Corbyn’s hero: the man who killed Britain’s car industry

Leo McKinstry on the death of Red Robbo

FOR THE growing numbers of young people who, in their naive idealism, seem determined to support Jeremy Corbyn and his Marxist lieutenant John McDonnell, the life and career of a man who died yesterday make for salutary reading.

With his relish for confrontation, Derek ‘ Red Robbo’ Robinson represented all that was worst about the British trades union movement in the Seventies.

In his thuggish obstinacy, he was the personification of the bullying, power-hungry movement that paralysed industry, wrecked the economy and turned Britain into ‘the sick man of Europe’.

A lifelong communist, his nickname was a badge of pride. Nor did he feel an iota of shame that, as the works convenor at the mighty car giant British Leyland, he brought the company to its knees with his appetite for mindless turmoil.

Oppression

In his twisted mindset, the workplace was not a place for production, but an arena for extremist intimidation and political confrontation.

Between 1978 and 1979, he presided over no fewer than 523 walkouts at British Leyland, costing the firm at least £200 million in lost output.

Robinson, a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), is one of the reasons that Britain no longer has an indigenous car-maker.

Through his epic irresponsibility, he made the Longbridge plant in Birmingham almost impossible to run.

The culture at the factory, which employed 18,000 people at its peak, was one of utter political oppression.

Strikes would be decided, not by democratic ballots, but by shows of hands at mass meetings, which gave total licence to the union bullies who stalked the workplace.

News footage of a vast AEU demonstration in Birmingham in 1979 perfectly illustrates the atmosphere of strident aggression that prevailed. Calls for a walkout were loudly cheered by protesters carrying placards with slogans such as ‘British Leyland equals Bloody Life’. Within an hour, the factory had stopped production.

Any industrial action was ruthlessly enforced by picket lines and shouts of ‘scab’ — and worse at — anyone daring to challenge the mob rule.

Leyland had inherited great motoring marques such as Austin and Rover but, in large part because of Robinson’s malign influence and that of others in his thrall, quality and innovation rapidly declined.

Increasingly synonymous with shoddiness, the company struggled to compete in the marketplace — not that Robinson cared. As a far Left ideologue, he did not believe in the market.

But his gospel of permanent workplace revolt exposed a fundamental paradox of Robinson’s career: the man who constantly prattled about the protection of workers’ rights was the greatest destroyer of jobs in the UK motor sector.

Yet there was a positive side to Robinson’s addiction to militancy.

Through his spectacular recklessness, he ultimately repelled the British public and paved the way for the election of Margaret Thatcher — she described him in her memoirs as a ‘notorious agitator’ — with a mandate to tackle the unions. His very name was a vote-winning weapon for the Conservatives in 1979.

It is a rich irony that, in his communist fervour, Red Robbo was inadvertently one of the Tories’ strongest allies as they embarked on ending Labour’s disastrous experiment in trades union domination.

And how significant it is that Robinson’s death at the age of 90, comes at the very moment Jeremy Corbyn is riding high in the polls, following on from his remarkable advance in the General Election.

Corbyn’s success was made possible because a large section of the British electorate have either forgotten, or never knew, the lesson of Red Robbo’s grim reign.

For young voters in particular, the terms ‘British Leyland’ and ‘the Winter of Discontent’ — that bleakest of periods in the bitter cold of 1978-79 when Britain was beset by public sector strikes, hospitals took emergency patients only, rubbish went uncollected and the dead in some parts of the country remained unburied — mean absolutely nothing.

But such ignorance is highly dangerous.

For Corbyn, himself a trades union official in the Seventies (for the National Union of Public Employees and for Red Robbo’s AEU, which had been encouraged by Tony Benn to develop a blueprint for the workers’ control of British Leyland), is desperate for a return to those dark days.

To him, that era was not a nightmare, but a golden age of Left-wing ascendancy.

If he were to gain office, among his first acts would be the repeal of Conservative trades union legislation which curtailed the power of the bully boys by banning strike action without a ballot of the workers — no more showing of hands — or notice to management; outlawed secondary picketing (in which strike action in one workplace was supported by a walkout in another), and imposed huge fines on unions which flouted the law.

Warped

It was indeed telling yesterday that Len McCluskey, Labour puppetmaster as hardline leader of the Unite union (into which the AEU was absorbed) and one of Corbyn’s loudest supporters, was so full of praise for Robinson.

‘History will show Derek was unfairly maligned by the media as he aimed to find solutions to British Leyland’s industrial disputes,’ he said. Those words illustrate just how warped the Corbynista Left really is. The endless industrial disputes were almost entirely of Robinson’s making.

Red Robbo may have reached his dangerous peak in the Seventies, but he was a political radical from the start. Born in 1927, he became an appren- tice toolmaker at the mighty Longbridge factory during World War II. The communists dominated the local trades union and Robinson was soon an active member.

During subsequent decades, he rose up the Longbridge hierarchy, becoming a shop steward, then, in 1974, works convenor, a position that gave full scope for his spirit of politically motivated rebellion.

His rise to the top came at a time when, nationally, the unions were increasingly flexing their industrial muscles, having seen off all attempts at reform by Harold Wilson’s and Ted Heath’s administrations. But the seizure of political control went to the union bosses’ head, and they grew ever more tyrannical.

Delusion

In the early months of 1979, at the peak of the Winter of Discontent, an incredible 29 million working days were lost. But this madness created its own backlash, even at Longbridge, as workers grew tired of the Red Robbo’s untrammelled rule.

When he was eventually sacked in November 1979 by the British Leyland management, then headed by the tough British-South African Michael Edwardes, Robinson tried to organise a sympathy strike in his favour. But the tide had turned.

In the ballot, 14,000 workers voted against him, just 600 in favour. It was a watershed moment that, like the election of Margaret Thatcher, signalled a return to sanity.

Robinson remained true to his convictions for the rest of his life. He stayed in the Communist Party and stood, unsuccessfully, in four General Elections in Birmingham. Through the Eighties and Nineties, he was a tutor in trades union studies, teaching a new generation of shop stewards.

He even served for a spell as chairman of the Communist Party, and right up to the end, he could be seen selling Party literature on the streets.

‘I can sleep sound at night because I never betrayed the workers I was elected to represent,’ he once said.

In truth, that was just another self-serving delusion. Red Robbo’s betrayal of workers at British Leyland and elsewhere could hardly have been more shameful.