Welcome

In 1975-1976 I studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I followed classes in Industrial Relations. B.C. (Ben) Roberts was head of that Department at that time. David Winchester was one of my lecturers. He invited me to be a translator for a group of members of the working councils of the Dutch company Internatio Müller. With that group I learned a lot more of the (actual) industrial relations by visiting Ford Dagenham, MP Giles Radice (Labour) and the South Wales Mines. I still feel my knees when I think of crawling through the mine... I still am very gratefull to David Winchester because of thius special opportunity he gave me.

As a student I was fascinated by the strength and the weakness of the British trade union movement. The very symbol of that seemed to me the Triple (Industrial) Alliance. Three big unions in three vital industries - mining, transport and railways - employers and government should be at their mercy. The idea alone was a threat of revolution in itself. However, an imaginative threat is not enough. You need an organisation, you need a strategy. And, as prime minister David Lloyd George made them clear: if you are more powerfull than the state, you must be ready to take over the state. For me this was a phenomenon I wanted to write a paper on.

After many years I read the paper again. I scanned it and made it ready for this website. The quality of my optical character reading program is not that good, so I had to made many corrections. I apologise for the few errors that I might have overlooked. The footnotes unfortunately did not survive the operation.

Internet made it possible to illustrate this paper with pictures of leaders of the Triple Alliance and other main actors. Some of them I could link to wikipedia, so that they got a little biography added :-).

Amsterdam, August 2009

Jeroen Sprenger