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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GLOBALIZATION: THE GENESIS OF DUNDEE'S TWO ‘UNITED FRONTS’ IN THE 1930s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

JIM TOMLINSON
JIM TOMLINSON*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
*
Economic and Social History, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Lilybank House, Bute Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RT[email protected]
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Abstract

Economic globalization has been a key force shaping British society since the mid nineteenth-century. This article uses a case-study of Dundee and its jute industry to examine the major issues that have arisen as the effects of those global forces have been responded to. Dundee was especially prone to detrimental effects from globalization because of its character as ‘juteopolis’, a one industry town with that industry subject to powerful competitive pressures from Calcutta producers from the 1880s onwards. In the 1930s these pressures became overwhelming, as cheap jute goods from India undercut the Dundee industry's home as well as export markets, and mass unemployment ensued. The local responses to this pressure were sharply divergent. There was both a ‘United Front’ between many elements in the local labour movement, mirroring the much-contested national calls for joint Labour and Communist party efforts, and a quite different ‘front’ bringing together jute employers, jute unions, local MPs, and the city council to call for protection for the industry. It is argued that this divergence can be used to explore key issues in the nature of the forces, national as well as local, operating on industrial cities and their populations.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 225 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Jim Phillips, Chris Whatley, and two referees for this journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

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30 In 1903, the ILP organized a national series of national demonstrations against tariffs, including one in Dundee: Baxter and Kenefick, ‘Labour politics’, p. 197.

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33 A wages council was introduced in 1919: Sells, D., The British trade boards system (London, 1923), pp. 94–100Google Scholar.

34 Lennox, ‘Working-class life’, pp. 250–5. This could reflect the greater wage flexibility in textiles, producing lower levels of persistent unemployment, as well as the lower wages available to fund such benefits.

35 Rodger, R., ‘Employment, wages and poverty in the Scottish cities, 1841–1914’, in Gordon, G., ed., Perspectives of the Scottish city (Aberdeen, 1985), pp. 40–1Google Scholar; Huberman sees cheaper transport as crucial in increasing labour mobility leading to wage convergence and the breaking down of sectoral attitudes: ‘Belgian labour’, pp. 329, 337–45.

36 In 1901, jute employed 73.5 per cent of all occupied women: Walker, Juteopolis, p. 1.

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42 Though, until 1929, one of its seats was occupied by Edwin Scrymgeour, Britain's only ever Prohibitionist MP. Ideologically complex (not to say erratic), Scrymgeour styled himself ‘Prohibitionist-Labour’ and was usually a reliable supporter of Labour in the House of Commons. For Scrymgeour, see J. Kemp, ‘Drink and the labour movement in early twentieth-century Scotland with particular refrence to Edwin Scrymgeour and the Scottish Prohibition Party’ (Ph.D. thesis, Dundee, 2000).

43 Foot later defected from the pro-government ‘Samuelite’ Liberals, and his stance on protection was somewhat wavering, though he usually combined opposition to it ‘in principle’ with justification of it for Dundee as an ‘emergency measure’. In 1931, he wanted to make tariffs a ‘secondary matter’: Dundee Free Press, 15 Oct. 1931.

44 Hansard (Commons), vol. 314, 15 July 1936, cols. 2168–95; vol. 331, 2 Feb. 1938, cols. 239–305.

45 The Jute Control operated on the basis of forbidding the sale of imported jute goods below Dundee-established prices, combined with state trading in raw jute: Board of Trade, Working party reports: jute (London, 1948), pp. 13–16.

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48 Thorpe, A., The British Communist party and Moscow, 1920–1963 (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar; Worley, M., Class against class: the Communist party in Britain between the wars (London, 2002)Google Scholar; on the United Front and trade unions, Fishman, N., The British Communist party and the trade unions, 1933–1945 (London, 1995), pp. 48–106Google Scholar.

49 Dundee Courier, 14 Nov. 1935. In 1931, almost half of Communist voters (4,811 out of 10,264) were ‘plumpers’, i.e. did not use their second vote to support Labour or anyone else; Southgate, D., ‘Politics and representation in Dundee’, in Jackson, J., ed., The third statistical account of Scotland: the city of Dundee (Arbroath, 1976)Google Scholar, Table 12.5.

50 Williamson, P., National crisis and national government: British politics, the economy and the empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 97–8Google Scholar, 217–18. For similar uncertainty on this issue at the TUC, Booth, A. and Pack, M., Employment, capital and economic policy: Great Britain, 1918–1939 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

51 Cited in Dundee Free Press, 13 Oct. 1931.

52 Hansard (House of Commons), 15 July 1936, vol. 314, cols. 2180–7.

53 Hansard (House of Commons), 2 Feb. 1938, vol. 331, col. 256.

54 Ibid., cols. 258–9.

55 Ibid., cols. 261–2, 263.

56 Ibid., col. 265.

57 Nairne Stewart Sandeman, ibid., cols. 270–1.

58 Ibid., col. 278.

59 Dundee Free Press, 13 Oct. 1931; note also Marcus's attack on Dundee capitalists for exporting British jobs by investing in jute in Belgium and Czechoslovakia: Dundee Free Press, 22 Oct. 1931. The Free Press, a Labour-supporting newspaper published from 1926 to 1933, also frequently used the ‘big loaf/small loaf’ argument in the 1931 election, comparing the low price of bread in Britain with the price in protectionist countries: for example, Dundee Free Press, 15 Oct., 17 Oct.

60 Dundee Courier, 23 Oct. 1931.

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64 These arguments were being made in the 1920s, and are still evident in the general election of 1945: People's History Museum CP/LOC/SCOT/1/11 Dundee Communist party minutes, 19 May 1925; Bowman, D., The case for jute (Dundee, 1945)Google Scholar.

65 The term was used in a headline in the Dundee Courier, 3 Mar. 1937: ‘“United Front” to press jute trade's claims’.

66 The AJSM had approached the union in 1919 about jointly pressing the government for protection against Indian imports, but the union, while willing to act with employers, wanted to press for action on Indian hours and conditions, not protection: DUA MS84/3/1 (2) AJSM trade meeting minutes, 7 Feb., 22 Apr. 1919; committee minutes, 4 Feb., 25 Feb., 10 Mar., 16 Apr. 1919.

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70 DUA MS84/5/4 (2) AJSM meeting with worker's representatives, 13 Nov., 27 Nov., and 28 Dec. 1936; DUA MS 84/5/3(4) AJSM fiscal sub-committee, 2 Feb. 1937. The third jute union in the United Front was the bleachers, who, like the tenters, were small and male-dominated.

71 DUA MS84/5/4 (2) AJSM meeting with worker's representatives, 10 May 1937, 28 May 1937.

72 DCL: LHC Dundee Corporation minutes, 15 Mar. 1937.

73 Ibid., conferences in connection with the jute trade, 18 Mar. 1937, 25 June 1937.

74 The provost from 1935 to 1938 was Phin, a Moderate and vice-chairman of the local Unionist party.

75 Ibid., 25 June 1937, 12 July 1937, 18 Oct. 1937, 8 Nov. 1937, 19 Sept. 1938.

76 Hansard (House of Commons), 2 Feb. 1938, vol. 331, col. 254.

77 DCL: LHC Dundee Corporation minutes, 15 Mar. 1937: it is noteworthy that later in 1937 Reynolds was de-selected for his council seat, and he alleged that this reflected the fact that Dundee Labour party was ‘run by communists’: Dundee Courier, 1 Oct. 1937.

78 Dundee Courier, 19 Mar. 1937.

79 Ibid.

80 Dundee Courier, 11 Sept., 24 Sept. 1937.

81 Ibid., 3 Sept. 1937.

82 Ibid., 19 Mar. 1937.

83 Ibid.

84 Phillips, J., ‘The “retreat” to Scotland: the Tay road bridge and Dundee's post-1945 development’, in Tomlinson, and Whatley, , eds., Jute no more, pp. 246–65Google Scholar.

85 DCL: LHC Dundee Corporation minutes, 15 Jan., finance committee sub-committee, 9 Jan. 1931.

86 In 1936, the largest delegations to the Trades and Labour Council were ten from the Transport and General Workers Union, nine from the Amalgamated Engineering Union, eight each from the National Union of Railwaymen and the shop assistants union, with six from the DDUJFW: Dundee Labour yearbook (Dundee, 1936).

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88 Dundee Courier, 14 May 1937.

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92 Though we know almost nothing directly about ‘consumer politics’ in Dundee, though the Free Trade League was active, helped by funds from one of Dundee's jute barons who remained faithful to liberalism, John Caird: Trentmann, Free trade nation, pp. 105, 109, 119.

93 Harris, ‘Labour's political and social thought’, pp. 16–17.

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95 After 1945, the union was to press strongly for the continuation of jute control in peacetime, to preserve employment in jute: for example, ‘TUC: European free trade area – jute industry’, 12 Mar. 1958, MRC MSS 292/629/3; more generally, Tomlinson, Morelli, and Wright, Decline of jute.

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