36 Wapping revisited News International Wapping 25 years on - the strike that made the modern media
Reviewed by Terry Conway The print workers' strike against Rupert Murdoch's News International was one of the significant milestones in the war waged by bosses and government against militant trade unions in the 1980s. The role of the scab Electricians union, the EEPTU who fully collaborated with Murdoch, formed an essential part in the deteat of the print workers. EEPTU members were bussed across picket lines as replacements for the 5,500 The story of Wapping is rather overshadowed by the better visit the exhibition about the dispute at the Marx Memorial Library in May. The exhibition was put together by strikers from the dispute with support for the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. (The campaign has some interesting background material on its website: http://www.cpbf.org. uk). It will also be displayed at the TUC's Congress House and at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool and hopefully at other sites across the country - see the CPBF site for details. dispute are of cold Saturday at the barbed wire plant in Wapping where police violence but even so I was still taken aback by some of the graphic images of bloodied picketers. For me the photographs were white; powerful testimonies to the readiness of the state to side with big business against working people. One of the stories in the strikers own newspaper, the Wapping Post, of a striker who was arrested and brutalised by police many miles from Murdoch's plant further underlined this I enjoyed explaining some of the background to the strike and the atmosphere on the pickets to two young people from Tower Hamlets Labour Party visiting at the same time. And also talking to a former woman print worker who had left the Sunday Times shortly before the strike about her But I did have some criticisms of the way the exhibition was constructed, which explain the origins of the dispute and some of its key events and themes - but these were in the third and final room of the exhibition. I couldn't see any logical reason for this - they would have fitted perfectly well into the first room. Even for those of us who had some involvement in the events recalled, twenty-five years is a long time ago. More to the point for anyone not involved this meant they had no real consider individual banners, This is not the best way to bring the lessons of labour austerity policies of this more Thatcherite than Thatcher government are stepped up