The Wapping Dispute: the print unions’ last stand
Britain is going through a golden age of plays about national politics. James Graham is established as a major West End playwright, with a string of very well received dramas from the Blair era onwards.
Now Robert Kahn and Tom Salinsky have seen their political play about the epochal dispute between print unions and Rupert Murdoch in 1986-87 getting good reviews. The Wapping Dispute defined the Margaret Thatcher government as the most successful union-busting government in democratic histoFry.
While broadcast and print political journalism in Britain especially seems very same-old, same-old, the theatre is bringing politics to life.
Earlier plays by the Kahn-Salinsky duo included one on Brexit and The Gang of Three about the rivalries between Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Dennis Healey which broke up the Labour Party as a party of government shaped by Harold Wilson between 1965-1976.
Their latest, In the Print, uses dramatic licence to pit Rupert Murdoch (played by Alan Cox) in the year-long dispute to destroy the unions at his London printing plants against Brenda Dean, the general secretary of one of the print unions whose members were threatened by computer type-setting.
This meant journalists’ copy could go straight from screen to being printed without being retyped as lines of metal that were then inked and newsprint rolled over them to print pages.
After the defeat of a national steelworkers’ strike in 1980, and an epic mineworkers’ strike in 1984-85, came the 1986-87 fight between Rupert Murdoch and the print unions.
The play puts words into the mouths of Rupert Murdoch and Brenda Dean, which set out dialectally the Murdoch capitalist view that new technology meant more newspapers could be printed more quickly with more pages, supplements, and new titles with new arguments could be on sale nationwide.
Print unions had been amongst the earliest known trade unions. The local newsroom or print-shop union shop steward was known as “Father of the Chapel” dating from the days when unions had to meet clandestinely and churches provided sanctuary for workers’ organisations.
Four decades ago historians of the industry reckoned that there were more than fifty different trade unions in the daily journalism business.. Each represented a different group of workers or a different history of workplace organisation. The BBC alone had three unions representing journalists alone. Their strength in printed newspapers lay in the closed shop system, so that no-one could get a job without having the approval of a union.
When I left Oxford, having been a student journalist, Harold Evans, the then editor of the Sunday Times (and arguably Britain’s greatest editor in the last 100 years), offered me and another student journalist, the late Anthony Holden, special 2-year training jobs on the paper.
But the National Union of Journalists had a rule that no-one could be employed in London on a national newspaper without two years working on a provincial paper in the British regions. I wrote a pompous piece for the New Statesman, arguing that the NUJ’s closed shop, with its insistence on two years of journalistic experience far away from London, was a racket. It kept out thrusting new younger journalists, willing to challenge the high priests of the London media establishment.
I was wrong. Since that rule disappeared, along with the de-unionisation of the news industry, the quality of reporting, fact-checking and understanding the difference between news reporting and opinion columns has considerably worsened.
In the 1970s and 80s, the ability to threaten editors and management with short but devastating stoppages unless pay rises were conceded gave London printworkers salaries often far above those of middle class university-educated professionals.
The print unions were all-white and had all-male leaders, until Brenda Dean was elected general secretary of SOGAT. In their play Kahn and Salinsky make Brenda Dean, the first woman print union leader, the main opponent of Rupert Murdoch. But it was another tightly-focused print union leader, Tony Dubbins, who led the type-setting compositors’ union, the National Graphical Association, who was far more effective and who kept the strike alive for more than a year.
One of the self-satisfied myths of the post-war Trades Union Congress was that it had been British unions that had rebuilt continental trade unionism after 1945. But German workers and others in Nazi-occupied Europe were not interested in copying British trade union organisation. They formed industrial unions – one union for each industry and only one union in each workplace. Moreover, in most continental nations work councils or other joint worker-management bodies existed to iron out workplace differences.
Today the German union confederation, DGB, has just 8 big industrial unions, in contrast to 48 TUC unions, including several health worker unions, and six unions representing employees in the transport sector.
There is a subplot in the play about the behaviour of the electricians’ union EEPTU. Its general secretary, Eric Hammond, refused all cooperation with other unions in the name of preserving the interests of his members. The electricians even defied the TUC to the point of being expelled. Mrs Thatcher loved them. But the EEPTU, like so many other unions, was eventually forced into mergers and later absorbed by the Transport and General Workers to form Unite.
The 1980s strikes against Mrs Thatcher were industrial battles of the Somme. Voters were not interested in Michael Foot, Tony Benn or Arthur Scargill defending all-white, all-male closed shop trade unions, some of whose members did well but rejected any wider social partnership with employers, such as could be seen on the Continent.
Brenda Dean and other union leaders had been on fact-finding visits to America and Europe, where new technology had abolished the old “Spanish customs” that could stop newspapers being on sale every morning. But instead of educating their members and merging into bigger, more powerful labour organisations, British unions were the last residue of communist and Trotskyist confrontational labour rhetoric.
There were about 2 million trade union members in Greater London alone. Although Murdoch transferred production from Fleet Street to the Wapping dockland, and most of his journalists, led by the ultra-Thatcherite Andew Neil, acted as strike-breakers to nullify the power of the printworkers by producing copy that, via the new computer technology, could be printed directly from screen. But there were some notable “refuseniks”, especially among labour editors who had detailed knowledge of the labour market economy.
Today there are no Labour editors left. The world of work is a complete mystery to the modern journalist, think-tanker, MP, or civil servant.
The striking printworkers could not stop papers being printed, but papers still had to be transported to railway station for distribution. If even a few thousand of the 2 million trade union members in London had come and simply sat down in the narrow streets around the Wapping works, while the strike-breaking police would have removed them, even a small delay in distribution would have cost Murdoch his daily sales.
But the London working class had no sympathy for the Murdoch papers of the 1970s and 1980s, with their daily sexism, racism, and poisonous anti-social ideology. They stayed at home and the print union leaders who had turned a blind eye to the noxious product their members produced had no wider support.
So Murdoch won. The sociological and ideological tensions of the demise of the unionised print industry can’t be covered in a 90 minute play — hard-hitting, well-written and extremely well acted as it is.
21st century British unions are a sad, pale shadow of what they once were. But it was their failure to adapt that led to their decline. The same fate may well await the Labour Party. Many on the Left still believe the march of history can be stopped if only voters listened to the political class instead of the other way round.
Other playwrights — including the former NUJ president, Francis Beckett, and the Labour MP Tom Levitt — are also writing excellent plays on politics, snapped up by the smaller theatres. Let’s hope the latter give the mastodons of the West End some serious competition.
‘In the Print’ continues at the King’s Head Theatre, Islington, until 3rd May.
Denis MacShane worked for trade unions in the UK and internationally before being elected a Labour MP in 1994 and serving under Tony Blair in the Foreign Office and on the Council of Europe 1997-2010.
