Kicking the carthorse: British Labour and the Anti-Apartheid Movement
Abstract- Christabel Gurney
From its foundation in 1959 as the Boycott Movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement prioritised work in the British labour and trade union movement. But the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the labour movement came from very different political traditions. The AAM was the solidarity wing of a movement which espoused national liberation and the overthrow of the apartheid regime. It saw sanctions as a means of weakening that regime in the face of opposition which, for much of the period, it expected to take the form of armed struggle. The British labour movement, on the other hand, was reformist and profoundly economistic. The TUC, in particular, was hostile to African nationalism and, in the 1960s and 1970s, took its line from TUCSA. The South Africa policy of the 1964–70 and 1974–79 Labour governments was dominated by the UK’s economic interests and the priority it gave to achieving a settlement in Rhodesia.
Nevertheless the Anti-Apartheid Movement, by capturing the moral high ground and using its international links to give itself legitimacy, succeeded in establishing itself as the leading voice of British anti-apartheid protest. After a slow start, through the 1970s it held labour and trade union seminars and conferences, and sought affiliations at all levels from Labour Party and union organisations and support from the labour movement for all its campaigns. In particular, it argued for economic sanctions and against the ‘Code of Conduct’ approach taken up by the TUC. In 1977 and 1978 it used ICFTU initiatives to prompt the TUC into calling on its affiliated unions to take part in ‘Weeks of Action’ against apartheid.
By the early 1980s the Anti-Apartheid Movement had built a base in the British trade union movement which was no longer restricted to the left-wing and was especially strong in the public sector and white collar unions. Relations with the TUC improved and it began to give real support to AAM campaigns. From the mid-1980s the labour and trade union movement became one of the main proponents of economic sanctions and an important provider of financial and practical support both to the independent unions in South Africa and, in the run-up to the 1994 election, to the liberation movement.
This was made possible partly by factors outside the control both of the AAM and of British labour. Changing trade and investment patterns, following the UK’s accession to the Common Market in 1972 and from the problems of the South African economy, meant that the self-interested economic constraints that had held back the political and trade union wings of the labour movement from supporting sanctions began to fall away. The coming to power of the Thatcher government in 1979 had the paradoxical effect of forestalling the collapse of the apartheid regime while turning the anti-apartheid struggle into an iconic issue at the heart of the anti-Thatcher opposition.
But the key factor behind the Labour and trade union movement’s growing alliance with the AAM was the changing nature of the South African struggle. The rise of an independent trade union movement in South Africa provided a focus for solidarity activity by British trade unions, enabling them act against apartheid without moving too far outside their traditional parameters. At the same time the AAM’s misgivings, in the early 1970s, that trade union organisation in South Africa would be exploited by forces hostile to the liberation movements were dispelled as the independent union movement became an vital, though discrete, part of the organisational web that channelled mass action in South Africa in the 1980s.
The paper argues that the AAM’s key contribution, in the trade union movement and more generally, was to instil into a widely held moral repugnance to apartheid the political perspective of the primacy of the liberation movement.