Bill Sirs, who has died aged 95, was the general secretary of the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation during the turbulent years of 1975 to 1985. He was the epitome of a moderate trade union leader in the days when trades unions were at the height of their influence. He led a union which traditionally had been co-operative with management and in the 1980s he was part of the “St Ermin’s” group of trade union leaders, named after their Westminster hotel meeting place, who sought to resist what they saw as leftwing domination of the Labour party. But his moderate views did not prevent him leading his steelworkers into a 13-week national strike in 1980 which was at the time the longest since the general strike of 1926.
Together with his friends Joe Gormley of the National Union of Mineworkers and Sid Weighell of the National Union of Railwaymen, he resurrected the historic triple alliance of the three industrial unions, but it fell bitterly apart during the 1984-85 coal strike when miners attempted to block coal and iron ore supplies to the steel industry, something that Sirs believed would bring about the physical collapse of steelworks. There was particular antipathy between Sirs and Arthur Scargill. Scargill, anxious to close down steel production to bring pressure in his own dispute, accused Sirs of a deplorable attitude “in violation of every basic principle accepted by the trade union and labour movement”. Sirs, in turn, commented that the NUM’s unilateral withdrawal from honourable agreements (to provide essential coal supplies) with a brother trade union was perhaps “the beginning of the end for the miners”.
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