The last trade union hero

At a time when even the Labour party panders to the rich and to the middle classes, it is a pleasure to talk to a genuine socialist. Jack Jones, who will be 90 in March and was one of the most powerful men in Britain when he led the Transport & General Workers’ Union in the 1970s, retains the unfashionable belief that the purpose of the Labour movement is to improve the lot of the working classes and the poor. He was born in Liverpool in 1913, in a house which was that year declared unfit for human habitation, and was brought up in poverty. In his youth he sometimes taught at a socialist Sunday school, where he inculcated a socialist version of the Ten Commandments, including such sentences as, ‘Remember that the good things of the earth are produced by labour. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the workers.’

When I met him in his office at the T & G, where he still works each day in a voluntary capacity on behalf of the union’s retired members, he said he still very much believed in this injunction. I remarked that many members of the working class resent the way in which the welfare state is exploited by idle people, and asked him what he would do about indigenous English people who do not appear to have a strong desire to work. To this he replied, ‘Such as the people at the Savoy Hotel? I don’t see them working very hard.’

Mr Jones remains a formidable negotiator, always seizing in a good-humoured way on the weakest point in the other side’s case. I found myself defending the people at the Savoy. ‘I think lunch isn’t quite the institution it used to be. In the City, certainly, I don’t think they sit around drinking port all afternoon.