Union leader who aims to do battle with the Tories

INTERVIEW: The leader of the GMB union will be in the front line of opposition to Conservative cuts, writes Mark Hennessy, London Editor

PAUL KENNY was not born in Ballygar, Co Galway, because his mother refused to journey home from London on the unstable, uncomfortable Holyhead ferry for the birth of her fourth child, as she had done for the others. But Ballygar is, nevertheless, a central part in his life. It is “home”.

“The only thing our family ever knew was that they would be forced into emigration. It wasn’t picturesque. It was real. It was still going on in the 1970s and 1980s – families waving goodbye to their kids,” he says.

Today, Kenny is the London-based leader of the GMB, a powerful union and one that will be in the front-line of opposition to the cuts announced yesterday by the Conservative/Liberal Democrats coalition.

However, opposition must be handled carefully. A 30-year full-time union official, Kenny’s instincts were honed by his experiences just weeks after he became a postman in the 1970s, when his union took workers out on strike without being sure of their strategy.

“I learned that you have got to think not just about tactics. If your only response is just to say to members, ‘Will you go on strike?’ then you are not a good general. You need to know what you are facing, and the members need to know.

“The most powerful tool is to show that the public rejects the cuts – not a winter of discontent, but a spring of political rejection. This is not a short spurt. You have to have a longer strategy,” he says.

“Those who rush, thinking that they are leaders of the working class, might look behind and see that there is nobody following. There are loads of people who spring to mind, both within the trade union movement and within the party who think the electorate got it wrong.

“Well, actually, the electorate took a decision. I have always said that I don’t think the public will react in October. My view is that this will come together when you are able to unify disparate groups: parents, for instance, who are not getting a school repaired.”

But opposition there will be: “I watched our education and hospital services decline during 17 years of the Tories under Thatcher and Major, and when I say decline, I mean decline. There were parts that were beginning to verge on Third World conditions.

“People were not just waiting on trolleys, they were dying on them and kids were going to school without overcoats. And all of this stuff about Labour not fixing the roofs while the sun was shining? The truth was the roofs needed fixing, the Tories didn’t fix them,” he went on.

The Conservative-led ideology today is the same as under Thatcher: “I don’t think that they are anywhere near as formidable as Thatcher. But don’t get me wrong, they are capable of creating as much social division and damage.

“I never voted for her, but you have to recognise that she was a formidable character. Her spectre hung over not just the Tories, but New Labour as well. We have to convince the public over the next five, six months as the impact of these social changes hit.

“We’re facing the worst of all worlds. We are facing an economic problem that is real, but no Tory politician is going to pass up a crisis. It is a fantastic opportunity to drive through a load of ideological clap-trap that they have been getting their jollies off on for years,” he said.

Unusually, perhaps, among trade union leaders, Kenny accepts the banks had to be rescued by Labour, although he laments the lack of action taken since to ensure that they can never cause the same damage again.

“I’m not Einstein but I was in front of the treasury committee three years before the crash saying that this is all built on sand, that if the economy gets into trouble, this is going to collapse around our ears.

“It was like the South Sea Bubble. People were being hailed as saviours of the universe. Jesus, you could do this on a market stall. Having got there we didn’t have any options, because otherwise ATMs really would have started to run out.”

For now, he concedes that Labour and the unions have lost – or, at least, not trumped – the Tories’ argument that the UK’s deficit cannot be reduced more slowly “or otherwise the world will collapse. I think that is absolute tosh. Absolute tosh”.

Accepting that action is necessary at some speed, the GMB leader insists it must begin with the banks and with the £40 billion which even the Conservatives acknowledge never sees Her Majesty’s Treasury because of tax evasion.

His father Patrick’s life guides much of Kenny’s thinking. He left Ballygar in the early 1930s to follow his brothers, Michael and John, to Manchester. Only 15 and unable to read or write, Patrick got the boat to Liverpool with his brothers’ address written on a piece of paper.

“The way he told me the story was that a very helpful Scouser saw he was struggling and offered to buy him his ticket. Dad gave him some money and the Scouser bought the ticket and put him on the train.”

Soon, his father realised that he had been conned. “The Scouser had bought him a platform ticket. So he ended up in London. He couldn’t get back. There were no telephones and he slept rough for about three days. By a million-to-one chance he ran into someone from the village.”

Soon, he got a job in Chiswick. Later, he met Jean Frances Watkins, also from Ballygar, at a dance. He was not reunited with his brother John until both found themselves in Royal Artillery anti-aircraft units in the second World War.

In time, his father built a painting and decorating business, with 100 workers: “It grew so big and so fast that I think that he couldn’t handle the worry and the stresses of it. Imagine, he came with no money, his first nights were sleeping rough and then 25 years later he is driving one of those big Essex cars, one of the American imports.”

As a child, his father had memories of the Black and Tans entering the family home during the wake for his own grandfather, tipping the body out of the coffin to search for weapons. “He had the stories, alright, but he didn’t have them with a sense of bitterness. It was almost matter-of-fact. He saw the difference between the powers and the people. He had that much vision about it. And he introduced me to Fulham FC, which is the love of my life,” says Kenny. His father died a week shy of his 65th birthday in 1981.

“He was always eternally grateful that he had had a good life in this country. He always loved home, as everybody does,” says Kenny, adding that his father’s generation had accepted anti-Irish discrimination in the 1930s “because it was almost normal”. Later in life, he refused to accept it: “He taught us that the one thing you shouldn’t give away was your dignity. You should always be willing to offer help and you shouldn’t expect anything in return, but that was different from work. Work was a transaction. He believed that you always gave your best.

“It was always instilled from the day of my first job that they could give me the sack, but they couldn’t take my dignity, and if I thought something wasn’t right, I should speak out.”

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the 600,000-strong British trade union GMB

PAUL KENNY: WHAT HE SAYS

"He taught us that the one thing you shouldn't give away was your dignity"

- on his father's influence

"You have to recognise that she was a formidable character"

- on Margaret Thatcher

"The only thing our family ever knew was that they would be forced into emigration"

- on his Irish background