The Evolution of British Industrial Relations Pluralism: Hugh Clegg and His Legacy

Peter Ackers’s biography of Hugh Clegg provides an account of Clegg’s life in family, among academic colleagues, and in public policy, with his academic papers summarized. Ackers moves from a detailed account of Clegg’s analysis and public policy views to brief claims as to failures and flaws, without locating such arguments in a broader account of the context and other actors. He argues that the collapse of trade-union power and of ‘social democracy’ was an ‘avoidable tragedy’ and that Clegg’s policy for industrial relations reform contained elements of a solution but that its failure was the ‘great defeat’. The attempt to draw wider lessons is terse and forced, especially his discussion of Clegg and E. P. Thompson. Some of Ackers’s conclusions seem to imply that Clegg was naive in his view of unions and the possibility of reform, whereas what he has uncovered is someone well aware of the tensions and ambiguities of the employment relationship and who strove to address them with, as befits a pluralist, recognition of the many competing interests in that relationship. He does not take the opportunity to elucidate his exposition of ‘neo-pluralism’. Although Ackers’s book is a testimony to Clegg’s life and work, it does not meet its wider goals. It does not dissect an intellectual generation and its account of reformism is unduly focused on Clegg himself to the neglect of the wider picture. And it does not explain why neo-pluralism would have been an answer.