There are many narrative histories of the struggles of British workers. However, Rob Sewell’s book is different. This book is aimed especially at class-conscious workers who are seeking to escape from the ills of the capitalist system, that has embroiled the world in a quagmire of wars, poverty and suffering. This history of trade unions is particularly relevant at the present time. After a long period of stagnation, the fresh winds of the class struggle are beginning to blow.
Rob Sewell’s book was written precisely with these new forces in mind.
The British labour movement is the oldest in the world. More than two hundred years ago, the pioneers of the movement created illegal revolutionary trade unions in the face of the most terrible violence and repression.
Available from Wellred hereIn the course of the nineteenth century they built trade unions of the downtrodden unskilled workers – those with “blistered hands and the unshorn chins,” as Feargus O’Connor called them. Finally, they established a mass party of Labour based on the trade unions, breaking the monopoly of the Tories and Liberals. In the stormy years following the Russian Revolution they engaged in ferocious class battles, culminating in the General Strike of 1926.
Nor did the achievements of the British trade union movement cease with the Depression and the Second World War. The post-war upswing served to strengthen the working class and heal the scars of the inter-war period. By the time of the industrial tidal wave of the early 1970s, they drove a Tory government from power, after turning Edward Heath’s anti-trade union laws into a dead letter. Later, the miners, the traditional vanguard of the British working class, waged an epic year-long struggle in 1984-85 against the juggernaut of Thatcherism. They could have succeeded, had the rightwing Labour and trade union leaders not abandoned them and left them isolated.
The book contains vital lessons and is essential reading for today’s worker militants. The foreword is written by Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists and member of the General Council of the TUC (personal capacity).
Table of Contents
- The Birth Pains
The Class Divide
Child Labour - Into the Abyss of Capitalism
Anti-union Terror
Unsung Herdes
Peterloo Massacre - Schools of War
“Captain Swing”
The Grand National - Breaking the yoke
The Newport Rising
The “Plug Plot”
The Demise - The “Pompous Trades”
New Model Unions
Marx and the First International
Impact in Britain
The Trade Union Congress
Vicious circle - From a Spark to a Blaze
From a Spark
New Unionism Under Attack - “The First Giant Step”
Mass Movements
Independent Representation
The Breakthrough
Victory Grayson - The Great Unrest
Strikes Spread
“Rank and Fileism” - War and Revolution
Voices Stifled
Revolutionary Objectives
Electrifying effect
General Election - On the Brink of Revolution
The Triple Alliance
Soviet Support - “Black Friday”
Lenin on Britain
Employers’ Offensive
The Political front - “Bayonets don’t cut coal”
The Minority Movement
Royal Comission - “Nine Days That Shook The World”
Scarcely a wheel turns
Unstoppable wave
Stand firm!
The Betrayal
Next time - “Never Again”
Coal Crisis Report - “Road to Wigan Pier”
American Labour
Consequences of 1931
Popular Frontism
Witch-Hunt - “Labour in the War”
Integral Part
June 1941 - Post War Dreams
Gradual Approach
National Debts
The Cold War
Cold War - Business (Unionism) as usual
The Blue Union
ETU Trial
Clause Four - In Place of Strife
Wage Restraint
Economic Difficulties
In Place of Strife
Discontent grows
Pilkington - “Close the Gates!”
State of emergency
1972 Miners’ Strike
Saltley Gate - The Road to Pentonville
Pentonville Five
Shrewsbury trial - The Turning Point
Ulster workers council
Paramilitary solutions
Wage Restraint
Winter of Discontent - Preparing the Class War
Premature confrontation
Flexible rostering
The Falklands War
Warrington dispute - “The Enemy Within”
Nottingham
The Ballot
The Orgreave
Dock strikes
Propaganda offensive
Action not words - Aftermath of Defeat
The Defeats
1987 General election
Driven out - “Ignorance is Strength”
“Counter-revolution”
Rover
Fruits of “New Realism” - Blairism and the Unions
General Ebb
The “project”
Coalition Government
Almighty row - The Class Divide Grows
Privatisation Disaster
Double-speak - Militancy is back!
The pendulum
Jackson’s defeat
General Council - Should the unions disaffiliate?
Keynesianism Abandoned
National Government
Justifiably angry
Accountability
Mass organisations
Words into deeds - Future of the Unions
“Partnership”
Transformation
Explosive situation - The New View of Society