Sabby Sagall

Dave Lyddon claims in his latest contribution to our discussion about the 1972 docks’ strike (Feedback, December SR) that the TUC threat to call a general strike was not key to the release of the Pentonville Five, that the crucial factor securing their release was growing unofficial action in which 250,000 workers had walked out by the time the Five were released in July 1972.

Clearly the TUC would not have acted without the unofficial strikes, but to describe the threat of a General Strike as “icing on the cake” underestimates its significance.

Fred Lindop is right to say that the 9-week London and Liverpool dockers’ strikes preceding their march supporting Enoch Powell in April 1968 following his “rivers of blood” speech had been over the “decasualisation” of dock labour rather than containerisation (Feedback, October 2019). Nor was it over housing as Dave Lyddon claims in his letter in the September issue.

On 20 April 1968, leading Tory politician Enoch Powell made his infamous “rivers of blood” speech in which he attacked mass immigration from the Commonwealth. Quoting from the Latin poet Virgil, he proclaimed: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most divisive political figures in the country.

Raph Piggot (Feedback, January SR) correctly attacks the EU for its role in imposing austerity on Greece and now Italy. However, the EU’s Social Chapter safeguards many workers’ rights — its working time regulations imposes a limit of 48 hours a week; young people under 18 are protected from super-exploitation by not being allowed to work more than 40 hours a week. Equal pay has been enshrined in EU law since 1957.

This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of 1968, that iconic year of struggle continues to provide inspiration in the fight for justice and equality. But there was also a sad anniversary: 2018 marked 50 years since the suicide of Tony Hancock, one of Britain’s best loved comedians, aged just 44.

At the height of his popularity 15 million people tuned into the radio programme, Hancock’s Half Hour, broadcast from 1954 to 1961, which doubled up as a television show from 1956.

Ian Taylor in September’s SR and Shaun Doherty in the October issue remind us that Brexit has unleashed a major crisis for the British ruling class and the Tories, caused by the anti-establishment vote to leave the EU.

But it has also created a major problem for the left and the forces of European anti-racism.

The EU is an unelected bureaucracy largely committed to neoliberal policies such as privatisation. In 2015 it hammered Greece with the imposition of austerity. It colluded with European governments that allowed hundreds of migrants to drown in the Mediterranean.

During the latter part of the 19th century and first years of the 20th, the European country which witnessed the most severe antisemitism was not Germany but the Russian Empire. The Tsarist state police would regularly organise pogroms during which drunken Black Hundreds or Cossacks would attack Jewish villages, murdering Jews and destroying their property.

The carnage and brutality of the First World War had punctured the balloon of late 19th century optimism and established that the industrial and scientific progress of capitalism had not led to a world based on justice and reason but to unimaginable horror. Industrial cities had produced unprecedented wealth but also poverty and alienation hitherto unknown.

Iain Ferguson quite correctly emphasises in his interview (November SR) that the roots of mental illness lie in capitalist society but that there is a Marxist psychoanalytical tradition that rejected Freud’s individualism.

The heart of John Rose’s argument (“Antisemitism and anti-Zionism today”, January SR) seems to me to be twofold: firstly, his emphasis on the need for dialogue between Israeli Jews and Palestinians as a precondition for resolution of the conflict. But secondly, it also raises the issue of the nature of Jewish cultural identity in a post-Zionist state of Palestine.