At the dawn of the 1960s the fight for supremacy between rival ideologies – communism and capitalism – sparks conflict around the globe. With the world being pushed to the brink new battlefields emerge for a proxy war. Cold War Armageddon s1e4
The Doomsday Clock had never been so close to midnight. ibid.
We socialists are always saying that workers change in struggle – but what a joy and a relief it is when we can test the theory in flesh and blood. When I drew back the curtains in Tayport at 6.30 a.m. on Thursday 20 May, the sun streamed in – it was a glorious spring morning. Half an hour later, across the river and through the city of Dundee, the picket line at Timex was revelling in the sunshine. There were 60 to 70 people there, their numbers alone a great shout of mockery at the Tory anti-union laws’ insistence on six pickets. There was laughter and anger in equal measure – laughter among the pickets themselves, anger as the scabs’ lorries came up the hill and turned into the gate. Inside the lorries, and inside the private cars of the supervisors, strike breakers cowered, some of them hiding their face in balaclavas, others making a pathetic show of defiance, especially after they passed the gates. Each vehicle was greeted with a great roar of rage …
A former president of the engineering union, Hugh Scanlon, once said in a famous TUC speech that every scratch on the trade union movement can lead to gangrene. The sweetheart approach of his successors led to gangrene soon enough. Every concession by the unions was greeted by the employers with cries for more. In Dundee like everywhere else the employers, led on this occasion by the Engineering Employers Federation, started to yearn for the day when they would not have to deal with unions at all. True, the unions were a pushover. But how much more of a pushover would the workers be, how much more clear profit was there to be made, if the unions were utterly broken once and for all? …
Shortly before Christmas last year, he announced lay-offs. On 5 January the workers all got letters – some ‘thick’ (the sack), others ‘thin’ (not the sack). They refused to accept the letters, and occupied the canteen. Hall promised negotiations. The workers went back to work, effectively accepting the principle of lay-offs, though they balloted (92 per cent) for a strike. From 8 to 29 January they worked rotating shifts to cover for their laid off workmates, and waited for the negotiations which never came. There was no whisper of negotiation from Hall. A plea to go to ACAS was vigorously snubbed. On 29 January, frustrated by the constant prevarication, the workers came out on strike. On 17 February they reported en masse for work. They were told they could return only if they accepted a 10 per cent cut in wages and other humiliations, including pension reductions. When they refused, they were locked out, and have been ever since.
... These men and women are out to win. They deserve to win and they need to win. Above all they can win. The entire resources – human and financial – of the labour movement should be put at their disposal. (Industrial Action & Strike & Work & Trade Unions & Dissent & Protest & Solidarity & Unity & Dispute) Paul Foot, article June 1993, ‘Seize the Time’
The struggle of ordinary people for jobs, security and dignity is the story of modern Britain. It’s been an epic story of gain and setback and courage – the miners, the transport workers, the nurses, the dockers, and it’s still going on especially here in Liverpool, although you wouldn’t know it reading the people’s papers. John Pilger, article ‘Breaking the Mirror: The Murdoch Effect’
This is Diego Garcia, the main Island of the Chagos Group in the Indian Ocean. It was once a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. A paradise. Today, it is one of America’s biggest military bases in the world. There are more than 2,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a satellite spy station. From here the United States has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon calls it an indispensable platform for policing the world. Diego Garcia is a British colony. It lies midway between Africa and Asia. One of a group of coral islands ... 2,000 lived in the Chagos Islands ... A benign undisturbed way of life. John Pilger, Stealing a Nation, ITV 2004
A conspiracy was underway between the governments of Britain and the United States. The year is 1961. In this film never seen before the man on the right is Rear Admiral Grantham of the US Navy. His visit to Diego Garcia marked the beginning of a top-secret Anglo-American survey of the Island for a military base so vast it would cost over a billion dollars ... Hidden from the Parliament and the US Congress the deal was this: the Americans wanted the island in their words swept and sanitized. An entire population was declared expendable; all of them were to be deported. ibid.
By the end of 1975 the secret expulsion of the people of the Chagos Islands was complete. A survey of their conditions in exile told of twenty-six families who had died together in poverty, of nine suicides, of young girls forced into prostitution in order to survive. ibid.
What was done to these people is today defined in International Law as a crime against humanity. ibid.
In the 1990s the Islanders’ struggle took a dramatic turn with the discovery of these documents in the Public Record Office in London. Here was the evidence that they and their supporters were looking for. These long-forgotten secret official files reveal the full scale of the conspiracy and the cynicism that drove it. (Diego Garcia & British Empire & US Empire & Dispute) ibid.
The reason the government won’t allow the Islanders to go home is not money. It’s power. American power and its self-given role to dominate. ibid.
What was done to the people of the Chagos raises wider questions for those of us who live in powerful states like Britain and America. Why do we continue to allow our governments to treat people in small countries as either useful or expendable? Why do we except specious reasons for the unacceptable? Four years ago the High Court delivered one of the most damning indictments of a British government. It said the secret expulsion of the Chagos Islanders was wrong; that judgment must be upheld. And the people of a group of beautiful once-peaceful islands must be helped to go home and compensated fully and without delay for their suffering. Anything less diminishes the rest of us. ibid.
This year on May 11th two judges described the actions of the British government as outrageous, repugnant and illegal. So it’s unequivocal, it’s wrong, and under the statutes of the International Criminal Court it’s a major crime. You can’t do that. So what the Blair government has done to try to undercut the High Court is to invoke the Royal Prerogative. John Pilger, interview Guardian Hay Festival 2006
They finally made their way to the High Court in London after many years. The judges of the High Court were ... horrified by the story. They invoked the Magna Carta which is the basis for all our laws and says you cannot throw people out of their homeland. They described the decisions by governments as outrageous and said they could go back. The British government of Tony Blair decided this wasn’t what they wanted so they invoked a Royal Decree power ... The High Court threw out the government’s decree ... The struggle goes on. John Pilger, lecture ‘Freedom Next Time’
I don’t often use the word incredible but ... when a group of us found classified files in the public record office in London, it revealed how the American and British governments had conspired to expel the entire population of this British colony – all of them British citizens, and dumped them in the slums of Mauritius ... They started killing their pets, they shots their dogs ... The message was clear, you’re next unless you go! John Pilger, Democracy Now! interview
Members of the flexible workforce might find a lesson in the dockers’ fight against casualisation.
Near the end of Dockers, shown last Sunday on Channel 4, there is a scene in which Big John, a docker, is found dead in his garden. It is deeply moving. I remembered the freezing day last year when Bill Rooney had a heart attack and died. A week later, Jimmy McUmiskey, who seemed a fit man in his 50s, followed. He was the fourth to die since the Liverpool dockers and their families made their stand: one of the longest and most tenacious in British labour history.
Dockers, the film, was written by Jimmy McGovern and the dockers themselves and their wives. It is fine work that guards the memory and tells the truth from the ground up. Among the characters, I recognised Doreen McNally. Feisty, funny, eloquent wife of Charlie, a Liverpool docker for 29 years, Doreen helped found Women of the Waterfront. I first saw her one Saturday in the autumn of 1996 at the Pier Head, a year after the sacking en masse of 500 men described by Lloyds list as the most productive workforce in Europe. The heroic Liver building reared up behind her to a watery sun; a flock of seagulls rose and fell until a hooter sent them flapping back to the Mersey. ‘Where is the union,’ she asked a rally, ‘where is Bill Morris, where is the TUC?’
It is a question millions of Britons might ask as Tony Blair’s ideas about flexible working guarantee a poverty that gives the children of British working people the worst health in western Europe, now on a par with Slovenia and Albania.
This was everything the Liverpool dockers fought against. Since the abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme in 1989, casualisation had spread through the docks; they believed they were next. In September 1995, they refused to cross a picket line which included their sons and nephews sacked by Torside, a sub-contractor to the main company at the port, Mersey Docks. Within 24 hours, their jobs were advertised. When they tried to return to work, they found the gates locked. It was a trap.
In July 1996, Bernard Bradley, managing director of Torside, revealed to the Commons employment committee that he had wanted to give his men back their jobs almost immediately. Having passed the offer to a regional official of the TGWU, Jack Dempsey, he heard nothing. The Torside dockers were never told about the offer. Had they been told, Mersey Docks would never have had a pretext to get rid of the main workforce.
Almost none of this was reported. Misrepresented as relics from a bygone era, the dockers looked abroad. ‘It was 6 am on a December morning in the fiercest blizzard for 70 years,’ said Bobby Morton, one of four dockers who set up a picket at the port of Newark in New Jersey just as a container ship had docked from Liverpool. ‘We didn't know what to expect. When we told the longshoremen coming to work what it was all about,they turned their cars around. We were dancing on the picket line, and we hadn’t had a drink.’
From a room with one phone, a fax line and a tea urn, they ignited a show of international labour solidarity believed to be without precedent this century. ‘Pacific Rim trade sputtered to a halt’, reported the Los Angeles Times, as dozens of mammoth cargo ships sat idle in their ports as union dockworkers from LA to Seattle backed the dockers of Liverpool. In Japan, 40,000 dockworkers stopped. Ships were turned away from Sydney harbour. In South Africa, dockers closed all ports ‘in solidarity with the Liverpool dockers who stood by us during the years of apartheid’.
Five months after the dockers were sacked, Bill Morris, general secretary of the TGWU, their leader, came to Liverpool. ‘I am proud to be with you,’ he told them. ‘Your struggle is so important that our grandchildren will ask, ‘Where were you at the great moment?’ and you will either stand up with pride, or you’ll hang your head in shame. There can be no backsliding until victory is won … God is on our side.’