ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism (1st series), No.58, May 1973, pp.7-9.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Mr Gollan paid tribute to all on the Left in the trade unions, the Labour Party and the movement generally, and many who are not normally designated Left, without whose work and effort the victories of 1972 could not have been won. – Morning Star, 15 Jan. 1973: Report of CP Executive’s January meeting.
It was the threat of a general strike led by the TUC that forced the release of the Pentonville Five. – Morning Star, 9 March 1973: Feature article by Eddie Marsden, general secretary CEU (construction section of AUEW) and CP member: regular speaker at Liaison Committee conferences.
1972 was a year of great working-class struggles. Hundreds of thousands of trade unionists took strike action, many for the first time since the 1920s. Mass and flying pickets, factory occupations and other tactics were tested and the experience passed on. Defiance of the law and political strike action became a frequent occurrence.
Yet the year that began with the miners smashing through the Tory government’s ‘norm minus one per cent’ strategy ended in nearly complete official union compliance with Heath’s Phase One wage freeze. Initiative had passed once more out of trade union hands. Faced with the alternative of acquiesence in, or rigorous opposition to, a Tory-imposed incomes policy, the leadership of the movement chose the former.
The crisis of choice was most acute for the Left in the trade unions. The miners’ strike, the freeing of the ‘Pentonville Five’ and the overturning of the Tory ‘lame-duck’ policy at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), all meant that by September 1972 the Left was in a potentially very strong position. They could have refused to talk to Heath on any terms, boycotted the proceedings if they had lost the vote on the general council of the TUC, led a fighting campaign against Phase One and Two, and organised real solidarity for those in struggle.
Jones and Scanlon, however, saw their job as working within the system, bargaining with the employers in controlled set-piece bouts. They are not prepared to break radically with the rules of the game by challenging right wing decisions on the general council. They therefore laid down terms for talks with Heath, attended all the Chequers and Downing Street meetings and abstained from leading anything but a token protest against the freeze.
The shift in initiative and resulting crisis on the Left, however, hardly found any echo in the analysis or commentary developed by the Communist Party. Its strategy of trying to influence the left trade union leaders by accommodating their every twist and turn without open and clear criticism meant that its industrial membership was not mobilised in any way to try and prevent capitulation. Indeed, every clear demonstration of that retreat was smudged and covered over, while every seemingly militant side-step by the Right and Centre of the movement was thrust into prominence.
The Morning Star offered repeated moral exhortation to call trade union leaders to refrain from the talks but was notably reluctant to inform its readers, let alone comment on the fact, that the left leaders were attending and actually putting forward terms on which they would accept a Tory incomes policy. While the TUC general council was admonished in general, not a single specific criticism of the Left appeared in the six months from the Brighton TUC in September 1972.
Indeed, the Morning Star actually tried to exempt the Left from some of its criticisms of the whole general council. On 28 September, last year, for example, an editorial pointed out that the idea of helping to manage capitalism is ‘one of the root causes of the mistakes and betrayals of Right Wing (my emphasis) trade union and Labour leaders’ – as if the Left in Congress House and parliament had any different ideas!
The real whitewashing came on 4 November, after the tripartite talks had finally broken down. Bert Ramelson, the CP industrial organiser, then wrote without even a hint of qualification, that ‘all that has happened has proved how correct were the communists and left trade union leaders and members who opposed the Downing Street talks’. This despite the fact that that Jones and Scanlon, the most important left leaders in the Morning Star’s usual vocabulary, had not opposed the talks, and that Briginshaw had only abstained on the issue.
The character of the Communist Party’s treatment of the left leaders is well illustrated by a report printed in the Morning Star, a few days after Heath proposed his £2 limit on wage rises. ‘Mr Jack Jones,’ it reported without comment on 30 September, ‘said in Birmingham yesterday that any government pay policy would have to include rewards for productivity and efficiency’. Instead of urging resistence to this approach, Ramelson, writing just three days later, referred warmly to ‘Jack Jones and Eddie Marsden at the Brighton TUC speaking in support of the resolution rejecting wage restraint in any form’, without mentioning that Jones had now entirely deserted that position and was wheeling and dealing on wage restraint.
Hugh Scanlon, left President of the AUEW, got similar treatment. On 1 November, for instance, his photograph appears on the Morning Star’s front page beneath a banner headline ‘Engineers’ flat no to Heath’. Reading further on in the article that Scanlon had actually said that ‘in exchange for statutory action on prices, the TUC would accept the idea of flat rate increases in pay, the sum of which would have to be negotiated and then the whole put to a meeting of all trade union executives’, it becomes clear that an honest headline would have been – ‘Engineers’ flat maybe to Heath’.
This reluctance to make clear the CP’s differences – if there are any – with Scanlon, was typified in just one sentence when Briginshaw of NATSOPA finally decided that he would not attend yet another Downing Street meeting to protest at rising prices. On 11 January, the Morning Star wrote simply, ‘Mr Scanlon will be attending, as he feels it is necessary to have the militant viewpoint put’.
The Communist Party uses the Morning Star, not as a socialist paper trying to mobilise the working class for a real fight against the Tory government, but as a passive instrument for presenting ‘realistic’ courses of action that can be easily adopted by the Left on the TUC general council. Clear, specific demands for a real lead from the Left are therefore ruled out. During the weeks before the Special TUC Congress, editorial after editorial called for decisions in support of ‘coordinated’ action. But only once did they specify exactly what this meant. On 3 March, a mere two days beforehand, they finally plumped for ‘a one-day general strike as the first step in a major campaign’.
This abdication from the responsibility of giving a clear lead and then fighting to win the movement to that position was reproduced after 5 March. While calling for the transformation of the ‘day of protest’ into a 24-hour general strike, the Morning Star waited until 22 March, the day the finance and general purposes committee of the TUC met before saying lamely, and for the first time, that ‘it would be better to decide on an earlier date’ than 1 May. This failure to wage a serious struggle for immediate action after the special congress was the most damning. For it had been the Communist Party which, under the auspices of the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, first raised the absurd idea of fighting Phase Two with a one-day token strike on 1 May, over three months later.
Those who wonder why the Communist Party is not prepared to campaign publicly for Jones and Scanlon to give a clear militant lead to their rank and file need look no further than the Morning Star of 27 December 1972. The CP sows illusions in the role of the left leaders because it aims to lead the working class by means of position and influence in the trade union bureaucracy. Respectability and trade union consensus politics therefore become their guidelines for action. The image they wish to project is that held by James Jack, the right-wing general secretary of the Scottish TUC. He is quoted approvingly by the Morning Star (27 Dec.).
‘From time to time we have had members of the Communist Party on the general council, and in almost every instance they have been outstanding members who have not adopted doctrinaire political views, and have made major contributions to the work of the STUC.’
The Communist Party’s timidity before the retreat of the Left was equalled by its treatment of those involved in confrontations with the Tories whom Gollan describes, without exaggeration, as ‘not normally designated left’. Where militants in the rank and file of the gas workers’ and teachers’ unions, for example, have raised demands that conflict with those of the existing trade union leadership, the CP has sided clearly with the latter.
When unofficial stewards’ meetings were held in the gas industry in October and November last year, GM WU officials moved sharply against those involved. Yet if any gas worker militants read the Morning Star on 10 November, their attention must have been caught by an absolutely uncritical article headlined ‘Neither Left nor Right – Basnett’.
Basnett, Lord Cooper’s successor-elect as GMWU general secretary, had apparently said ‘that he won’t be identified with either Right or Left wing within the movement’. The article then followed this claim up, without comment referring to his support for the TUC general council’s policy of appearing before the National Industrial Relations Court, and to his belief that the tripartite talks could be renewed – in the very week that the freeze was imposed on his members.
That this approach was no mere aberration was demonstrated week after week by the Morning Star’s treatment of the gas workers’ fight. Not once did editorials call for all-out strike action; not once did the paper criticise the piecemeal strategy adopted by the GMWU. On only one occasion did it even hint at the resentment and anger building up among the militants at the sabotage of their struggle by Basnett and Edmonds. On 26 February one shop steward was quoted as saying ‘It’s about time our union leaders called on others for support’. But this followed an 11-day period from 9 February in which not only were the columns of the Morning Star opened to Basnett to write a feature article on the dispute, but also the paper printed three different photographs of Basnett and Edmonds.
When finally the GMWU and Transport Workers authorised a secret ballot on the Gas Board’s offer to reduce pension contributions, this betrayal was reported without comment and without any call to gas workers to vote ‘No’. By 21 March, this policy of sabotage and betrayal had been transformed by Mick Costello, the paper’s industrial correspondent, into proof that ‘militant action can defeat the incomes policy’, and as symptomatic of the ‘changing leadership of what has long been the bulwark of class conciliatory trade unionism in Britain’.
The Communist Party’s attitude to the teachers’ struggle shows a similar willingness to defend the union establishment at all cost. Despite its well published campaign for a national youth TUC, Max Morris, a leading Communist Party member of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) executive, supported the move to scrap its annual young teachers’ conference and to wind up its national young teacher advisory committee. This decision was reported without protest in the Morning Star (24 Nov.) under the neutral headline ‘Conference to Go’.
But as the pressure from London’s teachers to take action reached boiling point, the Communist Party decided that it stood with the NUT executive against more militant action in support of the London allowance, and so even its pretended neutrality disappeared. Thus after the Central Hall meeting where 2,500 striking teachers voted decisively against their executive’s attempt to stifle discussion of the next steps against the freeze, the 1 March Morning Star headline was ‘NUT leaders condemn rowdies’.
The CP’s failure to try to prevent the left retreat before Heath, and its increasing accommodation to even the right wing of the movement means, that it has less and less chance of making any significant political gains. Indeed, as the International Socialists’ 1973 conference perspectives document put it, ‘their past "successes" in invading the (TU) machine deny them this possibility. Their trojan horse has become a prison’. Even the ‘victories of 1972’ to which Gollan refers in the extract at the head of this article, were unable to prevent the Morning Star from continuing to lose circulation.
Above all, this examination of the Communist Party’s record reveals the basic weakness of the CP programme. Writing of the need to oppose both the Tories and the right wing. The British Road to Socialism states:
The potential strength of the movement has never been exerted for socialist aims because, in the Labour Party and mass organisations, dominant positions have been held by right wing leaders. (1968 edition, p.19)
The CP clings to its distortions of reality partly because it doesn’t wish to embarrass the trade union officials within and close to it; but also because the concept of ‘socialism through dominant positions’ is linked with their reformist notions of a ‘parliamentary’ and peculiarly ‘British’ road to socialism.
Every time the Left is put to the test, whether in parliament or on the general council, a failure threatens the cornerstone of the CP’s strategy: its belief in the possibility of using the existing machine for socialist aims. Failures are therefore hidden and history is rewritten. In their view militant rank and file movements are not the key to harnessing the whole might of the working class for a struggle against the Tories and the capitalist system. For the CP they are at best left pressure groups operating on right trade union leaders, or as left election machines, and at worst an embarrassment to the Left already in ‘dominant positions’.
The struggle to transform the existing machine, for democracy and workers’ control of the trade unions, for genuine local councils of action and public sector alliances are either ignored or attacked by the CP. In this way the Communist Party is aiding the process of its own decline, and making it easier for the rank and file trade union activists within its membership to move towards the only politics that have any real relevance today, the politics of revolutionary socialism.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 10.3.2008