Peoples March for Jobs

I was heavily involved along with many others at Wolves Poly in the Peoples March for Jobs back in 1983 and just as all that stuff comes back again it was sad to hear of the death of old Tiptonian Pete Carter.Here is his Obituary from the Guardian:

Pete Carter obituary

Union leader who fought for the rights of construction workers by Jon Bloomfield The Guardian, Tuesday 25 October 2011,

Pete Carter, who has died aged 73 of lung cancer, was an idealistic, imaginative and effective leader of the construction workers' trade union Ucatt. He looked beyond the traditional labour movement to build wider alliances, notably around environmental values. The union's Midlands organiser from 1980, he worked with three TUC regional councils to mobilise the People's March for Jobs the following year. It sought broad support for alternatives to the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, and evoked memories of the Jarrow March of October 1936.

A group of 280 marchers left Liverpool at the start of May 1981, local groups supported them en route, feeder marches from Yorkshire and South Wales joined in, and by the end of the month 150,000 unemployed people and trade unionists converged on Hyde Park in central London for a final rally. Pete was again to the fore when the Scottish TUC, Wales TUC and regional councils set about planning a second march in 1983, this time starting from Glasgow and involving a wider range of localities.

Public campaigning and winning new allies were Pete's strengths. He was less comfortable with the political in-fighting that he had to endure from 1984 as the Communist party of Great Britain's industrial organiser. Immediately he had to deal with Arthur Scargill's disastrous leadership of the miners' strike of 1984-85. When it was over, Pete and the CPGB's general secretary, Gordon McLennan, met to discuss how unity could be preserved among the miners with Scargill and Mick McGahey, and a furious row ensued.

By then, the civil war between the CPGB's eurocommunist and traditionalist wings had grown too deep to resolve. This made it impossible for Pete to transform labour-movement politics in the campaigning directions that he had envisaged, and in 1991 the party broke up. Pete returned to the building trade. Too principled to be attracted to New Labour, he found himself beached by Blairism.

Born in Tipton, near Dudley in the West Midlands, Pete was the eldest of five children of Ted and Mabel Carter, licensees of the Whitehall Tavern in Greets Green, West Bromwich. Unable to write when he left school at the age of 15, he became a skilled bricklayer, and in the late 1950s met Norma Harris, who was a huge influence on his political awakening. They married in 1962 and had two children, Sue and Mike.

By the mid-1960s, Pete was an enterprising national organiser of the Young Communist League. For one of the League's summer festivals, he booked the Kinks; during the Vietnam war, he organised support for the communist north with a Bikes for Vietnam campaign; and when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, he expressed fierce opposition. The Stalinist old guard hated him for the next quarter of a century as he made the case through campaigning and action for the modernisation of the labour movement and linking up with new social movements.

In the early 1970s, as a shop steward on Bryant Estates sites in the Midlands, he and other communist militants succeeded in abolishing the "lump" casual labour system, improved wage rates and working conditions, and attracted enormous publicity through occupying the Rotunda site in Birmingham. Construction News magazine called the agreement with Bryant "a watershed in industrial relations in the building industry".

I recall a packed meeting in West Bromwich town hall in autumn 1979, when Pete was convenor – senior shop steward – of Sandwell council's direct labour organisation. Through a haze of cigarette smoke on stage, he lambasted management and called for an all-out strike. Suddenly, oratory turned to song, as he belted out a few verses of That Old Black Magic.

Pete persuaded workers on building sites to take down pin-ups from the canteen wall, and to buy copies of Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists from the boot of his car. Inspired by the "green bans" – industrial action in support of environmental aims – pioneered by the Australian builders' leader Jack Mundey, he saved Birmingham's Victoria Square post office through a dynamic campaign including demonstrations and construction-site crane occupations. Permission to demolish the post office was granted in 1973, and five years later it was reprieved, as was much of the rest of Victorian Birmingham.

His love life was turbulent: his marriage ended in separation in 1977, and Norma died 10 years later. Long-term relationships with Val and Jude followed, along with shorter affairs. In his final years, Pete lived on a canal boat in the West Midlands. He is survived by his children.

• Peter Edward Carter, trade unionist, political organiser and environmentalist, born 8 July 1938; died 11 October 2011