Organizing the Militants: the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions, 1966–1979
| Author | Alan Campbell,John McIlroy |
| Published date | 01 March 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8543.00116 |
| Date | 01 March 1999 |
Organizing the Militants: the Liaison
Committee for the Defence of Trade
Unions, 1966±1979
John McIlroy and Alan Campbell
Abstract
The Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions has been largely
ignored in conventional accounts of the campaigns against restrictive union
legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. This article discusses the origins of the
LCDTU, provides an account of its activities centred on the union
struggles against state intervention, and brie¯y explores some of the issues
concerning rank-and-®le movements. It concludes by suggesting that,
although the LCDTU merits recognition for the key role it played in
defeating the legislation, it can best be characterized as a front organization
of the Communist Party rather than as an independent rank-and-®le
movement.
1. Introduction
The Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU) played
a signi®cant role in the industrial militancy of the 1960s and 1970s. It was
particularly active in the opposition to In Place of Strife and the Industrial
Relations Act, and in assisting at the rebirth of the political strike between
1969 and 1974. Nevertheless, its activities remain obscure. The standard
industrial relations text on the 1971 legislation does not mention the
LCDTU, an omission sustained in later surveys (McCarthy 1992: 1±78;
Weekes et al. 1975). It receives no attention in near-contemporary scrutiny
of the militancy of these years (Goodman 1983), and merits merely a
sentence in the most detailed essay on the industrial politics of the 1970s
(Taylor 1980: 123). The LCDTU has failed to attract attention in recent
historical studies in industrial relations, receiving at most a couple of
dismissive lines (Taylor 1993: 193; Wrigley 1996). The situation is similar in
the political science literature. The LCDTU ®gures not at all in the
standard account of In Place of Strife and only ¯eetingly in the one
John McIlroy is in the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester; Alan Campbell in
the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Liverpool.
British Journal of Industrial Relations
37:1 March 1999 0007±1080 pp. 1±31
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extended study of the Industrial Relations Act (Jenkins 1970; Moran 1977:
114, 116).
This is part of more substantial de®cits. First, and speci®cally, the
conventional literature fails to assess the importance of industrial action
from below in immobilizing the 1971 legislation, the strong opposition to
such action by the TUC and the serious con¯icts within the labour
movement as to how the legislation should be opposed. In surveys of the
legislation's failure, explanatory emphasis is on its contradictions, on the
success of the TUC policy of non-registration, and on the refusal of
employers to use it Ð at the expense of scrutiny of the role of oppositional
militancy (McCarthy 1992: 22±5; Weekes et al. 1975: 220±4).
Second, and more generally, industrial relations historiography, particu-
larly since the 1960s, has neglected the role of the Communist Party (CP).
From outside the mainstream have come brief, general surveys of the
party's in¯uence (Taylor 1980: 120±6) and documentation, by a participant,
of CP involvement in the NUM (Allen 1981). Whether rejection of
stereotypes of `the steward as agitator' produced more general disregard
of leadership, or whether the reformism of leading academics stereotyped
alternative politics as peripheral, Terry's judgement that attention to CP
activities, particularly among stewards, had been perfunctory was justi®ed
(Terry 1988: 11±12; but see Turner et al. 1967: 220, 290±2). Indifference has
been largely sustained (Lyddon 1996: 204). The CP is relegated to the
margins. In consequence, our grasp of the human forces that create, drive
and nurture trade union activism, our comprehension of how trade union
consciousness is developed and organization constructed through politi-
cally con®gured exertions of human agency and our understanding of
industrial politics are depleted and distorted (cf. Kelly 1996: 176±8). Work
that acknowledges the importance of political allegiance and the signi®-
cance of the CP is rare (but see Darlington 1998; Jefferys 1988; Lyddon
1996). There remains a need for more detailed reconstruction of the
activities of CP members inside the workplace, as well as their attempts to
build a broader rank-and-®le organization beyond it.
The LCDTU declared itself a `rank-and-®le movement' (LCDTU, n.d.).
It was routinely referred to by its sponsors as a `rank-and-®le' body, and
rhetorically was situated within the history of such movements (Anon.
1978; Costello 1979: 5). There are well-known historical studies of the shop
stewards' movement of the early years of the twentieth century which
emphasized workers' committees operating within union structures but
independent of the of®cial leadership, answerable directly to the shop-¯oor
and linking workers across the unions (Hinton 1973; Kendall 1969;
Pribicevic 1959). The attempts by the infant CP to graft a Bolshevik
agenda on to the pre-1920 traditions of rank-and-®lism and to create, in the
Minority Movement, a cross-industry alliance of revolutionaries and
militant reformists on an agreed programme are also well documented
(Hinton and Hyman 1975; Martin 1969). Industrial relations is largely silent
on rank-and-®le movements: even Marxist texts are terse (Hyman 1975:
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2British Journal of Industrial Relations
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