New Labour, New Atlanticism: US and Tory intervention in the unions since the 1970s

All four of Tony Blair’s new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour’s Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The fourth, Dr John Reid, has spoken at TUCETU conferences. Peter Mandelson, the most important back-stage player in British politics, has written a pamphlet for the group. Meanwhile, ‘moderate’ campaigning in trade unions is partially bankrolled by a £35,000,000 Tory-controlled fund which also bestows its largesse on the Atlanticists. There is a considerable overlap of personal and funding with the TUCETU. The fingerprints of British and American spooks are everywhere to be found.(1)

The Dulverton Trust: Tory money for the union right

With the return of a Labour government, keeping the UK labour movement on side is back on the establishment agenda of both Britain and the USA. The task is relatively simple. The majority of trade union leaders are ideologically sympathetic to the present system. But even so, it is interesting to note how their loyalty is reinforced with relatively large sums of cash when necessary. There is a well-documented history of outside financial support for ‘moderate’ trade unionism, dating back at least to the First World War. Donors have included private enterprise, the political right, and both the British and US states. The trouble is that in most unions, the right relies on passive support from the membership rather than organised caucuses. Mail shots, meetings and canvassing all cost money, which cannot be met from union funds.(2) This is where the support networks step in. Hundreds of thousands of pounds are readily available to those who would keep the industrial peace.

Grant-seekers must apply to a panel of high-powered Conservatives. Trustees listed for 1994 include Lord Carrington, Foreign Secretary under Mrs Thatcher and currently Chair of the Bilderberg organisation; Lord Gowrie, former arts minister and chair of the Arts Council; and John Kemp-Wallace, former chair of the Stock Exchange. The income generated by Dulverton’s capital comes to well over £2,000,000 a year, which is dished out to mostly unexceptional causes. Who could object to the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, the British Dyslexia Foundation or the Hawk and Owl Trust? Rather more interesting is the noticeable bias towards religious organisations, including Christian fundamentalists. In addition a number of donations – to the complete satisfaction of the Charity Commissioners, of course – have been made to what are obviously partisan players in the British labour movement. These include the Industrial Trust, to all intents and purposes a charitable front organisation for IRIS, the British Atlantic Council, the parent body of TUCETU, and the Jim Conway Foundation.

IRIS and the Industrial Trust

The Industrial Trust is a registered charity set up as a conduit for the much older IRIS, an anti-left grouping supported by many prominent trade union leaders. Although IRIS was wound up in 1992, it was certainly active into the late 1980s.(4) IRIS began as a mid-1950s off-shoot of Common Cause, an alliance of Tory right-wingers, military men concerned about the strength of the Soviet Union and union officials worried about communist influence on their members.(5) Office space was provided at the London headquarters of the National Union of Seamen, which in those days was practically a company union.

The list of directors of IRIS reads like a who’s who of the British trade union right. They have included Lord Allen, general secretary of the shopworkers’ union USDAW from 1962-79; Walter Anderson, general secretary of the local government union NALGO from 1957-73 and on the TUC general council for much of that period; Sir John Boyd, general secretary of the AUEW from 1975-82, also on the TUC general council, a governor of the BBC and a director of British Steel; Terry Casey, general secretary of the teachers’ union NAS/UWT and vice-president of the pro-NATO teachers’ union international; Lord Collinson, general secretary of the agricultural workers’ union as was, and on the governing body of the UN’s International Labour Organisation throughout the 1960s; Ken Cure, an official of the AUEW and a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive; Lord Douglass, general secretary of the ISTC steel-workers’ union 1953-67 and sometime member of the Labour Party’s national executive and TUC general council; Ray Gunter, Minister of Labour in the first two Wilson governments; Owen O’Brien, general secretary of the printers’ union SOGAT; Bill Sirs, another ISTC general secretary; and Sir Jack Smart, a former leader of Wakefield Council and the Association of Metropolitan Authorities.(6)

Some IRIS office holders were entitled to retainers. Bill Sirs made up to £3,000 a year on top of his substantial union leader’s salary. Presumably this implies that the post was more than an honorary position. Sirs has denied that the organisation was involved with the government or the Conservatives during his time in office, but added that he willingly worked with industrialists and trade unionists to ensure that unions were run ‘in a moderate way’.(7)

Full details of business funding for IRIS in its early years are not public knowledge. But in 1964, former Labour cabinet minister Lord Shawcross – who subsequently defected to the Conservatives and embarked on a business career which at this stage put him in the Shell boardroom – arranged with Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan a payment to IRIS of £40,000, worth about £500,000 today.(8) Lord Shawcross revealed that IRIS was already getting money from major companies including Shell and Ford, but needed still more to pay for five full-time organisers to work against the communists in the Amalgamated Engineering Union and others, including the National Union of Mineworkers.(9)

I am unaware of any detailed research on the activities of IRIS from this point onwards until the 1980s.(10) But perhaps its most important service to the establishment was its efforts to undermine support for the NUM during the miners’ strike of 1984-5, one of the turning points in post-war British history. Using the argument that his members’ jobs were at risk, Bill Sirs helped to set up a number of local level deals with area officials of the NUM, which maintained the supply of coal to Britain’s steel mills. Another IRIS director, Ken Cure of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, sat on the Labour Party’s ruling national executive throughout the dispute. Sirs was on the TUC general council. Thus IRIS had access to the internal deliberations of the highest bodies in the labour movement.

The Industrial Trust

In the wake of the Tory victory over the NUM, Lord Shawcross seemingly decided to organise a regular conduit for big business donations to IRIS, in the form of a registered charity, the Industrial Trust. Signatories to the trust deed include Shawcross and his Shell colleague Sir John Greenborough, president of the Confederation of British Industry at the start of the Thatcher era; former Labour minister and later Coal Board chair, Lord Robens; Baron McAlpine of Moffat, father of the Thatcher fund-raiser Lord McAlpine of West Green and a man with extensive nuclear power industry connections; and Lord Boyd-Carpenter, then chair of the Tory backbenchers in the House of Lords and father of Baroness Hogg, wife of former agriculture secretary Douglas Hogg and later head of the Downing Street Policy Unit. The ruling council of the Trust has included: Glaxo chief executive Sir Austin Bide; BP chairman and P & O director Peter Cazalet; Bass chair Derek Palmer; Sir Duncan McDonald of NEI; Ronald Utting of the TI group and the National Grid; Lord Hanson’s father, Robert; and ship-owner Sir John Ferguson Denholm.(11)

The Industrial Trust functioned as a collection box for big business payments. As well as the Dulverton Trust, donors to the Industrial Trust included Allied Lyons, Bass, Boots, BP, Cadbury Schweppes, Cunard, GKN, Glaxo, Grand Metropolitan, Guinness, Hanson, ICI, Metal Box, NEI, P & O, Rugby Portland, Scottish and Newcastle, TI Group, Unilever, United Biscuits, United Newspapers and Whitbread. In its first year, the trust raised £131,871. Some £116,000 went straight to IRIS. In 1985-6, IRIS was given £132,000 in three instalments from a total of £147,200. In 1986/7, the trust took in £134,670 and gave IRIS £132,000.

In March 1988 the Industrial Trust was the subject of a Charity Commission investigation. It took three years for the findings that ‘on balance’ the money had been properly applied, to be published. There was ‘no evidence of any connection between the trust and the Conservative or any other political party.’ The unwelcome attention ensured that direct donations to IRIS from the Industrial Trust stopped in 1988-89. Instead, most of the money raised went to the Kennington Industrial Company, which passed on the bulk to……IRIS.

Press reports of the period also detailed how Kennington helped fund British Briefing, a newsletter established by right-wing activist David Hart, which maintained that the likes of mainstream Labour MP Bryan Gould were irredeemable crypto-communists. The editor was Charles Elwell, former head of MI5’s F branch, which counters ‘domestic subversion’. Rupert Murdoch was another reported source of funds.(12) The Hart connection provides another link to the miners’ strike: Hart was the organiser of the strike-breaking Working Miners’ Committee.

The Jim Conway Foundation

Between 1979 and 1994, Dulverton made annual donations of anything from £28,000 to £58,000 to the Jim Conway Foundation (JCF). JCF is a labour movement research body that forms the trade union right’s equivalent of the Labour Research Department. It is named after the late general secretary of the engineering union, who started out as a communist and metamorphosed into an outspoken red-baiter.(13) Conway died in the Paris air disaster of 1974, alongside his mistress, on the way back from a dirty weekend. His widow was subsequently given a place on the JCF board.

No-one can object to its earnest research and papers on such worthy topics as ‘Shiftwork Innovations in the Chemical Industry’, ‘The Extent of Trade Union Influence over Technological Change’: An Anglo-German Comparison’, and ‘Contemporary Developments in Training and Skill Development: UK and Overseas’. But the foundation’s political activities are rather more interesting.

JCF facilitated contacts between anti-Scargill factions of the NUM and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the wealthy foundation for the promotion of social democracy linked to the German SPD.(14) On its own admission, ‘since 1977 the Jim Conway Foundation had had an ongoing exchange programme with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, long before the FES opened its London office in 1987.'(15) JCF has also taken cash from the Foreign Office to provide training for the Romanian trade union confederation Blocukl National Sindical, running courses under titles such as ‘Transition to a market economy’.(16)

Affiliation to JCF costs individuals just £8.00 per year, and entitles them to a range of education services, a monthly report, and various discussion and background papers. Not available to individual subscribers is another service, ‘access to research and information service – all enquiries on a confidential basis’. Just what research and information is on offer is not stated.

The Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding: Atlanticism in the 1990s

US intervention has been a pervasive feature of the British labour movement since the early post WW2 years.(17) The best known version of this project in recent years had been the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, the fore-runner of today’s TUCETU. TUCETU is organised by two officials of the Atlantic Council, which has the astonishing ‘charitable purpose’ of building support for NATO. It incorporates Peace Through NATO, the group central to Michael Heseltine’s MoD campaign against CND in the early 1980s. It receives over £100,000 a year from the Foreign Office, as well as payments from the Dulverton Trust.(18) TUCETU chair Alan Lee Williams was a Labour defence minister under Callaghan who defected to the SDP. He now describes himself as a defence consultant. Director Peter Robinson runs the National Union of Teachers’ education centre at Stoke Rochford near Grantham.

In the mid-1980s Williams and Robinson sat alongside no less a luminary than future US vice president Dan Quayle on the European policy group of a Washington think-tank known as the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Other members of that policy group included former Labour cabinet member Peter Shore and electricians’ union leader Eric Hammond, both now in the House of Lords; Lord Hugh Thomas, chair of the Centre for Policy Studies under Thatcher; Ray Whitney, a Conservative MP and one-time head of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department; former CIA director James Schlesinger; another well known CIA man, Ray Cline; Robert McFarlane, former US National Security Adviser; and Irving Brown, former head of the international work of the AFL-CIO, the American TUC and a well known CIA figure in the post-war labour movement.

Among the senior union and Labour Party figures on the TUCETU’s 1995 notepaper are Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers; CPSA general secretary Barry Reamsbottom (a member of the Successor Generation Project discussed above) and president Marion Chambers; Lord Richard, Labour leader in the House of Lords; former AEEU officials Bill Jordan (now head of the International Confederation of Free Trade Union, the CIA’s chief post-war labour movement operation), Lord (Eric) Hammond and Lord (Frank) Chapple;(19) John Gilbert, then a Labour MP and now Lord Gilbert, Tony Blair’s defence procurement minister; Italian Euro-commissioner Carlo Ripa Di Meana; and former Portuguese president Mario Soares, recently alleged to have been an asset of the CIA.(20)

TUCETU’s roots lie in the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU), set up in 1976 by the late Joe Godson, labour attaché at the US embassy and highly active in Labour politics from the Gaitskell period onwards. As TUCETU put it, LCTU was formed ‘in order to develop a better understanding of the objectives and the democratic values of the Western Alliance in the ranks of the socialist and trade union movements in Europe and their counterparts in the United States.'(21) Further extracts from this summary of LCTU’s activities are worth quoting at length:

‘Since its formation, the committee has distributed a press service which provided news and analyses about the Altantic community amongst trade unionists, union editors and parliamentarians….(22) The committee has also held regular seminars for senior British trade unionists, as well as a variety of conferences on specific issues of concern to the Atlantic community. A number of international conferences have also been held in various European centres….The committee has also issued several pamphlets on trade union and Alliance issues. An extensive programme of briefings at SHAPE /NATO have also been held during the last two decades….The committee will continue to work closely with all those union leaders and politicians who understand why western values and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation are worth defending.’

LCTU first came to public attention in 1980, when it was revealed that it had received £32,000 from NATO. In 1985 LCTU received $49,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government organisation established during President Reagan’s term of office to do the kind of political funding done by the CIA in the first Cold War.(23) More recent traceable activities include a conference in January 1992 at Robinson’s Stoke Rochford centre under the title ‘Whose New World Order?'(24) Speakers included Sir John Killick, former British ambassador to both the USSR and NATO; Moray Stewart, second permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence and a UK delegate to NATO under the Heath government; Jamie Shea, designated ‘special projects officer, secretary general’s office, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ and Dr. John Reid MP, now Blair’s armed forces minister.

The spotlight was again thrown on TUCETU in 1995, when left-wingers on the executive of the Civil and Public Service Association accidentally came across the organisation’s request to the CPSA to renew its subscription. This also detailed a joint forum at the House of Commons with the Atlantic Council. The main speaker was Tory defence minister Dudley Smith. Peter Robinson added: ‘I am hopeful that through the good offices of Dan Turnquist, the Counsellor for Labour Affairs at the American embassy, we will have an opportunity in the near future of meeting the current ambassador, Hon. Admiral Crowe. I will keep you posted.'(25) TUCETU is also clearly in touch with Peter Mandelson, whose speech to a 1996 TUCETU conference has been reproduced as a pamphlet. There is a nice historical resonance here. Mandelson’s grandfather, Labour cabinet minister Herbert Morrison, wrote a pamphlet for IRIS in the late 1950s.

The Atlantic Council/TUCETU network has proved to be New Labour’s Ministry of Defence in waiting, taking up where Alan Lee Williams left off. Defence secretary George Robertson was a member of the Council of the Atlantic Committee from 1979-90; Lord Gilbert, minister of state for defence procurement, is listed as TUCETU vice chair; Dr John Reid, minister of state for the armed forces, spoke at a TUCETU conference; and MoD press office biographical notes on John Speller state that he ‘has been a long standing member of the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding’.

Conclusion

These are just some of the right-wing and intelligence efforts to suborn the trade union and Labour Party Right in recent decades. So, should anyone take notice of any of the above? Radical trade unionists and Labour Party members, at the least, certainly should. The whole purpose of trade unions is to be independent workers’ organisations standing up for the interests of their membership. Attempts to reduce them to conveyor belts for ruling class interests and ideologies not only negate their very object, but are uncomfortably reminiscent of the role of labour movements under totalitarianism. Trade unions hog-tied to employers and the state can scarcely be worth having.

Notes

1. These claims are detailed below. A whole swathe of both ostensibly fearless, radical periodicals and mainstream journals have declined to publish the material in this article. Most of the research underpinning this was carried out two years ago, when I had more spare time than at present, and has not been updated. Because I am a journalist rather than an academic, some of the references may be considered less than rigorous, especially those based on private correspondence. But all the information is contained in two over-flowing box files. Interested parties – especially those with further information – are welcome to get in touch through Lobster.
2. What about the Left? The relatively limited amount of radical trade union activity in Britain today is largely funded by the activists concerned, with perhaps limited subsidy from members of far left groups. It is now incontrovertible that the once powerful Communist Party of Great Britain industrial machine had financial support from the USSR, although the extent of this backing has yet to be quantified. See The Enemy Within: the Secret War Against the Miners by Seamus Milne (Verso, London 1994), which shows that substantial Soviet state cash was made available for the miners strike as recently as 13 years ago.
3. Its 1994 accounts record a net worth of £35,302,092. The Dulverton Trust’s accounts are available for public inspection on application to the Charity Commissioners for England and Wales. Its registered charity number is 206426. It has never made any grants to the left that I can trace. Dulverton rates a couple of mentions in Brian Crozier’s memoirs Free Agent (HarperCollins, London, 1993). Crozier speaks highly of General Douglas Brown, manager of the trust in the late 1970s, who was able to facilitate contacts with the Shah of Iran at the time when Iran was on the brink of revolution (p. 157). General Brown also gave a crucial £50,000 donation to Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict in 1978 (p. 174).
4. On IRIS see my ‘Anti-red and alive’ in New Statesman 10 February 1995.
5. IRIS and Common Cause have been extensively documented in Lobster. See ‘In a Common Cause’ in Lobster 19, the slightly updated section in the Lobster special issue, The Clandestine Caucus, and, on IRIS, the Peter Newell piece in Lobster 31.
6. This list was compiled by a trawl of Companies House microfiche records. A number of other people with common christan names and surnames are also listed, whom I suspect, but cannot be certain, were public figures. In ‘Anti-red and alive’ (see note 4 above) I mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that IRIS director Walter Marshall was Lord Walter Marshall, chair of the Central Electricity Generating Board.
7. Milne, note 2, p. 488, as part of the postscript added to the paperback edition (Pan, London, 1995).
8. Seamus Milne in the Guardian 2 January 1995 and the Mail on Sunday 1 January 1995. The latter was actually a more detailed piece. This deal came to light when 1964 government papers were released under the 30 year rule.
   Did state funding for IRIS continue under Wilson, who openly expressed his fear of communist manipulation of the 1966 seamen’s strike before the House of Commons? A thorough search of the 1965 and 66 papers at the Public Records Office is called for.
9. As a former full-time employee of a Trotskyist organisation, my best guess is that the far left in Britain today pays around 100 agitators to devote their energies to the class struggle, albeit with minimal effect. 15 years ago the figure would probably have been double that. How many were engaged in such efforts in 1964?
10. This is another potentially fruitful area of research. The basic financial picture could be pieced together through Charity Commissioners and Companies House records. There are also partial back files of the group’s publication, IRIS News, at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford and the Labour Research Department in London. IRIS News carried detailed analyses of the strength of the left in various unions, and reprinted union and Communist Party internal elections results in full. If there were any full-time organisers at this stage, they certainly weren’t providing their employers with the inside track through their public output.
11. Industrial Trust deed, lodged with the Charity Commissioners.
12. See the Guardian 7 February 1991 and the Observer 16 December 1990.
13. See Conway’s obituary in The Times in 1974.
14. Documentary evidence of this, including attendance lists at JCF seminars, is in the possession of the Scargill camp. I have copies. The NUM left believes – but cannot prove – that the JCF funded John Walsh’s campaign against Scargill for the NUM presidency in 1988. JCF has proved remarkably touchy on this subject. See the letter from JCF director Andy Woods (former Conway sidekick in the AUEW) to Frank Watters (veteran CPGB organiser in the Yorkshire coalfields and Scargill’s early mentor) of 21 May 1991. Walsh, incidentally, took part in a 14-day tour of the US for British trade unionists organised by the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding. See Tribune 30 September 1988. More on LCTU below.
15. Photocopied clipping from the JCF bulletin, which I did not bother to date. The original is in the Labour Research Department archive.
16. This is detailed in a circa 1995 issue of the JCF bulletin. Also see Financial Times 8 July 1992, ‘AEEU to assist unions in Romania’. Although the JCF isn’t mentioned, its umbilical ties to the engineering union make some sort of connection almost certain.
17. See The Clandestine Caucus (note 5) and the 1982 Militant Tendency pamphlet, CIA Infiltration of the Labour Movement, which includes a reprint of the locus classicus on this theme, Richard Fletcher’s article ‘Who Were They Travelling With?’
18. On the more recent activities of the Atlantic Council, see ‘Rifkind Denies Eurosceptic Line’ in the Financial Times 3 November 1995. Then foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind told the Atlantic Council’s annual conference that his support for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA was not ‘at the expense of our participation in the European Union.’
19. The prevalance of AEEU officials in the groupings examined in this article raises an interesting question. In the mid-1980s, the electricians’ union – which subsequently merged with the engineers to form the present AEEU – was expelled from the TUC because of its predeliction for single union deals and poaching members of other unions. There was widespread talk at this time that the two unions, in cahoots with the breakaway miners’ union the UDM, were plotting a rival union federation to the TUC. How far did such plans advance? What role would IRIS, JCF and the LCTU have played in it?
20. See ‘Bombshell book says Soares had links to CIA’ in the Guardian 7 February 1996.
21. The press service function appears to echo similar efforts by the Foreign Office’s now defunct Information Research Department (on which see The Clandestine Caucus) and various efforts by Brian Crozier. I have written for labour movement publications for over a decade, including Red Pepper, Tribune, New Statesman, the Morning Star and a number of trade union journals. Somehow TUCETU appears to have omitted them from its mailing
    list.
22. NED also provided $129,000 to the far right Russian emigré organisation NTS, later involved in the 1990 attempt to smear Arthur Scargill.
23. At this stage TUCETU did not incorporate the words ‘and European’ into its title, and was billed as the Trades Union Committee for Transatlantic Understanding. A copy of the conference programme was obtained and circulated by the Campaign for a Democratic and Fighting Union, a left faction of the National Union of Teachers.
24. Letter from Robinson – presumably a circular to affiliates – 3 May 1995.