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From International Socialism, No.56, March 1973, pp.7-8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Liaison Committee for the defence of Trade Unions, started as a ‘lobby organising committee’ under the secretaryship of Jim Hiles, organised its first lobby of Parliament on 1 March, 1966. Some 4,000 trade unionists participated. A second lobby was organised in June. It was sponsored by a number of rank-and-file organisations in London: the London Docks Liaison Committee, the Building Workers’ Joint Sites Committee, EMI and ENV Engineering Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee, Exhibition Workers’ Committee, London Sheet Metal Workers’ Organisation and the Shop Stewards’ Defence Committee.
Attempts now began to establish lobby committees and conferences to discuss Labour’s prices and incomes legislation in all major towns and cities. In September a meeting of the Shop Steward Co-ordinating Committee on the Clyde decided to launch a campaign of mass meetings and deputations to MPs, and work for a Scots deputation to take part in a demonstration at the Labour Party conference in Brighton. In February 1967 the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, as it had begun to call itself, organised a sizeable lobby of Parliament against the Labour wage freeze.
From 1968 onwards the LCDTU turned its attention to the impending threat of industrial relations legislation, as forecast in the Donovan Report which came out in July. As soon as the Labour government’s intentions became clear in Barbara Castle’s White Paper, In Place of Strife, the LCDTU managed to organise significant stoppages. In February 1969 150,000 stopped work mainly on Clydeside and Merseyside, followed by a May Day strike of 250,000, with a 20,000-strong demonstration in London and demonstrations in other parts of Britain. With Labour’s retreat over In Place of Strife, the committee became relatively dormant.
Not until the Tories came to power in the summer of 1970 did the LCDTU gather fresh momentum, which culminated in the massive unofficial stoppage of 600,000 on 8 December, 1970, despite TUC attempts at sabotage. This strike helped lead the way for the other stoppages in 1971 against Carr’s Industrial Relations Bill. These took place on 1 January (mainly in the Midlands), and 12 January. The engineers alone came out on 1 and 18 March. But the LCDTU’s active opposition waned from this point onwards.
On 28 February 1972 the major provisions of the Industrial Relations Act became law. On 8 April a Liaison Committee conference passed a resolution which aimed to stiffen the resolve of the TUC in its policy of non-cooperation with the Act, and declared that only industrial action would defeat the Act. Above all it called for ‘resistence and action’ against the paying of fines and carrying out any NIRC instruction that would prevent trade unionists taking action to defend their living standards.
Within three weeks of the conference, the three railway unions had submitted to the NIRC’s orders for a cooling-off period and a ballot of the memberships. The story of the LCDTU’s attempt to fight back through industrial action leaves nothing to tell.
Then came a second chance to prove an active commitment to fighting the Act. Another conference was held on 10 June. It called for a national stoppage on 5 September when the recalled TUC was to meet. The conference reaffirmed the principle of non-cooperation and called for mobilisation and solidarity action by trade unionists and trade unions attacked by the state through the Industrial Relations Act.
Yet again the step between the declaration and the deed proved too large. The imprisonment of five London dockers in July was met with widespread industrial action. But at neither local nor national level did the Liaison Committee play any part. As for the 5 September stoppage, only small numbers of Scottish trade unionists came out. The committee’s inactivity over the engineers’ recent entanglements with the Industrial Relations Act serves further to underline its weakness. It has acquired a lack-lustre appearance in comparison to the old campaigning days against In Place of Strife and the Industrial Relations Act. It has moved further and further away from the job of acting as a real left-wing organising centre in the unions.
This is not surprising. The Communist Party, the inspiration and effective controller, has not cast it for this role. Too often allowed to appear as a protest – lobby/demonstration/stoppage – organisation, the Liaison Committee has carefully subordinated its strategy to the ‘Parliamentary road’. Given this and the respectability that it implies, and given at the same time the committee’s substantial support among industrial militants, it has made an awkward tight-rope for itself.
If only for union electioneering purposes it would like to forget about too much industrial militancy. But faced with this perspective, its industrial base becomes disgruntled. Thus with the direct attacks by the state on industrial militants that first the 1966 Prices and Incomes Act and then the anti-union legislation entailed, the Communist Party sent some of its militants to organise the LCDTU, while not putting too much publicity and resources into it. Not only does the party’s strategy for socialism basically deny the revolutionary importance of building up an industrial base, it permeates its attitude to the whole question of trade-union bureaucracy.
Just as at the Parliamentary level it means electing the ‘right’ person in order to change society, ignoring the class nature of the state, so on a trade-union level it means almost exclusively concentrating on electing the ‘right’ full-time official, ignoring the bureaucracy’s strong tendency to have interests of its own inimical to the rank and file, and modes of behaviour that smother even the best-intentioned. One corollary is an attempt to win influence among the sitting ‘progressive’ incumbents. Thus another constraint has been put on the committee. It must not be allowed to go too far in antagonising the bureaucracy. Yet at the same time, to be influential, it has to have some independent strength. Thus the LCDTU has to be tightly-controlled and its function severely circumscribed. It has not been allowed to develop into a flourishing rank-and-file body that might threaten the bureaucracy.
Eddy Marsden, general secretary of the constructional section of the AUEW and CP executive member, has been the keynote speaker at recent LCDTU conferences. He has made fine-sounding left-wing speeches. The same Eddy Marsden signed a letter, jointly with D.J. Gorman (construction manager, Simon Litwin Ltd), stating that the Simon Litwin’s Llandarcy site was ‘now open for recruitment for AUEW construction section riggers and erectors’, while 57 construction workers were locked out by management (see Socialist Worker, 25 March 1972). And there, in a nutshell, you have the basic contradiction in CP – and therefore LCDTU industrial policy.
The strategy of working for the return of ‘left’ officials and executive members is not, of course, wrong in itself. It is an essential part of the struggle against the Right. But only a part, and not the most vital part. Without a militant rank-and-file movement, politically directed on class struggle lines, no amount of electoral victories can produce real left-wing leaderships. Unless the ‘Lefts’ are part of a movement, which will ruthlessly break with them if they default, and are under constant pressure from that movement, they will inevitably be absorbed.
The LCDTU is the nearest thing to a rank-and-file movement the CP has developed for decades. But no man – and no organisation – can serve two masters. And in the CP’s scheme of things, the LCDTU is subordinated to the policy of wooing whatever ‘Lefts’ are currently willing to make the right noises, irrespective of what they actually do. The price of that policy is the castration of the LCDTU as a campaigning, fighting organisation. It may yet have a future, of sorts, as an electoral auxiliary, demonstrating the CP’s influence. It has no future as an organising centre for politically conscious trade-union militants who are looking for a way forward.
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