The 1983 Peoples March for Jobs was controversial from the start. The idea for the march was initially opposed by the Labour Party and the TUC, which was only reversed by pressure within the movement. The march itself was plagued by controversy on and off the march itself over its 'non-political' stance. Before the march began Mick Archer interviewed Pete Carter, Midlands regional official of UCATT and the industrial organiser of the CP, who helped to campaign for the march to go ahead. Valerie Coultas and Redmond O'Neill interviewed two marchers, Tony Purtill and Paul Atkin, about the march, and the attitude of the Communist Party in particular.
'We have to win the centre ground'
MA: You have argued that a broad conception of the 1983 Peoples March is a prerequisite to its success: that we should resist a tendency to tag on questions like nuclear disarmament, the Alternative Economic Strategy, and so on which would preclude the involvement of broader forces. Could you explain why?
PC: Eighty per cent of people see unemployment as the main problem facing Britain, not inflation, nor a range of other issues. In that 80 per cent there are a mixture. They are not all socialists. They are not calling for the overthrow of capitalism. If we had the slogan 'Jobs not Bombs' you would initially alienate a lot of people who feel strongly that Britain should have the bomb, or the multilateralist elements, from taking part in this particular initiative on jobs.
Secondly, when you talk about, for instance, including an Alternative Economic Strategy to involve other forces once again I think you begin to limit the participation of people. Especially when you think that 49 per cent of people, at this stage, of those 80 per cent think that the problem is not of the government's making. So if we began to put forward an Alternative Economic Strategy, or if we became so narrow that we turned it into an anti-Tory march then you would alienate an awful lot of people.
The creation of such a broad movement on unemployment would also carry the potential for a wide range of discussions of political alternatives and for a socialist future.
MA: It seems to me what you are putting forward is a popular protest against unemployment that would include organisations like the Church, Tory councils in certain circumstances, and chambers of commerce. But how would such a march relate to traditional struggles like strikes over redundancies or even occupations?
PC: I think there is an organic relationship between the breadth of what we are trying to do and the traditional forms of struggle. I am sure, for instance, that there will be a definite relationship between the launch of the march in Scotland on the 23 April and the Timex dispute in Dundee. The contradiction would be if the march itself took on the fight to save Timex, and the fight to save Kraft. We have to find this way of the struggles complementing each other rather than either imposing a struggle on people who are not prepared to accept that struggle.
MA: But the march — anti-Tory, pitched at people who will not simply identify themselves as labour movement activists. Do you feel that, as a popular protest, it could be expressed politically in the form of alliances or a coalition?
PC: It seems to me that we have to find a kind of uniting minimum programme whilst at the same time retaining our long term overall objectives. I am sure that there are enough issues that would make such a minimum programme possible. But there are a lot of hostilities, a lot of fears, there is a lot of mistrust. On the question of unemployment we have got a kind of minimum programme, in the sense of the slogan 'to make employment a first priority'. It's a minimum demand, on which to develop and to forge new alliances. You can begin to see in embryonic form the possibilities of coalitions. And, incidentally, I do not just see the question of coalitions as political parties. My coalition extends much wider than those to involve all sorts of other people. It involves the peace movement, and the women's movement. The boards being planned by the Labour government, in terms of the tripartite things, I think they should be much wider, much broader. They should contain within them a much more representative voice of the British people as reflected in the types of movement that have been developing over the years.
But on the question of unemployment it does create that kind of new relationship with people. The practice of it brings about a completely new ball game. One example, for instance, is that during the course of the 1981 People's March we were able to develop a relationship with the Church in a way we had never done before. We worked with them and they worked with us. We got to know them. We got to know a lot of their parishioners. We were able after the march to carry that on in the sense that the West Midlands TUC meets regularly with the Industrial Mission.
MA: Do you feel these alliances or coalitions can maintain themselves around definite proposals for tackling unemployment? Isn't that much more difficult?
PC: Yes, and of course this is where we have not been good at intervening. We have tended to respond to situations and defence of jobs at all costs when in reality some of the jobs should have gone. We must really come off the defensive and now, under capitalism, begin to make an intervention. For instance, challenging workers who are using their labour in the armaments industry. It is a very difficult issue, but I think we have to confront that. We have to start to raise with the workers in those industries how they are going to begin to campaign to support the trade union movement's desire to end the nuclear rat race.
MA: But can employers, local Tory councils, chambers of commerce and so on be genuinely involved in discussing employment for social need, given that it will inevitably infringe upon the profit motive?
PC: Well, I think at this particular moment it would not be really possible. We are talking of a position of a really low level of activity. But what now seems impossible could well be different once the people in Britain are aroused. For instance, I know a lot of people don't think this is important, but in the 1981 march from the word 'Go' Mrs Thatcher refused to meet a delegation of the marchers. But the march reached such a climax that Jim Prior had to bale her out and meet a delegation. There are big divisions between the Tories but those divisions do not really express themselves in the absence of struggle.
I just think it is quite possible for quite a movement to develop which includes non-Thatcherite Tories and amongst them, of course, a lot of working class people — not just the cabinet wets. There are an awful lot of working class people who are actually non-Thatcherite but have a Tory tradition. I think they can be won. I am very mindful, for instance, of the divisions that have been created in the Labour Party. You can argue the rights and wrongs of them, I don't want to get involved in a debate about that, but those divisions between the left and the right and the way that they express themselves can only help the Thatcherite government because people could not see a real alternative.
The average worker just sees divisions and decides to support and vote for what they know to be at least fairly secure. And at this particular moment the government, in the eyes of the workers, does seem fairly secure and a safe bet. But if we can unite the non-Thatcherite Tories around the issue of unemployment then I think that would create deep problems for the Conservative Party. There is a problem, though, from people in traditionally left wing movements and so on — their view at the moment is they wouldn't work with a Tory for love nor money. I have come across this time and time again. They wouldn't share a platform with the SDP. But I think in the present climate that only goes to help Mrs Thatcher.
It does nothing to win the centre ground and that is what we have to do.
'All the TUC wanted was to march us from A to B'
R: Why did you go on the People's March?
T: The main reason initially was that I wanted the opportunity of visiting factories, getting out into the wider labour movement, stressing the need for stronger links between the unemployed and the employed. Having been involved in negotiations over quite a number of years particularly in the last few years, it's become dead clear how the threat of unemployment is used against workers who are employed. In wage negotiations you get this take it or leave it attitude, that if you don't like the offer we're making there are hundreds of people waiting who could start work tomorrow. When you're representing a factory with a large proportion of semi-skilled workers, which management say can be trained up in six weeks, the threat becomes quite real. The same kind of thing happens over conditions. That is really why the unemployed need to have some kind of a voice, to refute these tactics in employment negotiations.
R: How have the conditions in the Oldham factory you were working in changed?
T: The degree of militancy has definitely gone down from 1980. People are less prepared to take action. Living standards have been hit, particularly in the first years of this government, and the fear of unemployment, even if it doesn't affect you in a direct sense, you see what it does to other members of your family, and you realise it could be you next. People start to believe the propaganda in the press that strikes create unemployment. The reverse is true of course. Strong trade unions, democratically organised, would plan a fight against it. The unions as they stand haven't countered this argument. Some of the actions of the trade union leaders in trying to destroy democracy in the unions tend to strengthen the argument of the media.
R: Why do you think the Communist Party's strategy of a 'broad alliance' to fight unemployment held back support for the People's March? Do you think they damaged the potential of the march?
T: Yes. It stopped it mobilising, there's no question about that. It stopped it really being taken into the labour movement. You can't very well go and speak at a factory which is in struggle against redundancies and argue that the return of a Conservative government, as long as it says that it's going to make full employment its first priority, is the thing.
V: You were just told you had to stick to 'make unemployment a first priority'? That's all you were allowed to argue?
R: Why couldn't you argue at least on the policies of the labour movement, public works, more money on health, 35 hour week?
T: Because if you take up those kind of arguments you've got to talk about which kind of government it going to implement them, and quite clearly the Tory government isn't, or the Liberal/SDP Alliance, so you've got to start talking about the return of a Labour government that's going to implement real socialist policies.
V: Did you notice any political differences inside the Communist Party on the march?
T: On our leg, although the differences weren't as sharp as when we met up with the Eastern leg, a lot of the Young Communist League (YCL) members were quite bemused at what the old line Stalinists were saying. They couldn't really understand what was going on. Particularly around the 'Jobs not Bombs' slogan which the Stalinists opposed, the YCL joined in the debate over it and supported us. They were then dragged into line again and told they mustn't chant that. Even when some of them argued that unemployment was linked to the arms race they were told that this was a diversion. When we walked into Stafford we raised this slogan and all the YCL people chanted with us in our contingent. When we got to the accommodation they were approached individually and told they couldn't shout that. At our regional meeting the next morning some YCL members were still willing to argue about it. We were told by the Chief Marshall, Danny Collins, that if we continued to chant this slogan we would be off the march.
On the Yorkshire leg they were chanting anti-Tory slogans until they were stopped. Also on the platforms, the people that spoke to us reflected the 'broad' conception of the march. While the Yorkshire leg linked up with factory struggles ours did not. When we went through Widnes, a stone's throw from Warrington where Greenings was on strike, there was no altempt at all to link up with that. As far as I know no delegations were sent out to Timex either. The other leg was different, they held march meetings and decided to raise political slogans. They had prominent Labour Party lefts, Skinner and Cryer, addressing them but we didn't have any left-wing leaders addressing us until we got to London.
P: Jack Dromey of the South East Region TUC tried to make out that some of us wanted to sing songs about hitting Tories with spanners. But that wasn't it at all. When the CP talked about 'winning hegemony over middle layers' they omitted to mention that to do this you have to put across a clear labour movement alternative in terms of policies and actions. We could have toured round factories, youth clubs, shop stewards committees, CND groups, black and women's groups to win support. Instead we were told that during an election it was 'sectarian' for the labour movement to chant 'Tories Out'.
Worse was some of the harassment from some of the marshalls and CPers. For example not only were police called in to harass socialist paper sellers but also Peter Lenahan, a CP marshall, gave an interview with the Sunday Telegraph claiming that the North West TUC and Liverpool Trades Council were 'infiltrated' by Trotskyists. When challenged about it, Lenahan claimed to be 'proud' of what he had told this wretched right wing Tory rag.
Other CPers disagreed with this approach. We could read the shadow boxing in the Morning Star. Articles by Dave Hawkins, fulltime secretary of Manchester Trades Council, and Kevin Halpin, both called for the march to be 'an anti-Tory crusade', at the same time as their comrades on the march were kicking off people who wanted to do precisely that.
R: Did you feel that you had a broader march because it just concentrated on jobs? What support did you get from the Tories?
T: The theme of unemployment and expenditure of nuclear weapons wasn't linked. It was deliberately, artificially separated out and this had the effect of demobilising people, like CND activists. There wasn't a CND speaker on the platform until we got to London. CND can turn out a quarter of a million people. They should have all been brought in around this march.
As for the Tories, we got no support at all. Milton Keynes showed what nonsense the 'broad church approach' really was. The council refused to give us a school because they said it could constitute a fire risk. A disused factory was suggested and obstacles were put in the way of that. They wouldn't even allow us to cook on the premises. So they had to run out and order fish and chips for four hundred people.
V: And what about the Bishops?
T: That was quite funny really. On the boundary between Salford and Manchester we were greeted by the MPs for Manchester. They were told quite clearly they would have to join the back of the march. Yet when we arrived in Leek and handed over to the West Midlands, the Bishop of Stafford was allowed to walk from Leek into Newcastle-under-Lyne at the head of the march.
The Church sees unemployment as a moral issue. The Church will always involve itself in a campaign against unemployment. The people who seemed to be doing the actual work for us seemed to be there for political reasons, it wasn't the whole church by any means. I don't think that if the march had had a stronger labour movement line we would have 'alienated' any of this support. The march was always going to alienate Tory councils.
V: What did the march organisers do in relation to the organisation of black people and women?
T: On the march leg up to the West Midlands, there were three black youth that came from Shotton but there weren't any at all that came down from Glasgow through the North East. Very, very unrepresentative, and the same with women. There were 17 on our leg until we met up with the other people from the North East. We had, up to Salford, 110 marchers. Altogether when we all joined up there were about 40 women on the march, 50 at the most.
R: Was there any effort made to get black people to go to factories where black people worked or into the black communities to take up the unemployment issue.
T: No. Nor were women encouraged to go to factories where a large number of women worked.
P: Even when we were greeted enthusiastically by women along the route, from the men it was all, 'well done, lads'.
V: You did have the Women's Day though, on 24 May.
T: Well, yes we had to raise the women's day though. We had to argue for a minibus to go down to Greenham Common. Had we not brought that up nothing would have been done about it at all. They sent that minibus and they had four women holding the ropes of the banner, but there are a number of large factories coming into London that employ a large number of women.
R: Was there positive vetting to get a particular person on the march? I think they'd learned lessons from the 1981 march, with politicos on the march.
T: Our region, the North West, was heavily populated with Communist Party members who controlled all the transport side for the North West, and ended up running the transport for the whole march. There were a large number of YCL youth in our region too. It was an attempt to get a mixture of Communist Party members and non-political people, particularly non-political youth: youth who hadn't been involved in the labour movement, and I think they may have had the aim of trying to recruit.
R: Did they give any special kind of privileges to the Communist Party?
T: The Morning Star was distributed every morning. We were woken up sometimes beaten over the head in our sleeping bags with a copy. They were given out by the march organisers. While Newsline and other paper sellers were harassed from selling their papers.
R: What about the line of other tendencies on the march.
V: Yes the Workers Revolutionary Party for example?
T: I honestly don't think the WRP had a line on the march itself. They had marchers. They had the biggest far left presence. But there were quite a number of very young comrades amongst them, who had only recently been recruited. They didn't have a policy at all. They had been told from the word go, march and get down to London, if the march changes politically, fine, get involved, but if it doesn't don't go out on a limb to change it politically. While their paper constantly took up the opposition to the march organisers, I think their individual marchers were told to keep their heads down.
V: The Militant?
T: We had one or two on our leg but they were also unwilling to take up the argument forcefully with the CP. One guy from Scotland was quite good, he was expelled and then reinstated but they didn't come across in a coherent fashion, having a policy that they all argued for. It was generally Socialist Action supporters and other Labour Party lefts who led the opposition to the CP on the march itself.
V: The Communist Party might reply to these criticisms of the march, that working class people are shifting to the right under the impact of the Thatcher government and that there is a lack of support for the struggle against unemployment, which explains the lack of rank and file feeling for the march. Would you agree with that?
T: No, I wouldn't agree that there is no rank and file feeling against unemployment. What I would agree is that there's no leadership in that fight, which is totally different. The reasons for the attitude of workers towards unemployment is that there is this feeling that most of the right-wing trade union leaders seem to be going along with it. That it is inevitable and it's got to be accepted. I don't know how else you explain the lack of fight against it.
It's difficult to see why the CP went to all the trouble they did to get the march going in the first place. They went to the trouble of pressurising the TUC and the Labour Party to stage the People's March to put it on and then they didn't build it. It wasn't built, there's no question about that. Some of the turnouts as we came down into London were absolutely appalling — two hundred people at a rally in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester — precisely because it hadn't been built, we hadn't toured any factories, very little information had gone out to anyone. It wasn't surprising the turnout was as small as it was. When you consider that with practically no mobilisation at all you can still turn out between 50 and 60,000 people out on 5 June, this gives the lie to the idea that people are not concerned with [illegible].
There are differences in the TUC line and the Communist Party line. With the CP, it could reflect the politics within the Communist Party at the present time. According to them, the choice is not between one extreme and the other, either a left-wing Labour government or a right-wing Tory government. They say that the class isn't ready to move to a left wing Labour government, that there's got to be some middle ground somewhere along the line. This falls into line with their collaborationist politics, the coalitionism that they're pushing for. I think they put on two faces with this march. Publicly they say that it was a success by the amount of people that came out, but in other circles that it wasn't a success, people couldn't be mobilised, people aren't going to be mobilised for left-wing policies, and so on. It's significant that the march was labelled as anti-Thatcher and not pro-Labour. Anybody who is against hard-line Toryism then they can all get together in one sort of huge party.
V: Including in a government or just around things like the People's March?
T: For them, including in a government, yes. There are examples like Italy, where you got Communists proposing participating with Christian democrats. They don't seem to see anything wrong with that. I think the British Communist Party would be quite prepared to get involved in something like that here, with the SDP.
V: So you're saying that the Communist Party specifically organised the march and then didn't build it in a massive way because they wanted to promote a particular political line away from a left-wing Labour government and towards coalition. Do you think the TUC wants to stop the organisation of a National Union of the Unemployed by these marches? Do these substitute for building such a movement?
T: I think the TUC entered the march from a different perspective. The TUC's line, along with the right-wing of the Labour Party, opposed the march simply because they felt that once you start mobilising the unemployed and the employed, a march like this could create a real mass movement against unemployment and real anger. With all the statements by Michael Foot 18 months ago saying he's against extra-parliamentary action it makes it difficult for him to come into line and back what this march should have been all about — namely extra-parliamentary action against unemployment. They are frightened of any kind of mass movement that they're not going to be able to control. This is the reason why they didn't build it.
V: I think the TUC patronises the unemployed. I think it's like charity to salve the conscience of the bureaucracy for not doing anything to fight unemployment.
T: It could be seen like that certainly: like we are doing something for the unemployed, we're staging this march that's going to end in a massive demonstration in London, then you can all just go home. It's significant that after the march on Monday morning people were just left hanging about outside County Hall at about a quarter to nine, waiting for the train tickets to go home. It certainly came home to me then just what this march had all been about. All they wanted to do was to march us from A to B. Nothing else.
R: The TUC has backed an action on unemployment. How can that be used to develop some kind of movement? What kind of movement do you think is necessary?
T: What's necessary is that the unemployed have got to be in charge of their own destiny in terms of the trade union movement, rather than relying on TUC bureaucrats doing everything for them. They decide what you can do. They decided on a march. This march wasn't decided on by unemployed people it was decided on by employed people. They decided on the character of the march. They decided on the politics of the march without any real input from the unemployed. Unless you've got a national movement that represents the unemployed you're always going to be in the hands of the TUC who are going to decide when, what you can do, where you can do it, and how you can do it.
V: What balance sheet would draw of the march?
P: It's interesting to compare it with the 1981 march. In 1981 the Labour Party was organising mass demonstrations on unemployment, CND had huge marches, there was the hunger strike in Ireland, and the Benn deputy leadership campaign — 'Tony Benn for number ten' was the slogan of the day. In short the left seemed to be on the move. Since then unemployment has risen to four million. Many workplaces that came out in 1981 had closed by the time we got there this year. The 1983 march did not appeal to 'broader' forces than the labour movement, but at the same time it failed to project a labour movement alternative to mass unemployment and Thatcherism. But not all the responsibility for this can be laid at the door of the CP. On 5 June the Labour left was mostly out on the knocker instead of in the streets with us. It ceded the march to the CP without a fight, when the march could have been the best catalyst we had during the election to pull the movement together. Never again!