TUC conference: unions may be too weak to fight
BRENDAN Barber doesn’t really do righteous indignation. In all my 30 years of sitting through speeches by trade union leaders, I can honestly say that he stands out in my mind as easily the dullest orator I have ever had to politely applaud. This is nothing personal; I have never met the guy. Nor is [...]
Unite: Len McCluskey or Jerry Hicks?
I AM not a member of Unite and have no factional alignment to any of the candidates in the impending general secretary contest. So much for the disclaimer. But I can’t help noticing that of the two contenders for the leftwing vote, onetime Liverpool docker Len McCluskey seems well ahead of his rival Jerry Hicks. [...]
Why David Cameron snubbed the TUC
IT WAS unspeakably obsequious of the general council of the Trades Union Congress even to invite David Cameron to address its annual conference in Manchester in September. How amusing, then, that this thoroughgoing display of sycophantic servility should be met with a riposte of truly Old Etonian hauteur. The prime minister ain’t going, largely because [...]
The general strike demand: time for a revival?
I HAVE no idea what social background Rosa Prince comes from, or where she went to university. But as she is political correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, I’d hazard a guess that the answers to those questions will most likely be ‘posh’ and ‘starts with an O’ respectively. Whatever the case, her grasp of the [...]
Woodley, Unite and Labour: more than a bit of verbal?
MANY trade union general secretaries can deliver a punchy left-ish sounding speech when the occasion demands, without any particular implications for their political practice. Tony Woodley is a case in point. I am not suggesting he is in any way a poseur; he’s a genuine working class bloke, labour movement born and bred, who made [...]
Roger Bannister or Paul Holmes: choices for the Unison left
MY NEXT door neighbour is standing for the council. Matt Hanley is a thoroughly nice bloke, on the socialist wing of the Green Party, a former union rep who has organised low-paid retail workers, an active anti-fascist, and a full-time campaigner for human rights. So obviously I won’t be voting for him. I’m a Labour [...]
NUJ elections: evil Trots exposed
I’VE BEEN covering industrial relations as a hack for over 20 years now. Once it was my main specialism. These days the task takes maybe 25-30% of my typical working week, but I still keep an eye on a number of trade unions. I write about Nautilus International and RMT, who organise seafarers, fairly regularly. [...]
MI5 and the unions: did Jack Jones spy for the KGB?
SUCH is the harmless good guy reputation that the passage of time has granted the once widely hated Jack Jones that even Gordon Brown felt safe in hailing him as ‘a giant of the labour movement’ in a speech to the TUC conference in Liverpool last month. In terms of leftie street cred, Jones really [...]
TUC conference: what is trade unionism for?
I DON’T know if Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson are particularly up on Søren Kierkegaard. But as the annual Trades Union Congress conference kicks off in Liverpool today, I reckon many union leaders could do worse than dust off their copies of Fear and Trembling. The labour movement today is clearly facing what the Danish [...]
British jobs for British workers: round three
THE far left is usually an uncritical supporter of industrial action in any and all circumstances, rightly adopting Rosa Luxemburg’s stance that ‘where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken’. Yet the two rounds of ‘British jobs for British workers’ wildcats this year have been the only exception to this rule [...]
