UK

Obituaries

Baron John Prescott: from striker to strike-breaker

John Prescott was a militant in the National Union of Seamen. He threw his principles overboard, became a Labour minister and pushed privatisation

John Prescott

By John Newsinger
Thursday 21 November 2024  

SOCIALIST WORKER Issue

John Prescott, who died on Thursday, is being celebrated throughout the media as some sort of “giant of the labour movement”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, he personifies the old joke about Labour MPs—that they believe in the emancipation of the working class, but starting with them. Membership of the House of Lords was the climax of his personal emancipation.

Prescott was not always like this. He came from a working class family and failed the 11 plus, a brutal exam system which entrenched class divisions. When he left school without any qualifications, he went to work in the Merchant Navy.

Here, he became a trade union militant and was involved in unofficial strikes. He took on the corrupt right wing leadership of the National Union of Seamen (NUS). He was one of the leaders of the National Seamen’s Reform Movement, fighting to bring the union under rank and file control.

In 1963, Prescott got into Ruskin College, Oxford, and from there went on to do a degree at Hull university.

While a student at Hull, he was still involved with NUS, helping his comrades out in 1966.The Merchant Navy workers took on Harold Wilson’s Labour government in a strike that lasted from 16 May until 1 July.

Wilson denounced the strike as Communist-led. Prescott wrote a pamphlet defending the strikers and supporting their demands, Not Wanted On Voyage.

In the June 1970 general election, he was elected as a Labour MP for Hull East. To begin with Prescott was on the left, very much a working class militant who had made it to the House of Commons.

But over the years this began to change. His lifestyle became increasingly upper middle class—while his working class credentials became a means to advance himself and right wing positions.

He decided to embrace the politics of New Labour and support Tony Blair in the 1990s. In fact, Prescott was useful to Blair because New Labour could always wheel out the “working class Prescott” in order to justify all their anti-working class measures.

New Labour adopted a whole-heartedly neoliberal agenda. Prescott was there to pugnaciously argue that it was in the interests of working people. This was his role. He was installed as deputy prime minister in 1997 after Labour’s landslide victory in the general election.


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Prescott supported the government’s privatisation agenda, particularly the part privatisation of the Royal Mail and the full privatisation of Air Traffic Control.

New Labour introduced university tuition fees in September 1998. If fees had been in place back in the 1960s, then there can be no doubt whatsoever that Prescott would never have gone to university.

Prescott was wholeheartedly behind British involvement in the US invasion of Iraq in 2001— for which Blair was forever grateful.

His role in taking on the trade unions in order to further New Labour’s neoliberal agenda was even more important.

He was put in charge of breaking the 2002 firefighters’ strike. Labour governments have always had to take on the unions at some point, decisively smashing a strike in order to make sure that the workers know their place.

This is what Wilson had done with the seamen in 1966—and what Prescott was charged with doing to the firefighters. There was concern in some circles, given his early history as a union militant, about whether he was up to the job. But Blair had every confidence in him.

In his memoirs, Prescott later moaned about how one of his oldest friends from the Merchant Navy, whose son was a firefighter, had attacked him over the dispute. He told Prescott that he was a “fucking sell-out” who had once been all for the workers and now was betraying them. And Prescott complained that the man had not spoken to him since.

But while he might have sold out the working class and lost some old friends, it was not all bad. Once he resigned from the Commons, he was promptly installed in the Lords as Baron Prescott in 2010, devoting himself to making as much money as possible.