Britain’s Ascot of the Left

‘THE Ascot of the Left” is how someone described the extraordinary scenes outside Grunwick, a small film-processing company in a rundown part of North London. Just about everyone who is anyone in the world of big unions or radical chic has turned up on the picket lines, eager to catch the eye of the television cameras, rather like those ladies in fantastic hats who flock to the Royal Enclosure. The Liverpool Trades Council chartered a train to take their people south to the mass picket on August 18; the radical women’s libbers were there too; and Trotskyists and Communists made the occasion a test of their relative revolutionary machismo.

Arthur Scargill, the Marxist miners’ boss from Yorkshire, led his men south to face the police around Grunwick on successive “days of mass action” like some commissar of the International Brigade heading off to the Spanish Civil War. The image was somewhat tarnished by the discovery that these horny-handed heroes of the revolution were being paid £20 ($34.40) a day plus travel expenses out of union funds —and by the bizarre attempt of Scar- gill’s Communist side-kick, Maurice Jones, to seek political asylum in East Berlin after being charged with insulting behavior.

RM

About the Author

Robert Moss

‘THE Ascot of the Left” is how someone described the extraordinary scenes outside Grunwick, a small film-processing company in a rundown part of North London. Just about everyone who is anyone in the world of big unions or radical chic has turned up on the picket lines, eager to catch the eye of the television cameras, rather like those ladies in fantastic hats who flock to the Royal Enclosure. The Liverpool Trades Council chartered a train to take their people south to the mass picket on August 18; the radical women’s libbers were there too; and Trotskyists and Communists made the occasion a test of their relative revolutionary machismo.

Arthur Scargill, the Marxist miners’ boss from Yorkshire, led his men south to face the police around Grunwick on successive “days of mass action” like some commissar of the International Brigade heading off to the Spanish Civil War. The image was somewhat tarnished by the discovery that these horny-handed heroes of the revolution were being paid £20 ($34.40) a day plus travel expenses out of union funds —and by the bizarre attempt of Scar- gill’s Communist side-kick, Maurice Jones, to seek political asylum in East Berlin after being charged with insulting behavior.