Please, Mister Postman

by Alan Johnson

  I drove Joan Lestor around a few times during the election campaign and on polling day our house was used as the Labour ‘committee room’ for our part of the Britwell. This involved a party official basing himself in our living room with a huge map of the electoral ward balanced across our dining table. We were a hub from which information on which of our supporters had voted was sent and received. I’d always naïvely believed that political parties persuaded voters to back them on polling day by the force of their arguments, but while that is of course the aim of the national campaign, on the ground, on polling day, it all boils down to the single imperative of ensuring that your known supporters (as determined by canvass returns between elections) actually get to the polling stations.

  Outside every station was a party supporter asking each voter for his or her polling-card number. These volunteers had no interest at all in how the vote might have been cast, only that it had been. The numbers would be collected by a runner, who’d bring them back to the ‘committee room’, where they’d be used to identify the addresses of those who had voted. The party official would then cross out the addresses on a thick duplicate pad, tear off the top copy and give it to other party workers, who’d use it to ‘knock up’ supporters who had yet to vote and try to shepherd them towards the polling station. The elderly and infirm would be offered lifts, although many a cunning pensioner has claimed to support a particular party, received a lift to the polling station from its volunteers and then voted for someone else. Canvass returns weren’t always up to date or accurate. The motive of these more tribal voters was to ensure that Party A’s car was wasted on a Party B supporter.

  Our three children did stints as ‘runners’ (Jamie was particularly enthusiastic) while I did my share of knocking-up and giving (I hoped) honest pensioners a lift to the polling booth. Judy supervised the committee room.

  Our efforts were not in vain. Joan Lestor survived in Slough in 1979 with a reduced majority. But in the country the new Conservative reign was to last for eighteen years.

  Chapter 18

  MY LAST-EVER DELIVERY for the Post Office was completed on a Saturday morning in May 1981, just before my thirty-first birthday. That afternoon I left Slough in Dave Stock’s car. We were off to annual conference in Brighton where, at my third attempt, I was elected to the executive council.

  My life would never be the same again.

  The results of the ballot for the executive, along with a swathe of other national positions such as the Standing Orders Committee and the UPW delegations to the TUC and Labour party conferences, were announced at lunchtime on the Tuesday. I was sitting in the conference hall, my heart thumping so hard I thought it would be audible in the hushed silence of that large crowd, while the chair of the Standing Orders Committee, Harry Varcoe, read out, in his rich, fruity Bristol accent, the names of the fifteen successful postal nominees in order of the number of votes they’d received. My name was the fifteenth announced. Dave Stock let out a little cheer, Joe Payne shook my hand and Rose Ticket kissed me. One of the headquarters staff immediately came to see me with an envelope of papers for my first EC meeting, which was to be held that Thursday on the conference site.

  With so few full-time officers and no regional machinery worth mentioning, the twenty-two lay members of the executive council (fifteen postal and seven telecoms) covered a much wider range of activities than their counterparts in most other unions. As well as attending the various executive meetings (full EC, postal executive, organizing committee, finance committee and so on), it was EC members who supported national officers in negotiations, taught at the union’s training schools and were sent to resolve disputes and as fraternal delegates to the conferences of sister unions around the world. We were the standard-bearers for the union and, as such, we were based at its headquarters in Clapham, which was to become my new place of work. The union also owned a large Regency house where EC members from ‘the provinces’ could lodge during the week. I was classed as ‘provincial’ in the sense that I was from an office outside London, but with the Britwell only an hour’s drive away I never needed to take advantage of these facilities.

  Becoming a member of the national executive was a big deal. I’d be a lay member, placed on permanent special leave, but only if I failed to be re-elected would I ever go back to work as a postman in Slough (although I’d remain a Post Office employee and be paid a postman’s wages).

  On the evening of my election, I went to hear Tony Benn speak. He’d come to conference, uninvited by the executive, to attend a fringe meeting as part of his campaign to be elected deputy leader of the Labour party. Fringe meetings were a previously unheard-of phenomenon at our conference. This one had been organized by Pete Dodd and Billy Hayes, two postmen activists a few years younger than me who were from Manchester and Liverpool respectively. These bright, articulate young men were the leading lights in a new generation who, like me, were baby-boomers. Unlike me, however, they had no memories of the strike and thus none of the inhibitions and lack of confidence that had instilled. I knew Pete well – we’d been at the same union ‘induction’ school. I’d never met Billy but I knew of the reputation he was building as a young dissident determined to push the union down a more radical and confrontational route.

  This was a reflection of the zeitgeist in the Labour movement, where a form of collective frenzy had taken hold ever since Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the 1979 election. Militant, a group built around the Militant newspaper and formerly known as the Revolutionary Socialist League, had initiated a serious Trotskyite insurgency, stoking a culture of betrayal against anybody connected with the previous Labour government – anybody, that is, apart from Tony Benn. Despite having been a Cabinet minister and part of that government, he not only joined in the condemnation but led the charge against the colleagues he’d worked beside. Benn’s leftwards lurch made him the idol of those seeking to turn the Labour party away from democratic socialism and this all congealed into a toxic mixture of syndicalism and cynicism.

  Our union had decided to support Denis Healey, the shadow foreign secretary and former chancellor of the exchequer, who was the incumbent deputy leader, against the challenge from Benn and it upheld that decision the following day.

  In the meantime I went to listen to what Benn had to say. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him speak – in fact I had been with Mick Pearson to hear him at Slough College only a month or so before. Once again he was erudite, fluent and persuasive in his rhetoric and, given the Wolfie Smith phase I was in, he should have won me over. And yet there was something jarring about his attempts to claim that he was now hunting with the hounds having previously run with the hare. I distrusted the cult of personality that was being built around him and, while I admit to being attracted by his arguments for more accountable party structures and a greater role for trade unions, the venom directed by his supporters at figures such as Healey, Callaghan, Barbara Castle and all the other so-called traitors sickened me. Benn’s refusal to lift a finger against this character assassination seemed to me to be the real betrayal.

  My MP, Joan Lestor, was no Bennite, although she was a leading member of Tribune, the left-wing alliance formed around the newspaper of the same name. She had told me how worried she was about Tony Benn’s apparent determination not to be outflanked by any grouping on the left, no matter how bizarre and eccentric their views. ‘These people are nasty and intolerant,’ she said, ‘and Benn is placating them when he should be confronting them.’ Given how close the vote was that summer for the deputy leadership, Joan’s refusal, together with that of her great friend and Tribune colleague Neil Kinnock, to vote for Benn (they both abstained instead) might well have cost him the position.

  On the Thursday, Dave Stock insisted I cut short my attendance at conference and go back to our bed and breakfast to rest up and prepare for my first executive council meeting later that day. But I was too excited to sleep, and arrived for the meeting twenty minutes early. It was held in
the Bedford Hotel on the Brighton seafront, where the headquarters officers and staff were based. There was only one other person in the room when I arrived. It was Tom Jackson. He was standing by the window looking out to sea.

  Ten years on from the strike, I was still in awe of this famous figure who, as a young postman, I’d watched remotely on a TV screen. Now here I was, not only in the same room, but one of his colleagues in the national leadership of the union.

  A good deal had happened since Tom had left the platform to offer me encouragement at the 1978 conference. The name of the union had changed for a start. We were now the Union of Communication Workers (UCW), British Telecom having been separated from the Post Office.

  The country had been through the Winter of Discontent, which had seen widespread strikes by public-sector unions provoked by the ongoing pay caps implemented by the government in an attempt to control inflation. That summer the TUC had rejected the government’s proposed 5 per cent guideline for increases and voted for a return to free collective bargaining. The UPW had only narrowly avoided being sucked into the maelstrom thanks to some nifty footwork by the Post Office and the union that led to a pay deal at the eleventh hour.

  Tom Jackson had taken a key role in the build-up to these historic events. As a member of the TUC general council he was instrumental in formulating the social contract between the Labour government and the TUC which had been in place since 1975. Tom had always supported a national pay policy. He believed that free collective bargaining was a chimera. For public-sector workers it was never free and rarely collective. The seven-week UPW strike in 1971 had caused him to think deeply about how to control inflation without the low-paid having to endure greater constraint because the more powerful unions had cut themselves the biggest slice of the pie.

  By its third year the social contract was becoming increasingly difficult for the trade-union movement to deliver. The Callaghan government had declared a pay norm of 5 per cent in 1978, at a time when inflation was running at 8 per cent. Tom Jackson was president of the TUC that year, which meant that he chaired the meetings of the general council. When a helpful statement basically supporting the government’s 5 per cent guideline (which, if passed, would have prevented the trauma of the Winter of Discontent) was put to the vote, an equal number of general council members voted for and against. This gave the chair the casting vote.

  The reasonable expectation was that Tom, as a strong advocate of wage control, would cast his vote in favour of the supportive statement. He didn’t. Instead he declared the proposition not carried. The reason was quite simple. Like any good chairman, Tom was guided by Citrine’s ABC of Chairmanship, the little book that had been my Bible ever since I was elected as branch chairman in Slough.

  Citrine said that if a proposition was tied then it self-evidently hadn’t been carried. For the person in the chair to declare it carried would undermine the neutrality essential to the chair’s authority and the incumbent’s ability to remain in control of the gathering over which he or she presided.

  I doubt that the Callaghan government appreciated the finer points of Citrine but its logic on this point was indisputable, and Tom followed it despite his disappointment at the decision he’d been forced to make.

  Since the general election the EC had been wrestling with another thorny issue. One of Mrs Thatcher’s first decisions as prime minister had been to order a Monopolies and Mergers Commission report into the London postal service. The fact that the Post Office had a monopoly on handling items up to a certain weight and value was crucial to its capacity to offer a universal service at a single price. There was a necessary cross-subsidy from the lucrative high-volume, easy-to-distribute city mail to the daily deliveries in remote rural areas, which were not viable in purely economic terms but which the Post Office was still expected to provide to every address, along with accessible counter services.

  The Post Office and the UCW had a mutual interest in maintaining the monopoly and a shared concern about what the commission was likely to discover. Stones would be lifted and questionable practices exposed.

  Slough wasn’t part of London’s postal empire but its problems of poor recruitment and high numbers of vacancies were, if anything, even more acute. The Thames Valley had a thriving labour market in which the Post Office couldn’t compete and, unlike post offices in the capital, provincial offices couldn’t offer extra pay through London weighting. Some of the deals I’d helped to negotiate, like a two-hour book-through time, a rebate delivery agreement and twelve-hour daily attendances at Christmas, mirrored the kinds of agreements that existed in the main London offices and could have been construed as old Spanish customs.

  The challenge for employer and union was to find and agree on a way to deal with this unproductive ‘hourage’ before the Monopolies and Mergers Commission concluded its report. Its recommendations could then be pre-empted and, it was hoped, modified so that there was a better chance of the monopoly remaining intact.

  John Taylor and Derek Walsh had entered into negotiation with the new director of postal services in London, a Scotsman by the name of Bill Cockburn (or Bilco, as the London guys called him). Tom Jackson kept a close watch on the negotiations, as did the personnel director for the Post Office, an urbane diplomat named Ken Young. But this had to be a London solution.

  The result was an agreement with the unimaginative title of Improved Working Methods (John and Derek insisted that the word ‘productivity’ must not be used, despite the fact that this was clearly a productivity scheme). Under IWM, the union would sell hours of work that weren’t needed back to the Post Office. The rate for an hour’s work in each office would be calculated (it varied according to the level of overtime) and the workforce would receive 70 per cent of the savings (increased to 75 per cent if certain quality-of-service targets were met) as a weekly bonus.

  It was a courageous move by the union and it took all of John Taylor’s charismatic leadership skills to get it accepted by the London membership. There had been a furious reaction around the rest of the country. Many union branches were understandably concerned that a policy as controversial as effectively selling jobs for local bonuses had been agreed without any reference to the membership outside London. Other branches, fearing that their slack hours might be removed with no compensation, were equally anxious, albeit for different reasons.

  Slough fell into the second category. Selling jobs was hardly a concern in an office with almost a hundred vacancies. To us it was simple: either the hours would be lost with no recompense to the workforce or the union could exert some influence over which hours were extracted and negotiate extra pay for our members in return. At Christmas 1979 branches outside London had been given the chance to participate in the IWM scheme as an experiment, just for the ‘pressure’ period. I had convinced the branch that Slough should participate and worked with the Post Office to produce the revised hours.

  The issue of worker control was important to me. I believed in what was then known as industrial democracy – the participation of the workforce in the way their business was run. The Post Office was then one of two industries (the other being British Steel) where a form of industrial democracy had been introduced as part of the reforms recommended by the Bullock report commissioned by the Callaghan government. It’s fair to say that the unions (ours included) never properly engaged with that huge opportunity and the experiment was already dead before Mrs Thatcher gave it a decent burial a few years later.

  The IWM trial, however, allowed me to have a significant influence on Christmas attendances across the office with the aim of declaring a saving over the previous year’s ‘hourage’ which could be translated into something we’d never known before: a Christmas bonus to be repeated every year into the future. It worked. My members in Slough each received a bonus of around £40, which was equivalent to a week’s wages back then.

  At a special union conference in 1980 it had been agreed to extend this entire scheme beyond London on a non-
compulsory basis. Slough volunteered for IWM and I negotiated a weekly bonus of £10, which meant that the Post Office saved money through improved productivity, the workforce earned more money and became less dependent on overtime, and being a postman or woman in Slough became a more attractive proposition in the local labour market.

  As a firm advocate of IWM, I now found myself, at my first EC meeting just two days after being elected, the only member of the executive council with any experience of grappling with its intricacies at the sorting-office coalface.

  As I entered that room in the Bedford Hotel in Brighton, Tom Jackson turned from the window where he’d been gazing out to sea. He welcomed me and said he had high hopes for my future; that I could rise as high as I wanted to in the UCW. It was the first time we’d spoken since my election, though he’d sent a nice handwritten note to me via one of the stewards.

  I knew that Tom had come through a horrendously difficult period personally as well as industrially. At the height of the Grunwick dispute, and during a difficult set of pay negotiations (which were always handled by the general secretary), he had been diagnosed with a cancerous growth behind one of his eyes. The treatment kept him out of action for four months. It had been successful but he’d lost the eye and now had a glass one in its place.