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| Volume 56 Number 2, January 31, 2026 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
Rally in Trafalgar Square supporting print workers, April
6 1986 - Photo: Morning Star.
2026 marks the 40th anniversary of the Wapping dispute, a pivotal confrontation provoked when Rupert Murdoch's News International relocated production of its major newspapers from the traditional Fleet Street to a new, heavily secured, high-tech facility at Wapping, in January 1986.
News International controlled a significant section of the British press at that time, publishing The Sun, News of the World, The Times, and The Sunday Times. At the same time as the move, the company opened a new parallel plant at Kinning Park, Glasgow.
The relocation had been years in the planning. Both new facilities had been developed in secret, and for Wapping in particular, a cover story of a fake newspaper, "The London Post", was circulated to disorient opposition [1].
The dispute was a deliberate strategic move by Murdoch in alliance with the Thatcher government, part of the restructuring of the state around powerful monopoly interests and the overhaul of social relations that was to do away with the social-democratic arrangements that had held since the end of the War. The Miners' Strike had ended in defeat less than a year earlier, and the important Warrington Messenger newspaper group dispute of 1983-4 had proven that union opposition can be broken using the recently-introduced new anti-union laws.
When production shifted to Wapping, 6,000 members of the main print unions - the National Graphical Association (NGA) and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) - declared strike action on January 24, 1986. News International immediately sacked these workers while on strike to avoid redundancy payments amounting to some £40 million [2].
The open rule by police powers so brutally used during the Miners' Strike was again deployed by the state at Wapping. Daily demonstrations and pickets began outside the Wapping plant, met by thousands of officers who had been sent to protect the site and distribution trucks. Over the protracted year-long conflict, hundreds of people, both striking workers and police, were injured, and over 1,200 arrests were made.
While a significant uniformed police presence was evident for the protection of the Wapping plant, an undercover operation by Special Branch operated simultaneously [3]. This covert operation aimed at intense surveillance of strikers and protesters, producing daily intelligence briefs and maintaining detailed files on union leaders and MPs. Special Branch utilised informants and meticulously documented various aspects of the protests, including banners and chants, as well as the individuals involved and their lives [4].
The strike ended on February 5, 1987 after 54 weeks - three weeks longer than the Miners' Strike itself - of no pay and was unable to sustain itself further.
Prior to the dispute, the phrase "Words and Spaces" had highlighted the impact of the transition to computerised typesetting [5]. The adoption of modems, digital production techniques and automation resulted in redundancies, undermining the previously established relationship between workers and management. The organisational shift was to use new technology for maximising productivity while systematically dismantling the very workforce that had built the printing industry. What News International produced previously with 6,800 workers they now produced with just 670. The neoliberal view of workers as things rather than human beings, and the monopolies' relentless push for efficiency and productivity, were fully backed by the state. The Wapping, Miners' and Messenger disputes were the prototypes of the kind of imposition that is the norm in so many present-day disputes. It was the new modus operandi, presenting a serious challenge for the unions as the civil society of which they were part was smashed to pieces, a challenge which remains to the present day as they seek to remain effective as the self-defence organisations of the workers in the current reality.
Not only was technology used to drive efficiency, not only was it used to increase control over labour, but it was also used to create a form and content of journalism appropriate to the new neoliberalism. By decimating the staff, Murdoch overhauled the very makeup of the journalism and printing workforce, changing its very character as an industry. Production could be fast, change dynamically, and the product itself could be cheaply made in full colour. The method of organisation in the workplace had changed, and the management held all the cards. The age of the monopoly-controlled media had truly been born.
The issue could not then have been to push back the clock, on any front. In fact, the strike pointed to the need for the New on all fronts.
It was notable that the dismissed print workers, using their skills, produced their own newspaper The Wapping Post over the course of the strike, which served as a crucial instrument for organising and informing the strikers and their community as well as the public at large. Significantly, it effectively communicated the workers' own independent viewpoint, speaking in their own name, overcoming a media blackout imposed by the company [6].
This experience of the need to build the independent voice of the workers, the workers' independent press, relates to developing an independent outlook on the economy and politics. It is on this basis that technological progress can enhance human well-being, not detract from it. Workers themselves are integral to this transformation, requiring their voices to be central in discussions about how technology is developed and applied.
The silencing on the one hand of the alternative, of the direct voice of working people, and on the other, the disequilibrium of the social relation between employer and employed with the negation of "big labour" that characterise the neoliberalism that aggressively took hold in the 1980s are critical factors in the profound political crisis that exists today.
The Wapping strike exposed the inadequacies of a political system that fails to express the interests and voices of workers. It also threw down the challenge to working people as to how to organise to make their defence organisations effective in the period of the retreat of revolution. The legacy of the strike remains relevant in the present in the need for deep-going democratic renewal that empowers the working people to be in control over the matters that affect their lives, particularly now when the productive forces are growing exponentially and the response of the ruling elites is to smash what they cannot control.
The need then and now is for a system of authority rooted in collective decision-making rather than imposition. Modern movements, such as that embodied by the phrase "Enough Is Enough," aim to empower workers to make their claims on society, which they must, and claim their agency, so that any form of change, technological or otherwise, is not posed as a force outside of their control.
Workers' Weekly has confidence in the working class that they can rise to the occasion in the present phase of historical development, and meet this challenge. In this respect, it puts on the agenda to creatively work itself to continually improve the content and form of its journalism.
Notes
1. Annie Brown, "Wapping dispute 30 years on: How Murdoch and Thatcher
united to crush British workers", Daily Record, October 1, 2016
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/wapping-big-read-8949504
2. "Wapping dispute", Wikipedia, retrieved January 29, 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
3. Nicola Cutcher, "Wapping strike - story: Special Branch kept close
watch of the industrial dispute", Special Branch Files Project, January
12, 2016
https://specialbranchfiles.uk/wapping-strike-story/
4. In this regard, see:
"The Undercover Policing Inquiry and the Fight for Accountability",
Workers' Weekly, October 12, 2024
https://www.rcpbml.org.uk/wwie-24/ww24-25/ww24-25-05.htm
5. The phrase related to the move towards computerised typesetting systems,
which used digital "words" composed with the "spaces" in
between them, enabling journalists (and others) to have direct input into the
system, rather than traditional methods that required physical typesetting by
compositors. This shift meant that fewer workers were needed, as machines could
handle tasks previously performed by several printworkers. The phrase
highlighted the broader transformation in the industry towards automation, with
computers taking over roles that were once labour-intensive. How to deal with
this move was one of the challenges facing the print workers and their unions
at that time, at the beginning of, and then throughout, the 1980s.
6. "Wapping Dispute", Marx Memorial Library
https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/special-collections-and-subject-guides/wapping-dispute