Ralph Darlington and Dave Lyddon,Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain, 1972. London: Bookmarks, 2001. xii + 304 pp. £13.99 paper.

Extract

Official statistics for 1972 (which certainly understated the total picture) recorded over twenty-five hundred strikes in Britain, a figure exceeded only once before (in 1970) and three times subsequently. The number of “days lost,” almost twenty-four million, was the highest since 1926, the year of the General Strike; in only two subsequent years has the total been greater. To a generation that reached maturity in a dark period of trade union defeat and decline, the record of those years of (at least partial) victory and advance must seem like another world. In providing a chronicle of trade union activism in that year, Darlington and Lyddon perform a genuine service.