It’s the time of year again when Dartington Hall hosts the Ways with Words festival. This year it is my pleasure to interview Alan Johnson, the union leader who became Home Secretary, about the third volume of his autobiography The Long and Winding Road. This covers the period when Alan became an MP and a Minister.
Alan was a Londoner who found himself nominated for the safe Labour seat of Hull West and Hessle, a constituency covering inner-city Hull and the fishing port. His first task was to work his way round his patch electioneering. It was not long before he came across the fishing community and discovered how their lives had been destroyed by Government neglect.
Hull trawlers used to fish the Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. This was a desperately dangerous occupation, 
estimated to have a mortality rate 17 times higher than coal mining: over 90 years more than 8000 men had been lost from Hull. But there was worse: in the early 1970s the distant-water trawling industry was wiped out. This had nothing to do with the EU or its Common Fisheries Policy. It was due to the UK accepting Iceland’s demands for a 3, then 4, then 12, then 200-mile fishing limit around its coast. True, the UK disputed this and deployed the Royal Navy. But Iceland was the home to the USA’s Keflavik early-warning base and America was told to get British warships out of Icelandic waters or lose its base.
Soon Russia, Norway, Canada and Greenland followed Iceland’s example and so it was that almost all of the distant-water fishing grounds became inaccessible to British fleets. Thousands lost their jobs in Hull. There was compensation, but that went entirely to the trawler owners. None went to the crews who were left jobless and in poverty, with no prospects of being able to use their considerable skills again.
For Alan, fresh from running the Union of Communication Workers, this was both an outrage and something he could rectify. Gradually, all too gradually, he worked his way around Whitehall. He secured £1000 compensation for every year worked on the trawlers, irrespective of rank, capped at 20 years, and full payment to widows and dependants. This was never going to be enough but it was nevertheless a triumph of negotiation, hardly mentioned in the press outside Hull. It’s a reminder of why we have constituency MPs.
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