Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
Latest editorial
The shocking inside story of the Shrewsbury pickets
Author and Shrewsbury 24 Campaign researcher EILEEN TURNBULL speaks to Ben Chacko about the lessons learned from the framing of the 24 pickets and the long fight to clear their names ahead of today’s launch of her new book at TUC Congress
(Left to right) Eileen Turnbull, Mark Turnbull, Harry Chadwick and Terry Renshaw, outside the The Royal Courts Of Justice, London, ahead of a hearing in the Court of Appeal for the so-called "Shrewsbury 24”
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
THE narrative around the events of “the fateful day,” September 6 1972, is striking in that nothing unusual seems to have happened — no arrests, no complaints by police, a normal day’s picketing. Months later the Shrewsbury pickets were prosecuted.
Do you think the pickets were chosen largely at random — the government decided an example needed to be made to intimidate pickets and unions, and picked on the building workers concerned?
There was nothing random about this case. The documents for this period at Kew show that the government was seriously worried about the power and confidence of trade unionists that was shown in the many strikes in 1972.
The building industry employers were closely connected to the Tories and their profits were threatened by the growth of trade unionism.
They demanded action. North Wales pickets were targeted because they were more isolated, over a semi-rural area, not in one of the industrial conurbations like Merseyside, the West Midlands or West Yorkshire, where trade unionism was stronger.
Similar stories
Megapicket to shut down Birmingham’s refuse sites
In part II of a serialisation of his new book, JOHN McINALLY explores how witch-hunting drives took hold in the Civil Service as the cold war emerged in the wake of WWII
It is only trade union power at work that will materially improve the lot of working people as a class but without sector-wide collective bargaining and a right to take sympathetic strike action, we are hamstrung in the fight to tilt back the balance of power, argues ADRIAN WEIR
The Home Secretary’s recent letter suggests the Labour government may finally deliver on its nine-year manifesto commitment, writes KATE FLANNERY, but we must move quickly: as recently as 2024 Northumbria police destroyed miners’ strike documents