened food supplies at a time of severe
shortages and rationing – encouraged the government to take a hard line. Public
hostility was fanned by the press. On 13
January, troops were sent into Smithfield Market, the centre of the strike,
provoking sympathy walk-outs in other major London markets and by nearly 10,000
London dockers. By 15 January, some 28,000 workers were out nationally and the
possibility of a total stoppage throughout the country loomed. The Cabinet decided
that the dispute should be put before a Joint Industrial Council specially
created for the purpose. This done, the strike was called off and most of its
major demands were eventually conceded.
On May Day 1947. Another dock strike was in progress, this
time in Glasgow, where the threat of 500 redundancies had sparked the dispute.
In London, 10,000 port workers, mostly members of the stevedores’ and
lightermen’s unions, had come out in sympathy. Troops had been sent into
Glasgow three weeks earlier. The committee drew up plans to use military labour
in London, considered the declaration of a State of Emergency and agreed to
warn the TUC that the government intended to prosecute the leaders of unofficial
strikes. The measures were stillborn: the strike ended the next day.
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