We had a Conservative government. They appointed Conservatives to the Board of the National Blood Service (as it was at that time). I was the union rep at the Blood Centre and one day in August I saw on teletext (!) that our Centre and 4 others were to close.
Did we accept it? NO. We organised a huge joint union campaign. We went out most Saturdays taking our case to the public of Liverpool and Merseyside; we lobbied councillors and MPs. We obtained the management consultants’ report by Bain and Co. and analysed it and exposed it for the overpriced nonsense it was – at around £1,000 a page – and some of the pages had just six words on them, or one bar chart.
Before long we had members of the public, pensioners, and shop stewards collecting signatures for our campaign to stop the closure. We ended up with 500,000 signatures which led to Liverpool City Council giving us St George’s Hall in Liverpool for a public meeting with the National Blood Authority executives.
The meeting itsef was huge – around 1,000 people and it was covered on Newsnight. The NBA Board never recovered from the experience. They were expecting a church hall! When they won the election the Labour Party sacked the Chief Executive and Chair, and promised the people of Liverpool a new blood centre. It stil stands there today, a £20 million facility giving high quality scientific employment to the young people of Liverpool, Wirral, St Helens and Knowsley.
But it didn’t just happen. We had a committee meeting every Monday with delegates from each of the trade unions; we regularly reported back to our members; we sent delegations to the other threatened centres; we visited factories and workplaces; we even had a weekly lottery organised by a member (not a rep) which raised about £100 a week. I think I maybe took it too far – I dedicated three years of my life to that campaign – and when it was my daughters first day at school I was going to miss it for a meeting. Luckily Dr Duguid, the BMA rep, said to me “No! Andy you are not doing that. Go with her to her first day”. And looking back, she was right.
But what it taught me was that if workers are organised and determined they can achieve anything. We didn’t get too much help off the actual unions, we did 90% of it ourselves, because we had to. And we won.
The new Liverpool Blood Centre. Only there because of union members.
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