BETWEEN 1969 and 1972 two successive attempts were made to limit the right to strike in Britain. Both were defeated.

The first was by a Labour government. In 1969 Harold Wilson produced his white paper, In Place of Strife, proposing to make unofficial strikes illegal and to punish unofficial strikers directly. Penalties were to include both fines and ultimately imprisonment.

The second was by Edward Heath’s Conservative government. Its 1971 Industrial Relations Act required the registration of all trade unions and laid down financial penalties for any union whose members were responsible for unofficial strikes deemed illegal under the Act. Strikers themselves were punishable at law for infringements of the Act.

The first of these attacks was abandoned before it reached the statute book. The second, despite becoming law, was effectively abandoned within a year.  

Today, at a time when the current Conservative government’s Strike (Minimum Service Level) Act is poised for use against key workers, it is worth reflecting on how these victories were achieved.  

In neither case was it through opposition in Parliament — though this was attempted. The key blows were delivered by trade unionists themselves. On May Day 1969 up to a million workers took part in a nationwide unofficial strike — followed by a declaration by trade union executives, after a mass lobby by shop stewards, that they would oppose any such legislation. Wilson and his principal accomplice, Barbara Castle, quickly abandoned the proposal.   

The battle against the Industrial Relations Act was more protracted. But again unofficial (and technically illegal) strike action was critical. In summer 1972, when the London dockers were imprisoned, it was the unofficial Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions (LCDTU) that initiated a mass strike — forcing the TUC to call the first general strike since 1926. The dockers were released almost immediately.

None of this action was, however, spontaneous. It depended on painstaking organisation in factories and communities going back over a decade, the creation of a new, far more cohesive national shop stewards’ movement, work to integrate this organisation within official trade union structures and, not least, in its final phases, the embedding of this organisation within local working-class communities..

Circumstances are different today. But it is worth remembering how these victories were achieved — because “circumstances” often depend on people themselves. And they can change quickly. 

The first steps in developing this movement go back to the late 1950s and the realisation on the left that the defeat of right-wing and pro-government influence in the official trade union movement depended on a more politically conscious and cohesive shop stewards’ movement, one with direct influence in the workplace. 

In the development of this movement wider economic events played their part. The government and the big motor and electronics companies had sought to overcome wage pressures in the south-east by setting up subsidiary plants in the low wage areas of the north and west.  

The response, led by the left and also Frank Cousins and Jack Jones in the TGWU, was to establish all-British combine committees of shop stewards to ensure wage parity. Stewards from across Britain — Glasgow, Merseyside and Coventry — were brought together in a new way. The beginnings of a national movement was established. 

These human links were further reinforced by the engineering apprentices strikes of 1960 and among women workers by the beginnings of a national movement for wage parity. Finally in 1966 these developments were given organisational form by the creation of the LCDTU chaired by the legendary Kevin Halpin.  

By this point it was clear to all that a major struggle over trade union rights was imminent. In 1964 Lord Devlin had ruled that trade union action to defend a union closed shop at Heathrow airport amounted to unlawful intimidation. Unlimited damages were therefore warranted. The following year Lord Devlin was appointed by the government to break the power of the dockers’ rank-and-file Liaison Committee in the London docks. Press demands for action to ban “wildcat” strikes escalated.  

All this occurred in a period of steadily rising inflation when unofficial strikes at workplace level were, in many cases, the only way of securing redress. LCDTU pamphlets and meetings explained the real causes of inflation in monopoly profit gouging and why there had to be resistance.  

Such working-class politics (as well as some Marxist economics) were also promoted by the Morning Star, then selling in its hundreds in major workplaces. It was this longer-term mobilisation that created the “circumstances” for resistance. 

Later on, opposition to Edward Heath’s Act was intensified by another “circumstance,” one created by the government itself when it sought to use unemployment and factory closures as a tool to dampen militancy. Led by resistance from the shipyards on the Clyde it did the reverse. 

“Work-ins” and occupations now united working-class communities, usually led by trades union councils, and brought them into the struggle across the whole country. Those leading the struggles on wages and jobs, miners leaders, engineers, women and men, achieved film star status. 

Across Britain also this new level of solidarity was embodied in a series of one-day sympathy strikes that ran through 1970s and continued into the early 1980s — the last major strike being in support of NHS workers in 1982.

This time round, in 2023, the Tories have initially picked on a narrow group of workers in order to isolate and defeat them — in order to provide, they hope, a rationale for extending the principle further. In response, as in the 1960s and ’70s, a new generation of workers is now creating the circumstances in which basic trade union principles can be reasserted once more.