Upper Clyde Shipbuilders
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HOW CLYDESIDE’S WORKERS DEFEATED A CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT New Light on the Work-In at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders In July 1971 8,500 shipyard workers took control of four shipyards on the Upper Clyde: Govan, Linthouse, Scotstoun and Clydebank. They did so to stop their closure. Two months before the Conservative government of Edward Heath had withheld further financial support from the semi-state company running the yards, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. The government’s intention was to force the company into liquidation and sell off all the yards. The workers’ resistance stopped this. The shop stewards remained in control for the following fifteen months and only ended their ‘Work-In’ when the government had fully capitulated and financially guaranteed the survival of all four yards. This action on the Clyde had a much wider national impact. The workers’ successful enforcement of their right to work gave encouragement to workers in hundreds of other workplaces facing closure during the recession years of 1971-73. The network of supporters groups formed across Britain became a powerful organisational resource for all workers in struggle, including the miners in 1972, while the occupation of the yards, strictly illegal under the law, gave encouragement to the wider trade union movement to defy the imposition of the Tory government’s 1971 Industrial Relations Act. In Scotland it was the UCS shop stewards who initiated the convening of the first Scottish Assembly – the body which launched the demand for a Scottish parliament with the economic powers to stop closures and to defend people’s right to work in their own communities. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the UCS Work-in represented one of the key turning points in the history of the later twentieth century. It helped re-establish workers’ confidence in the organised power of labour, brought about the policy U-Turn which ultimately derailed the Heath government and transformed the image of Scotland and its workers. The history of the UCS has been told many times and celebrated in film, poetry and drama. The objective of this pamphlet is to do two things. One is to examine the detailed tactics of the government now that its records have been opened. The second is to examine how the shop stewards, and in particular the Communists among them, developed such effective tactics in response. 1. “Put in a Government Butcher” In December 1969 Nicholas Ridley MP travelled to Clydeside to talk to leading Tory industrialists. He did so as the representative of Keith Joseph, member of the Conservative Party’s shadow cabinet responsible for drawing up industrial strategy ahead of the 1970 general election. Ridley, a member of the family that had dominated Tyneside shipbuilding for three generations, met Sir Eric Yarrow, whose family had owned the main warship yard on the Clyde, and also, it seems, Sir William Lithgow. Yarrow’s yard had been incorporated into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1968 when the Labour government had consolidated four loss-making private yards around the Fairfield yard in Govan. This had already been taken into semi-state ownership in 1966. The owners of the four private yards had been given places on the new board – as well as being paid very significant financial compensation. Lower down the Clyde Sir William Lithgow controlled the biggest of the remaining shipyards. His father had been the dominant figure in Scottish industry before the war - acting on behalf of the Bank of 1 England to rationalise the production of coal, steel and ships by closing down up to half the total capacity. Sir William was himself a leading figure on the Scottish Council for Development and Industry. After the meetings Ridley wrote a report to Joseph. He described UCS as a ‘cancer’ which was poisoning industrial life on Clydeside – a reference to the belief of Yarrow and his colleagues that the preferential wages and conditions negotiated by workers in the Fairfield yard after 1966, and then transferred to UCS, were undermining the profitability of surrounding firms. Ridley’s solution was for an incoming Conservative administration to ‘put in a government butcher to cut up the UCS to sell (cheaply) to the Lower Clyde and others’.1 At some point in 1970-71 Ridley’s report was leaked and by summer 1971 had become a major embarrassment to the government. It seemed to indicate that the closure had been premeditated and was not the simple result of insolvency – causing anger not just among workers but also among the two thousand business creditors and the shipping companies that had placed orders with advance credit and who stood to lose millions. The government denied that the report had had any influence on policy – even though Ridley had become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State with responsibility for shipbuilding in the new government. Government records, or those that have been made available, do not decisively answer this question. They do, however, make it quite clear that the government did have policy to close existing shipyards - whatever the social consequences. They also reveal that even the original stages of the process were somewhat more complicated than Ridley or his colleagues had envisaged. These complications tell us a great deal about the nature of the Conservative Party and its relationship to the ruling class. Just prior to the election, in February 1970, the Conservative Party held a policy conference at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon to resolve internal differences on economic and industrial policy. On the one side was the hard-line monetarists led by Keith Joseph. They argued that only a complete break with Keynesian full employment policies and state support for industry could reassert the industrial discipline needed for a profitable economy. This wing drew its support from the regionally based industrial barons, such as those on Clydeside, together with those strategists of the ruling class who were alarmed at growing shop stewards militancy and mounting inflationary pressures. They were particularly critical of the impact on wages rates of the regional subsidies to incoming US firms – brought in by the strategists of the City of London to shore up Britain’s languishing balance of trade. Heath, on the other hand, represented these interests. These included the great City institutions and the British multinationals associated with them, such as Shell, ICI and BP. Their main aim was greater access to European markets through membership of the Common Market and a drive to consolidate and modernise British industry in preparation. They were hesitant about any direct confrontation with organised labour and sought to continue the Labour government’s policy of strengthening the powers of union leaderships over shop floor militancy and unofficial action. Neither side paid much attention to the interests of small or medium business at regional level or to the mass of professional and managerial staff who ran the vast array of state and semi-state institutions that had developed during the period of managed capitalism since 1945. The outcome of the discussions was a compromise, the Selsdon Agreement, by which the incoming 1 Where not otherwise indicated, sources are to be found in Foster and Woolfson, The Politics of the UCS Work-In, Lawrence and Wishart, 1986 2 Conservative government would end subsidies to semi-state industry (‘lame ducks’), drastically cut regional subsidies, allow unemployment to rise somewhat, proceed with Common Market membership and introduce legislation that would ban unofficial strikes and require trade unions to register and themselves discipline strikers. When the Conservative’s won the election in June 1970 it was one of Heath’s allies, John Davies, a former oil company executive and CBI chair, who was placed in charge of Tony Benn’s giant Ministry of Technology, shortly to be renamed the Department of Trade and Industry. Below him, however, were two junior ministers, Sir John Eden and Nicholas Ridley, both hardliners. Ridley had responsibility for shipbuilding. Ridley’s first recorded meeting with the Shipbuilding Industry Board (SIB) took place in September 1970. The Board had responsibility for a dozen semi-state shipbuilding companies across Britain and was chaired by Sir William Swallow. The meeting was notably frosty – in part no doubt because the government had already announced it would abolish the Board within a year. Ridley came with two apparent intentions. One was to emphasise that no more government money would be provided to the SIB beyond the £600m already allocated. The other was to demand that money be made available to allow Yarrows to be separated from UCS. Unfortunately for Ridley, Swallow was able to demonstrate the inconsistency of the two demands. Swallow argued that the £600m was quite insufficient to meet the needs of modernisation and development in the twelve different firms supported by the ministry. Ridley denied this – but, on the basis of his ‘recent discussions with Sir Eric’ also asked for a significant increase in the £122,000 already allocated to Yarrow. ‘Mr Ridley said that it should be understood that there was no question of ministerial pressure’ but .. ‘Yarrows should not be allowed to go bust’ and ‘Yarrow’s shareholders must have a fair deal, in view of the “shotgun merger”’. Swallow then gave a detailed refutation and Ridley left – commenting that matters ‘were now much clearer’.2 Over the previous month the SIB had received financial statements from the UCS which indicated that its trading position, although still in deficit, was improving, that there had been sustained increases in productivity in terms of steel throughput and that the loss-making orders taken on in 1967-68 were being replaced by profitable ones. Two weeks before Ridley’s visit, Ken Douglas, managing director of UCS, had addressed the Board outlining a general improvement in performance but warning that the management of Yarrow’s, still represented on the UCS Board, was intent on sabotage: ‘it was in Yarrow’s interest to see the downfall of UCS, as Yarrow could only manage men in a heavy unemployment situation’.3 Inconclusive negotiations on the separation of Yarrows continued through the autumn of 1970.