There could hardly be a series on songs in labour history without reference to the Strawbs. But, asks Mark Crail, was this a celebration or a condemnation of trade unions?

Part of the Union
The Strawbs (Richard Hudson and John Ford, 1973)

There is nothing subtle about Part of the Union. From it’s opening ‘Now I’m a union man / Amazed at what I am’ to the repeated refrain of the chorus, ‘You don’t get me, I’m part of the union’, this is very much a song of its time. But is it, as some have argued, an unashamed celebration of working-class power and confidence nearing its pre-Thatcherite peak – or, as others insist, a bluntly ironic bit of union-bashing, a parody of the bloody-minded obstructionism holding back Ted Heath’s Britain? You may be surprised to learn that not only was this very issue debated at length at the time, not least in the pages of Melody Maker and the New Musical Express, both of which took themselves rather more seriously than did anyone else, but that it has continued to be an intermittent point of sometimes bitter contention in online discussion forums to this day.

To some extent Part of the Union is part of a minor flowering of jokey one-off singalong songs of the era, having more in common with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Urban Spaceman (1968) or the Scaffold’s Lily The Pink (1969) than with any wider musical trends of the time. But it lacked their twist of peculiarly English eccentricity, and most definitely did not have their humour: in Part of the Union, the whimsy of the late 1960s had foundered on the reality of the Industrial Relations Act and the three-day week. There is, of course, also a third interpretation of the song: that regardless of the writers’ intentions, it could be co-opted by trade unions and given new meaning, as indeed it was at numerous trade union conferences then and since. The final word, however, should probably go to Jack Jones, then general secretary of the Transport and General Workers, who when asked for his thoughts replied, ‘It’s just a song’.

Mark Crail is web editor for the Society for the Study of Labour History