Betraying ignorance of class struggle

Ann Douglas of the Morning Star reviews the TV film 
Dockers to be shown on the ABC on Wednesday December 1, 9.30 pm.

The Channel 4 film Dockers is a must. Powerfully scripted, 
brilliantly acted and beautifully filmed, it is gritty drama indeed.

Dockers is based on the epic 28-month struggle of 400 Liverpool 
dockworkers who were sacked for refusing to cross a picket line.

It is a tale of personal passion and raw class struggle and it is all the 
more remarkable for having been written by the very people involved in the 
dispute.

Fourteen of the 16 writers were either dockers or their partners — tutored 
by Jimmy McGovern and Irvine Welsh — and another 200 were involved as 
actors, extras, crew members or office staff.

The making of the film is the subject of a documentary also to be screened 
(see below). But beware, Dockers carries an historical health 
warning.

The Liverpool docks dispute began in September 1995, when 80 men working 
for Torside Limited, a company working on Mersey docks, were sacked in an 
over-time dispute.

The Torside workers picketed the Seaforth dock and some 320 Merseyside 
Docks and Harbour Company workers were summarily dismissed for refusing to 
cross the Torside men's picket.

More than two bitter years later, the dockers voted to accept a settlement 
which was negotiated by their union.

The TV drama centres on two fictitious families.

Tommy Walton, played by Ken Stott, has been a docker for most of his life 
and has been married to Jean (Crissy Rock) for 30 years.

Their son Andy (Lee Ross) is one of the first Torside workers to be sacked.

Tommy is, at first, angry when his wife becomes involved in the women's 
support group Women on the Waterfront, but, ultimately, their relationship 
is strengthened by their shared experience.

The struggle also finally gets father and son on the same wavelengths. For 
years, Tommy has thought of Andy as a waster and the son has seen his 
father as a dinosaur.

Tommy's best mate is Macca (Ricky Tomlinson). Both are lifelong union men, 
but their friendship ends when Macca becomes a scab.

Even Macca's family disowns him.

Central to Dockers is the idea that the Transport and General 
Workers Union (T&G) betrayed the dockers — and here is the rub.

For, ultimately, this is a drama about betrayal and, for dramatic impact, 
we need to have one side squeaky clean and the other as the devil 
incarnate.

But we all know that life is more complex than that.

The main problem is what is left out.

Much is made of the moment, more than a year into the dispute, when 
delegates at the T&G conference clearly voted against a leadership 
statement on the dispute — but the platform announced the statement to be 
carried.

It is a moment as embarrassing as it is accurate and its portrayal is 
intended to seal the idea of the dockers' final betrayal.

But the same conference also threw out ultra-leftist calls for unlawful 
action by an even larger majority.

And what the union did for the dockers gets scant recognition.

From the start, then T&G Deputy General Secretary Jack Adams — later to 
play a key role in negotiating a settlement for the sacked men — warned 
the Torside workers that mounting a picket designed to stop the Merseyside 
Docks and Harbour company would lead to more sackings.

And, during the course of the dispute, the union pumped well over half a 
million pounds into the dockers' hardship fund and many of the union's 
6,000 branches sent in cash.

T&G General Secretary Bill Morris — played without the merest hint of a 
Midlands accent by Rudolph Walker — is shown insisting to the Liverpool 
shop stewards that whatever the union would do to support the dockers would 
be within the law.

In this, Morris was honest and forthright and was respecting T&G conference 
policy.

Nonetheless, as the film progresses, the recriminations against the union 
leadership increasingly take centre stage.

At a rally held in the T&G Liverpool office, Morris is shown promising 
solidarity, while a US Longshoremen's Union leader whispers to dockers' 
leading spokesman Jimmy Nolan: "Watch him!"

But what Morris did not — and would not have — offered was solidarity 
action that would fall foul of the anti-union laws.

Like it or not, that is what successive T&G conferences had told him to do.

The film portrays the end of the dispute with Nolan tearfully telling his 
people that "we've run up against a brick wall" and calling a vote to call 
off the dispute.

Not mentioned is that fact that Adams, — himself a product of the 
militancy of the British motor industry — had spent several months trying 
to negotiate a settlement for the 400 sacked men.

His efforts culminated in an offer of 41 jobs and L28,000 per man for those 
left out in the cold.

Not much for workers who, in many cases, had given a lifetime to the docks 
and who faced the prospect of never working again. But under the 
circumstances, far more than many would have expected.

Nor was it made clear that, quite rightly, the dockers' stewards' committee 
had the run of the facilities of Liverpool's Transport House — although 
producer Sally Hibbin at the press screening made much of the fact that the 
dockers' writing co-operative which produced this script was "thrown out" 
of Transport House.

The press preview was an interesting event in its own right.

One of the first questions asked was why the film seemed to reserve more 
bile for the T&G than for the employers who had sacked the original Torside 
five.

Nolan denied this and pointed his finger at the journalists, accusing them 
of neglecting to alert people to the reality of what the Tories were doing 
to working people.

But how naive to expect the capitalist press to do anything else.

And hardly surprising that the following day's Guardian [the British 
one] headline, ironically, proved this point by running with the 
predictable "dockers accuse union of treachery" line.

Dockers is great television and even better on a big screen. It is a 
shame that the skewed view of the history of the dispute gets in the way of 
what is, nonetheless, still a powerful drama.

Tomlinson's scab is brilliantly played. Macca is shown as a real human 
being and even allowed to justify himself in a showdown scene with his 
former best mate Tommy.

In fact, the scab gets more sympathetic treatment than the union which 
sustained the dockers' families throughout the two years of the dispute.

This should not surprise readers who may remember the scorn poured upon the 
T&G by McGovern in articles in the capitalist press during the course of 
the dispute.

The view that somehow all working-class struggle is doomed to betrayal by 
trade union leaders ultimately serve only to undermine those organisations 
at a time when they need all the strength and unity that they can get.

The fact is that the Mersey dockers were not betrayed by the T&G, they were 
victims of anti-union laws and anti-trade union bosses.

The roots of the dockers' dispute go back to the neoliberal economic 
policies pursued by the reactionary governments around the world on behalf 
of transnational capital, out to secure bigger profits at the expense of 
wages and conditions.

The election of the Tories in 1979, the defeat of the Miners' strike in 
1984/85 and the failure of the entire labour movement to oppose effectively 
the imposition of anti-trade union laws were all staging posts to a dispute 
that was, nonetheless, heroic.

If the 1995-98 Liverpool dockers' dispute holds any lessons, it is that, if 
the working class is to take on the might of the state, it must do so 
united.