Ballot rigging and the T&G right
Labour Briefing1980sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
A victory for George Wright in the forthcoming re-run ballot for General Secretary of the TGWU would be a disaster not just for that union, but for the whole labour movement. It would establish a hard right leadership which would line up Britain's largest union with the likes of Terry Duffy and Eric Hammond. It would establish a formidable right-wing block vote within both the TUC and the Labour Party, and make the conditions for a fightback against Thatcher very much more difficult.
The left has a responsibility to organise an effective campaign in support of Ron Todd, to counter the intervention of the media.
Moss Evans has said that this episode is "the most serious crisis in the history of the union". If this is so it is entirely the responsibility of successive leaderships of the union: they have established and defended balloting procedures which have long been, among union activists, a sick joke.
These rules are so loose as to constitute an open invitation to ballot rigging. In the ballots for Regional Committees and General Executive positions, branch secretaries receive bundles of ballot papers and a return form for the results. All the branch is required to do is to appoint two scrutineers, check the membership cards, and stamp them. The ballot papers are required to be kept for one month after the vote (not the result).
This leaves huge loopholes for corruption. The ballot papers are un-numbered, and no details of the voting are disclosed. In regional ballots, only the total results are disclosed, not those of the individual branches — which is what counts in terms of a serious check.
In balloting for General Secretary, cardboard ballot boxes are provided, which are then counted regionally, with no branch votes being disclosed. The regional results are then collated at the national office. Candidates have a right under rule to be present at the count — but which count?
I was a candidate in the 1978 election for General Secretary, and asked to be present at the regional count, where the branch votes would be counted. This was refused. Jack Jones interpreted the rule as giving me a right to be at the national adding-up of the regional figures. I attended that, and of course there was not a ballot paper in sight. Nor would they reveal any details of the regional voting.
There are plenty of examples of ballot-rigging in the history of the T&G. But they have always been whitewashed or covered over, with only minimal action, if any, taken against the offenders.
In 1975 Alan Law, a regional officer in the Midlands, and secretary of the huge 5/35 haulage drivers' branch, was caught red-handed casting the whole of the branch's 17,000 votes for three candidates of his own choice. It was euphemistically called "block voting". In reality it is ballot rigging, in that case on a massive scale.
After 25 years in the TGWU I have been a victim of ballot rigging myself. In 1977 I stood in the vote to represent the Cowley and Coventry car plants on the Midlands Regional Committee. The successful candidate was a little-known right-winger, who won by a huge majority, in a ballot which lacked any credibility. Anticipating a fiddle, militants within the biggest plant involved had checked the voting. They had counted the number of members casting their votes: the figure was just over two hundred. The right-winger won by an unbelievable majority, yet the branch officers refused to reveal the branch voting figures. A process of elimination revealed, however, that about 6,000 votes had been 'cast' in that plant for the right-wing nomination.
After complaints were made, the Regional Committee held a 'preliminary enquiry'. This declared the ballot void and ordered a fresh election because, they explained, there had been a "technical infringement" of the rules; which, it emerged, was the destruction of the ballot papers contrary to rule. thus preventing a full investigation taking place. Those involved were completely exonerated by the enquiry's report.
The right wing in the TGWU have supported this state of affairs. The voting figures in George Wright's Wales Region, for example, were less credible than the much-quoted 'unbelievable' figures in Ireland. There are 77,626 members in Ireland, of whom 60,600 votes: that is, 66.6%. Ron Todd got 40,111, George Wright 8,022, and others 12,600: which is a 2-1 vote for Todd against all others. In Wales there are 80,319 members, of whom 49,100 voted, or 61.1%. 2,401 of these voted for Ron Todd, 43,639 for George Wright, and 3,000 for others. That's an 8-1 majority for Wright against all others. Yet the media concentrated on investigating Ireland.
The media role in all this is completely hypocritical. Why the sudden interest? They have never been interested in the past when the right-wing have been caught and proven to be ballot rigging against the left. Now, because it involves a right-wing campaign which ties in with the Tory drive towards postal ballots — suddenly they are the champions of democracy.
T&G members therefore have two very important jobs to do. First they must ensure that this particular media campaign does not succeed, and that Ron Todd is re-elected. Secondly they must change the structures within the union, which not only make it vulnerable to this kind of thing, but deny the members basic democracy, and protect bureaucratic positions at the top.
There have been serious attempts to do this in the past, which have been rejected by the leadership. My branch, the Cowley Assembly Plant 5/293, campaigned for changes at the last TGWU rules conference in 1980. We proposed amendments to rule which would have provided for consecutively-numbered ballot papers, the scrutiny of all used and unused ballot papers at regional level, the retention of all ballot papers for one month after the declaration of the result, and the publication of all details of the voting, including the branch results. Membership cards would be stamped as now.
These proposals were opposed by the platform and voted down. The current arrangements were declared to be perfectly adequate. The matter of democracy in the Trade Union movement is far too important to allow this attitude to continue. It is not yet clear what procedures will be used for the re-run ballot, but T&G members should not be satisfied with anything less than proper democratic procedures.
The left must campaign both for a victory for Ron Todd in this ballot, and for democratic reform for the future.