PROFILE COUSINS DROPS POLITICAL FOR TRADE UNION POWER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31111, 14 July 1966, Page 14

PROFILE COUSINS DROPS POLITICAL FOR TRADE UNION POWER

(By S

SIMON KAVANAUGH)

“Dear Harold” the letter began, but that was a formality; Frank Cousins’s resignation as Minister of Technology was a sharp kick in the ribs for Harold Wilson, George Brown and the Incomes Policy of the Labour Government; all the more so for being unexpected. But then, Frank Cousins believes in striking while the iron in his soul is hot Mid, with a few exceptions, he has the quickest temper of anyone within striking distance of the Cabinet room.

While the Prime Minister had the minimal notice of his going, political pundits were quick to see the logic in Cousins’s departure. If men can be said to be born union leaders, then he was one. As general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, he controlled the world’s largest body of organised labour. He ran it efficiently and effectively, almost ruthlessly. And he was highly popular with his one and a half million members.

Political Power Translated to more direct political power, he ran a new Ministry whose birth was Caesarean, whose purpose was in question from the first day; he has been sniped and jibed at from every quarter and pressured by economic and political groups of whose existence he could hardly have been aware.

Then from, say, a day inspecting designs for computers in the 19705, he would have to enter into the nine-teenth-century mysteries of the House of Commons, with all its beloved mumbo-jumbo of protocol which, he admits, he was too impatient to understand fully. Meanwhile, at union headquarters, there remained the empty chair. Technically, he was on “leave of absence” from the union. But his heart was still there, and so were the faces and the problems he knew best. Disagreement over the Prices and Incomes policy, then—which he felt was against the interests of trade unionists — would have been, and was, the last straw. He went back to his old desk, to be greeted with open arms and a rise of £5OO a year in salary. Harold Wilson was left to pick up the pieces, amid almost audible cheers from

his left wing, who have been telling him for 18 months that the Prices Board will cost the party dear. A Mining Family Frank Cousins became a Socialist the hard way, as the eldest of 10 children in a mining family where boys were sent down the pits at 14. He hated it, and got out when he was old enough to drive. As a long-distance lorry-driver he soon saw that the poverty he knew in Nottingham was the rule rather than the exception, and that many areas were far worse off. At 26 he married the daughter of a Doncaster railwayman who had been victimised for supporting the miners in the General Strike, and for 35 years they have remained as close as any couple can be. Until recently they could be seen walking hand-in-hand on the annual Aldermaston march. Friends say that this was a very significant and moving experience for both of them. In 1938, Frank Cousins got his first full-time job as a union official, as South Yorkshire organiser for the Road Transport Section of the T.G.W.U. This particular area had a reputation for being tough, and the skill and determination with which he matched up to the job impressed Arthur Deakin, then general secretary of the union, so much that he predicted Cousins would one day sit in his chair. Seventeen years later, he was proved right. Co-operation Denied Cousins had been in office for only a few months when he put a heavy foot through the political plate glass window of the Trade Union Council’s "voluntary wage restraint”—the forerunner of the Prices and Incomes Board. To roars of approval

from delegates at the Trades Union Congress in 1956, he announced that, as far as his union was concerned, co-oper-ation with the Government in keeping down wages was onesided and unacceptable. The mutiny spread, and Cousins became the hero of the hall, if not of the platform. Two years later, however, he was to push his unionism beyond the bounds of political value. He called out the London busmen. Their case, he said, was undeniable, and their demands would have to be met—or else. Indeed, their case was a strong one, but Cousins overlooked the full effects of the strike (which lasted six weeks) on electors who had to tramp miles every day and get up at dawn to be in their offices and factories on time. The busmen lost—and so did the Labour Party when it went to the polls. He was accused of having directly cost the Socialists one million votes. It was not long before he picked another fight over principles—this time with Hugh Gaitskell, whom he said was no Socialist. This was over the two major issues of the day—nuclear disarmament and Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution with its insistence on public ownership. Cousins wanted to ban the first and make compulsory the second. Gaitskell said he was impractical and irrational. The argument continued until the Labour leader’s death. Choice A Surprise Mr Wilson’s choice of Cousins as Minister of Technology was a surprise, but the leaders of Britain’s scientific industries gave him a good reception; he had been for four years a member of the council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and was not unfamiliar with the problems arising from a lack of overall national policy. He also had a good reputation for being a forward-thinker, not afraid of discussing automation and new labour-saving techniques. He was also concerned that displaced men should get good redundancy payments and re-training schemes.

But a Minister needs more than dedication and a seat in the House. He needs a touch of showmanship. Cousins is not the best of speakers, and his showmanship tends to be of the big stick variety. Now that he is out of the Cabinet and back with his own army of one-and-a-half million, on his own ground, Harold Wilson has good cause to watch that big stick. It may soon be brandished at him.