Public enemy No.1 or rebel With legitimate cause?
With industrial action paralysing Britain again, Mike Lockley asks whether that icon of the 1970s union movement – ‘Red Robbo’ – was misunderstood
EVERY tabloid newspaper needs a hate figure, a man whose loathing among readers would swell readership.
And for a time in the 1970s they found – in the form of Black Country born Derek Robinson – the perfect public enemy.
They dubbed the trade unionist Red Robbo.
They accused him of causing a staggering 523 walkouts at British Leyland between 1978 and 1979, costing an estimated £200 million in lost production.
He was, in their eyes, the man behind a culture of skiving at Leyland, he was the rabid socialist hell-bent on crushing this nation.
Robinson, the infamous Leyland convenor and shop steward, died in 2017, aged 90.
In its obituary, the Guardian stated: “As the convener of one of the largest manufacturing complexes in the country, the British Leyland motor company’s Longbridge plant on the edge of Birmingham, and an unabashed member of the Communist party, he was known as Red Robbo.
“This catchy nickname, a headline writer’s dream, allowed him to be portrayed as a symbol of the conflicts that were bringing the industry to its knees.”
Born in Cradley, he was a communist. After being accused of creating carnage in the car industry, he even became a sale representative for the Morning Star.
But was Red Robbo the villain painted by the press? Legendary filmmaker Ken Loach, in his never-aired 1983 documentary Question of Leadership, portrayed a man who had suffered as a result of a long smear campaign. He had, said Loach, attempted to prevent many unofficial strikes.
The Government, however, had no doubts Red Robbo was a problem.
Margaret Thatcher, in her memoirs, described him as a “notorious agitator”.
He was even monitored by MI5. They tried to break Robinson’s rule by placing an agent among union officials.
The popular perception is that Robinson’s didn’t give a damn what the media wrote about him. In reality, the persistent public floggings took their toll.
Many years after slipping from the spotlight, he confessed: “The pressures were immense but were it not for the ideological understanding that I had, I could very well have ended up with a nervous breakdown.”
That’s in stark contrast to Robinson’s sabre-rattling at the height of his infamy. Back then, he described the Red Robbo tag as a “badge of honour”.
Robinson came from a family of Black Country chain makers.
He began an engineering apprenticeship at Longbridge aged 14. He became a qualified toolmaker and, in 1951 during the Korean War, joined the Communist Party.
He stood as a Communist candidate in four consecutive elections in Birmingham between 1966 and 1974.
By 1975 Robinson was the union convener at Longbridge: it was also the year British Leyland went bump and was nationalised. It proved the start of very stormy relations between management and workers.
History has forgotten, however, the fact Robinson publicly advocated an “everyone pulling together” approach to save the company. He said: “If we make Leyland successful, it will be a political victory. It will prove that ordinary working people have got the intelligence and determination to run industry.”
Such “olive branch” offers brought Robinson into conflict with hard-line Trotskyists on the shop floor.
British Leyland continued to be scarred by dispute after dispute.
In 1977, Michael Edwardes was appointed managing director and strived to find a solution to the problem. But the walkouts that had caused such disruption at Longbridge continued – and spread like a rash across the nation, resulting in the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978 and ‘79. In all, 29.2 million working days were lost.
Bodies were left unburied following a gravediggers’ strike and uncollected rubbish piled high in the frozen
streets when dustbin workers walked out.
Robinson addressed massed ranks of British Leyland workers at Cofton Park but the militant unionist was sacked in November 1979 for putting his name to a pamphlet that criticised the company’s management.
In a watershed moment, a strike ballot over Robinson’s dismissal was held and an overwhelming majority – 14,000 votes to just 600 – refused to down tools.
The unions’ power was slipping. MG Rover, as British Leyland had morphed into, closed its operations in Longbridge in 2005, leaving around 6,000 people out of work.
In his last newspaper interview at the time of the closure, Robinson told our sister paper, the Birmingham Mail: “Edwardes wanted to reduce it to a small motor company and closed 13 factories, but he never made a profit.
“I grew up with the company, joining as a toolmaker at 14 in 1941 and loved my time, both as an ordinary worker and then convenor.
“But when Edwardes took over the writing was on the wall. Shutting plants down was not the way to go.”
He added: “I did a better than average job in the interests of BL workers. When the critics say we were just a bunch of militants, they forget we were actually fighting for jobs. We didn’t come out on strike just for the
sheer fun of it.”
The enduring question is whether Robinson was a man hellbent on industrial destruction or a visionary who could see what was looming and fought tooth and nail to prevent it happening.
Following his death, Birmingham historian Carl Chinn said: “In the divisive decade of 1970s Britain, in which controversial characters
abounded, Derek Robinson was among the most controversial.
“Many decried him as a politically motivated agitator who used his position as convenor at the huge Longbridge car works to disrupt production through strikes.
“They made him the sole cause of the adversities besetting the British car industry, ignoring the negative effects of decades of lack of investment,
decline and short-termist approaches.
“Others praised Robinson as a man who was intent upon defending the interests of the workers whom he represented and as someone committed to car manufacturing.
“Forthright, determined, combative and divisive as he was, yet not even his many enemies could deny that Derek Robinson was a man of principle who lost his job because he stuck to his beliefs.”
On their website, Sandwell Conservatives carried a far less glowing obituary: “Robinson, a life long Communist, was able, in late 1960s and 1970s Britain, to behave in a way that would have secured him a bullet in the brain, polonium in his tea or a sharp stab from a poisoned umbrella, had he operated in any one of the Communist run countries which he so admired.
“An official of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (now Unite) at the car maker Austin’s Longbridge site in Birmingham, he succeeded another Communist agitator to be the plant union convenor.
His time at Longbridge was marked by strike after strike, 523 in total, most of which he promoted and organised.
“In those days, mass meetings of workers took strike decisions. This made possible intimidation and activist domination of the workforce.
“Tactics which Robinson and his fellows did not hesitate to use for their own political ends.
“Robinson’s efforts at Longbridge were rivalled by other unionist extremists at the company’s Cowley plant.
“At Cowley, there was a Trotskyist cell determined to outdo Robinson’s disruption at Longbridge.”