Events in 1956, however, were to have a significant, but unexpected, effect within the trade union movement. The British Communist Party was deeply shaken, as was the Communist movement internationally, by the secret revelations of Khrushchev in the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. He was forced to raise the lid on the heinous crimes of Stalinism – the frame-ups, purge trials, labour camps and murders – in order to place the sole blame for these atrocities on the personality of Stalin and away from the regime. In October 1956, another shock-wave hit the CP when the Hungarian Uprising (two general strikes and two insurrections) against the Stalinist rule and its bloody suppression by Russian troops created a widespread crisis internationally. In Britain, up to a third of the party’s membership resigned in protest, including two prominent members in the electricians’ union, Les Cannon and Frank Chapple.
The Electrical Trades Union (ETU), with its quarter-of-a-million membership, had been under the control of the Communist Party since the war. But with Cannon and Chapple now in opposition to the party, a battle royal opened up for control of the union. Eventually, both men ended up with Jock Byrne (who was backed by Catholic Action) and former CP member Mark Young, on a programme of a “free democratic union”. They travelled up and down the country to union branches gathering evidence about corrupt practices in union internal elections. These “democrats” received financial aid from a group of Catholic businessmen, members of “moral rearmament”, whose aim was to deter workers’ militancy by appealing to their religious and “patriotic” fervour. Apparently, Vic Feather from the TUC bureaucracy acted as the “go-between” for the conspiracy. Les Cannon was even given a year’s leave of absence on full pay from his job in order to lead the investigation. There were no depths to which the Cannon-Byrne-Chapple axis was not prepared to sink to gain control of the union. It is worth bearing in mind how easy it was for Chapple, Cannon, and co. to gather this evidence. As former members of the CP caucus in the union they must have had intimate knowledge of the ballot-rigging procedures. In fact, Les Cannon, as chief instructor at the union’s college probably trained many of the branch officials involved in the ballot-rigging case. What form of tuition they received from Cannon can only be left to the imagination. Subsequently, the ETU became a highly publicised political confrontation, involving the capitalist press, the TUC, and the Communist Party.
At this time, the CP had a strong industrial base and drew towards it many excellent and sincere class fighters, deeply influenced by the aura of the October Revolution. They constituted the militant left of the unions. The best militant activists, shop stewards and convenors in industry, were instinctively drawn to the CP as a means of fighting the right wing. Unfortunately, many of these class fighters were misled and mis-educated by the leadership of the CP, who had long ago abandoned any revolutionary perspective of changing society. For many years, especially since the popular front period, the party sought a left-wing “accommodation” with the union bureaucracy. Its leadership, corrupted by decades of Stalinism, had in reality lost confidence in the working class. This lack of faith had bred a large degree of scepticism, the hallmark and psychological basis for reformism. Such scepticism sometimes even affected genuine militants, who tended to move ahead of their class and became disappointed by the lack of response from their fellow workers. It is not uncommon that those who held such views ended up as a barrier to struggle at a later stage. This mood of despondency became the starting point of all kinds of mistakes and opportunist tendencies, which were to have disastrous consequences in the ETU. A layer of the top officials, who held CP cards, was determined to hold on to their positions (“for the good of the members”) at all costs. Shamefully, this false method led to all kinds of skulduggery, including election fraud, forgery, arbitrary disqualification of branches, and the falsification of electoral returns. Of course, all this played into the hands of the right wing, which took up a hue and cry for “democracy”.
Woodrow Wyatt MP, then a left-wing supporter of Tribune, made allegations of corruption in the magazine Illustrated, which opened up an outcry involving the rest of the media. Wyatt prepared and took part in a series of BBC Panorama programmes on the ETU, and this was followed by an “exposure” in the right-wing New Statesman magazine.
According to John Freeman, the editor of the New Statesman:
Ever since 1957, the New Statesman has consistently exposed the operations of the Communist clique and urged both the rank and file of the ETU, and the TUC, to take action to remove a scandal which, allowed to go unchecked, would bring grave discredit on the whole trade union movement.[6]
Of course, these allegations of criminal malpractice were grist to the mill of the right-wing union leaders, which, behind closed doors, were never averse to such practices. A hue and cry was launched against the “Communist clique” controlling the ETU. Chapple and co. were hailed as the saviours of British trade union democracy. Clearly, no class-conscious worker could condone the actions of the ETU leaders, Foulkes and Haxell, but neither could they support this right-wing witch-hunt orchestrated by the capitalist press whose sole purpose was to discredit the militant left. This hired press has always defended their friends in the right wing of the Labour movement, despite its corrupt double-dealings and links to the intelligence services, both in Britain and the United States. The press barons deliberately turned a blind eye to such malpractices.
Very quickly the TUC bureaucracy was drawn into the controversy, and demanded an explanation from the ETU leaders. As expected, an internal ETU enquiry exonerated the union leaders. However in 1960, Byrne and Chapple issued writs against the union and its officers for alleged fraud in the 1959 general secretary election. In June 1961, the Courts found that a group of ETU leaders, including Frank Foulkes, its president since 1945, and Frank Haxell, its general secretary, had acted to prevent Byrne’s election by “fraudulent and unlawful” means. The judge pronounced Byrne duly elected general secretary of the ETU with immediate effect. The Communist Party had little choice but to distance itself from the ballot-rigging, and placed the sole responsibility for the affair onto Haxell’s shoulders, who duly resigned from the party.
Arising from the legal judgement, the TUC gave the ETU leaders an ultimatum to debar its officers for five years. Their refusal resulted in the ETU being expelled from the TUC and then the Labour Party. In the ensuing witch-hunt, most of the Communist members and supporters were soon removed from the leadership in the union executive elections. These were conducted under new procedures, which allowed Byrne’s supporters to take control of the leadership, winning nine out of eleven places on the executive. The publicity and acclaim which Chapple, Cannon and the others received in the capitalist press, ensured that in the postal ballot their election to office was guaranteed by a grateful membership. In the election Byrne became general secretary, Les Cannon became president, Chapple became a member of the EC and Young was given a full-time position. The following year, under right-wing control, the ETU was readmitted to both the TUC and Labour Party. To consolidate their victory, the rules of the ETU were then changed banning CP members from holding office. Any member of the union who had a CP card was forced to resign from office or renounce their CP membership. Many tore up their cards, while others resigned their posts, leaving control of the union completely in the hands of the right wing. Hand-picked national and area officials were installed by the leadership to take charge of the day-to-day running of the union. The left in the union suffered from an almighty backlash. Later, Cannon and Chapple used their extensive experience from when they were in the Communist Party to manipulate the union, this time in the interests of the right-wing clique, which ruthlessly controlled the union right up to the 1992 amalgamation, and beyond in the AEEU.
On Byrne’s death Chapple was elected general secretary. In the ensuing period, rank-and-file appeals’ committees and area committees were abolished. Under Cannon and Chapple, literally volumes could be written about the destruction of union democracy in the ETU. It will be sufficient to note that rules were introduced forbidding the reading of unauthorised circulars in branches, forbidding written communication between branches except with the permission of head office, forbidding communication of internal union matter to any outside body, etc. Branches were bureaucratically closed down or amalgamated and placed under the control of appointed officials. The intention of these measures was to drive out the union activists and reduce participation to a minimum, allowing the union apparatus to assume even greater powers. The election of officials was abolished and the appointment system introduced – supposedly to make the union more efficient by giving continuity of employment to officials! With the death of Les Cannon, all real power was concentrated into the hands of the general secretary, Frank Chapple. The ETU was dominated by a totalitarian regime. Increasingly isolated and paranoid of his own toadies on the EC, Chapple even went so far as to secretly tape-record all conversations in his office. His old desk, which is now stored at the union’s headquarters at Hays Court, shows the secret compartments and wires where tape recorders were once hidden from sight. Those tapes, if they ever came to light, would be more devastating than the Watergate tapes of the Nixon administration!
At the 1959 TUC Congress, George Woodcock took over as general secretary from Sir Vincent Tewson. This Congress witnessed a shift to the left with the adoption of an anti-nuclear defence policy and the reaffirmation of Clause Four. Yet despite these successes, the right wing still retained its organisational stranglehold on the movement.
The election of Frank Cousins as general secretary of the TGWU was nevertheless symptomatic of the future changes that would loosen the grip of the right wing. In that year, the Conservative Party won a new term of office under Harold MacMillan’s famous election slogan “You’ve never had it so good”. MacMillan was a very clever and astute bourgeois politician – one of the last in a long line of Tory patricians – who greatly valued “compromise” and “manoeuvre” as diplomatic weapons in the class struggle. In his book, The Middle Way, he expressed the astute belief that “if capitalism had been conducted all along as if the theory of private enterprise were a matter of principle”, and all intervention by the state had been resisted, “we should have had civil war long ago.”[7] With the decline of British capitalism, this breed of Tory leader became increasingly scarce. The Tories of today have more in common with the grocer’s daughter, the narrow-minded get-rich-quick parvenu, than the likes of Harold MacMillan.