150th anniversary of Peterloo

 

August 1969 saw the 150th anniversary of Peterloo. Nellie Beer, a leading Conservative councillor, former lord mayor, now chair of the Town Hall Committee, was dismissive. 'I don't think there will be a lot done. I have no very strong feelings about it. There's always somebody who wants to commemorate something.'

Nellie Beer had not done her homework. There was a lot going on. The leading local Communist Party member, AEU district secretary and historian, Eddie Frow, spoke to about a hundred people on the site of the massacre. The council published a short history, Manchester's public library produced a portfolio of contemporary documents with an eight page guide. The Manchester Evening News ran a Peterloo essay contest for schools, asking for 'a 1,000 words telling the whole graphic story.'  There was a concert at the Manchester Sports Guild featuring Harry Boardman and Leon Rosselson with Michael Foot speaking. The Library Theatre put on an improvised reenactment with young people. The local Peterloo gallery held an exhibition of prints specially commissioned from Ken Sprague.^[1]

There was also a sharp argument triggered by two new histories of Peterloo. Joyce Marlow's 'The Peterloo Massacre', written as a popular history, supported the demonstrators and their cause.  Robert Walmsley's weighty 'Peterloo: the case reopened' supported the magistrates, presenting the event as a tragedy rather than a massacre. A wonderful scrapbook at the Working Class Movement Library holds around thirty reviews, all taking sides. W.H Challoner, co-editor of a recent edition of Engels’s ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’ backed Walmsley and argued

To a generation that has seen the resurrection of 'The Black Dwarf' and is familiar with the ugly undertones (and overtones) of today's demonstrations, the prophetic fears expressed by Colonel Ralph Fletcher of Bolton to the home office in 1818  seem reasonable enough, however exaggerated they may have seemed to liberal minded historians 100 years afterwards.

 The Times Literary Supplement's very lengthy review of Walmsley’s book, titled 'Man bites Yeoman', tore into Walmsley, challenging his position with a host of detailed arguments.  EP Thompson commented how the book demonstrated the astonishing tenacity of the Manchester loyalists. 

While most reviewers opposed Walmsley, the Conservative controlled council rejected the proposal to rename Peter Street Peterloo Street. The blue plaque that failed to mention why people gathered with at least 15 killed and over 600 injured remained. It was not replaced till the Labour left took control of the council in the mid 1980s.

image: History Workshop Journal

---

^[1] Ken Sprague -  https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/aug/06/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1

Letter from Dr Peter Milliard, Pan Africanist, Mancunian, to Larry Brown, composer, Paul Robeson's accompanist

Peter Milliard with Anne van Laer

Peter Milliard was born in British Guiana. He studied medicine in the US and worked in Panama where he helped striking canal workers.  Arriving in 1923 to train further in Edinburgh, he settled in Manchester to work as a doctor.  When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Milliard organised the International Brotherhood of Ethiopia, doing street meetings in Stevenson Square. A couple of years later he was joined in Manchester by Ras Makonnen. Milliard founded the Manchester Negro Association in 1943 becoming its president. With Makonnen he established the Pan African Federation, Manchester branch, in early 1945. The two of them were key organisers of the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester in October that year. Suffering increasingly poor health, Milliard died early in 1953.

The letter is in the Larry Brown collection in the Schomburg Library, Harlem, New York. It is quoted in part in a footnote in Martin Duberman's biography of Paul Robeson, p686, footnote 7. There is no other letter from Milliard in the collection. It seems likely that given the comments Milliard makes about Robeson, Brown did not reply to the letter.

Letter from Dr Peter Milliard to Larry Brown

Capoey,

West Point

Manchester 19

Sunday July 3rd 1949

My dear Brown,

Your letter of June 13th last was a real surprise my recent experience has taught me not to expect letters from people who had lived in England.  Believe me you are the outstanding exception. Do please accept my hearty thanks.

Let me at once enquire as to your health. I trust that you are having no more trouble with those disagreeable things that call for the knife. Take my advice: don't squeeze don't pick don't (?) don't touch and two try not to (?) them at all.  You will find that the little boils can give a lot of trouble if they are interfered with. Left alone nature takes care of them for the bodily resistance is quite sufficient to put them out of action.

I do hope your general health is good and you are fit enough to face

P2

the firing line.

Now I did not reply to your letter immediately as I wanted to report progress   in other words I was waiting to announce the arrival of the food parcel. I can now let you know that I received the parcel on Wednesday last. Everything was in perfect condition. Not having had Carolina rice for years I hastened to cook some for dinner that evening. You know how difficult it is to get rice here so you can imagine how enjoyable it was. Had two ladies to join me at dinner. They did themselves well and pronounced my cooking excellent. As soon as I sample the other articles I shall report to you.

To the most common place. For a change we are enjoying excellent weather all over England so (?) in Manchester but I cannot recall so excellent a summer during my long sojourn in England. I am glad we really needed some of Nature's tonic. The coming winter should find us fortified against its rigours. I need I not ask what is (?)  there? No seasons as a rule are true to form

p3

and one may safely look forward to summer when (?) is due.

Tomorrow is Independence Day whatever that means. I hope you have a pleasant holiday but don't blow yourself to pieces. I am looking forward to meeting you again here or in New York very soon.

Well what price (?) Paul? A section of the public in England is constant (?) against him and (?) reports re the marriage of his son to a pale face has not helped matters. What is happening? Personally I am disappointed in Paul. He has become Anglicised (?) And Negroes who have become Anglicised (?) should be left severely alone. What does Paul expect to gain by joining the Communist Party especially in Britain? What contribution does he expect to make to his people by allying himself to Anglo-Saxon communists. It is alarming how Negroes misinterpret (?) the feelings and attitudes of the Anglo Saxon Whites. I say without fear of contradiction that there is only one party in

P4.

England. The imperialist party. If tomorrow the Communist of England won power and form[ed] a government Mr/our(?) Paul Robeson would (?) how he had been fooled. (?) my (?) friend Paul Robeson's talk  of "Allies" is so much rubbish. Doubtful allies are dangerous. Better no allies than doubtful ones. We have a West Indian Peter Blackman by name he has been a member of the Communist Party these many years. What contribution has he been able to make by reason of such membership. Visits all over the continent at their expense and a splash here and there. These are personal benefits at the expense of his people as (?) if only helps to fasten the wool over our eyes more securely. I accept Communism as a creed for our African forefathers were all communists as a necessity and a natural (?). We therefore (?) but this bastard creed which the Anglo-Saxon Whites are fathering must be??. 

A word about the meeting which Paul graced or disgraced at Bellevue last May. it was a howling success as a "Communist" show but as a political meeting billed for a speech from Paul exposing the (?) charges against

P5

 the (?)Trenton lads it was a failure. That meeting simply confirms my oft repeated assertions that Negroes should be watchful lest they make themselves tools of the Whites. Paul did not make a speech explaining the Trenton case. What an opportunity what (?) he had for bringing home to the people what happens in America. The people departed without a knowledge of the Trenton case. I speak for myself: Paul succeeded in making himself a buffoon. He sang "Waterboy" like a 3rd rate comedian and I am just a bit tired of Negroes who seek sympathy, pity and tolerance from Whites by referring to the fact that their fathers or grandfathers were slaves. Good god this is of a global (?) asset. Other people have been slaves. White slaves worked in the fields of America along with the Blacks. The present Australians are descendants of slaves and (?) hear them talking about what their forefathers

P6

were but always the Constantines and the Paul Robesons must mouth this slush. Paul is disappointing I am no longer interested in him. Moreover he prefers the company of Whites and his courtesies are reserved only for Whites. "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul." One word more I think this marriage of his son is a great political blunder and it is an historical betrayal if it can be so dignified.

Well I must be off. Please let me hear from you again. I am happy to meet again a (?) Southern Negro hospitable kind and genuinely friendly My mind goes back to the days when I lived in DC and enjoyed the friendship of some (?) and genuine Negroes. God bless them.

Therefore let me thank you and take this opportunity of wishing you the best. Anytime you come to England, my house is at your disposal.

Cheerio

(signed)

Peter Milliard

Dock strikes in Salford

Building on wartime arrangements, the 1947 Dock Labour Scheme brought some financial security to what was still a casualised workforce.  It guaranteed daily attendance money, fall back pay for those registered dockers who were not hired that day.  It did not stop conflict. On the contrary, between 1945 and 1955 there was hardly a year without a dock strike. Up to 1951 this was despite the Attlee government repeatedly bringing in troops to break strike using the Emergency Powers Act. Up to 1951 out of a national total of over 14 million strike days, 2.8 million, one in five, was in the docks where there were just 70,000 dockworkers. Paid for by the employers, the scheme was run by local Dock Labour Boards with equal numbers of employer and worker representatives.  In northern ports, the latter were all TGWU full time officials, ultimately answerable to the general secretary, the rabidly anti-communist Arthur Deakin, head of Britain’s largest union with 1.3 million members.  Acting as agents of the boards, the officials, in effect, policed the workforce.  Overwhelmingly, strikes were unofficial, led by committees elected from the rank and file.  Five big unofficial strikes accounted for 70% of the 2.8 million strike days. One was over a local board decision requiring dockers to unload zinc oxide in unsafe conditions, the other four were over disagreements between the rank and file and officials such as solidarity with the long running Canadian seaman’s strike.[1]  The 1951 unofficial pay strike for 25 shillings a day against the offer of 21 shillings led the government to use the hated but still operative war time regulation Order 1305 banning strikes and lockouts. Seven strike leaders were prosecuted for conspiracy.  What had been patchy backing for the strike now became solid, spreading to every port. The Old Bailey trial of the seven was marked by solidarity strike action and clashes with the police outside the court.  With the government under severe pressure, after eight days the Attorney General had the case discontinued and the seven discharged without penalty.[2] Within months Order 1305 had been repealed.[3]

A 1945 Manchester Guardian report spelt out the problem with the officials

This antagonism towards their own union, it must be stressed, is no sudden development. It is a growing feeling that has been brought to a head by the strike, and conversations with the men it any of the control points at which they assemble to discuss matters provide evidence of a very real solidarity on this point. They state that time after time they have been disappointed and “let down” by the union's handling of their complaints. Indeed, a list of union “failures” has been compiled. One striker said, “Because their hands are tied is always their explanation for their own inaction. They have become our masters instead of our servants.” Older men who have experienced many disputes at the docks reluctantly agree with this judgment. They realise that without strike pay they are facing a severe ordeal, but so strong is the general feeling on the rightness of their actions that there is little or no wavering among those to whom one talks.[4]

A week after the seven were discharged, April 1951, 2,300 Manchester dockers took action over two colleagues suspended for refusing to work overtime in breach of a local agreement. The strike was led by the unofficial Manchester Port Workers’ Committee chaired by George Norman, CP member who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain. [5] After six weeks with 250 dockers reported to be back at work, a mass meeting voted to return to work. The Guardian makes no report of any agreed settlement while Ratner claims the employers capitulated with the two re-instated and all references to the suspension removed from their work records.[6]

The rank-and-file committees leading the unofficial strikes were a model of democracy.  The 1945 strike over pay

... established quite clearly the real objectives of such committees: to organize the fight for the dockers’ demands in a way that would actively involve in the struggle as many workers as possible, irrespective of sectional divisions. Elected by mass meetings often attended by over 90 percent of the men of a particular control or dock, the committees represent the most progressive and advanced form of organization yet developed by the dockers. All committee members are subject to immediate recall. During a dispute new members will often be added to the committee, having proved themselves useful to the running of the strike. In between strikes, the committee will often dwindle to a hard core of five to seven members. Immediately a new struggle erupts the committee will call a mass meeting, place itself before the men for re-election and seek an immediate broadening of its base, asking for other men to be elected to it. This ensures a genuine responsiveness to the needs of the ranks and a responsibility towards them no other form of organization is capable of providing.

In the course of the strikes the committees are charged with holding frequent report back meetings. Decisions on whether or not to continue the strike, on whether to extend it or not or whether to return to work on certain conditions, have to be ratified by mass meetings of the men, convened by the committees. The committee members are unpaid, all are working dockers and each individual is known to the men who have to decide whether to vote for him or not. This latter point is very important and contrasts with union elections where men are called upon to vote for people they may never have heard of and seldom know really well.[7]

The strike attracted support from engineering workers and members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR). Also, perhaps not so surprising given that the docks were in Salford, it was Salford Education Department that provided free school meals for strikers’ children. However, the decision of Salford City Labour Party’s executive to back the strikers brought down the full wrath of the Labour Party machine.  Reg Wallis, the party’s north west regional official threatened to disaffiliate the local party if it did not withdraw its support.  He further required that that all record of the original decision be expunged from the minutes. When, on the chair’s casting vote, the City Party delegate meeting refused, disciplinary measures followed with five senior members expelled and only re-admitted after a year when they acknowledged they had been in the wrong.

Anger with the officials persisted. Three years later, the autumn of 1954, a breakaway movement started, not to a new union but to leave the TGWU to join the more democratic National Stevedores and Dockers Union (NASD) organising a mix of stevedores skilled in the loading of ships to ensure the cargo was safely stowed and dockers who did the graft loading and unloading.  The NASD were known as the Blues from the colour of its union card, the TGWU being known as the Whites for the same reason.  First to leave the TGWU were dockers in Hull where officials had badly mishandled a dispute over the traditional unpleasant and antiquated ‘scuttling’ method of unloading grain by filling sacks by hand in the hold.  The grievance was that new technology made it no longer necessary to scuttle but the officials had failed to act.  They were followed by dockworkers in Birkenhead where over half joined the Blues, then others in Liverpool and Hull.  Five hundred joined in Manchester. In February 1955 Joe Harrison who had been dismissed from the Scheme because he took a position as paid organiser for the NASD opened an office on Trafford Road, Manchester, after Birkenhead dockers had made contact with Walsh and Butters, the leading rank-and-file militants in Manchester and arranged for a campaign committee in Manchester.[8]  In total upwards of 10,000 joined the NASD which had previously had a membership of 7,000.

April 1955, the TGWU counter-attacked, insisting that all dockers on Merseyside and in Manchester should have a TGWU card to register for work. When following this, NASD members were refused registration as dockers, 13,000 out of 17,000, including the great majority of TGWU members working in the three ports struck.  Victory came in just two days with the Dock Labour Board issuing cards to all dockers.

Still lacking official recognition by the employers in the northern ports, the NASD now seized the initiative calling an official strike starting 23 May with the demand of recognition by the employers.  Despite the CP-led unofficial Port Workers Committee not supporting the strike, 1,400 dockers in Manchester struck against 1,000 who continued working. There was a similar split in the Merseyside and Hull workforces.[9]  When after a few days the London based NASD leadership recommended suspending the strike, their proposal was soundly rejected.  Just two voted in favour at Manchester’s mass meeting.[10]  With 19,000 out on strike nationally, the Guardian reported that ‘the TGWU is even more unpopular in the North than had been supposed. Not only the National Dock Labour Board but the NASD itself has been taken aback by the strength of the rebellious response.’[11]

The TUC having expelled the NASD for poaching 10,000 members from a fellow union, the TGWU’s ninety full time dockworker officials now worked to break the strike.  It nevertheless continued with no signs of weakening for a fortnight.  Excluding delegates from the northern ports from the vote, the NASD conference then accepted the TUC’s proposed enquiry and the NASD executive now recommended a return to work. There were still big majorities at mass meetings voting to continue even when in the fifth week the 7,000 NASD members in London voted to return to work ‘provided the Northern strikers would go back too.’[12] 

The response from the north was to organise coaches travelling through Sunday night to London to appeal face-to-face with the London dockers. Manchester dockers visited Trafford Park factories and local shopkeepers to help pay for three coaches to London.[13]  Despite harassment by large numbers of police, they assembled at Tower Hill and other points to march to the dock gates.  With ongoing police obstruction, they set up picket lines which succeeded in increasing the numbers on strike by 200 compared to the Saturday two days earlier.[14]  Richard Barrett who had resigned his position as NASD general secretary just a week earlier, walked through the pickets onto the Surrey docks to apply for work at the call-on point. Only one docker joined him in this, a symbolic gesture since as a full time official he was not a registered docker and ineligible for work. One eye-witness talked of dockers with tears in their eyes as their former leader stepped through them.[15]  The northern pickets then went to lobby their MPs asking why after five weeks the strike still had not been raised in parliament.  Having concluded its enquiry, the TUC General Council now ruled that the NASD must refuse membership to those leaving the TGWU.  With the NASD leadership accepting the ruling, the strikers in Manchester and the other ports returned to work Monday 4 July.  The Guardian reported

Few seemed to feel perturbed that the strike had produced no tangible gain. The satisfactory thing was to have made such a good show of solidarity independent of the TGWU. They feel that in spite of their substantial loss of wages – amounting to perhaps £100,000 on Manchester docks - the strike was worthwhile and necessary. But they are well aware that the return to work far from settles the inter-union trouble and they are anxiously “waiting for the showdown.”[16]

The 1954/55 strikes were ‘among the bitterest industrial disputes in post war Britain’[17]  For all the NASD’s greater democracy, under pressure its officials also became separated from the rank and file. One outcome was a tradition of non-unionism among dockers – ‘A plague on both your houses’ - Among the rank and file, politically motivated dockers - CPers and Trotskyists – continued to get a hearing and maintain a following but only when they directly engaged with their workmates industrial grievances. ‘Trotskyist influence in the move to the NASD and the recognition strike was ... marginal, to say the most.’[18]  With full employment continuing, the shift of power from the union office to the shop floor that the Donovan Report[19] found in manufacturing in the 1960s also applied to the docks.  With the Tory government determined not to use troops as strike breakers as the Labour government had done, they and the employers had a greater reliance on the union officials.[20]  Workforce unity was however still undermined by inter-union rivalry, non unionism and a lack of trust between workers in different ports. 

Politically, the Labour Party’s insistence on keeping politics separate from industrial matters, in effect, a ban on party involvement in disputes persisted.  Peter Grimshaw, one of the five expelled from the Labour Party for supporting the local unofficial strike in 1951, went on to be secretary of Salford City Labour Party.  Thirty years later, with the council under attack from Thatcher’s government, he was arguing ‘...we are living in a capitalist system. If the council did not reduce its workforce, it would be the unemployed who would have to pay the price through higher rents or rates.’[21]

---

[1] Jim Phillips, Inter-union conflict in the docks, 1954-55, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 1, March 1996, pp 107-30

[2] Manchester Guardian, 19 April 1951 p7

[3] Ralhp Darlington and Dave Lyddon, Glorious Summer, Londo, 2001, p141

[4] Manchester Guardian 5 October 1945, p5, cited by Phillips (1996), p122

[5] Manchester Guardian, 27 April 1951 p5

[6] Check Salford City Reporter and Daily Worker. It may have been the U-turn by the Runcorn tug men on whether to join the strike that tipped the balance in favour of a return to work.

[7] Bob Pennington, Docks breakaway and unofficial movements, International Socialism 1st series, No.2, Autumn 1960, pp.5-11.

[8] Pennington, p8

[9] Guardian, 24 May, p12

[10] Guardian, 28 May, p14

[11] Guardian, 4 June, p1

[12] Guardian, 25 June, p1

[13] Guardian, 25 June, p12 and 27 June p1

[14] Guardian, 28 June, p1

[15] Phillips, p117

[16] Guardian, 4 July, p12

[17] Phillips, p119

[18] Phillips, p125

[19] Report of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations 1965-1968, H.M. Stationery Office, 1971,

[20] Phillips. P129

[21] Steven Fielding, Duncan Tanner, The 'Rise of the Left' Revisited: Labour Party Culture in Post-war Manchester and Salford, Labour History Review, Dec 2006, Vol.71(3), pp.211-233

Colin Barker, putting revolutionary theory into practice

Colin and Ewa Barker at the COP21 Climate protest, Paris, December 2015

For me, as for many revolutionary socialists in Manchester, Colin was a political older brother, the comrade who helped with difficult questions, who advised on tricky problems, knew the theory, Marx's Capital, all three volumes, and much else.

Always beautifully clear in explaining ideas, never an “ego”, kind, soft spoken, witty, he consistently challenged the stereotype of the revolutionary activist.

In the same spirit, he wrote as he spoke and encouraged comrades to go through each sentence they wrote to see if it could be shorter and sharper.

Colin was a theorist in the revolutionary tradition. He combined his theory with his practice.

Moving to Manchester in the early 1960s, he built the first branch of our organisation in the city. He started organising round anti-apartheid and was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The first recruits were students, followed by building workers, printers, engineers and journalists.

From these came rank-and-file groups which produced hundreds of bulletins, many typed by Colin, whose own bulletins showed his own mastery of wit turned against bullying and incompetent managers at what is now Manchester Metropolitan University.

He recruited Berry Edwards, the leading black activist in Manchester and with him organised the first march against police racism in the city, only for it to be sabotaged by the Dean of Manchester Cathedral working on behalf of the Chief Constable.

It was Colin who wrote the pamphlet Support the Roberts Arundel strike, the most important strike in Greater Manchester in decades, in 1967-69. The pamphlet was adopted by the strike committee which printed and circulated thousands of copies, helping sustain the 15 month strike needed to beat the employer.

Last year we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Anti Nazi League and Rock against Racism march and carnival in Alexandra Park, Manchester where 30,000 came.

It was Colin who set up the Anti Nazi League in Manchester six months earlier, getting support from MPs, the North West TUC, Paddy Crerand of Manchester United, Dave Watson of City and many others. This was the political base needed to make the carnival a success.

When in the early 2000s the BNP started to grow, it was Colin who brought together the forces to establish Unite against Fascism in Manchester, with a launch meeting that filled the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall.

Review of ‘Walls come tumbling down’, Daniel Rachel, Picador, 2016

Music and politics often intersect but rarely as dramatically as the reaction to a drunk Eric Clapton on stage in Birmingham in August 1976.  Clapton had called for 'wogs' and 'Pakis' to leave the hall and leave the country. Three hundred responded to a letter in New Musical Express protesting against this racist rant and Rock against Racism, RAR, was born. Inspired by RAR, despite racists triggering violence at its gigs, Two Tone music brought black and white musicians together.  Memories of RAR combined with the solidarity generated by the 1984-5 miners’ strike helped create Red Wedge, formed to rally support for Labour in the 1987 general election.  Daniel Rachel brings all three episodes together in a single volume.  Astonishingly, he does this without a word of his own.  The five hundred page account is composed completely using the words of those who took part.  Extracts from well over a hundred interviews, one of whom is the present writer, plus quotes from Paul Weller and Dave Widgery are woven into a single coherent narrative. 

Many music fans take their history seriously, preserving it in all kinds of ways, sometimes, as with the Manchester Digital Music Archive www.mdmarchive.co.uk, to a very high standard.  Music histories are a substantial part of Manchester Central library's local history section. Largely produced outside of academia they are often lively, a few like Dave Haslam's 'Manchester, England', deserve a wide readership. Daniel Rachel's 'Walls come tumbling down' now joins this select list.

However, besides being a book that will be read by musicians and music fans for many years to come, it has a more urgent importance.  With the hard right on the rise in Europe and the US and hundreds of thousands supporting the call to ‘Free Tommy Robinson’, mobilising the many to challenge them is a priority.  Without any illusions in history repeating itself, the story of RAR has a sharp relevance. It is worth remembering how, as David Widgery put it, 'the music provided the creative energy and the focus in what became a battle for the soul of young working class England.'  He added 'But the direct confrontations and the hard-headed political organisations which underpinned them were decisive.'  The two big Carnivals in London, April and September 1978, in Manchester, July 1978, and on a lesser scale elsewhere, brought together many tens of thousands.  It was now cool to be anti racist. This could only happen because the Anti Nazi League, ANL, had become a mass organisation, with tens of thousands of members, branches in every town, many workplaces, most universities and many colleges. Its members distributed millions of leaflets, sold hundreds of thousands of badges, scrubbed out racist graffiti and mobilised against every public appearance the National Front made.  The Battle of Lewisham the previous August saw a couple of thousand anti fascists together with a similar number from the local community succeed in breaking up the National Front march through an area with many black immigrants.  Necessary as this was, such confrontations were not enough.  It needed bigger numbers out on the street celebrating their opposition to racism.  The key to that was music, gigs large and small combining reggae and punk. This in turn was a battle.   To quote Linton Kwesi Johnson, just one of the many valuable quotes Rachel gives us,

Initially we, that is the alliance of the Race Today Collective, the Black Parents Movement and the Black Youth Movement were a little bit suspicious about Rock against Racism because it was an initiative of the Socialist Workers Party who we knew were Trotskyites. And we didn't subscribe to their position on blacks and Asians, who they saw as victims.  Victims are people who don't fight back. We were engaged in the business of fighting back, not only against racism, but for the social justice to transform the society we live in.  That was soon dispelled when one saw the effectiveness of what they were doing. (p77)

Punk too played a central role. Riddled with political contradictions, anti racists had to fight, often physically, for punk’s creative energy to oppose racism. Rachel’s quotes give us this story in rich detail and the follow on with Two Tone. For those who want to fight now, this book is a valuable weapon.

Review of 'Martin Parr: Return to Manchester', Manchester Art Gallery

Almost 50 years ago, the teenage Martin Parr came up north to Manchester Polytechnic where he learnt his trade as a photographer, shooting in black and white, as he was expected to do.  He looked for people, often managing to get close to them. He hung out in the city centre, Piccadilly Gardens, where he found young couples and fans of the Osmonds willing to pose for him.  He explored every Yates’ Wine Lodge in the area on weekday dinner times, often rather sad places. He walked around Moss Side before it was flattened by bulldozers finding ‘Season’s Greetings’ painted in large white letters on a house already half demolished.  He watched others drink and dance and got invited inside people’s homes to take pictures of their families as they sat round the fire. He spent time in places most people never saw, such as the wards at Prestwich mental hospital, where he photographed both patients and staff.  

His course finished he soon moved away coming back every so often to Manchester, recording the changes, the disappearing world of small shops being replaced by the supermarket. At some point  in the eighties he abandoned black and white. From now on he shot only in colour.. So this exhibition is sharply divided. It’s almost as if Manchester changed to being a more colourful place.

Of course it didn’t. The eighties was an awful decade as battles were fought to defend tens of thousands of jobs as the oldest industrial city in the world was de-industrialised. Twenty years later Manchester had become New Labour's favorite city, run by Sir Howard Bernstein, its chief executive till last year, and Sir Richard Leese, the leader of the council.  A model neoliberal city emerged. Today’s skyline shows dozens of cranes, new office towers and blocks of flats, not one ‘affordable’. At the same time it is the second worst local authority in Britain for child poverty.

Parr never found his way to a picket line or a tenants’ meeting. He was never going to upset the great and the good.  Their failures, from the concrete housing monstrosities of the 1960s and 70s, to today’s homeless amid glass and steel palaces are all but absent. This is a huge exhibition with hundreds of pictures, mostly in colour, some wonderfully large, yet much is missing.  Parr tells us he has always been interested in decoration. He gives us lots of clothes, hats, and tattoos. They are often fun to look at but Parr seems content to leave investigating what lies underneath to others. He gives us an everyday, conventional Manchester. He tells us he worked hard to find street parties celebrating the Royal Wedding this summer. If there’s a theme it’s the continuities and changes. Conventions change, We see both St Patrick’s Day Parade and Gay Pride. In looking for colour, we find Parr is always sympathetic to his subjects. He likes a joke as with the kid left in a buggy outside a betting shop.  This is an exhibition whose more contemporary half is designed to entertain, not to ask questions. There’s much more to Manchester than this, not least the city of the late Mark E Smith, My Ex-Classmates' Kids, when he sang ‘They cheat the kids, I cry for them, I cry for me, I cry for thee'.

Socialist Review, December 2018