Willie campaigning against the closure of care homes in 2023 – Image by Pete Cannell

1974 – an end and a beginning

1974 was a pivotal year both in Britain and across the world – high points of workers’ struggles, but also the beginning of five decades of neo-liberalism, defeats and increasing inequality around the globe. Willie Black, who was then a young electrician’s union militant and member of the International Socialists, evokes the year’s highs and lows and explains how it shaped the following decades. Interview conducted by Pete Cannell.

Looking back on 1974, it was a time when things were in flux. The events of 1968 were still fresh in many people’s minds. Trade union membership was more than thirteen million. The early 1970s had seen the first national Women’s Liberation Conference, the founding of the Gay Liberation Front in London and the first edition of the Ecologist. 1974 was the year when striking miners brought down a Tory government that asked, who runs the country? The Tories were replaced by a minority Labour government, which won a three-seat majority in the year’s second election, in October. It was the year of the Birmingham pub bombings – and the year that Rolls Royce workers in Scotland refused to repair and maintain jet engines for the Pinochet military regime in Chile. And it was the year of the Portuguese revolution.

For me, 1968, affected my political direction, and affected millions of young people across the world. We were going to change the world. Looking back, the traditional parties of the working class in Britain – Labour and the Communist Party – were still strong. As a young worker, I found that the best class fighters were often in the Communist Party. Many of the worker activists I saw and admired were in the Communist Party.

But then you look at 1968 in France, and you see the role of the Communist Party quite differently. The huge general strike of 1968, the biggest strike in working-class history, could have won so much more, but the CP-led unions made a deal and left the students and other young people isolated. They treated the political crisis as just an opportunity for trade union negotiation. There were clear echoes of the 1926 general strike in Britain, when the government said to the TUC leaders: Gentlemen. You have beaten us. Are you ready to take over? And clearly, the TUC wasn’t ready for that, so they buckled. The same thing happened in France.

So, my politics were shaped by May 1968 in France, the Prague spring earlier that year and generally the struggles around the world against colonial rule. And I see parallels now with the continuing struggle of the Palestinians against Israel. Back then you could look and say, well, how did the Americans not win in Vietnam? Decades later the US had the most powerful military, yet they got bogged down in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Then and now people were prepared to rebel and rebel and rebel. Even at the darkest points it’s a matter of finding new tactics, but it’s also about the resilience of the people.

Despite the shock and awe, the ability to kill thousands and thousands, it doesn’t need to be the outcome that the people will be suppressed forever. Israel is surrounded by Arab countries whose rulers made a deal with Israel. But by no stretch of the imagination were the people part of that deal. So, we can begin to see hope, opportunities, that this will shape the future generations. You see in the struggles right now the linking up of different movements that were separate before. The ability to come together is important. And I think that when you look at 1974, you begin to see an example of that. If you fight, you’ve got a chance to win; if you don’t fight, you’re sure to lose.

A year of transition

So, 1974 was a moment when things were changing. At factory level, rank and file workers were strong. There was the ability to win – there used to be a saying get out and win it before the full time official can come along. So, there was economic power in the workplace, and it was obvious. But there was also a problem, in that the political situation required something different to respond to the ruling class. The working class needed to develop a sense of being a class for itself. In a sense neoliberalism was a product of our strength – what the other side needed to do was to break us as a class. And that wasn’t understood by the leaders of the trade union movement or the political parties.

The high points of struggle in Britain were 1972 and 1974. But already things were being put in the place to weaken us. 1974 paved the way for the emergence of Regan and Thatcher, inspired by the defeat of the Chilean Allende government, and the smashing of the working class in Chile for decades. And there was a struggle for ideas taking place on our own side.

In response to the miners’ strike, Tory prime minister Edward Heath went to the country and said look, you know, these people can’t be allowed to carry on with what they’re doing. Well, the answer was clear – people didn’t vote for him, and his government went down to defeat. Heath was replaced by Labour. But at the end of the 1960’s Labour had already proposed measures to curb trade union power. Labour politician Barbara Castle had attempted to introduce a policy called In Place of Strife, which aimed at curbing shopfloor power and ending mass meetings voting to take strike action. The 1974 Labour government brought in the Advisory, Conciliation, and Arbitration Service (ACAS), and pressured union leaders to use ACAS to negotiate rather than taking strike action.

In Place of Strife was defeated by the working class, but after 1974 Labour used the two most left-wing union leaders, Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones, to introduce a different curb on strikes – and on wages – what was called the Social Contract. The ‘contract’ was between the employers and the trade union leaders to replace strikes. So as economic crisis started to spread across Europe and particularly Britain, Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones persuaded the TUC to accept wage controls under this policy, which we called ‘the Social Contrick’.

What this revealed was a weakness on our side about challenging Labour governments. As a revolutionary, as a socialist, as a Marxist trying to win fellow workers, I was arguing against what seemed to be an easier path. Instead of going on strike and losing money and all those other things, workers were being told that they could get benefits without conflict.

Labour’s slow-motion collapse ended five years later in the election of 1979. When Thatcher stands on the steps of 10 Downing Street, she gives a speech full of irony, trying to peddle the idea that she represented the end of conflict. And then she fills her cabinet with people that were looking at Chile and the social experiment there, and following the neoliberal ideologues. But when you look at the votes, she never won the working class. The working class didn’t turn out for Labour because of the behaviour of the Labour government and the trade union leaders. With confidence, we are many, they are few. But if we don’t have confidence that we are many, and networks are broken, we’re in a difficult situation. And you have to kind of mark time waiting for change that always comes.

The miners’ strike

The miners’ strike in 1974 was a magnificent thing, but it was very short lived – they won quickly! It wasn’t like the 1984 strike where they would struggle for the year. They had the power. But they also had tactics to win. That frightened the ruling class to the point that they tried to make a deal. The thing is it teaches us a lot about left- and right-wing trade union leaders. We always want left union leaders.

But in 1974 Joe Gormley was the miners’ leader, a right-winger with very close links to the establishment, maybe even the secret service, who eventually got his reward by getting a seat in the House of Lords. But that was matched or trumped by the fact that the miners were organized at the pit head. They had ballots at the workplace. So everybody could see, and everybody took part in a mass meeting. They went and voted and heard the arguments. They were hearing their fellow workers the leadership inside the pits speaking, making the argument for why they should vote to strike.

Three Day Week – leaflet, 1973, London Federation of Trades Councils. Image via Britain at Work.

And that echoed many of the mass meetings that appeared on your telly at that time, the Ford Workers, the British Leyland workers, the mass meetings of three, four, five thousand in a car park, putting their hands up to vote. The working class had a huge powerful image. You could feel it. And then when Heath said that because of the coal supply (and the miners were actually just on an overtime ban, not yet a strike at that point) that workplaces would be closed down to save electricity, and we went onto a three-day week. Britain was then almost entirely dependent on burning coal to produce electricity, and the coal stocks had never really recovered from the 1972 strike, so they panicked.

So, if you ever wanted to know what the power of the working class was, it was when your lights went out. The miners were the clearest example of that. And they won completely. But then after the election, you’re now up against a Labour government, who were supposed to be your friends. The Labour Party played its role, which was to tell people to calm down: We’ll help you out. We’ll pass legislation and bills and over the next decades we’ll gradually get to socialism. You don’t need to do anything, just keep voting for us.

And we, the left, weren’t up to that challenge. There wasn’t enough organisation or class consciousness or politics that said we need a revolutionary party. And that then became a problem. Because the imbalance between the tiny groups of revolutionaries who had acquired some ability to mobilise and to lead, and what was necessary, didn’t match the requirements of the new situation.

Meeting the challenge

For a while the political group that I was involved in, the Internationalist Socialists (that became the SWP in 1976), saw a small opportunity to change. We were accepted in many workplaces. We had a rank-and-file conference that people came to from all different industries. But in the context of the Social Contract the employers stiffened up and said –prompted by politicians and by editorials in the Financial Times – that if we don’t fight them, we’ll have to concede more and more of our profits back to the working class. So, they stiffened up, and our side wasn’t ready for that stiffening up.

Socialist Worker and International Socialism covers from 1973-4, via marxists.org

There was a joke around then about a mass strike meeting. The full-time official steps forward and says to the meeting that they’ve won £5, but a big cheer goes up when it’s voted against. So, the official goes away and negotiates, and comes back to say, good news, we’ve won £10. That’s great. This is what you should accept. And once again the vote goes against the £10. And the official gets really angry, and shouts at the meeting: well, what do you want? And a wee voice at the back shouts: socialism. And the official says but management will never agree to that!

And that’s the problem, if you’re fighting for a different world. You’re not fighting for a fiver or a tenner. You’re fighting to break the other side. And that’s the victory. The victory is not monetary value. The trade union leaders are there to get the best deal for your labour not to lead revolutionary struggle. You don’t know how that’s going to map out, how the trade union leaders are going to shape up, but history tells us that in nearly every occasion the left act like the right in terms of the control that they want to put on us.

When you look at what the other side had written about 1974, you see some quite amazing. comments and commentary on the period. One Tory minister called his children round the hearth to tell them this was the last Christmas of its kind they would be enjoying together! Their confidence was shot, as they could feel themselves losing control, and so they were ready to reach for any tool in the box. On the fringes, some of them were thinking about a military coup. There was a strange situation when Harold Wilson resigns as prime minister in early 1976, for reasons that have never been properly explained. Some of the atmosphere around this is captured in the book and BBC drama A Very British Coup, and was corroborated in Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, which Thatcher banned.

But in the event Harold Wilson, and then James Callaghan (who took over in 1976), went to the banks, who said: forget your manifesto, you cannot carry that out – the Bank of England and the money markets will not allow this. Even though for revolutionaries the manifesto was relatively wishy-washy, it did reflect the power of the working class at the time, and the Labour Party’s desire to make concessions to regain legitimacy. It was a threat to the ruling class and the ruling class used their instruments to say well, you’re not doing it.

But if Labour hadn’t caved in, then the ruling class had other tools. Some of them would have been ready to reach for marginal right-wing organisations like the National Association for Freedom and would strengthen them. They would get them TV coverage; they’d be in the media.

1974 and now

And now in 2024 we are seeing echoes of that past. Articles in the right-wing press about conscripting young people, complaining that they’re not patriotic enough, or they’re not ready to fight Russia or whatever. You see the Reform Party threatening the Tories from the right. If the Tories get a major defeat in the next general election, then as in 1974, you could see the right saying what are we going to do? How are we going to get out of this? So, we need to be alert to the growth of the right, and ensure that the street fighters are confronted and smashed here and now, so that they can’t reach for semi-fascist solutions.

But another lesson of 1974 is that we also need to take on Starmer. So, we must look to the movements and say that it’s not enough to fight on one issue at a time. We must fight on all issues, at different levels of the struggle. At COP26 for example, different parts of the movement came together, environmental activists and the trade union movement. And we can build on the struggles that took place in 2023. The picket lines reflected that rainbow coalition with speakers from tenants’ campaigns, the climate movement, other struggles and the community as well.

It’s important to reach out, try to give focus and political clarity, because we don’t want just the consciousness that things are bad. But while we learn from the past, we have to look at what’s right for the 21st century. Class is important, but so is understanding class. But if you just put purely economic terms, you miss the chance to mobilise on a wider scale, and  to shape future generations. I think it’s important that we are the tribunes of the oppressed. That we don’t see oppression as marginal or something which can be left till later days.

We struggle right now. We get impatient a little bit. Because what we really should have is a working-class political revolutionary organisation. But that’s still to be built. And that will be built in the movements and through the struggle. So, victories can be achieved that are not strictly class struggles in the sense of how people used to perceive class struggles. I think class struggles are about liberation, about oppression and how oppression has to be fought.

So, if you’re in a strong workplace the workforce is made up of people who reflect the social movements. There’ll be people who are very deeply concerned with climate in every workplace. So, as revolutionary socialists we form a bridge between the gaps in the class. We help to bring movements together.