Jack Dromey and the Grunwick strike

Submitted by AWL on 8 January, 2022 - 9:08 Author: Mohan Sen
Jack Dromey

Birmingham Erdington Labour MP Jack Dromey has died unexpectedly aged 73.

Long a Transport and General Workers’ Union full-timer before he became an MP in 2010, before that Dromey played a central and generally positive role in one of the most important working-class struggles in British history – the 1976-8 Grunwick strike.

The book about the strike Dromey co-authored, Grunwick: the Workers’ Story, is very much worth reading.

In the 1970s he had CP-type politics and was close to the CP, but was a genuine class-struggle militant. Subsequently he moved a long way to the right. As a T&G official he generally opposed the union's leadership from the right. He was a middle-of-the-road or even right-wing Labour MP, resigning to overthrow Corbyn in 2016 and serving as a shadow minister under Starmer. He no longer supported the abolition of the anti-union laws introduced to prevent struggles like Grunwick.

On the other hand, many labour movement leaders and activists have paid tribute to Dromey, citing recent support for and assistance with their struggles. He supported the Birmingham refuse workers in their recent disputes and, just before his death, the Birmingham GKN workers. He would regularly turn up at rallies and picket lines. Clearly he remained more loyal to and concerned with the labour movement than many Labour MPs (though close to many who were much worse – for instance apparently close friends with corporate shill Patricia Hewitt). How he would have reacted to a new working-class struggle of the intensity and militancy of the Grunwick strike we will never know.

The key thing to take from Dromey's life is Grunwick. We must discuss and learn from that magnificent fight, resisting attempts to depoliticise it as something other than a militant mass working-class struggle; fight the struggles of today in the spirit of Grunwick; and reassert against the Labour right clear, radical policies on issues like migrants’ rights and the right to strike.

• Read more about Grunwick here
• Join our discussion on Grunwick (and Gate Gourmet) with Sundari Anitha on 30 January 2022: Eventbrite and Facebook

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