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Militant Frank Chapple

OwenM

The patronising flippancy of youth
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More of a crack POD that could be included in something else than a serious suggestion in itself, but:
In his youth, the man who would later, as EETPU General Secretary become known as Britain's most right-wing trade unionist was actually a member of the Communist Party (my Granddad never trusted him as a result), which dominated the then-ETU at the time. Like many, he left over the Soviet invasion of Hungary and abandoned communism entirely. Many of those who did not became Trotskyists - mostly joining Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League, but Ted Grant, leader of the then tiny Revolutionary Socialist League (with a membership barely in double figures) did make some personal outreach attempts to specific ex-Communists including Chapple. Reportedly, the two of them got on well enough on a personal level in the resulting chats, but Chapple never joined what would became famous as the Militant tendency.
But what if he had? Could the electricians' union, instead of somersaulting to the right of the Labour Party, have become a leading vector of Trotskyism? It's probably unlikely even so - I don't think any Labour-affiliated union has seen Trotskyists win control OTL - but it seems like a potential beginning for an interesting chain of consequences.
 
More of a crack POD that could be included in something else than a serious suggestion in itself, but:
In his youth, the man who would later, as EETPU General Secretary become known as Britain's most right-wing trade unionist was actually a member of the Communist Party (my Granddad never trusted him as a result), which dominated the then-ETU at the time. Like many, he left over the Soviet invasion of Hungary and abandoned communism entirely. Many of those who did not became Trotskyists - mostly joining Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League, but Ted Grant, leader of the then tiny Revolutionary Socialist League (with a membership barely in double figures) did make some personal outreach attempts to specific ex-Communists including Chapple. Reportedly, the two of them got on well enough on a personal level in the resulting chats, but Chapple never joined what would became famous as the Militant tendency.
But what if he had? Could the electricians' union, instead of somersaulting to the right of the Labour Party, have become a leading vector of Trotskyism? It's probably unlikely even so - I don't think any Labour-affiliated union has seen Trotskyists win control OTL - but it seems like a potential beginning for an interesting chain of consequences.

I think one of the first questions I asked y'all in the Britpol chat back in the day was if Militant reached their ceiling IOTL or if they could have gotten any further. Would a major Labour-affiliated union under Militant control make it more difficult for the party to purge the tendency from its ranks?
 
I think one of the first questions I asked y'all in the Britpol chat back in the day was if Militant reached their ceiling IOTL or if they could have gotten any further. Would a major Labour-affiliated union under Militant control make it more difficult for the party to purge the tendency from its ranks?
I think it could help them get a bit further in parts of the country outside Liverpool, but they were never particularly strong in other parts of the country outside the Young Socialists, so that may not be as helpful as they'd like.
Having been reading more about it I think the ETU is a bit of a difficult one here because, well, it was under control of two very different extremes for most of its OTL history and it didn't have much success in pulling Labour in its direction either time until bigger unions like the T&G or the AUEW elected more moderate leaders in that direction - it just made itself something of a pariah. I do think it would make things more difficult for the expulsions - a still left-aligned ETU would probably have a member on the NEC - but it might be more of a case of slowing down and the SPEW coming out with more members.
One thing I stumbled on last night was the 1960 ballot-rigging trial in the ETU, which saw them fairly perfunctorily expelled from both Labour and the TUC until clean elections saw the anti-Communists in control. Something similar could happen to them under Militant control, but I doubt it - for one, the trial was a fairly blatant case that (obviously) was settled by the courts, when years of vaguer allegations, still whilst it was Communist-controlled, had led to no attempts at official action, for another one of the main reasons Militant lasted as long as it did was that for ages they were seen as a lot less likely to make trouble than the Communists or the SLL (or indeed Peter Hain's Young Liberals for their leadership) had been.
Actually, part of me is now wondering whether Chapple's famously abrupt style might have changed that impression if he had been applying it for the forces of Trotskyism - maybe it's not implausible this actually leads to earlier disciplinary action. Again, I think this would leave the SPEW (or whatever it ended up being called) stronger, though, simply because it would have a much bigger avenue of later recruitment than any they had OTL.
 
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What would this do for the merger with the Plumbing Trades Union (PTU) and later ones? I've got no idea of where on the political spectrum their future partners were, so don't know if a much more left-leaning union would derail them. This is the first time I've really heard of them outside of the future EETPU and their part in the Wapping dispute replacing the the print workers.
 
What would this do for the merger with the Plumbing Trades Union (PTU) and later ones? I've got no idea of where on the political spectrum their future partners were, so don't know if a much more left-leaning union would derail them. This is the first time I've really heard of them outside of the future EETPU and their part in the Wapping dispute replacing the the print workers.
Definitely a good question, which I'm afraid I don't know enough about in the case of the PTU, although I suspect the AEU would be much less inclined to merge.
 
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