Extract from New Left Review 1/53 Jan/Feb 1969
Keir Starmer frequently mentions that his father was a toolmaker, although likely in a small tool shop rather than the factory described below. A reminder though that toolmakers were union men (and sometimes women) often well read and quite often seeing things through a socialist perspective. They certainly don’t deserve the enormous condecension of posterity
The work environment of the toolmaker is, compared to that of men operating machines against the clock, quite conducive to reflection and conversation. The men I worked with were, for the most part, only interested in their personal lives, and in their working-class subculture which ranged from football to beer drinking, with a smattering of pigeon fancying and aggressive sexuality. They were not for the most part, thank God, made up of that mixture of piety and self-help which the Victorian middle classes so admired in the ‘superior artisan’. But quite a few had managed to steer a middle course between the excessively physical and the excessively Calvinistic aspects of working-class culture. And one such workmate, widely read and with considerable practical experience in workers’ organization, undertook my political education. He was about 50 years old, the son of an Irish docker and one of a very large family. He had left school during the First World War and managed to obtain a skilled apprenticeship, despite his background, because of the munitions boom. During the inter-war period he had suffered long spells of unemployment, and Love on the Dole was very much the story of his life. While a still very young man he had abandoned an ancestral faith in Rome, for a burning faith in socialism. For him, socialism was a religion far removed from the economic rationale of the Fabians.
Under his guidance I began to read my way through his personal library. I cut my teeth on a battered copy of Robert Blatchford’s Merry England, before grinding my way painfully through Engels’ Condition of the Working-Class in England. And under the pretence of consulting him about a tool I was making, we would discuss what I had read. Years later I understood how unfortunate the undergraduate is in trying to learn politics in a university. He will never savour a real educational experience such as I enjoyed
. Not only did I receive a wonderful introduction to the world of books, but my ‘mentor’ also persuaded me to join the union as a junior member. Not that I needed much persuasion, for I had long been fascinated by the huddled dinner-break meetings at which my benchmate, the shop steward, would make slightly pompous speeches. For me the union was never the purely economic institution concerned only with getting larger earnings that the middle-classes naively believe it to be. Certainly, the union was the organization which we looked to in the struggle to increase wages, but it was by no means its only function, and perhaps not even its prime function. For me the union was ‘us’ and ‘ours’. It stood between us and the power of the foreman and undermanagers to direct us at will. It was the collective instrument by which we asserted our right partly to control our daily destiny. The union stood between us and that concept of slavery and degradation called ‘managerial prerogative’. We never really believed that the union could do any more than hold the ring on the question of wage levels. If the union had really possessed that ‘dangerous power’ to ‘blackmail’ employers into paying high wages, so avidly believed by the middle classes, why then has the proportion of national income going to wage earners remained basically unchanged for more than a century? Indeed, one of the first political truths to hit me was the impotency of the trade union movement to change fundamentally the lot of the working class. For a change in ‘the system’ the movement would have to rely upon its child: the Labour Party. And every parent knows how difficult it is to fashion children in their own image.
The satisfaction membership of the union gave me cannot be separated from the satisfaction given me by membership of the workgroup. At the bottom of the instinct for trade unionism lies the instinct of the worker to be a fully integrated creative being, finding his salvation through work. Unfortunately, the normal lot of the industrial worker is a very unsatisfactory work experience of performing a fragmented task under conditions he can only marginally control. The union assists him in the struggle to assert his personality over these forces which threaten to disintegrate his wholeness. Fortunately, being an apprentice craftsman, I was saved from the type of work which so quickly destroys the creative personalities of so many industrial workers. My work was satisfying to a surprisingly high degree, and this was reinforced by the ‘intellectual’ discussions I was able to have with my ‘tutor’ without authority being able to detect them. A further factor which enabled me to reach out to that personal fulfilment denied to so many in that cavern of a factory was the making of ‘foreigners’.
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