“I shared their view [of the active members] that the decision smelled of McCarthyism”, wrote Jack Jones. “Since a number of shop stewards in my district were communists I felt that the union could only be harmed by the decision. Some members did, in fact, leave the TGWU and join the ETU. Determined to be no party to victimisation, I managed to protect the shop stewards and they continued to function in my district.”[7]
It was not until twenty years later, in 1969, when Jack Jones became general secretary of the union, that this ban on CP members holding union office in the TGWU was finally rescinded. But in the meantime, the ban had resulted in the removal of many leading figures in the London Bus Section and provoked an upsurge of unofficial action. The union bureaucracy came down hard, and, after a series of skirmishes, the whole of the Dalston union committee and officers were debarred from office until the end of 1952/3. Although unofficial opposition to Deakin was successfully organised around the fortnightly Platform journal, it never succeeded in creating a large-scale opposition within the union. “This was due partly to the climate created by Deakinism…” explains Ken Fuller.[8] The right-wing bureaucracy, through control of the machine, maintained a vice-like grip on the union.
The Cold War witch-hunt took on international dimensions with the rise of McCarthyism in America. In October 1945, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was formed, composed of 70 million members in 71 countries. Within two years, the Cold War had split the federation wide apart. The initiative for this split was taken by the then President of the WFTU, none other than Arthur Deakin, who rested for support on the British TUC and the American CIO. Deakin denounced the WFTU at the 1948 TUC Congress as “nothing more than another platform and instrument for furtherance of Soviet policy”. The following January, the British, American and Dutch representatives walked out, and by the end of 1949 established the pro-Western International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
In Britain, unrest on the docks and on the railways set the scene for 1951. The new Labour Chancellor, the upwardly mobile Hugh Gaitskell, in the face of a new balance of payments crisis, again introduced austerity measures, reducing the NHS budget by £25 million. In the words of the historian Ralph Milliband, “the Budget served to crystallise an accumulation of discontent over the general drift of the government’s policy.” This provoked the resignations of Nye Bevan, Harold Wilson and John Freeman from the government, and created a spur for the development of a Bevanite opposition grouping within the Labour Party.
However, in the general election on 25 October 1951, the Labour Party was defeated – despite achieving its highest poll ever – with 13,948,605 votes or 48.8 percent of the total vote. The Conservatives, who formed the new government, secured their victory with only 13,717,538 votes or 48 percent of the vote, due to crooked parliamentary boundaries. A Tory government was returned to power with Churchill at its head.
Like the Catholic Church that could adapt from feudalism to capitalism, and later even reach an accommodation with the Stalinist regime in Poland, the trade union hierarchy immediately entered into “fraternal” relations with the new Tory government. This subservient class collaboration coloured British trade unionism for the following decade. It was a continuation of a policy that had emerged from the defeat of 1926. The long economic upswing throughout the 1950s served to underpin this close “co-operation” between master and ever-so-humble servant. It also served to preserve the domination of the right wing within the leadership of the British trade unions. As long as these favourable economic conditions prevailed, and there was relative social peace, there would be no serious challenge to this consensus.