IN June 1984, the National Union of Mineworkers entered the fourth month of its historic year-long struggle with the Thatcher government.

A few weeks later a massive police attack on the Orgreave picket was unleashed. The prisons started to fill with pickets. Industrial action was being branded a crime.

Thatcher had vowed to take on and defeat any group of workers who opposed her wave of deindustrialisation and the jobs massacre that was its inevitable consequence.

While the miners were a prime target, there were other casualties of her onslaught on the trade unions.

None more so than the Cammell Laird 37, shipyard workers in Birkenhead imprisoned for going on an official GMBATU (now GMB) strike.

Although little remembered outside of the Merseyside region today, the occupation of a gas rig and a Royal Navy destroyer by Cammell Laird strikers opposing compulsory redundancies was both legitimate and heroic.

But the strikers’ stand continues to cast a long shadow over our town. And its protagonists — the 37 striking workers who sacrificed their freedom to defend their jobs and community — are still awaiting any recognition for the injustice they faced.

For over a century, shipbuilding was the very lifeblood of Birkenhead. Cammell Laird shipyards dominated the town’s skyline and provided meaningful and well-paid employment for thousands of people.

In the 1940s around 20,000 workers at the yard helped build the ships that won the second world war. But by the early 1980s the workforce had been slashed to under 2,000.

British shipyards were at crisis point. Years of underinvestment and the privatisation of the publicly owned British Shipbuilders in 1983 left the sector struggling to compete on the world stage.

In the two years leading up to the dispute, 12,000 shipbuilding jobs across the country were consigned to the scrapheap.

And in the first six months of 1984, over 1,500 workers at Cammell Laird were laid off.

By mid-1984, the situation had grown even more desperate at Lairds.

With management reporting that the yards were badly short of work, a further 800 redundancy notices were issued on June 1.

When plans were made to move a gas rig, then under construction, the workers knew that the future of the shipyards hung in the balance.

It wasn’t just their own livelihoods that were at stake — the supply chain would be devastated too and the loss of so many jobs was a dagger at the throat of the whole community.

On June 28 a strike was called. Everyone knew this was a do-or-die battle. The stakes were high and the action drew broad support from across the local labour movement and beyond.

Tugboat operators began a boycott of the yard, while local trade unionists — including workers at the nearby Vauxhall and Ford car plants — joined picket lines in support of their striking comrades.

Shipbuilders from Tyneside to the Clyde made generous donations to the strike fund and striking miners rallied to their cause.

Three weeks into the dispute, a group of strikers took the dispute to new heights. Led by shipwright Eddie Marnell, Billy Albertina and Lol Duffy and other members of the GMBATU, they occupied the gas rig and blockaded the gangway to the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Edinburgh.

Among them was my brother Chris, a 30-year-old stager. He has now sadly passed away, but his stand means that my memory of him is forever filled with pride.

The average age of the stagers was 27. These were young men doing their best to save their future from an employer and a government hell-bent on managing the decline of their industry, their region and their community.

The occupation ensured that the bosses were unable to use their favourite tactic, a lockout (now reborn as fire and rehire).

There is a proud history of occupations in the unions. In 1971 the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in thwarted Tory attempts to close the Scottish yard, and over the water from Cammell Laird, in Kirkby, Fisher Bendix workers took over their entire site to prevent redundancies.

At Lairds the workers knew the enormous risk they were taking. Those who hadn’t yet been served redundancy notices faced immediate dismissal, while those who had received them risked having their redundancy payments snatched away.

With the massive police operations under way against the miners it was clear that they could well face arrest and prosecution as well. In the summer the bosses duly went to the courts to get a repossession order.

Despite this looming threat, Albertina, the occupation committee chair, was candid in his response: “Although we are facing prison and that’s going to be hard, it’s a damn sight worse on the dole.”

By September, the remaining occupiers found themselves surrounded by barbed wire, under the threat of being stormed by special forces and running out of water.

Meanwhile, management leveraged its enormous financial might to demonise the occupation in the press and take the occupiers to court, where spurious national security concerns were cited to undermine the occupation.

When the remaining 37 workers refused to abandon their action to attend a court hearing, they were held in contempt and sentenced to a month in prison.

Although the occupation had been peaceful, the 37 were sent to HMP Walton, a Category A prison usually reserved for the most violent and dangerous offenders.

The judge who sent them there — Justice Lawton, a former supporter of the fascist Oswald Mosley — declared: “This is about as bad a bit of behaviour as I have come across in 50 years of the administration of justice.”

Presumably this supposed custodian of the law felt that defending jobs was a more heinous crime than those committed by the murderers, armed robbers and rapists that had no doubt passed through his chamber over those 50 years.

Thatcher’s team had become dab-hands at organising strike-breakers to undermine trade union influence and activity.

Just as they funded “Silver Birch” to break the miners’ strike and Medlock Bibby to do the same to the dockers’ strike, so they touted a “Back to Work Committee” at Lairds.

Despite the vocal support of local newspapers, this operation was unable to break the will of the strikers.

While inside prison, some of the strikers’ families even received death threats from anonymous callers opposed to the strike.

The strikers nevertheless stood firm and the offers of early release extended to some of the occupiers were roundly refused.

The spirit of solidarity that had led them to occupy rig in the first place endured: no-one would leave until they were all free — this despite being incarcerated at Walton and locked up in their cells for 23 hours a day.

The local Cammell Laird Occupation Support Group had called for united strike action across the movement in support of both the miners and the occupiers.

Although Liverpool City Council workers struck in support of the imprisoned shipyard workers, there was no sustained or co-ordinated action. Like the miners they were isolated and then picked off.

The strikers were released from prison in October 1984 and went straight back onto the picket line to campaign for their own reinstatement and that of six other men who had been sacked during the dispute.

Eventually, though, the management regained control of the yard and the dispute ended.

The occupiers and their families continued to experience grinding hardship. The 37 had lost their jobs and pension entitlements and were effectively blacklisted. Many struggled to find even casual employment on the Liverpool docks.

The defeat of the occupation also heralded in a dark chapter for Birkenhead. It signalled the beginning of long decades of economic decline and government neglect from which our town is still struggling to recover. By 1993 Lairds finally closed, with a further 900 sacked.

Just as I am committed to building a better Birkenhead so too am I committed to securing justice for the 37. And with Cammell Laird now reopened, the memory of men who fought so hard to keep the yard afloat and sacrificed so much needs to be commemorated.

Over the following three-and-a-half decades, the surviving members of the 37 have worked tirelessly to clear their names, supported by the GMB union.

At GMB national conference in 2006, the then prime minister Tony Blair was pictured holding a “Justice for Cammell Laird” sign, which was followed by a sit-down between representatives of the 37 with his successor Gordon Brown in 2008. It is a great shame that nothing happened as a result.

The campaign had a major success in 2014, when the European Parliament’s petitions committee ruled that the response to the occupation had been disproportionate and that the government should release all documentation related to the dispute and issue an apology to the men.

But nearly seven years later and despite the under-secretary of justice promising to revisit the issue in 2017, the government has so far not acted to redress the injustice the men suffered.

Since then, 12 of those who were imprisoned have passed away without seeing this historic wrong righted.

As the MP for Birkenhead, as the brother of one of the strikers and as a lifelong trade unionist myself, I am not going to let this matter lie.

In conjunction with representatives of the campaign I will be pushing for the type of outcome that the Shrewsbury Pickets recently had at the end of their long campaign for justice — the recognition that the 37 lads in Birkenhead were victims of a miscarriage of justice and that they should receive full compensation for the many years of detriment they suffered.

Mick Whitley is Labour MP for Birkenhead.