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Remember the Pentonville Five, when workers' solidarity shook the system
ROGER SUTTON reflects on the mass action that freed imprisoned dockers on this day in 1972, which is to be commemorated later this year in an event drawing parallels with the struggles of workers today
Vic Turner (left) being escorted into Pentonville Prison by the High Court Tipstaff (balding, back to camera) after his arrest. He had earlier appeared in the dockers' picket line outside the prison. Turner was one of five dockers committed to prison for contempt by the National Industrial Relations Court on the 21 July 1972
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IN the blazing of summer of 1972 mass working-class action forced the release of the five docker shop stewards.
In the last week of July, the action being taken by workers reached its highest point and, as a massive march reached Pentonville prison in north London on July 26, the gates of the grim Victorian jail were opened and let out the five.
Workers had been walking off jobs across the country. Solid strike action had turned over the ruling-class attempt to smash unions.
An onslaught begun under a Labour government with In Place of Strife was picked up and intensified by the 1970 Tory government with the Industrial Relations Act. It was aimed at workers resisting attacks on their shop stewards.
It was out to stop a wave of workplace occupations to save manufacturing jobs; miners’ strikes; the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in; the battle for equal pay; and building workers’ struggles. And much much more. We have held Pentonville Five commemorations each year to celebrate our history.
It was a key victory for trade unions and the lessons learnt in that struggle have an important resonance today. After the working-class advances of the early 1970s in a period of international struggle (for example, the Vietnam war was approaching Vietnamese victory, liberation struggles in Africa, and the struggle in Northern Ireland with Bloody Sunday in 1972) the ruling class came back with the Thatcher salami-slicing tactic of attacking trade union rights from 1979.
That prolonged onslaught up to this day has tried to limit workers’ effectiveness, but as we have seen over the last few years workers have been coming back strong. However, the anti-union laws continue to entangle those struggles and deny workers rights.
So as we celebrate the victory of 1972, we want to take the lessons of that time and use them to reinforce the struggle for workers’ civil rights today and build the campaign to win those rights back.
To that end, to properly commemorate the Pentonville victory, there will be a Pentonville Five conference in November to develop that struggle.
Roger Sutton is the secretary of the Cities of London and Westminster Trades Council, treasurer of Greater London Association of Trade Union Councils; and part of the Pentonville commemoration group.
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