Wow fella you added a lot of gibberish there from your first post to what I Replied to.
It is you and your fellow centrists who keep lying about people like me.
If you keep moving the Overton Window rightwards, using blatantly dishonest labelling to do it, 30 years from now, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer will be remembered as hard left trots, Mussolinii and Pinochet will be remembered as centrists whilst Genghis Khan and Vlad the Impaler will be regarded as just a tad right of centre. To be considered hard right you would need to be well to the right of Satan himself. But to be hard left you would need only to be seen cuddling a fluffy bunny rabbit. lol
You keep trying to call yourself real. Labour but real labour supporters back. In the day like George Orwell hated you far leftys with a passion .you far left trots have always been hanging on the tails of real labour. I've already mentioned to you about how the far left unions at the time brought the labour party's down in the late 70s .And gave the Conservative a 20yr reign of Government. Until.new labour came into.power.
Derek Robinson
Derek Robinson (trade unionist)
Derek Robinson
Occupation Trade Unionist
Years active 1970s
Known for British Leyland trade union leader
Political party Communist Party of Great Britain, Communist Party of Britain
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en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
Derek Robinson (trade unionist) - Wikipedia
This was the communist view of the Labour party from. The Mid.7os until.the late 70s .when it bought down. The labour Government and opened the door for 20yrs of Tories rule
If you are old labour has you say you.will recognise what the Far left done
The Communist
Strikes and industrial militancy in the 1970s
10 MARCH 2023
Strikes and industrial militancy in the 1970s
BEN GLINIECKI British labour movement Featured
Hundreds of thousands of workers are walking out together next week – the latest wave in Britain’s strike tsunami. Not since the 1970s has the country seen such levels of industrial action. We must learn the lessons from this period of struggle.
The current upswing in industrial militancy is unprecedented in the last 30 years. We have to go back to the 1970s to find something comparable.
[br, the summer of 1972 there was an almighty industrial battle on the docks in London. Two haulage firms went to court to try to stop the dockers’ union picketing their workplaces during the dispute, and requested that the court fine the unions under the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act.
One of these haulage firms succeeded, and the court granted an injunction against the union. On the evidence of private detectives, the bosses secured the arrest of five trade unionists for breaching the injunctions, and had them sent to Pentonville prison.
As soon as the arrests were discovered, 44,000 dockers immediately downed tools and walked out. 130,000 workers in other industries did the same. The movement spread like wildfire.
The pressure on the TUC leaders was instantaneous and immense. The leaders convened a meeting and decided to call a one-day general strike at the end of July, which would have been the first in Britain since 1926.
This posed a huge risk for the ruling class and the government. Under the circumstances, a one-day general strike could easily snowball into something more prolonged – potentially even developing into a revolutionary situation, beyond the control of the TUC bureaucracy.
The overzealous actions of an insignificant haulage firm had, under the heightened conditions of class struggle, brought Britain to the brink of an epic industrial showdown, which the ruling class was not confident of winning.
Such was the volatility of the situation. Sharp turns and sudden changes were implicit. Echoes of those conditions are growing louder today.
The government accordingly panicked once again. The Tories conjured up someone called the Official Solicitor, who has never been heard of before or since. He reinterpreted the law, discovered a loophole, and ordered the immediate release of the Pentonville Five.
This was another massive victory for the labour movement.
The Shrewsbury 24
The mood among the working class was jubilant and confident. For the first time since 1926 there was an official building workers’ strike in 1972. Flying pickets of strikers would go from picket line to picket line, shoring up support and plugging any gaps.
The government hated these flying pickets because they were particularly effective, as the Battle of Saltley Gate had proved.
The Tories decided to make an example of some of these flying pickets, which they did in north Wales in February 1973. The government arrested and framed 24 workers on charges of intimidation, violence, and conspiracy.
They were taken to court and given an overtly political trial. Fourteen were convicted and received up to three years in prison.
Scandalously, these workers were forced to finish their sentences under the Labour government elected in 1974. It was not until March 2021 – 47 years after their arrest – that the Court of Appeal finally overturned these political convictions.
Despite this setback in the struggle, the general line of march was towards more radical and militant action. The working class was outraged, but not cowed, about what the Tories had done to the Shrewsbury 24. They were determined to intensify the struggle.
Workers bring down the Tories
1972 was a year of industrial insurrection. After such convulsions, there was a slight lull in 1973. But at the end of 1973, a new miners’ strike began to develop. Inflation was putting pressure on the miners once again.
The Tory government tried to isolate the miners and turn the public against them. The Tories declared a three-day-week, blackouts of television and street lights, and other measures, citing the disruption to fuel supplies caused by the NUM.
This was an attempt to in February 1974.
Capitalism’s B-team
In 1974, there was a world slump. It was the end of the post-war boom. Unemployment shot to over one million in Britain. Internationally there was the Carnation revolution in Portugal, the collapse of the Junta in Greece, and the turbulent twilight of the Franco dictatorship in Spain.
All of this, coupled with industrial struggle and economic collapse, was spawning plots and conspiracies within the ruling class.
A high-ranking military officer in Britain wrote a book called ‘low-intensity operations’, in which he said the main threat for the army is not external but internal. Specifically, he referred to the working class in Britain and their organisations, such as the trade unions.
There were military manoeuvres at Heathrow airport, in which a takeover of the airport was carried out by the military, ostensibly as a training exercise, but without informing the government. In fact, this was a threat by the military to the civilian government.
This is the context in which a Labour government came to power. Cowed from the start, the new Wilson government immediately started doing the ruling class’ work for it, as a loyal B-team, while the Tory A-team was out of action.
The Labour government immediately introduced a policy of wage restraint, despite massive inflation, which reached 25% in 1975. This meant that 1974-77 saw the greatest fall in real wages of any comparative period prior to that. That was presided over by a Labour government, carrying out the diktats of big business in the face of a capitalist downturn.
After a period of Tory rule, the Labour Party leaders were supported by the working class to a certain degree, at least at first. The workers wanted them to succeed, and wanted to give them time to do their work.
It soon became clear, however, that the Labour leaders were simply doing the bidding of the ruling class. Despite this, the trade union leaders refused to stand up to the government on behalf of their members.
Even Jones and Scanlon supported the wage restraint policy. They didn’t like it, but they couldn’t see any way forward except supporting a Labour government.
These leaders never looked beyond the confines of capitalism and reformism. They lacked the revolutionary socialist perspective of Will Thorne and the New Unionists of the 1890s. So they backed austerity and convinced workers to follow their lead.
In doing this, these left trade unionists held the working class back. And they were uncritically supported in doing so by the Communist Party and the Liaison Committee.
In 1976, there was a sterling crisis, and the IMF had to step in to bail out Britain.
As is well known, when the IMF bails out a country, it comes with strings attached. The conditions for the bailout were £3bn of cuts to public services.
The conditions were designed to be especially harsh, because the IMF didn’t trust the Labour government – with its links to the organised working class and its strong left wing – to carry out the necessary policies.
Nevertheless, the Labour government bent the knee and accepted the bailout and the conditions imposed by the IMF. It was behaving as the humble servant of the capitalist class.
Unions move into opposition
Wilson resigned, and Callaghan took over as Labour leader and Prime Minister in 1976. He pursued policies of harsh austerity as required by the ruling class.
Finally, after two years of holding back the working class, the union leaders caved to the pressure of the rank and file, and moved into action against the government.
A wave of disputes began against the Labour administration. These were mostly on the question of wages, as workers struggled to keep their heads above the water in the context of rampant inflation.
The mood was reflected by the Fire Brigades Union, whose members voted for strike action, even in the face of opposition to action from the union’s right-wing leadership. Such was the fury at the government’s wage restraint and austerity policies.
Eventually the pressure from the ranks was so great that the TUC itself, which had been supporting the Labour government’s wage restraint policies since 1974, was forced to come out against the government.
The Winter of Discontent of 1978-79 saw a huge wave of industrial action against the Callaghan government. Between October 1978 and March 1979, ten million working days were lost to industrial action.
Lorry drivers, local authority workers, health workers, and many more were on strike. The struggle affected every part of society. It led, in the end, to the fall of the Labour government in 1979. Callaghan called an election and lost to Thatcher, opening up a new chapter in the history of the class struggle in Britain.
Throughout this decade, the working class demonstrated its power. It brought down governments. In factory occupations, it showed it could organise production. It was butting up against the limits of capitalism, and posing the question of socialism.
Ultimately, however, this was not enough, as the resulting election of Thatcher shows.
What is needed is to combine this industrial militancy with revolutionary political leadership, without which capitalism cannot be overthrown.
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