What about the workers?: The Conservative Party and the organised working class in British politics

By Andrew Taylor

The relationship between the Conservative Party and the organised working class is fundamental to the making of modern British politics. The organised working class, though always a minority, was perceived by Conservatives as a challenge and many union members dismissed the Conservatives as the bosses’ party.
Why, throughout its history, was the Conservative Party seemingly accommodating towards the organised working class that it ideology would seem to permit? And why, in the space of a relatively few years in the 1970s and 1980s, did it abandon this heritage? For much of its history party leaders calculated they had more to gain from inclusion but during the 1980s Conservative governments marginalised the organised working class to a degree that not so very long ago would have been thought inconceivable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526103635

Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is the author of a number of crime novels, including the ground-breaking Roth Trilogy, which was adapted into the acclaimed drama Fallen Angel, and the historical crime novels The Ashes of London, The Silent Boy, and The American Boy, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and a 2005 Richard & Judy Book Club Choice. He has won many awards, including the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award (the only author to win it three times) and the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger.

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What about the workers?

Series editor

Richard Hayton

The study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly interest and importance, and is also of great significance beyond the academy. In spite of this, for a variety of reasons the study of conservatism and conservative politics was traditionally regarded as something of a poor relation in comparison to the intellectual interest in ‘the Left’. In the British context this changed with the emergence of Thatcherism, which prompted a greater critical focus on the Conservative Party and its ideology, and a revitalisation of Conservative historiography. New Perspectives on the Right aims to build on this legacy by establishing a series identity for work in this field. It will publish the best and most innovative titles drawn from the fields of sociology, history, cultural studies and political science and hopes to stimulate debate and interest across disciplinary boundaries. New Perspectives is not limited in its historical coverage or geographical scope, but is united by its concern to critically interrogate and better understand the history, development, intellectual basis and impact of the Right. Nor is the series restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage original research from a plurality of perspectives. Consequently, the series will act as a voice and forum for work by scholars engaging with the politics of the Right in new and imaginative ways.

Reconstructing conservatism? The Conservative Party in opposition, 1997–2010 Richard Hayton

Conservative orators: From Baldwin to Cameron Edited by Richard Hayton and Andrew S. Crines

The right and the recession Edward Ashbee

The territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales Alan Convery

David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation? Edited by Gillian Peele and John Francis

Rethinking right-wing women: Gender and the Conservative Party, 1880s to the present Edited by Clarisse Berthezène and Julie Gottlieb

English nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere: Wider still and wider Ben Wellings

Cameron: The politics of modernisation and manipulation Timothy Heppell

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR): Politics, parties and policies Martin Steven

What about the workers?

The Conservative Party and the organised working class in British politics

Andrew Taylor

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2021

The right of Andrew Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 5261 0360 4 hardback

First published 2021

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COVER IMAGE: Victor Maddern as Knowles from the Boulting Brothers’ film, I’m All Right Jack (1959). Courtesy of Studio Canal.

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They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,

Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords,

They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;

They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,

Their doors are shut in the evenings; and they know no songs.

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,

Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,

Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Secret People’ (1907)

Contents

List of tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1A strong taste for the despotism of numbers?

2Peace and good will?

3We shall get their help

4War, conservatism and union power

5Milk and water socialism?

6The smack of firm government?

7Confronting the British disease?

8The enemy within

Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Tables

5.1Conservative Party trade union organisation and membership, 1952

5.2The Low Committee’s survey of 1961

8.1‘Trade unions have too much power in Britain today’

8.2Support for Conservative trade union reforms

8.3Sectoral changes in employment, 1980–90 (000s)

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in writing. I would like to thank Richard Hayton as series editor of ‘New Perspectives on the Right’ for including the book in the series and to the editors at Manchester University Press, especially Robert Byron, who shepherded the book to final publication. I would also like to thank all those many people who gave up their time to talk to me; there are too many debts to acknowledge individually but I would like to single out the late Michael Fraser (Baron Fraser of Kilmorack), the late Robert Carr (Baron Carr of Hadley) and the late Peter Thorneycroft (Baron Thorneycroft of Dunstan), who generously shared with me at great length their memories and recollections and so added much of value to the book. My colleagues in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield provided a congenial intellectual and working environment, and as the book draws on a wide range of academic and other literature covering a long period of time the University Library was crucial in facilitating the research.

I would like to thank the following for permission to cite and quote from material in their possession: Dr Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist at the Parliamentary Archives, for permission to quote from the political and private papers of John Colin Campbell Davidson MP, First Viscount Davidson and the private papers of Andrew Bonar Law; Liz Bregazzi, County Archivist, for permission to quote from the diary of Cuthbert Headlam MP in the Durham County Record Office; Sam Lindley, of the Special Collections Reading Room, to quote from the papers of Frederick James Marquis, First Earl of Woolton in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Howard Davies, Information Policy Manager at the National Archives, Kew, for permission to quote from Crown copyright papers under the Open Government Licence; Professor Seamus Perry, Fellow Librarian, to quote from the papers of Walter Turner Monckton, First Viscount Monckton of Brenchley held at Balliol College, Oxford; Chris Collins of the Thatcher Archive Trust and Andrew Riley for permission to quote from the Thatcher Papers held by the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. Finally, I would like to thank Harry Methley, of the Conservative Campaign HQ, and Jeremy McIlwaine, of the Bodleian Library, for permission to use and quote from the Conservative Party Archives at Oxford.

My wife, Georgina, was a tower of strength in completing this book, not least by helping me through the illness that delayed the book’s completion and by providing a critical, but always constructive, commentary. Last, but certainly not least, our daughter, Kay, provided all the necessary diversions that make life (even life in a contemporary British university) so fulfilling.

Introduction

There was a time when, odd though it may seem today, British politics was focussed on the needs and desires of the working class. Post-war Britain saw the emergence of not just the welfare state but also a determination by politicians of all parties never to return to the mass unemployment of the 1930s. Both of these developments were implemented in the name of the working class. A form of corporatism was adopted by both Conservative and Labour governments so that working class interests were represented politically and the ‘forward march of labour’ was consolidated as part of the ‘long revolution’. (Evans and Tilley 2017, 1)

This book explores one notable aspect of this lost era, the relationship between the proportion of the working class that joined trade unions (the organised working class) with the Conservative Party – the party that dominated twentieth-century British government and politics. The organised working class, though always a minority of the working class, was perceived by most Conservatives as a significant challenge, even a threat, to the economic and political order. Unions were condemned as threatening property rights and as harbingers of class conflict, confiscatory democracy and ultimately socialism; historically many union members dismissed the Conservative Party as the bosses’ party, ever-ready to inflict retribution on the unions and their members in the interests of profits. The threat posed by the unions went beyond their numbers and resided in their class nature, and the unions’ organisation of the working class constituted the characteristic feature of a new social, economic and political order: industrial capitalism (Hobsbawm 1975, 13).

This was, as figures as different as Karl Marx and Lord Salisbury (the Conservative leader between 1881 and 1902 and three-time prime minister) insisted, a wholly new form of politics – class politics – driven by the industrial working class. Although this new class’s lack of revolutionary consciousness proved a disappointment to Marx and a relief to Salisbury, the working class was nonetheless critical to the transformation of politics particularly when it was organised into trade unions. ‘Trade Unions’, Marx wrote,

work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the current system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (Marx 1970 [1875], 226)

For Conservatives Marx’s description of the unions’ limited role of fighting ‘a guerrilla war’ was quite bad enough and dealing with this became fundamental to defining Conservative politics. This working class, or more correctly a part of it, adapted many existing strategies as well as developing new forms of collective action (Stedman Jones 1983), notably the trade union and the strike, as well as a new language and vocabulary of politics stressing occupational solidarity (Briggs 1960, 43–77). These institutions and language were central to a new ‘cycle of contention’ (Tarrow 2011) and trade unions were at the centre of a contentious politics (Tilly 2008; Tilly and Tarrow 2007) characteristic of industrial capitalism – a politics that hinged around conflict over control of the workplace and the distribution of the fruits of production.

A second important component of this contentious politics was the Conservative Party. Although widely (and correctly) seen as the party most hostile to democracy’s growth, most committed to maintaining the existing pattern of social and economic inequality, and most suspicious of the unions, the Conservative Party prospered mightily in this contentious politics, which its actions did much to mould. There exists a vast literature on working-class electoral behaviour and the Conservative Party (Waller 1994, 580–585) and to a considerable extent, as Evans and Tilley suggest, twentieth-century British politics was oriented around these two institutions, but only rarely have these two institutions been analysed together. Marquand suggests the working-class Conservative was seen by many as ‘somehow an aberration or an anachronism sliding inexorably toward the margin of history, not a robust, red-blooded creature, with as much sociological staying power as his Labour-voting, dues-paying party neighbour’ (Marquand 1991, 59). The classic texts of political sociology and electoral behaviour address the high point of class politics in twentieth-century Britain and despite their many intellectual differences they demonstrate significant commonalities: first, that trade union members were more likely to vote Labour than non-union voters; second, Conservative working-class supporters, whether union members or not, were much more likely to identify unions as too powerful and in need of legislative reform; and third, around 25–30 per cent of the organised working class voted Conservative. What these sources do not address (a partial exception is McKenzie and Silver 1968) is the broader relationship between the organised working class and the Conservative Party, Conservative governments and the trade unions (Butler and Stokes 1971; Goldthorpe et al. 1968; Jessop 1974; McKenzie and Silver 1968; Nordlinger 1967). A notable exception is the work of Peter Dorey (notably 1995 and 2009a). Anyone working in this field owes Dorey a debt so why write this book? Dorey’s work devotes most attention to the Conservative–trade union relationship after 1945, whereas my object is to place this relationship in a much longer historical context and consider the relationship as an aspect of mass democracy. Dorey’s approach tends to privilege 1945 but I see 1945 as not only the beginning of a new relationship but also the culmination of a series of contingencies. For example, I have a strong sense that if Bonar Law had not died and been replaced by Stanley Baldwin, then State–labour relations in Britain would have been very different, and if Chamberlain had avoided war, then the structure of politics would have been very different. Rather than seeing Thatcherism as the end result of the failure of One Nation Conservatism, I prefer to see it as the latest phase in a long debate within Conservatism on the place (if any) of trade unions in politics (see Morgan 1992, 475 for a comparison of the 1920s and 1980s). Whereas Dorey tends to focus on the Conservative government–union relationship, I wanted to give greater attention to the understudied efforts of the party to create a Conservative labour organisation and the reasons for the repeated failure of these attempts. The party’s electoral record suggests strongly that these failures have not affected Conservatism’s ability to attract working-class and trade union votes, but the failure of these organisational efforts tells us much about the nature and contours of British governance. Early attempts to capture this approach is my chapter in Seldon and Ball’s, The Conservative Century (Taylor 1994, 499–543) and my article in the Labour History Review (1992, 21–28).

My approach has been influenced strongly by Keith Middlemas’s synoptic exploration of British politics, Politics in Industrial Society (1979) and his analysis of the post-war British state in his trilogy, Power, Competition and the State (1986a, 1990, 1991). In Politics in Industrial Society Middlemas aspired to write the new Bagehot, in order to lay bare the ‘efficient secret’ of state power and governance, and the secret of Britain’s avoidance of the domestic political turmoil of the twentieth century. He identified this efficient secret as ‘corporate bias’ (Middlemas 1979, 371–385); this, the core characteristic of the governing process, required ministers, employers and the unions (the governing institutions) to negotiate a continuous contract that was infused by a cult of equilibrium. As a result power shifted away from Parliament and parties to the executive, civil service and interest groups.

Corporate bias, defined as ‘governing institutions [sharing] some of the political power and attributes of the state [and] avid to admit representative bodies to its orbit rather than face a free-for-all with a host of individual claimants’ (Middlemas 1979, 20), was produced by the threat (and reality) of class politics and the need to promote harmony by encouraging collaboration between government, employers and the unions, which, in this case, led to a shift in the unions from being a concern to a governing institution, in return for limiting class conflict. Middlemas never defines the cult of equilibrium clearly but it is discussed extensively (see Middlemas 1979, 389–429) as both a description of behaviour and as a norm infusing the political and policy process, with an emphasis on the management of opinion and a closed and confidential policy process in which authority was grounded on consent. The cult of equilibrium grew as the scope of policy grew and previously ‘private’ activities (for example, wage bargaining) assumed a public guise and became politicised, so changing dramatically the way of doing politics and the content of policy. Middlemas is careful to describe corporate bias as only a tendency and, therefore, open to dramatic change. Corporate bias began under Lloyd George and the 1916 crisis of manpower and production and developed thereafter under the impact of the inter-war depression and the Second World War, reaching its apogee between 1951 and 1979.

Middlemas’s analysis has been heavily criticised. Rodney Lowe, focusing on his characterisation of the Ministry of Labour as the core manifestation of corporate bias, identified major errors of fact that, he argues, undermine the overall thesis (1980, 23–27). This is not the place to go into the detail of Lowe’s critique which focuses on the 1920s and 1930s rather than on the war and post-war era (see Lowe 1974, 1978) but he concludes that Middlemas’s emphasis on corporate bias is grossly exaggerated and that party and Parliament remained more important in policy-making than Middlemas allowed. Lowe argues that representation was never conceded on a scale that transformed, for example, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) into a governing institution but sufficient representation was granted that gave the TUC a privileged role, even if not as privileged as that of the employers. Whilst it is true that neither the Ministry, its ministers, nor its civil servants were as important as Middlemas claims Lowe shows the inter-war Ministry ‘did go through the process of consulting unions and employers and it did inject into Conservative Cabinets more knowledge and perhaps understanding of the trade union movement (but would not the strength of unions have ensured this anyway?)’ (1980, 25). Post-war politics suggests that Middlemas’s overall thesis has validity.

In a review of Politics in Industrial Society in the Labour History Review Michael Dintenfass takes issue with the idea of corporate bias (1980, 63–65). For corporate bias to carry the analytical weight required, Dintenfass argues, Middlemas has to show that the working class was radical to the point of being revolutionary, which, he argues, it was not, and so organised labour did not become a governing institution; thus corporate bias (if it existed) is simply a description of how politics was done in a complex industrial society. Again, Middlemas is accused of exaggeration, but we do not have to accept the thesis of the TUC as a governing institution or the working class as revolutionary in order to accept that the TUC was perceived as crucial to policy-making and that the organised working class posed a threat – a possibility that fuelled the unions’ integration into the policy process.

Politics in Industrial Society coincided with the election in 1979 of the Thatcher Government, which was determined to uproot a system many Conservatives believed responsible for national decline and the crises of the 1970s, as recognised in Power, Competition and the State. A major concern of this book is why Conservative attitudes and policy towards the unions shifted so dramatically in so short a time. The Conservative analysis sees the governance described by Middlemas as the result of paying Danegeld to the unions and the failure of political conviction by many Conservatives and employers, so corporate bias, governing institutions and the cult of equilibrium become synonyms for the management of national decline. Thus, the political methods that were deemed necessary for the country’s survival in 1940–41 and to fight a ‘people’s war’ dramatically reduced the country’s ability to adapt to a changing world (see, for example, Barnett 1986; Barnett 1995). Also relevant is Mancur Olson’s argument that post-war British governance facilitated the creation and institutionalisation of structural rigidities and constellations of vested interests that make it far harder for a political economy to adapt to changing world-market conditions (Olson 1982). Adaptation requires a major exogenous shock or endogenous action (usually the two go together) to break these structural and political rigidities, which is what happened in Britain after 1979 when a government was elected that was determined, in contrast to past behaviour, to address ‘the union problem’ as part of the wider ‘British disease’.

Before proceeding further I need to explain some concepts that are used throughout the book. First of all, I use governance, a popular if contested concept in academia, in two ways: first, to describe the relationship between the unions and the Conservative Party in government, and second, to describe the union movement’s internal political processes that determine policies and behaviour. Governance, then, refers to the interaction of actors in relation to collective problems via the creation and reproduction of rules, norms, policies and institutions. The way rules, norms, policies and institutions are developed, structured and regulated in the case of industrial relations through a process of largely private governance that had growing public effects (collective bargaining and industrial action) was progressively joined by processes emphasising public governance via a transformed legal environment, particularly after 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher. Second, voluntarism (see Currie 1979; Flanders 1974) is used to conceptualise and describe the unions’ collective attitude to the scope and extent of legal intervention and the external regulation of their internal affairs, and the conduct of collective bargaining and industrial relations. Essentially, voluntarism entailed minimising external regulation in favour of self-regulation and of unions and employers cooperating relatively free from state interference, and was based on the conviction that in the final analysis the judiciary and the state were fundamentally hostile to the unions. Voluntarism was structured by the State granting trade unions legal immunities – immunities that were fundamental to union power and which were of serious concern for many Conservatives. Third, One Nation Conservatism (Seawright 2010) is a style of politics intended to integrate the lowest social classes into conformist politics and so protect the status quo. The elite’s primary role and responsibility was reconciling potential and actual competing interests to the status quo by emphasising mutual interests and obligations and making necessary and judicious concessions in a timely manner. However, One Nation Conservatism could also be deployed to justify hostility to the unions, as in the 1926 General Strike and after 1979, when their behaviour was deemed to conflict with the national interest. One Nation requires, therefore, a pragmatic approach to politics and a high degree of policy flexibility that may require the party elite pursue policies that are deeply disliked by party activists. The fourth concept is governability, which goes wider than just ‘the ability to govern’ and implies a capacity to deliver legitimate rule, and that both effectiveness and legitimacy depend on more than electoral sanction. This is because democracy and plural politics, the consequence of social complexity, widened effectiveness and legitimacy far beyond just electing a government to include the conduct of government–society relations. Effective and legitimate rule came to rest on positive relations between government and society (in this case government-union relations) which implies that this interaction imposes restraints on what government can do, so the concept of governability segues into the idea that the ability of government to ensure their decisions are implemented depends on the consent of their social partners. So, governability refers, first, to the idea that government is made easier and more effective by engagement with societal interests and second, to the idea that engagement entails government’s dependence on these interests.

At the book’s core is a puzzle: why, throughout its history, was the Conservative Party seemingly more sympathetic and accommodating towards the organised working class than its ideology, social composition and the prejudices of its members would seem to allow? And why, in the space of a relatively few years, did it abandon this heritage? Part of the answer lies in the long-term political hegemony of One Nation Conservatism and the party’s articulation and re-articulation, according to different historical circumstances, of a narrative that claimed Conservatives had never endorsed laisser-faire or a capitalism red in tooth and claw. Related, though of more importance, was the Conservative Party’s history of electoral success and its penetration of (particularly) English society, a penetration that familiarised the party with working-class attitudes and the potentialities of class politics – organised in unions or not – a familiarity that persuaded many Conservatives that the working class constituted a manageable threat so encouraging a flexible and politically pragmatic Conservatism (see Ziblatt 2017 for this argument). Confident it could win office and prosper politically in a class society made Conservatism less overtly hostile towards the unions and more willing to accommodate them. This tolerance, however, did not rule out a hostile response when unions were considered to have stepped outside what was deemed legitimate politics (as happened in the 1920s and 1970s) neither did this rule out attempts to divide the working class to the party’s electoral advantage.

Probably a majority of Conservatives consistently regarded the unions as a significant threat and problem, but what is remarkable is how little influence this attitude had on the party’s policies and behaviour. Although Ziblatt’s thesis concerning Conservative penetration into society is persuasive, it also has limitations. One notable limitation is the party’s repeated failure to develop a sustainable organisational presence in the existing unions or create a Conservative union movement, such as exist in some West European countries. Although party leaders from Disraeli onwards opposed creating autonomous working-class organisations that sought to win working-class (organised or not) support for the Conservative cause, such organisations have periodically existed. However, the largest and most successful, the Primrose League, was most definitely neither purely working class nor autonomous as it was intended to be the physical embodiment of One Nation and cross-class integrative politics (Pugh 1985). Attempts to create a Conservative labour movement before, during and after 1914–18 were unsuccessful, as were subsequent attempts in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in the 1970s and 1980s. These efforts tended to occur in periods of industrial and political unrest when union behaviour was perceived as politically threatening and contrary to the ‘real’ interests of union members and the country. Once the immediate crisis was over these organisations faded, having had little substantive influence on the party and none on the unions (Parkinson 2020).

Each instance of Conservative labour organisation had broadly the same purposes: intelligence (what was the state of organised working-class opinion?), propaganda (the advocacy of Conservative nostrums to challenge socialism), persuasion (winning the votes of union members) and policy (informing party policy) and each failed for the same reasons. First, they failed to attract and develop a significant presence in the unions or the workplace; and second, the activist stratum was small and failed to overcome the social and political prejudices of the wider party membership or find a recognised place in the party’s organisation and power structure. Related was the reluctance of many employers to permit Conservative trade unionists any role that threatened to ‘politicise’ workplace industrial relations. At best these organisations had a transient political utility, enabling the party to argue it was not irredeemably hostile to the unions. The party leadership refused to grant these bodies any influence over policy (except where their preferences were those of the party leadership) and party leaders were sensitive to the party’s wider support for an increased role for the law in industrial relations and union governance. The relationship was stabilised by the labour organisation’s deference, its acceptance of the limits placed on it, and its approval of the party leadership’s refusal to amend the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act (1927). The unions constituted a profound concern for a party that denied the validity of class, but the party’s dislike of, or even hostility, towards the unions did not, of itself, offer an effective policy or political response. The fact of the unions’ existence, their strength and resilience, and the sway they held over broad sections of the working-class interacted powerfully with the party’s recognition that it could only protect the status quo if it was elected to government. Successive Conservative leaderships concluded it could not form a government unless it demonstrated a willingness to recognise organised labour as a legitimate component of British society and governed accordingly. What about the workers? therefore became, at times, the central question of Conservative politics.

The words and language that constitute the stories individuals tell themselves and each other do much more than convey meaning because ‘the mobilization of words can actually change how people act collectively’ (Tarrow 2013, 3). Language reflects the social and political context and forms the linkage between behaviour and its framing. This book considers a long period of history, during which the Conservative Party’s language about trade unions changed from active hostility, to grudging acceptance, to positive endorsement, and then back to active hostility. Throughout the period unions and industrial relations were important aspects of the British repertoire of contentious politics, but how that contention was managed and manifested depended on the nature and shape of the specific conflicts that characterised each epoch, which, in turn, prompted shifts in language and action.

This evolution was quite easily presented as being in conformity with the Conservative Party’s One Nation tradition, and was matched by the unions’ corresponding long-standing commitment to the voluntarist tradition, but ultimately these two narratives became incompatible as the party and the State became increasingly committed to the legal reform of industrial relations and union governance as the solution to ‘the British disease’ of poor industrial relations, low productivity and high levels of industrial action. Nevertheless, the historical interaction of One Nation and voluntarism produced a pattern of relationships between the unions and the TUC and the Conservative Party, whereby each conceded the inviolability of the other’s central purpose, and although occasionally destabilised and producing serious conflict, the relationship was always re-established as being an essential feature of effective governance. This remained characteristic of Conservative Party–union relations until the mid-1970s.

The formula of One Nation plus voluntarism in the interests of governability and electability, although dominant, was never universally accepted within the Conservative Party. Historically, grassroots party sentiment, which found allies amongst the leadership and intellectual elite, continued to regard unions as a fundamental challenge. This was reinforced after 1918 by the electoral challenge posed by the Labour Party, by union affiliation to Labour, the rise of the shop stewards movement and the prominence of Communists in union leadership. From their earliest days unions were criticised by the party for their perceived organisational failings, which could be (and were) reduced to the contention that the vast majority of the unions’ members, who were assumed to be industrially and politically moderate, were manipulated by a militant activist stratum. A poster produced by the Conservative Trade Unionists in the 1980s, entitled Who Speaks for You?, captures this critique:

Take 200 people

180 of them stay at home and wonder why their union is run by left-wing extremists

20 will vote regularly in union elections

5 of these regularly attend union meetings

And one of these is a Left-wing extremist

Never has so much been achieved against the interests of so many by so few.

Union members were dominated and manipulated by organisationally cohesive and ideologically conscious radical minorities. These minorities exploited the membership’s natural sentiments of solidarity with fellow workers as well as their apathy, to deploy union power and resources in pursuit of political and industrial objectives not endorsed by the vast majority of the membership.

In essence the relationship between One Nation Conservatism and voluntarism rested on accepting that unions could only function if they enjoyed a series of immunities from legal regulation. Social, economic and political relationships in capitalism are based on the fallacy of individual equality. A worker, for example, is not obliged, or forced, to accept the terms of engagement offered by an employer (and vice versa) and under capitalism’s terms of exchange a worker has the right to charge the maximum price for her labour, but equally an employer has the right to refuse and seek an alternative, cheaper supply of labour. The assumption of equality, given the actual imbalance in power between individual employers and individual employees, inevitably produced a conflict between individual and collective rights in which the unions combine the individual’s rights via organisation, thus constituting a ‘collective individual’ and amplifying the individual’s power. Similar interests organised in similar ways and behaving in similar ways constituted a class interest; organising a class interest is the core of the problem because organisation means that the unions can be deemed as a result to pose a serious threat to the stability of the economy and polity. Union legal immunities offered one solution even though critics argued they put unions ‘above the law’ and were the core of union power – a situation that could be remedied by the legal regulation of union behaviour and governance employing a positive legal framework to bring union behaviour and moderate mass membership sentiments into alignment by, for example, extensive individual balloting. However, achieving this alignment required a level of external interference inimical to the voluntarist tradition, which could then easily be portrayed as a rejection of One Nation and which would guarantee union hostility. Although he was not then a Conservative, Churchill captured the political implications of the voluntarist tradition in 1911 in the House of Commons: ‘It is not good for trade unions that they should be brought into contact with the courts, and it is not good for the courts … where class issues are involved, it is impossible to pretend that the courts command the same degree of influence’ (Milne-Bailey 1929, 381). The measures required transforming the unions and industrial relations by, for instance, banning the closed shop, extensive union balloting before industrial action and when electing union officers, imposing limitations on the right to strike in essential services, banning unofficial strikes, and restricting union affiliation to Labour, would fundamentally challenge the unions’ role in economy and polity. These and other measures were, however, put in place by successive Conservative governments from the 1980s onwards (and which were not repealed by succeeding Labour governments) and transformed the governance of trade unions. Notwithstanding, what is remarkable is not that these measures were passed, but the extent to which Conservative elites were able to resist repeated demands from the party to establish a transformed regulatory legal regime.

Chapter 1 considers the broad strategic choice facing the Conservative Party with respect to the unions and the organised working class, namely, exclusion or inclusion. Workers who were not union members posed less of a problem because their attitudes were not influenced by a collective perspective (symbolised by union membership) that was perceived, rightly or wrongly, as inimical to much of what the Conservative Party represented. Exclusion or inclusion were different responses to the challenge posed by the contentiousness of class politics and by the hostile legal regime regulating unions that gave way progressively to the acceptance not only of the unions’ right to exist, but also to organise, bargain collectively and influence government policies. Despite the decline in radicalism after the 1840s, unions were still seen by many as collectivist tyrannies threatening individual freedom and property