I know what you mean. My Vietnam War AAR had to go on hiatus for over a year because of different things that were going on in my life.
That is good news to hear. Looking forward to it.
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I know what you mean. My Vietnam War AAR had to go on hiatus for over a year because of different things that were going on in my life.
That is good news to hear. Looking forward to it.
An AAR update is never early, nor is it ever late. It arrives always at exactly the right time.
Very glad to hear it! Thanks, NathanThat is good news to hear. Looking forward to it.
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I don't wish to alarm anyone, but I have just finished the next chapter. Pending final revisions and formatting, it will be up some time tomorrow.
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In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority (Part Two: Red Autumn II)
Chapter Six
In Place of Strife: Lewis in the minority
Part Three
In The Autumn Of Our Youth: The Makings of ‘Red Autumn’ (II)
IV.
Bernard Whitehead had hoped, perhaps a little naïvely, drawing upon all available reserves of his faith in the fundamental reasonableness of human beings, that his decision to re-open the university on September 28 would put an end to the ‘bloody silliness’ of the previous week. He had been subject to little but continual embarrassment since adopting a hardline stance against incipient student radicalism the Friday before, and having bowed to more forceful (and arguably more sensible) voices, he trusted that this show of good faith would be repaid in kind by a willingness among the student body to return uneventfully to their studies.
Inevitably, it was not so. At lunchtime on the first ‘normal’ day of teaching since the start of the new academic year, the Students’ Union and the UTW called an extraordinary public meeting to resolve how to move forward in light of the ‘gross managerial misconduct’ of the previous week.[18] Immediately, the scale of the response to the call for a meeting demonstrated the level of ill-feeling that still existed towards Whitehead and his management team; almost one thousand people packed themselves into Theatre A in University Place, the university’s principal meeting room, whose notional seated capacity was a mere six hundred.[19] Hundreds more, students and UTW members who could not find themselves a space in the theatre itself, sat in the lobby outside, straining to hear the discussion inside through propped-open doors and ad hoc communication lines. Those who had to content themselves with simply hanging around outside the building were kept abreast of developments by runners from inside passing along periodic updates as the meeting unfolded.
By all accounts, it was a raucous and highly improvisational affair, later scoffed at by aggrieved managers, wounded by what they saw as attacks from ‘poorly-organised layabouts’. But the level of emotion on display was undeniable, and the standard of the discussion itself was frequently passionate and articulate, reported verbatim in the student journal The Mancunian.[20] Union president Fiona Carradine, facilitating from the chair, opened proceedings by congratulating students and workers for having ‘come together to assert our collective strength in the face of grave threats to our freedom to learn and to work’. She continued by calling for a ‘cementing’ of this collective strength in ‘ongoing acts of solidarity between students and workers’: ‘not only will this allow us to defend ourselves equally strongly’, she said, ‘against any future strong-arming by the bosses tomorrow, but united in this way we can go further and work to re-shape the university into a truly democratic place of teaching and enquiry’.
Carradine’s call for an ongoing solidaristic relationship between teachers, staff and students alike was well received. Subsequent speakers developed upon the idea with invocations of other ‘sites of struggle’ in the wider campaign against ‘managerialism’. Dr. Maggie Roberts, at that point branch treasurer for the Manchester UTW, made a pointed comparison between the plight of teaching staff at Manchester and that of the coal workers in South Wales, ‘who have demonstrated so ably what stands to be gained by throwing off the bloated bureaucracies Whitehall insists on foisting upon the workers, to manage industries that, in truth, they know so little about’. When a handful of attendees raised the possibility of ousting Whitehead and his team by a vote of no confidence, Roberts was withering in her response: ‘Professor Whitehead, alas, is only one grey head of the hydra – and one whom I am sure Mr. Lewis would have few qualms about sacrificing in his greater project of total control’. What the situation demanded, said Roberts, was ‘radical action, not pantomime symbolism’. Roberts’ fiery words provoked an equally heated response, and soon open talk of insurrection was widespread on the lips of attendees. When at 2 p.m. the time came for resolutions, none received more enthusiastic support than item four on the agenda, that: ‘this congress resolves to take back in sum what is ours by right; namely, to occupy the University estate, and to take the running of teaching and research into the collective hands of students and workers’. When just after 2.30 p.m. item four passed by fervent acclamation, two facts became clear: first, that there could be no denying the radicalism and the strength of conviction of the student–teacher movement combined; second, that nobody present in Theatre A quite knew what, exactly, would now happen.
Students and workers unable to make it into the main theatre discuss the results of the occupation vote.
Events could not wait for sober clarification, however, and as is so often the case at acute moments of action, activity found itself propelled onwards by unspoken, common consensus. Some attendees nearest the edges of the theatre left the room immediately, returning to that afternoon’s scheduled lectures and seminars in the hope of organising ‘sit-ins’, or else simply taking their new revolutionary enthusiasm out into the University’s public spaces, broadcasting the call to occupy. The majority stayed squarely put. After a brief conference between elected officers of the Students’ Union and the UTW, Fiona Carradine took to the stage shortly before 2.40 p.m. to propose a sit-in within the theatre itself, suggesting University Place as the locus of the protestors’ new ‘autonomous university’. This ad hoc motion was duly acclaimed and passed, and with this the assembled occupiers marked the birth of the ‘Manchester Free University’, subsequently given form and character by the means of various working groups and a provisional co-ordinating committee.
Fiona Carradine presiding over elections to the provisional co-ordinating committee of the Manchester Free University.
As the afternoon progressed, word spread across the main campus of the Free University’s birth. Teachers and students who had not been present at the initial lunchtime meeting continued to arrive at University Place – some attracted by the spreading revolutionary fervour, many simply curious as to what, if not regular teaching or study, had so pre-occupied their peers and colleagues. Alongside the dissemination of the news among curious and sympathetic groups, inevitably word of the Free University’s founding soon reached less sympathetic, and in some cases openly hostile groups. In the building itself, the sympathetic bemusement with which maintenance workers had met the initial meeting was compounded later in the afternoon by the frustration and hostility of middle managers and administrative staff, returning from their lunch breaks to find almost two thousand protesters occupying their offices and vestibules. At 3 p.m., university security staff – unionised, though hardly the most radical – responded to an initial formal call from management to intervene, though they were hardly energetic in attempting to evict the large crowd. Even the WB officers and volunteers who arrived later that afternoon were reluctant to engage in anything more than ‘crowd control’ – the volunteers unsure about the legal validity of evicting students and workers from a building that, technically, they had all right to occupy, and the officers still bruised after their official dressing down by the city council following their improper ‘guarding’ of the university the previous week. When an infuriated Bernard Whitehead put through a call to Manchester WB Commander David Hathersage, the Commander advised him that, unless he could prove that the protesters were trespassing, his safest course of action was to apply to the courts for an injunction against the occupation on grounds of public safety. Hathersage consented to keep an eye on the situation, and conceded that he could at least try to prevent more protestors from entering the building, but he urged that he would only start making arrests if the occupiers began to damage property. Until such a time, the latest sally in the battle for control of the university had settled uneasily into stalemate.
That night, for the second time that week, coverage of events in Manchester was afforded a dominant portion of the CBC News. For the 10 o’clock edition, Cliff Michelmore was joined by two members of the occupation co-ordinating committee, Nina Hope of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist League and Dr. Maggie Roberts of the UTW. Also on the programme were representatives of both city and university authorities, Chairman of the City Council Stan Orme and university pro-vice-chancellor Professor James Underwood. With Orme’s inclusion, the balance of opinion tipped noticeably in favour of the occupiers, though as a civic representative Orme did his best to refrain from open partisan commentary. Hope and Roberts had both consistently agitated in favour of direct action up to and including occupation well before that afternoon’s sit-in, and the occupation committee’s decision to send them as its emissaries on national television marked a curious but unmistakeable statement of radical intent. Where two nights prior Fiona Carradine had been erudite – even measured – in articulating the students’ grievances, sticking close to the specific terms of the dispute in Manchester, Nina Hope was far more eager to play the firebrand. Going beyond Manchester in her denunciations of the ‘lingering authoritarianism’ present in the universities and elsewhere, Hope praised activists engaged in the dispute against the Industrial Relations Bill and expressed solidarity between the Manchester occupiers and the coal workers in the Free Pits, before calling for students and workers at other universities to follow their example. Maggie Roberts tempered Hope’s youthful enthusiasm somewhat, if not by any perceptible gulf in viewpoint, with an experienced hard-headedness of expression. She articulated with an exceptional lack of sentiment the reasoning behind her belief that workers (and, to a lesser extent, students) should control the daily operation of the university, arguing that ‘disinterested managers and bureaucrats in central government are simply ignorant of the challenges we face “on the factory floor”’. Later she dismissed the bureaucracy inherent within British society as ‘wildly inefficient’. Underwood challenged Roberts, mounting a defence of ‘disinterested’ management as necessary to ensure critical distance in decision making, but Roberts held firm, batting away Underwood’s protests by criticising ‘those who have chosen management as a profession’, in somewhat vague terms, as ‘out of touch’ and ‘behind the times’.
Faced with Roberts’ unflinching attack, Underwood adopted a hard line of his own. While he conceded that the protestors had a right to express their opinions about the governance of their university, he stated firmly that senior management would not be ‘held hostage by idealists’, backing up his bid for level-headed pragmatist status by declaring that the university authorities were exploring ‘all options available’ to ensure a swift resolution to the dispute. When pressed for clarification by Michelmore, Underwood dismissed the idea of negotiations, characterising the student movement as naïve: ‘Given time, I am confident that the troublemakers will come to their senses. Once they realise for themselves that the work of running a university is not glamorous, I believe they will be only too happy to go back to their studies and leave the work of management to the managers.’ Underwood’s condescension, while no doubt calculated to give the appearance of a man firmly in control of a rapidly unravelling situation, did him few favours in the moment. The veteran broadcaster Michelmore, sensing that tensions were fast approach boiling point in the studio, pressed ahead before the interviewees could come to blows with one another. He pressed Underwood again, asking what the university planned to do should the protesters not simply disperse of their own accord. Underwood, clearly, had been backed into a corner – but he remained consistent in his line and answered firmly: ‘Regrettably, we would be left with no choice but to restore order to the university by force – a task in which we would be supported, I’m sure, by all relevant authorities.’
Occupying students and staff watch their comrades on the CBC news.
For Nina Hope and Maggie Roberts, this was the admission they had been waiting for. In that moment, Underwood had given voice to the self-assured authoritarianism streak that they had been warning against in their denunciations of management culture. Before Michelmore could turn to Stanley Orme to ask for the response of the city council – one such ‘relevant authority’ as invoked by Underwood – Hope began to drown out the broadcaster with cries of ‘Shame!’. Roberts jumped in with a stern admonition of her own, declaring to Underwood that ‘it is we, the teaching staff and the student body, who make up the university, and we will not be lectured or bullied by the likes of you, who contribute nothing of worth to it’. Underwood’s ill-judged returning sally, that the two women were being ‘hysterical’, was lost under Michelmore’s pleas for order and civility. With the full sense of a battle being fought in microcosm in the television studio, Stanley Orme finally said his piece, talking down the prospect of city authorities being used to ‘restore order’ to the university, and emphasising his respect for the right of the students and staff to protest peacefully:
I have been working tirelessly to try and mediate a settlement between the protestors and the university authorities, and I will continue to do so – but I will not countenance Manchester being turned into a battle site over what remains a peaceful, legitimate dispute. I would remind Professor Underwood that this country of ours was built on protest, and I will not deny anyone their right to be heard. Nothing is at stake that cannot be resolved through good-faith talks and compromise on both sides. My council remain wholly invested in achieving resolution by these means, for the good of our city’s university, and its survival as a place of radical thinking and free inquiry into the world in which we live.
Dr. Maggie Roberts (b. 1925) achieved a degree of national notoriety after her appearance on the News at 10, thanks chiefly to her direct, combative style of debate and her unwillingness to tolerate being talked down to by Professor Underwood.
If the atmosphere on television had been fiery, the situation on the ground in Manchester following the CBC broadcast soon settled into a stalemated calm. Realising that they would not be able to call upon the forces of order to restore campus life to the status quo, university authorities resolved for the time being to attempt to wait out the student protest movement – all the while keeping a jealous watch on events in University Place for any signs of the sort of violent disorderliness which might form the pretext for an escalation from the WB. Meanwhile, ripples from the disturbances in Manchester made themselves known across the country. On Friday 29, demonstrations in solidarity with the student protestors were held on campuses from Edinburgh to Exeter, with dozens of student unions making statements of support for their comrades in Theatre A. Anticipating attempts at copycat occupations over the days to come, authorities at various universities announced precautionary measures for the maintenance of public order. On Saturday morning, the diligent among students at various of the University of London’s constituent institutions found themselves physically barred from entry to several major faculty libraries, whose gates had been locked by order of the central university council, giving much of Bloomsbury the eerie air of a conflict zone. In Bristol, a number of left-leaning societies found themselves subject to interdictions upon their activities – including, absurdly, a ban on the Marxist Reading Group meeting for a start-of-year communal dinner, for fear of the event fomenting revolution. A sense of incipient panic was general across the leadership of the country’s old institutions of learning, contributing to a feeling that the student movement was simply the latest wave in a prolonged period of anti-authoritarian unrest alive in Britain since the previous winter. If before observers had merely whispered it, or couched their diagnoses in hedged truisms, at the end of September it now seemed clear beyond doubt that the summer’s agitation had not been a fit of seasonal madness: Britain was suffering from a sustained crisis of authority. The Young Autumn had arrived.
*
In the early days of the Revolution, when the old working classes and the sympathetic gentry could still be heard offering up optimistic tributes to the coming new tomorrow with equal zeal, an eccentric, little-remembered act of mischievous rebellion took place in the unlikely grounds of what was then Wadham College, Oxford.[21] Early in the morning on Tuesday 4 October 1927, two days before the start of Michaelmas term, a group of four fellow-travelling pranksters switched the college flag flying in pride of place above the gatehouse for the Red Flag. Good timing by the group, pulling off their stunt the morning that a local photographer was due to take the college’s picture for a commemorative, start-of-term postcard, ensured that the event was immortalised in a now-infamous photograph known simply as ‘Red Wadham’. The college authorities, hoping that members of the public would mistake the Red Flag for the Wadham standard (itself predominately red) did not admit to the stunt and allowed the postcard to be printed as if nothing unusual had taken place. When CPGB general secretary Albert Inkpin received a copy on his desk days later, however, inscribed on the back with lines from the old workers’ hymn – ‘Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer / We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here’ – there could be no mistaking its intent. Having dismissed a group of student volunteers calling themselves the ‘Oxford University Communist Party’ a week before, judging them to be upper-middle-class amateurs of little use to the workers’ cause, here was a statement from the students that they, too, despite their class background, were sincere and willing in their desire to contribute to the revolution. Inkpin duly found roles for the group delivering party bulletins and performing minor acts of sabotage against the OMS, and later at least two of the OUCP’s founding members achieved genuine notoriety as figures on the broad left.[22] So began, in what might be said to be fittingly absurd fashion, the modern British tradition of the revolutionary student.
'Red Wadham', 1927.
By 1967, forty years on from Red Wadham, it was not the students who needed to convince the organised left of their sincerity to the cause, but the organised left who were called upon to account for themselves to the would-be student revolutionaries. Polling of over five-thousand students across the country conducted by the New Partisan Review in early October found that only 14 per-cent held a positive opinion of Chairman Lewis, compared to 67 per-cent who held an unfavourable opinion of the premier. On the face of things, Dick Crossman fared better, with only 23 per-cent reporting an unfavourable opinion – but this was tempered by the fact that only 29 per-cent viewed the deputy premier in a favourable light, with the majority ambivalent towards the LUPA leader. The students were more receptive to the left opposition parties of the New Left Coalition, but even here there was little sense of popular leader who might galvanise the rebellion and transform it into a genuine political movement; New Socialist Front leader Ernest Millington and CPCB leader Bert Ramelson were viewed favourably by students who described themselves as ‘politically informed’, but the majority remained ambivalent. Intriguingly, the figures who were received most enthusiastically were those who remained outside of traditional politics. In a result calculated to induce apoplexy in the hearths of Middle England, the anonymous MAC insurgents behind the kidnapping of Albert Roberts received a net approval rating of 56 per-cent, with anti-establishment folk star John Lennon garnering a similar response. Thus the picture that emerged from the NPR’s polling was of a movement sure of little, except that change in Britain was long overdue – and yet to be convinced by the current crop of politicians already promising reform.
John Lennon (l) and the MAC (r).
Wayward heroes for wayward youth?
Yet if the student movement remained uncertain of what, as a whole, it was in favour of, it knew full-well what it was against. Of the names put to respondents by the pollsters, only two were received with more hostility than that of David Lewis: John Freeman, parliamentary leader of the Mosleyite Group for Action, and Enoch Powell. While the hostile reception for Freeman, as the heir to Mosley’s authoritarianism, was surely only to have been expected from an anti-authoritarian movement, the distaste reserved for Powell was less of a certainty, and offered a significant clue in characterising the movement overall. Powell’s paradoxical concoction of a nationalism veiled in anti-authoritarian language found little traction with the student population, for whom the idea of a threatened non-white migrant takeover held little credence, and who showed themselves to be generally uninterested in the sorts of academic economic arguments with which Powell decorated his racialist pronouncements. The student movement was against the specific authority of the Lewis government, prone as they saw it to heavy-handed micromanagement, and too greatly enamoured of disproportionate displays of force. It was not, as the Powellites were, concerned with paranoid fantasies of global capitalist plots against Britain, nor was it predisposed towards a reactionary suspicion of the world beyond the Commonwealth. Its uncertainty remained its strength, holding its anger open to all and inviting all manner of visions of change without nailing its colours to any one mast.
Enoch Powell mixes with supporters at a rally in winter 1967.
It did not take long for the Mosleyites and Powellites of Britain, such as they remained organised, to make known their own distaste for the ‘anarchy’ of the student movement. On the morning of Saturday 30 September, John Freeman addressed a crowd of around 5 thousand at the ‘National Rally for Order’, called in Birmingham as a demonstration against what its organisers saw as the crisis gripping not just in the universities, but the moral authority of the Commonwealth at large. From a stage decked out in the black and gold colours of the Mosleyite movement, Freeman spoke out against what he diagnosed as a ‘permissiveness’ in British society, fostered by Bevan in the years after Mosley’s fall from power:
Once, the essential character of the British citizen was marked by his sense of discipline and his sense of duty. It was these qualities that allowed us, in the years after the turmoil of revolution, to build a society whose standard of living far outstripped any that had previously been seen to exist on these isles. This was a society guaranteed by strong government, driven forward by powerful, forward-thinking industry, and held together by strong bonds of family and community. Today, our young men and women, have lost all sense of this world. Coming of age at a time of great political uncertainty, encouraged by indulgent leaders who promised the world knowing full well that they could not deliver it, our children no longer possess the orderly independence of character that until recently was our greatest strength. Now the watchwords of the young are ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ – and in ever greater quantities. Yet in every conceivable way their freedom is already greater than any to have ever been enjoyed in Britain. They enjoy freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of speech – the freedom to live their lives as they choose, where they choose. What more could they possibly demand, except perhaps freedom from all sense of responsibility, freedom from any sense of duty to one’s fellow man? This, I contend, is not freedom, but tyranny – the total collapse of social order and moral authority, and with it the final decline of Britain as a global power. It is our duty as citizens of the Commonwealth to resist this tyranny in every form – not to surrender to siren calls for liberty or death, but to hold firm in our defence of our morals, our communities and our institutions. This is why I call upon Chairman Lewis to act, urgently, to restore order – before we are driven to anarchy and to ruin.
John Freeman, 1967.
If Freeman’s overblown rhetoric carries an air of the absurd, it was heartily received by his audience, who made clear their support for his defence of the Commonwealth’s traditional institutions. While Mosley’s regime had been comprehensively defeated at the start of the decade, first by popular outcry and then, belatedly, at the ballot box, there were many who were anxious not to throw the baby out with the bathwater – or Mosleyism out with Mosley. If the former chairman had gone too far in his personal enjoyment of power, this was no reason, so the argument ran, to discredit the achievements of his system. Faced with the threat of ‘anarchy’, a vocal minority were prepared to overlook the abuses of the old regime – the virulent anti-humanism; the mean disdain for political pluralism; the callousness of its violence and the eagerness of its paranoia – for a return to the stability which, they believed, had since been lost in the rush of liberalisation. In times of social and economic uncertainty, few figures present a more attractive proposition than a strong man promising easy answers. Forty years previously, Mosley had been such a figure. In 1967, some clung to the hope that his ghost could conjure up similar miracles.
Oswald Mosley, 1967.
Freeman gambled that the reality of the former chairman in 1967, languishing pathetic and defeated in exotic exile, might be forgotten behind promises of a return to the ‘security’ his regime imposed upon Britain.
A somewhat paradoxical feature of this groundswell of support for a return to Mosleyism in certain corners of the country was the speed with which it was taken up by many opportunistic anti-establishmentarians, for whom Mosley himself would have been (and in some cases still was) anathema. The Powellites were chief among these uncertain allies. Economically, Enoch Powell’s free-market vision of Britain could barely have been further from Mosley’s strict dirigisme. Yet on the question of Britain’s purported social and moral ills, the two were perfectly aligned, and the social conservatism of the nascent anti-student movement contained the seeds by which it might be transformed into a broader reactionary wave. Further, the political space opened up within this reaction threatened to allow a number of groups on the extreme fringe of Britain’s emboldened right-wing a route towards the mainstream. Among the authoritarians in the Mosleyite camp and the nationalist Powellites, also visible at the National Rally for Order to those paying close enough attention were signs of a disturbing new undercurrent within the conservative opposition, apparently growing in confidence. This undercurrent synthesised Mosley’s authoritarian methodology with Powell’s anti-communism, diagnosing the root cause of Britain’s present ills not in 1961, but in 1927, in the beginnings of the revolution that led to the downfall of the old British Empire. It was a synthesis which marked the re-emergence of a strain of political thought – fascism – not simply unfashionable or unpopular, but outright illegal in Britain since the ratification of the Commonwealth’s first constitution. Its return, heralded by the public display in Birmingham of a black banner emblazoned with a single white ‘F’ – an approximation of an obscure symbol of the British Fascisti – betrayed the severity of the crisis in which Britain now found itself.[23]
Anti-racist graffiti in East London, late 1960s.
The invocation of Cable Street (just around the corner from Jubilee Street, where this picture was taken) is a reference to successful anti-fascist organisation in the area during the Revolution.
In Whitehall, David Lewis could not afford to be troubled by reports of a couple of thousand protestors in Birmingham. For him, the crisis in the universities was not a question of fundamental political philosophy, but a practical problem to be resolved before moving on to issues of greater importance.[24] The question only days earlier had been: how to get the universities open? Now, having underestimated the resolve of the student radicals in the first instance, the question had evolved into: how to keep the universities open – and under their legitimate authorities? As will by this point require no prefacing, Lewis was by no means inclined to agree with the student movement’s position, which was ultimately the workerist or autonomist position: that, combined, staff and students comprised the university, and thus the final say on the direction and the product of its operation was theirs and theirs alone. Lewis, himself a former Oxford don and hence in theory a class ally of the UTW protestors in Manchester and elsewhere, nevertheless held firm to his belief that the most efficient management was dedicated, external and professionalised, and that self-direction for the shop floor was a recipe only for confusion and inefficiency.
To this end, there could be no reformist path out of the present impasse. Lewis could not remove through policy the objections of the student movement to the status quo – not at least without a serious change of heart on the underlying ethics of the matter – and neither was there any reasonable legislative solution, barring a total suspension of liberal government, that would appease Bernard Whitehead and his allies. Yet following the calamity at Mountain Ash the previous winter, even the steely premier knew that he could ill-afford to risk simply bussing in the WB. Instead, he resolved to draw upon a relatively underused tool in his arsenal: the judiciary. On Saturday evening, Lewis telephoned John Dunwoody instructing him to advise Professor Whitehead that the government would welcome university authorities in Manchester applying to the courts for an emergency injunction against the participation of staff in the occupation. His rationale (which was not an original interpretation of the situation, but was nevertheless an interpretation that might now prove useful) was that in the absence of an official ballot for strike action any staff member withholding their labour in protest was doing so illegally – in effect, a ‘wildcat’ strike. Such unofficial strike action was not, in and of itself, an illegal act, but workers going on strike without an official ballot were unprotected from reprisals by employers, chiefly for breach of contract. In practice, however, such unofficial disputes were either infrequent enough or else sufficiently minor (and the unions sufficiently strong) that reprisals were seldom carried through. Thus the issue remained a legal grey area, and the opportunity for clarification fit well with Lewis’s broader programme of reform to the law around industrial relations.
John Dunwoody with wife Gwyneth.
Having received the governmental imprimatur to pursue an injunction via Dunwoody, Whitehead instructed the university’s solicitors to prepare an application to be heard at Manchester magistrates court on Monday morning. In the event, however, Lewis’s legalistic stratagem would be superseded by less sophisticated developments elsewhere. On Monday morning, staff at the Group for Action’s Manchester headquarters arrived at work to find that their offices had been vandalised in the early hours. The front windows had been smashed with bricks, and the door had been graffitied with the phrases ‘Death to Mosley!’ and ‘Fascist scum’. No obvious indication remained of who, exactly, the perpetrators had been – though speaking to the press on Monday morning, Derek Collings, one of the North West region’s nine GfA AMs, was quick to make the suggestion that members of the student movement were behind the attack:
Not all of our student population have fallen victim to the radical, individualist ideology which has been allowed to flourish within our universities, but a loud minority have embraced the anarchic tendency with open arms. On Saturday, members of our movement in the West Midlands made it clear the strength of feeling present that exists in Britain against the further proliferation of this anarchy beyond the academy. By standing up for our communities, for order and for the institutions of the Commonwealth, we have made ourselves enemies of the youth movement – and I have little doubt that this outrageous, criminal attack has been perpetrated by members of that movement in an attempt to silence our dissenting voices.
Collings called upon the authorities in Manchester to ensure that those behind the attack were identified and brought to justice as soon as possible – even while expressing doubts that those whom he described as the ‘liberal-minded student sympathisers in the city council’ would be quick to act. For his own part, Stanley Orme was quick to condemn the attack, telling the Manchester Guardian that ‘freedom in our Commonwealth includes the freedom of all legitimate political groups to operate without fear of intimidation or violent attack’, and stating that he would be meeting with WB Commander David Hathersage that evening to discuss a city-wide strategy to counter political violence. Foot-soldiers in the Mosleyist movement, however, soon revealed themselves unwilling to wait patiently for the WB to do its work. After sunset, a group of local organisers and supporters of the GfA, about 50 strong, arrived at University Place to picket the Free University. The pickets banged on the front doors and chanted slogans in favour of ‘law and order’, some carrying placards condemning ‘anarchy’ and ‘extremism’. They were met by the small handful of WB volunteers stationed on duty outside the building, but this represented an ineffectual ‘law and order’ presence in the face of an angry group several times their number. Initial attempts by the volunteers to persuade the protestors to disperse had no effect, and when occupiers entered the foyer to confront the pickets it seemed inevitable that the night would not end without some sort of escalation. Shortly before half past seven, two vans of WB volunteers arrived to reinforce their beleaguered colleagues, forming a defensive wall in front of the door to University place between the occupiers in the foyer and the pickets outside. Caught between the two sides, some pickets began to deride the WB as ‘defenders of anarchists’, hurling insults and accusing them of being on the side of the occupying students. In response, Fred Wilkins, the WB sergeant on duty warned the GfA protestors that he would order his volunteers to begin making arrests – but this succeeded only in antagonising the crowd further. The pickets closest to the door began to shove the WB line in an attempt to reach the front door, and soon these first sallies grew into larger scuffles. Inside, the occupiers watched on, some taunting the protestors, some reinforcing the front doors and windows with makeshift barricades. By all indications, a fight was close at hand.
University Place under siege by activists of the GfA.
Just before eight o’clock, following after the WB reinforcements, representatives of the university management arrived at the scene in the form of Professor James Underwood and Felix Soulsby, the university’s head of security. Underwood immediately confronted Sergeant Wilkins, reminding him of Commander Hathersage’s assurances the previous week that in the event of a threat to order the WB would break up the occupation. The sergeant replied that the occupation had remained peaceful, and that the threat had been provoked by the anti-student protestors, whom his volunteers were now trying to disperse. Underwood replied, not without a sting, that his volunteers did not seem to be doing a very good job, and demanded to speak to the a superior officer. When Sergeant Wilkins explained that he was the senior volunteer on duty, Underwood stormed off in search of a telephone. Within ten minutes, he had Commander Hathersage on the line, angrily demanding that he send reinforcements to evict the occupation before tensions broke out into open rioting. Commander Hathersage, more than a little annoyed at Underwood’s presumption to call him at home, nevertheless consented to send reinforcements – though made it clear that he would order his volunteers first and foremost to break up the protest, not to evict the occupation.
Within fifteen minutes, three-dozen more WB volunteers arrived at University Place, under the command of Area Captain Derek Gregory. Captain Gregory addressed the crowd to order them to disperse, warning that anyone who defied the order would be arrested for breach of the peace. By now, the protestors who had not already been arrested by Sergeant Wilkins’ volunteers had been galvanised to the point of paying little attention to Captain Gregory’s order and stood firm. Within minutes, Captain Gregory gave the order for his volunteers to form a kettle around the pickets and begin making arrests. This prompted even more scuffling amongst the crowd – and as the WB volunteers made their first arrests, from inside the building occupiers on the first floor did their best to aggravate the situation by serenading the arrestees with a taunting rendition of the popular football chant ‘Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio!’.[25] When a GfA picket responded by aiming a stone missile at the occupiers, missing his target but smashing a first-floor window, the long-threatened escalation appeared to have arrived. A third of their number having already been arrested, the GfA protestors who remained – for the time being – at liberty, joined in with the attack on University Place, pelting the building with stones and bottles, breaking windows and injuring WB volunteers caught in the line of fire. Captain Gregory had seen enough, and at half-past eight he ordered the assembled volunteers, five-dozen strong, to charge the crowd. Carnage was the result – compounded when, after the breaking of the WB defensive line in front of the building, a group of students rushed out of the building to join in with the attempts to repel the pickets. Fearing a riot was imminent, Gregory’s men arrested all remaining GfA protestors, as well as several of the street-fighting students, before falling back into a defensive formation and attempting to cool tempers inside University Place. By nine o’clock, calm had more or less returned to the Free University – but not before the arrest of over fifty people, and injuries to over two-dozen. If the GfA had wanted to prove a point – that the anti-libertarian reaction made up a potent force – they had made it amply – and now fears turned to what might possibly happen next.
The occupation committee convene an emergency meeting.
For Professor Underwood, the night’s events were evidence enough that the Free University could not be allowed to remain in place. Telephoning Commander Hathersage at his home for the second time that night, after a good deal of convincing, Underwood finally got his way over a tired and frustrated Hathersage; the commander gave his word: the next morning, he would issue the order to evict. At 7 a.m. on Tuesday 3, students and staff in occupation at University Place woke up to find over two hundred WB volunteers, bussed in from across Manchester, lined up outside the building under the command of Captain Gregory. It was Gregory himself who first approached the building’s foyer to lay out his intentions to the students on guard inside. He had orders to evict the occupiers, he explained, but he did not intend to make any arrests so long as things remained calm. He reinforced that this was a direct order from Commander Hathersage, leaving the occupiers with thirty minutes to leave peacefully before his volunteers would begin to remove people by force.
The ultimatum provoked outrage among the residents of the occupation. Members of the occupation co-ordinating committee first attempted to meet with Gregory to negotiate, but the captain insisted that he would not – and could not – move on the matter: he was under orders to see the building emptied that morning, and he not had intention of disobeying them. The situation clearly outlined, the occupiers convened an extraordinary assembly in Theatre A to vote on a course of action: would they comply with the eviction order and leave peacefully, or would they resist and try to defend the Free University? After fifteen minutes, with only fifteen minutes remaining until the expiry of Captain Gregory’s ultimatum, the debate had yielded no one resolution. Student Union president Fiona Carradine took to the podium at 7:20 to table a compromise motion: that all members of the Free University be allowed to vote with their feet. All who wanted to leave would be free to leave, and all who wanted to stay and resist would be free to stay and resist. Almost by default, the motion passed – and soon afterwards those who did not wish to fight began to collect their things. In the meantime, student representatives communicated their resolution to the WB outside, gaining assurances that all leaving occupiers would be afforded free passage back to their homes. At the same time, the co-ordinating committee contacted members of the press – national and local – and also left an urgent message with the office of Stanley Orme, demanding to know whether he had ordered the eviction to take place. Orme, who had only arrived at work minutes before, telephoned University Place immediately to relay that he was shocked to learn of the eviction; he had not been consulted, and he would speak to Commander Hathersage to demand immediate clarification. When Hathersage explained to the council leader that he had given the orders on grounds of public safety to prevent a repeat, or even an escalation, of the previous night’s unrest, Orme protested that this was tantamount to a concession to the Mosleyites. Hathersage reminded Orme, bluntly, that his job was not to play politics, only to keep the peace – at which point Orme realised the unlikelihood of effecting any sort of climb down, and cautioned instead that he would be keeping a personal watch over proceedings in order to ensure the proper conduct of the volunteers.
Occupying students launch improvised missiles onto the crowd of WB volunteers below.
By the time clocks struck half-past, around a quarter of the occupying population had quit the building. This left approximately seven-hundred students and staff inside, armed against the imminent WB attack with little except improvised clubs and missiles. The WB, by contrast, were outnumbered by a ratio of about three-to-one, but volunteers were outfitted with helmets and riot shields – and in some cases mounted on horses, positioned away from the building to control any attendant crowds.[26] Watching on were: Underwood and Soulsby from the university management; Stanley Orme; local Assembly Members Janette Feeney (Labour–Unionist), Bill Geraghty (NSF) and Tom Mortimer (CPCB); and representatives of the UWT. Also present were various representatives of both print– and broadcast news media, on hand to bear witness to the climactic event.
At 7:30, Captain Gregory announced over loudspeaker that he was now giving the order for his volunteers to storm the building. The order given, volunteers in the vanguard of the eviction force broke down the front doors and began to disassemble the makeshift barricades erected by the occupiers in the foyer as a first line of defence. As WB volunteers poured into University Place, students positioned on the first floor, repeating their strategy used against the GfA the previous night, pelted the intruders with missiles – weapons including empty milk bottles and paperweights raided from office store cupboards. The sally did little to stem the advance – the WB men kept free from injury by their shields and protective clothing – and soon volunteers arrived to arrest the missile-throwers, neutralising much of the Free University’s offensive threat. Before long, the WB had cleared all of the occupiers in the foyer and moved into Theatre A, where the bulk of the occupying population awaited. What resistance took place was limited to shoving and scuffling, with many of the students even electing to resist through extreme passivity – making themselves hard to move by going limp and refusing to co-operate with evicting volunteers. By eight o’clock, almost half of the occupiers had been removed from University Place – and it seemed a matter of course that the rest would follow before long.
Fiona Carradine is arrested by WB volunteers.
Outside the building, supporters of the occupation, many from local branches of trade unions and left-wing political groups, amassed over the course of the morning to try and resist the eviction, but they were held at bay by the ranks of the WB. At the same time, opponents of the student movement came to cheer on the evicting forces, with minor clashes erupting between the two sides – augmented in some cases by evicted occupiers who had not been arrested. The atmosphere remained testy, but all parties seemed to recognise the reality of the situation – and in spite of the numerical advantage enjoyed by the occupiers and their allies over the WB, there never seemed any serious prospect of a successful counter-attack. Shortly after half-past eight, in an event which seemed to augur the imminent death of the Free University, CBC news cameras captured Fiona Carradine being led out of University Place by two WB volunteers, soon followed by other members of the co-ordinating committee. They were among 231 people arrested during the course of the eviction, most on minor charges of assault or criminal damage, and as WB vans drove the last of the detained away to barracks across Manchester towards nine o'clock,[27] Captain Gregory announced to the crowd that the eviction had been successfully completed, and with this announcement gave the order to disperse. After a life of only five days, during which it had captured the imagination of the autonomist movement the Commonwealth over, the Manchester Free University had fallen to the forces of the the British state. As interested parties across Britain would soon learn, however, in death, as in life, the Free University would prove a powerful agent for change.
*
V.
V.
In the days after the eviction at University Place, figures of authority from all corners of the political landscape rushed to capitalise on the brief lull in national tensions. Looking to forestall a third wave of radicalism, Bernard Whitehead announced an ‘amnesty’ for all occupiers who returned peacefully to normal teaching, promising that no sanctions would be enforced against staff or students who refrained from subsequent protest. For the most part, morale among the autonomist student and staff population being at a low ebb following the eviction, this peace offer was taken up – if not enthusiastically, then with varying degrees of reluctance and resentment. What displays of radical feeling remained from the frenzy of the previous week were mostly confined to the realm of the symbolic. Most pointedly of all, students held a mock funeral procession for the Free University on Wednesday 4, attended by over one thousand ‘mourners’, which interrupted most of that afternoon’s scheduled teaching. (In a moment of great pragmatism and self-restraint, Whitehead declined to press the issue of whether the demonstration constituted a violation of the terms of his amnesty.)
Moves towards reconciliation in the academy were mirrored, too, by gestures in wider society. As if demanding his share of some unspoken bargain struck ahead of the eviction, Stan Orme leaned on Commander Hathersage to ensure that the vast majority of protestors were released without charge within 24 hours of their arrests. Of the 231 arrestees, only 28 were prosecuted – and of these only three were ultimately convicted, all on minor assault charges, for which they received modest fines.
Students mourn the demise of the Free University.
None of this was to say, however, that any sense of anger over the conditions that had led to the declaration of the Free University, or indeed over the issues that had arisen during its short lifetime, had simply vanished into thin air. If the authorities who had orchestrated the death of the Free University were eager to quell any lingering revolutionary feeling with acts of public benevolence, it was not simply out of the generosity of their hearts. Images of the eviction broadcast on the CBC throughout Tuesday had mobilised a considerable bloc of public feeling against the authorities in Manchester, for whom the notion of a student occupation had previously been abstract and evoked little sympathy or solidarity. In particular, many among those who remembered Fiona Carradine’s articulate performance on CBC News only a week earlier had been horrified on Tuesday night to see footage of her arrest on uncertain grounds – the image of her being led out of University Place flanked by WB volunteers not unlike that one might have seen under the Mosley regime. At all levels – from Chairman Lewis, to regional WB commanders and city council officials, to bureaucrats in university management – the authorities in Britain had over the previous days exercised powerful muscles previously unused for some time. This public reminder that considerable mechanisms of state power still existed in the Commonwealth gave a stark indication of how little ground, in some ways, the reforms of the previous six years had put between the old regime and the new. Judicious massaging of public opinion was now required to prevent the shock from metastasising into a fresh wave of disorder.
Thus, having put off further confrontation with ‘fundamental principles’ for as long as he could, with the Free University consigned to history a raft of deeper issues remained exposed to Chairman Lewis, demanding to be faced.[28] These included: the unsolved questions of political, cultural and economic autonomy; the programme of centralisation and managerial reform; the negotiation of new limits on rights of protest and the right to strike; and (perhaps most pressingly of all) the rising incidence of revolutionary and reactionary extremism. The first two issues, those of autonomism and centralisation, were those with the longest histories prior to the eruption of the Free University, having also formed the nucleus of the unrest that characterised the ‘Black Winter’ of 1966/7. In the present day, the two questions remained to be fought over in the legislature in the protracted battles around the Industrial Relations (Conciliation) Bill and the Mines and Quarries (Safety) Bill – the latter scheduled for its second reading on October 19, and the former for its third reading on November 7. As such, the two matters could be considered, if not safely so, then certainly to one degree or another under control. Hence the next issue presented itself for consideration: that of the right to strike. The closure of the Free University having seen UTW members in Manchester return to work, the injunction under consideration by local magistrates had all at once lost its validity. No sooner had the courts received the appeal for an injunction from the university’s lawyers than it had been thrown out as redundant. Lewis’s attempt to sneak through a ruling clarifying (and, he hoped, reinforcing) the laws against unofficial strikes thus came to nothing, and any subsequent action on the topic, it appeared, would have to go through the legislature – at that time a politically contentious (one might even say foolhardy) proposition.
David Lewis, back in control.
With this possibility in mind, it almost seemed confected, therefore, when, in the days after the resumption of usual business at the University of Manchester, the legal question of unofficial strikes gained fresh impetus. The circumstances by which the matter was reinvigorated had much to do with the fourth of the problems I have outlined facing Britain that autumn: the resurgence of political extremism on the left and on the right. The brief life of the Free University in Manchester had brought together both poles of the new extremism – first (let us not forget) in its birth out of the embers of a dispute over protests in sympathy with Welsh autonomist kidnappers; and second, in its death following a panic over public safety sparked by the unwanted attentions of right-wing authoritarian counter-protestors. In the country at large, public opinion was split along a spectrum ranging from sympathy with one tendency or another – or else caught in the middle, fixed in shock. The broad centre-ground consensus that was the foundation of mainstream politics in the Commonwealth of the 1960s, with its belief in efficient, munificent state control and its faith in the transcendent strength of liberal democracy, was neither so young nor so fragile as might be assumed if one takes its birth as having occurred some time between the years 1961 and 1964. In reality, the liberal consensus that gave a unified character to the post-Mosley world had its roots at least a decade beforehand, in opposition to the mounting authoritarianism of the Mosley regime. It was the mature politics of the youth movement that had challenged Mosleyism as far back as the late Forties, and its political representatives were of a generation whose lives – public and private – had been marked by a struggle against the creep of totalitarianism. Having finally achieved dominance after a march a generation long through Britain’s cultural and political institutions, it was frustrated by the vision of its approaching supersession, right at the point of its triumph, by new forms of opposition. Confronting its two main opponents, it addressed to each one fundamental question: to the left, ‘are you not satisfied with things as they are?’; and to the right , ‘how could you want things to be as they were before?’. (The answers were the familiar ones: freedom, power, security, and so on)
In Manchester, the defeated students and university workers had been unsuccessful in their attempt to press home an advantage for the left alternative, autonomism. The alternative itself, however, remained alive. So too did the reaction against it; this much was evident from the brute efficiency with which the right had been able to organise to close the Free University, ultimately spooking the authorities enough to compel them to lend their power to the reactionary cause. This fact should not be underestimated in its significance: for the first time in the post-Mosley era, the state had been compelled by popular pressure to intervene against the broad movement of workers.[29] In effect, this represented an admission that the anti-liberal reaction had grown to a position where its strength was sufficient to demand concessions from power-holders – certainly on a regional level, if not yet nationally. One could also frame the point from the opposite perspective: that it was now politically reckless to ignore the right-wing opinion. Almost totally obscured by the flow of events rushing from development to development, political life in the Commonwealth passed a point from which there could be no easy return, threatening an imminent re-writing of its most enduring paradigms. For those sensitive to the change, these were times of acute importance.
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Demonstration in solidarity with the defeated students against Mosleyism and Powellism, London, 1967.
Joan Lestor, the New Socialist Front's education spokesperson, is seated in the front row, fourth from the right.
Those most sensitive, perhaps predictably, were on the whole those most readily convinced by the idea that the Commonwealth had not yet gone far enough in its efforts to leave behind the spectre of Mosleyism. In the vanguard were, of course, the autonomists. The reactionary insurgence in Manchester had already shocked left-wing groups locally – compounded by public celebrations by Mosleyites and their allies at ‘their’ victory over the Free University – and in the days after the eviction of University Place many translated their shock into action. On Wednesday evening, somewhere in the order of a thousand people came together in Albert Square to protest both the eviction and the rise of authoritarian sentiment in the city. Among the crowd were veterans of the Free University occupation, but many more were sympathetic allies who had come to express their solidarity against what was widely perceived by the left and centre-left as a grave misuse of state power. Speakers including Fiona Carradine (freshly freed from WB detention) and Maggie Roberts eulogised the Free University and made rallying cries for the continued fight against centralisation and creeping authoritarianism, while allies from other left-wing organisations called for concrete actions to remind the state of their power. Most notably, Roy Tonkinson of the Manchester Trade Unions’ Assembly, a body representing the numerous trade union branches operative in the city, called for a day’s go-slow the next day in protest against the ‘injustice’ of the eviction. Many heeded the call, and the next day industry in Manchester was brought to within touching distance of a halt by workers angry at the treatment of the occupiers and the concessions made to the Mosleyites.
Most noticeable were the slow-downs undertaken by workers employed by the local authority – including at the council itself. Stanley Orme recollected many years later how embarrassed he felt when he chided his office tea lady for the long delay in receiving a drink that afternoon – only for her to tell him that she was happy to bear any frustration he cared to articulate if it meant he would stop and think about being so quiescent the next time he had to confront Mosleyists. ‘The realisation that I had valued political convenience over moral conviction in my handling of the eviction’, he said when asked about the affair by a journalist only last year, ‘coloured my engagements with the authoritarian parties from that moment onwards. I knew then that I could not afford to be so compliant a second time.’[30]
By far the most far-reaching of the actions against authoritarianism in Manchester, however, was that undertaken by staff at Moss Side Infants’ School, where a group of five teachers stopped work entirely on Thursday 5 in solidarity with students and staff at the university in their fight against domineering management, and also more broadly against the right-wing violence that had precipitated the eviction. Janet Unwin, one of the five, spoke eloquently about the group’s motivations when asked by a reporter from the Manchester Guardian at the end of the first day of their protest:
The world in which we grew up was one of terrible repression, with a government by men who wished to control every aspect of daily life. Those of us protesting today are of an age where we started our working lives just as this repression seemed, finally, to be a thing of the past. But now echoes of it have returned, and our present government have demonstrated that, when pushed, they will sooner side with the bullies than with the people. Having lived through such a world ourselves, we cannot stand by and watch a return to this sort of authoritarianism, where our children are demonised and our rights to teach and learn freely are subject to attack. While we are compelled to speak out by our consciences, we speak out most of all for the children in our care who should not have to grow up worrying about the same sorts of repression that we did. It is for their sake, and the sake of the world that they will grow up in, that we call upon the local authorities and the national government to condemn the recent demonstrations by supporters of Mosley and Enoch Powell, and take a proper stand against the return of fear and division in our society.
The five were tacitly supported in their walkout by headteacher Roberta Riordan, who had little love of her own for Mosleyism. Riordan had lost her husband prematurely to a heart attack some years before, induced, she always suspected, by years of stress following his blacklisting after taking a leading role agitating for improved pay and conditions in the strike wave of winter 1947. When asked by the same Guardian reporter whether she condoned the teachers’ protest, she danced teasingly around the subject, praising the five for their principled stance and assuring parents that the school was not neglecting its duty of care for their children in the meantime. Riordan was a well-respected figure locally, and her steadfastness went a long way to reassure parents who might otherwise have worried that the teachers were playing politics while playing fast and loose with their children’s education. In truth, however, any such worries were few and far between. Moss Side was home to a long-established working-class community, bolstered on a number of occasions by immigrant newcomers, who had gained far more in the short years of CPGB rule than during the long Mosleyite ascendency. The area had been little touched by the material investment Mosley poured into Manchester’s ‘modern industries’ during the 1940s and 50s; its inhabitants still lived, for the most part, in CPGB-built housing, and its workers still found employment in the old industries: transport, light industry, and chief of all brewing. Its voters were solidly left-leaning, and hardly inclined to support calls for a return to a regime from which they had barely benefitted.
CPGB-era houses in Moss Side, shortly after their construction in the early 1930s.
(Note the communal allotment front and centre.)
Suspicions of the new Mosleyite movement were only enhanced when, alongside their story on the protesting teachers in Moss Side, the Manchester Guardian published a piece on Friday 6 reporting that authorities investigating the vandalism of the Group for Action’s Manchester offices on Monday had discovered inconsistencies in the accounts supplied by several key witnesses. Without alleging any specific wrongdoing, the innuendo cast serious doubt on the GfA’s claims to have been the victim of an attack by supporters of the student movement – particularly in the absence of any claims of responsibility for the vandalism by autonomist groups.[31] The timing of the two stories – perhaps engineered by sympathetic editors at the Guardian – worked to the great benefit of the five teachers, who saw the moral heart of their argument strengthened in the eyes of the neutral public as their opponent’s credibility declined. For John Freeman, however, it was an annoying embarrassment. That morning in the Assembly, domestic secretary Dick Crossman appeared for weekly questions on his department’s policy. Freeman planned to use the occasion to speak out against the over-zealous policing of ‘legitimate political activity’ by supporters of his party the previous weekend and at University Place. In the event, his speech – which included critical remarks aimed against the WB, whom he alleged had demonstrated bias in favour of ‘left-wing agitators’ – was undermined by Crossman himself when the minister referenced the Guardian article in his reply. Defending the conduct of the WB in Manchester on Monday evening as a ‘proportionate response to mob unrest’, Crossman concluded his response to Freeman by suggesting that, ‘if half of what I read in my newspaper over breakfast this morning is true, perhaps I should be politely advising the WB that they pay more, not less, attention to the activities of the Comrade member’s party’.
Crossman.
David Lewis did not attend the debate on policing, but he was not uninterested by the unfolding dispute in Moss Side. Ever the opportunist, he saw in the teachers’ protest a second chance to push through his desired clarification of the question of unofficial strikes without having to resort to legislation. While Crossman defended the conduct of the WB in Manchester, Lewis placed a call to the director of the Manchester City Board of Education, Harold Roding, encouraging him to seek a court injunction against the teachers in Moss Side. Roding agreed, anxious to forestall any proliferation of the dispute to other schools, and privately scornful of the teachers’ ‘foolishness’ in making a grand statement against what he saw as a ‘vague’ political point. He had already planned to consult the board on bringing charges of misconduct against the teachers, but this would have involved a lengthy tribunal process and, without the co-operation of the school’s headteacher (an unlikely prospect, as we have seen), offered scant possibility of success. An injunction would circumvent the problem while offering greater consequence in the event of non-cooperation
On Tuesday morning, the courts granted the education board’s request for an injunction, to go into effect from midnight. The magistrate presiding agreed with the interpretation of the board that the protest constituted illegal strike activity, placing an interdiction on all stoppages in schools under the board’s authority that had not first been called and passed by the local union. By midday, the news of the ruling had reached Moss Side. The five protesting teachers conferred, consulting their union representatives and Roberta Riordan, soon coming to the conclusion that there was little that could now be done to sustain the walkout without risking serious consequences. At a minimum, if the five teachers continued their stoppage on Wednesday they would likely be charged with contempt of court – of which they would almost certainly be found guilty, and subsequently fined or even imprisoned. The Manchester branch of the National Union of School Workers (NUSW) resolved to pass an emergency motion calling upon the central union executive to appeal the ruling in a higher court, on the grounds that the decisions interfered with the basic right of protest, but noted that this would be a lengthy process and would not overturn the injunction in the immediate term. Similarly, it would not be possible to organise at such sort notice any sort of retroactive confirmatory vote to legitimise the action in Moss Side; this would have been as legally dubious as it would have been logistical challenging. The one small hope that the five retained rested on the fact that, being a civil injunction, in order to be enforced the education board would have to issue an order of committal against them, for which they would need to know their names and addresses. Four of the five remained anonymous, but Janet Unwin had been named in the Guardian article on Friday, making her a likely target for prosecution. Hence, with the consequences of continued action all but certain, only one consideration remained to decide whether the five would walk out again on Wednesday: did the fight against Mosleyism outweigh the likelihood of personal persecution? All five were agreed: yes, it did.
Striking teachers (and pupils) demonstrate in solidarity with the Moss Side Five, November 1967.
On Wednesday morning, the five resumed their stations by the school gates, now augmented by a number of supporters arrived to wish them strength and bring expressions of solidarity from various local groups. The protestors’ intentions had been heralded in that morning’s Guardian under the headline ‘Teachers in Moss Side to defy strike ban order’, and later that morning further representatives of the media arrived to hear directly from the young women at the heart of an unlikely political row. A CBC news crew came to interview the five for a live segment for that afternoon’s local News at 12, happening to catch the arrival of education board representatives shortly after noon. The board officials confronted the strikers, confirming that they were aware of the injunction (they were, said the five) and informing them that they would soon be receiving summons to appear in court for acting in breach of its terms. Uncertain whether the officials were bluffing – four of the five still, so far as anyone knew, anonymous in the public eye – the protestors remained outwardly untroubled by the news, which in any event could have come as no great shock. The next morning, the arrivals of summons at the homes of each of the five confirmed that the board had been founded in their threats; somehow, the names and addresses of the protesters had been passed on to the courts, and the dispute would now go to trial. Clearly, the stage was now set for a fresh battle over the right to protest, its significance far exceeding the confines of south Manchester. Once again, the Lewis government would fight its corner in favour of greater control over the unions – but not before one final wry intervention from fate.
As the Moss Side Five prepared themselves to take their moral arguments to court, in Westminster news spread through the Assembly that Chairman Lewis planned to address the chamber at midday, in a closed session, on a mater of urgent significance. Usually, such an announcement would suggest a government in decaying health – and while Lewis’s was a ministry wracked by its fair share of complaints, it was still a far sight from dying. It must therefore be some other topic – but what? By five to twelve, the chamber was in full session. Lewis arrived a couple of minutes later; shortly after, after all the requisite appeals from Michael Foot for quiet, in a calm and measured voice, he began to speak:
Good afternoon, comrades. I thank the assembled members for convening here at such short notice. The matter on which I now speak to the chamber is a serious one, and one which, I believe, is sufficiently grave as to merit more sensitive handling than that which may be the result if the first the members hear of it is as an item on tonight’s television news.
This morning, shortly after 5 o’clock, a unit of agents from the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence located Mr Albert Roberts, along with five members of the terrorist paramilitary group calling itself the ‘Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru’, in a remote farmhouse, four miles north-west of the town of Llangefni, on the Welsh island of Anglesey. The agents stormed the farmhouse in an attempt to secure both the safe recovery of Mr Roberts, and the apprehension of the kidnappers. I regret to inform the Assembly that, in the course of this operation, Mr Roberts was killed. In addition to the death of Mr Roberts, two of the MAC paramilitaries were also killed during the operation. A third sustained minor injuries. The the three surviving paramilitaries have been arrested and taken into secure custody.
I thank the comrade members of the house for their attention, and assure them that my government will be acting swiftly and decisively over the coming hours and days to prevent any further disorder as a result of this news.
I will not be taking any further questions at this time.
…
___________________________________
18: OOC: A reminder, seeing as it’s been a while, that the UTW is the Amalgamated Union of University Teachers and Workers. In our world, there are currently multiple unions representing the various groups who work in further and higher education, the most prominent of whom are arguably the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), representing teaching staff and some support staff, and UNISON, a wide-ranging super-union (though not, it must be said, a super union…) for various public sector workers. (Other large business unions like the GMB also have a noticeable presence on campuses.) Historically there has been some tension between the teaching and non-teaching unions, with the UCU and its forebears having at various points displayed the character of a so-called ‘craft union’, ie a union open only to members of one particular craft (or, if you prefer, closed to all others). These days, changes in how most academic contracts work (ie, most are no longer permanent) has led broadly to a revision of this strict professional bias, and the UCU has a fairly cordial relationship with its sister sectoral unions like UNISON. In the Commonwealth, the alternative to craft unionism, ‘industrial unionism’, where all workers in one industry are organised together, regardless of specialism, has a far greater foothold owing to the lingering historical influence of syndicalism. The UTW, being an amalgamated union, is therefore home to all university and college workers under one banner.
This does bring up the question of why, so far in this dispute most of the focus has been on teaching staff? The answer is not especially elegant, and hinges on the fact that the dispute remains ‘unofficial’. Under Mosley-era trade union laws, yet to be repealed (and in fact quite well supported by the Lewisites), for strike action to be legally valid it must be backed up by a simple majority vote of the relevant union membership. In this case, however, as has already been endlessly litigated over, staff have not withheld their labour but have rather been prevented from supplying it in the form of an effective lockout. Hence at no point has the UTW called an official vote to down tools. The nature of the lockout leaves maintenance staff and some support staff better able to continue working as normal, thus the whole thing has taken on the character of a teachers’ strike. Which, strictly, it isn’t. (Yet.)
19: OOC: There is a modern building called ‘University Place’ in our own timeline’s University of Manchester, but the building described here is not the same one. TTL’s University Place is no doubt a 1950’s construction, probably built with the assistance of central government money during Mosley’s cultivation of Manchester as a centre of scientific and technological excellence. (Ironically, it probably looks more like the OTL Steve Biko Building, home to Manchester’s student union.)
20: OOC: Again, not to be confused with OTL paper The Mancunion, whose portmanteau name (‘Mancunian’ + ‘union’) is no doubt appropriate – but just strikes me as a little… contrived. Aside from this narcissism of small aesthetic difference, there is a more concrete reason for the change. The OTL paper arose in 1964 to correct a perceived lack of coverage of student union issues in the main student paper, the Manchester Independent; I don’t think there would be any such need in this timeline, where the overall student community is more radical.
21: In common with all other colleges of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, named as they were for royalty, religion or wealthy aristocratic benefactors, Wadham underwent a name change during the first years of CPGB government. The college was renamed for notable alumnus, the polymath Christopher Wren, most famous as the architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Independent of the ‘Red Wadham’ episode (for more on which, see here), Wren has developed and maintained a reputation as being one of the most progressive of any college at either Oxford or Cambridge – a reputation which no doubt owes much to its notorious Warden, Professor Maurice Bowra (1898–1971). Bowra, a young don in 1927, though already Dean of College, was a singular figure whose own strong personal ethic combined a sincere, though somewhat amateur leftism with a fierce, extroverted wit and an unflagging commitment to personal liberalism. (He kept an open secret of his homosexuality, even at the lowest points of the Mosley-era terror.) Managing to stay securely in-post at Wren throughout the chilly Mosley years, when his eccentric, aristocratic fellow-traveller status earned him a more than his fair share of suspicion from the regime, Bowra’s considerable personal charm paid dividends in helping him to navigate changeable political waters. Michael Foot, a student at Wren during the CPGB years, was a lifelong friend, and Bevan’s education secretary Dick Crossman, himself an Oxbridge don, if more retiring than Bowra, was a natural ally. This unusual longevity gave Bowra influence over the character of Wren’s political and intellectual climate, far outstripping that of almost any other Oxbridge college. Its resulting reputation for left-wing ecumenicism endures to the present day, evident even after Bowra’s retirement in 1970 in, for example, in the demonstrations in solidarity with East Timor in mid-Seventies.
22: ‘OMS’. Organisation for the Maintenance of Supply: a counter-revolutionary paramilitary force instituted by Winston Churchill in 1927 firstly to insulate the Conservative government against the ill-effects of the general strike, and latterly to defend the regime against the workers’ movement. It was modelled along the lines of the British Fascisti’s paramilitary ‘Q divisions’, whose members were officially barred from joining the OMS, but who in reality were eagerly accepted into the ranks of Churchill’s organisation. The OMS had been largely defeated by the time Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government fell in February 1928 and was not actively revived by Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour ministry.
‘at least two of the OUCP’s founding members’. The four responsible for ‘Red Wadham’ were Tom Driberg, John Lawson, Cecil Reid and Alan Taylor. Neither Lawson nor Reid chose to enter public life after Oxford, though both seem to have maintained relationships with the CPGB at least until 1956. Alan Taylor, known to the wider public as A. J. P. Taylor, is a well-known historian, controversial in recent years for his public defences of Chairman Mosley. (He published a political biography, Mosley: A Political Life, in 1969 – to sustained criticism.) Tom Driberg, a writer and former war correspondent, was the only one of the group to have kept faith in the CPGB after 1956, remaining a vocal advocate for the party until his death in 1976.
23: ‘a black banner emblazoned with a single white “F”’. The motif was apparently obscure enough to go unnoticed by the attendant WB, who give no indication of having recognised the public display of a proscribed symbol. (The following week, back-bench Labour–Unionist AM Dolores Bradley, one of the newly-elected members for the West Midlands region at the election in May, raised the mater in the Assembly during a question-and-answer session with domestic secretary Dick Crossman. Crossman assured Bradley that he had passed on details of the incident to the relevant authorities, and that he treated the public display of fascist symbols with the utmost gravity.)
24: As I have already discussed, this was not the first occasion on which Lewis took this pragmatic approach, having made this his public position when attempting to treat the crisis in the coal industry as a matter of safety standards without troubling the issue of autonomy. I argued in that case that the premier’s manoeuvre displayed a resonance with Mosley’s distinction in 1928 between the ‘emergency programme’ and the ‘fundamental principle’. Here I must credit him with not legitimising the complaints of a radical right-wing minority with a national response – though I would criticise his ultimate lack of attention towards the extremist problem.
25: OOC: For the uninitiated…
26: Allegedly, Professor Underwood had requested that the force be supplemented by a water-cannon from the local fire brigade. Evidently, if such a request were made, Commander Hathersage did not humour it.
27: ‘barracks’. OOC: Having its origins in a paramilitary organisation, much of the language associated with the WB remains a more openly militaristic edge than that of our own police force.
28: ‘with the Free University now history’. This statement is not, strictly, true: across the Commonwealth, occupations at varying scales sprang up in sympathy with the Manchester Free University in the days after the occupation, all declaring themselves branches of a Commonwealth-wide Free University. Sites of occupation included the universities of: Cambridge, Colchester, Glasgow, Lancaster, Liverpool, London (College of Art) Reading, Southampton, Swansea and Warwick. Many – Keele and London College of Art being the most notable examples, surviving for 15 and 23 days, respectively – ultimately outlived the original Manchester occupation, but none received such widespread media coverage, and so none achieved the same level of notoriety within the popular imagination. All, however, would prove locally significant in the fullness of time.
29: I am choosing to discount the obvious and significant counter-example of the campaign against the Free Pits the previous winter on two grounds: firstly, that the Lewis government freely pursued a reactionary policy against the miners; and secondly, that the state was ultimately unsuccessful in its attempts to re-establish ‘order’.
30: Stanley Orme, interviewed in ‘“Five days of exhilarating freedom”: Remembering the Manchester Free University, fifteen years on’, by Gemma Gould. New Partisan Review, October 1982.
31: While I do not wish to give credence to the ‘strategy of tension’ conspiracy theory extant in certain left-wing circles (the alleged spate of ‘false flag’ activity by right-leaning, government-backed forces beginning during the troubled second half of the 1960s, calculated to incite opposition to the resurgent left), it is worth noting that in this case, while the investigation was ultimately inconclusive, the balance of probabilities does seem to suggest some degree of wrong-doing by agents of the GfA and/or their allies.
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There it is, at long last.
A lot to digest, but I felt I owed you all something substantial after the long, long wait. I hope it lives up to expectations. Felt like I was blowing off cobwebs at times while writing it (an especially protracted process; I wrote the first 2 thousand words in December and then the latter 10 thousand last week).
I do appreciate the ever-growing irony of waiting thirteen months in between two sections of a chapter of a fictional book entitled 'The Longest Year'. I started the bloody thing in December 2020. Here's hoping I can see it off before it hits its fourth birthday – or maybe even its third…
I will aim for the next chapter to be a bit less unwieldy as we continue our stop-start journey to the finish line. It would be nice to have something else for you all before the year is out, but I have learnt not to make promises. In any event, I hope you enjoy this latest piece!
A lot to digest, but I felt I owed you all something substantial after the long, long wait. I hope it lives up to expectations. Felt like I was blowing off cobwebs at times while writing it (an especially protracted process; I wrote the first 2 thousand words in December and then the latter 10 thousand last week).
I do appreciate the ever-growing irony of waiting thirteen months in between two sections of a chapter of a fictional book entitled 'The Longest Year'. I started the bloody thing in December 2020. Here's hoping I can see it off before it hits its fourth birthday – or maybe even its third…
I will aim for the next chapter to be a bit less unwieldy as we continue our stop-start journey to the finish line. It would be nice to have something else for you all before the year is out, but I have learnt not to make promises. In any event, I hope you enjoy this latest piece!
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The student union smacks of inmates running the asylum. What do they want? (In real terms, not some utopian dream.) Thanks
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I've got to say, certainly a wild ride from start to finish. I empathize with those WB guys. Never easy to make an arrest on idealists. Not that I've been put in that position specifically yet, but seen it happening. Kinda makes me wish that we could just be reasonable with one another, say "Okay, you've made your point, thank you for exercising your First Amendment rights; now let me handle my job peaceably so that we can get on with our lives."
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Welcome back, and with another long and gripping chapter. I love how Lewis tries to use the legal system to crack down on strikers without having to actually change the law but only the way in which it is applied, nice and sneaky, even if it might still blow up in his face.
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"Excuse me - sorry - excuse me - pardon ma'am - terribly sorry - ..."
<filcat tries to get to the reserved seat at the theatre, but being late as always means passing along all the row - manoeuvring, jumping, hopping around, over, through what is available among the audience>
"Terribly sorry - thank you - yeah, sorry for that - if you could've - pardon me - ..."
<finally makes it to the seat, filcat sits, and every other one makes the noise of grumble and disapproval and relief, all at the same time, after the seating-aikido of another late-comer to the play ends. Excitement prevails, as all including filcat have been waiting the another chapter of the play for so long, and now it is there for them to watch, listen, read, digest, smell, feel>
<the newest chapter of the play opens with john lennon>
<filcat rolls eyes in a full circle, and with an audibly loud whisper>
"For faqs sake..."
<all in the house react immediately>
"Shhh!"
<filcat tries to get to the reserved seat at the theatre, but being late as always means passing along all the row - manoeuvring, jumping, hopping around, over, through what is available among the audience>
"Terribly sorry - thank you - yeah, sorry for that - if you could've - pardon me - ..."
<finally makes it to the seat, filcat sits, and every other one makes the noise of grumble and disapproval and relief, all at the same time, after the seating-aikido of another late-comer to the play ends. Excitement prevails, as all including filcat have been waiting the another chapter of the play for so long, and now it is there for them to watch, listen, read, digest, smell, feel>
<the newest chapter of the play opens with john lennon>
<filcat rolls eyes in a full circle, and with an audibly loud whisper>
"For faqs sake..."
<all in the house react immediately>
"Shhh!"
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The Commonwealth continues to be the most relentlessly depressing British dystopia I've ever seen, there is no green shoot of hope that is not ruthlessly stamped on, no light in the distance that does not prove to be an oncoming train. A truly impressive achievement, Dr Roberts being a particular high/low point depending on one's perspective.
The in-character footnotes are nice. I say nice, they are mostly little vignettes on how awful everything is, but they are very well done.
In terms of the wider debate there is a touching faith in the courts from the unions which I find slightly baffling. Even assuming the laws are fairly written there is no way the judges aren't bent. The verdict will be what the government want it to be regardless of any trivialities like fact or the law. The question then becomes do the unions start using industrial muscle and the general sympathy they likely have to continue the fight, I suspect they do but either way I look forward to finding out.
"The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings" as Oscar would say. Plus of course it means that power never ends up with the 'people' but instead with those with the willpower to sit through such relentless tedium and master the bureaucracy.
Why is she not busy fighting the traitors and deviaonists of the Maoist People's Revolutionary Communist League due to a disagreement about where the comma goes in Line 4 of the Manifesto? Very suspicious.
As in both groups depend on everyone else in society subsiding them, while showing open and naked contempt for the people subsidising them?
This is of course true, but when has truth ever counted for anything in a debate? The best course of action would have been leaving them to it and waiting them out, of course that has a short term political cost but letting the protest collapse under the weight of it's own contradictions would be valuable.
As the whole point of Marx is an inevitable revolution I'm not sure this is absurd. But then the in-character author is hardly the most balanced of people about those he disagrees with so it certainly fits.
Ha! This can only be right-wing in the "Right wing of the Labour Party" sense of the word. That said there seems to be a howling void between centre-left and fascist in the Commonwealth so I suppose words would adapt to the new reality.
The in-character footnotes are nice. I say nice, they are mostly little vignettes on how awful everything is, but they are very well done.
In terms of the wider debate there is a touching faith in the courts from the unions which I find slightly baffling. Even assuming the laws are fairly written there is no way the judges aren't bent. The verdict will be what the government want it to be regardless of any trivialities like fact or the law. The question then becomes do the unions start using industrial muscle and the general sympathy they likely have to continue the fight, I suspect they do but either way I look forward to finding out.
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@DensleyBlair I must compliment you on this... not sure what to call it. But it's amazing. It's part documentary of all the turmoil of the '60s, part college textbook with more detail than a documentary could ever take time to give.
I'm not claiming to have absorbed this whole thing -- it's quite a lot to digest. But you certainly capture the topsy-turvy atmosphere of disruption, disruptors and shifting sands well.
I'm kind of popping from update to update and trying to get a feel for the whole picture. But even by just doing that I can appreciate the scope of your project, and it's quite fascinating.
Rensslaer
But it's amazing. It's part documentary of all the turmoil of the '60s, part college textbook with more detail than a documentary could ever take time to give.I'm not claiming to have absorbed this whole thing -- it's quite a lot to digest. But you certainly capture the topsy-turvy atmosphere of disruption, disruptors and shifting sands well.
I'm kind of popping from update to update and trying to get a feel for the whole picture. But even by just doing that I can appreciate the scope of your project, and it's quite fascinating.
Rensslaer
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I thought it was well worth the wait. While this update about college unrest (there were times I was reminded of college unrest in the US during the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly at Berkley) was long, it's engrossing to the point that I lost track of time. "How will this side react to that action? I got to know."
Looking forward to what comes next in the longest year(s).
Fiona Carradine is arrested by WB volunteers.
Getting arrested in a 1960s miniskirt. If you are going to get arrested, you might as well be fashionable.
That's a good point, El Pip. People are always arguing over who is really the true adherent to a particular ideology and who isn't.
"You are not (insert ideology here) enough!"
"What do you mean? I am more (insert ideology here) than you are!"
*they get into a fist fight over who is the "true" (insert ideology here)*
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Apologies, everyone -- after an absurd length of time away I'm back to respond to your comments. But then again, if I'm on the 1.5 updates a year schedule then maybe this is an appropriate speed with which to take everything in. (Thoughts, @El Pip ?)
I've been laid low by that cold everyone's had recently so I've been afforded a day in bed with nothing to do except feel mildly sorry for myself. Part of me feels like this would be the perfect state of mind in which to get to work on more Echoes… We shall see what fate brings.
Anyway: to your comments!
As for their demands: in the immediate term, recall that this protest was about freedoms of assembly and freedoms of expression; the students were reacting against what was, in their view, over-heavy policing of (left) political sentiments being expressed publicly. This has been overtaken by a general movement for 'freedom', which broadly will include things like staff/student control over teaching and assessments, more 'democratic' decisions on funding and financing, and no doubt ending certain long-standing relationships between academic research and the 'military-industrial complex'. (Much of Manchester's prestige as a university in this timeline comes from its position as Mosley's primary STEM research hub, providing many of the brains that developed Britain's brawn during the graves years of the Cold War.)
Of course, were the Commonwealth not going through a period of great political realignment and turmoil, with a government generally set on various rights to strike and so on, then none of this would be nearly so important. But in this regard the movement is as much a beneficiary of its time as it is a product of it.
Sorry fil. Hopefully this means the chapter could only get better from the start though, right?
It is also worth repeating that after nearly fifty years of alternate history, 'left' and 'right in our alternate Cold War have little resemblance to our own world.
Of course, the unions benefitting and the members benefitting are two totally different things -- which is why the autonomist movement has sprung up at all. But broadly speaking, if the magistrates are bent then the mainstream unions have fairly decent ground to imagine they'll be bent towards their cause.
As things stand, the left are threatened but still strong and so present a united front in defence. How long it can withstand Lewis's assaults without cracking, however, remains to be seen -- especially with the latest developments from Wales…
I've been laid low by that cold everyone's had recently so I've been afforded a day in bed with nothing to do except feel mildly sorry for myself. Part of me feels like this would be the perfect state of mind in which to get to work on more Echoes… We shall see what fate brings.
Anyway: to your comments!
Thanks for commenting, MD! Student movements are always funny beasts: caught up in political struggles which seem relevant only to a vanishingly small group of people beyond the academy, but for very creditable reasons deeply deeply concerned by those struggles. From the outside it gives them a very eccentric character, and from within it can make for highly dysfunctional movements.
As for their demands: in the immediate term, recall that this protest was about freedoms of assembly and freedoms of expression; the students were reacting against what was, in their view, over-heavy policing of (left) political sentiments being expressed publicly. This has been overtaken by a general movement for 'freedom', which broadly will include things like staff/student control over teaching and assessments, more 'democratic' decisions on funding and financing, and no doubt ending certain long-standing relationships between academic research and the 'military-industrial complex'. (Much of Manchester's prestige as a university in this timeline comes from its position as Mosley's primary STEM research hub, providing many of the brains that developed Britain's brawn during the graves years of the Cold War.)
Of course, were the Commonwealth not going through a period of great political realignment and turmoil, with a government generally set on various rights to strike and so on, then none of this would be nearly so important. But in this regard the movement is as much a beneficiary of its time as it is a product of it.
Thanks Wraith! I'm sure there was a fair bit of reluctance from a number in the WB to break things up. Which wouldn't have helped things with the Powellites, of course…
Thanks Rover! Lewis is definitely having to get creative -- particularly with things so fractiously balanced in the Assembly. By this point it's sort of an open secret that his coalition with Crossman and the LUPA is dead in the water, so in order to keep government running he's made the hardheaded if somewhat foolhardy decision to use as many of his executive powers as possible. But given what the last (but two) guy got up to with executive powers, it's understandably going to leave quite a lot of people suspicious of his intentions.
Hahahaha
Sorry fil. Hopefully this means the chapter could only get better from the start though, right?
Wonderful to have you back in the thread, Pip. I'm not entirely sure there is anyone out there who would be happy about Dr Roberts (I almost had to sterilise my keyboard after writing her parts) but there we are: the topsy-turvy world of the Commonwealth writ large.
Quite so -- though when the people vote with their feet and decide not to back anything the bureaucrats decide upon, some balance of democracy can at least be restored. No point six people voting through a contentious action if only six people then make it happen.
Your powers of perception serve you well, Pip. My feeling is that as soon as the student coalition shows any signs of coming apart, the Maoists will be the first to unleash the recriminations.
I'm sure they see it more along the lines of "we keep society running" (YMMV) but the logic of your interpretation is valid enough.
Chairman Lewis is in too much of a hurry to afford people the time to make their mistakes for him.
I actually intended the 'absurdly' there as a bit of a patrician back-hander to the Marxists as much as to the authorities. Not so much, 'this is an outrage!' as, 'these youngsters are obviously harmless, why not let them have their fun?' But then perhaps the distinction is irrelevant for anyone reading with a blanket mistrust of anyone to the left of Michael Heseltine.
You have answered your own question there, but it is worth emphasising again that 'left' and 'right' are relative terms.
It is also worth repeating that after nearly fifty years of alternate history, 'left' and 'right in our alternate Cold War have little resemblance to our own world.
Thank you. They began as a way to collect all the bits of information that couldn't make it into the update, and to remain myself of links with previous material, but I have come to enjoy the extra colour they can provide.
Don't neglect the extent to which the unions became part of the establishment during the Bevan years. Much of the work of 'anti-Mosleyfication' was 'reforming' the courts so that they were less hostile to unionism in general. The opposition to Lewis is much because he is an iconoclast dismantling the Bevanite settlement, which the unions benefited from massively, as it is over general principles.
Of course, the unions benefitting and the members benefitting are two totally different things -- which is why the autonomist movement has sprung up at all. But broadly speaking, if the magistrates are bent then the mainstream unions have fairly decent ground to imagine they'll be bent towards their cause.
It's a pleasure to have you here, Renss! Thank you for reading -- I hope you've enjoyed the bits you've managed to take in so far. Please do feel free to comment on any old updates if you happen to read any. Always intrigued to hear what people think of the earlier stuff, particularly as we get further in time from them!@DensleyBlair I must compliment you on this... not sure what to call it.
I'm not claiming to have absorbed this whole thing -- it's quite a lot to digest. But you certainly capture the topsy-turvy atmosphere of disruption, disruptors and shifting sands well.
I'm kind of popping from update to update and trying to get a feel for the whole picture. But even by just doing that I can appreciate the scope of your project, and it's quite fascinating.
Rensslaer
Thanks Nathan! Glad you enjoyed it and that it rang true to you.I thought it was well worth the wait. While this update about college unrest (there were times I was reminded of college unrest in the US during the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly at Berkley) was long, it's engrossing to the point that I lost track of time. "How will this side react to that action? I got to know."
Looking forward to what comes next in the longest year(s).
All the better to make a splash in the media!
In my experience there is far less of this when the left are confident and in the ascendant than there is when they are retreating and under attack. Which is a fairly backward reality but does make a certain instinctive sense (defeat is when people are drawn in recriminations; recriminations breed hostility).
As things stand, the left are threatened but still strong and so present a united front in defence. How long it can withstand Lewis's assaults without cracking, however, remains to be seen -- especially with the latest developments from Wales…
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Clearly this is a question that requires science. Applying the statistical methods honed on Wraiths AAR we start with the simple pattern 27 updates in 2021, 2 in 2022, 1 this year. The trend is clear and there will be no further chapters as it's all zeros from there on out, but that seems a tad grim so I will dismiss it. Instead let us plot the last two years of updates, if do so we can get a perfect R² of 1 and a prediction the next chapter will emerge April 2027, a gap that even I would be impressed by. Some may claim this is the result of trying to predict using only 3 data points. And some are probably correct.
Looking at the last three years, stripping out the Death of Bevan ones as they are basically one update, and plotting it all up you get a not exactly great R² of 0.69 but a reasonable sounding prediction of the next chapter being published in December 2024.
So on the statistically supported basis that you are going to get the chapter out until next year, your current comment response schedule is entirely appropriate.
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Nuclear war it is. Finish this world off, its beyond saving.
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I am still far too scarred from having made the very questionable decision over the summer to follow up watching Oppenheimer by watching Threads.
Wonderful bit of maths, @El Pip. I will endeavour to make a mockery of your grave predictions, unassailable though the logic behind them may be.
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Found both lacking. For some reason, the best nuclear bomb movie is still the original godzilla. Or that really dark british animation about an elderly couple dying slowly in their house.
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Ah, When the Wind Blows. With a title song by David Bowie, for some reason.
From the mind of the man who bought the world The Snowman, too. Some range that!
It does raise the question of whether the Echoes universe has the same cultural conception of the bomb. They’re both less of an historical feature, and at the same time far more abstract, unknown and potentially terrifying. I hope Barry Hines can stick to writing nice things about kestrels in this world, but if he ever does have to write Threads for whatever reason maybe it will end up being even more stark.
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Are you serious? The british get to write their own cultural perception of the bomb without any American pressure or influence.
They'll be absolutely fascinated with it, in the same way artists love every other extremely dark, deathly and resonant metaphor for literally everything you can think of.
Watership Down in this universe will be even bleaker and have nukes as well as chemical warfare gas attacks.
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I did wonder if all things nuclear would inevitably be viewed more bleakly if they were more mysterious and unknown. Then I remembered this is Echoverse and everything is bleaker, so why would the bomb be any different?
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