Strikers with Poems

Abstract

In the summer of 1966, the National Union of Seamen (NUS), expressing the demands of an increasingly militant rank-and-file membership, called an official strike over wages and working conditions. Lasting for six weeks and involving more than 26,000 workers it proved to be the most serious industrial dispute to take place in Great Britain since the General Strike forty years earlier.¹ An anonymous account of a rally in South Shields captures the mood of the strikers across the country: “It gives us in the South great heart when we read of the solidarity among the workers of the North East Coast and our minds go back to the days of hunger marches from Jarrow-on-Tync and the fight for social justice which has never ended.”² Though the British seamen, among the most poorly paid in Europe, could be confident of their place within a continuum of struggles against injustice, the nature of their adversary had changed. They were faced with a Labour government whose economic platform rested on the Prices and Incomes Bill, a set of disinflationary measures designed to promote growth and protect the currency from speculation. In practice this meant a policy of wage restraint and suppression and a consolidation of state power and private business interests. Prime Minister Harold Wilsons response to the strike was aggressive; he declared a State of Emergency and appeared willing to bring in the Navy and Armed Forces if necessary, and he made a remarkable ideological attack in the House of Commons, insinuating that the dispute had been coordinated by communists.³