Jack Jones dies: Former leader of Transport and General Workers Union and Pensioners Movement.

Jack Jones, the former leader of the TGWU and the UK Pensioners Movement has died at the age of 96, in his day he was a controversial figure for the left, as many of us felt he was far to close to the Labour governments. However in his defense, by working closely with Harold Wilson he did manage to make real gains for working class people.

Sadly as is often the way with reformist gains they were not permanent, as Mrs Thatcher once in power gradually snatched them back.

It must have been a personally tragedy for Jack, a man who had given the Labour Party his loyalty throughout his life, to witness the Labour Party when it eventually returned to power in 1997 under Tony Blair's leadership, refusal to annul the anti trade union legislation that Thatchers government passed onto the statute book.

He also became extremely angry and bitter and rightly so, at Gordon Browns refusal when Chancellor and later Prime Minister to reinstate the link between old age pensions and average earnings.

On a personal level Jones was totally incorruptible, spending his time as TGWU general secretary living in a south London council flat and when on retirement he was given an extra £10K handshake, he immediately donated it to the pensioners movement.

Jack Jones was one of a number of left reformist trade union leaders who emerged after WW2 under the leadership of Frank Cousins, whom he succeeded as head of the T@G. Most of these were honorable people who dealt with the world as they saw it; and in their own way contributed greatly to the betterment of working class life. Looking back it seems like another world and was all the better for that. A world in which working class people were given the respect they had earned, both in struggle and by playing the major role in bringing about the defeat of the Hitlerite Nazis.

These comrades would be appalled at the reactionary nature of today's Labour Party, in which there is no place for people from working class backgrounds on the Labour benches but space for the 22 year old daughter of a millionaire.

Below is a short video of Jack Jones life. and a link to the radio 4 today program here in which Tony Benn comments.