The 1972 miners' strike: popular agency and industrial politics in Britain

The national miners' strike of 1972 is central to contemporary British history: it undermined Edward Heath's Conservative government and sharpened social conflict; the common interpretation of the strike as a 'victory for violence', shown here to be disingenuous, legitimised the Thatcherite attack on organised labour in the 1980s. This article examines the high politics of the strike, but situates popular agency - the actions and attitudes of the miners - as the predominant historical contingency. This was especially so in the uproarious events documented at Longannet in Fife, which shaped the outcome of the strike. This analysis is related to the character of industrial politics more generally in the 1960s and 1970s

The campaign for democratic socialism 1960-1964.

PhDIn early 1960 it seemed likely that the official Labour Party defence policy would be defeated by a unilateralist resolution at the Scarborough Conference. In response to this possibility the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, or CDS, was established. The CDS projected the image of a grass-roots movement inspired by Gaitskell's "fight and fight again" speech. But it was run by a Campaign Committee which included leading members of the Party like Tony Crosland, Roy Jenkins and Patrick Gordon Walker, as well as less well known members like Bill Rodgers, Dick Taverne, Philip Williams, Brian Walden, Denis Howell and David Marquand. This highly talented group launched an elaborate and successful lobbying, publicity and briefing operation which was influential in overturning the unilateralist vote at the Blackpool Conference of 1961. After Blackpool the Campaign helped many of its leading members find seats in the House of Commons while continuing to put the "revisionist" case through its newspaper Campaign. The importance of the CDS in the history of the Labour Party is, primarily, as the first internal pressure group organised by the right of the Party. It was also the first internal Party group to use such sophisticated lobbying techniques. Moreover, the subsequent careers of the leading members of the Campaign influenced the development of the Labour Party. The CDS was an important formative political action for many of them. Finally many of the CDS supporters set-up or joined the SDP when it was launched

‘Off With Their Heads’: British Prime Ministers and the Power to Dismiss

The British prime minister’s power to appoint and dismiss ministers is probably his most important single power. This article explores how prime ministers from Macmillan to Blair have used that power. The article considers the criteria that prime ministers use when choosing to appoint or dismiss individuals from office before examining the calculations and miscalculations that prime ministers have made in practice. Finally, the article analyses the way that prime ministers have exercised, in particular, their power to dismiss and finds that Thatcher was far more likely than others to sack cabinet colleagues on ideological or policy grounds. The article emphasizes that prime ministers’ relationships with especially powerful ministers – ‘big beasts of the jungle’ – are crucial to an understanding of British government at the top.</jats:p

The crown's marine estate- A sovereign wealth fund?

A response to the Treasury Select Committee investigation of the management of the Crown Estate, focusing on the marine estate and highlighting the Crown Estate's stewardship responsibilitie

The cost of hubris

The demise of Gunns in the spring of 2012 was as much a psychological shock to Tasmanians as it was economic. Alongside cricket stars Ricky Ponting and ‘Boonie’, Gunns had become the best-known Tasmanian. On 25 September 2012, Gunns went into voluntary administration after its creditors, who were owed more than $500 million, refused to bankroll the business any longer. Gunns had posted a$904 million loss for the 2011/2012 financial year and had been in a trading halt since March 2012 with a share price of just sixteen cents. The shareholders are now unlikely to see any of their investment returned. The announcement that Gunns would go into administration also resulted in more than six hundred job losses, about three hundred of which were in Tasmania. This effectively marked the end of one of Tasmania’s most successful businesses. Founded in Launceston in 1875 by brothers John and Thomas Gunn, the business quickly grew with interests in timber trading, sawmilling, build- ing, brickmaking and hardware. According to Tom Gunn, the historian great-grandson of John Gunn, by the turn of the twentieth century Gunns ‘was one of the first companies in Australia to become an integrated business’. At one point, Tom Gunn explains, you could walk into the company’s office in Launceston with title to a block of land and they could design and build you a house from the ground up to put on it. Gunns dominated the building and timber industries of northern Tasmania and from the 1890s onwards built many of Launceston’s impres- sive heritage buildings. Launceston’s current mayor and anti-pulp mill politician, Albert van Zetten, agrees that Gunns has left an important mark on the city. ‘They’ve employed a lot of people over those years, which has been a very significant part of our economy,’ he says. Gunns remained in family hands until it went public in 1986, and John Gay took over as managing director. The Gunns family sold their remaining shares soon after, signalling the end of one chapter and the beginning of another in the company’s history. As a public company, Gunns was able to raise funds for an aggressive expansion, buying out other timber businesses including Boral Timber, North Forest Products, Auspine, and ITC Timber. With the purchase of North Forest Products for $335 million in 2001 Gunns became the largest exporter of woodchips in the southern hemisphere. In 2004, in the midst of this expansion Gunns announced its controversial proposal to build Australia’s biggest pulp mill at Bell Bay in the picturesque Tamar Valley. The pulp mill turned into a game-changer for Gunns, but not the kind it wanted. Increasingly, Gunns and its ‘pet’ project came to represent all that was wrong with Tasmanian politics: deals with mates, secret dinners with a premier, flagrant indifference to the planning process. For Gunns, the normal rules of the game didn’t seem to apply. Read the full article &gt; This essay first appeared in Griffith REVIEW 39: Tasmania – The Tipping Point? Photo Credit: Cheeseness via Compfight c

"Victims of our history", the Labour Party and In Place of Strife, 1968 to 1969

PhDThis thesis consists of a detailed chronological examination of the events leading up to the publication of the white paper, In Place of Strife in January 1969, and its subsequent replacement with a 'solemn and binding' agreement with the Trades Union Congress in June 1969. The work seeks to address four propositions that have emerged from the historiography: that Barbara Castle was unduly influenced by anti-trade union officials; that the contents of the white paper were a knee jerk reaction to the Conservative proposals; that neither Castle nor Harold Wilson understood the trade union movement; and that the final agreement, was a failure that demonstrated the inability of a Labour government to escape from its trade union roots. In Place of Strife has received considerable coverage in the diaries, autobiographies and biographies of politicians and trade union leaders. However, there remain a number of important gaps, notably; the respective roles of civil servants, politicians and outside advisors; the detailed debates of the parliamentary Labour party and the internal discussions of the trade unions, especially the TUC general council. Drawing from a range of primary sources including; newly released government papers this study addresses the gaps in our knowledge and evaluates the existing historiography. What emerges from this study is that, rather than being unduly influenced by her officials, Barbara Castle was the main instigator of the white paper. Similarly, whilst the white paper was influenced by the publication of the Conservative proposals, it was grounded in a well thought out philosophy of trade union rights and responsibilities. Similarly, whilst confirming that Castle and Wilson demonstrated considerable naivety in failing to anticipate the extent of the antagonism shown by trade unions towards the proposals, the study also reveals a depth of trade union intransigence that came close to challenging the government's right to govern. Consequently, Wilson in particular emerges as a skilled negotiator who extracted as much as was possible given the constraints placed on him

The limits of anticolonialism: the British Labour movement and the end of the empire in Guiana

The Labour Party’s ambivalent attitude to anticolonial nationalism is well known but its place in the conflicts between the party’s revisionists and the left has been less fully elaborated, while the influence of British trade unions in the formation of party policy on decolonisation has been cast to the margins of the historiography. Events in British Guiana are representative of this trend because, while the activities of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations have been detailed by a number of historians, including Stephen Rabe, Robert Waters, Gary Daniels and Lily Ramcharan, the impact of the British TUC has been largely ignored. A study of the international labour politics of the 1950s and 1960s suggests both that the fate of the Guianese left was inextricably tied to conflicts in the British Labour party and that trade union leaders in the metropolis offered powerful support to revisionists in making the case for prioritising Atlanticism over colonial liberation. The Labour Party’s support for the suspension of the Guianese constitution by the Churchill government in 1953 and their willingness to implement Conservative plans for constitutional reform in 1964 demonstrate that the party’s liberationist faction were unable to overturn the Cold War agenda espoused by the right wing of the parliamentary party and anti-communists in the trade union movement

Housing, the hyper-precarization of asylum seekers and the contested politics of welcome on Tyneside

This paper analyses the role of housing in shaping the contested politics of welcome in the North East of England. It argues that changes to state provision of asylum seeker housing and the introduction of new legislation to create a hostile internalised bordering regime have led to a hyper-precarization of asylum seekers, which has been contested through a range of political projects at the urban scale. On Tyneside, these projects coalesced around struggles for improvements to state-provided accommodation for asylum seekers. The analysis reveals that whilst asylum housing has become key to the articulation of the politics of welcome within cities outside of London, it is spatially and temporally differentiated. The differential political projects shaping ‘welcoming’ at the urban scale emerge from contestation between a range of actors. On Tyneside, this contested politics arises from two key shifts: a change in national and local government in 2010 and 2011, which catalysed an oppositional politics of welcome amongst regional politicians; and the emergence of a new civil society initiative on Tyneside, whose direct action destabilised the relatively sedimented existing political landscape of welcome in the region, making space for differentiated asylum seeker political subjectivities