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TRADE union militant and former Communist Party general secretary Mike Hicks, who was famously jailed during the Wapping dispute, died on Thursday night at the age of 80.
He collapsed at a meeting of his local Labour Party in Bournemouth while accepting the honour of being named its honorary president for his “enormous contribution” to the party.
“He died doing what he loved,” Bournemouth Labour secretary Sharon Carr-Brown told the Morning Star — “giving a political speech.”
Forty years on, TONY DUBBINS revisits the Wapping dispute to argue that Murdoch’s real aim was union-busting – enabled by Thatcherite laws, police violence, compliant unions and a complicit media
![[Pic: Andrew Wiard]](https://dev.morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2026-01/19860503_a_wiard_0003.jpg.webp?itok=mR5zV0nE)
The once beating heart of British journalism was undone by technological change, union battles and Murdoch’s 1986 Wapping coup – leaving London the only major capital without a press club, says TIM GOPSILL
Enduring myths blame print unions for their own destruction – but TONY BURKE argues that the Wapping dispute was a calculated assault by Murdoch on organised labour, which reshaped Britain’s media landscape and casts a long shadow over trade union rights today
On the 40th anniversary of the Wapping dispute, this Morning Star special supplement traces the long-planned conspiracy that led to the mass sackings of printworkers in 1986 – a struggle whose unresolved injustices still demand redress today, writes ANN FIELD