Death of the industrials

Alex Doherty — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:00:12 +0000

They were the terrors of Fleet Street – irreverent, anarchic, hard drinking, hard living and often cynical. Tony Blair hated them and invariably referred to them in a sneering tone in his uneasy speeches at the Trade Union Congress. Government ministers – Labour as much as Conservative – as well as employers often trembled in their presence. Even trade union leaders felt they had to treat them with a wary suspicion.

And yet they were hard-working, up at all hours, hanging around in pubs and on doorsteps as they plied their trade. They were often sexist and some were homophobic. They were not fond of abroad, either. They hunted in packs and they gave no quarter. But they also maintained a strong esprit de corps as they saw themselves as a special band of brothers.

Now they have almost all disappeared from the scene. Next week will witness their last hurrah with the final end of their traditional farewell Congress speech that first began in 1924. Memories are fast fading of their deeds and misdeeds. They have gone the way of factories and mines, car plants and steel works – into the industrial museum of British social history. These are the industrial/labour correspondents. Until recently, they constituted a group – albeit a shrinking one. Now the survivors make up little more than an informal network. Their rapid demise, which began in the late 1980s, has been an unlamented event for the smooth people of the “new” Labour project whose own demise is rapidly approaching

Thirty years ago, industrial reporting attracted some of the best and brightest in national journalism. Their reports from the frontline of Britain’s labour wars invariably made the front page. Some could even influence the Financial Times share index by what they wrote. They were the troublemakers, not spoon-fed by manipulative spin-doctors. Their sources were everywhere and not confined to the exclusivity of the Palace of Westminster or Whitehall department briefings. “We don’t like you lot because we cannot control you as we can the parliamentary lobby”, arch-spinner Peter Mandelson once told me.

Of course, the industrials were never perfect – far from it. The group was often divided viciously by the politics of the Cold War, which added spice to the fierce competition. Many passed through or remained in the orbit of the Communist Party – in spirit, if not in membership.

The party’s effective industrial base gained them access to a diffuse range of personal contacts inside many unions. Others avoided the CP’s embrace and ploughed a different furrow. But it was hard not to have some kind of commitment to the labour movement. Too many became much too close to particular trade union leaders. Most identified with the unions in an uncritical and narrow way. It made them less aware of new trends in the labour market and a changing world of work They were often too much a hallelujah chorus and not enough a fifth column within organised labour’s ranks.

But they inhabited a wonderfully unpredictable and fascinating world with its daily routine of press briefings, seminars, lunches, dinners and long sessions in the pub. Mapping an industrial correspondent’s life could take you from central London to a picket line of unofficial strikers at the Longbridge car plant in Birmingham, talking to miners in pit villages, reporting from once important union conferences in seedy seaside resorts.

Not all industrial correspondents came from the working class or provincial backgrounds. Many were middle class with guilty consciences about class. Some even went to Eton or other such schools and even Oxbridge, although they tended to keep such secrets hidden.

A number rose to eminence in national journalism: John Cole, Peter Jenkins, Paul Routledge, John Lloyd, John Elliott and Donald McIntyre. Others became eminent doyens in the group: Geoffrey Goodman, Eric Wigham, Sir Trevor Evans, Hugh Chevins and Margaret Stewart. Many others passed through the group’s ranks that in its heyday grew to more than 70.

Not all they wrote deserves to be buried with them. Much was of long-forgotten strikes and endless wage negotiations and doomed incomes policies. Such work soon ended as fish-and-chip wrappings. But some articles gave an accurate, authentic picture and analysis of what was going on and why in a predominantly manual workers’ world that somehow mattered.

What happened? In part, the industrials were the victims of social change. The new workplaces of computers, hot-desking, de-skilling and information technology, open-plan offices and 24-hour news replaced the old. They were also casualties of the demise of the labour movement.

But there were other profound reasons for their decline and fall. The revolution in Fleet Street’s technology with the utter defeat of the once mighty print unions was a devastating blow. Previously, newspaper proprietors and their hapless managers were at the mercy of the small elite of printers with their power to stop the presses in the fight for differentials and perks. Some Fleet Street bosses paid out wages to fictitious workers such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to keep production rolling. Others provided print leaders with grace and favour flats and even allowed them to run recruitment agencies for Fleet Street jobs. After Rupert Murdoch’s ruthless escape to Wapping in 1986, the print unions lost their grip on the means of production. Most importantly, employers no longer feared them. For much of the time the industrials had been – whether they liked it or not – pillion riders with the printers who had kept a close eye on what they reported. Now news desks no longer needed to worry about lost production. Their industrials could be culled.

But the waning of industrial reporting in its widest sense should concern anyone who wants to know what is happening in this country’s workplaces today. Often forgotten now are the important sources contained in the long gone nationalised industries – especially in coal, steel, the railways and even the public utilities. The best industrials needed to know a good deal about those commanding heights of the political economy. Then there were the employer organisations – particularly the CBI and the Engineering Employers’ Federation. Journalists also needed to know the twists and turns of government economic policy. They were always far more than the convenors of the trade union interest. I recall following the complexities of manpower policy and labour markets, health and safety and training, productivity and diversity. A good industrial was absorbed in a range of widely different worlds of work at home and abroad. Their desk was piled high with government reports, academic monographs, trade union and employer press releases and a large number of books about labour economics, history, politics and international (and especially European) social affairs.

The centrality of work grew more obvious at the very time when reporting the subject began to fade away. The young and ambitious were now to find fame in financial reporting or on rugged lands in the Middle East. Or they sought careers in television with its obsession with triviality and personality glitz. There was a dumbing-down of reporting in general. For industrials, it spelt the end. However, the world of work has not gone away. Now it is covered in advert-related supplements, niche journalism, soft features and uncritical puff stories about no-nonsense entrepreneurs obsessed with the share price, their share options, downsizing and corporate restructuring.

One result of this is the almost complete absence of reporting about work in the mainstream media. In the United States, there are only about three full-time industrials in newspapers remaining in the entire country. The picture is little better here. But Britain is heading into a deep recession. Millions face unemployment. Power and influence has gone to the few and not the many. After 11 years of this Labour Government, we now live in a society and economy closer to neo-liberal America than the European social market.

Occasionally, a report on workplace inequalities and class divisions exposes the world that still exists: of poverty pay for women and the young, exploited immigrant workers, old male manual workers with no hope. What we need desperately is the emergence of a new kind of labour journalism that will address all of these outrages. There seems little chance of this. The combative years of the industrials are not going to return. But at least we can call for an irreverent, uncompromising, toughly realistic coverage of the world of neo-liberal capitalism we now live in.

Robert Taylor was labour editor of The Observer from 1976-1988 and employment editor of the Financial Times from 1994-2001

Robert Taylor | ukwatch.net

Death of the industrials