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The Story of the Shrewsbury Pickets
EILEEN TURNBULL looks back on Britain’s first-ever national building workers’ strike
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
BRITAIN’S first-ever national building workers’ strike took place in 1972. Construction workers faced hostile and powerful employers, lump labour and isolated workplaces that changed constantly whenever a contract finished.
Workers faced dangerous conditions on sites every day and there were no health and safety measures. One building worker died each working day in the early ’70s. Over 70,000 would suffer serious injury or illness each year. Ucatt, the T&G, FTAT and NUGMW were the main unions that had members in the industry.
Many industrial relations commentators thought that their strike was doomed to fail because of the difficulties in organising building workers compared with the highly unionised miners and dockworkers.
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The newly catalogued News International Dispute Archive ensures the history of the Wapping dispute – and the solidarity it inspired – is preserved, accessible and alive for future generations, says MATT DUNNE
KIM JOHNSON MP places the campaign in the context of the history of the working-class battles of the 1980s, and explains why, just like Orgreave and the Shrewsbury Pickets before it, justice today is so important for the struggles of tomorrow
Former judge ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the details and controversy of Lucy Letby’s trial and appeal in the context of famous historical wrongful convictions that prove both the justice system and legal activists make errors
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