Wells
May Day 2018:
International
Worker’s Day greetings from a life-long Somerset trades unionist, a
school-cleaner for 11 years, a postman for 38, a shop steward for 35
of those years, to the Wells Constituency Labour Party for organising
this, the first May Day March in Somerset for 24 years.
Solidarity,
also, to Wells, from Somerset’s working-class capital: Bridgwater.
Bridgwater,
a town where, today, 14 out of 16 town councillors; 10 out of 15
district councillors, and 2 out of 3 county councillors are Labour.
Bridgwater,
home of 17 pub-based workers Carnival Clubs, which organise, at
weekly meetings of 10 to 30 members, on November’s first Saturday,
the greatest West Country working class cultural event, one enjoyed
by 100,000 people from all over.
Bridgwater:
The home of Robert Blake, Cromwell’s General at Sea, staunch
republican if not a regicide, who personally inflicted some of the
first Royalist casualties of the Civil War.
Bridgwater,
where, after the battle of Sedgemoor in 1685, no member of the Royal
Family set foot in the town for over 300 years.
Bridgwater,
the town, a century later, that remembered Judge Jeffries sending 800
Monmouth rebels to Barbados sugar plantations, so well, that radicals
like John Chubb organised Britain’s first ever petition against the
slave trade.
Bridgwater,
which, even if the town’s large factories have been replaced by
warehouses, still hosts militant trade union organised workplaces,
like the Unite union at Refresco-Gerber and ARGOS, who have struck
for two weeks and three weeks, respectively, in the last few years.
Like
Hinkley Point “C” construction workers, who won back lost bad
weather wages recently after a successful and illegal sit-in.
Like
my former workplace, the Royal Mail Delivery Office, where, still,
national and regional managers are regularly thrown into panic upon
rumours of yet another wildcat strike being planned by the CWU Reps
and Committee;
But
what of the rest of Somerset? What of the Mendip area? What of Wells
itself? Well, it seems clear now, 33 years after the epic NUM strike
of 1984/5, that Tory Governments planned, starting with the miners,
to shut down whole industries in order to weaken or eliminate strong
trades unions.
Over
the next decades, Thatcher, Major and Blair were glad to wipe out 90%
of UK manufacturing, to critically wound trades unionism as a whole.
So Somerset, too has been almost completely de-industrialised: we now
have hardly any large factories that make things.
Think
at all those losses: the dozen or so Somerset Clarks shoe factories;
Moorland and Bailey sheepskins; printers and packagers like Butler
and Tanner, Mardon, Purnells; Cider makers like Showering; Evercreech
dairy; Nutricia; St Cuthberts paper mill at Wookey; and for Wells,
skilled engineers like Clares and EMI.
So
it wasn’t just the cities, not just the NUM: Somerset has, also,
descended, within two generations, from a place where working-class
people through their union could negotiate reasonable wages,
conditions and pensions, to a dog-eats-dog individual race to the
bottom: bullying supervisors, zero-hours, no holidays, no sick pay,
no pension no rights at all.
But
why, then, I am proud to announce, in the last few weeks, has Wells
hosted the launch of Mendip TUC, the newest local trades union
council in the UK?
Because
trades unionism still exists in the Mendips, there are reps and
stewards and union branch officers in every town and many villages.
Because
rural trades unionism can still thrive: in every village school,
every small town Royal Mail Delivery Office, every time you see a BT
Openreach worker shimmying up a telegraph pole, shop in most
supermarkets, try and find a job in one of the few remaining job
centres, you will come across trades unionists: in the CWU, in the
NEU, NASUWT, UNISON, in PCS, Unite, GMB or USDAW.
If
you are a Mendip area trades unionist, join us at our next Wells
meeting in the Lawrence Centre, Union St, 6pm on Monday May 21st!
What
of the radical and socialist tradition in Mendip, and Wells itself?
George
Howell was a bricklayer, shoemaker, and Chartist. He was also an
auto-didact, a historian, and Secretary of the TUC Parliamentary
Committee in the 1870’s and 1880’s. George was born and grew up
in Wrington.
Fred
Swift was a Writhlington coal miner, an ILP/Independent Labour Party
socialist and, with the Bridgwater railwayman James Young, one of the
first two socialists elected to Somerset County Council before World
War One.
Arthur
James Cook: AJ Cook, born at Wookey in 1883, brought up in Cheddar
where he worked on Caleb Durbin’s dairy farm, became at 17 a
Rhondda miner, a fiery and revolutionary syndicalist orator jailed
twice, for sedition and for opposing World War One, and finally,
leader of the MFGB during the General Strike and Miner’s Lockout of
1926.
The
General Strike, where the local Wells strike committee, led by
railwaymen, ordered 200 copies of the TUC’s daily The British
Worker during those epic nine days.
From
syndicalism to Parliamentary socialism: Only two generations ago,
Labour and Tory were almost neck and neck in Wells: In the 1945
General Election, the Tory majority over Labour was reduced to only
2,465.
In
1950 Labour polled 18,000 votes to the Tories 20,600 in a turnout of
87.8%.
In
1951, Dai Llewellyn, former Welsh miner and veteran International
Brigader from the Spanish Civil War, the Somerset Miner’s Agent,
won 21,500 Labour votes and again came a narrow second.
It
wasn’t until 1974 that the Liberals overtook Labour in Wells.
You
can never tell me, looking back at that astonishing working-class
Labour support, in Wells, a Cathedral City for goodness sake, the
“Belly of the Tory Beast” that what happened once, a long time
ago, could not happen again, but better still, Labour winning Wells!
Why
not? People can sometimes change very quickly!
After
all, 50 years ago, a fortnight before the French Revolution of May
1968, were not learned Marxist historians predicting decades of
working-class subservience?
To
start winning, we do need to organise, campaign, show solidarity, on
a Somerset county-wide basis.
From
Dulverton to Bath, Portishead to Chard, Burnham on Sea to Frome,
Keynsham to Yeovil, Radstock to Wellington, Cheddar to Wincanton.
Poor
public transport does make this difficult.
You
can get a bus from Clevedon or Wells to Bristol up to 10.30pm at
night, yet try and get to Bridgwater from Glastonbury, or Burnham on
Sea from Bridgwater, after 7pm, and this is the same First Group bus
company!
Reason:
the Tory Somerset County Council is the only West Country county that
cannot be bothered to have a County Transport Forum: then again, how
many Tory Councillors have ever caught a bus?
Somerset
needs county-wide independent campaigns, supported by the six
Somerset Trade Union Councils and all local Labour Parties:
Against
Library Closures;
Against
cuts and closures to NHS Community Hospitals;
Support
teaching and other education unions fighting Academy attacks on their
pay and conditions;
Against
Tory County Council cuts to children centres, children and adult
disability learning services;
Against
outsourcing of NHS District Hospital non-medical staff:
The
list of dismantled Somerset public services is almost endless.
I
suggest that, from 2019, trades unionists and socialists in every
Somerset town host an event, such as a public meeting, on May 1st,
but for all Somerset towns to come together in Wells, the centre of
our County, to celebrate International Worker’s Day on this first
May Saturday.
Today,
we still honour the sacrifices of those anarchist workers in Chicago
who in the late 1880’s suffered state execution for fighting for
the 8-hour day, but in dying for our socialist cause, they lit a
torch that still, if sometimes dimly, burns.
2018 should be the
year that Somerset’s workers get of their knees, learn that if you
fight you can win, if you never fight you always lose.
Don’t be a
drop-out! Get up, get into it, get involved! Refuse to lose!
Three rap titles
from the greatest of all popular musicians, The Godfather of Soul,
the Minister of Super Heavy Funk, James Brown.
But, 2018 in
Somerset, not Atlanta, Georgia: Get involved in what? Refuse to lose
what? Fight for what?
I hope you don’t
mind me ending with a personal point of view.
Just remember, I was
a Labour Parliamentary candidate a long 31 years ago!
I have been a
Somerset socialist agitator for over 40 years, but I’m not tired:
I fight for a
country that is run by a radical industrial workplace democracy, that
has priority over councils and parliament;
The fundamental
units: Community Assemblies (They were called Soviets);
The old and still
un-achieved Chartist demand for annual elections with recallable
delegates;
An anti-militarist,
non-nuclear federation of the nations, where the rotor blades of
Westland/Leonardo PLC really are turned into Bristol Channel wind and
underwater turbine blades;
Where swords really
can become ploughshares;
Where, here in
Somerset and throughout the world, the long-suffering working-class,
the peasants and the poor are anything but meek, are so bloody-well
organised that they really can inherit the earth.
See you in Wells on
our very own First May Saturday in 2019?
07707 869144
davechapple@btinternet.com
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