Abstract
AbstractThis is an account of the 2002–2004 firefighters' dispute in the UK based on interviews with key figures, attendance at meetings and scrutiny of contemporary sources. Our emphasis is on the political nature of the dispute with the case made that senior members of the Labour government sought to ‘politicize’ the industrial action in order to undermine the credibility of the union leadership, win over public opinion and set down a marker for public sector unions. In particular the government aggressively pursued centralization; that is, national leaders took over the running of the dispute from the local authority employers in order to maintain central government control over the process of ‘modernization’. Moreover, their various interventions confirm the Hay thesis that the Labour Party leadership now openly and uniformly seeks to defeat union industrial action.
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