The union gave the dockers money, though not enough to live on. Morris refused to make the dispute official, claiming the government would invoke Thatcher’s law on secondary picketing – a technicality in this case – and sequestrate his funds. Had he launched a legal campaign challenging the injustice of the dockers’ dismissal and anti-trade-union laws that are shameful in a democracy, the battle could have been won there and then.
Betrayal is the political theme of Blair’s Britain, whose pillars include those paid generously to protect the vulnerable, with or without God. In such surreal times, the dockers’ great achievement was to show what was possible. For me, watching their principled fight as they lost almost everything, until the loss of Bill and Jimmy proved too much to bear, was watching Britain at its best. John Pilger, article July 2006, ‘What Did You Do During the Dock Strike?’
1981 Belfast Northern Ireland: The conflict in Northern Ireland seems to be just on and on in a relentless cycles of violence, and then suddenly in 1981 it took the strangest darkest most dramatic twist when Bobby Sands and 9 of his young comrades insisting they be recognised as political prisoners went on hunger strike. Bobby Sands: 66 Days, BBC 2017
‘The march in West Belfast was the first test of public support for this second republican hunger strike.’ ibid. television news
‘There was no-one to save us but the boys … At 18 and a half I joined the Provos.’ ibid. Sands
In 1920 Irish Republican Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, began a hunger strike against his imprisonment without trial by the British government. ibid.
After four years in the Long Kesh Internment Camp Bobby Sands was released in 1976. ibid.
By 1976 over 1,500 lives had been lost in the conflict. ibid.
When Bobby Sands returned in prison in 1976 special category status had been abolished. ibid.
‘The blanket protest was born.’ ibid.
‘There can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign oppressive British presence is removed.’ ibid. Sands
Their Hunger Their Pain Our Struggle. ibid. wall protest mural
‘The body fights back sure enough.’ ibid.
Miners: It was a showdown that divided the nation ... The miners raised the stakes as their overtime ban became an all-out strike. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s II: Doomwatch 73-74, BBC 2013
The [Brentford] Trico women went out on strike ... After twenty-one weeks with production lines at a standstill Trico gave in. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s III: Goodbye Great Britain 75-77
In most cultures where there are coal miners, middle-class people and above think they’re animals. Literally. And treat them that way. American Experience: The Mine Wars, PBS 2016
Strangers rarely found their way into the coal camps of West Virginia. So when a matronly older woman walked into a camp one Fall morning in 1901 the local store keeper was curious … She was the notorious Mother Jones there to convince the coal miners in the region to join her union – United Mine Workers of America. ibid.
Miners in southern West-Virginia had been beaten down by the mine owners. ibid.
The largest armed insurrection since the civil war … A blood-soaked war zone. ibid.
Nearly three quarters of a million men across the country spent ten or twelve hours a day in coal mines. ibid.
There were no elected officials, no independent police forces. ibid.
They forced mining families to shop exclusively at the company store. ibid.
Thousands of West Virginia miners decided to stand with the strikers in Pennsylvania and to fight for their own rights. ibid.
[Justus] Collins like all the West Virginia coal operators saw himself as a man under siege. ibid.
Each mining town was a feudal dominion with the company acting as lord and master … The laws were the company’s rules. Plutocracy: Political Repression in the USA I: Divide & Rule, 2015
1907: The most deadly mine disaster in US history occurred when an explosion killed 361 men and boys in a West Virginia coal mine. ibid.
In 2012 coal miners in Kanawha Country in West Virginia issued a list of demands including a shorter workday, the right to organise, recognition of a worker’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, an end to the blacklisting of union organisers, and alternatives to company stores. The requested pay raise would have cost the company fifteen cents per miner per day. Instead of negotiating, the company hired a private militia to break the strike. ibid.
[Mother] Jones had been declared The Most Dangerous Woman in America. ibid.
Union organisers were blacklisted and beaten. ibid.
The West Virginian mine wars were part of a broader conflict between the forces of labour and the forces of capital. A struggle that claimed the lives of thousands of American workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thousands more were beaten, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and sent to early graves due to poor working conditions and dismal safety standards. ibid.
Day of Blood at Lattimer! Lower End Mine Strike Takes a Terrible Turn … They fire on Marching Strikers with Terrible Effect … Deputies Use Rifles! … 16 killed 70 wounded. Plutocracy II: Solidarity Forever, Mother Jones, newspaper report
The London Docks may have been the gateway to the wealth of empire but the men who worked here were some of the poorest in Britain ... They were paid little and only by the hour. On average a docker worked three hours a day. Resentment ran high. But all this was about to change. On August 12th 1889 the London dockers fought back ... Within a week 30,000 men were on strike ... For the strikers the suffering was intense; but not only for the dockers, for their families too ... In London the dock strike took to the streets. Thousands of dockers and their families marched carrying huge banners, their children holding signs saying please feed us. Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians: Having It All, BBC 2009
In September 1995 nearly five hundred Liverpool dockers were sacked. Their fight for reinstatement has become one of the most important industrial disputes in Britain. Yet it is scarcely reported, is largely ignored by politicians and is not officially recognised by the unions. Ken Loach, The Flickering Flame 1997
The story of the dockers is the story of a struggle for regular work, regular hours and regular pay. Everyone has a fear of going back to the bad old days. ibid.
They [employers] found a willing ally in Margaret Thatcher. And in 1989 the National Dock Labour Scheme was abolished. ibid.
The T&G had called off the strike everywhere else. ibid.
The evils of casual labour began to reappear. ibid.
329 dock workers were sacked for showing their solidarity with the Torside men. ibid.
The dockers and their families are now up against it – real hardship. ibid.
Women have got organised – Women of the Waterfront. ibid.
There has been solidarity action from dockers in twenty-two countries. ibid.
Jayaben Desia: One of the most notorious industrial disputes had begun: Grunwick … She hadn’t planned to start the strike but she was a natural … Reporter: Why are you on strike?
Desai: We have to ask permission to go to the toilet. New Elizabethans with Andrew Marr II: A Brave New World, BBC 2020
But Churchill was not a splendid Chancellor. He had one great decision in front of him and he got it wrong. In March 1925 he summoned four economists to dine at the Treasury to thrash out the burning economic issue of the day – the Gold Standard ... Globalisation with Britain at the centre ... The radical young economist John Maynard Keynes thought that going back to gold would devastate Britain’s already weakened industry. By instinct Churchill was also against ... And hell it was. The return to the Gold Standard made British exports more expensive, including coal ... An industrial dispute was coming to the boil. The mine owners stood firm. Then at one minute to midnight on the third of May 1926 the TUC called a general strike. Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
On the 17th of January 1969 Barbara Castle published her vision for industrial harmony in Britain In Place of Strife. It promised pre-strike ballots and a cooling off period before strikes could start, and that settlement would be imposed on wild-cat strikes. Moderate by today’s standards, most of Wilson’s cabinet saw all of this as extreme and divisive. And the union leaders regarded In Place of Strife as an outright assault. ibid.
But for Heath there was no escape. On the 9th January 1972 the National Union of Mineworkers demanded a pay increase of 45%. When this was rejected they began their first national strike since 1926. The miners began a mass picket of the largest coke distribution depot in the country at Saltley in Birmingham. ibid.
This battle she [Thatcher] was determined to win. The confrontation when it came was ugly and very violent. Ancient, county and regional rivalries resurfaced. Yorkshire men against Lancashire men. South Wales against Nottinghamshire. Southern police against northern strikers. And it was also medieval ... The worst pitched battle was took place here Orgrave where seven thousand well prepared police took on five thousands strikers. ibid.
On 4th May 1926 more than two million ... downed tools ... in solidarity with Britain’s one million miners. Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain III: Last Hurrah? BBC 2012