The attempted coup in PCS by former General Secretary Barry Reamsbottom has been widely reported. It may have looked like a fit of pique by a man who could not bear to hand over power, despite the democratic verdict of the union membership.

But there is a lot more to this story than Mr. Reamsbottom’s ego. He is a Vice-President of an organisation peddling US influence within the British labour movement and publishing NATO pamphlets. Its Director briefed MP’s and the media during Reamsbottom’s election campaign.

Two weeks before the Moderates gained control of the PCS National Executive Committee, “The Economist” (11 April) explained:

Mr Blair’s main hope that the left may not consolidate its hold hangs on the outcome of the biannual national executive committee elections, due on April 25th. If the Moderates win, the plan is to keep Barry Reamsbottom, the outgoing general secretary and a Moderate, in the job until 2004 and sideline Mr Serwotka.

But whose plan was it? A week later, and while the election was still on, an extraordinary circular was issued by Peter Robinson, Director of the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU).

Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding
INCORPORATING THE LABOUR COMMITTEE FOR TRANSATLANTIC UNDERSTANDING

President: Lord Richard QC

Vice Presidents: (Sir) Ken Jackson, (Lord) William Jordan, Doug McAvoy, Barry Reamsbottom

Chairman: Alan Lee Williams

Vice Chairmen: Marion Chambers (UK), Lord Chapple (UK), Peter Corterier (Germany), Sandra Feldman (USA), Rt Hon Lord Gilbert (UK), Eric Hammond (UK), John T. Joyce (USA), Ruth Kohn (Germany), Kate Losinska (UK), Carlo Ripa di Meana (Italy), Mario Soares (Portugal), Annemarie Renger MP (Germany), Jay Mazur (USA) Henri Simonet (Belgium) Max van der Stoel (Holland)

Director: Peter Robinson

Please reply to: C/o Cringle Lodge, Stoke Rochford, Nr Grantham, Lincolnshire NG33 5EF

PR/ap/tu
18th April 2002

Dear Colleague

Re: PCS and AMICUS (AEEU) Elections

Sir Ken Jackson and Barry Reamsbottom together with their moderate colleagues are once again fighting elections to ensure moderate control and direction for each of their unions.

Ken is standing again for his current post as General Secretary of the AEEU and Joint General Secretary of AMICUS. Barry’s moderate group in PCS is endeavouring to secure a majority in the current executive elections. As TUCETU Vice Presidents it’s important that we give them both as much support as we can.

I enclose Ken’s flyer for Branch nomination and a copy of the Moderate PCS Election lists together with an article from last week’s Economist for your information and use.

Any support you can provide in your own area amongst AEEU and PCS members will be appreciated.

In view of other recent trade union leadership and executive elections it is vital that we do all we can to reinforce the moderate’s role in these two vitally important unions.

Please do all you can to help.

Best wishes,

Yours sincerely

Peter Robinson
Director

Circulation: -

TUCETU Members
Members House of Commons/House of Lords
Media

And who are the TUCETU? Journalist David Osler and investigative publisher of “The Lobster” Robin Ramsay spilled the beans soon after Labour took power. Osler’s material is summarised in this excerpt from Ramsay’s 1998 essay Uncle Sam’s New Labour:

An older and more direct expression of American influence within the wider British labour movement is the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). TUCETU is the successor to the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding (LCTU), which was set up in 1976 by the late Joe Godson, Labour Attaché at the US embassy in London in the 1950s who had become an intimate of the then leader of the party, Hugh Gaitskell. Organised by two officials of the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council, TUCETU incorporates Peace Through NATO, the group central to Michael Heseltine’s MoD campaign against CND in the early 1980s, and receives over £100,000 a year from the Foreign Office. TUCETU chair Alan Lee Williams was a Labour defence minister in the Callaghan Government, before he defected to the SDP; director Peter Robinson runs the National Union of Teachers’ education centre at Stoke Rochford near Grantham. In the mid-1980s Williams and Robinson were members of the European policy group of the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Among the senior union and Labour Party figures on the TUCETU’s 1995 notepaper were Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers; CPSA general secretary Barry Reamsbottom (a member of the Successor Generation Project discussed above) and president Marion Chambers; Lord Richard, Labour leader in the House of Lords; former trade union leaders Bill Jordan (now head of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the CIA’s chief cold war labour movement operation),14 Lord (Eric) Hammond, and Lord (Frank) Chapple.15

The Atlantic Council/TUCETU network provided New Labour’s Ministry of Defence team. Defence Secretary George Robertson was a member of the Council of the Atlantic Committee from 1979-90; Lord Gilbert, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, is listed as TUCETU vice chair; Dr John Reid, Minister of State for the Armed Forces, spoke at a TUCETU conference; and MoD press office biographical notes on junior Defence Minister John Speller state that he ‘has been a long standing member of the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding’. Peter Mandelson has written a (very dull) pamphlet for TUCETU based on a speech he gave to its 1996 conference.

In other words, the people round Blair, the key New Labour ‘project’ personnel, are all linked to the United States, or the British foreign policy establishment, whose chief aim, since the end of the Second World War, has been to preserve the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ to compensate for long-term economic decline.

14 On which see, for example ‘The AFL-CIA’ in Frazier (ed.) and Peter E. Newell, ‘The International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile’ in Lobster 31.

15 These paragraphs on TUCETU are taken from David Osler’s ‘American and Tory Intervention in the British Unions since the 1970’s in Lobster 33.

TUCETU leaders starred in the May 1998 “Congress of Istanbul” organised by “The New Atlantic Initiative” of the American Enterprise Institute.

Topics included Getting Capitalism Right, and Broadening the Atlantic Perspective: The Politics of Oil, Water, and Pipelines... while guest speakers included former Tory Ministers Michael Portillo and Michael Howard, along with Richard Perle, Lane Kirkland (AFL-CIO)...

TUCETU Director Peter Robinson chaired a session called Looking Ahead: Do Current Atlantic Institutions Suffice? TUCETU Chairman Alan Lee Williams, billed from the Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom, helped out with a Defense and Security Roundtable: After NATO Enlargement: What Next?

Which brings us back to NATO.

Jamie Shea is their current Director of Information and Press. His NATO biography mentions previous jobs as Spokesman of NATO and Deputy Director of Information and Press (July 1993 to September 2000). From January 1991 he was Deputy Head and Senior Planning Officer, Policy Planning Unit and Multilateral Affairs Section of the Political Directorate, NATO, plus Speechwriter to the Secretary General of NATO. Drafter of NATO Ministerial communiqués and policy planning of Ministerial meetings.

His prolific writings include:

• NATO’s Future: Pamphlet published by the Trade Union Committee for Transatlantic Understanding, London, June 1989.
• Coping with Disorder in Europe: Pamphlet published by the Trade Union Committee for Transatlantic and European Understanding, London, June 1993.

So where does that leave us? In April, Peter Robinson briefed MP’s and journalists during Barry Reamsbottom’s fight “to ensure moderate control and direction” of PCS. He circulated an article from “The Economist” which stated that if the Moderates win, “the plan is to keep Barry Reamsbottom... in the job until 2004 and sideline Mr Serwotka” and told colleagues “Any support you can provide in your own area amongst AEEU and PCS members will be appreciated.”

Peter Robinson’s organisation promotes the US-UK Special Relationship and NATO.

PCS organises workers at GCHQ.

Coincidence? We don’t think so.