‘Trades Union Congress has modified massively – nevertheless it’s not all for the higher’

Brighton 2024 is my 50-somethingth Trades Union Congress, and my, is it different to the old days.

The image, and the reality, has changed. No flat caps, no smoke-filled conference hall – and half the delegates are women. This is a different “parliament of labour” as its champions like to call the show. Even the slogan “Changing the world of work for good” is slicker.

But is it any better? I look back over half a century and wonder. Portsmouth 1969 was my baptism with the beer ’n’ sandwiches brigade, though I vaguely recall a special conference in Croydon the year before, called to defy Barbara Castle’s law reforms?

We were in Pompey at the wish of the outgoing general secretary, delphic George Woodcock, whose majestic eyebrows made Denis Healey jealous. I confess to bunking off one afternoon to visit the Isle of Wight Festival, but it was duller than the TUC debate on equal pay, and that lasted longer than the Trojan Wars.

The 1970s were the heyday of Congress, when membership of trade unions topped twelve million and leaders like Jack Jones of the TGWU, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, handlebar-moustachioed Tom Jackson of the posties, and Joe Gormley of the NUM were household names.

But they weren’t the best speakers. That palm goes to Rodney Bickerstaffe, Buddy Holly-look alike, charismatic champion of low-paid public service workers and founder leader of Unison, and Lawrence Daly, brilliant spokesman for the miners. I can still hear their thrilling voices.

Arthur Scargill was the greatest ranter, but his style wasn’t to everybody’s taste, and he didn’t resonate outside conference. Arguably the least riveting was quiet-spoken David Basnett of the GMB, nick-named “the bishop”. He was hardly audible, and a good thing too, scoffed critics of his moderate views.

The action then was inside the hall. The Beeb and ITV screened live debates on controversial issues like anti-union law reform and the restrictive incomes policies so beloved of Tory and Labour governments alike. Remember them?

And there was no Edinburgh-style “fringe” as there is now. These days the conference centre looks like Leipzig Trade Fair with lavish stalls supporting – or opposing – every issue from nuclear power to animal cruelty.

What’s more, sideshow political meetings morning, noon and night, where Labour wannabees strut their stuff, were positively frowned upon. This wasn’t the party conference, though the unions ran that, too.

Instead of lectures from ambitious suits of both sexes, there were, frankly, blokes’ union p***-ups, where you drank with deglegates (as Hugh Scanlon memorably called them). And nobody who saw Jimmy Airlie, hero of the Upper-Clyde Shipbuilders work-in, in cabaret at the bank employees’ bash will ever forget it. As funny as his old workmate, Billy Connolly.

Why was Jimmy appearing there? He’d been a batman to the bank workers’ union leader Leif Mills while in the services. They were from opposite ends of the industrial spectrum, but that was the spirit of this annual gathering by the seaside. Comradeship.

In my time – I attended as Labour Editor of The Times for 16 years, before being exiled to the Far East after the Miners’ Strike for Jobs of ’84/85 and then sacked for joining the Wapping strike against Rupert Murdoch – it was always in a holiday resort, usually Blackpool or Brighton, and whole families sometimes took it as their holiday.

We were always made welcome in working men’s clubs, but the theatre sometimes found its way into the bars. I recall turning up in Blackpool’s Yates Wines Lodge for a morning heart-starter, to be told by the manager: ”You press boys should have been in here last night!”

Why? “An IRA bomber threw a Molotov cocktail into the bar.” Jings, what happened? “It was OK, one of the regulars drank it before it could go off.” Boom, boom! We retold that story every year.

We only saw the political correspondents when the Labour leader came to town. He always attends the TUC general council’s private dinner, but speaks to Congress only every other year, as he is due to do this week.

It’s always a bet on who might walk out in protest at some policy or other. They don’t like being told off for being what they are – representatives of millions of workpeople. They get enough of that at work.

It helps if the leader has a genuine sense of humour, rather than Tony Blair’s manufactured jokes. I remember the late John Smith coming to a GMB drinks do in the basement of a Blackpool hotel, when they were serving draught John Smith’s bitter.

The snappers urged him to pull a pint, but his spin doctor advised him not to. F*** off, he countered, and strode behind the bar, saying “This what you want lads?” It was a hit.

I’m now on my eighth general secretary. George Woodcock, the philosopher of Congress House, once asked at a Press conference: “What are we here for?” I thought he was there to tell us. After him came wily Vic (later Lord) Feather – full name Victor Grayson Hardie Feather, like Sir Keir Starmer, he was called after the great socialist pioneer but his second name.

Then it was Len Murray, probably the best of the lot, in my experience. If the TUC is, as is argued, the civil service of the labour movement, then he was its finest Permanent Secretary: unflappable, a canny Shropshire lad, forever with a cheroot in his hand, like Tory Ken Clarke.

He was followed by Norman Willis, the first “political” appointee, from the TGWU, then John (now Lord) Monks, Brendan (now Sir) Barber and the first woman in the post, Frances (now Lady) O’Grady, who gave way to the current general secretary Paul Novak.

In those days, they were all men, of course. It wasn’t unusual for general council members to be knights or even lords. Sir Sidney Greene, laconic (and that’s an overstatement) railwaymen’s leader, was a member of the court of the Bank of England. Respectable, or what?

And what men they sometimes were. Welsh giant Hector Smith, the blast furnace men’s leader who looked as if he’d just been cast in iron, was an ex-Guardsman captured by the Nazis in WW2. He escaped east, and joined the partisans.

When his lads in the state-owned British Steel Corporation came out on strike in the early seventies, the posties had just been beaten, and received wisdom said you couldn’t beat the government. “Look you,” he said to me. “We don’t just post letters, you know.”

Neither do the posties, they deliver them. But I got his point. The BSC caved in after three days. His union, like so many others, in the print, engineering, power supply, agriculture and construction, is just one section of mighty Unite.

And despite growing numbers in work, membership of trade unionism is less than half the figure achieved in the TUC’s heyday, a victim of the decimation of our basic industries, hostile employers, Tory anti-union laws and the spread of Thatcherite attitudes. I’m All Right Jack writ large.

From where will come change for the better? Today, the two top trade union jobs are held by women – Sharon Graham of Unite and Christine McAnea of Unison. I’m sure they will command the attention and support of Congress just as well as the men who went before, but who will hear them?

For years I sat at a bench below the platform, taking shorthand notes to record the speeches and votes. That doesn’t happen any more. The telly stopped showing live debates years ago, and most newspapers hardly mention the conference, except for the Labour leader’s speech, or to slag off any signs of militancy. It may not be a conspiracy of silence to gag the positive message of “the workers’ parliament”, but it amounts to the same thing.