It is not the primary task of the authors of these two volumes to provide answers to how what was in 1945 arguably the world’s most important trade-union movement came to such a pass, though eventually attention has to turn to the question. These writers are historians, from that excellent stable, the Society for the Study of Labour History, and good historians are not concerned with treating the past as something which culminates in the present. After all, any particular present enjoys only a moment in that privileged role before itself becoming part of the past. Furthermore, these are historians in the British tradition: deeply empirical and detailed, scrupulously scholarly, concerned with reconstruction rather than the perception of directions of movement. If any general conclusion does emerge for this period, seen in its own terms and not looking beyond, it is one of steadily growing strength, with only occasional setbacks for the place of British unions in political and indeed industrial life. The editors gently but convincingly suggest that their mentor, Eric Hobsbawm, the doyen of British labour history and contributor of the Afterword to Volume 1, may have been wrong to speak of ‘the forward march of labour’ having ‘halted’ from around 1953. They also contest his rather rigid periodisation of this process, revealing instead a more subtle and fluctuating scene.

This is British history as well as British historiography. Until the final two pages of text, in Richard Hyman’s Afterword to the second volume, there is no attempt at international comparison of British experiences or even at placing British developments in an international context. Foreigners in general make very marginal appearances: Anthony Carew has a chapter in the first volume on the TUC in the international labour movement, but that is almost solely concerned with the struggles between the rival Russian-and American-supported federations rather than with industrial political events within countries; and the Soviet Union somehow looms in the background of many chapters, mainly because of many of the authors’ fascination with communism (see below). But the only west Europeans to receive any serious attention in these 750 pages are a couple of Germans in the odd socialist sect which influenced the young Allan Flanders in the 1930s and 1940s (discussed in John Kelly’s intellectual biography of Flanders’s early years). Flanders was an industrial relations academic who rose to prominence in the 1960s when he managed to convince the government and much of industry that a system of productivity bargaining established in a small US-owned oil refinery at Fawley could be a paradigm for reform of all British industrial relations.

To point out this isolationism is not really to criticise the editors and authors. They tell it how it was. Once British trade unions (like Britons generally) had got foreigners off their backs in 1945, they turned away from them and buried themselves in their own national, industrial, factory-level and internecine struggles until, precisely as in this project, in the final two pages of the period the outside world began to intrude again. In retrospect it is rather odd. These were the decades when the UK, as then an essentially manufacturing economy in a regime of fixed exchange rates, was required to be internationally competitive in the sale of manufactured goods. But during that time the only international context that seemed to be important to trade union politics was the Cold War struggle. Today one meets Europeanisation, Americanisation and globalisation at every turn, and yet the UK economy now seems, at least temporarily, to have shaken off any connection between external trade performance, on the one hand, which remains very poor, and job creation, perceived economic success and currency stability, on the other, which are strong.

A balanced perspective?

Detailed historical scholarship can be a problem for a project which needs to provide an overview of a 35-year period, even if it is done in two volumes. The editors solve this in a creative way which is largely successful. Each book contains a lengthy ‘survey’ chapter, written by the editors, in which they review the main developments and events. This is sandwiched between two other sections: ‘overviews’ and ‘case studies’.

In the former individual authors survey the whole period of the particular volume, but from the perspective of a particular topic: Geoffrey Goodman on the role of the industrial correspondent, and John McIlroy on trade-union education in the earlier volume; Mike Savage, Chris Wrigley and Ken Lunn on various gender and race issues in the later. The case studies deploy the careful historian’s craft in the reconstruction of certain key events. Clearly there is a danger that, since only a few topics can be dealt with, there will be a quirky lopsidedness in the coverage. In general the selection avoids this and achieves a balanced perspective. The disputes that are analysed were certainly important ones. Nina Fishman’s studies of the engineering and shipbuilding disputes of 1957 and the London bus strike of 1958 are excellent choices for the 1945–64 period. Those in the second book are slightly more questionable. John Foster’s and Charles Woolfson’s choice of the Upper Clyde shipbuilding work-in of 1971–2 is felicitous; but less so is their decision to examine it through a linguistic analysis of the strike leaders’ speeches, following a methodology established by two Soviet psychologists in the 1930s. Dave Lyddon’s examination of the strike wave of the early 1970s is confined to the summer of 1972 and does not extend to the great mining dispute starting at the end of 1973. There is also nothing on the ‘winter of discontent’ disputes at the very end of the period covered by this volume.

Both books appropriately carry chapters on relations between the unions and the Labour party (by David Howell for 1945–64, Andrew Thorpe for 1964–79). The Conservative party also merits a chapter for the second period (by Andrew Taylor). The rise of the shopfloor movement in engineering during the 1950s clearly deserves Alan McKinlay’s and Joseph Melling’s detailed treatment; likewise, the importance of the docks in that pre-containerisation period justifies Jim Phillips’s chapter. But one does miss something on the mining industry during the first, very productive decades of nationalisation. The second volume lacks these industry focuses—surely the motor industry and the growing importance of public service unions merit sustained attention in those years? Robert Taylor’s cameo of that moody and interesting general secretary of the TUC, George Woodcock, is nevertheless a valuable contribution.

A question of balance does however hang over the prominence in these case study sections of studies of communists (and anti-communists) and, in the 1964–79 volume, of Trotskyist groups. Apart from Carew’s chapter on the international union movement, in Volume 1 there is also Richard Stevens’s discussion of Cold War politics within British unions, while the Flanders chapter is also mainly concerned with anti-communism. In the second volume John McIlroy has one chapter on the Communist Party and another on assorted Trotskyist movements. Is this quirkiness, or a restoration to these organisations of the true importance they have had in the history of British labour? One is occasionally reminded of the film The Life of Brian, where different factions dedicated to the liberation of Judaea pass resolutions and spit abuse at each other while outside the Roman imperial power works steadily towards the crucifixion of all of them.

More serious is the fact that somehow the vacuum left for many of these authors by the passing of both communism and Trotskyism is never filled. There remains a real sense of moral purpose beneath the careful scholarly tones of these essays. The trade union movement is, as the word movement implies, supposed to be heading somewhere; persons and groups within it are evaluated according to whether they are felt to have assisted or impeded this movement. But what, once the old ideologies have fallen away, is it? It has something to do with grass roots, with anti-capitalism; it is certainly not something to do with social democracy. But ultimately it disappears in the retelling of how many copies of which far-left newspapers were being sold in 1977, of which shop stewards defected from which faction to which other one, of what picketing methods helped secure which victory. This is where the question of where it was all leading to in the next stage starts to be asked.

But this is also where British empiricist historiography comes unstuck. It does not really lack theoretical analysis; it just keeps it implicit and therefore unexamined, whether it be Whiggish or Marx-ish. In an introductory chapter to both volumes the editors pay some attention to the contributions to the study of labour of other disciplines—sociology, political science, economics, industrial relations. But this mainly takes the form of listing their contributions (in footnotes) and berating them for the topics they have not addressed. Had they grappled more substantively with the topics these disciplines have addressed, and with the more explicit theoretical models of many writers in them, the editors and their colleagues might have become more explicit about their own essential standpoint.

As it is, we are left until the very last two paragraphs of the work for Richard Hyman to notice the emperor’s nakedness in his Afterword (called indeed ‘What Went Wrong?’): ‘In England, by the 1970s unions seem to have lost their former status as influential components of civil society ...’ Then, after a wise comment that in Scotland and perhaps Wales matters were probably different, he makes use of a phrase invented by the Italian sociologist Marino Regini: ‘By the end of the 1970s, “pluralistic detachment” as the basis of British industrial relations had run into the sands.’

Pluralistic detachment is an excellent term for describing the position into which British unions, nationally and locally, moderates and left-wing militants, had worked themselves after the exhaustion of their mobilising ideologies. It describes a position, but not a movement.