SHADOW chancellor John McDonnell made a number of important announcements at the 2018 Labour Party conference on the subject of industry.

He has said that Labour will give workers in the private sector shares in their business, limited to £500 personally, the remainder to be used to invest in public services. He has also argued that there should be a significant number of workers on company boards, with the proviso that they are trade union members.

Given the unfortunate decline in trade union influence (by no means irreversible) and the power of the large private-sector companies like Amazon and Google, McDonnell’s policies ,if radical by recent standards, are also modest.

Having recently called for more histories of the present I’d suggest that some more context is required than media stories have given.

Readers of a certain age may recall names such as Michael Barratt Brown, Ken Coates, Stuart Holland and indeed the Institute For Workers Control who agitated for a more democratic industrial set-up, where workers and unions had more influence in the 1960s and 1970s, pre-Thatcher.

Indeed the 1974-79 Labour government set up a National Enterprise Board, promoted partnerships and planning in industry and sponsored the 1977 Bullock Report on industrial democracy.

The Bullock Report in 1977 recommended putting trade unionists on the boards of companies with over 2,000 employees. They would have significant influence in running the company but shareholders would have a veto over decisions. As Labour lost office in 1979 little progress was made on implementation.

Not all of it worked but it was a template that offered perhaps a way forward, although critics argued at the time that workers on boards looked like a way of trying to avoid the inevitable collision of class interests.

While the Tories briefly styled themselves the “workers’ party” and Theresa May talked about industrial democracy of course nothing has happened.

There are some outposts of the 1970s period still around. As a manager in one of the UK’s largest private-sector companies I have been collecting (free) shares since the mid-1980s and now have quite a shareholding. Occasionally I have pitched up as a shareholder at the AGM of the company and asked a question. The answer is invariably “thank you Mr Flett, we are aware of the trade union view.”

As a trade union officer I cannot recall any of the managers and professionals I represent suggesting that the way to challenge decisions of the company is to act as a shareholder. They rightly seek trade union influence.

So would workers being on the board actually work? It might work but care is needed. Firstly, simply asking trade union board members to back “difficult” decisions (job cuts) is not a way forward. In reality, for the idea to work, more is needed.

Namely measures that the 1997 Labour government said it was going to look at but did not.

That means widening the legal scope of company boards beyond a duty to make profit for shareholders and providing a duty to look at the impact of their actions on jobs and the wider community. It also means narrowing definitions of what information is held to be commercially confidential or share-price sensitive, which currently means that even if workers were to sit on boards they couldn’t say much about what was discussed let alone do anything about it.

Socialism or workers’ control it is not. It would be a modest rebalancing of a worker-employee playing field that has been tilted a long way, the wrong way, since Thatcher came to office.