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By Root 1730 0

to settle. In the nature of things this not only increased potential friction between groups of workers, but risked weakening the hold of the labour movement as a whole. Nobody could live through the strike-happy 1970s in Britain without being aware of union militancy and the tensions between unions and governments. It reached its peak in the autumn and winter of 1978–9. However, I was sufficiently remote from the political scene on the industrial labour left to be surprised to find that my lecture led to an intense and politically charged controversy in Marxism Today over the next year. Without particularly intending to, I had touched several very raw nerves. The fact that within a few months of my article the weak and struggling Labour government had been comprehensively defeated in a General Election by the Conservatives under their new militantly class-warrior leader, Margaret Thatcher, made the pain even more intolerable. By the time the last criticism of my paper appeared in Marxism Today the Thatcher era had already begun. By the time the post-electoral debate on my paper was added to the pre-electoral, and both were published in 1981 in a book jointly sponsored by Marxism Today and Verso Editions,1 the Labour Party itself had been split by the secession of the so-called social democrats, and the remaining rump of the party was struggling to survive.

In retrospect, the illusions of the mixed coalition of lefts which almost destroyed the Labour Party between 1978 and 1981 are harder to understand than the trade union leaders’ illusions of power which had undermined it since the late 1960s. Since the General Strike of 1926 the British ruling class had been careful not to seek a head-on confrontation with the unions, i.e. with the 70 per cent or so of Britons who saw themselves as workers. The golden age of the post-1945 economy had even taken the edge off the built-in anti-unionism of industrialists. For twenty years giving in to union demands had not put pressure on profits. The seventies had begun to worry both politicians and economists, but they were a triumphant period for trade union leaders, who had blocked a Labour government’s plans to limit their power, and who had twice defeated a Conservative government by national miners’ strikes. Even those union leaders who realized that there had to be some limit on uncontrolled free market bargaining, saw themselves as negotiating a ‘wages policy’ with governments from a position of impressive strength.

As it happened, the glory years of seventies unionism were also those of the trade union left. For though the CP was small, declining, politically divided between Moscow hardliners and a ‘Eurocommunist’ leadership, and harassed on the left by younger Trotskyist militants, it probably played a larger part on the national trade union scene in the 1970s than ever before, under the leadership of its formidably able industrial organizer, Bert Ramelson, whose remarkable wife Marian, a Yorkshire textile worker, had been an amateur historian herself and an active supporter of the Historians’ Group. The CP was not merely part of the 1970s militancy. With the blessing (not unqualified) of the two figures closest to national Godfathers in the TUC, Hugh Scanlon, of the Engineering Union, and Jack Jones, the former International Brigader, of the Transport and General Workers, the TUC left, largely marshalled by Ramelson and Ken Gill, co-ordinated the unions’ fight against the two Wilson governments’ attempts to clip their wings. Moreover, the long-hoped-for shift in the balance of the (still) great National Mineworkers’ Union had happened in the 1960s. Yorkshire had swung left, bringing to national prominence a – then – CP protégé, the young Arthur Scargill. Together with the always solid and Party-led bastions of Wales and Scotland, the left now outvoted the equally reliable moderate bastions of northeast England. The fifteen years after 1970 were the era of the great national miners’ strikes – victorious in 1972 and 1974, disastrous in 1984–5, thanks to the combination of Mrs