Reflections from February: "far too little strike action in Britain at the moment"

There is far too little strike action in Britain at the moment given the pay freezes, the job losses and, above all, the anger and in the last year we have seen the return of both the all out strike - Superdrug and the Leeds bin strike - and occupations. So in taking action and doing it in such a lively and determined way, the UNITE Fujitsu workers are a beacon and they certainly shone at the Right to Work conference a week ago.

This week I've been in the WCML reading about the Automat dispute 1976/1977, and the row about the Engineers Charter pamphlet which was temporarily withdrawn at the request of the strikers because they didn't feel confident enough to support an open challenge to Mather the local right wing official. The Automat workers weren't strong enough to occupy - they tried, though not in sufficient numbers - but they had amazing tenacity, the strike lasted a year and as the mass pickets were established, the employer finally crumbled. I suspect because of pressure from other employers, unhappy that the mass pickets, in mobilising the rank and file, were creating a strength that they, the extremely class conscious EEF, could see as a real threat. Looking back on it, it looks like a Pyrrhic victory: we won but at a cost which weakened the confidence of our side and boosted that of the employers. It will be worth looking at the actions of Winston Churchill Junior, MP for Stretford, and involved in the dispute, not least because he wanted to “get JT”, as revealed in a leaked letter, JT being John Tocher. 1976 is the year that Thatcher gets elected a Tory leader and the hard right in the Tory Party, inspired by the free market idea of the Institute of Economic Affairs, is busy planning their revenge for the defeats under Heath.

I’ve also gone back to the chapter on the Manchester occupations in ‘Glorious Summer’. There is a marked contrast here with the chapters on the miners and the building workers and the dockers where the strikers won a clear victory. The attitude of the strike leaders to the rank and file is the key here. In fact, the contradictions of John Tocher’s politics seem to sum it up.

Here was a man who mobilised the rank and file to win a decisive victory at Roberts Arundel in the late 1960s. This happened under the control of his leadership in a purely industrial dispute. It did not create any tensions with the CP and its relations with left officials, the heart of their industrial strategy.

By 1972, under a Heath government with the AUEW the key union in the resistance to the IR Act, Scanlon’s leadership was seen as tactically skilful. In fact, the right remained a very powerful force in the union and the overall CP strategy of an alliance with left Labour MPs, a parliamentary road to socialism, meant that the emphasis was on the election of left officials, getting the vote out at geographical branch meetings, not on the organisation of the rank and file. Thus the election campaign of AUEW president involved having transport ready to get people to go from work to the branch to vote. In the event, Scanlon’s majority in the Manchester area was greater than his majority nationally.

It is also worth noting the mobilisation of the Birmingham engineers, under right wing leadership to Saltley in March 1972 and their absence during the fight against the EEF that followed soon after. Only Manchester and to a much smaller extent Sheffield fought.


I’ve heard that Tocher many years afterwards, said it had been our International Socialist bulletins – the Greater Manchester Engineer – that had worried him during the dispute. The chapter in Glorious Summer certainly keeps referring to them for the argument on how the dispute was progressing.

It is a complicated story at one level. Large numbers of workers on one side, ranged against a large number of employers. In the context of 1972 it was perhaps the biggest battle

The title refers to Richard III – the original quote was ‘the winter of discontent’. There is a curious reversal however in the timing. Glorious summer in the original succeeds winter. Here it precedes it. It leaves open the question ‘Why?’

Colin Barker argued with me the question was easy to answer and Adam Rose put it simply in a recent meeting -. It was he said ‘A lack of politics’. More of this anon.

Coming back to the RtW conference, and how the discussion in the pub the day before with UNITE strikers: they've certainly developed a clear understanding of the position of their officials but that isn't the same as an overall view of the relation between rank and file and bureaucracy

All history is the history of class struggle. Easy to say, harder to spell out. The struggle is ‘sometimes open, sometimes hidden’. Rather more hidden at the moment.