[A-List] Paul Foot on New Labour bankruptcy

[Michael Keaney]

Strange loss of memory

Paul Foot
Wednesday December 11, 2002
The Guardian

What is going wrong with John Prescott's memory? Here is a passage from his
Commons statement three weeks ago on the fire dispute: "I found myself in
conflict with the government in 1966, following a dispute between seamen and
shipowners, and our movement suffered another glorious defeat. I hope that
Andy Gilchrist will not mind my giving him a piece of advice: he should be
very careful not to get into a conflict with the government about public
pay." Well, what did happen in 1966?

In April, just a month after a Labour government was elected with a majority
of almost 100, the National Union of Seamen, with a membership roughly
similar to today's Fire Brigades Union, after failing to negotiate a decent
pay rise for their members, called an official strike. The Labour
government, under Harold Wilson, immediately took sides - with the
employers. After 10 days' strike, a court of inquiry was set up under a
judge, Lord Pearson, one of whose members was an academic, Hugh Clegg, the
Sir George Bain of his day. In a great hurry, the inquiry recommended
substantial cuts in the working week, but precious little money to go with
them, and the National Union of Seamen stayed out on strike. The union's
leaders were silent, but the rank-and-file were not. In Hull, some union
activists decided to publicise their members' case against the Pearson
report. Nearly 30,000 copies of a powerful pamphlet, Not Wanted on Voyage,
were sold. It was written by the branch chairman, Charlie Hodgkin, and a
young liner steward, J Prescott. The Marx Memorial library, keeper of a
million radical pamphlets, kindly sends me a copy. The pamphlet was an
answer to what it called the "bias" of the Pearson report, and angrily
denounced the Labour government's involvement in the dispute. The pressure
for the seamen to accept the Pearson offer, it revealed, "occurs against a
background of huge increases for members of parliament, judges, top civil
servants, ministers of the crown and the doctors. The incomes policy has
lost all pretence at being concerned with social justice; it is one law for
the rich, another for the poor". The 20-page pamphlet ended with a ringing
conclusion: "There is a wealth of evidence we could produce to show that
behind the government, in its resistance to our just demands, stand the
international banks, the financial powers which direct the government's
anti-wage policy. The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working
class. How familiar a story that is of Labour governments when we cast our
minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and his 1929-1931 government. It was the
trade unions then who stiffened the Labour party against the attacks on
unemployment pay. They must rally to the same cause in the different
circumstances of today. We have tried to show in this report why the
hostility to our modest claim has been so fierce. The unholy alliance of
Labour government, Tory opposition, press, shipowners and international
bankers is both frightening and politically very revealing."

The outcome of the 1966 strike was not a defeat for the Labour movement.
Because they went on strike, the seafarers made gains in the hours they had
to work, if not in the wages they were paid. The result was more of a draw.
Its chief effect was that whole sections of British labour were outraged
that a Labour government with a huge majority could throw itself into battle
against low-paid workers in an affiliated union on official strike.

There are many similarities between the seafarers' strike of 1966 and that
of the firefighters: the same "objective" inquiry objectively putting the
case against the workers, the same government bias, the same witch-hunts,
the same grotesque contrasts between the people who do the dirty work and
the well-heeled academics, editors and businessmen who scold them. There are
differences, too. Not the least remarkable is the contrast between the
idealistic seafarer in Hull, standing up for his class, and the portentous
deputy prime minister siding with the employers every bit as meekly as did
his predecessors 36 years ago.

Talking of historical differences, can we distinguish between convicted
fraudster Peter Foster, who advised the Labour prime minister's wife about
the purchase of flats in Bristol, and Ronald Milhench, the dodgy
Wolverhampton insurance broker who, nearly 30 years earlier, advised the
family of Marcia Williams, later Lady Falkender, secretary to Harold Wilson,
over buying and selling slag heaps near Wigan? Yes, we can. Milhench was so
desperate to capitalise on the relationship that he forged the prime
minister's signature. Foster didn't need to.