Starmer promised a reset after Labour’s dire electoral performance, but the government’s programme still falls far short of the bold action needed, says ANDY McDONALD MP
A GLORIOUS History, Tony Burke and Ann Field’s new history of the print and papermaking unions of Britain and Ireland, is a glorious spectacle.
The book — launched tonight at the Marx Memorial Library — is a beauty to behold with its reproductions, mostly courtesy of the library’s own Printworkers’ Collection, of print union certificates, posters and photographs of workers in struggle.
Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the book briskly runs you through interrelated themes like the wages struggle, women’s struggle for equal pay and representation and international solidarity.
The newly catalogued News International Dispute Archive ensures the history of the Wapping dispute – and the solidarity it inspired – is preserved, accessible and alive for future generations, says MATT DUNNE
Forty years on, TONY DUBBINS revisits the Wapping dispute to argue that Murdoch’s real aim was union-busting – enabled by Thatcherite laws, police violence, compliant unions and a complicit media
Enduring myths blame print unions for their own destruction – but TONY BURKE argues that the Wapping dispute was a calculated assault by Murdoch on organised labour, which reshaped Britain’s media landscape and casts a long shadow over trade union rights today
On the 40th anniversary of the Wapping dispute, this Morning Star special supplement traces the long-planned conspiracy that led to the mass sackings of printworkers in 1986 – a struggle whose unresolved injustices still demand redress today, writes ANN FIELD



