Economists estimate extreme poverty could be drastically reduced for a fraction of global defence spending, yet military budgets continue to expand year on year, says JON TRICKETT MP, ahead of the Stop the War International Conference on Saturday
WAS 28 years of age when the Wapping dispute started. Even now as I fast approach my sixtieth year, it can still stir a great range of emotions within me.
I was a librarian at Times Newspapers Limited (TNL), publishers of the Times and the Sunday Times, and was a member of the clerical chapel committee (a shop steward).
Rupert Murdoch’s News International had purchased TNL in early 1981, adding them to his other national newspaper titles the Sun and the News of the World which he obtained in 1969.
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
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


