TERRY CONWAY and BRIAN GARDNER examine issues raised in the recent television WHY WAS it that our first review of "Our Friends in the North™ in Socialist Outbok seemed so caught up with the question of whether or not its writer, Peter Flannery, would advocate revolutionary change as a way of transforming society!
Not having seen such a large Dole ormon our sons for some time, we were desper. ate to detect an authorial standpoint an overriding moral and political framework for the whole piece.
Many viewers seemed disappointed with the conclusion, see. ine both the characters and the writer as having sold-out and descending into the illusion of sugary family values and individual reconciliation.
Such a one-dimensional read. Ing misses many aspects of Flannery's eple drama. Our Friends In the North Is the story of four Individuals - Nicky, Mary, Geordie and fosker • now they im pact on and are changed themselves by the political and moral landscape of Britain in the last four decades of the wenden century:
One of Flannery's central themes is the difficulty of changIng the world and the personal cost to those who try to do so. Nicky returns is experiencing rapid change. Slums are about The Great Alliance:
Economic Recovery and the Problems of Power THIS BOOK deals with themes that arc very much Bye issucs to-oty. it discusses the record of the 1945-51 Labour government and its attitude to the unions, focusing particularly on the docks. At a time when active trade unionists are discussing what a Blair government will do and when the courageous Liverpool dockers are fighting on, it is timely to read this book.
The core of the book is a detailed account of three important industrial disnutes: the Dockers' Charter Strike of 1945, the "Zine Oxide' Strike of 1948 and the Canadian Seafarers dispute of 1949. The origins of each of are not fulfliled. Nicky's mates, Geordle and Tosker want to make it big in a group but harsh reality intervenes when Geordle flees Newcastle after a fight with his drunken and overbearing father.
T. Dan Smith or Austen Donohue, as he is in the series, has a dream of rebullding the getting nowhere, nothing happening."*' oday the sackco lychpool dockers fight on with little effective support from the national union. They are gain. ing excellent support internationally. from rank and file trade unionists at home and from their local communities including the dynamic Women of the Waterfront.
However the current TGWU leadership fulfils the same function as in the 1940s. The role of Bill Morris reminds you of the Manchester dockers leader who had the nickname "Houdini" because whenever dockers demanded action, he replied, 'My hands are tied."
phillips ends his book by writing.
"Only through sharing the Attlee govemment's appraisal of the positive value of trade unionism and by seeking the active and voluntary co-operation of the trade union movement, can a future Labour government hope to survive and flourish." This may well be true but there is no sign that Blair thinks that way. Indeed, it is almost inevitable that a New Labour' goverment will north. This dream is perverted by his own self-aggrandisement and the financial greed of the bullder John Edwards or, as he was in real life, the architect, John Poulson.
When Nicky works with Donohue, he sees the aspirations of the latter as compensating for a political vision which his own father, Felix, was unable to give him.
in the earlier episodes. Dono. hue genuinely belleves that the homes he is building and the Jobs he is creating will bring permanent prosperity and happiBut the tower blocks proved co have their own pitals including cementing a more atomised society than that that had exIsted in the old back to backs.
Labours paternalism is con trasted starkly with the portrayal of Thatcher's vision. Tosker and his second wife, Elaine, buy into the natcher dream of the classless share-owning democracy only to lose almost their entire fortune on *Black Wednesday' in 1987.
no aways no worki class who want to change the world - sometimes the ruling class need to change it too. In the unforgettable episode dealing with the miners strike of "84 to '85, Thatcher has to destroy the remaining centres of working class resistance.
The episode conveys, in a way that no other fictionalisation or documentary has ever managed, the destruction of an eneconomic violence of the state and the physical violence of the policeFlannery doesn't preach a one-dimensional view in which Subscribe!
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Nicky's father Felix, powerfully portrayed by Peter Vaughan, lost his dream when the great jarrow march failed to bring jobs to the area deeply blighted then, as now, by structural unemployment. He cannot share his sons dreams because he grieves for his own. But while we see the tragedy that is his loss, especially when he suffers In the later episodes from Alzhe Imers, we are angry at his treat. ment of his son, to whom he has always been a bastard.
The behavlour of Christopher Collins, an out-of-control young man who terrorises Nicky's ageing mother and father, is partly explained by the treatment he receives at the hand of his own stepfather.
In the final episode we see how thirteen-year old Sean ColIin's has been damaged both by the conditions in which he lives no Che chans own tae Is coldly uninterested in him. Mary's policeman son, Anthony Is angry that she and her 'New Labour' party seem only interested in controlling sean and those like him, not in relating to him.
It is true that Flannery's drama did not call those who watched it to build the barriCa003 But It does provide a damnIng critique of those who, like Blair's New Labour, write off the Sean Collinses of this world as mad or bad, who are not prepared to fight for a vision that many individuals and communities have suffered though the ravages or natcherisme Fight to
Press £12.99: reviewed by KEITH SINCLAIR