The Daily Telegraph

Sir Gavin Laird

Engineerin­g workers’ leader who stood up to Scargill and campaigned against the union block vote

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SIR GAVIN LAIRD, who has died aged 84, was one of Britain’s leading trade union moderates as general secretary of Amalgamate­d Union of Engineerin­g Workers (AEU) from 1982 to 1995.

Immaculate­ly suited, with a flower in his buttonhole and a permanent orangey tan, Laird was one of many union leaders who began as a Communist and migrated to the Right of the Labour Party. A supporter of nuclear power, the deterrent and Nato (whose opponents he dismissed as “bananas”) when Labour was opposed to them all, Laird was viewed with suspicion by his Left-wing counterpar­ts, notably Ron Todd of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the mineworker­s’ president Arthur Scargill. At the 1981 party conference he accused Scargill of talking “nonsense” on nuclear power, for claiming that a mishap at an atomic power station could kill 500,000 people.

When Scargill brought the miners out on strike in 1984 without a national ballot, then demanded support from the TUC, Laird told him: “No union has the right to adopt unilateral­ly a course of action, pursue its own strategy, circumvent the leadership of the movement, yet expect the same leadership to give unconditio­nal support.”

Laird had to read the riot act to members in failing industries whose unofficial strikes put their jobs at risk. In 1977 he failed to persuade 1,700 fitting-out workers at Swan Hunter’s shipyard to go back; a £52 million contract and hundreds of jobs were lost. The same year machinists at British Leyland’s Bathgate plant ignored for seven weeks his warning that they were on a “hiding to nothing”.

He never threw the union’s muscle behind pay claims he considered unrealisti­c, yet Laird was uncompromi­sing when convinced his members had a case; British Aerospace and the nation’s flour millers found this to their cost. Keen to maintain his members’ pay differenti­als, he was a critic in the early 1990s of Labour’s plans for a national minimum wage.

Under Laird the AEU risked expulsion from the TUC by concluding single-union deals with employers. When in 1987 he signed such a deal for a new Ford car electronic­s plant in Dundee, 10 other unions made such a fuss that Ford pulled out. Laird accused them of being “ignorant, disunited and living in the past”.

Laird not only survived the Left’s attempts to ostracise his union, but negotiated a merger with the electricia­ns, who had been ejected from the TUC for their complicity in Rupert Murdoch’s defeat of the print unions at Wapping. In 1992 the TUC accepted the merged union, with Laird heading its engineerin­g section.

By rights, Laird should have been a fixture on the TUC General Council. But when elected AEU general secretary in 1982, he was taken off it by Right-wingers in his union who favoured another candidate. The Left were pleased to see him go; in 1980 he had led protests against the TUC sending a delegation to Poland after the Communists declared martial law.

Gavin Harry Laird was born at Clydebank on March 14 1933, the son of James and Frances Laird. On his eighth birthday his home was destroyed in the Blitz while he was at the cinema; he managed to rescue his school bag. He joined the Young Communist League, and on leaving Clydebank High School went to sea as a marine engineer for six years. “I called into ports in Communist countries – they were anything but paradise,” he recalled. He finally left the party over the Soviet interventi­on in Hungary.

Laird became a maintenanc­e fitter at the Singer works at Clydebank, and eventually its AEU convener. He made his mark nationally at the union’s 1969 conference, opposing calls for union members on company boards; Laird said this would not give workers control, but create “management men”.

A full-time official from 1972, Laird was elected to the AEU executive in 1975, defeating Jimmy Reid, Communist hero of the UCS work-in, by a margin of two to one. To the anger of the Left, the union’s Left-wing president Hugh Scanlon threw his weight behind Laird.

Laird was at the heart of efforts to persuade the Labour government to ensure British Leyland’s future through a merger with a Continenta­l manufactur­er.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power, he pledged to oppose Conservati­ve legislatio­n to shackle the unions, but warned that the AEU would not bankrupt itself in the process. When the TUC called a “Day of Action” in 1980, Laird observed: “Political strikes are always anathema to the people of this country.”

In 1982 Laird became general secretary of the engineerin­g section of the AEU. His margin over the Communist Ken Brett was just 1,062 of 190,000 votes cast.

Laird introduced radical changes at the union’s Peckham headquarte­rs. He took a hatchet to the union’s unwieldy structure, made full-time officials redundant, urged staff to work harder and launched a recruitmen­t drive to halt a haemorrhag­e of members.

He backed Roy Hattersley for the Labour leadership over Neil Kinnock when Michael Foot stood down, urged the TUC to drop its policy of non-cooperatio­n with the Tory government, and campaigned for proportion­al representa­tion. At Labour’s 1984 conference Laird was booed when he reminded opponents of Nato that the occupying troops in Czechoslov­akia and East Germany were Russian, not American.

Laird’s union came close to expulsion from the TUC in 1985 after it accepted £1.2 million in government money to run its elections. He stood firm and the TUC blinked first, saying the engineers could keep the money but take no more without members’ approval.

Talks with the electricia­ns began in 1988; after several interrupti­ons a deal was struck and in 1992 members of both voted by 4-1 to merge. The combined union had 930,000 members, reflecting a further contractio­n.

Laird was the originator of John Smith’s plans for curbing the unions’ block vote within the Labour Party and introducin­g “one member, one vote”.

When other unions, led by the

T & G, tried to block the reforms, Laird accused them of “Tammany Hall tactics”. They squeaked through the 1993 party conference after a barnstormi­ng speech from John Prescott.

Shortly before retiring in 1995, Laird joined Conservati­ve ex-ministers to urge the government to commit itself to a new generation of nuclear power stations.

For a decade from 1976, he was a director of the state-owned British National Oil Corporatio­n. When Nigel Lawson as Energy Secretary proposed selling shares in it, Laird resisted, but unlike his fellow union leader, Clive Jenkins, escaped the sack.

In 1986 Lawson appointed Laird to the Court of the Bank of England. He served until 1994 when Kenneth Clarke refused to reappoint him, despite an appeal from the Bank’s governor, Eddie George.

When Labour came to power, Laird chaired the government’s task force to keep the former UCS shipyard at Govan going after its Scandinavi­an owners, Kvaerner, pulled out.

He was appointed CBE in 1988 and knighted in 1995.

Gavin Laird married Catherine Campbell in 1956. She survives him with their daughter.

Sir Gavin Laird, born March 14 1933, died October 26 2017

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 ??  ?? Laird (right), and in 1999 with Labour’s Scottish Under Secretary Gus Macdonald (far right) at the Kvaerner Govan shipyard, being shown round by managing director Gunnar Skjelbred (left of picture), following the announceme­nt that the company was...
Laird (right), and in 1999 with Labour’s Scottish Under Secretary Gus Macdonald (far right) at the Kvaerner Govan shipyard, being shown round by managing director Gunnar Skjelbred (left of picture), following the announceme­nt that the company was...

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