The People’s March for Jobs …………………

Peoples March for Jobs, 1983

It was the April of 1983, and the continued opposition to the economic policies of the Conservative Government included the Peoples March for Jobs which started in Glasgow and finished in a rally in London on June 5.

Now I remember the event well, partly because at the time Chorlton Labour Party and the Withington CLP supported the event, and because I still have the badge.

And I did once have a whole collection of these badges and possibly even a t-shirt.

But I had completely forgotten that this was the second Peoples March for Jobs, and that the first march had started in Liverpool two years earlier when 500 unemployed people marched the 250 miles to London.

Michael Foot, speaking at Birmingham, 1983

The Guardian reported that “The TUC People’s March for Jobs, which had tiny beginnings in Liverpool, Wales and Yorkshire a month ago, culminated in the biggest and most widely backed demonstration the Labour and trade union movement has held since the war.  

The trail of the march was still leaving Hyde Park more than three hours after its head arrived in Trafalgar Square.”*

On the platform were a broad front of Labour Party MPs, including Michael Foot, Dennis Healey, and Tony Benn, along with Dennis Skinner, Arthur Scargill, and Colin Bennet, the TUC North-west regional organiser who lead the first 200 marchers out of Liverpool on May Day.

In his speech Michael Foot pointed out that “the underlying rise of 60,000 in unemployment last month was ‘like the whole labour force of a town the size of Middlesbrough or Norwich being wiped out’ going on to point out “the marchers will take their place in Labour history with the Jarrow marchers of 1936, the workers massacred at Peterloo in 1819, and the Tolpuddle martyrs’”.

Dennis Healey, and Dennis Skiiner on the platform in Birmingham, 1983

I didn't attend either of the London marches but remember the first Labour Party demonstration in Liverpool in 1980 and the Birmingham demonstration three years later.

The first had been called soon after the election of the Conservative Government, while the second was held against the backdrop of an unemployment figure which had surpassed the three million mark.

These national demonstrations, sat beside local ones. and here in Manchester there were plenty of these.

Some of these purely focused on unemployment, but many merged the issues of the Government's record, with opposition to  cuts in public spending,  the installation of a new generation of missiles designed to deliver nuclear warheads across the European continent and the struggle against racism.

People March for Jobs, 1981

Locations. Liverpool, Birmingham and  London











Pictures; The badges, Peoples March for Jobs, 1981 and 1983, , and the Labour Party demonstration in Birmingham, 1983, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*100,000 join jobs march finale, The Guardian, June 1, 1981