Graham Stevenson (historian)

Stevenson died of cancer on 1 May 2020 at the age of 69.

In 2007-2008 Stevenson played a key role in creating Unite the Union, the largest trade union in the UK. After retiring from Unite in 2010, Stevenson dedicated the rest of his life to supporting the British communist movement. He served as the treasurer of the Marx Memorial Library between 2013 and 2019, an organisation known for housing the records of many anti-colonial fighters. In 2011 Stevenson was awarded the ITF Gold Badge. In 2017 Stevenson ran for the Mayor of Birmingham, receiving just under 6,000 votes.

In 1999 Stevenson became the National Secretary for the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), one of the largest trade unions in British history. In this capacity he also played a leading role in the founding and running of the European Transport Workers Federation, a union with 2 million members. As the new vice-president of the European Transport Workers Federation, he helped organise dock worker strikes across Europe in January 2003, forcing the European Union to abandon the commission's Directive to seek privatisation. As a leading member of the TGWU, he worked to ensure the union opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Stevenson worked very closely with trade union leader and communist Frank Watters, who was famous for his trade union activism with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in Yorkshire. Together they redeveloped the Birmingham CPGB Communist Party premises into a social club, heavily featuring Jamaican Reggae music. This social club became a home for many members of Birmingham's black communities, including the future general secretary of the TGWU, Bill Morris. Stevenson met Frank Watters's daughter Lesley, and married her in 1979. In 1980 Stevenson began his career as a full-time trade union officer, applying for the position of TGWU district organiser in Derby, where he successfully re-unionised bus services and expanded the union's activities into the wider community. He was also involved in re-establishing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In 1982 he became the organiser of the Midlands March for Jobs in 1982. In 1983-84 he worked to ensure that transport workers gave their full support to striking mining workers.

In 1973 Stevenson joined the UCATT construction union, and alongside fellow communist Pete Carter they worked together to unionise building sites in Coventry. In one instance, Stevenson clashed with the manager of a building site during an attempted occupation that led to the famous Rotunda legal case. Many months after the attempted occupation, Stevenson and his colleagues were arrested by the police and charged with 'conspiracy to trespass', with potentially unlimited penalties. However, the jury at their trial was led by a sympathetic local union convener, and the jury found Stevenson innocent.

By 1970, Stevenson had become the Secretary of the Coventry Trades Council Youth Committee, and by 1971 he was a member of the Coventry Communist Party City Committee. In 1972 he became a member of the Midlands District Committee, while also holding national leadership positions in the YCL.

On request, his family gifted him Christmas books on socialism, including Nikolai Bukharin's book The ABC of Communism and Joan Robinson's book Economic Philosophy. During the late 1960s Stevenson had become a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and their youth wing the Young Communist League, successfully reviving the previously deflated YCL branch in Coventry.

Graham Stevenson (28 October 1950 – 1 May 2020) was a British communist, trade union leader, and historian who specialised in the history of British socialist and labour activist biographies. He led a career as one of the most influential trade union leaders in Britain, becoming the national secretary of the TGWU IN 1999, and as a founder and later president in 2009 of the European Transport Union Federation, he helped organise strikes across European docks in 2003, forcing the European Union to stall privatisation plans. Between 2007 and 2008, Stevenson played a key part in the negotiations that formed Unite the Union, the largest trade union in the United Kingdom. He also served on the Executive and Political Committee of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and served as the treasurer of the Marx Memorial Library from 2013 to 2019.

Graham Stevenson was born on 28 October 1950 in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry, England. Born into a working class family, his mother worked as a textile worker and his father was an engineer and a lifelong trade unionist who worked with the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Stevenson won a scholarship to the King Henry VIII School, a strongly conservative institution. He often argued with the other members of the school over political debates, reading Labour Research and buying the Daily Worker with his lunch money to back his arguments. He became interested in James Klugmann's writings on Christian Marxism, and by the age of 15 he was getting into trouble with right-wing teachers over political debates. Stevenson left school at the age of 16.