The Labour Party’s States of Emergency – Class War Against Labour?

Towards a Siege Mentality? Crisis, Authoritarianism, and Emergency Powers in the Long Twentieth Century

Virtual workshop, 22-23 September 2023

The Labour Party’s States of Emergency – Class War Against Labour?

Bill Bowring, Birkbeck College

Outline

1. There will be a General Election in the UK not later than the end of 2024. On present polling, the Labour Party. led by Sir Keir Starmer, will win, inheriting the wreckage of 13 years of Tory Party rule and austerity, and of course the disaster of Brexit.
2. On 12 September 2023 Labour’s Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner, a proud working class woman, addressed the annual Trades Union Congress,  which has more than 5.5 million working people in 48 member unions, and said: “I come here with one message today. That the next Labour Government will build an economy that works for working people. With a New Deal for Working People. And Labour will start by bringing forward an Employment Rights Bill to legislate for this. Within the first 100 days of entering office. That’s a cast-iron commitment.” At present there is no Right to Strike in Britain, and to go on strike legally requires onerous procedures.

What is the Labour Party?

• The Labour Party is completely different from continental European social democratic parties, in that it was created by and for the trade unions. In most European countries, trade unions were organised by left wing political parties, for example the CFDT and CGT in France, CGIL in Italy.
• The Trade Union Congress, TUC, was founded in 1868, when a group of trade unionists from all over the UK came to Manchester, and held the first meeting of the TUC.
• In 1899, a Railway Union member proposed in his union branch that the TUC call a special conference to bring together all left-wing organisations and form them into a single body that would sponsor Parliamentary candidates. The proposed conference was held in London on 26 and 27 February 1900. The meeting was attended by 129 delegates, a broad spectrum of working-class and left-wing organisations—the trades unions present represented almost half of the membership of the TUC.
• The delegates passed a motion by Keir Hardie to establish “a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour.”
• This created an association called the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), meant to co-ordinate attempts to support MPs sponsored by trade unions and represent the working-class population.
• Support for the LRC was boosted by the 1901 Taff Vale Case, a dispute between strikers and a railway company that ended with the union being ordered to pay £23,000 damages for a strike. The judgement effectively made strikes illegal, since employers could recoup the cost of lost business from the unions.
• In the 1906 general election, the LRC won 29 seats. In their first meeting after the election, on 15 February 1906, the group’s members of Parliament decided to adopt the name “The Labour Party” formally.
• Many Labour MPs are sponsored by trade unions, and a significant part of Labour’s income comes from the trade unions. 11 trade unions are affiliated to the Labour Party.
• At the Party Conference half a million Party members are represented by Constituency Labour Party delegates, and millions of working people are represented by Trade Union delegates. Currently, affiliated trade unions hold 50% of the votes at the conference, down from 80% in the period before Tony Blair. Some 40% of the votes are held by the three largest affiliated trade unions (Unite, 1.4 million members; Unison, 1.3 million; GMB, 580,000)
• I insist therefore that the Labour Party was founded by the trade unions, and belongs to the trade unions.

States of emergency in Britain

1. In the UK, only the Sovereign has the power to introduce emergency regulations in case of an emergency, broadly defined as war or attack by a foreign power, terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the UK, or events which threaten serious damage to human welfare or the environment of a place in the UK.
2. The Sovereign, now the ill-named Charles III, always and only acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. The duration of these regulations is limited to thirty days, but may be extended by Parliament.
3. A state of emergency was last invoked in 1974 by then Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath in response to a wave of strike action.

What is Labour’s record in power?

1. Contrary to the intention of its founders, Labour in power has instigated States of Emergency against workers in struggle.
2. In the long 20^th century there were only four declarations of a state of emergency, in the dock strike of 1948 and 1949 (by the Labour government), during the 1955 rail strike (by the Tories), and in the 1966 seamen’s strike (by Labour).

1945 – the Labour government of Clement Attlee

1. On 5 July 1945, just two months after Victory in Europe day, to the astonishment and chagrin of Winston Churchill, the Labour Party led by Clement Attlee won a landslide victory in the General Election, with 393 seats to the Tories’ 197, an increase of 239 from the previous election in 1935. 
2. Attlee is Sir Keir Starmer’s role model.
3. (Collins) No period in the Labour Party’s history ranks as highly in Labour left mythology as that of the post-war Labour government led by Clement Attlee from 1945 to 1951.
4. The election of a Labour government gave hope to many workers whose lives had been ravaged by the impact of a devastating war, and it is undeniable that the introduction of the National Health Service and the welfare state under his leadership were truly transformational to the lives of ordinary people for decades to come. Indeed, the Party proclaimed in its election manifesto that “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it.” 
5. Yet (Collins) it was a strange kind of socialism, which imposed a bloody partition on India, pursued colonial war in Malaya, and played a pivotal role in creating NATO. Indeed, Labour’s nationalisations of key sectors of Britain’s ailing post-war economy took place without any semblance of workers’ control. And when it came to industrial unrest, Attlee and his government proved yet again that Labour’s priority was maintaining social order and capitalism in Britain, and sided with the employers against working people. 
6. Recent scholarship (Edgerton) has shown that Attlee’s government was far from socialist, but had in fact a nationalist programme and policy.
7. The Attlee government had declined to overturn Order 1305 – a ban on strike action introduced during the Second World War – upon coming to power. This meant that any industrial action taken under Attlee’s government was ‘unofficial,’ which made it far more difficult to conduct negotiations, but much easier for the government to use extraordinary means to put down strikes.
8. Within its very first week of existence, the Attlee government had already sent up to 4,000 troops to break up a strike by port workers at London’s Surrey Commercial Docks, who had been calling for a basic pay rise in one of the lowest paid industries.
9. Not long after, in September 1945, a strike broke out at the docks in Birkenhead. The minister for Labour refused to meet the strikers and the government proceeded to send 21,000 troops to break the strike.
10. These were not exceptional cases. Attlee’s government routinely employed troops to break strikes across various industries in the years that followed – totalling no fewer than eleven occasions by 1950 – and declared state of emergencies to deal with strikes in 1948 and 1949.
11. The Labour Government twice resorted to emergency powers proclamations after the Second World War. In both instances a dock strike was the cause of the declaration.

The 1948 Dock Strike.

• (Barram). By 25 June 1948, 19,622 men were on strike in London, and troops were brought in to unload perishable cargoes. On 28 June the strike spread to the Liverpool docks, so that more than 9,000 men were on strike there. At that point the Government sought to have a State of Emergency declared, and Attlee broadcast to the nation on that evening.
• On 28 June 1948, the first proclamation of emergency was issued. The dispute was not prolonged, and the proclamation was allowed to expire. No regulations were issued on this occasion.

The 1949 Dock Strike.

• (Cotter) On 11 July 1949, an emergency was again proclaimed. On this occasion a code of emergency regulations was promulgated. The emergency was declared at an end and the proclamation revoked on 29 July 1949.
• Broadcasting to the nation, Attlee spoke about the fact that the strike was unofficial, was affecting the UK’s needs for food and trade, and was taking place in spite of the availability of negotiating mechanisms. 
• The focus of the nineteen regulations submitted to Parliament by the Labour Government on 11 July 1949, was the flow of material to and from the docks. The Minister of Transport was empowered to appoint an “emergency Committee” which, subject to general or special instructions from the Minister, had power to control the commercial port facilities of the nation.
• The regulations proscribed interference with stevedoring operations, trespassing on working or storage premises, “loitering in the vicinity of any premises used or appropriated for the purposes of essential services,” and the inducement of His Majesty’s military or police forces to withhold their services.
• The prohibition of “loitering” would appear to have been a ban on picketing, although the Emergency Powers Act exempted peaceful persuasion to strike from curtailment by emergency regulation.

Harold Wilson and the 1966 seamen’s strike

• A downturn in the economy and a series of scandals in the early 1960s (the most notorious being the Profumo affair) had by 1963 engulfed the Tory government, in power since Labour’s defeat in 1951.
• The Labour Party returned to government with a 4-seat majority under Harold Wilson in the 1964 general election, but increased its majority to 96 in the 1966 general election, held on 13 March 1966. The 1966 election was my first experience, aged 16, of campaigning, and I have been a member of the Labour Party, with an excursion through Trotskyism from 1969 to 1973, ever since. 
• (Tyler p.18). A seven-week strike by the National Union of Seamen (NUS) began on 16 May 1966, just a few months after the election. It demonstrated both the fragility of government attempts to control incomes, and the growing frustration of Wilson with what he saw as politically motivated attempts to damage his government.
• The NUS was demanding that their 56-hour week is reduced to 40 hours.
• The Minister of Labour Ray Gunter acknowledged that conditions and regulations governing the seamen needed to be modernised, but said the pay demands could not be satisfied because the resulting amount of overtime pay would go counter to the prices and incomes policy that aims to reduce inflation by limiting wage rises to 3.5%.
• As Cabinet conclusions from 19 May 1966 record, it was feared that concessions to the NUS would lead to the country suffering, “both the industrial dislocation of the strike itself and the grave economic consequences of concessions on pay which would totally undermine the Government’s Policy on prices and incomes”‘.
• On 23 May 1966 a State of Emergency was declared. The emergency powers allowed the government to cap food prices, and allowed the Royal Navy to take control and clear the ports and lift restrictions on driving vehicles to allow for the free movement of goods.
• On 28 May 1966, Harold Wilson said that Communists were using the seamen’s strike to gain influence over the NUS. He said they were “endangering the security of the industry and the economic welfare of the nation”.
• The following day the seamen decided to return to work, partly due to his comments and partly thanks to a pay compromise reached with ship owners.
• On 20 June 1966, Wilson launched an attack on what he saw as the militant elements within the union, famously referring to ‘a tightly knit group of politically motivated men’.

Conclusion

• The last two years have witnessed a wave of strikes, called by several trade unions, including my own (UCU, University and College Union), and the Royal College of Nursing, which had initiated no strike action for 100 years. Doctors and Consultants, teachers, and many others are on strike. The two largest unions, Unite and Unison, with nearly 3 million members between them, are now led by remarkable women, and have put Labour on notice that their financial support is dependent on Party support.
• However,  Sir Keir Starmer told TV’s Sky News on 15 August 2022 that “you can’t sit around the cabinet table and then go to a picket line” in some of his most direct criticism of his own MPs defying party orders by appearing at strikes recently. Asked if there are any circumstances where he would stand on a picket line, Sir Keir said: “No”.
• Starmer has no background in trade unions (unlike his Deputy, Angela Rayner), and indeed was chief Prosecutor, Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. His TV appearances show him against a background of Union Jacks, and he is a firm monarchist and nationalist.
• With Labour governments having called two out of three States of Emergency in the long 20^th century, what is the likelihood that under a new Labour Government there will once again States of emergency and the use of the armed forces against workers?

References

Anderson, Ben. (2021). “Scenes of emergency: Dis/re-assembling the promise of the UK emergency state.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(7), 1356–1374.

Collins, Jodie (2022) “ Keir Starmer’s Betrayal of Workers is Nothing New for Labour. Since its beginnings, Labour has been no friend to workers.” Novara Media at https://novaramedia.com/2022/08/05/keir-starmers-betrayal-of-workers-is-nothing-new-for-labour/

Campsie, Alex (2017) “Populism and grassroots politics: ‘New Left’ critiques of social democracy, 1968-1994” Renewal : a Journal of Social Democracy; Vol. 25, Iss. 1,  62-75.

Cotter, Cornelius P. (1953) “Constitutionalizing Emergency Powers: The British Experience,” Stanford Law Review 5, no. 3 (April 1953): 382-417

Edgerton, David (2005) Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 Cambridge University Press

Edgerton, David (2019) The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History Penguin

Fielding, Stephen (2014) “The Wilson government: a roller-coaster reputation” British Politics Review Volume 9 | No. 3 | pages 2-5

Harrod, Roy (1966). “Recent Events in the British Economy”. Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 97, 233–250.

Klieman, Aaron (1978) “Emergency powers and liberal democracy in Britain,” The Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 16:2, 190-211

Minkin, Lewis. (1974). “The British Labour Party and the Trade Unions: Crisis and Compact.” ILR Review, 28(1), 7–37.

Neocleous, Mark. (2006). “The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to “Permanent Emergency.” Alternatives, 31(2), 191–213. And at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241643145_The_Problem_with_Normality_Taking_Exception_to_Permanent_Emergency

Neocleous, Mark (2007) “From Martial Law to the War on Terror”  New Criminal Law Review 10 (4): 489–513.

Roberts, L. (2015). Strikers with Poems. In: Lang, A., Smith, D.N. (eds) Modernist Legacies. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Rubinstein, David (2000) “A New Look at New Labour” Politics Volume20, Issue3 Pages 161-167

Sandbrook, Dominic. State of Emergency: the way we were: Britain, 1970-1974. Penguin UK, 2011.

Statewatch News online: “The origins of Emergency Powers Acts in the UK” 28 March 2012 at

https://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/june/statewatch-news-online-the-origins-of-emergency-powers-acts-in-the-uk/

Thompson, E. P. (1979). The secret state. Race & Class, 20(3), 219–242.

Thorpe, Keir, (2001) “The ‘Juggernaut Method’: The 1966 State of Emergency and the Wilson Government’s Response to the Seamen’s Strike”, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 12, Issue 4, Pages 461–485

Turnbull, Peter., Morris, J., & Sapsford, D. (1996). “Persistent Militants and Quiescent Comrades: Intra-Industry Strike Activity on the Docks”, 1947–89. The Sociological Review, 44(4), 692–727.

Tyler,  Richard (2004) Thesis “’Victims of our history’, the Labour Party and In Place of Strife, 1968 to 1969” at https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/1853/TYLERVictimsOf2004.pdf