Jarrow: the truth that was murdered (1986)

From the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jarrow is a trigger word for the British labour movement, detonating emotions, prejudices and false reputations; for half a century it has given nourishment to the misconceptions of Labour politicians. Fifty years ago this month the Jarrow march (it called itself a crusade) set out to bring a petition to parliament from the stricken Tyneside town. It was, to be sure, a moving episode in working class history. now to be celebrated by another march which will climax with the presentation of another petition, worded just as it was in 1936. Most of those taking part will no doubt be sure that they are doing something significant about unemployment and poverty. The crucial question will evade them: why must it happen again, fifty years later?

Labour's propaganda victory of the 1940s was largely based on their asserting that prewar poverty and unemployment was the result of the policies of a heartless Tory government. In support of this, free use was made of photographs of events like the Jarrow march, with nostalgic references to the town's Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. In this way the Labour Party succeeded in identifying itself with the march and with the idea that, had they been in power at the time, there would have been no reason for it to happen. In fact the march was not a Labour Party demonstration; it was a protest on behalf of the whole town, the petition was carried jointly by the Conservative and Labour agents and at the time a truce was observed in the local elections. Even more: far from supporting the march the Labour Party and the TUC condemned it. At the Labour conference which took place while the march was on the road the NEC representative made a scathing attack on Ellen Wilkinson. The TUC advised all trades councils to ignore the march. Of course not all of them took this advice but when they did hospitality was often provided to the marchers by the local Conservative Party, or the Territorial Army, or businessmen.

Jarrow's established reputation for militancy comes from its mistaken association with the marches of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, which happened regularly in the 1930s and which were larger, more demanding and often riotous. Jarrow was anything but riotous; it would be more accurate to describe it as a company town. As it developed during the second half of the 19th century its central industry — in effect its only one — was C. M. Palmer's shipyard, which took advantage of the change from wooden to iron ships to develop a screw-driven collier. Palmer's financial policies have been described, in retrospect, as "exuberant'. which implies that they were recklessly optimistic but at the time they could have had few critics. By 1860 the company was dominant among the iron ship builders of the Tyne. It had grown into a huge, integrated business with its own ironstone mines, its own port, its own coal mines and steel furnaces. Palmer's workforce included a large proportion of highly skilled men such as boilermakers and ship wrights. the kind who are sometimes referred to as an ''aristocracy of labour". Until 1921 Jarrow was, by working class standards, one of the better-off towns, where wages were relatively high. Its people were confident that things would stay that way.

This was reflected in the way Jarrow voted. Until the turn of the century it was a Liberal stronghold. Before 1907 the Unionists would not even contest the seat and one Labour MP grumbled that "There was never a more hopeless constituency for a Labour candidate to attack than Jarrow in the nineties. Sir Charles Mark Palmer, the sitting member, was the most popular man in the north of England". The secretary of the Jarrow march described the place as "more a Tory town than it is a Labour town". After Palmer's death in 1907 the Labour Party won the seat but it then changed between Labour and Liberal until 1929, when a Conservative won there, inflicting on Labour their second worst result in the North-East. When Ellen Wilkinson won the seat in 1935 the Tory vote was as high as 47 per cent. Wilkinson had been a member of the Communist Party, changing to Labour when the Labour Party made it impossible to be a member of both parties. She accumulated the familiar reputation for fearless militancy but — and this again is a familiar story — her career peaked when she became Minister of Education in the 1945 Labour government, which was continually at odds with the Communist Party over its policies both at home and abroad.

In many ways Jarrow represented the economic changes which were forced on British capitalism during the first half of the 20th century. By the 1930s it was accepted by all but the hardest of die-hards that British capitalism had lost for good many of the export markets which it had once dominated and on which so much of its wealth and power rested. As heavy industry and mining, located mainly in the North, went into decline capital was switched to lighter, consumer-orientated industries in the Midlands and South. Jarrow's dependence on Palmer's made it particularly vulnerable in any such movement; the First World War demand for shipping postponed the inevitable but by 1921 the brief post-war boom was at an end and shipbuilding was badly hit. In December that year 36 per cent of the industry's workforce were unemployed, by the following August in Jarrow 43 per cent were out of work. Palmer's were unable to take advantage of the partial recovery which followed and Jarrow might be said to have led the way into the slump of 1929. In July 1932 Palmer 's launched its last ship and in 1933 the yard was closed. By 1934 there were 67.8 per cent of the town's insured workers unemployed, by 1935 it was 72.9 per cent and by 1936 it had reached 80 per cent.

J. B. Priestley, in his English Journey, described Jarrow as he saw it in 1933: "Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them". The town had long suffered a high incidence of tuberculosis — the result of bad housing, malnourishment and topography — in spite of its relative prosperity. In the 1930s the rate of TB rose to double the national average. In 1934, when the infant mortality rate was 47 for each thousand live births in the Home Counties, in Jarrow it was 114. So alarmed was the Board of Education at the malnutrition among Jarrow's schoolchildren that they sent a request to the council to increase free school meals.

Little wonder that Jarrow should feel, in its desperate plight, that an especially harsh discrimination was being applied to it. If, as the title of the famous book has it, it was The Town That Was Murdered who., or what, did the killing? During the recessions of the 1920s and the 1930s some industries attempted to defend themselves by forming cartels with the object of restricting (they called it "co-ordinating" or "rationalising") production and marketing, in the hope that this would enable part of the industry to survive in profitability. Much the same thing happens now in. for example, the oil industry. The steel industry organised the British Iron and Steel Federation, which set itself to oppose any efforts by non-members to open up production. It was opposition from the BISF which caused the abandonment of a plan for an integrated steel plant in Jarrow — the event which sparked off the march.

The shipbuilders' cartel was National Shipbuilders Security Ltd. set up in 1930 with most of the industry and the big banks as shareholders. The NSS was financed through a levy on its members and its object was to buy up shipyards and then "sterilise” them. By 1934, in this way, it had finished off 137 berths, or two-fifths of the British industry. with a production capacity over a million tons. Among them was Palmer s yard at Jarrow, which went into receivership in 1933 and was sold — delivered up to — the NSS in 1934.

With their dreams and their confidence in tatters, it was tempting for desperate, starving workers to think of Jarrow as being murdered. cut off in its prime, by a small group of greedy capitalists supported by a pitiless government. This is a common enough reaction to unemployment; it goes with the theory that capitalism's problems — its disorder, its crises, its inadequacies — are abnormal and could be avoided by running the system differently. Jarrow, it was said, was the victim of a monstrous crime and crime is. or should be. abnormal.

By the standards under which capitalism must operate, what happened to Jarrow was perfectly normal and reasonable. This society does not produce wealth to meet people's needs, or employ them so that they can be healthy and happy. Its wealth is produced for sale on the market, intended to yield a profit to the minority who possess the means of production and distribution, including things like steel works, mines, shipyards and ships. Workers are employed, that is to say their labour power is bought by the capitalists, in order to turn out that wealth. But it is impossible to predict how the market will behave, to control it. to guarantee that it will always absorb what has been produced. That is why every so often there is a "surplus" of some sorts of goods, however much people may need them. When sales are high, in a boom, "exuberant" investment policies are praised as divine wisdom; in a recession they are condemned as blindly irresponsible. So it was with Palmer's; had things turned differently the company would have been a favourite among the economic experts and the apologists for capitalism as a masterpiece of financial and industrial genius.

Jarrow was badly hit in the slumps of the 1920s and 1930s but it was not alone for the entire shipbuilding industry was in decline. In 1920 British yards turned out over 2 million tons but by 1933 this had fallen to 133.000 tons. In 1932 the industry had nearly 60 per cent unemployment; that was the year when, according to the Home Office, two unemployed men committed suicide every day. There was a similar story in towns which had depended on other branches of heavy industry; Dowlais. Brynmawr and Motherwell, for example, all had unemployment at about 75 per cent in 1934.

Some of this must have been in the minds of the Jarrow marchers, as they assembled for their trek to London. This was one of the smaller of the many protest marches of that time — 200 selected men compared to the thousands who would take part in the demonstrations organised by the NUWM. It did not demand better benefits or more humane treatment for the unemployed; its object was to persuade the government to direct investment into the town. The marchers were generally regarded benignly by the police (Special Branch kept close observation on all demonstrations by the unemployed for no matter how desperate working class poverty may be it could be permitted to arouse only the best-mannered of protests), the press and the government — in contrast to the NUWM marches which were battered with relentless sneers and criticism and, by the police, with unprovoked assaults.

As the Jarrow men made their way to London The Times congratulated them on their stoicism and sympathetically reported their blistered feet and their fatigue. They enthusiastically cheered King Edward VIII. who happened to be passing by in The Mall. The Home Office agreed that, as ". . . the marchers show every sign of being orderly, it would be a good way of encouraging them and placating them" to allow them to be entertained in the Houses of Parliament. Taking tea with the MPs was hardly the way to bring down capitalism, or even to change its course. Even more, friendly Members took them on a boat trip down the Thames, which caused them to be absent from the climax of the march — the presentation of their petition. They also missed the government's response, which was bluntly translated for them by a Jarrow councillor: "It means you have drawn a blank". The next day the Jarrow men caught the train back home, to the end "well disciplined . . . conduct was exemplary" in the words of the police report.

Apart from putting the town's name and that of its MP — into the history books and the laying out of one small public park, there was nothing to show for the Jarrow march. Its objectives were restricted and short term but even at that they were beyond its reach. No government can change the nature of capitalism or divert it from its natural course and that was why they had to refuse to do anything to revive industry in Jarrow. They even stopped the marchers' unemployment pay, on the grounds that they were not available for work for the period of the march (there was, of course, no work in Jarrow for them to be available for. but never mind). Capitalism continued on its troubled way; while Jarrow agonised the excessively rich Tory MP Henry Channon set out in his diary some of the difficulties his class were experiencing in early 1937:

[I] had a large dinner party . dinner was magnificent. Lady Granard could hardly walk for jewels.

And later that

I find a new, unexpected joy at the age of nearly forty, in accumulating money and watching it grow.

Those appallingly smug words illuminate the real social and political issue, in the 1930s and now — the class division of society based on the private ownership of the means of life. As Channon wrote, one per cent of the population owned 56 per cent of the wealth in private hands. The situation is very little different today. The social system which exploits and impoverishes the majority, which forced the men of Jarrow to that moving, fruitless crusade, remains in being. Now. after another post-war boom, we are in another recession which again has affected the shipyards of the Tyne. Unemployment in the area is at 25.6 per cent. This is what brings the people of Jarrow to London once more, to set down their protest at the effects of capitalism but giving no thought to abolishing the system. That the famous march must happen again, fifty years on. is no cause for celebration for it demonstrates how futile it was in 1936 — and how futile today.

Ivan

The Jarrow March (1996)

From the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Criticising the Jarrow March of the 1930s is considered almost a crime amongst left-wingers yet the facts are that working class men tramped hundreds of miles simply to beg with the political representatives of the capitalist class that something be done about unemployment in a particular area (an impossibility anyway) only to be treated with contempt by them

The economic slump that plunged Britain and many other countries into depression in the 1930s was felt in few places harder than in Jarrow', where unemployment soared above 80 percent, where people lived in overcrowded and vermin-infested houses and where poverty was unimaginable.

In 1933 J. B. Priestley, having visited Jarrow, wrote about the town in his book English Journey.

"Wherever we went there were men hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them. The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak sabbath. The men wore the masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its people, would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that its inhabitants were not criminals, but citizens with a vote. ”

Not long after the publication of English Journey, in January 1934, a delegation of 300 people from Jarrow, Hebburn and Felling travelled to Seaham to argue their case with the town’s MP and leader of a largely Conservative National government, Ramsay MacDonald.

Leading the delegation was “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Jarrow, hoping to impress upon the PM the plight of the people along the Tyne and their desperation for work.

No doubt MacDonald was all too aware of the pathos of the situation and the inevitability of the 1930s’ slump and capitalism’s inability to solve it. The advice he gave the member from Jarrow was later described by her as “sham sympathy”:

"Ellen, why don't you go and preach socialism, which is the only remedy for this?”

This reply from a supporter of capitalism was as cold and smacked of the same indifference as a similar delegation received when they visited Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, regarding the opening of a steelworks in Jarrow. Said Runciman: “Jarrow must work out its own problems”.

Jarrow, it seemed, was indeed left to sort out its own problems. To a town whose ship industry had closed down and whose much-anticipated steelworks had failed to materialise, Runciman’s words were received as icily as they had been uttered and sent a shiver down the collective spine of the borough.

Distressed area

At a time when the entire country seemed to be taking part in hunger marches and protest rallies, Councillor David Riley’s suggestion in July 1936 that the unemployed of Jarrow should march to London hardly seemed original or serious in light of the fact that many previous marches had been dismissed as “communist demonstrations”.

However, the idea was discussed at length with the town’s MP and the Jarrow Labour Party executive. Eventually it was decided that any march should be the town’s march, only to go ahead with the full support of the citizens. The town council sanctioned the march and above the signature of the mayor went appeals for support. This was followed by the sending-out of letters requesting the use of services and halls in towns along the proposed route to London. As the pace of events hotted up the organisation of the march was done from the town hall and under the supervision of the town clerk. At the same time, men were also marching to London from South Wales, Cumberland, Durham and Yorkshire, all bent on expressing their grievances against the means test and the Unemployment Assistance Board regulations, which was for the Jarrow men "a welcome sign that other men felt the same as they did and were kicking, too” (Wilkinson, The Town that was Murdered, 1939).

So on a cold morning, Monday 5 October 1936, 200 marchers set out from Jarrow, ahead of them representatives from the Labour and Conservative parties to arrange meetings en route to London. Even the Inter-Hospital Socialist Society came to their assistance, sending out relays of helpers performing dentistry and medical necessities.

The marchers had hardly time to get blistered feet when their organisers were condemned by a Labour Party meeting in Edinburgh for “sending hungry' and ill-clad men across the country on a march to London”. Incensed, Ellen Wilkinson left the marchers and travelled to the Conference in Edinburgh in an attempt to rally support. Her efforts were in vain for the conference had more important matters to discuss, such as their attitude to the Spanish question and the re-armament issue—a time-honoured and typical response from the Labour Party to requests for help from the working class. Neither was support to be found with the TUC, who similarly blacked the march and advised trade councils against giving help. Wilkinson had this to say: “I went from the warm comradeship of the road to an atmosphere of official disapproval . . . Had the Labour Party put its power behind the marchers, sent out the call for solidarity with them, then by the time these men reached London, not only from Jarrow, but from all parts of the country', the support that would have been aroused . . . would have been enough to shake the complacency of the Baldwin government” (The Town that was Murdered, p. 204-5). There was, however, no shortage of support for and working-class approval, of the march After all, 47 percent of the industrial population of the country at that time resided in areas scheduled as “distressed” or in need

of being so scheduled.

The brainwashed Trades and Labour Council at Chesterfield might have obeyed the TUC circular denouncing the march, but this did not stop the local Conservative Party from rallying to the aid of the marchers, providing hot meals and a place to sleep. The Labour Party rationalised their apathy by asserting that if they gave support to one march, then support would have been demanded of them all. This from an allegedly working-class party!

Along the route to London, members of the working class, and indeed the capitalist class, were all too ready to support the march. By the time the marchers reached Leicester their boots were falling apart. In response, the Co-operative Society’s own cobblers took it upon themselves to work all through the night without pay to repair the boots of the Jarrow men, the Co-op donating the necessary material free.

One cobbler almost anticipated socialism, saying:

“It seems sort of queer, doing your own job just because you want to do it, and for something you want to help, instead of doing it because you’d starve if you didn't. ” (p. 207).

Elsewhere, at Leeds, a newspaper proprietor laid on free food and beer (no doubt providing his own newspaper with a story) and at Barnsley, Joe Jones, a miners’ leader had the municipal baths specially opened and heated in time for the arrival of the marchers. A group of journalists, following the march, even clubbed together and purchased a dozen mouth organs in an attempt to boost the morale of the marchers.

The march continued and gained support and sympathy the entire 291 miles of its journey. The men marched between 10 and 21 miles every' day and held meetings every night. After three-and-a-half weeks on the road, they reached Marble Arch tired and rain-soaked, perturbed that only a small crowd had braved the October weather to greet them.

The following day they were given permission to hold a meeting at Hyde Park. The Communist Party was already there, holding a mass demonstration to protest against unemployment. Realising the Jarrow men were in the area, they suspended their rally for an hour and asked their audience to swell the Jarrow Crusade meeting.

Humble petitioners

When Parliament re-assembled two days later, the men marched to the Houses of Parliament and handed in two petitions, one containing 68,500 signatures from towns along the Tyne. The petition presented the case for Jarrow in simple language, pointing out how Jarrow was experiencing a stage of industrial depression unprecedented in the town’s history. Shipyards had closed and the steelworks had been denied a lifeline. Once 8,000 workers were in employment. Now the figure stood at 100 with others on temporary schemes. The petition continued:

“The Town cannot be left derelict, and therefore your petitioners humbly pray that His Majesty's Government and this honourable House will realise the urgent need that work should be provided without delay. ”

But there was no debate. As Wilkinson points out: “A few questions were asked .. . and the house passed on to consideration of other things.”

The marchers took it all in their stride. Wilkinson describes them as being “rather sporting about it” and how they were afterwards entertained to tea in the House. Demoralised to the point that they could not care less would have been a more fitting description of the marchers’ sentiments—men pushed and crushed until they could only accept their lot.

When the marchers arrived home they did so to a hero’s welcome. Tens of thousands turned out to greet them and bonfires burned long into the night. For many they had achieved something, even if it meant no change to their meagre existence.

Wilkinson writes of the marchers: “Many were politically educated men, who through the long, bitter struggles, knew who and what was the real enemy.” But to be honest, and not to disparage such a monumental event in working-class history', did they? Were they so educated as to think marching could better their lot and did they really think it possible that capitalism can be bargained with? Did they realise that, in truth, they were marching for the right to be exploited by a system that cared not a jot had the marchers perished to a man en route to London?

Three years later, work did come to Jarrow (more would follow as the capitalist war machine revved up) in the form of a new rolling mill. Walking through the site when the men were laying the concrete foundations, Wilkinson was greeted with: “This is what we marched to get.”

Wilkinson could only find a strange pathos in the statement. She commented:

“The grim thing is that the workers have no share in these mills. When the works are built they will still be subject to the toll of profit, the exigencies of a system where they can be closed at the will of people far away to suit a financial policy. "

Seemingly, as with the cobbler at Leicester, the stark reality of the madness, the insane logic of capitalism, had become apparent to the future Labour Cabinet Minister. But did she actually realise that the internal mechanisms of capitalism run on with a will of their own, oblivious of logic and men with Geordie accents and sore feet?

John Bissett

Hunger marching in the 1930s (1981)

Hunger Marching in Britain, 1934.

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was an awesome predictability about the comparisons drawn between that People’s March for Jobs in May and the Jarrow Crusade in 1936. Awesome because the comparisons were blind to an important fact: this is a sick society and its history is not so much repeated as regurgitated.

The 1981 March, much publicised, had some impressive sponsors—like Harold Wilson, whose second government saw unemployment begin to rise to its present level and who was always inveighing against “overmanning” in industry and was fond of referring to redundancies as “shake-outs”. Like garrulous Brian Clough, who doesn’t mind sacking footballers if they don’t play up to standard. Like compulsive protester Peter Main. Yes, it was impressive and exciting, and thoroughly predictable.

The Jarrow marchers were selected for their physical fitness: they marched in ground sheets and flat caps, fed at wayside soup kitchens, and had their boots mended at the local Co-op. One participant (Sunday Times 26/4/81) remembers it as “. .. a holiday . . . they were feeding like fighting cocks. And they got 1s 6d (9p) pocket money at a time when the Means Test Commissioners said you could keep a child on a shilling (5p) a week”.

That stark memory says a lot about conditions in the thirties. In Britain the effect of capitalism's global depression was the crumbling away of the foundations laid down in the Industrial Revolution—the coal mines, textiles, iron and steel and shipbuilding. (In 1932, 62 per cent of shipyard workers were unemployed.) Thus what had once been the boom spots of British capitalism became its Depressed Areas, where the plight of the workers was particularly wretched:

  Most of our children are suffering not so much from tuberculosis as from starvation. Seventy-five per cent of the cases admitted to the Society’s sanatorium were suffering from undernourishment. (Dr. O'Hara at the 1933 meeting of the Durham County Society for the Prevention and Cure of Consumption.)

But the government were not impressed. John Boyd Orr, who found that in 1935 30 per cent of the British population were trying to survive on a seriously deficient diet, remembered:

  Mr. Kingsley Wood, the Minister of Health, asked me to come and see him. He wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance there was no poverty in the country. (As I Recall.)

Any surprise at Kingsley Wood’s denial of something which was all to obvious should be tempered by the consideration that he was, after all, a politician—and governments had for some years been busily turning the screw on the unemployed. In 1931 an unemployed man received 85p a week, with 45p for a dependent wife and 10p for each child. “Unemployment benefit”, insisted Ramsay MacDonald, “is not a living wage; it was never meant to be that’’. MacDonald’s rare flirtation with the truth can be explained on the grounds that at the time he was arguing for a reduction in the benefits. This was introduced a few months later by MacDonald’s National Government, under an Act passed by his earlier Labour Party administration.

One result of the cuts was that many people were disqualified from receiving state benefits as of right and were left at the mercy of locally based Public Assistance Committees (PAC), whose decisions were often distinguishable only by a variation in harshness. In January 1935 there was another turn of the screw, when unemployed benefits were placed under the central control of the Unemployment Assistance Board (UAB). This change led to even lower allowances than those under the PAC; Tory MP Robert Boothby summed it up: “The new administration is brutal. I can use no other word”.

But the UAB were fretting about the profligacy of the unemployed on those generous allowances. Their 1935 Report was shocked at one who, having inherited some money “. . . immediately took his whole family for an expensive seaside holiday”. One remedy for this sort of behaviour was in places called “residential instruction centres and camps” where, under the watchful repression of ex-army officers, young men were disciplined back to “employability”.

The Times (22/3/38) was ecstatic about the camps (some of its readers had been writing in to say how well this very matter was being handled in Nazi Germany):

  . . . hundreds and thousands of young men . . . do not show any disposition to bestir themselves to get themselves out of unemployment and into employment . . . there is a slackness of moral fibre and of will as well as of muscle . . . the breakdown of morale can only be made good by applying compulsion.

Strangely, no lack of moral fibre was descried—and the UAB did not fret about—the country house parties remembered by Harold Macmillan (Winds of Change) where: “There were no rules except the necessity of appearing at dinner . . .Otherwise, in a large company the groups organised themselves for golf, tennis, walking, talking or quiet reading”. Nor in the world of Tory MP Henry Channon, who had married into the Guinness family and who complained in July 1935: “I am tired of being ‘tiddly’ by night and ‘gaga’ by day: the season has lasted long enough”.

By then marches by unemployed workers had become an established routine of protest. At the spearhead was the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), led by Communist Party member Wal Hannington and widely regarded with the sort of hostility and contempt expressed for the flying pickets a few years ago. “Hannington and the revolutionary riff-raff of London” was the Daily Telegraph's (1/11/32) description. The NUWM was proscribed by the Labour Party and the TUC, was under continual police surveillance and the subject of many a worried Special Branch report.

In spite of this the NUWM organised numerous marches and protests, many of which were on the receiving end of violent repression from the blue uniformed guardians of capitalist law and docility. At the peak of the violence, in October 1932, a crowd of tens of thousands in Hyde Park was attacked by the police, who then stole—there is no other word for it—the petition brought by the marchers to London. Later NUWM demonstrations were on a lower key; in 1936 they finished an orderly march with a rally in Hyde Park, where Attlee and Bevan spoke from the same platform as Hannington. There was nothing to cause alarm, except to any workers class-conscious enough to understand what Bevan meant when he proclaimed, “This demonstration proves to the country that Labour needs a united leadership”.

But the NUWM protests, although they were bigger and more violent, they have been historically overshadowed by the Jarrow Crusade. This latter march sprang from the 1934 closure of Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow, which threw 80 per cent of the town’s workforce on the dole. Both the Labour Party and the TUC, although they now lay claim to the Crusade as part of their glorious history, condemned it at the time as a publicity stunt by Jarrow’s Labour MP, Ellen Wilkinson. The march was orderly; almost the loudest noise it made came from the mouth organs in the lead, until they got to London and saw King Edward VIII in the Mall. At this they forgot any indignation they might have felt about their poverty as against ruling class privilege and. said the Special Branch, “cheered lustily”.

Benignly, the Home Office agreed that, as “. . . the marchers show every sign of being orderly, it would be a good way of encouraging them and placating them” if they were to be entertained to tea at the House of Commons, where much of their misery was discussed and legislated upon. That was about all they got, and Ellen Wilkinson was scathingly rebuked by the Labour Party NEC at their Annual Conference that October. One Jarrow councillor said ". . . you have drawn a blank” but that was not entirely true. Because the marchers had not been “available for work” while they were away from Jarrow the UAB, overlooking the fact that there was no work to be available for, reduced their benefit by up to 55p a week.

Little more could be claimed for the protests than the restoration of some benefit cuts. Unemployment remained stubbornly high; Jarrow did not come back to life. Until the war in 1939 enforced a change, the UAB continued as the scourge of the unemployed. And now, nearly fifty years on. the failure is starkly illuminated: it is all happening again because we are almost back where we began, with 2½ million unemployed.

This is no accident. Wal Hannington (Unemployed Struggles 1919-36) claimed some massive demonstrations in 1931—30,000 people in Dundee, 50,000 in Glasgow, 40,000 in Hyde Park, and much more. Yet that same year the British working class voted overwhelmingly for capitalism to be run by the National Government—the very government who were imposing the cuts in dole money, the police repression of the hunger marchers and all. The total government vote at that election was over 14½ million against just over 7 million for the equally futile, equally culpable, opposition such as the Labour Party.

So capitalism was allowed to continue and now, 50 years on, there can be no optimism that the protesters would have it any different. Like the battlers of the NUWM, like the pathetic men from Jarrow, the 1981 marchers demanded the unobtainable—capitalism without its inevitable ill-effects. One of their leaflets urged: “Unemployment is a human tragedy . . . People must act now . . . Say no to unemployment. . . Demand a return to full employment”.

These ringing phrases could only have reinforced the demonstrators’ confusion, when their overwhelming need is to grasp that working class life under capitalism is tragedy, whether they are in or out of work. There is no dignity in the degrading experience of a person who sells their labour power as the only way of getting a living. It is futile for workers to say no to unemployment, for an economic recession does not happen through a mistake, because someone has not listened. And even if they—the politicians, the economists, the experts—had listened, they would still be powerless to end the recession, to put all the unemployed out of their misery of idleness into the misery of active exploitation.

There is much, much more to it. Those who protest about the effects of capitalism would do better to look for a more radical approach—or else contribute towards generations to come suffering the same sore feet, the same sore heads—and the same bitter disillusionment.

Ivan