IT'S OFFICIAL: LABOUR ARE THE REAL CONSERVATIVES!

“Labour are the real conservatives.” 

So says Sir Keir Starmer, making official what most of us already knew. 

The knight of the realm went on to elaborate: “Somebody has got to stand up for what makes this country great”, declaring his intention of making Labour “change its DNA”, in a project he described as “Clause 4 on steroids”. 

The latter refers to the infamous Tony Blair’s purge of socialist members and socialist aims from the Labour Party thirty years ago – scrapping the socialist Clause 4 Part 4, which pledged Labour “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” 

So Starmer’s ‘Clause 4 on steroids’ mission to make Labour ‘the real conservatives’ leaves little to the imagination. 

Beware of False Friends 

As growing hatred for Tory atrocities against working-class people obliterates over 1,000 of their council positions in England, and opinion polls speak of Scottish Labour winning seats off the SNP, working-class people desperate for change should beware of false Labour friends. 

There are some good and decent people in the ranks of Scottish Labour, trade unionists included. And the Scottish Socialist Party has a proven record of organising with them in common cause on picket lines, in building solidarity with strikers, in taking action against the profiteers, racists, fascists, and other human dross. But we have no illusions in Scottish Labour as a party of the working class. 

When Anas Sarwar made bogus claims about supporting workers’ rights, when he addressed the recent STUC Congress, he should have been called out for rank hypocrisy, given that for years he refused to even let USDAW recruit workers in his warehouse, let alone recognise the union for negotiations. Then he tried to disguise his track record by handing over his shares to his young children in a trust. It's no coincidence he did so after I and others in USDAW had called him out for his anti-trade union antics, when he was seeking the support of our union as deputy leader of Scottish Labour, with the unqualified support of USDAW’s dominant right-wing leadership. 

The truth is Scottish Labour have long since abandoned the working class and only make noises about supporting trade unionists in a cynical play to exploit workers’ votes, as the increasingly discredited SNP/Scottish Green government comes into collision with trade unionists. 

The hunger to dump the Tories is in danger of getting a New Tory PM

Starmer Abandons All Promises 

Under the centralised dictatorship of Keir Starmer, Labour has abandoned even the timid reforms they previously promised. As the giant energy companies rip billions of profits out of people in desperate fuel poverty, Starmer has abandoned Labour's previous policy of a public energy company - which in any case merely amounted to a state company competing with the existing profiteers, rather than the necessary full-blown public ownership of all forms of energy which the SSP advocates. 

Starmer’s Labour have likewise dropped the demand for nationalisation of Royal Mail and done a complete U-turn on abolition of student tuition fees down South, which had been a policy that mobilised tens of thousands of young people behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. 

Blair's landslide election in 1997 left Tory laws and inequality intact

Labour Denies Democratic Rights 

The ‘Starmtroopers’ - as Sir Keir’s disciples rather stupidly and distastefully decided to label themselves - are not even democrats, let alone socialists. 

They point blank refuse even the right to a referendum vote on Scottish independence, with the same devotion to (literally and politically) wrapping themselves in the blood-stained flag of British imperialism - the Union Jack - as the Tories. 

When the vicious anti-protest Public Order Bill of Rishi Sunak was rammed through parliament on the eve of the coronation and used to arrest peaceful protesters calling for a republic on the day of parading a parasite king around in a gold, bejewelled carriage costing millions to public funds, Labour's leadership refused to pledge that they would repeal this anti-democratic legislation. 

The pathetic excuse given by Labour's Foreign Affairs spokesperson, David Lammy was “It would take up too much parliamentary time. Labour can’t come into office picking through all the Conservative legislation and repealing it.” 

What contemptible scorn that shows towards people's civil rights. And what an alarming signpost towards what a Labour government will do with the most repressive anti-union laws in the western world. 

History of Betraying Workers 

When it comes to anti-trade union legislation, Labour seems to have cooled off even on its very specific, limited earlier pledge to scrap the Tories’ brutal Minimum Services Level Bill. This threatens workers with the sack if they refuse to go to work on strike days, despite their union having cleared all the high hurdles required to carry out a legal ballot for industrial action. 

However, these unforgivable stances by ‘modern’ Labour are no accident or aberration. They are merely the modern manifestation of a long, inglorious history of pro-capitalist Labour leaders siding with the employers’ class against workers - deploying the full force of the law, and more, going back decades. 

During recent ambulance workers’ strikes, Labour MP Stephen Kinnock publicly supported the Tories’ use of the army to break these frontline workers’ action in pursuit of decent pay. He's the son of the ermined Lord Neil Kinnock, who refused to support the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5, despite representing a South Wales mining community, and then joined the chorus of denunciation of those heroic workers in the latter stages of their desperate fight for survival. 

Labour Kept Tory Anti-Union Laws 

Throughout the 13 years of Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010) they steadfastly refused to repeal the vicious battery of anti-worker, anti-union laws imposed by Thatcher’s Tories in the aftermath of the miners being defeated. The only real exception to that was that they lifted the ban on trade union membership at the GCHQ spy centre… but that was only conceded on condition of a strict no-strike clause. 

During the mid-1990s, when council workers in the Labour-led Glasgow City Council were driven to take strike action, Labour council leader Frank McAveetey threatened to jail the rank-and-file union leadership, courtesy of the Tory anti-union laws. 

Blair converted Labour into a nakedly, proudly capitalist party by scrapping the socialist aims encapsulated in Clause 4 part 4 - “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” - by neutering the influence of trade unions over party decision-making, and by shutting down Labour Party democracy to prevent socialists within its ranks winning any influence, nationally or locally. 

He achieved his openly stated mission by converting Labour into the equivalent of the American Democrat Party; another capitalist institution, which certainly exploits and abuses workers’ votes, but doesn't even pretend to be a workers’ party, let alone a socialist one. 

1945 Labour government used troops against dockers 5 days after being elected  

Serialised Use of Strike-breaking Troops 

However, even so-called Old Labour, which preceded Blair’s New Tories, has a history stained by the use of anti-union laws and even the deployment of troops, to break the will of workers in struggle. 

A few random examples suffice to show that whilst up until about 30 years ago Labour could be defined as a mass workers’ party with a primarily pro-capitalist leadership, that meant they refused to challenge the capitalist class and frequently sided with the exploiters against the workers whose votes they relied upon. 

It was a Labour government which is 1977-8 deployed troops against striking firefighters, earning the derision of working-class people when the army's Green Goddesses often had to be push-started, such was their state of dereliction, as they feebly tried to respond to fires.

The 1964-70 Labour government of Harold Wilson drafted “In Place of Strife”, a package of anti-union laws lifted straight from the Tories’ playbook, which was only halted by the ferocious opposition of the organised trade union movement, driven from the bottom upwards. 

Labour government used troops against firefighters' strikes

Concession and Repression 

Even the frequently lauded post-war Attlee Labour government of 1945-51 has a chequered record. It's true that under the mass pressure of demands for radical change and the fear of revolution that swept Europe, they carried out the most radical reforms in the history of Labour in power - creating the NHS, welfare state, and building tens of thousands of council houses. 

Alongside that they nationalised a series of collapsing industries, such as coal mining, railways, gas, and electricity. 

But the same Labour government sent troops in against striking dockers five days after being elected – and again used 21,000 troops to break dockers’ strikes in the autumn of 1945. On 14 different occasions, between July 1945 and October 1951, the Labour government sent troops in against strikers, including dockers, gas workers, and lorry drivers at Smithfield meat market. 

Those examples could be greatly added to but suffice to show that any party which accepts the continued rule of the capitalist class, and refuses to mobilise workers for socialist change, will frequently side with the sworn enemy of working people and utilise the same anti-democratic, anti-worker, anti-trade union laws that the open enemies of the working class in the form of the Tories readily use. 

Indeed, that also applies to the SNP, who recently declared their intention to use the army to break a firefighters’ strike, after the sweeping majority vote for industrial action was announced by the FBU.

Whilst SNP threaten use of army to break firefighters' strike, SSP stand with workers

Build a Working-Class Socialist Party 

Workers need a genuine workers’ party. Socialists need to be organised in a socialist party. 

The Labour Party does not qualify for either definition. Their historic track record, their readiness to do deals with Tories, and their abandonment of even the mildest reform policies make them unfit for the loyalty and votes of the working class. 

Individual socialists in Scottish Labour are nothing short of political prisoners. They should be released and offered a home in the SSP, which genuinely stands up for the historic socialist aims of full trade union and civil rights; democratic public ownership with workers’ control; and a socialist democracy where the fabulous wealth of the nation is used in a Socialist Green New Deal that could reverse the capitalist onslaught on jobs, incomes, public services, and the health of the planet we live on. 

No trust in Starmer’s and Sarwar’s New Tories! 

Join the SSP and help build a genuine working-class socialist party!

https://membership.scottishsocialistparty.org/join_us/

UCS: STILL AN INSPIRATION, 50 YEARS ON

UCS WORK-IN BANNER 

On a hot 30 July 1971, the shop stewards in Clydebank’s John Brown shipyard took control of the yard gates as the historic UCS work-in began. 

Jimmy Reid declared to the mass meeting inside: “There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying, because the world is watching us.”

Thus began one of the most momentous showdowns by working people since the 1926 general strike.

UCS had been formed in 1968, comprising the yards in Govan, Linthouse, Scotstoun and Clydebank. The naked greed of shipbuilding dynasties had meant a refusal to invest and modernise, causing Britain's world share of shipbuilding to plummet from 80% during WWI to 5% in 1970. Mergers and mass redundancies in the 1960s ran alongside increased productivity by the workers. The 1964-70 Labour government refused to nationalise the industry, instead merging the UCS yards, with a 17% government share. 

In 1969, the notorious Tory, Nicholas Ridley, held a one-hour meeting on the Clyde with his pal Sir Eric Yarrow, owner of Yarrow’s shipyard and Scottish Tory Party treasurer. ‘Old Nick’ subsequently drafted his Ridley Memo: “We could appoint a government butcher to cut up UCS, hive off Yarrow’s and sell (cheaply) the remainder of UCS to private industry.” (December 1969)

Jimmy Reid addressing mass meeting 

Tory Spirit of Butchery 

Ted Heath’s 1970-74 Tory government proceeded in this spirit of butchery, consciously confronting workers and their rights, deliberately decimating industry and speeding up monopoly ownership of what remained. Tory Minister of Trade and Industry, John Davies, spelt it out with his infamous ‘lame ducks’ speech, declaring an end to state subsidies to industries in crisis, especially targeting Rolls Royce and UCS. 

In June 1971 the Tory government triggered the liquidation of UCS by refusing management’s modest demand for £6million to sustain it. They instead conceded £3million to keep UCS afloat until August, whilst conducting a bogus review by ‘The Four Wise Men’, comprising mostly merchant bankers. Their subsequent Report smeared shipyard workers and recommended the slaughter of 6,500 of the 8,500 jobs, with closure of Clydebank and Scotstoun, only keeping Govan and Linthouse on the basis of decimated conditions and halving of the workforce. 

The baying mob of Tory MPs who cheered these announcements badly underestimated the response of the UCS workers and hundreds of thousands who came to their side in a 14-month battle that engulfed society in Scotland and beyond. 

50,000 march in Glasgow on 23 June 1971 

Work-In, not Walk-Out 

In June 1971, the Union shop stewards from the four yards decided that instead of walking out to the Labour Exchanges (JobCentres) or being declared redundant they would occupy the yards and continue production of ships; a work-in. Their opening demands were “Not a man down the road - the right to work - not a yard will close.”

They sent delegations to the government, only to be ‘slung a deafie’. The fight was on. They called a West of Scotland conference of shop stewards, 800 strong, which announced a general strike and demonstration on 23 June. About 150,000 took solidarity strike action and 50,000 marched through Glasgow. Placards carried slogans like ‘Launch UCS - Sink Heath’ and ‘Nationalise not Paralyse - we shall not be moved’. The STUC at first called for nationalisation of the yards. 

When on 29 July the government tried to ride this storm and announced 6,500 job losses - with at least another 15-30,000 associated jobs to go - the working class of Scotland and beyond were inspired by the act of mass, militant defiance by the UCS workers. 

A conference of 1,200 shop stewards from Scotland and the North of England agreed financial support to sustain the work-in, and called a mass half-day strike and demo on 18 August. About 200,000 workers marched out of Scottish workplaces and joined the demo of 80-100,000 in George Square, the biggest since at least the days of Red Clydeside; some reckoned the largest since the Chartist movement of the 1840s. The themes of the right to work and the power of the working class in solidarity were combined with calls to kick out the Tory government. Industrial and political demands fused. 

John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave donation and solidarity

One of many Support Concerts 

Unprecedented Solidarity 

The UCS workers’ courageous defiance evoked unprecedented solidarity. Workplace collections and weekly levies came from across Scotland, Britain and as far afield as New Zealand. Combined with the 50p a week levy on the UCS workers themselves, this financial solidarity sustained the wages of the work-in and the campaigning costs. School students held jumble sales. Pensioners donated. A cleaner in Yorkshire sent a week's wages every month. 

Workers’ heads were raised because a group of trade unionists defied every law, every conservative norm, and waged the battle for the right to work from the stronghold of staying inside their own workplace. The occupied yards were their fortresses, with buses between the yards for mass meetings; a Coordinating Committee and several sub-committees, including ones for finance and publicity, and speaking tours of workplaces that trained hordes of orators. 

Even the middle layers of society were drawn to this mass workers’ movement, with virtually every local shopkeeper publicising the UCS struggle, and donations famously from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. 

Such was the ferment that Sir David MacNee, Glasgow's chief constable, phoned a Cabinet meeting to warn the government that the police couldn’t guarantee order in the city if the yards were closed. The government postponed the closure announcement by two weeks to allow them to bring troops back from Northern Ireland! 

General strikes developed against 1970s anti-union laws

Monumental Government U-turn

In the subsequent months the government tried manoeuvres to divide and conquer, especially by declaring a new Govan Shipbuilding Ltd, initially only embracing Govan and Linthouse. 

Eventually, by February 1972, they were forced into a monumental retreat. In contrast to their refusal to cough up £6million the previous June, the same John Davies told the House of Commons on 28 February 1972 that the Tory government would hand over £30million to Govan Shipbuilders Ltd, which would now also include the Scotstoun yard, and look favourably on subsidies to the impending buyer of Clydebank - the USA oil-rig giant, Marathon Manufacturing.

Months of negotiations did involve very substantial concessions by the unions, with loss of jobs and severe sacrifices of conditions, but the four yards remained and about 6,500 of the 8,500 jobs were saved. This was a massive victory compared to the wholesale butchery that any meek-and-mild response from their unions would have guaranteed. 

Perhaps the biggest significance of the UCS work-in was on the wider working class and political developments. It was part of a rising tide of industrial action engulfing the Heath government, but added impetus and confidence to it. A major factor in the February 1972 government U-turn on UCS was their bloody-nosed defeat just days prior by the miners, in their first national strike since 1926, which included the NUM's mass picket attracting 15,000 workers, which shut down the Saltley coke depot, near Birmingham. 

One of UCS worker Bobby Starrett's cartoons, a vital part of the publicity  

Wave of Workplace Occupations 

The UCS work-in inspired a wave of workplace occupations; one every fortnight at its peak! 

Many won unconditional victories, and mostly involved the even more radical tactic of sit-in strikes, rather than the continued production of the UCS work-in tactic. At Plessey’s in the Vale of Leven, the victorious sit-in included workers’ barricades!

The issue of a general strike was never far below the surface, particularly in the first half of 1972. This period included the government’s panic-stricken release of five jailed dockers' leaders from London's Pentonville prison - in the face of general strike action, organised from below despite the hesitancy of national union leaderships and the TUC. 

Young people were touched by the daring militancy of UCS, with school students staging strikes and demonstrations in the summer of 1972, over school conditions and job prospects.  

Ultimately, in a further showdown with the miners and an emboldened working class, Heath’s government was booted out in February 1974, and the incoming Labour government was obliged to nationalise at least most of the shipyards.  

Marching for the right to work 

Tony Benn amongst the marchers - driven to the left by UCS 

Mass Defiance Can Win 

The limitations of a work-in with continued production of ships – as compared with an occupation and strike - could be the subject of a whole separate article. This issue came to a head in January 1972, when the UCS Coordinating Committee reversed their earlier stance and agreed to launch one of the newly built ships (at the Govan yard) as ‘an act of good faith’, rather than a full-blown showdown with the government which had been their policy up until then. How many more jobs could have been saved and conditions protected if they had stuck to their original policy, combined with the battle for nationalisation of the yards, will never be known for certain. 

What was known at the time - by tens of thousands of working people - is that the mass defiance of occupying the yards built unprecedented workers’ unity and solidarity and forced a humiliating U-turn on a Tory government just as vicious in its desire to butcher jobs and conditions as the current Boris Johnson cabal. 

Over and beyond that, UCS demonstrated workers’ control in practice, and the managerial skills of working-class people - a glimpse of a socialist future where capitalist owners and their enforcers, in the form of senior management, would be redundant. 

Mass meeting in the occupied yards 

Lessons 50 Years On 

50 years on, as we exit the period of COVID-19 lockdowns, workers are confronted by closures, mass redundancies and systematic attacks on workplace rights, including the new capitalist pandemic of Fire and Rehire. Amongst the many lessons from UCS that need to be applied is that pleading with the bosses and their governments guarantees defeat for workers and their communities, whereas methods of mass collective struggle that brush aside the whole machinery of anti-trade union legislation can win victories. 

The brutal determination by Pladis multinational to close the McVitie's factory is a classic current example of where the methods of the UCS workforce would be required to reverse the butchery of jobs and livelihoods. 

As part of the crazed drive for short-term profiteering - through the conscious destruction of industry and the financialization of the economy - in the decades since UCS, the shipyards on the Clyde are barely a shadow of their former selves, and heavily dependent on production orders for war, rather than socially useful production. 

Socialism or Barbarism - a real and harsh choice today 

Socialism or Barbarism 

50 years on, the climate catastrophe and the capitalist economic crisis highlighted and exacerbated by COVID-19, both scream out for a green re-industrialisation of Scotland; a Socialist Green Recovery plan, embracing the skills and equipment of what remains of the shipyards. For example, to build the desperately needed fleet of ferries, and marine engineering equipment for the production of clean, green, affordable energy.

Everyone talks these days about ‘recovery’. But perhaps the most central recovery required is the working-class solidarity and fighting spirit epitomised by the UCS workers and their hundreds of thousands of allies 50 years ago. Without such a revival of collective action by organised workers and the solidarity which that would undoubtedly evoke, the capitalists and their hired governments will continue to wreak havoc and destruction on jobs, living standards, democratic rights and the very planet we live on. 

Socialism or barbarism is not empty rhetoric, but indeed the stark choice we face. And the lessons of UCS need to be studied and absorbed to help re-arm new generations of fighters, to make socialism the chosen future.