‘They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The trouble with Federationism is that they couldn’t even agree on whether they wanted a horse.’
Oswald Mosley, speaking to a class of political theorists, 1952
How did Federationism work?
Terry Pollitt
A manufacturing plant that was abandoned mid-construction due to a breakdown in agreement between Syndicates, 1932
Any self-respecting political theorist will tell you that the title of this article should really be ‘how did Federationism fail’. Its failings are far easier to list than its positive aspects, and history has vindicated those who believed its inefficiencies would one day be rejected by the Union as a whole. Nevertheless, it is important to grasp the workings of Federationism, for without it, the resulting systems that came to dominate the Union, from Maximism to Democratism, would not have taken the shape they did. Many aspects of Federationism became more than simply tenets of a political faction – they entered the written (and unwritten) constitution of the Union itself. Some of the ideas of Maclean, Snowden and Maxton survive to this day. Others could not withstand the tide of history.
As Federationism is often described as ‘a very British flirtation with Syndicalism’, it will be necessary to outline the three units by which it governed, the most famous of which being the Syndicate. Syndicates filled the role held before the Revolution by the various Local Authorities of the old regime – county and district councils and so on. Like their predecessors, they handled local issues like road maintenance and infrastructure in addition to their negotiating role with other Syndicates for supplies and transport links. Taxation was also agreed on an entirely local basis, with the Syndicates themselves voting individually on the percentage they would pay into the national coffers. The main difference was that instead of being a directly elected body, Syndicates at this time were a sort of ‘micro-congress’[1] of the local Trade Unions. Each Union elected delegates within itself to sit upon the Syndicate Council, and the chairmen and women of each Union also gained an automatic seat on this body. Trade Unions themselves underwent radical change in the period between 1925 and 1930 – within a few months of the Revolution the emerging need for Unions to take control and have direct authority over the country meant that the national and regional Unions that spoke for workers across their profession were becoming too unwieldy to effectively administer each individual coal mine, branch line or dockyard. In response, reforming ‘Localist’ Trade Union leaders began to take charge of local branches of the national Unions and form transform them into Unions that specifically dealt with the surrounding area. The local Unions remained part of their national equivalents and worked with them to improve working conditions and pay nationally, but regionally began to work in the interests of local workers. For example, the Dover office of the National Union of Railwaymen formed the Dover and Ashford Railwaymen’s Union, with its Chairman Bernard Browning sitting on the committee of the National Union of Railwaymen itself. The DRU worked with other local Unions such as the Union of Channel Coast Dockers (itself a local offshoot of the Transport and General Workers Union) through the meetings held within the East Kent Syndicate to rebuild the dilapidated docks of the town after the Royalist Exodus had left the port partly sabotaged and lacking much of the equipment to rebuild it.
The Unions made up the bulk of each Syndicate by there were also representatives from the third arm of Federationism’s economic structure – Co-operatives.[2] With public ownership of companies (selling shares) banned and co-operatives being the only legal means of running a business, the Union of Britain quickly became ‘a nation of co-operation’.[3] Representatives from local co-operatives would sit on Syndicate Committees locally and speak for not only their workers but also to recommend what resources and construction projects were necessary for their businesses’ survival and viability. In summary, then, there were three main pillars of British Federationist Syndicalism – the Unions, the Co-operatives and the Syndicates themselves that were made up of representatives from both of the other pillars.
Another area to be explored is the processes by which elections took place within the Union. Elections for both officers of the CTU and the motions put forward at each Congress itself were all done at the annual Congress, that from 1931 onwards took place from the first Monday in September until the third Friday. The Syndicates across the country sent representatives – usually leading to a total of around 1300 attendees, 90% of which were directly elected each Congress by workers’ ballot, the rest of whom were entitled to attend because of their position within Syndicate or national committees – all of whom were entitled to vote on motions and officers under a First Past The Post system. All elections, as enshrined in the Constitution, were done under this system, including those within the Syndicates themselves. It is important to note that neither the Constitution nor precedent guaranteed the universal suffrage – only those who worked and were part of a Union had the right to vote. This left a high proportion of women and, in the early years of the Union, men unable to find work, without any democratic representation. On the other hand, there were no regulations regarding the right to vote past the membership of a Union, which generally carried no age restrictions, merely proof of employment. Consequently, the youngest person to vote in the Union of Britain during these early periods (and to this day) was Gareth Burn, a 12 year old boy who voted in the election for Chair of the Ellington Union of Pitmen.
First members of the Ellington Union of Pitmen outside the hall of St Mary’s Church, Ellington, for their first meeting after shift ended in December 1926. Gareth Burn is on the far right, second row.
The role of the Congress of Trade Unions and specifically the Federal Council in directing the economy in the years of Federationism was at best minor and at worst cripplingly ineffective. Each Congress, Yearly Aims would be voted on, usually without debate, having been drawn up by the General Secretary, Commissary for the Exchequer and other relevant members of the Federal Council. The problem with the Yearly Aims was not their scope – they regularly called for massive industrialisation, particularly in the steel and coal industries. The problem with them was how unenforceable they were – Federationists feared above all else the accusation of ‘Bolshevism’ or too much centralist control, and as such the Yearly Aims were just that – aims. There were no penal measures that could, either Constitutionally or in practice, be exercised or enforced. This resulted in them being largely ignored by the beginning of the 1930s, and industry progressing at its own rate as Syndicates independently pursued their own aims of either consolidation or small-scale expansion.
The lack of real industrial progress was just one of the many problems that the inherent failings of Federationism brought about. The obsession with debate, fairness and an obscene number of vetos at every level of legislature and administration meant that, in short, nothing ever got done. While it is true that regeneration programmes driven by a sense of working for the common good did heal and rebuild the areas worst hit by the violence of the Revolution and Exodus (notably Dover, Plymouth and Westminster), once this urgency and uniting factor was removed so too did the compromise that made progress possible. The individual Unions and Syndicates simply did not have the motivation or interest to work with one another sufficiently to carry out monumental industrial reform – the only real success stories of the 1920s and early 1930s such as the rebuilding of the rail network occurred under the direction of national Unions like the NUR. Personal disagreements, like the infamous feud between Sunderland Union leader Joseph Havelock Wilson and his Newcastle opposite number Joe McCauley, often led to the cancellation or lack of progress on pre-existing agreements regarding factory or road construction. Britain was, it was said ‘littered with half-finished causeways, bridges that cannot support the weight of a small horse and factories that contain no machinery’.[4] It was on this backdrop that the Great Recession would bring down Federationism for good, because of its inherent flaws – it bred stagnation but called it ‘consolidation’, and in promising freedom to decide how to direct one’s own industry on a local level it ultimately relied on a non-existent brotherhood between all workers in the Union to strive for each other’s benefit. Such an attitude would not be present until the war and post-war years, and even then only after significant state coercion.
So these were the problems of Federationism – there was no enforced direction of production and consequently a stagnation and gradual implosion of Britain’s industry. It had a great many ideals of choice and independence, but ultimately these translated not into a free workers’ utopia, but a backwards and barely surviving state. The most lasting impact of Federationism is it discredited ‘Syndicalism’ in its purest form for good in Britain. The British as a people had always referred to their Revolution and subsequent state as a Socialist, not Syndicalist undertaking, but the word itself remained in use when it was relevant. The concept of Syndicalism and the radical freedom it offered local communities proved itself unsuited to the mass growth that Britain required in the inter-war years, and eventually, once people tired of what they would eventually call ‘the freedom to starve’, destroyed its own credibility. It is my opinion that it was this that also frightened off many potential Autonomists from supporting y Glais’ cause, explaining to an extent why they have remained a fringe group ever since the mid 1930s. Britain was a Socialist Union. But she had toyed with Syndicalism and the autonomy it granted, and this had been found wanting – dangerously so. Not only did pure Syndicalism, that had achieved so much in France, failed in Britain, it had also taken with it the credibility of the Federationists. The reforms of the Snowden years, covered in the next chapter by Comrade Hobsbawm, were in Eric’s own words ‘too little, too late’. Nevertheless, the spirit of the Federationist system – the right for workers to choose their own destinies, discussion between Unions to achieve a greater good and the right to own a stake in your employer through co-operatism – remain ingrained on our Union’s political and cultural fabric to this day. The literal survival of Federationism was scuppered by the Great Recession, but some of its ideals shaped even those systems that would destroy it. In this sense, in that no knowledge gained from it was ever wasted, it was, as with all the great systems this country has produced, a thoroughly British experiment.
[1] Ed Dunkley,
Syndicalism for Beginners, (London: Crimson Literature, 1990) p.31.
[2] An enlightened form of business, where workers in the company automatically gain a proportion of the shares in it, as opposed to shares being sold to outsiders with no interest in the company’s success. Workers therefore gain a stake in what they are working for as well as some control over the company’s decisions.
[3] Tony Crosland,
The Future of Britain, (Sheffield: Blade Publishing, 1951) p.67.
[4] Eric Blair,
The Road to Wigan Pier, (London: October Books, 1937) p.32.
