Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

labelling ACAS as the ‘Association of Comrades for the Advancement of Socialism’. Lord
Denning’s Appeal Court ruling overturned the High Court verdict and declared the ACAS
report invalid. The House of Lords confirmed Denning’s ruling against ACAS. The state deployed
the Special Petrol Group (SPG) which used methods developed in Northern Ireland
by the notorious Royal Ulster Constabulary. Again and again they tore into the mass pickets
and used violence unseen in normal policing of strikes. The right wing tabloids were able to
print images of ‘pickets fighting with the police’. The unions were not prepared to fight until
the end. They tried to impose a limit on the number of pickets. For a while, anticipating an
opportunity to gain a foothold among the Asian immigrant workers, they had paid double
the strike pay and officially sanctioned the Union of Postal Workers (UPW) to ban postal deliveries.
But they were losing control and faced with images in the tabloids of pickets fighting
with police, feared a legal backlash which did materialise after Margaret Thatcher became
the Prime Minister. As ‘the Grunwick Strike’ by A. Sivanandan clearly explains, the Social
Contract, the government-trade union collaboration agreed by the Labour government and
the trade union movement, ensured that both the TUC and the UPW withdrew support.
For the Managing Director Ward, and his managers, the main issue was the workers
joining a union which threatened their cheap source of labour. Race or gender were irrelevant
to the bottom line except when they could use it to increase their profits. They did, of
course, use race and gender to get their way. Having replaced the largely white workforce
with vulnerable Asian immigrants from Kenya and Uganda, Ward had made a detailed study
of workers’ home backgrounds and tried to use cultural and religious differences between
different sub-groups of striking Asian workers to his advantage.
Workers’ struggles in the 1970’s, including the one at Grunwick, were, among other
things, about unions negotiating with employers on behalf of its members about wages,
annual holidays, working conditions and other aspects of workers’ rights. Today in Britain
we are fighting against zero hour contracts and a ‘self-employed’ workforce. The rights of
workers to join picket lines in solidarity with others, as was done so dramatically by miners
during the Grunwick strike, is now illegal. In France collective bargaining is still the norm but
Macron, the new president of France is trying to outlaw it. The struggle goes on.
Lessons learnt
Experience of working in conflicts like Grunwick made me question my younger self’s
belief that all-out revolutionary struggle is the only way forward. It reinforced my emerging
view that to bring about change, working in broad-front organisations on single issue campaigns
should not be dismissed. I came to understand the importance of forming alliances
with sympathetic individuals and organisations to maximise the strength of one’s forces,
even where they embraced views at odds with my own on fundamental issues such as hu-
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