struggle? or a den for the bureaucrats?
A 'consultative paper' on the state of Trades Councils in England and Wales shows a steep decline: the most telling figures are those indicating the average attendance, which fell from 8,430 to 4,136 in 1989! In the ten years from 1979, branches affiliated (in terms of their total membership) fell from 3,461,413 to 2,413,137. This of course, reflects formal affiliation which says nothing about active involvement.
What do these figures - contained in a document produced by the Trades Councils Joint Consultative Committee (TCJCC) (involving reps from Trades Councils and members of the TUC General Council) reflect? They are obviously a product of a decade of defeats at the hands of the Thatcher government. The massacre of whole sectors of traditional industries led to the departure of a large layer of activists, including those who were the mainstays of many Trades Councils. At the same time there has been a general decline in the numbers of union activists, and a dearth of younger ones coming forward.
The smashing of the militant shop stewards" movement in industries such as car production also had a deadening impact. The decline in the AUEW and TGWU in terms of organisation and activity has been particularly marked. In the Thames Valley area for instance, these unions now have little involve. ment in the Trades Councils.
The domination of 'new realism' which has been largely responsible for the defeats has also fed off them, and created an atmosphere in which militant trade unionism has been seen as an anachronism, a thing of the past. The tradition of class solidarity has been denuded by the defeats, producing a decline amongst activists of the consciousness of belonging to a labour movement. Sectoral mentality and a scramble for members has been cultivated by many union bureaucrats, in this situation, and unions have retreated into a deadly parochialism which is concerned purely with direct workplace interests - wages and conditions. Political trade unionism has SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-Auqust 1990
FEATURES Trades Councils:
By Sam Stacey Horty Brbraptle Daily
BIGGEST STRIKE IN KURS FINAL SOMERS LEAVE NEARLY 5,000,000 WORKERS OF GOVERNMINT
STOPPED
APPEAL. INVOLVED IN STOPPAGE. CURTARED SERVICE THERENT INH
MR 1H. THOMAS MAKES FINAL BUT 21S FUTILE MEDIATION EFFORT. PREMIER'S REPLY TO 5252 1926 general strike: Trades Councils frightened the TUC declined.
This is the climate that has produced the decline of the Trades Councils. But the steepness of this decline is not simply the product of objective factors. For the experience in different areas has been contrary to this general trend. Results have depended on the political composition of each Trades Council and the view held of what their role is. For many years, the Trades Councils were dominated by a tedious routinism which drove people away through sheer boredom and opposed and initiative.
Occasionally they would be brought to life in support of a particular dispute, though even this was often passive as opposed to active solidarity. But in many areas in the 1980s a vacuum opened up as the old bureaucratic stalwarts began to disappear. The decline of the Communist Party also had a similar impact. In some places the left began to fill this vacuum and tum the Trades Councils into a more active, campaigning force, showing that the decline of the Trades Councils overall is a political question which requires political answers - something which the TCJCC completely ignores.
Trades Councils are an arena of political struggle. Their make up and role at any time is dependent on the political complexion of the local labour movement. There has been enough positive experience in the last few years to show that they can be important centres for organising solidarity. Equally, the
Mail CITY EDITION. "bronicle BRITAIN'S HISTORY
BEGUN. EMERGENCY PLANS WIDE POWERS OF THE STATE ANTAL TO PERLIE WN ME MIZE .. COMPLETE CÓNTROL CHALLENGE reverse can be the case - as in some arcas during the miners" strike, where conservative Trades Councils were able to present major obstacles to political solidarity and impede any struggle against the sabotage of the dispute by the TUC and Labour leaders.
Where solidarity has been a regular, and natural feature of the activity of a Trades Council it has been possible, as in the case of Oxford (where Trades Councils have on ongoing disputes committees) for instance to achieve a good response to struggles such as the ambulance dispute, and on the right issue, mobilise big demonstrations.
It has been argued by some, notably the Socialist Workers Party, that there is little point in organising to win control of Trades Councils because they "represent so little in the workplace". Certainly there is little point in winning control of a Trades Council to carry out SWP-style politics, and merely push through propagandist left wing resolutions every now and again. If a trades council is to be given political life it has to serve as a focus for the local labour movement. Ir has to address the concrete problems of the working class in its locality. This will inevitably, to one degree or another, bring it into conflict with the local union bureaucrats and right wing labour councils.
The experience in Reading is interesting in this respect. There the Trades Council was responsible for setting up a town-wide campaign on the Poll Tax which has meant a
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public battle with the Labour coun cil. This has led to the local NALGO branch, whose executive committee is full of Labour Party hacks, withdrawing its delegates from the Trades Council. But the left has been able to achieve far more from its position on the trades council than it would otherwise have been able to. True, the Trades Council would not be able to mobilise strikes by a call to the work places; but this is hardly surprising given the fact that for decades this Trades Council like many others has not "sold' itself to the working class. Their relationship has been entirely with the union branches, whose attendances have declined. But what is to stop Trades Coun- cils working to develop a direct relationship with the workplaces? Indeed even the TUC has been forced to think about opening trades councils to workplace reps - from shop stewards" committees - as a means of stemming their decline. They decided to set up a number of trials, where Trades Councils would invite delegates from shop stewards commit- tees and other workplace organisations, though with typical ineptitude this still has not yet been carried out. Potentially Trades Councils can be or- ganising centres of the local workers' move- ment, carrying out such work as unionisation drives which cut across sectoral interests and draw together local unions in the service of interests; common fighting to keep out firms. non-union trying to unionise non-union sites and so on. TCJCC The document offers the chance of a discus- sion on the role of Trades Councils today. They have asked for views to be expressed on how this decline can stemmed. It be would be useful for the Socialist Move- ment Trade Union (whose Committee conference late last year was supported by 24 Trades Coun- cils) to promote a discussion amongst these trades councils and seck some degree of coordina- tion. Page 36
FEATURES Major Public RALLY Oxford Town Hall TUES. JUNE 5th 7:30 pm speakers Peter Heathfield Cathy MacKey Ron Todd Dennis Skinner Jimmy Knapp Ivor Braggins Malcolm Young Andrew Smith It can be done! Trades Councils can boost solldarity work their solidarity, assisting in rebuilding Trades Councils originated in the second half of the last century, the period of the craft unions of artisan workers, who were a definite separate social strata from the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. They were the product of the small scale workshop in the period just before the growth of the large-scale mass production factories. They founded the TUC, and lived quite amicably with the Liberals who dominated it. The trades councils were able to send delegates to the TUC Congress until 1895. But with the rise of 'new unionism' or ganising the unskilled manual workers, the Trades Councils became far more radi- cal. In the three years at the height of the struggles which gave birth to the new mass unions (1888-91) 60 new Trades Councils were set up. Consequently this led to an influx of socialists and militant unionists into the TUC Congress, When the Liberals recaptured control of Con- gress in 1895, the trades Council
OXFORD & DISTRE TRADE SUPPORT the MINERS Escutive Officer TOWU Labor MaN TOWU Commense Co Oxford Dialect are. ALEW Lab, Orland City Cir If this is done trades councils can become political bastions in the struggle against 'new realism' in the labour movement; not in the sense of passing empty resolutions, but in practical activity, promoting class working class organisation, and drawing together the cil movement. best and most class conscious trade union ac- tivists who want to build a combative move- to the TUC. of Action.
ment. Of course, the local full time union bureaucrats will not simply sit back and see a trades council transformed into a centre of political op position. Where they are able, they will reorganise their forces to restore the Trades Council to a harmless routinist body. But that is an inevitable and constant part of the struggle. The Trades Councils an- nual conference is a talking shop which has no powers. It is not taken seriously by a great many Trades Councils who do not bother sending delegates, viewing it as a waste of money. One of the demands that the left should press is that the Trades Councils conference should have powers to organise in- dependently of the TUC, able to elect a committee mandated by the conference to carry out its decisions and organise independent initiatives. Naturally this would be resisted by the TUC, but it would surely be a demand around which it would be possible to organise those Trades Councils in which the left has a strong base, and want to build a live, active Trades Coun representatives were booted out. Al- though the Liberals were finally defeated 4 years later, the Trades Councils were never again allowed to send delegations The union bureaucracy has always viewed the Trades Councils with a certain ambivalence. This is because in periods of major struggles the Trades Councils have taken charge of those struggles; that is, taken them out of the control of the official union apparatuses. Hence in the 1926 General Strike, the TUC General Council instructed the Trades Councils not to take charge of the strike. They were not to consider themselves as local reps of the General Council. They were to leave the organisation of the strike to the full-time officials of the unions on strike. Many of them, of course, simply ignored these instructions and acted as the or- ganising centres of the strike, either by setting up strike committees, or Councils SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-August 1990
Ruth Rendell THE BRIDESMAID HER NEW BESTSELLER Holiday bestsellers The Bridesmaid Ruth Rendell, Arrow, £3.99 Devices and Desires P.D. James, Faber and Faber, £6.99 The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber and Faber, £3.99 Reviewed by Jane Wells Armed with a brief (but, needless to say, no budget) from Socialist Outlook to find a clutch of books from the bestseller list worth reviewing and even recommending to readers, I decided on a twopronged strategy.
First, the easy option, Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. I would have read them anyway. They are a guaranteed enjoyable - if not necessarily thought-provoking - read.
Ruth Rendell is a Labour supporter, a feminist and long-time CND member. This rarely makes an obvious impact on her work apart from avoiding some cruder excesses indulged by other writers.
She fits more neatly with the Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers school of women thriller writers than with the new radicals who've been infiltrating the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 26, July-Auqust 1990
FEATURES KAZUO ISHIGURO The Remains of the Day mainstream publishers" lists in recent years. Some, like the American Sara Paretsky, are real storytellers (in her case, in the tradition of Chandler, but without the blonde double-cross- ing femme fatale as the root of all evil), working in a thoroughly political framework. Unfortunately many others are disappointing because they're just not good writers. P.D. James' and Ruth Rendell's popularity can be put down to the fact that they can tell a good story, at the very least. Their accessibility is due in part to their familiarity. English detective books are known as "cosies" in the States. The low life is never really that low, characters generally operate within a moral world of received wisdom, if good doesn't win out in the end you at least know who the baddies are, and the bobbies are not just decent, they're even interesting. Ruth Rendell's more compell- ing works are those written under the Barbara Vine pen name which detail the psychological build-up to crime, and her thrillers in which the perpetrator's psychology, and not the detection of crime, is the focus.
The Bridesmaid falls into this last category, and is one of the best accounts I can remember reading of a sort of personality and circumstance which has rarely been explored and never makes the headlines in real-life crime reporting. The individual's link with reality is tenuous at best, and their moral frame of reference is not evil or maniacal, but seriously wacky whilst nearly-normal to a superficial glance. Rendell shows how such a fragile grip on life can be nearer than we think to "normality', and just a short step away from crime - and that it can be catching, too.
P.D James is even more of an establishment writer, and it shows. A civil servant with a background in the Foreign Office, NHS and police work, she is now a BBC Govemor. A less prolific writer than Ruth Rendell, her plots are often more complex, and always engrossing-
Another pleasure reading her is spotting the stereotype or piece of gratuitous reactionary commentary. In earlier books revolutionaries in donkey jackets pronounce their programmes in north London pubs, and arrange coded cloak-and-dagger meetings in the British Museum (to what end was never made clear). I suppose the WRP at its height may have indulged in such nonsense, but in P.D. James' imagination they posed a widespread and serious threat to the fabric of society as we know it.
So too did sixties sociology lecturers with long hair. In Devices and Desires there's an anti-nuclear activist who actually receives almost fair treatment. But the reader's main sympathies are directed to a recently redundant head teacher, hounded from her loony left London school for refusing to call a blackboard a chalkboard. And so myths are made, and sustained. For all that I'd still recommend it for some entertaining holiday reading.
My second prong was to branch out and buy some books that I wouldn't normally try. I easily resisted the No. 1 bestseller Ambition, a shopping and sex' novel by Julie Birchill, on the grounds that I didn't want to add to her profits: by all accounts it's awful, and so is she -
particularly since she claims some left-wing credentials whilst taking up reactionary postures on everything from Ireland to Iran.
I decided to go for something completely new. Ranked about number fifteen on W. H. Smith's bestseller shelves was Ruling Passions, by Sunday Times columnist (and former wife of famous Labour MP Tony), Susan Crossland. This turned out to be a political saga in the mould of Jeffrey Archer, only it was even worse: 1 should have known from the cover which features a Tory rosette lying tastefully on some silky lingerie. Sex in novels I don't mind but sex combined with politics is only slightly more interesting than sex and shopping.
A heroine called Daisy, given immortal lines like The thing about you, Carl, is your arrogance.
You know you're the brilliant intellectual of the new right. You know you're going to get one of the key posts in Washington. You know you're the greatest artist in the sack. You don't need anyone else to tell you so. Sometimes it makes me feel I'm simply a doll' just didn't do anything for me. So 1 gave up after two chapters, and wouldn't advise you to bother at all.
The Remains of the Day, by Nagasaki-born and now Englandbased author Kazuo Ishiguro, was much better. The novel won him the Booker Prize last year, so I knew that the story centred on a butler at the end of his career and at the end of an era.
Whilst it's ostensibly not about much at all, the story builds up a portrait of a man coming to terms with some of life's Big Questions - what motivates other people, and himself, and confronting the limitations in his own understanding.
It's also funny, and quite romantic. Inter-war politics provide a subtle backdrop to the novel. Whilst its not the ultimate combination of the dialectics of psychology and politics, individual and society. The Remains of the Day is a well written book with plenty of insight to be going on with until a socialist classic makes it into Smith's top ten.
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