Subsidising bosses: Denis Healey tions on hospital admissions.
The nurses were supported by the Society of Radiographers, who mobilised nearly half their 8,000 national membership in a march through London, while radiographers in ASTMS staged strikes in London and the north cast.
ane pressure foreca wilson's government to launch a face-saving inquiry into NHS pay, headed by Lord Halsbury. Reporting in July, the Halsbury committee found nurses to be a "special case", and awarded increases averaging 30% (though some grades got as little as 6%).
Fighting back
The arrival of a right-leaning Labour government had not, therefore, deterred the working class from defending itself. Union leaders found themselves dragged into action by the anger of their memIn their effort to escape from this, key union leaders signed up in the summer of 1974 for a "Social Contract" imposing voluntary limits on wage demands after Heath's Phase 3 pav controls ended.
But Healey's November 1974 budget did little to help union leadwin support for the so-called deal, allocating a massive £1.S bil. lion to his efforts to "improve prof itability and liquidity in the continuation of British capitalism, the union leaders continued to balshop-floor membership and that of the profit-hungry employers.
While remained strongly organised fight back, they were politically by timid reformist bureaucrats, the Labour Party by parliamentary careerists with no shred of socialist Open the books Even apparently limited de. mands, such as the opening of the books of private firms to clected trade union committees - flying in the face of "business secrets" - and the call for a sliding scale of wages to ensure pay levels stayed ahcad of inflation were seen (correctly) by union chiefs position and to the system, opening for workers' control of production, the working class majority, not the pronts or ine capitalist Iew.
This type of approach is essenclass activists and broader layers of wider campaigns are to be won to socialist politics.
But the left in the 1970s was un. successful in building any broad alliance of class struggle forces in the unions which could move politically beyond these limitations.
It remained fragmented and predominantly sectarian in its politics. late to recognise the emergence of a new "Bennite" left which grew after Labour was ousted in 1979 but guished by the setbacks inflicted on the working class and its organisations by successive years of Thatch.
emergent politics of "new realism".
ine challenge to socialists in 1997 is to recognise the scope of the opportunities that are likely to open up - some only fleetingly - as an expectant working class movement, exultant at the defeat of the Tories, runs into conflict with the hard-line right wing politics of "new La. bour".
If the left again fails to develop and popularise a socialist programme, win support and fight for it in the broadest possible cam. paigns throughout the labour movement, it faces more decades in the doldrums.
IB REMES