In from the cold? Ben Roberts and Conservative industrial relations reform

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12083
• Date: 01 March 2015
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Author: John Kelly

In from the cold? Ben Roberts and

Conservative industrial relations reform

John Kelly

ABSTRACT

Over the course of his career Professor Ben Roberts became an increasingly vocal

critic of the trade union movement and a firm advocate of the case for legal restric-

tions on their activities. The growing influence of neoliberal ideas inside the Con-

servative Party, driven by think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs, could

have provided him with the opportunity to exert some influence over industrial

relations policymaking, after years of political isolation. In fact Ben Roberts

remained on the margins of the policy networks that constructed the Thatcherite

programme of industrial relations reform. His labour movement background and

lack of involvement in think tank seminars and activities made it difficult for him to

penetrate the tight and cohesive networks that were integral to Conservative

policymaking. In any case his main focus was institution building in the academic

world of industrial relations, rather than policymaking in the political world, and his

legacy continues today in the British Journal of Industrial Relations and the Inter-

national Labour and Employment Relations Association.

1 INTRODUCTION

From the 1950s until the early 1980s Professor Ben Roberts was a prolific industrial

relations academic, the editor and author of a dozen books and numerous articles. He

was also the long-serving Head of the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE)

Department of Industrial Relations, from its foundation in 1963 until his retirement

in 1984; the founder and chief editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations

(BJIR), also from 1963; co-creator of the International Industrial Relations Associa-

tion (IIRA) in 1966; and a regular attendee at annual conferences of the British

Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA). Through the IIRA he trav-

elled widely and frequently, encouraging the promotion of national industrial rela-

tions associations around the world. It is clear from this evidence alone that he was a

highly effective institution builder (Gennard, 1986; Kaufman, 2004: 311–328). More-

over his achievements were enduring and his legacy remains in the international

organisation, now renamed ILERA, in the BJIR and in the Industrial Relations staff

at the LSE (now downgraded from a Department to a Group).

❒John Kelly is Professor of Industrial Relations in the Department of Management, Birkbeck, University

of London. Correspondence should be addressed to John Kelly, Department of Management, Birkbeck,

University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX; email: j.kelly@bbk.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 46:2, 100–116

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Politically Ben Roberts was for many years well to the right of many of his

academic industrial relations peers, particularly the most well-known doyens of the

Oxford School, Hugh Clegg, Allan Flanders, Alan Fox and Bill McCarthy (Clegg,

1990; Kelly, 2010). While the latter were all heavily involved in the Donovan Com-

mission and enjoyed good links with Labour and trade union leaders, Ben Roberts’s

critical views of trade unions and collective bargaining and his strong commitment to

restrictive labour law, consigned him to the margins of government industrial rela-

tions policy making in the UK throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed McCarthy’s

(1994) article on the involvement of IR academics in UK policy making simply does

not mention Roberts at all. His views may also have contributed to the decision by the

Economic and Social Research Council to locate the new Industrial Relations

Research Unit at Warwick under Hugh Clegg in preference to the LSE and Roberts

(Roberts, 2000: 439).

One might have thought he would be far more influential with the political right,

among Conservative MPs, or among the right-wing think tanks that began to emerge

from the 1950s, most notably the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA, founded in

1955) and later the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), co-founded in 1974 by Margaret

Thatcher, Keith Joseph and the journalist Alfred Sherman. In a similar vein the rise

of the neo-liberal wing of the Conservative party under Thatcher and Joseph and their

adoption of a neo-liberal agenda for industrial relations reform could well have

proved to be the trigger for Ben Roberts’s elevation to policy-making circles. In fact

Roberts exerted hardly any influence over Conservative industrial relations policy,

despite his clear affinity with much of their thinking. The aim of this article is to show

why that was the case. Section 2 traces the evolution of Roberts’ thinking about

industrial relations from his leftist ideas of the 1940s through to the 1980s, shortly

after his retirement from the LSE in 1984. Section 3 discusses the evolution of

Conservative industrial relations policy, with particular reference to the neo-liberal

think tanks, which often provided a conduit for academic involvement in policy

formation. Sections 4 and 5 then describe and account for Roberts’s limited involve-

ment with, and influence on, the world of Conservative policy making.

2 THE EVOLUTION OF BEN ROBERTS’S INDUSTRIAL

RELATIONS THINKING

Roberts’s writings on industrial relations have already been summarised in some

detail in Gennard’s (1986) essay, written on the occasion of his retirement from the

LSE, and so this section concentrates on his thinking about industrial relations

problems and the policies required for their solution. It is clear from his first book,

Trade Union Government and Administration in Great Britain (1956) that Roberts was

a firm supporter of trade unions and of their social and economic role. Yet by the

1960s he was expressing considerable sympathy for the Conservative proposals to

increase the legal regulation of trade unions, collective bargaining and industrial

disputes and by the 1980s he had become an open admirer of Margaret Thatcher and

her legislative assault on trade union power (Roberts, 1968a; 1987: 14–15). The

apparently radical shift in Roberts’s views becomes even more striking when we recall

that between 1941 and 1947 he was an active member of the Socialist Vanguard

Group (SVG), a tiny organisation led by Allan Flanders and then in transition from

its primal revolutionary socialism to a form of ‘democratic socialism’. The group’s

May 1941 National Letter described him as a promising potential member and the

101Ben Roberts and conservative industrial relations reform

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd