The press
People's March for Yobs?
Paul Johnson
Next to those IRA funerals, the so-called 'People's March for Jobs' designed to re-create the 'Jarrow Crusade', has been the best-organised media event of the year. 'TUC chiefs', noted the Sunday Times, 'want to capitalise on what they see as the "overwhelming" success of the march'. It quoted one as speaking of 'this great monster rolling southward . . . it represents a re-birth of popular protest in this country . . . we have finally got the carthorse on the move again.' Louis Heren in The Times found it 'comparable to Nicholson's forced marches to relieve Delhi during the Mutiny'. The Guardian's man-on-themarch, Martin Walker, enthused: 'Blacks, Asians, punks with moth-eaten haircuts, women and middle-aged men, the marchers seem a microcosm of modern Britain.' The Guardian quoted the tear-jerking remark of one marcher that the young unemployed 'are not just missing out on a job. They are missing out on the whole marvellous experience of trade unionism'. 'These people', intoned an organiser quoted by the Sunday Times, 'have been through an immense emotional experience.'
So they had. Under the headline The People's March for Making Love', the News of the World's Adrian Needlestone reported: 'It hasn't been much of a job finding love on the dole march. Night after night, in town after town, teenagers have been on a booze-and-birds spree.' He quoted one employed shoe-worker, 'his neck covered in love-bites': 'The girls have been great. I wish the march could go on for a whole year'. Another marcher boasted: 'There are plenty of birds on the march, and plenty of them hanging about in the towns. I've had two so far'. At one overnight stop, 'a couple of birds' had 'streaked round a church hall where we were staying'. There had been free drink everywhere: 'They laid on so much booze for us in Stevenage that I was out of my mind. I was knocking back double vodkas-and-oranges one after the other.' Girl-marchers were equally enthusiastic. One claimed: 'You can always pick up fellas on the march or along the way'. A typist told him: 'This march is a great wayito spend a • few weeks with everything paid for.' The total of those who had in fact spent a few weeks on the march remains a mystery. Reporting from Watford, the Daily Telegraph'sBrian Silk wrote: 'There were 500 of them, and they had walked all the way from Liverpool'. The TUC organisers in London claimed, according to the Sunday Express, '260 set out from Liverpool and 130 from Huddersfield with 50 joining them in the West Midlands. A total of 440.' But, said the Express, `by the time the combined force reached Bedfordshire there were only about 250 taking part.' All that forced marching-to-Delhi bit had taken its toll. Others, including 20 at Northampton, had been thrown out for non-conformity. The News of the World quoted one: 'It's the Communists. They're very regimented and wanted us to walk in fours like soldiers.'
Certainly Communists and Marxists appeared to be in charge. Gerard Kemp in the Sunday Express listed the three `TUC March Co-ordinators' as Peter Carter, a member of the Communist Party's National Executive, who ran the campaign for the Shrewsbury Two', Jack Dromey, a Labour Marxist, Grunwick picket-organiser and a defence witness in the Angry Brigade bomb trial, and Cohn Barnett, a so-called `Christian Marxist' who runs the Manchester shareholders of the Communist Morning Star and its branch of the 'British Soviet Friendship Society'. According to Kemp, the large crowds of 'marchers' who appeared on the TV screens were all an illusion. Thus, the Welsh contingent which appeared in Bedfordshire had actually travelled from Newport by coach, and had been specially kitted out with marchers' gear on arrival at the village of Kempston. The South-East contingent also arrived by bus. The marchers present at a civic reception in Stevenage came by bus. Buses took the marchers from Stevenage to Letchworth, from church halls to setting-off point, for meals in Hemel Hempstead and again to the Civic Centre for showers. Buses were available to drive marchers to the 'Carnival against Unemployment' in Lambeth, to a reception by the Brixton black community and to Hyde Park Corner for the Sunday march to Trafalgar Square. Indeed, the big rally in the Square was made possible, said the Express, by `a fleet of 150 luxury coaches, and two special trains' bringing 20,000 motorised marchers' down from Birmingham, and 'other contingents from different parts of the country will also be arriving by train and coach.' The 'mass march' was from Hyde Park Corner only; the anoraks were for show. If the old carthorse was 'on the move again' it was travelling strictly by horsebox. According to The Times even the original banner of the Jarrow crusade had been transported to London for its ritual appearance: insured for £20,000 it was too valuable and fragile to go on the march. As for the clapping spectators on the route, they had, said the New Standard, been coached by one of the organisers, who job 'is to walk about 100 yards ahead of the People's March and see to it that the marchers get the proper applause. If he finds a group of children he gives them each an apple and a pat on the head.'
The cheerleader and coaches were to be invisible as the `marchers' paraded past Downing Street. When permission to do this was refused there followed, wrote the Sunday Mirror, 'heated arguments with police chiefs', and 'organisers' of the event 'branded' the decisions as — wait for it! — 'blatantly political'. According to the Observer the parade, passing the Dorchester, howled 'The rich, the rich, we've got to get nd of the rich!' and, outside Westminster: 'Occupy, organise, kick the Tories out!' Then to County Hall where Tony Benn was waiting to welcome them with similarly non-political remarks. Monday's Daily Telegraph headline summed up the climax: `Jeers for Healey, Cheers for Bean at Jobs Rally'. Bean, wrote Woodrow Wyatt in the Sunday Mirror, was the real beneficiary of the march, or 'march'. Wyatt had some statistics suggesting that not only the march but the whole unemployment scare may be a bit of a con. Britain, with 4 million fewer people than West Germany, actually has more of them in jobs. Germany has 39 per cent of its population working, France 38 per cent, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium between 34 and 36 per cent. Britain is top of the employment league with 42 per cent. As a car-driver told a Telegraph reporter in Watford, the march was 'a damn nuisance. I'm going to be late for work'.
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