How the Pentonville 5 can inspire a way forward

Fifty years ago in July 1972, five trades unionists were jailed in a dispute over jobs at the docks in East London. Their imprisonment, under new anti-union laws, sparked a mass movement and the threat of a General Strike that eventually led to the collapse of the Tory government of the day.

The 1970s was a period of great industrial militancy following the abrupt ending of the long post-war economic boom. The controlled inflationary boom, during which the Western economies were tied to the dollar which in turn was convertible into gold, was ended when, in 1971, President Nixon tore up the deal struck at Bretton Woods in 1944. Inflation took off, a recession began and the leaders of world capitalism were driven into crisis.

By this time the trade unions in Britain had become very powerful. They had over 12 million members, representing more than half the working population. The ruling classes were dismayed by their inability to bring the unions to heel.

It was not so much the trade union leaders they feared, but the shop stewards, who were directly elected by the rank-and-file workers in the factories and the workplace. It was these “unofficial” committees, like the one at the Royal Docks in East London, that led and carried forward many of the strikes and actions, often against the wishes of the official union leaders.

The government of Edward Heath that was elected in 1970 tried to address this issue by passing laws to hold union leaders responsible for the “unofficial” actions of their members. The unions could be fined for any actions by its members not officially sanctioned.

New laws on picketing were also introduced, limiting their numbers and outlawing altogether any so-called “secondary” pickets. It became illegal for workers to spread their dispute to other workplaces. It was these anti-union laws, backed up by a completely new court, the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC), that were challenged by London dockers in 1972.

The use of containers to transport goods in ships and by road was threatening jobs in the docks, as was the use by the employers of huge warehouses, staffed by lower-paid workers, to store the cargo near the docks. The dockers claimed that the work in these warehouses should be done by registered dockers working, like them, under the official National Docks Labour Scheme.

They mounted pickets outside two of the warehouses, putting themselves in jeopardy from the new laws which viewed them as “secondary” pickets. The scene was set for a confrontation. The multi-national corporation, the Vestey Group, which owned one of the warehouses, applied to the NIRC for an injunction to stop the picketing. The dockers ignored the order. Industrial spies were hired to identify the pickets` leaders.

Five shop stewards were named in court as the ringleaders: Bernie Steer, Vic Turner, Tony Merrick, Cornelius Clancy and Derek Watkin.  Four of them were arrested for contempt of court on July 21 1972. The fifth, Vic Turner, was finally arrested outside Pentonville Prison a couple of days later while leading the protest to free the other four.

The police had failed to find Turner though he always insisted that he had not tried to evade arrest. He was approached outside the jail by a policeman who asked him if he was Vic Turner. On receiving an affirmative reply, the policeman asked him if he would mind waiting there for a bit. Half an hour later, the policeman returned with lawyers. Turner was formally identified, arrested and taken into the prison.

What followed was not in the government’s script. The prison was besieged by workers from all over London –  so much so that one of the jailed men complained jokingly on his release that he had not been able to get a minute’s sleep because of the din made by the protesters through the night.

A huge demonstration led by the Royal Docks shops stewards’ banner, with “Arise Ye Workers” emblazoned across it, formed up and marched to the prison, rather than to Parliament which was the original plan.

Fleet Street was quiet for once, as printers at the national newspapers walked out behind their banners. As the strikes, walk-outs and demonstrations spread throughout the UK, the government found itself facing the prospect of a general strike. In fact the TUC had eventually even called for a one-day general strike, more to control it than to lead it, after Heath had turned down their request to intervene.

The government buckled and asked the previously unheard-of Official Solicitor to look into the case. He hastily applied to the House of Lords sitting as the top appeal court on the grounds that the NIRC had insufficient evidence to deprive the dockers of their liberty and that the evidence from the spooks was also insufficient. The dockers were freed amid tumultuous scenes of celebration after five days in jail.

After this, the NIRC was discredited and largely ignored, while the government whose main stated task had been to take on the power of the unions, then lost a national strike by the miners later in 1972. Inflation by now was out of control, driven on by a tripling of oil prices, reaching 13% by early 1974. In January 1974, miners voted by over 80% to reject a 16.5% pay rise and went on strike in early February.

Heath called a general election while the three-day week was in force. The government emphasised the pay dispute with the miners and used the slogan “Who governs Britain?”. Heath believed that the public sided with the Tories on the issues of strikes and union power. Labour defeated the Tories, but without securing an overall majority.

These years marked the high point of what could be achieved by trade union militancy alone. The unions had beaten an offensive by the state in a period of relatively high employment and before the economic crisis went critical, but they had no other perspective than working to return a Labour government. The Labour Party, by this time dominated by the pro-business right-wing and moving swiftly away from its founding principles, could offer no alternatives to the working class.

The Labour governments of 1974-1979, with the help of the trade union leaders, effectively blunted the power of the unions, making sure workers didn’t stray too far into the realm of politics. Public spending cuts began as a condition of loans from the International Monetary Fund. The ground was thereby prepared for the return of the Tories under Margaret Thatcher.

The Tories had developed new policies, and new strategies for dealing with the unions.

Capitalism should be freed from regulation and the global market should determine everything, with never a thought for the social consequences. Armed with this monetarist dogma, the Thatcher government elected in 1979 aimed to break the deadlock with a new offensive on the working class, using high levels of unemployment as well as new anti-union laws as the anvil to her hammer. 

This time, with the destruction of much of manufacturing industry, the unions were unable to hold the line, in fact they didn’t even try. The forces of the state had been strengthened. The TUC, who had completely failed to prepare for this new kind of offensive, had no answers and no ideas with which to stem the tide. They refused to recognise that they were in a political battle and that jobs, wages and conditions could only be saved by challenging the government’s right to rule.

When the miners were finally provoked in 1984-5 to defend pits and communities, their great year-long strike raised the question of state power. The strike itself was a challenge to the power of the state, but the TUC offered no meaningful support as the miners were isolated and starved back to work-  a betrayal even more blatant than in the General Strike of 1926.

The leaders of the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock were, if anything, even more feeble. Far from exposing the government for what it actually was –  an instrument of global finance and the big corporations – and mounting a challenge to its right to rule, the leadership of the party ducked the issues, and went on to embrace globalisation, becoming its most ardent adherents during the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. These governments carried on with the agenda of the Tories, facilitating the corporations, and supervising the slide of the economy towards one of low wages and weak unions.

Today, 50 years on, we see some similarities to the crisis of 1972. The Tory government of Boris Johnson has also been forced to resign in a period of high inflation, not just because of its incompetence and corruption, but for its inability to square the needs of the corporations with those of the people. It foundered on the rock of multiple global crises. The splits in the ruling party arose from the different views within it of how to confront a new era of all-round crisis enveloping the world, and in particular Britain.

And, as in 1972, we see a Labour Party under Keir Starmer, with a complete lack of vision, determined to maintain the status quo, and to carry on ruling in the interests of capitalism. Another kind of world beckons, just as in the 1970s, but the leadership of the Labour Party is blind to it.

There are also big differences between then and now. Heath’s government of 1970-74 was toppled by the organised workers, while Johnson’s government was toppled as a result of splits within the Tory Party, from within.

The global economic crisis is far deeper now. It is becoming evident to millions that the world system is not able to meet any of the challenges facing humanity, not least the threat to life on earth from climate chaos.

Our capitalist world, by its nature, cannot stop the dangers of war between the different capitalisms, nor can it solve galloping inflation, or the global food crisis, the grotesque inequality, the cost of living crisis, destruction of the environment, widespread pollution and so on, because they are all caused by the uncontrolled drive for growth and profit. The system demands that the profits from the fossil fuel companies and the other giant corporations must be protected, no matter that a third of the country’s children are living in poverty.

Starmer’s Labour Party has no answers to any of these threats, any more than the Tory Party has. It is tied to the system, unable to think beyond it. No support is offered to railway workers and other trade unionists fighting to protect jobs and living standards. Quite the opposite.

In that sense, the central lesson of the 1972 victory, still applies today: The necessity of building a movement to challenge the power of the corporations and their enablers, and to take us beyond capitalism. That’s the inspiration we should draw from the heroic defiance of the Pentonville 5.

All photos taken in 1972 by Workers Press, now the copyright of Report Digital.