Orme, Stanley

by Patrick Maume

Orme, Stanley (Stan) (1923–2005), Baron Orme of Salford, minister of state in the Northern Ireland Office, was born in Sale, Cheshire, on 5 April 1923, son of Sherwood Orme, clerk, and his wife Nellie (née Drew). Orme was brought up in poverty by his mother, and this was an abiding influence on his political outlook. Educated at the local elementary school, aged 14 he become an instrument-maker's apprentice in the giant Metro Vickers engineering plant in Trafford (near Manchester). In later life he continued his education through the National Council of Labour Colleges and the Workers' Educational Association; he promoted the arts in Salford and was proud to call himself a 'William Morris socialist' (Tribune, 13 May 2005).

Orme joined the RAF in 1942 and served in Canada and Egypt. He flew many missions as a bomber navigator, attaining the rank of warrant officer; he always felt lucky to have survived. Leaving the RAF in 1947, he took up an engineering job at Metro Vickers and rapidly became an activist in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (latterly the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW)) and a shop steward. He had joined the Labour party in 1944 and served on Sale borough council (1958–65); he strongly supported the left-wing party group led during the 1950s by Aneurin Bevan. An unsuccessful Labour candidate for Stockport South in the 1959 general election, in the 1964 election he was elected Labour MP for Salford West. He held this seat until 1983, when he was elected for Salford East.

In the later 1960s, when the Labour government had a large majority, secured at the 1966 general election, Orme was regarded as a member of the 'awkward squad' of left-wing rebels, supporting such causes as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, strongly opposing the Vietnam war, and complaining that the government was insufficiently active in opposing white minority rule in Rhodesia. He was an early and consistent opponent of British membership of the European Economic Community. His dissent centred on the government's trade union and economic policies, which he saw as insufficiently attentive to Labour's trade union and working-class supporters. In November 1967 he was one of two MPs whose parliamentary questions to James Callaghan, chancellor of the exchequer, about the possibility of devaluing the pound led to stock market instability when it was realised that Callaghan's evasive replies suggested that the government was preparing to devalue. After devaluation, he continued to complain that the working class were being blamed for Britain's financial difficulties and told to accept wage restraint while other sectors of the economy escaped similar controls. In 1969 he was an outspoken opponent of Barbara Castle's abortive attempt to persuade trade unions to accept balloting and arbitration. Labour MPs who supported the leadership complained that the chief whip seemed to think that the rebels could be handled by 'a bottle of wine with Stan Orme' rather than more concrete sanctions, while left-wing constituency activists were denouncing the loyalists as timeservers.

After 1966 he emerged as a leading member of the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, a group of Labour MPs sympathetic to the grievances of Northern Irish catholics and receptive to the labourist complaints of the newly elected West Belfast Republican Labour MP Gerry Fitt (qv), whom they joined in challenging the parliamentary convention that the internal affairs of Northern Ireland should not be raised at Westminster. Orme was generally regarded as the group's second-in-command after the Manchester MP Paul Rose. Orme's interest and involvement cannot be explained simply by the presence of an Irish vote in Salford, since the other Salford MP, Frank Allaun, a leftist close to Orme on most issues, later adopted integrationist views on Northern Ireland.

Rose, Orme and the Glasgow Labour MP Maurice Miller visited Northern Ireland on 14–16 April 1967 under the auspices of Fitt, touring parts of Tyrone and Derry city to witness the effects of discrimination by unionist councils and to hear the views of nationalist and NILP representatives on the situation. On returning to Britain, the MPs sent a 1,000-word report to the Labour leadership criticising the treatment of the minority in Northern Ireland. Unionist MPs dismissed their views on the grounds that their reception by enthusiastic crowds (often accompanied by bands) resembled anti-partition rallies rather than impartial investigations.

Orme continued to visit Northern Ireland; he was present in Derry when British troops were deployed there on 14 August 1969, later recalling that 'I saw for myself the B Specials firing tear gas into the Bogside…I have never been so frightened in my life' (Bew, 48). He joined prominent local nationalists in a delegation which visited Victoria Barracks, Derry, to meet the troops' commanding officer. He strongly opposed the introduction of internment (9 August 1971) and helped to force a parliamentary vote on the issue.

In May 1972 Orme was part of a delegation from the left-wing Tribune group which informed Harold Wilson that his performance as opposition leader was, in Orme's words, 'like punching cotton wool'. (Orme may have been influenced by the fact that Wilson had cried off a delegation of Labour MPs who were to meet their Irish counterparts at the British embassy in Dublin on 13 May 1972, and had then phoned Orme during the reception, leaving it to him to inform the infuriated MPs that Wilson had been meeting the Provisional IRA.)

Despite his discontent with the party leadership, Orme belonged to that section of the left (particularly associated with Michael Foot) that believed it necessary to accept office in order to influence government policy. (Foot later recalled that Orme retained a strong fascination with the critique of the Labour party by the Marxist commentator Ralph Miliband, though he rejected Miliband's conclusion that the party was irreformable.) In 1973, after the implementation of direct rule, Orme became junior opposition spokesman on Northern Ireland; in this capacity he paid many visits to Northern Ireland and the Republic. Merlyn Rees (qv), the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, noted that Orme's public identification with nationalist grievances was balanced to some extent by contact with the AUEW's predominantly protestant Northern Ireland membership.

Following the Labour party's return to office in March 1974 Orme became minister of state in the Northern Ireland Office under Rees. Since the ministerial team had to spend much of their time in Northern Ireland, Orme was made a privy councillor to allow him access to confidential documents in London when Rees was in Belfast. He was widely distrusted by unionists because of his previous support for the civil rights campaign and past statements advocating a united Ireland (though he had maintained that unity should only come about through majority consent). He was rapidly plunged into the May 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike, which he privately described as fascist; during negotiations with its leaders, who included loyalist paramilitaries, Orme was accused in some quarters of giving them credibility by meeting them at all. He accused them of mounting a 'political strike' to which Ian Paisley replied that this was strange coming from a member of the engineering union. Some commentators claimed that Orme's slowness to grasp the seriousness of the strike reflected overconfidence in the ability of the official trade union movement to restrain the strikers, and the contrast between his optimistic statements at Westminster and the deteriorating situation on the ground was much remarked on. On 22 May Orme succeeded in persuading the SDLP members of the executive not to resign and to accept deferred implementation of the Sunningdale agreement's provisions for a council of Ireland, but this proved insufficient to save what remained of the executive.

Orme's duties involved him in administering the detention without trial system (including signing detention orders when Rees was unavailable); the contrast between this and his earlier promises to bring a speedy end to the system alienated some former associates, although detention was indeed phased out during Rees's (and Orme's) period at the Northern Ireland Office.

He was particularly associated with economic policy. He oversaw the nationalisation of the Harland and Wolff shipyard (noting that the free enterprise advocated by unionist MPs would have brought about its closure) and made unsuccessful attempts to implement 'workers' democracy' – then much in vogue in the Labour party – in its management. He commissioned a review of the Northern Ireland economy, which produced the 1976 Quigley report, and oversaw the 1976 fair employment act (which outlawed sectarian discrimination) and legislation to improve industrial training and apprenticeships. Although he was not the sole author of these measures, he deserves some of the credit for their implementation. He paid several visits to the United States, trying to persuade Irish-Americans not to support the IRA.

When Harold Wilson retired as prime minister and party leader in April 1976, Orme managed Michael Foot's unsuccessful campaign for the Labour leadership (sardonically comparing pledges of support with Rees, who managed the successful campaign of Jim Callaghan). In April 1976 he became a minister of state at the Department of Health and Social Security in London, and in September 1976 he entered the cabinet as minister for social security, a post he retained until the Callaghan government lost office in May 1979. He was on the left of the cabinet and considered resigning over its decision to seek assistance from the International Monetary Fund rather than adopt an 'alternative economic strategy' involving import controls. His links with the trade unions and the left led him to play a significant (though not always successful) role in trying to persuade the unions and the left-wing Tribune group of MPs of the necessity to uphold the government's wage restraint policies (this resembled his role in Northern Ireland).

After the defeat of the Labour government Orme became a shadow spokesman: for health and social security (1979–80) and industry (1980–83). In the intra-party conflicts of 1979–83 he was a staunch supporter of Michael Foot's leadership and of the Footite 'soft left' as opposed to the 'hard left' led by Tony Benn (partly because Bennites tended to favour unilateral British withdrawal from Northern Ireland); he was one of several left-wing MPs who helped to defeat Benn's 1981 candidacy for the deputy leadership by abstaining on the final ballot. In the 1983–7 parliament he was shadow spokesman for energy, and in this capacity tried unsuccessfully to broker a compromise in the 1984–5 miners' strike. He was chairman of the parliamentary Labour party (1987–92), then served on the parliamentary privileges committee and the 1996 committee on standards in public life. In 1997 he retired as MP and became a life peer as Baron Orme of Salford.

Orme was survived by his wife Irene Harris, whom he married on 20 January 1951. Friends described her as one of the two great passions of his life (the other being Manchester United football club). They had no children. He died at Trafford General Hospital on 28 April 2005 after a stroke. He represented a style of Labour politics which saw the party primarily as the political expression of the trade union movement; his involvement in Irish affairs expressed and was shaped by this form of labourism. His papers are held by the LSE.