RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Tremors of Discontent: My Life in Print 1970-1988
Nuanced and frank narrative of dedicated union activist
SEMINAL MOMENT: Sogat picket, Wapping, 1986
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
SOME on the left will have locked in their memory actions and moments which became vital to their political awakening and growth in consciousness, which Mike Richardson’s autobiographical account Tremors of Discontent calls to mind.
Powerfully stark and honest, he recounts and assesses his experiences in the 1970s and 1980s while an active print worker and SOGAT trade unionist in a Bristol printworks.
Richardson recounts his post-war boyhood as the son of working-class parents on Lockleaze council estate in Bristol’s northern suburbs, his secondary-modern schooldays and his first permanent job in a works producing printed packaging.
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JOHN LANG recalls how Murdoch used scabbing electricians and even devised a fake newspaper to force a confrontation with printers – then sacked them all
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
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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