Trade Unions

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 19th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, who spoke earlier. Like my noble friend, I look forward very much to hearing more from her in the future. I was also delighted to hear the tone with which my noble friend Lord Foulkes introduced this debate. There is a Bill coming and we will have the opportunity to say things about it, but it is not a bad thing to remember that the trade unions are a part of our national life—not sectoral, not subdivisional but an integral part of our national life—and it is good that we hear the positive news.

I am therefore encouraged by my noble friend to bring up something that comes from a rather personal angle. I was 10 when my grandfather died. He had been a coal miner all his life and used to tell me, until I could tell the story off by heart, of how in 1910 at Penygraig in the Rhondda valleys he was one of those miners who came out on strike after there had been a lock-out. The miners were asking for 1 shilling and ninepence for mining a ton of coal. They were protesting that the price was not quite enough and the owners shut them out, so the workers came out on strike. My grandfather told me so graphically about Samuel Rhys, who died of a fractured skull right alongside him in the crowd. I am absolutely certain that every one of the 12,000 miners on strike that day told their grandchildren that they were next to Samuel Rhys. At the same time, at that very incident, the then Home Secretary ordered the British troops to move into the valleys. The Riot Act was read and bayonets were fixed. My grandfather could tell that story pretty graphically. I was only 10, but I remember it to its last detail.

The mining industry has gone. Traditional heavy industries are no more. The injustices—let us be honest, that is what they were—under which workers went down those mines continue to exist, but they have morphed into other places. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby mentioned some of those areas. If it is a matter of justice, the fight has to go on. The champions who are behind the standard that they raise in the name of justice must not be vilified because they are doing that.

I want to go on to pay tribute to one of my personal political heroes, who is almost never mentioned in Parliament but deserves to be recognised much more. He was Jim Griffiths—no relative of mine, although he lived in Burry Port where I grew up. As a coalminer himself, Jim Griffiths came up to become president of the federation of miners in South Wales and, in that way, he became Member of Parliament for Llanelli in the 1930s. With the Labour victory in 1945, Clement Attlee invited Jim Griffiths to take up office in the Foreign Office but he refused. Clem Attlee was a little surprised: “Well, what do you want?”, he said. “I want to do something for my people”, said this former trade union leader, and so he took on the job of Minister for National Insurance. Under his leadership, four of the six parts of the welfare state as envisaged by Beveridge were put into place. He implemented the Family Allowances Act and brought the Industrial Injuries Act, National Insurance Act and National Assistance Act on to the statute book. We know about Nye Bevan and 1948; we know about Rab Butler and 1944; but nobody knows about Jim Griffiths, who did all four of the other Acts, so I pay my tribute to him here.

However, let us remember that the welfare state was itself created to address those evils that are called poverty, ignorance, disease, squalor and idleness. Let nobody in this House pretend that that battle has been won. All of us who have our feet on the ground and visit people in their homes and neighbourhoods can point to places where the scourges of those particular enemies continue to have their place. We rejoice, however, that we have had 60 years of benefiting from the implementation of those measures to address those enemies, and we stand fearfully on the threshold of the dismantling of those measures in our own day—woe to all of us. Of course they need reform and can no longer hold up in the way that they were envisaged originally but, my goodness, we are going to be a fragmented society if we lose hold of that.

I then want to pay tribute to another Jim Griffiths: my brother, who was an area organiser for the GMB. He did not live long enough to get into the retired GMB members and join my noble friend but my brother, who failed the 11-plus and did hard work on a factory floor, managed to impress the union by his ability to communicate with fellow workers. He soon became a shop steward. I have been with him many times at 6 am, when the shift ended, as he tried to recruit new members for the union. I saw my younger brother stand on a soap-box and arraign them with his oratory: Griffiths the preacher listening to Griffiths the soap-box orator. He was so persuasive in helping the people coming through those factory gates to understand what the real benefits of joining a union were. He became an area organiser and this failure at school used to phone me to ask what I thought about John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant or Aristotle and Plato. He was offered a place at Ruskin College. We must not underestimate the contribution to the social fabric and leadership skills of this country that has come through the trade unions. They must not be typified and thought of exclusively in terms of certain well-rehearsed and well-publicised confrontational moments in our national life. There is far more to trade unions than that, and they ought to be honoured for it.

Finally, I pay my tribute to a Member of this House, Lord Murray of Epping Forest, a very close friend of mine. He attempted to work out something that he called pragmatic socialism in the social contract, which he played his part in establishing, and in attempts with the CBI to see that, across the employers/employees divide, there should be joint ways of solving our national problems. He had to endure the winter of discontent and understand how the new Prime Minister of 1979 had her own way of doing things. ACAS was formed in his time, but confrontation came out of the new political realities.

By paying tribute in this way to people who have touched my life, I should have added myself as a Methodist minister. Goodness me, where would the trade unions be without Methodists? One after another, they gave the public-speaking skills, organisational skills and self-confidence in public to working-class people who went on to found the Agricultural Labourers Union, the stonemasons union and, in Durham in 1832, the mineworkers union. All these things and so much more came from the Methodist Church—not Wesleyan Methodism, the posh bit that was going through a long mahogany phase, but the primitive Methodists who were out there doing their stuff in the highways and byways of the land. I owe to Methodism my self-confidence—I would not be standing here now without it—and Labour owes more to Methodism than to Marx, having come down the ILP route rather than the SDF route.

So, my friends, I just wanted to say how much I owe to the trade union movement, even though I was in it officially only as a junior member, aged 21. I was in the Association of University Teachers when I had a cameo career in that part of our life. I pay tribute to the trade unions and say that they must, in their stance for justice, continue to be approved, wanted and helped to morph into the modern realities that they face. God bless the trade unions and God bless this House, if it can see the good side of them.