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becoming ‘disabled’, there were others for whom bodily impairment did not necessarily mean an end to their working lives. How did industrial expansion contribute to the incidence of injury, disease and impairment? What happened to those ‘disabled’ through accidents or disease during Britain’s Industrial Revolution? How did people with impairments negotiate changing welfare and medical regimes of assistance, and what was the place of disability in industrial politics? Did industrial change lead to increasing marginalisation of ‘disabled’ people and how receptive was the
strategy, there was a perennial wait for the revolution. In order to be able to answer this question, it is necessary to understand the history of the CPGB, its industrial politics and the miners’ union. Building British Bolsheviks At least superficially, the picture had not always been so bleak and, in terms of its industrial strategy, the CPGB was often perceived to be ubiquitous and, indeed, nefarious. The strategy itself was simple, and can be dated to 1947–48, the onset of the Cold War being more than a coincidence in the party’s thinking. It asserted that the rank
important – and overlooked – recent accounts is that of Jim Phillips, who identifies a crucial merging of class and national identities in the industrial politics of 1960s and 1970s Scotland. Phillips’ account improves on that of the ‘cultural’ and ‘institutional’ approaches by taking both global political economy and the balance of class forces seriously. For him, the crucially left-wing character of modern Scottish nationalism has at least some roots in the way that the Scottish labour movement was forced to adapt to changes in British industry under conditions of
There was an important book on South Wales, written by Hywel Francis, Labour MP for Aberavon since 2001, who in the 1980s worked in adult education and had political and personal links with coalfield trade unionism in South Wales, including through his Communist Party membership. Francis’s book explored the campaign to save pits before the strike, community activism during 1984–85, and the wider industrial politics of South Wales, which, like those of Scotland, encompassed an NUM-shaped move towards devolution. 43 More broadly there was unwillingness to ask different
majority to assert themselves. In combination with deindustrialisation, legal change transformed what had been one of the major defining characteristics of British politics. The situation described in the first paragraph of the Introduction was the product of long-term historical change. Britain’s contemporary post-industrial politics seems to offer no way back to even a
–136. Campbell, A., Fishman, N. and McIlroy, J. (eds) (2007; 1st ed.: 1999) The Post-War Compromise: British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, 1945–64, Monmouth: Merlin. 15 16 Introduction Clark, A. (1995) The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, London: Rivers Oram. Clegg, H. (1964) History of British Trade Unions since 1889: 1889–1910, Vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coates, K. and Topham, T. (1991) The History of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cohen, G. (2007) The Failure of a Dream: The
illustrated. Yet disabled miners were involved more proactively in industrial politics, sometimes independently of trade unions, which might not always sympathise with their cause. Breaking terms of employment to escape unhealthy or dangerous collieries, seeking to supply shortages of labour during strikes, challenging colliery doctors, or fighting for compensation in the courtroom were all means by which disabled miners asserted themselves politically during this period. While this book has opened up new perspectives on disability in Britain’s coalfields, it points to the
Introduction By 1914 the Conservative Party had reached a modus vivendi with the organised working class, which was to accept the unions as a fact of life whilst remaining deeply critical of their failings. As the Opposition, the Conservatives had little option but to acquiesce in the Liberal Government’s management of industrial politics but opposition spared the party from
as the disorder in the 1960s – multiunionism, demarcation and differentials – some elements of sectional bargaining actually facilitated reform. 160 Assembling cultures Decentralisation may have been the greatest strength of workgroup democracy, but the limited space it provided for wider industrial politics could make resistance to broader managerial initiatives more difficult. In the case of MDW at Stoke Aldermoor, members and stewards discussed the new wage structure in ways that reflected a limited sense of responsibility for problems outside their shop
April 1971. 2 J. McIlroy and A. Campbell, ‘The High Tide of Trade Unionism: Mapping Industrial Politics, 1964–79’, in A. Campbell, N. Fishman and J. McIlroy (eds), The High Tide of British Trade Unionism: Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, Vol. 2, 1964–79 (Monmouth: Merlin, 2007), pp. 93–130. 3 J. W. Durcan, W. E. J. McCarthy and G. P. Redman, Strikes in Post-War Britain: A Study of Stoppages of Work due to Industrial Disputes, 1946–1973 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 315. 4 J. McIlroy, ‘ “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned”: The Trotskyists and the Trade