Eddie Dempsey on why Britain needs a trade union revival

New Statesman​

4 days ago

Eddie Dempsey, photographed by David Sandison for the New Statesman
In a quiet corner of King's Cross, London, is a small pocket of an old world. The office of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers' Union (RMT) is a time capsule for the 20th-century left. Appropriately, the building stands opposite an interwar housing estate based on Vienna's Karl-Marx-Hof, an icon of the faded tradition of municipal socialism. (Just down the road is a blue-plaqued building where Lenin once resided.) At the reception in the RMT's Unity House lies a pile of copies of the Communist Party-affiliated Morning Star. Its corridors and rooms are adorned with left-wing, proletarian nostalgia: hammer and sickle coasters, strike memorial badges, gifts from comrade brothers in the Teamsters, and busts of heroic dead leftists.
But the RMT is still very much alive – growing, in fact, despite the general decline of trade union membership in the Britain that Thatcher built. The union has a reputation for political and industrial militancy, provoking frothing editorials from the press for its ability to periodically bring the capital to a halt. But it can also claim credit for securing decent, liveable London salaries for its members – a rare thing in today's world.
I was at the RMT's office to meet Eddie Dempsey, who became its general secretary earlier this year after Mick Lynch retired. During his tenure, Lynch was renowned for his blunt put-downs of hapless, confused junior ministers and calm eviscerations of Partridge-esque breakfast television presenters.
Dempsey welcomed me with a comically firm handshake. At 43 he is baby-faced, but embodies the old-school London pie-and-mash bloke, somewhere between the former Apprentice contestant Thomas Skinner and Arthur Scargill. He pointed to a wall of black and white photographs behind him in the grand meeting room, depicting a century of the union's leadership. 'I'm the 18th, by the way,' he told me. 'He retired; he retired; he died; he died; he was sacked; he died.' You got the sense that he was doing a bit. He paused on one photo: 'Him up there, he got pancaked. Flattened by an articulated lorry. In Stalingrad, no less.'
After our interview, I looked this up. One Jimmy Campbell, a former RMT general secretary, did indeed die in Stalingrad – not in the bloody Second World War battle, of course, but in a car accident during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1957. This gives some clue as to the union's historic political proclivities, which are still very much apparent.
'My politics are pretty straightforward,' Dempsey said. 'I want to see people being able to work and have a good standard of living. I want them to have public services that educate you, look after you when you're sick, and give you retirement in dignity. I want to rebuild communities and rebuild a sense of shared responsibility. And I want a world that lives in peace.'
But Dempsey's politics haven't always been so straightforward and anodyne. He is fervently pro-Brexit; in some liberal-left circles that's enough to place you beyond the realm of political acceptability. The RMT stood out among a Remain-orientated labour movement for its opposition to EU membership (not least because of the bloc's restrictions on state interventions and public ownership). In Dempsey's world-view, there is some crossover with the ideological hinterland of the Corbyn project – the harder-edged, workerist, industrial wing, rather than the putative 'kinder, gentler' crowd that mixed a more middle-class, hippyish aesthetic with links to foreign jihadis. The Labour left, Dempsey told me, 'went wrong going into the 2019 election with an incoherent policy on Brexit'. A full-blooded 'Lexit' position would have rescued Labour's fraying connection with working-class Leave voters, he contended – a view that was shared by several senior figures in Corbyn's office at the time.
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More controversially, in 2015 Dempsey visited the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and was pictured with pro-Russian separatists. He told me this was 'part of a humanitarian visit' prompted by the deaths of trade unionists at the hands of ultra-nationalists in Odesa the previous year. Nevertheless, as head of one of the most visible, public-facing organisations in the British labour movement, at a time of ongoing war in Ukraine, Dempsey may find this episode is not easily forgotten.
Eddie Dempsey was born in 1982 in south London to Irish parents. He grew up on New Cross's Woodpecker Estate, before starting work on the railways in his twenties. I tell him I lived in New Cross for nearly a decade and we share our appreciation for the Marquis of Granby pub on New Cross Road. 'I grew up in that pub really,' he said. 'I'm going to be having my father's wake in there next week.' The Granby hosts a mixed crowd of working-class, established locals and student pretenders – art-school hipsters and earnest humanities undergrads – from nearby Goldsmiths, University of London.
If the contemporary left has become associated with the post-2008 wave of 'millennial socialism' backed by this kind of progressive-liberal graduate class, then Dempsey – like Lynch and the late Bob Crow before him – represents something older: a throwback to an era when left politics was spearheaded by blue-collar trade union firebrands. A friend familiar with the culture of RMT describes it as 'a madhouse' – a strange place where balding cockneys of a certain vintage can discuss the differences between a Bolshevik and a Menshevik, a Tankie or a Trot.
Movement leaders such as Lynch and Crow were informed less by the academy, the professoriate or social media platforms, and more by workplace organising. Dempsey is no different. 'I was a union rep within six months,' he said of his early days in the workplace. 'I became embroiled in union activity from day one. So I didn't really get into politics as such, I got involved in trade unionism, which then becomes political as you progress.'
His father was a deep-sea sailor. 'The dock shut in '81. A lot of people were laid off,' he said. The recent history of London's former docklands is an apt microcosm of the British economy as a whole over the past half century. Amid chronic unemployment, closed ports were declared an enterprise zone, deregulated banks were lured to invest with tax breaks, and swathes of working-class east London was redeveloped into the global financial centre that's now Canary Wharf.
Dempsey, a proud south Londoner, interprets this as a story of decline rather than regeneration. 'In my father's day, when he went to sea, a lot of workplaces were closed shops,' he said. 'Everyone was in a union. You couldn't get on the dock without being in the union. Life was better in some ways. Your wages could pay for things that you wanted. You could buy a house if you had a normal job. You could take a holiday. You could buy a car. Employment was secure. A lot of people can't do these things now.'
The ultimate prize for RMT's new general secretary would be a 21st-century version of this postwar era of security: the end of the five-decade experiment in neoliberalism, the restoration of corporatist labour relations, and the pursuit of a more statist economic strategy. The means and method to achieving this, Dempsey said, is securing Scandinavian-style, nationwide, sectoral collective bargaining.
'At one stage, about 80 per cent of contracts of employment in Britain were covered by these kinds of agreements,' he told me. 'Now it's about a quarter, and the result has been stark: declining living standards, and a massive shift in power away from working-class people. So we're determined that the trade union movement demands it's restored. The future depends on it.'
The Labour Party, for its part, has committed to introducing such a system in social care, with unions negotiating pay and conditions with representatives of employers across the industry nationwide. But it's unclear whether this will be replicated in other sectors.
'This government has made some important steps in the right direction,' Dempsey said, not just on employment rights, but also on some long-time, totemic demands of the British left, such as the nationalisation of the railways.
And yet, all the political momentum today is with the populist right. The union man's Championship team, Millwall FC, are known (among other things) for a terrace chant, sung to the tune of Rod Stewart's 'Sailing': 'No one likes us, we don't care.' It's a mantra that could just easily have been adopted by sections of the progressive-activist class militantly pushing causes that have little or no resonance with the wider public. 'Our political culture has been focused on the things that divide us for too long,' Dempsey said.
In 2019, during the interminable Brexit negotiations, Dempsey was the subject of an online fracas. The journalists Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones, alongside the Labour MP Clive Lewis, pulled out of a rally because of his attendance. He had been accused of racism for stating that he empathised with the working-class followers of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, and their hatred of the liberal political class. Many also took issue with his support for a no-deal Brexit. Today, Dempsey shrugs off the incident, but has little time for the very-online left, which he describes as 'destabilising and debilitating. I've always argued that just abandoning parts of the working class in favour of the more well-educated types is not going to work in the long run.
'We've got to find those common bonds, and I think the reconstruction of the trade union movement has to be a part of that. I don't think people realise just how much we've lost… The trade union wasn't just a card you carried into work… There was a whole broad architecture of what was the working class and its institutions in Britain that's been pulled away. It gave a sense of community, a sense of dignity and togetherness, and it gave people a framework [through which] they were able to articulate what they thought about society, to articulate a political view.'
The sense of collectivity that came from organised labour, as well as the institutional architecture of workplace branches, mass memberships and political education, has given way to individualism and the purity-rituals of cancel culture. Left politics and class consciousness are now less determined by organising and more by an individual's adherence to a set of ever-shifting progressive mores. 'A lot of the movement has been dragged away,' Dempsey said, 'and what people have tended to do is demonise and insult people that they disagree with politically. That doesn't help us, but that has been the approach… People have become obsessed about what's in people's heads.'
The radical left may be ailing, but politicians of the Fabian centre left aren't faring too well either. Despite the 'steps in the right direction' Dempsey describes, Labour's leadership has spent its first year in power shedding support in all directions. What's going wrong? 'We're living under a dictatorship of the bond markets,' Dempsey replied. Even Donald Trump has been tamed by bond traders. 'The government is scared to invest.'
We spoke before Rachel Reeves delivered her Spending Review, which combined capital spending with a continued squeeze on day-to-day departmental budgets. This broad fiscal policy picture is unlikely to shift the dial decisively towards national renewal, still less be the starting gun for constructing a new, post-neoliberal economic model.
'I don't believe the trade union movement should be a committee for arguing for a bigger slice of an ever-dwindling public expenditure pie,' Dempsey said. 'We've got to be addressing the economic reality: we need to rebuild the country. We can't rely on imports of wage-producing goods. We cannot rely on the chaotic situation that we've had for the past 40 years. It doesn't work any more. It doesn't deliver better living standards any more. The only way we're going to change it is by having proper investment. We've got staggering profits, falling living standards and wages, and a really, really low level of investment – and that's business investment as well as government investment.
'We can't just be an association of banks with a country attached any more. We need to be making things. We need a real economy, with high-tech manufacturing and infrastructure. And today, you can't rely on the market to deliver that.'
This is an analysis that will be familiar to many New Statesman readers. The UK is in its second decade of declining living standards, and the deterioration of the public realm continues apace. 'People's lives feel chaotic,' Dempsey told me, 'the social fabric has been torn away.' Our industrial base is threadbare. The financialised, debt-driven, service-dependent economic model no longer generates growth. The ethereal nature of a digital 'knowledge economy' became apparent during Covid. Britain is tired and worn out, its real wealth increasingly concentrated in the capital's property bubbles and the glass-and-steel edifices of its tertiary sectors.
Against this bleak backdrop, a figure like Eddie Dempsey espousing a bread-and-butter, populist socialism might be seen less as an anachronism and more as a welcome antidote to the moribund left and progressive gentrification. As much of the electorate joins the Faragist revolt, could a revived, popular trade unionism lead a fightback? 'We've got to focus on providing people a good standard of living and bringing people together,' the RMT leader said. 'And I wouldn't mind the beer price coming down, and Millwall being promoted. If I can have all that – I'm happy.' Hapless junior ministers and Partridge-like TV hosts: beware.
[See also: Geoff Dyer's English journey]
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