Is Bill Morris the “onlie begetter” of New Labour? Before les frères Miliband, along with all the other gravediggers of what Labour achieved between 1997 and 2010, get too carried away they should look at the trade union roots of the political project to which they themselves contributed so much.
Let us go back to Labour’s European conference at Bournemouth in November 1992. In those far off days Labour had an annual weekend devoted to discussing political life beyond these shores. The party was down in the dumps; it had lost a fourth election in a row. Everyone liked John Smith but there was no fizz or electricity in the air. Bill Clinton had just won in the United States. Many in the Labour Party distrusted his centrist politics, later to be denounced as triangulation. In fact, Clinton was the closest America would get to a classic European social democrat in the mode of Willy Brandt or Felipe González. They made their political peace with free market economics and Atlanticism and led their parties in Germany and Spain into power with a solid reformist programme.
As an international trade union official at the time I knew many in Clinton’s team and saw his outreach to workers and the labour movement. In Bournemouth I found myself in a queue for coffee behind Bill Morris and his very smart young aide Joe Irvine. Morris had had to fight against ingrained labour movement xenophobia – sometimes racist in the era of Enoch Powell and often anti-European. Luckily no one was mouthing the slogan “British jobs for British workers” 50 years ago when Morris began work as a metalworker in Birmingham. He had a steady career progression though the ranks of the TGWU, first as shop steward, then regional organiser, and finally as the union’s general secretary.
Bill comes from the Americas; in his case, Jamaica. The United States is the object of so much scorn and hate among the white, university-educated British left. But for the African and Caribbean-rooted British left, the US is where African Americans on the liberal left could rise through the labour movement and the Democratic Party in a way that is still unthinkable in Britain.
Bill listened in his kind, patient way as I enthused about Clinton. After a dozen years of right-wing rule, he had proved it possible for the liberal left to win. Labour was where the Democrats and the labour movement had been a few years before. Why not learn from Clinton and the success of his new Democrats, I argued?
I tentatively suggested that we should organise a conference at the time of Clinton’s inauguration. To my delight, Bill– backed by the far-sighted Irvine – agreed and said the T&G would find £50,000 to sponsor the event and he would get trade union comrades in the US to help as well. The Clintonomics conference was held over a weekend in January 1993 at the QE2 centre. Luckily, John Prescott attacked us for importing American ideas. John’s outburst turned what might have been just another weekend conference into a political turning point. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as well as Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould, Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, and others who gave birth to New Labour, took part in workshops and plenary sessions chaired by Margaret Prosser and Jack Adams as well as the evening parties and get together breakfasts. The conference led the TV news and the Sunday papers devoted pages to the inauguration of what soon became the New Labour project. Arrogantly, New Labour historians have written Bill’s role as the midwife of the project out of their accounts. But it is unlikely that any other trade union leader then or now would have had the imagination to seize the possibility of opening the door to a new politics.
But, as Geoffrey Goodman’s sympathetic and generous biography shows, Bill Morris has spent his life seizing possibilities. No other British black citizen has risen so far and done so on his own merits and against great odds. Goodman is also a doughty campaigner against racism and, especially, the racism of anti-Semitism about which he has first hand experience. Trade unions barely exist today for our Oxford-educated media controllers. Judges can contemptuously overrule democratic ballot box strike decisions. But at the heart of the 20th century democratic project of the left, in all countries, lies the need to represent and articulate the voice of the workers.
Bill had to overcome racism in his own union as well as plots to defeat him as he sought the support of his members. Goodman reveals shocking details of the T&G hard left, as well as the old right, trying to smear him as they tried to stop Britain’s biggest union being led by a man who wasn’t white. Bill in turn helped prevent a putsch by the right to prevent John Monks becoming general secretary of the TUC. Tony Blair once told me that Monks was the only trade union leader he admired unreservedly. So just as Bill’s sponsorship of the Clintonomics conference helped bring about New Labour, his support for Monks gave Blair a key union ally. John Monks and Bill Morris later fell out with Blair – but that’s politics. What future historians need to recall is that the last big general secretary the T&G produced was a black immigrant who served his class, his party, his people and his nation to the highest degree.
