For Your Freedom and Ours

Leeds labour movement solidarity with Polish workers during the 1980s Polish Crisis

By Tom Palmer

‘We have nothing to do with the hypocritical statements of Thatcher and Reagan – their attacks on workers’ rights in their own countries show where they really stand’.[2]

Tucked deep in the papers of a fellow Labour Party activist in Shipley, West Yorkshire, I discovered the founding document of the Leeds Polish Solidarity Campaign (LPSC), from which the above quote was taken. Following a meeting of labour movement activists convened by Labour councillor Brian Dale in February 1982, LPSC formed in reaction to a lesser-known crisis that shook the Eastern bloc.

Expressions of solidarity by the British labour movement in the 1980s with workers suffering under Pinochet’s regime in Chile, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, or Palestinians are well understood. Solidarity with workers dissenting against a communist state, less so. The Leeds Polish Solidarity Campaign was not an anti-communist force. Instead, the existence of LPSC embodies a chapter in British labour movement history of genuine international solidarity, rooted in the principles of democratic socialism and the right to independent trade union organisation.

The period referred to as the ‘Polish Crisis’ began in August 1980 with the foundation of Solidarność (translating to Solidarity), the first independent trade union in the Eastern bloc, and culminated with the eventual implementation of martial law in December 1981. Solidarność members encompassed a broad spectrum of views, including Polish Communist Party members, Trotskyists, liberals, and members of the Catholic church. In the sixteen months of legal organisation, the trade union made significant gains for the rights of Polish workers. It pursued a ‘self-limiting revolution’ – it professed no desire to challenge the communist state, but instead defended the right to democratic trade union organisation.[3]

When, in December 1981, General Jaruzelski introduced martial law banning Solidarność, labour movement activists across Western Europe organised in defence of Polish workers. Solidarność members and leaders were imprisoned without trial, and independent representation of workers ceased. While labour movement solidarity activity in Britain centred in London, activists also organised in regions and industrial heartlands.

The Leeds Polish Solidarity Campaign exemplifies this activity. Their meeting was supported by Leeds Labour Left, Leeds North-East CLP, and North Leeds Labour Party Young Socialists, with Leeds Trade Council also passing a resolution in support. LPSC formed ‘to organise practical and political support for Polish workers’. Bilateral, regional grassroots solidarity formed, with the committee establishing links with workers in the Polish city of Wrocław. The founding document of the Leeds Polish Solidarity Committee went on to ask ‘union branches in Leeds to “adopt” an internee from the equivalent branch in Wrocław’.

The adoption of internees after the implementation of martial law was a central means through which the British labour movement supported Solidarność activists. Workers at the British Leyland’s Albion plant in Scotland, for example, adopted various prisoners, providing material assistance to the internees’ families[4]. Unions would often adopt their Polish counterparts; the National Union of Students raised funds for the Polish Independent Students’ Association (Niezależne Zrzeszenie Studentów, NZS), the student branch of Solidarność, and adopted Jarosław Guzy, its President who was imprisoned at Białołęka detention camp.[5]

Other acts of solidarity involved the boycotting of Polish production parts by British union members. Piotr Kozlowski worked at the Ursus tractor factory outside Warsaw, and was a Solidarność activist who did not return to Poland after the implementation of martial law through fear of arrest. Throughout January 1982 he appealed for the workers of Massey Ferguson, a tractor factory based in Coventry, to express solidarity with their Polish counterparts by refusing to handle components from Ursus. After hearing Kozlowski’s plea, over three-thousand Massey Ferguson workers unanimously voted to support it. Similar action was also taken at the Manchester Massey Ferguson factory[6]. ‘In a tremendous display of working-class solidarity’, relayed Les Hartopp, a worker at the Massey Ferguson tractor factory in Coventry, ‘the meeting wholeheartedly supported the recommendation to boycott Polish parts’.[7]

Unsurprisingly perhaps, considering the politics of the Polish state, labour movement solidarity with Solidarność was not without hypocrisy and complexity. In a letter to News Line, the daily paper of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, Arthur Scargill described Solidarność as ‘an anti-socialist organisation which desires the overthrow of a socialist state’.[8] ‘British Scargill Denounces the Polish Scargills’, the Socialist Organiser aptly described the ordeal.[9] 

A little over a year later however,  as miners in Yorkshire and across Britain went out on strike, any doubts as to the working-class nature of Solidarność were dispelled. ‘To the striking miners of Great Britain’, read a statement made in June 1984 by David Jasrzebski (President of the Solidarność Committee in the Upper Silesia mining region) ‘…Solidarity miners send you fraternal greetings and our…solidarity for your struggle’.[10] This statement represents the industry-based links between grassroots trade unionists in Britain and Poland – the political support provided to Solidarność by grassroots NUM members since 1981 was reciprocated three years later.

This was perhaps somewhat embarrassing for Scargill, but more crucially it also exposed the hypocrisy underpinning Thatcher’s surprising support for Solidarność in the early 1980s, as part of her condemnation of the communist Polish state. Astoundingly, Solidarność’s Lech Wałęsa visited London in the early 1980s as a guest of the TUC and during that same visit also received an invite to Chequers from PM Margret Thatcher – ‘prompting many to note that Mrs Thatcher was happy to support trade unionism provided it was of the Polish variety’ [11].Now however, Thatcher’s government sought to crush the NUM, who enjoyed the support of Solidarność. Whatsmore, in order to break the miners’ strike, her government increased coal imports threefold from the same Polish regime she had initially sought to condemn[12].

Trade unionists were quick to point out Thatcher’s double standards.[13] When she visited Poland in November 1988 even her Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Charles Powell, noted the exposure to accusations of hypocrisy. That the proposed closure of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk coincided with Thatcher’s visit was no accident – according to Powell, the Polish authorities were saying to the Polish people who lined the streets to greet the Prime Minister, ‘we are being Thatcherite. See how you like it’.[14]

Highlighting Thatcher’s hypocrisy was also a key purpose of the Leeds Polish Solidarity Committee:

‘The Polish workers’ fight over such issues as the right to strike, access to the media, better provision for women workers, health and safety at work and the shorter work week, is the same as ours – a point which needs to be brought home to Thatcher’.

Far from disregarding Solidarność because of its support from British Conservatives and cold warriors, the new Polish union was understood by many on the British Left for what it was – a worker’s movement demanding the right to exist as a trade union independent of the state. It is only by shedding light on grassroots cross-Iron Curtain engagement that the constructed Cold War binary separating East and West is challenged, broadening understanding of the way in which this ideological divide was conceptualised and experienced by British leftists.

For labour movement activists in Leeds, the situation was simple. Workers in Poland deserved their solidarity. The struggle was the same. The mantra historically adopted by Poles supporting global liberation struggles became that of labour activists across Britain – Za wasza wolność i nasza (for your freedom and ours).

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[1] The full product of this research can be found in Tom Palmer, ‘“For Your Freedom and Ours”: Poland’s Solidarność and the British Left, 1980-1989’, Moving the Social, 68 (2022), pp. 83-114.

[2] Brain Dale, ‘Leeds Polish Solidarity Committee’, February 1982, Papers of Paul Hubbert [in private possession].

[3] Aleksander Smolar, ‘Towards ‘Self-limiting Revolution’: Poland 1970-89’, in Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present, ed. by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 127-143.

[4] Joe Singleton, ‘British Labour Movement Response to the Military Coup in Poland’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 5.1-2 (1982), pp. 38-39.

[5] Chris Serge, ‘Solidarity with Poland in the British Student Movement’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 5.3-4 (1982), p. 38.

[6] Joe Singleton, ‘British Labour Movement Response to the Military Coup in Poland’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 5.1-2 (1982), pp. 38-39.

[7] ‘Massey Ferguson Workers Black Polish Parts’, Socialist Challenge, no. 230, 28 January 1982, p. 6.

[8] Arthur Scargill to Michael Banda, 21 July 1983, in News Line, 7 September 1983, encl. in ‘Scargill, Solidarity & Workers’ Revolution Party Pamphlet’, p. 8.

[9] ‘The British Scargill and the Polish Scargills’, Socialist Organiser, no. 145, 15 September 1983, p. 2.

[10] ‘Solidarność Miners’ Statement in Solidarity with the NUM’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, 7.2 (1984).

[11] https://tuc150.tuc.org.uk/stories/solidarity/

[12] Brendan Keenan, ‘Poles Turn Down Short-Term Coal Supply Plea’, Financial Times, 17 May 1984, p. 12; John O’Mahony, ‘Workers’ Unity East and West’, Socialist Organiser, no. 200, 11 October 1984, p. 10.

[13] Eric Heffer, ‘Thatcher is a Hypocrite!’, Socialist Organiser, no. 379, 10 November 1988, p. 6.

[14] Charles Powell to Margaret Thatcher, 31 October 1988, in The National Archives, Kew, Records of the Prime Minister’s Office, PREM/19/2385.