13.06.1996

The Party and the unemployed

Party notes

This year is the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Unemployed Workers Charter by our organisation. It is instructive to look back over this decade both to examine the historical reasons for the setting up of the campaign and to illustrate its continued necessity, particularly in view of the way mainstream politics have moved to the right.

The UWC was initiated in response to Jarrow ’86, a re-run of the famous Jarrow unemployed march of 1936. This event has become an icon of the ‘hungry thirties’ and the plight of the unemployed. This is an example of how the past is a contested area in the class struggle.

Jarrow ’36 is lauded because it was established as an explicit scab alternative to the militant Hunger Marches, organised by the Communist Party-initiated National Unemployed Workers Movement. In contrast, Jarrow was a beggar-bowl stunt, designed to make the unemployed objects of pious charity. It banned communists from its ranks and crept into and out of London with no impact whatsoever.

The Hunger Marches on the other hand were huge displays of working class strength and combativity. The NUWM fought to build an independent organisation of the unemployed through these events, based on self-activating branches of a national movement, committed to fighting for the interests of the unemployed against any shade of capitalist government. They were reviled by the bourgeois press, opposed and sabotaged by the TUC and greeted by monster demonstrations of support from the rank and file of the workers’ movement (two useful histories are Never on our knees by Richard Croucher and the biography of Wal Hannington, leader of the NUWM, Unemployed struggles).

The re-launch of the Jarrow stunt in 1986 was if anything an even more cynical exercise. It was conceived of as nothing more than a publicity event for the Labour Party led by Neil Kinnock, fresh from his betrayal of the livelihoods of the miners in the Great Strike of ’84-85, of course. Jarrow ’86, said the organisers, was intended to “provide a massive public platform for the presentation of Labour Party policy” to “demonstrate that only Labour has the will to solve the twin evils of mass unemployment and social deprivation” and “make a major contribution to the election of a Labour government”.

Against this cynicism, the UWC campaigned in every city and town along the route of the march for permanent democratic organisation of the unemployed, for a new NUWM, for a campaign for what the unemployed and their families needed to live dignified human lives, not what fitted with the empty promises of the ‘next Labour government’.

Like any campaign, the UWC has seen high and low points in its activity since its launch. Over the last ten years, it has had to contend with the opposition and active sabotage of elements of the official movement, the desperate financial position of the campaign, the lack of a solid core of seasoned activists nationally and the atomised and increasingly demoralised nature of the unemployed themselves. Despite this, the UWC has been a very successful campaign. It has a proud record of active defence of the unemployed.

Like the NUWM of the past, the core of the UWC has always been the communists. The unemployed unorganised are simply a reserve army of labour, swept in and out of work by the whim of capitalism. The unemployed organised with communist leadership are the reserve army of the revolution.

On Saturday, June 29 the UWC commemorates the life of its first honorary president, Jack Dash, the famous dockers’ leader and activist in the National Unemployed Workers Movement. All comrades and friends are welcome to join us in remembering this outstanding working class activist.

Mark Fischer