A New Labour Nightmare: The Return of the Awkward Squad

by Andrew Murray

After a generation of retreat and decline, the trade unions are once more starting to command the public agenda and become a major force in political and social life in the UK. The bitter firefighters’ dispute, following the major strikes by local government employees and railway and tube workers, is the most recent indication of this return. Another is the unbroken run of victories in union elections for left-wing candidates, including the sensational defeat of the leading Blairite in the trade union movement, Sir Ken Jackson, in the ballot for the leadership of Amicus-AEEU.

These developments suggest the unions are emerging from a long period of slumber. At stake are not only the reigning industrial relations dogmas of recent years”social partnership” and “sweetheart deals” with employersbut also the future of New Labour. The new union leaders are militant in promoting members’ economic interests and also support a radical political agenda, calling for both a halt to privatization and vociferous opposition to the Blair-Bush war. A New Labour Nightmare is a mixture of hard-hitting analysis and interviews with those leading the new movement... the group the tabloids dub ‘the awkward squad.’

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Journalist, labour activist, and onetime Communications Officer for the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF).

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes it is good to go back to a decent political potboiler of a slightly earlier period and see how things panned out. Did the author call it right? Did he have insights we missed at the time?

In 2003, Andrew Murray, a prominent organised labour Leftist in the UK, wrote this book primarily as a challenge to the too-easy acceptance of the leadership of New Labour's Tony Blair in the wake of the Iraq War.

It is thus of its time and you might think it can be passed comfortably to the library shelves for the historians while the rest of us move on. Not so.

It contain important clues to what we may see if we get a centre-left coalition or Labour Government in May of this year (2015). The activism he describes may not have resulted in short term success but it has definitely changed the terms of trade inside the British Left.

The book is a game of two halves and it is a quick read. The first is the analysis and the second is a set of interviews with prominent trades union figures in what was then (inappropriately) called the 'awkward squad'.

The conclusion tagged on the end is weak and inconclusive but I am not worried about that. The book was not intended to offer a specific prescription but to mobilise the debate around labour representation.

What comes across from both sections is that the trades union movement had been shaken to the core by the battering it received not just by the Thatcher Government but by globalisation.

Above all (and this situation has intensified to the point of parody), the union movement had not only shrunk overall but had become the voice of largely the 'foundational economy', the bit that provides public services, mostly in the public sector owned by the State.

Even then, more so now, the twin crises were ones of holding on to existing members and recruiting amongst the new poor and vulnerable - ethnic minorities, migrants and women workers - as well as dealing with bullying and harassment (including within the unions themselves at times), driving the movement towards feminist and LGBT issues.

Murray does not deal with the corollaries which may not have been so clear then - the sense of disinterest and abandonment of the white working class forced into the white van and benefits economy as the culture of the Left feminised - but he could not cover everything.

The debate at that time was interesting. Does the Left (with the old Communist appparat that did not give up, die and become Blairite being its solid organising principle alongside rival and more unstable 'Trot' elements) stick with the Labour Party or not?

There were no clear conclusions at that time. One could fight within, create something politically new outside (as the RMT under the late Bob Crow advocated) or 'mix and match' tactically.

It is also interesting to see George Galloway treated with respect (excuse the pun) at the time, given that if he had had three feet, he would have shot himself in each one of them by now.

The book becomes useful precisely because there were no clear answers at the time. The interviews with mostly old guard white male trades unionists help us to see those debates being carried out in public before a sympathetic listener.

At the time, a sort of proto-militancy was bubbling up creating nervousness within New Labour and its right-wing allies at the ousting of longstanding union supporters like Ken Jackson.

There was also the brutal firefighter's strike on which the Murdoch Press directed its wrath. Yet that militancy died off quite quickly. This book helps to explain why.

First, the new trades union leaders were inclined to socialism but were not socialists of the militant or fanciful kind. These men come across as thoughtful, intelligent and practical rather than as either intellectuals or bruisers (even if Bob Crow might have revelled in the latter image)

On the contrary, they were pragmatically (a word they hate) aware of the limitations of their power and the fact that New Labour had the mandate at a national level and they did not.

Moreover, one senses a growing feeling that a lot of work had to be done to grow the unions as a social force within the foundational economy.

There were also battles to be fought within the trades union movement to transfer more internal power to those who were closest to these new forces - especially women.

In that context, if there is time to read one interview in the book, it should be that of the younger Scot Rozanne Foyer, now Unite's Regional Organiser for Unite, but then Assistant General Secretary of the Scottish TUC.

Foyer was the voice of the new Labour Movement in 2003. The other voices clearly want to understand what she is saying even while they continued to struggle to recover the legacy of power lost in the 1970s.

In the end, some of the best and brightest of the Left declined (one would say almost as a matter of honour if they had been of another class) to remain active in the Labour Party. They concentrated on socialist alternatives which have emerged as significant in Scottish context.

With caveats, Murray's general analysis of the situation after Thatcher and under Blair strikes me as pretty sound - but politics is not about sound analysis but mobilisation. To be analytically right is not necessarily to be right about the 'objective conditions' as seen through the dark glass of confused perception.

Nevertheless, these radicals were setting the agenda for an idea that the Labour Party could be reclaimed for the working class even if the old concepts of working class had become decidedly dodgy and lop-sided in favour of sectors owned by the State (and so limited in scope).

What happened between 2003 and 2015 is relevant to what we can expect to see not only if Ed Miliband becomes a majority Prime Minister in a month or so but if he is forced into a de facto coalition with equally left-driven Celtic nationalists.

The organised labour movement decided on drawing back from confrontation and concentrated on a quiet process of internal and then party-driven organisation, sublimating differences between the mainstream components of the Movement for a common end.

The conciliatory, almost submissive, attitude of John Monks and his Marxist revisionists at the TUC was not replaced by militancy but by organisation and a determined effort to say 'never again' (not so much to Thatcher as to Blair).

The naive support for Brown would, of course, become embarrassing but the political situation right up until 2010 required thinking in simple binaries - Blair/Brown and then Ed/David. Terribly sad but true.

The choice of Ed Miliband over David Miliband was thus a significant turning point. He may be singularly uninspiring for the general public but he serves an important purpose in the long climb back for organised labour.

'Ed' was the front man for the new coalition of organised labour and soft socialists who wanted to speak for the huge unrepresented female work force, the public sector and the low paid across the economy.

The punt here was that a soft socialism might be reinstated quietly and without frightening the horses but in such a way that the social democrats and Blairites could find no cause for anything more than sniping before the election and acquiescence during it.

The other side of the story (forgetting the scepticism for the moment of many of the more committed socialists) has been the price paid for this strategy.

The continued acceptance of globalisation and Euro-federalism as a possible 'solution' through participation in progressive campaigning is one. This reviewer considers this futile because of a failure to understand that usable power still ultimately resides in nation states.

Of more immediate concern is the failure to expand labour representation back into the private sector's working class during the worst recession since the 1930s and the continued and associated alienation of the white working class outside the public sector.

As a result, with the rise of 'blue UKIP' (lightly mimicking the transfer of working class votes from the SPD to NSDAP in the German interwar recession), the new revised Labour Party is looking more like a sectional interest (public sector) with quasi-socialist characteristics than a dynamic representative of the masses.

The triumph of the new New Unionism is, however, to recapture the majority position in the Labour Party without scaring the media horses and to ensure that, despite the challenge in Scotland, it remains as one of the only two viable parties of Government in the UK.

We must remember that the shock of the early 1980s was profound. The right-wing split from the Party by the Social Democrats really did threaten that viability and offer trades unionism little more than the AFL-CIO model or futile crushable revolt in the future.

If it attains some semblance of power through the Party this year then, evidently, the challenge is to hold on to power and make a viable choice for control of the State into the hegemonic preference of the people - and that means getting votes amongst the Southern English.

This book thus tells you something about the next Labour administration (if it comes about) that you are not hearing from our increasingly pathetic national political commentators, It does not tell you everything, of course, but the something is significant.

Whatever we get with Labour under Ed Milliband may be a rather pale pink version of socialism but there is, for the first time since Michael Foot was replaced by that posturing liberal Neil Kinnock, something approaching it.

Whether there is any money in the Treasury to do more than ameliorate conditions without disrupting the international markets and causing a crisis is one question.

Similarly, whether raising taxes on the Southern English including the increasingly resentful 'little man' in his white van, and then transferring tranches of it to feather-bedded Celtic partners, is the way to build long term political viability is another question altogether.

[Rob M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considering this book was published in 2003, one might be tempted to think it would be out of date, a historical curiosity at best.

That would, however, be wrong. This 20 year old analysis of the UK industrial and political landscape is still depressingly salient. This perfectly lucid, concise book confronts head-on the problem of organised labour and liberal globalisation, via a series of interviews and profiles of prominent trade union leaders of the time.

A New Labour Nightmare is a snapshot of the exact moment the British trade union movement woke up to the danger to themselves inherent in the Blairite 'Third Way' or, in industrial relations parlance, 'social partnership'. It captures the mood of trade unionism at the moment it swung conclusively from its traditional 'bread-and-butter', small 'c' conservatism, and began to pitch itself as the radical opposition to the neoliberalism which had captured the Labour Party. If you are looking for a single explanation of the institutional-political roots of Corbynism, you can find it right here.

Frustratingly, although the political project outlined in A New Labour Nightmare has risen and fallen, the industrial project is only just finding its feet. The trade union leaders who contributed their thoughts and analyses to this book are unified in their belief that unions need both serious modernisation and a return to traditional principles. Modernisation in the sense of engaging with new ways of working and a new, more diverse workforce, a return to first principles in terms of rebuilding their autonomous industrial strength through a large, well-engaged lay membership. Both things easier said than done.

Today there are women at the helm of Britain's two largest unions, and at the head of the TUC, and a widespread consensus for a serious return to building strength through organising at the base. But is this clear progress deep enough and fast enough for the survival of organised labour as a mighty power in the land? That remains to be seen.