Keir Starmer from the Wapping picket line & Workers Control 1986 to backing Thatcher in the Telegraph 2023
Keir Starmer’s Great Moving Right Show is continuing with a front page of the Sunday Telegraph (3rd December) praising Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. As is normal with any Starmer public pronouncement these days a clarification swiftly followed. He told Radio 4’s Broadcasting House on Sunday morning that he was a fan of Thatcher’s political leadership and determination. Policies were not mentioned.
Even so for a Labour leader to say anything positive about Thatcher doesn’t go well with many, perhaps particularly with those of us old enough to remember all of his political career
Keir Starmer was at the Wapping mass pickets in 1986 & referenced it in his leadership campaign in 2020.
In the mid-1980s Keir Starmer was one of those involved in producing a small circulation magazine called Socialist Alternatives. Its politics were red-green, perhaps what might be described as Movementist. Young Keir was assistant editor, in what was a very small scale operation.
He wrote about the Wapping dispute where he was an attender at the Saturday night mass pickets.
Wapping was one of the totemic disputes of the post-1945 era, where Rupert Murdoch busted out the print unions from the Sun and Times. The print unions from the perspective of 2022 were not entirely marvellous but they were well organised and hugely better than anything Murdoch had in mind. Following on from the defeat of the miners in 1984/5 this was very much part of Margaret Thatcher’s far too successful plan to break the organised working class.
I was often at the Wapping picket line myself on Saturday nights in 1986, as was Keir Starmer. Who knows we may have met, either at the picket or in the nearby(and still open) Artful Dodger pub where people stopped for a beer.
During the 2020 leadership contest Starmer used a video of himself at Wapping as part of his campaign.
Keir Starmer, Socialist Alternatives July/August 1986
Trade Unions in a Wapping World
The struggle for workers control means.. effective defense of the unions, supporting national and local pickets and a principled advocacy of solidarity action.
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