The last trade union hero

At a time when even the Labour party panders to the rich and to the middle classes, it is a pleasure to talk to a genuine socialist. Jack Jones, who will be 90 in March and was one of the most powerful men in Britain when he led the Transport & General Workers’ Union in the 1970s, retains the unfashionable belief that the purpose of the Labour movement is to improve the lot of the working classes and the poor. He was born in Liverpool in 1913, in a house which was that year declared unfit for human habitation, and was brought up in poverty. In his youth he sometimes taught at a socialist Sunday school, where he inculcated a socialist version of the Ten Commandments, including such sentences as, ‘Remember that the good things of the earth are produced by labour. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the workers.