Weekly Worker 576 Thursday May 12 2005

Where now for FBU?

On May 6, Matt Wrack ousted Andy Gilchrist as general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union. Gilchrist had been deeply compromised both by his disastrous leadership of the union during the bitter pay dispute of 2003-04 and by a witch-hunt launched against the left in the aftermath of that debacle. In a relatively high turnout of more than 20,000 firefighters (out of a 55,000 membership), comrade Wrack polled 12,833 votes, Gilchrist 7,259 - a convincing margin.
On the eve of the union’s four-day conference in Southport, Mark Fischer spoke to Paul Embery - FBU London region committee member and prominent alongside Matt Wrack in the militant rank and file group, Grassroots FBU, that was forced to close in the face of disciplinary threats from the Gilchrist leadership (see Weekly Worker February 10)

Matt Wrack: victory

First of all, congratulations are in order, of course. A victory - but what accounts for it?
The first thing to say is that there is no doubt that the outcome of the pay dispute played a big part in the election. There is a huge amount of anger against the ex-leadership of the union because of their role, first, in the way the dispute was handled and, second, in the consequences of the defeat - consequences we are now dealing with daily in our workplaces.

We’ve always said that you can’t kid people. There was propaganda coming down from the leadership of the union telling us the result was not so bad, that we had achieved ‘three and half’ of the four pillars of the pay claim, etc. But FBU members are not stupid. They are at the ‘coal face’ every day - they know whether we have got a result or not. They see it in their conditions of service, in reductions in cover coming about in their fire stations every day as a direct result of the pay dispute.

Then you have a union leadership telling them that everything’s fine, that we have won improvements. You can’t tell people nonsense and expect them to believe it - that’s what reflected in this election result.
Many members knew that Matt was an outspoken critique of the national leadership during the dispute. They knew that he called for a very different approach at the time of the dispute, not with the benefit of hindsight. And members saw that he was proved right, so they are now prepared to put their faith in him.

The ex-leadership actually had a very Stalinist-style approach. They were basically telling the membership that their real conditions, their experience of daily work, didn’t matter. Even though the leadership were working at head office, drawing a salary over two times the size of firefighters, insulated from what is going on in the stations, they felt themselves better qualified to tell the members that they had won a good deal. Well, now the members have spoken …

That’s a general problem though, isn’t it? Trade union officials - however left, or well intentioned - become insulated from their membership by their lifestyle, the circles they mix in and the deals they do. Remember Scargill post-1984-85 telling the miners that they had not been defeated? That clashed with their daily experiences in the pits as well. One of the ways to counteract that is a politically engaged, independent rank and file …
Well, we need to be totally honest about this. Our members have taken a huge knock. Our union has taken a hammering over the last three years. Our rank and file have very bad experiences of striking.

The FBU membership is not going to be champing at the bit to be walking out of the door on every issue that pops up. That’s an inevitable consequence of their experiences over the last three years. Who can blame them? Last time they struck, they lost £1,000 on the picket line, they lost far more than that in terms of conditions of service. The media crucified them and they took an absolute hammering on all fronts.
Inevitably, it is going to take some time for our members to build up the confidence to really have a fight. I think one particular issue that firefighters are prepared to have a go on is pensions. It’s a very big thing with them - probably priority number one at the present time. It is one of the few things that I find that members around the country are prepared to countenance industrial action over.

Although I wouldn’t say it is unanimous, the feeling is that pensions is a big issue, with members standing to lose thousands of pounds and having to work longer, for less benefit. In the FBU, we haven’t had an intensive campaign over the issue yet - we need one.

Of course, we have to be clear. We still have an executive council that is largely made up of people who were in control during the strike. They remain very loyal to Andy Gilchrist, even though he has gone. So, even if the members are prepared to have a fight on pensions, they are going to come up against that bloc on the executive council.

And we shouldn’t forget that this executive have had their fingers burned as well. They led a dispute that they were confident of winning in the beginning, but they ended up being absolutely hammered as a group by the government and its media. We have certainly seen since the end of the dispute that those EC members have been very cautious about fighting on new issues. So the job is to get past them, to go beyond the EC members, not simply giving the rank and file the go-ahead. There is definitely a mood of ‘What have we got to lose in taking industrial action over this question?’

‘Moods’ are one thing; getting action is another, though. Over the past few years, we have seen a series of ‘awkward’ leaders elected to lead various important unions. So the rank and file have expressed an anti-Blairite rebellion in the ballot box, which is good. But - as we have subsequently seen - this is not an expression of the fact that the rank and file is gagging for action, is confident or self-assertive in any way.
On that, the interesting thing about the FBU is that the membership did not lose the dispute: the leadership did. They capitulated. The members were willing to fight to the last. We took 15 days strike action and every time, picket lines were solid. We were never in a position where people were drifting back to work, or the strike was split. The membership were never beaten: it was the leaders that refused to fight any more.

We have always had a membership that has been prepared to fight on certain questions. Had it been a case that the membership had been beaten or the rank and file decided to cave in, then what you are saying about the situation in other unions with ‘awkward’ leaders would fit. With all the qualifications I have already made about the mood in the union, I think the situation is different with us. I am confident that we have had a membership that is prepared to fight and a leadership that wasn’t.

The interesting thing about the pensions issue is that it is a general question facing other sections of the working class. Members have emphasised to me that if industrial action is taken, we don’t want to be going out the door on our own. We really need to be part of a TUC-coordinated campaign. That has its logistical and political difficulties, obviously. But our members are starting from the point where they want to take action with other public sector unions. Also there is a real sense that the Blair government is now weakened after the general election …

But on that general political context, there has been talk of a new workers’ party floating around for some time now. And that’s a key question, isn’t it? At the end of the day, any trade union leader - Matt included - is subject to all sorts of pressures to compromise and do unprincipled deals. There are no guarantees in politics, of course, but a working class party has a discipline and a general programme - not simply on trade union issues - that leaders can be judged against. So militant trade unionism is one thing, but what about this question of a party of the class?
When you speak to FBU members about politics in general at the moment, the Labour government and the need for an alternative, I find they are very cynical. Although it’s wrong, their experiences of two, three years ago have led to the conclusion that politicians are all liars, they are all the same, that our unions should be concentrating solely on bread and butter industrial issues.

Now you can understand that reaction because of the bitter experiences of the union members with what politicians have done to them. The decision to disaffiliate from the Labour Party last year has in many ways liberated brigade officials and ordinary members. Previously, every official in the union was compelled to recommend a vote for Labour, even in local elections where the Labour councillors were the people who were driving through cuts in your fire authority, for example.

That crazy situation actually had the effect of switching a large number of people off from politics. They felt alienated from the ‘vote Labour’ advice of their own union - they could see what the Labour Party was actually doing to the union around the country. So, it is certainly an improvement that now we actually have the space to have a political debate with people where they actually feel their view about who we should politically support matters.

Previously, supporting anyone else apart from Labour - the Green Party, the Scottish Socialist Party, Respect or whatever - was simply banned without any discussion. So disaffiliation has at least opened up a meaningful debate.

In London we supported Respect candidates, Green Party candidates - I know East Anglia made a donation to Respect for the election. This political question you raise, the creation of a workers’ party, is needed. But it is going to be a slow process. The members are not going to be keen to rush into a new affiliated relationship with any party after their experiences of Labour - as I said, there is a cynicism with politics in general.

However, gradually I think we can win members back to the idea that workers do need a political strategy, that we cannot divorce ourselves from politics. Even if that initially takes the form of just tentatively supporting specific organisations for the time being, it is a slow process that we can and must win our members to.

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