Twenty-five years ago this weekend, I was in a hotel room in Manila , puzzling over a telex message from The Times in London telling me there was a printers’ strike and that Reuters would no longer handle my copy, usually sent via their systems. I was to file through some new numbers, and if I didn’t I would be “deemed to have dismissed myself”.
Outside the hotel, crowds of poor, ill-clad but angry Filipinos were protesting in the streets about the latest theft of a presidential election by corrupt US-puppet Ferdinand Marcos. This was the birth of “people power” in the Philippines, which swept around the world and is still making itself felt in such unlikely places as Tunisia. It did for Marcos and his shoe-crazy wife Imelda, and it made me think: “If these people, who have nothing, can make a stand against the rich and powerful, then how can you stand aside?”
I made three international phone calls. One to The Times’ foreign desk, where deputy foreign news editor Martin Huckerby was leaving to become the first “refusenik” to reject Rupert Murdoch’s ultimatum. The second was to my wife in Singapore who was even more bewildered than me – there being nothing in the newspaper or on BBC World Service. And the third to John Stones, National Union of Mineworkers delegate at Frickley colliery in south Yorkshire, and a longstanding friend. “If you’re ringing me, you know already”, was his laconic advice.
I took it and so began my involvement in the year-long Wapping dispute, joining a dozen fellow members of the National Union of Journalists at The Times who refused to bow to News International’s diktat. Others on the Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World made up the 50-plus cadre of journalists who said “No”. Our contribution alongside that of the 3,500 sacked printers was small, but not insignificant. It proved that the NUJ was a proper union, not a sweetheart outfit.
Most of our colleagues on the four titles crossed the picket line and went into Wapping, on the promise of a £2,000 pay rise, free BUPA services and a swimming pool on site. As I suspected, the pool never materialised, and far from replacing the print unions in a cockpit of power, our union was de-recognised and still has no bargaining rights with the Murdoch press.
But elsewhere, right across the newspaper business and the electronic media, the NUJ has had a post-Wapping renaissance – thanks in part to the changes in trade union law – introduced (albeit reluctantly on the part of Tony Blair) by Labour. Our union has exploited the recognition procedure with real skill, driven by the desire of journalists throughout the country to have an organisation that speaks and fights for them. One day, the day when we can dance on Murdoch’s grave, I believe we will be back in News International. The membership is already there, in some numbers.
Wapping is often derided, by those who are too young to have been there, or have an anti-union agenda, as one of those great defeats to which the labour movement is historically addicted. I do not agree. The print unions had no alternative but to stand and fight. “Here I stand, I can do no other”, as Martin Luther said. They took on the most powerful media magnate in the world, the police, the judiciary, the rest of the media, Norman Tebbit’s laws and a Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher determined to humble organised labour. It was no shame to be defeated. It would have been shaming not to have fought.
Arthur Scargill claimed the miners’ strike was a victory. He was wrong, except in this respect: he and his members showed that the spirit of resistance lives. Wapping taught us that we must keep it alive.
