The Ambulance dispute 1989/90 - 'Now the police won't just put you in hospital, they'll drive you there too'

The 1989-90 ambulance workers' fight for a decent pay rise started out with an overtime ban in September 1989 and was escalated to refusing to answer non-emergency calls. Workers who refused non-emergency duties were suspended without pay, though many continued to come into work and run an emergency service themselves from the ambulance stations, dealing directly with calls from the public and in effect cutting out management altogether. 

There was considerable support for the dispute. On a day of action on December 6th 1989 council workers (in Hackney and Hammersmith), construction workers (including 300 steel erectors on the Canary Wharf site) and hospital workers (at the Elizabeth Garret Anderson in Soho) were among those in London who took unofficial strike action for the day in support of the ambulance crews. Another day of action on 30 January 1990 saw London bus drivers staging a short strike. The dispute finished in February 1990 having achieved a 16.9% pay rise. Not quite the 25.8% initially demanded but a big improvement on the original offer of 7.5%.

Report from Evening Standard on 30 January day of action in support of ambulance crews

Flyer for TUC 'Public Assembly in Support of Ambulance Workers' in Trafalgar Square, 13 January 1990

During the dispute the Government brought in the police and the army to drive ambulances. I was involved in producing a couple of posters in response to this. One read 'Now the police won't just put you in hospital, they'll drive you there too', the other was an image of a soldier in Belfast with a woman asking 'are you sure he's an ambulance driver' and her dog answering 'well he's about to put somebody in hospital'. 

The posters were widely distributed and copied across the country, we heard of them being flyposted in various places and they were reproduced in a number of publications (the 'Support the Ambulance Crews - Troops Out' one was unsurprizingly featured in Troops Out magazine). I remember getting rid of a big pile of them at a Chumbawamba gig at Stratford Polytechnic in November.

(A3 original)

North Middlesex Hospital

The posters were printed by a friend working at Union Place Resource Centre, a community print co-op in Camberwell. It was also at Union Place that we made a banner 'North Middlesex Supports the Ambulance Crews'. I was working at the North Middlesex Hospital at the time and was a NUPE union rep. I helped set up a North Middlesex Ambulance Support Group, we collected funds and linked with the nearby Edmonton Ambulance Station. I also went to a couple of meetings of the London Health Workers Co-ordinating Committee at University College Hospital (UCH), an unofficial network of militants from London hospitals. 

'This crew are not being paid'

Support for ambulance crews at North Middlesex Hospital (think this may have been on the 6th December national day of action)

The biggest event we organised was for the national protest on January 30th 1990. Around 100 hospital workers joined the protest outside the North Middlesex Hospital on the north circular road.

Sheffield rally, 18 November 1989

I went to an Ambulance workers rally in Sheffield, here's a few pictures:

'our pay has stopped, but we have not'

I think this is union leader Roger Poole speaking in Sheffield

See also:

Hospital workers say: 'we're not paying': North Middlesex Hospital anti-poll tax leaflet, 1990

Barnet and Edgware Hospital Workers Against the Poll Tax

The Maudsley Nurses Strike 1988

Socialism through Oi? - music and politics 1982

From Socialist Worker (9 January 1982), Chris Moore looks ahead to a year in music (Moore was in the Socialist Workers Party and wrote for NME as X Moore).

'While Adam played Prince Charming and while white funksters swapped favourite shirts, Toxteth danced to the sound of breaking glass... 1981 was the year compliant complacency set in and fightback was drowned out. 1982 will be harder... 

It's depressing but honest to admit that there is in reality no working class mass movement called Oi, no revolutionary punk/skinhead force threatening to smash capitalism... (or whatever it is Gal Bushell

wants to smash now that he's replaced the revolutionary party with Oi! the Party)...

1982 will fight back not with angst-ridden Sturm and Drang aggro singles but with ideas. The strength of musical muscle behind CND and the strength of three and a half million on the dole will force the music press this year to give the movements the level of coverage RAR [Rock Against Racism] used to get when Webster was fouling the TV screens and Lewisham was throwing bricks and bottles tiswas style(e)

The bands you will see that fuel and fire the arguments, pulling the music press away from the bar and beyond will be varied. Scritti Politti will talk a lot and win people to their ideas and music, in spite of coming it with the intellectual verbals. Grace Jones and Pigbag will keep you dancing through the

year, the Higsons and the Stunt Kites will surprize you, and Black Flag and Death in

June will crack it... Listen to the poets, dance to the rhythm, clash and rock against Thatcher!'

Some interesting choices there - Death in June may have had their roots in radical left punk band Crisis but they were soon being denounced as fascist sympathisers. 

Moore's dismissal of Oi brough an angry response from a left wing skinhead which was printed under the heading 'Socialism thru' Oi': 'Oi bands and their followers have short hair cuts and Air Wair boots. We just can't afford all the trendy gear the high street posers wear'.

Moore was not averse to the skinhead look himself. Later that year he founded The Redskins.

[found this browsing through old copies of SW scanned by the excellent Splits and Fusions]