Strikes and trade union history

It’s tempting to think of the The Village as the BBC’s anti-Downton. Set during roughly in the same time period as everyone’s favourite High Tory soap opera, the two shows were bound to draw comparisons, but they are totally different beasts. While Downton Abbey approaches the class system of early 20th century England with a sort of Things-Were-Better-Then gentility, at times The Village has been so bleak that it has drawn inevitable criticism for being a cover for lefty, kitchen-sink agitprop. Written by Peter Moffat (Cambridge Spies, Silk) The Village is inspired by Heimat, the long-running...

When I was a young boy, my grandfather told me a story of a bus depot, a mass picket line, and a scab bus being turned on its side by an angry crowd. Later I realised he was telling me about his highlight of the 1926 General Strike. A union railwayman all his working life, he never made it into the history books, nor did his wife’s twin children who, born a year after the strike, died because no doctor could be afforded. My family’s history is nothing out of the ordinary for working class lives — the sort of lives you can see reflected in the halls and archives of the Manchester People’s...

Following on from an account of the events leading to the jailing of the Pentonville Five in July 1972, and of the working-class movement that freed them, a second article assesses the role of the left and draws out the lessons.

Ernest Rice McKinney (1886-1984) was a black US trade union organiser, revolutionary socialist and central leader in the "Third Camp" socialist organisation the Workers Party. Born in Malden, in West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley, McKinney’s father was a coal miner and then a teacher (his mother was a teacher too). McKinney Sr. eventually landed a job at the US Treasury through his involvement in the Republican Party, which had widespread black support in the decades after the American Civil War. Although it did experience a brutal white-supremacist reaction following the defeat of post-war...

In the twenty or thirty years before World War One, mass socialist and trade union movements were built across Europe, starting off very small in the 1880s and acquiring such strength by, say, 1905 that most of their activists believed that they would soon be able to overthrow capitalism. That inspiring advance came to a sudden end in early August 1914. With the start of World War One, most of the big socialist and trade-union movements rallied behind their own bourgeois governments. A permanent line of division was drawn in the labour movement, and remains to this day, between the...

The May 1979 general election, in which Labour Party leaders who had systematically turned against their working-class base since winning office in 1974 were defeated by Thatcher’s Tories, triggered rank-and-file revolt in the Labour Party. Local Labour activists, and for a while even some trade union leaders, rallied around the slogan “Never again”. They vowed to win changes in Labour Party structure and policy which would tie future Labour governments to the mandates and interests of the labour movement. The revolt surged forward through 1980 and 1981, and into a Labour deputy leadership...

The Christmas of 1969 was a turning point for me. I was a month off my ninth birthday when my sister gathered up all the selection boxes and various other sweets and treats and parcelled them up for the pot-bellied, fly-covered starving black kids who appeared in our living room every teatime all the way from Biafra. I didn’t declare then that I was a socialist. But I did carry what felt like huge burden of concern that I had some responsibility to sort things out. Immediately, that meant giving all our chocolate away. In the long term, it meant finding out about how the world works and why...

The great anthem of the labour movement, written in 1889 by Jim Connell, a one-time Fenian, on a train journey from Charing Cross to New Cross Gate. The people's flag is deepest red, It shrouded oft our martyred dead, And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, Their hearts blood dyed its every fold. Then raise the scarlet standard high. (chorus) Within its shade we'll live and die, Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We'll keep the red flag flying here. Look round, the Frenchman loves its blaze, The sturdy German chants its praise, In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung Chicago swells the...

The AWL believes that socialist organisations must be the “memory of the working class”. A big part of our job is to preserve, rediscover, discuss and spread the lessons and inspiration of past struggles, victorious and defeated. Our annual event, Ideas for Freedom (3-6 July), will include many discussions on working-class history, with a focus on the First World War and the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. IFF will open on the evening of Thursday 3 July with a Radical Walking Tour of East London, looking at how working-class, socialist and women’s liberation activists organised in the East End in the...

A leaflet produced by the small Irish Trotskyist group in the mid 1940s, after nationalists split the Irish trade union movement. This is a leaflet produced by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which was then the (small) Irish section of the Fourth International, some time soon after the splitting of the Irish trade union movement (Irish TUC) by Irish Transport and General Workers' Union leader William O'Brien and his allies. Protesting against alleged "British domination" in the Irish TUC, they formed a separate Congress of Irish Unions, made up solely of Irish-based unions, and rejecting...