John Prescott, who died on 21st November, went from being a working class activist among seafarers to being a useful cover for Tony Blair in his attacks on workers.
Prescott went straight from school at 15 to train as a porter and chef. Two years later he joined the Merchant Navy to escape military service. He worked as a steward on Cunard liners.
He led a strike on the Mauretania, after ship’s officers refused to allow other ranks being allowed to wear whites in the tropics. His militant behaviour meant that he got fewer postings. The National Union of Seamen, of which he was a member, sponsored him to go to Ruskin College. The right-wing leadership probably thought that this was a good way of getting rid of him.
He then went on to do a degree course at Hull University. He was able to support seafarers as a student during the 1966 seafarers strike, which took place under the Labour government of Harold Wilson. This strike lasted for a month and a half. Wilson referred to the strike being led by a “ tightly knit group of politically motivated men,” and threatened to use the Royal Navy and RAF to smash the strike. The Wilson government set up the Pearson inquiry into the strike.
In response Prescott and Charlie Hodgins published the pamphlet Not Wanted on Voyage: The Seamen’s Reply, put out by the Hull Dispute Committee. As Prescottt noted, “The job of the Inquiry was to discredit the seamen’s case, and to deliver up the sailor for sacrifice on the altar of George Brown’s Incomes Policy…The goodwill of the bankers, the ill-will of the working class. How familiar a story that is of Labour Governments, when we cast our minds back to Ramsay MacDonald and the 1929-31 government. It was the trade unions then who stiffened the Labour Party against the attacks on unemployment pay. They must rally to the cause in the different circumstances of today.”
Prescott was elected as a Labour MP for Hull East in the 1970 election. At first, he was on the Labour left. He showed an increasing desire to use his working class background to enrich himself, however, and evolved his positions to the right.
In the 1990s he sided with Blair, to whom he was very useful. Prescott became the “working class” enabler of increasingly neoliberal policies. He managed to get through the abolition of Clause IV on a second vote in 1994. This clause was a Labour Party commitment to the public ownership of key industries.
With the 1997 election, Prescott became deputy prime minister. He supported the encroaching privatisation of Royal Mail, and the complete privatisation of Air Traffic Control. He backed the introduction of tuition fees for university students in September 1998, when he himself had been able to go to Ruskin and Hull University with grants.
In 2001 he fully backed British support for the American invasion of Iraq. The following year, he adopted an aggressive stance against the firefighters’ strike. He told the firefighters, “Take the gun away from the head that there’s going to be a strike, because that’s not the way to negotiate.” He blocked the original 16% pay offer, saying it was “excessive” that the strikes were “unnecessary” and that the Fire Brigades Union should halt them immediately.
Resigning from the Commons in 2007 with the defeat of Blair, Prescott subsequently became Baron Prescott in the House of Lords. Two years before he had denounced the “flunkery and titles” of the House of Lords in an interview. He now fully devoted himself to increasing his wealth.
Every part of the parliamentary racket, from David Cameron to Blair, Starmer and Alistair Campbell, mourned Prescott’s death, with Jeremy Corbyn chiming in to say “I am really sad to hear that John Prescott has passed away. John was a huge figure and personality, from his seafaring union days to the highest offices in Government.”
A salutary lesson that Parliament and the Labour Party are the enemies of working class emancipation. Prescott was not a “working class hero” but, as one of his old seafarer ex-friends told him, “a fucking sellout.”
Photo: Creative Commoms Licence, Photo/Sedrak Mkrtchyan