Come Together: Trades Councils 1920-1950
By Michael Bor and Jethro Bor
Published by The Book Guild Limited, 2024, £13.99
Reviewed by Kevin Parslow
Trades councils are local federations of trade union branches and bodies which organise and struggle for the workers in their area, usually a local government district. This book is, in the words of its authors, “a celebration of the activities and politics of trades council members and their contribution to British society, 1920 to 1950”.
There are interesting chapters towards the end on the struggle against mass unemployment, on the role of women in the workforce and how they joined trade unions to defend their interests, often being ignored by the male leaders of the movement. Trade union history is (relatively briefly) brought up to date, with comments from trades council activists (including the president of Southampton Trades Council and Socialist Party member Sue Atkins).
But the bulk of the book deals with how trades councils operated in the defined period and the obstacles they faced in struggling for the working class. It is written from a perspective of sympathy for the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the main left-wing force for many decades after the Russian revolution of 1917. But the narrative is not uncritical of this party’s political zigzags during this period, particularly after the general strike of 1926.
Trades councils started developing in the mid-19th century in London, Bristol, and other areas of Britain. The calling of the first Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1868 was in part due to the lobbying of trades councils for a national trade union body. However, having been instrumental in its formation, trades councils were excluded from the TUC after 1895, only to return many decades later with one token delegate.
This decision typifies the difference on the role of trades councils between the largely conservative right-wing trade union and Labour leaders, and those forces within the trades council movement who favoured more campaigning, fighting bodies.
The TUC General Council perceived trades councils as local representative agencies of trade unionism and, eventually under pressure, formed a national body, the Trades Councils Joint Consultative Committee (TCJCC). This is still seen by the TUC as purely advisory. Union leaders determined trades councils’ purpose as loyalty to TUC policy, solvency, administrative efficiency and absence of dissent.
For the right-wing Labour figures Sidney and Beatrice Webb, trades councils were comprised of “tired working men”. They should organise and educate local trade unionist electors, carry out instructions received from the TUC parliamentary committee, watch and criticise the action of parliamentary representatives, and supplement and supervise local councillors’ activities.
But many trades councils were far more active than the Webbs and the trade union leaders wanted. For example, the1917 Leeds convention which supported the revolutionary movement in Russia, had 207 delegates from trades and labour councils represented at it. Many trades councils were actually ‘trades and labour councils’ – joint bodies with local Labour Parties – for many years, including Battersea trades and labour council in South London, which selected the Communist Party member Saklatvala Shapurji to fight and win the Battersea North seat in the 1922 general election. The right-wing eventually succeeded in separating them, although Liverpool Trades Council and Labour Party remained until the early 1970s.
When the CPGB was formed in 1920 in the wake of the October revolution in Russia, its members and supporters became the main opposition to the TUC General Council in trades councils and the trade union movement generally. The CP saw trades councils as local working-class parliaments. In 1922 , CP leader Tom Quelch went so far as describing trades councils as “infant soviets like the workers’ councils in Russia… The local central bodies of the working-class movement… Best fitted to bring complete local working-class solidarity into being”.
The authors argue that the years 1920-1926 were arguably the most effective in the history of the Communist Party. During this time, it was influential in forming the National Federation of Trade Councils, an unofficial body that forced the setting up of the TCJCC. It was also prominent in the Minority Movement, the left organisation in the unions, and the National Unemployed Workers Movement, fighting for jobs or full pay, not the dole.
Many trades councils supported these bodies, which challenged the notion of trades councils having a subsidiary role. That is why TUC-trade council relations were in this period characterised by endemic conflict.
In 1924, right-wing official Herbert Tracy warned of trades councils becoming “centres of disaffection”. At the post-general strike Bournemouth TUC, delegates questioned the General Council’s decision not to permit unions to join the Minority Movement. Arthur Conley of the Tailors and Garment Workers Union, representing the General Council, expressed the fear that if trades councils allowed requests for Minority Movement affiliation, within a short period it might become the majority movement!
The general strike of 1926 is the bitterest class conflict in British history to date. Many trades councils leapt into action in defence of the locked-out miners, although the degree of activity and militancy varied, depending on their political outlook. Many transformed themselves into councils of action for the duration of the strike, assisting or even taking over some of the functions of civil government in many areas. There are reports in the book from some trades councils, although these, disappointingly, were not as extensive as could be hoped for. A glaring omission is the situation in the North-East of England, which was recorded in detail at the time by CP member R Page Arnot.
Arnot had found himself stranded in the North-East as the general strike began, and chronicled and assisted in the running of the strike there, particularly in the mining village of Chopwell near Gateshead. Peter Taaffe, in his book, 1926 General Strike – Workers Taste Power, describes how Arnot “ʻjotted down headings for a plan of campaign in the Durham-Northumberland area’. He clearly understood that because of its general character the strike should not be restricted to a section of the working class but should draw in all workers and organisations. Arnot suggested that local authorities with Labour majorities could effectively disrupt the government’s plans by refusing to carry out government proposals… The plan set out, in effect, the machinery for organising working-class control of the region. Arnot insisted that it should be ‘simple, easy to throw up’ and crucially ‘all inclusive’.” Peter comments that this was “an indication of just how, with clear leadership, at least on an organisational level, the councils of action could have become a reality throughout Britain”.
The authors do describe well though the view of the General Council: “The TUC strike organising committee actually inhibited local activism and thought left-wing elements might take control and conduct the strike as a political affair, but the police and army did their work for them, trades councils also often censoring themselves. This was the crux of the battle [between the TUC and trades councils]: how to compel trades councils to perform the role of purely industrial bodies”. This was a large factor in the General Council calling off the general strike after nine days, without anything won, and when more workers were coming out, as it feared losing control of the situation.
The defeat of the general strike led to a downturn in industrial militancy, a loss in union membership and, correspondingly, a fall in trades council participation and activity. It also coincided with the CP following the Communist International’s turn away from an internationalist, militant stance to policies which defended the interests of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, at every stage. The Bolsheviks who had led the revolution, including Leon Trotsky, were removed from positions of power and influence.
The right-wing leadership of the General Council took advantage of the despair caused by the defeat to attack the left in trades councils, particularly the CP. The CP assisted in this with its ‘Third Period’ policies (from 1928-1935) in which it attacked right-wing labour movement figures as ‘social fascist’. This policy had its terrible conclusion with the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany.
The TUC took this opportunity to try to eliminate any militant opposition in the trades councils. It issued a series of ‘Black Circulars’ – rulings designed to exclude CP members from becoming dominant in trades councils, later extended under a different name. The most infamous was Circular 16, which banned trades councils from admitting delegates from proscribed organisations – communists were lumped in with fascists in this. Indeed, the TUC used explicit propaganda to link fascism with communism in the 1930s. They even used the expulsion of Leon Trotsky (no ally of the TUC General Council!) from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as an example of ‘communist authoritarianism’.
TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine years later acknowledged that Circular 16 had been fitfully enforced but warned Congress delegates that the General Council, as custodian of the movement, must safeguard trades councils against disruption and had to be convinced CP disruptive tactics had been abandoned. However, at least four trades councils who refused to comply were disaffiliated because of alleged excessive CP influence.
Yet the CP, its organisations and the bodies it influenced, were still attacked even when Comintern policy changed to the Popular Front phase in the mid-thirties. The man put in charge of the TUC’s investigations into recalcitrant trades councils was Vic Feather, who would become the TUC General Secretary from 1969-1973. In correspondence with a right-wing Birmingham trades council officer, he wrote that he was glad that the “sounder trade unionists are hitting back a little bit more at the communists”. The authors quote from the book, Vic Feather, TUC, by Eric Silver, who cites a trade unionist from the time: “We knew Victor. He was the kind of man who caresses your back looking for the right place to put the knife”.
The authors’ conclusions are interesting. They recognise that the CP’s ‘Third Period’ policies and its ‘anti-imperialist war’ phase from 1939-1941 (before the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany) were gifts to the trade union leaders. Once the USSR entered the war in 1941, the CP and its allies switched to a policy of encouraging production to ‘aid the war effort’. Militant trade unionists then sometimes found themselves confronted not just by the TUC right wing, but the Communist Party as well. The authors admit: “Eventually the CP itself chose the easy option, to steer its own reformist path, the path of least resistance”.
In contrast to this, the prescient words of the Clyde Workers Committee in November 1915 are recommended: “We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them”.
The authors conclude that the transformation of trades councils into fighting organisations “may take time, but social change in trades councils can be part of a broader cultural transformation that is not only possible, but necessary”. Socialist Party members are already involved in this, for example moving an emergency motion at the trades councils annual conference in May opposing the cuts to disability benefits proposed by the Starmer government, which included a call for the TUC to organise a national weekend demonstration against ‘Labour austerity’.
This resolution was carried overwhelmingly and agreed as the conference’s motion to go to this year’s Congress in Brighton. This and other campaigning policies – and leading the debate on workers’ political representation in this new period – are the way forward for trades councils and the trade union movement as a whole.