Derek Robinson

Career Robinson was born in Cradley, then in Worcestershire He soon became a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1951.

With his network of representatives in the 42 different Leyland plants around the country, he led a long-running campaign of strikes around the company, which he argued were in protest at mismanagement, leading 523 walkouts at Leyland's Birmingham plant during a 30-month period. In 1975, British Leyland became bankrupt and was nationalised by the Government. In 1977, a new managing director, Michael Edwardes, was appointed. He aimed to find a resolution to the ongoing industrial disputes and turn the company around. Robinson, for his part, supported the development of the policy of "participation", in which convenors and stewards would work together with company management.

During the 1970s union organisation in British Leyland was split between the largely Communist Party-orientated stewards under Etheridge, and later Robinson, at Longbridge, and a smaller number of Trotskyist stewards based at the more militant Cowley plant. Many of the individual workers, however, took a more militant line than that espoused by the CP officials. An article by Frank Hughes in Workers' Liberty suggests that Robinson, by supporting the introduction of the "measured day work" system in place of piecework and by encouraging the adoption of "participation", in fact destroyed the relationship between stewards and the shop floor and left them unable to control unofficial strikes.

Margaret Thatcher later described Robinson in her memoirs as a "notorious agitator". Many years later, Robinson commented "The pressures were immense but were it not for the ideological understanding that I had, I could very well have ended up with a nervous breakdown".

A 2002 BBC documentary series by Peter Taylor revealed that in the late 1970s MI5 had been attempting to undermine Robinson through an agent they had placed amongst his union officials; Edwardes stated that he had been "privileged to read minutes of meetings of the [...] joint committee of the Communist Party and our shop stewards", which had been passed to him via the Government.

Robinson was accused of causing as many as 523 strikes yet, when interviewed, admitted to no more than 3, with one of those relating to his own sacking.