The Unfinished Revolution: South Tyneside 1969-1976. Jack Grassby. TUPS Books, pp. 343, 1999.
The period around the mid-60s to mid-70s was seen by many then as a time of radical change. These were the days of “People Power”, of world-wide grassroots political action involving students, trade unionists, claimant groups and all manner of single-issue fanatics. The era was typified by such events as the student protests in the France of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movement in the USA and the UK miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974.
Set against this backdrop, Jack Grassby’s book is an account of the intensity of grassroots political action from 1969 to 1976 on South Tyneside and in which the author played a key part. A cornucopia of reproduced pamphlets, documents and press reports from the region and period, the book is more a primary source for the political and social historian than any guessed-at academic account of a revolution that failed.
Chapter by chapter, the documents are carefully accompanied by a running commentary which gives a vivid detail of events and feel of the period.
Grassby makes no bold claim for his work and no remarkable political statement. As he states in the preface, the book has an “objective manner” in which the “political/social significance is left largely to the reader”.
Socialists have no objection to grassroots action—i.e. the struggles of claimant groups, students and trade unionists—so long as the struggle for socialism is not side-tracked by the campaigns for individual reforms, the futility of which this journal has been exposing for the best part of a century. And Grassby takes time out in an epilogue to remind us of the pitfall of reformism:
“Few of those involved in those events . . . would claim that their long-term objectives had been realised. Although some local campaigners can claim to have had a limited success—heating allowances for pensioners, social security benefits for students and strikers etc—their success was often transient and was overturned by subsequent government legislation. Even the miners’ success was to prove ephemeral.”
Grassby’s book presents as a fascinating testament of what workers are capable of achieving if enough are prepared to join together in common cause, whilst at the same time standing as a stark reminder of the philosophy of settling for crumbs in a world of abundance. As the title suggests, the revolution is very much “unfinished”.
The book is now on website: http://www.unfinishedrevolution.co.uk
John Bissett
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