Comrades in Conflict: Labour, the Trade Unions, and 1969's "In Place of Strife" by Peter Dorey (review)

For three decades, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the "labour question" was at the heart of British politics. The industrial role of trade unions, their impact on economic performance, their influence over public policy, and, perhaps most urgently, their role in provoking or limiting strikes, were central political issues, heavily discussed in party manifestos, media commentary, and even popular culture. A plausible case can be made that the strike capacity of the labor movement played a key role in bringing down three governments, two Labour and one Conservative, in the 1970, 1974, and 1979 general elections. Ultimately, it ushered Margaret Thatcher and a more radical, neoliberal Conservative Party into power.

The role of trade unions first took center stage in the second half of the 1960s (though there were plenty of skirmishes prior to that), when the Labour government of Harold Wilson tried to introduce a set of industrial-relations reforms that would both offer some new rights and protections to unions but also create statutory processes to limit strikes, particularly those not given official sanction by trade unions themselves. The government white paper laying out its proposals was titled "In Place of Strife," and for the first half of 1969, until the government humiliatingly withdrew its legislative proposals and agreed to allow the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to police itself, it was the most divisive issue in British politics. That initial defeat set the stage for subsequent, equally unsuccessful, reform efforts in the 1970s and then for the legislative assault on trade unionism that came from Conservative governments between 1980 and 1993. This assault, for better or worse, settled the labor question such that it has played a far smaller part of British political debate over the past two decades.

Peter Dorey has written the first book-length account of the origins, content, and outcome of "In Place of Strife" since Peter Jenkins's journalistic account published in 1970. Published fifty years later, Dorey's book has the benefit of access to government papers that were closed for decades, as well as the personal papers of key actors. That has permitted him to write a detailed, day-by-day, and, at some points, hour-by-hour account of how the debate over industrial relations legislation played out within the cabinet, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and the trade-union movement. It is a thrilling story, though, since we know the outcome it has a tragic quality. This book will not change how we understand the way events played out, but it fills in many details of the thinking and motivations of important actors. It particularly focuses on Barbara Castle, whose job was shepherding the legislation through; Jim Callahan, its chief cabinet opponent; and the civil servants and members of the TUC General Council who were drawn into battle. The book reminds us how important the political battle was, and how, with the benefit of hindsight, "In Place of Strife" was a path not taken that helped pave the way for Thatcherism.

The structure of the book is broadly chronological. It begins with growing political concern over unofficial strikes and their economic consequences and notes one of the central paradoxes of British industrial relations: the widespread public belief that unions were too strong in the context of a trade-union structure. In reality, the TUC had very limited authority over its affiliates, and individual unions had limited control over their members. The book then discusses the Donovan Commission, created by the Labour government in the hope that it would provide intellectual cover for legislation to curb strikes. It was heavily influenced, however, by the British Pluralist school of industrial relations that was dubious of the power of legislative sanctions and emphasized the need to integrate informal union workplace power structures into more formal industrial-relations institutions, a diagnosis that was...