Stuart Hill
Tom Sankey: This is Tom Sankey with the British Left Oral History Project. It is quarter past two on the 27th of June 2025. Can you please say your full name for the recording?
Stuart Hill: Stuart Clark Hill.
Sankey: What was your first introduction to politics as an adolescent?
Hill: I became interested when I was fifteen. I went round all the political youth organizations that existed in the area at the time. The Conservative Party youth organization was talking about life insurance, I didn't, I wasn't very attracted to them. The Young Liberals had gone on holiday or something. The Labour Party Young Socialists, I met the Labour agent, he was extremely hostile and said “Why do you want to join the young socialists?” and it was so unpleasant and hostile, I thought well there's nothing there, and so I went to a meeting of the Young Communists League, which was talking about wage labour and capital, and the tutor was George Short, a student of the Lenin School in Moscow, and a very great man in lots of ways, and despite being a bit bored, the Young Communist League was active on the Vietnam, and Vietnam was the biggest issue for me, so I joined the Young Communists League.
Sankey: So how did this compare with your parents beliefs?
Hill: Well, neither my mother or father were, had any particular interest in politics. I didn’t know, for many, many years, that my father was a long-standing shop steward in the Transport and General Workers Union at Cookruns’s foundry. So, most of my, most of my family and relatives were just generally speaking Labour supporters but not actively engaged. So, I was the rst person in my family who joined the political party
Sankey: So how did you come across the Vietnam War movement in the first place, the anti-Vietnam movement?
Hill: Well, it was in the news, constantly in the news, so you couldn't miss it in the newspapers and everything, and the first organization that I actually joined was Medical Aid for Vietnam. My best mate from Stainsby Boys School, he was the chair and I was the secretary. We unfortunately had no other members at all whatsoever, but we raised an awful lot of money with collections at the time. We were arrested a couple of times but we managed to get away with it.
Sankey: So how did that transform into your membership of the Communist Party?
Hill: Well, I became very actively involved in the Young Communist Leauge, sort of going down to Vietnam demonstrations, all sorts of things, and the Young Communist League was involved in things, at that time, major tenants campaigns, and so we were engaged with the Communist Party as well, you know. And so as soon as I reached my eighteenth birthday, because I was told that you couldn't join until you were eighteen, I went round, I found out where the secretary of the Communist Party lived, I went round their house and joined.
Sankey: Brilliant. What was the community like at the YCL, Young Communist League?
Hill: The community, it was quite a large organisation that, a lot of people involved, majority of them older than me, sort of, I was fifteen, a lot of them were seventeen, eighteen, some of them were going to university, some of them were working, already working, and it was a very, very, very, friendly, welcoming organisation.
Sankey: Was there much of a crossover between that group and other socialists/leftist organisations at the time?
Hill: Inevitably, we met people in the Labour Party, in the Labour Party Young Socialists. So we met and generally speaking, those, how to put it… The Labour Party looked on us as being slightly ridiculous and irrelevant because they were the big boys and they controlled councils and MPs and things like that, and we had, relatively speaking, nothing.
Sankey: Brilliant, yeah, so aside from the Vietnam War, was there anything that drove you towards socialism in your views?
Hill: The Vietnamese war was enough. The process, the Vietnamese people were led by a Communist Party. And even though the Communist Party in this country was tiny in comparison, nonetheless, they had fundamentally the same body of beliefs and commitment to emancipation. So I thought, well, I'm, I’m joining a movement, a worldwide movement, even though it was only in this country that I was active.
Sankey: So then when you transitioned into the Communist Party from the YCL, did you notice much of a difference in the outlook, or the makeup, of the groups, or was it more uniform?
Hill: When I started attending meeting of the Communist Party, there were some very real differences. It was in the period of the 1968, so there was a lot happening! In, the divisive issue was Czechoslovakia, and there were very, very strong arguments both ways. At the Communist Party branch meetings, who were well attended, they were packed out. In the from row of a bloke called Charlie Denton, his house, he had quite a large family and all of his children seemed to be in the Young Communist League, including two very attractive daughters.
Sankey: Um, So it was, sorry, I've lost my place. So was there anyone in the party or outside the party who particularly inspired you to join or continue your membership there?
Hill: I’d say George Short impressed me, and there were a number of trade union activists that impressed me as being like outstanding leaders in their own right. A number of them were shop stewards at ICI in particular.
Sankey: And how did you come across these people, was it publications, meetings?
Hill: Meetings.
Sankey: Meetings… So can you describe your involvement with Communist Party in the 1970s, how you engaged with it, how involved you were?
Hill: I was very involved, I soon went on to the District Committee of the Communist Party, and during the 1970s, mid 70s, I would say I was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist Party at the very tender age.
Sankey: How did you find that, was it intimidating at all?
Hill: I didn’t find it intimidating, I found it intellectually extremely stimulating. It was an exciting time. There was all the industrial strife, in fact, literally, in that period, we had in In Place of Strife from Barbara Castle, and I must have sold hundreds of pamphlets, opposing that and pay restraint.
Hill: And of course, it, there was deep, deep, arguments within the executive of the Communist Party between what you might call, perhaps unfairly, the economist wing which was more trade union based and the, those that believed in a new form of social contract and were more concerned about social issues, feminism, such like. But there were, there were shades and between the different opinions. But I remember particularly the discussions leading up to the Winter of Discontent, because the Industrial Department of the Communist Party was completely out of touch with what was happening in the public sector. There was a kind of all these myths that there used to be about the big battalions; so, it was the miners, the dockers, the engineers, the shipyard workers, these were the true proletariat. And unions like my own, NUPE, National Union of Public Employees, that was seen as being just like on the periphery. They were only part-time women workers, and you know, they weren't even skilled, they had no bargaining strength or anything. So, they were marginalised by the Industrial Department and I'm actually an activist and listening to people, and working with people, and seeing that the anger that was welling up. And we'd had the Ford dispute, and the Ford workers won a big substantial increase, and it was obvious that we were heading into a confrontation, and not only did the Industrial Department not recognizing it early on, the Labour government didn’t either, much to their cost.
Sankey: So what was your relationship with mainstream politics, at the time. This is moving a bit later into the 1980s, but did you vote? Did you get involved with the Labour Party itself?
Hill: I was a Communist Party member, and as a Communist Party member, you couldn't get involved with the Labour Party, there was a very strict rule against… you just couldn’t, by the Labour Party. 19, in, I was on the executive of the Communist Party, in 1979 they had the first elections, the first direct elections to the European Parliament. The executive agreed that there would be five or six candidates for the Communist Party. And I came back to my own district and argued strenuously that we should stand a candidate, and the candidate should be me, and I won that argument. In between times, the Political Committee of the Communist Party, had decided that it, there wasn’t, there wasn't the basis of standing very many candidates, and therefore we shouldn’t stand any at all. And I received an instruction that I would not stand. I don’t take instructions like that very lightly, I’d already got my nomination papers in.
Sankey: What became of that?
Hill: Well I was in, well I was told that if I put on the ballot paper that I was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, I'd be expelled. So my title was something along the lines of “The Anti-Common Market in Favour of the Alternative Economic Strategy Candidate”.
Hill and Sankey: [laughs]
Hill: And I stood in the, I lived in Middlesbrough at the time, in the Cleveland and Whitby constituency. And I just got a handful short of five thousand votes. I had a wonderful time being on the TV, being, sort of like being interviewed by newspapers, Here, There and Everywhere on the radio, and that was fascinating, on the radio there were four candidates, Labour Party candidate, Labour Party candidate was Ernest Wistrich, who was the director of the European movement, like one of the top, top ballers.
Hill: The Tory candidate was a former Lord Mayor of London and a very heavy drinker with his hip flask. The Lib Dem was a headmaster from Scarborough who spoke with a very plummy voice, and I'm from Middlesbrough and I speak with a very Middlesbrough voice on the radio. I mean, they said that there were absolutely flooded out with people ringing in saying “why did you have those other three candidates on, none of them are from the area!” Loads of my friends contacted me and said they thought I was good, I sounded good, and I said any particular things that you agreed with? Oh, I didn't listen to you that much, just listened to the voice. So I had great fun. That was in March.
Hill: Just prior to that, the chair of the Strike Committee, during the Winter of Discontent for Cleveland, for the three unions, TNG, GMB, and my own Union, NUPE, I was the chair of the combined committee, the strike committee was in perpetual session. A bit like when the Russian Revolution took place, it was 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and we were in that, continued doing that for six weeks. Six weeks. And we had, nothing moved in Cleveland and it was not as industrial now but there was a lot of tankers and all sorts of things. They couldn’t get ambulances or anything to move unless we gave permission, so we were a very, very powerful organisation. And it, loads of women became active who hadn't really been active, and some of the men who held positions were just total failures. That's why I would say it was one of the most important things that I noticed. The way in which the activity, the energy led to people being transformed and other people being exposed for their inadequacies in all sorts of ways. It was, it showed what could be done in a very, very short period of time. So, there was tremendous amount of levels of organisations, pickets, I was responsible for all the picketing in the, in the Middlesbrough area, and that was the strongest area. Even when the strike was over, we stayed on strike an extra week, just in order for us to to first obtain extra compensation for the time that we had off. So, it was a, It was a thrilling time.
Hill: The other thing… The decision that was taken, not to stand candidates, was taken by the Political Committee, which is supposed to be a subordinate body to the Executive. But the Political Committee took a decision contradicting the Executive. That's why I, I wouldn’t accept it, and it affected my view about the Communist Party and its style of leadership. Because it was controlled effectively by a small group of people who were paid officials, Very much like trade unions in fact.
Sankey: Do you think that division between the paid Political Committee and the Executive Committee had anything to do with the eventual collapse of the party?
Hill: Um, no, I think there were much more fundamental issues. It was, there was, there was an element whereby the democracy was at times, too much top down and too much organized. At a later stage, I was a member of the Commission on Inner Party Democracy, which was supposed to, [chuckles] to change things for the better, and what, what happened illustrates everything so much. I, the division was people who felt we should basically do away with democratic centralism, and have a much more open, free-er kind of way of dealing with deciding policies. What... So, so there was a division between, as I say, those that wanted to maintain democratic centralism, perhaps freshen it up a bit, and those who didn't want to keep democratic centralism.
Hill: And then there was me, and I basically agreed with keeping the democratic centralism, but, because of my experience with the Political Committee, I didn't, I felt that the Political Committee exercised far too much power and so I said that I wanted my reservations on that point to be contained within the report as just a, you know, a very small paragraph saying that. (Sankey: Sure.) Boom: I was pushed into the group that was opposed to democratic centralism, which I was not opposed to! But, and I said, and I was, so, it was again, it was the assistant general secretary of the party, a paid official, obviously, who just squashed me in for convenience, which really pissed me off.
Sankey: So how did your commitment to the Communist Party affect other aspects of your life, I’m particularly thinking about friends or family?
Hill: Well, the Communist Party itself provided a friendship, friendship networks. My family, well, probably saw me as, dependent on what stage, how long I’d been the Communist Party and how active I’d been in the Communist Party, just accepted that I was, I was, compared to them, I was like super active in politics. Not many of my wider family agreed with me, although some members of my family joined the Communist Party. My eldest sister, Dorothy, became secretary of the Communist Party branch, and stood as a candidate in council elections.
Sankey: Okay, where are we… Ok so now I’m going to try and sort of go through a timeline, sort of starting at the start of the 80s and ending at the end of the 90s, kind of ask your, what, how you reacted at the time, reflection on various events in the period. So, we've gone over Winter of Discontent and all that. Let's see… Yeah, how did the rise of Thatcher affect your political involvement very much?
Hill: Well, on the first of January 1981, I was elected secretary of the Middlesbrough branch of the National Union of Public Employees. I'd previously been assistant branch at, one of the many assistant branch secretaries. I was elected on the basis of what had happened in the Winter of Discontent. And so, as secretary of the NUPE branch, I was in an absolutely critical position in terms of opposing the cuts that were obviously being imposed by Thatcher. I should have said I was also Secretary of the Middlesbrough TUC, and I was on the national TUC committee. I was, I was extremely active in the trade union world, as well as the Communist Party world.
Sankey: Yes. Did you notice much of a conflict between the aims of the two organisations?
Hill: No, no. Basically, I found that the great majority of communists I met in the trade union world were dedicated to represent their membership and many of them made sacrifices. They'd been, they’d been victimised and so forth, like any group there were some people who may well have joined the Communist Party in order to further their trade union ambitions, you know, if they were there in a union that had a strong communist influence. I was, I was the leading unionist in NUPE for many, many years, together with Irene Swan from Scotland.
Sankey: Was there any part of the Communist Party’s relationship to the trade unions that you didn't approve of as much?
Hill: Strange because at a later, much later stage I was involved with the producer, production of a trade union pamphlet by the Communist Party, I wrote one section of it, and there was a very, very good get-together where we were different people contributing different ideas, different aspects, about bargaining and about all sort of things. The Communist Party’s always had a policy of supporting industrial unionism; one union, one industry. But that was theoretical, in practice, the… In my case, I was secretary of the Public Employees' Union, but we only had responsibility in practice, in activities in NUPE. There was also a local government advisory industrial organisation, and that was a euphemism for people involved in NAGLO. And despite us believing in industrial trade unionism, In all the years I was active the NALGO and the NUPE activists never ever formally met. And the reason, one of the main reasons for that was because the Communist Party in NALGO looked down on NUPE people, because they were overwhelmingly manual workers and part-timers.
Hill: So, there was an enormous snobbery and that, so in other words, divisions within the working class were reproduced within the Communist Party which was supposed to resolve them. The same thing, I believe even to this day, instead of having a railway advisory, you have a train drivers advisory, you have an RMT, then you have a TSSA, the white-collar workers, you've got three advisories in the Communist Party, or used to have, for what, for what, for what industry? And when I was involved in producing this pamphlet about trade unionism, I said there doesn't seem to be a chapter about trade union democracy, a big omission. I was shut down by the industrial organiser, Pete Carter at the time, who said, “that's taboo”. I think he used those words: taboo. Pete Carter was one of those that was, in all sorts of of ways was supposed to be one of the more avant-garde, pro-youth, sort of, the sort of Eurocommunist and all the rest of it, but when it came to the trade unions, it was like hands off. You know like yeah, too controversial, too dangerous.
Sankey: Sure. Okay, moving internationally now, how did you react at the time to the evolution of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and then its eventual collapse?
Hill: Well, I very much welcomed Gorbachev. I mean, I’d come, I'd come to see Dubcek as being farsighted, you know, and a good leader in '68, and when Gorbachev started with his reforms I thought there was a possibility of actually sort of achieving some real democratisation. When he was effectively overthrown, I mean, I, I saw it as an absolute disaster. I mean, for the people Russia, I mean the devastating effects on the standard of living and all the rest of it. And what you saw was quite a number of people who were functionaries in the Communist Party, and all of a sudden were multi-billionaire oligarchs; they made the transition without hardly any trouble whatsoever. And I thought that, that was all sorts of ways, you think, you know, sort of, the Communist Party was clearly, you know, it didn't have the ideological strength which people thought it might have had.
Sankey: This is the Communist Party of Russia?
Hill: Communist Party of the Soviet Union, yeah. I went on a number of international trips, and one of them was to Riga in Latvia. And we met shipyard workers, young shipyard workers, and met at a nightclub and sat around tables [unintelligible] different things. And why none of the others wanted to talk about politics. The war in Vietnam was still going on and they wanted to talk about postcards and pen pals. And you thought, well, either, either this is what they’re like and they’ve got a very low political level or they’re under strict instructions not to talk politics; either way, I thought it stunk. I mean, I went to the German Democratic Republic as it was, I went and visited the steelworks and the, there was some Sheffield steelworkers with us and they were saying that the protective clothing was almost non-existent. They were appalled at the level of health and safety.
Hill: So, I mean there were a number of international things, I've gone on a trip to Mongolia early on. That was extremely interesting but many stories for another day. It was quite funny because, again, it's the kind of attitude of some of the people in the Communist Party, I was told I could go to any other socialist countries, but unfortunately I was at the end of the queue, being such a new person, new person. And almost all the good places like the GDR and the different places, they'd all, they’d all sort of been taken, and very few places left. One of them was Mongolia, but nobody ever wants to go there. I said yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll go! I think I was the only one there who ever went there, but, but it was the, again, it was kind of the international pals act. In, in, I mean later on in my political activity, I never stopped being involved in international issues, and I met loads of communists in leading positions in the various... If you talk about what became Yugoslavia, Nicaragua, almost any country was involved in any kind of anti-imperial struggle, obviously South Africa, I was heavily involved in that, and sort of… I will throw in that I've got all these different sorts of leaflets and stuff, things that go back to me being involved in international issues. There wasn’t, there wasn’t the compartmentalization with my activity as a communist. I was, I spent more time as a trade unionist because that, on my daytimes, on my daytimes I was representing people at work, but outside I was involved in elections, international things. It was like the Communist Party provided enormous opportunities and encouragement and support for people. I mean, just, I learned so much just talking to other communists.
Sankey: Sure. So how, on a more local level, how did the fall of the Soviet Union affect the party in Britain from your understanding?
Hill: Well, it led pretty directly to its dissolution. (Sankey: Yes.) I was on, again, I was on the Executive Committee of the Communist Party at the time, and I was involved in the decision to dissolve the Communist Party. I regarded it as giving it a decent burial. And I was also very, very much involved the formation of Democratic Left. And the various other, from new, new, New Times Network or whatever it was called. New Politics Network. I was involved in merging New Politics Network with Charter 88 to create Unlock Democracy. I was a director, in fact I still am a director of Rodell Properties.
Hill: When the Communist Party was dissolved, eventually, with Nina Temple's hard work, the money was all resolved into a single company. And I was the director of that company and we, we just sold one of the buildings that we held. And we are in the process of selling another building that we developed into housing accommodation. I think either got four million quid or whatever it was, whatever we got for it.
Hill: So, there's a, there’s a continuity and it's an interesting thing because in a sense, in terms of politics, we went from being a communist organisation, so Democratic Left opened itself up to people who were Labour people. And when it became New Politics Network, there was a major argument within the New Politics Network, to some extent between the, some of the former communists, I’m, myself and some other communists, as to whether we should appoint director of New Politics Network who was a Liberal Democrat. And at first they appointed a bloke who was, I think he's Labour MP now, but he, he didn’t, he wasn’t very successful and he moved on. And then, I then I was able to, I was very pleased that we appointed a Liberal Democrat, which was a reflection of the whole emphasis of the organisation.
Hill: At one point, it might have gone in different directions and become a small left-wing group or left-wing think tank or whatever it was, but it actually became more of a campaign organisation for democracy. I mean, people say, you know, the fact that communist money, some of it, no doubt, you could argue came from Moscow, the fact that it, it today is actually used to campaign to abolish the House of Lords, to introduce proportional representation, and a whole range of other democratic policies. And part of the ideas from the, from the Communist Party and Democratic Left, are contained in Unlock Democracy, or are only part of it, because it doesn't just campaign for constitutional reforms, it also says that that there needs to be engagement with politics and pluralism and respect, and all these kinds of values, because constitutional change without those other things is a waste of time. So, I'll, I'll be going to the annual meeting, I’m on the council, the national council of Unlock Democracy. I’m, you know, sort of, I think I’m the, I'll be the only survivor from the Communist Party days. So, I still play an active role.
Sankey: So would you say you’re broadly pleased with what became of the Communist Party in the end?
Hill: I think I share the same view as Andy Croft, I was shocked at how quickly the structures and organisation of the… When the, when the organization was formally dissolved clearly, a great majority of the membership had decided it was all over and went on to do different things, other things. I mean, in 19, 1984 I joined the Labour Party, and I was active in the Labour Party for thirty years, including being a councillor for four, that was a pretty horrible experience.
Hill: My activity in the unions continued. I was on the, I was vice-president of NUPE. I played a leading role in the formation of UNISON, I was on the negotiating team. And just a bit of irony, a reflection of how things change; In the NUPE rule book, there was Clause Four of the Labour Party was in the NUPE rule book and it was there because I moved the rules change, which led to all sorts of difficulties and problems in the negotiation, because NALGO was desperate to get it removed, that kind of Labour association, they wanted nothing to do with it. And, at a later stage in UNISON, I moved the resolution to change UNISON’s opposition to Tony Blair’s proposed new rule, Rule Four, to supporting it. And, and that carried the day which was like people, people were surprised, there was, there was a lot of people thought that it wouldn't happen. And I came under quite a bit of pressure from people obviously associated with the Labour Party to, not to, not to put it forward. Well, I put it forward, the National Conference carried it.
Sankey: Sure.
Hill: So, it’s like, so my, my handiwork is all over UNISON, though at the later stage, I mean, I tangled with, I tangled with the leader of Middlesbrough Council. All the time I was employed, there were constant battles over time off, and I mean constant. I mean, almost daily. I mean, you know, this was going on for years and years. They made a major effort to sack me in the, in the early 80s when I'd become branch secretary and that failed, and as a result, the leader of the council lost his position, because the right wingers were against him because he failed to sack me and the left wingers because he was trying to sack me, and he lost out both ways and the new leader came in. And with local government reorganisation in 1996, there was a new Middlesbrough, and a new political leadership took over, which was pretty right-wing Labour. And it didn't take long for the leader of the council to say that he was going to sack me. And he, before I was sacked, he put it to the Labour group that I should be sacked, and if anybody disagreed with what he was proposing to speak up, none of the cowards did. Although one of them came back to me and told me what was, what was going to happen.
Hill: I was involved in what was called the Cleveland school meals dispute about equal pay for school meals workers, which was a absolutely crucial battle. Enormous pressures came on me, well, Stefan Cross, the solicitor and now barrister, he was providing the legal support, I was involved with the GMB and my branch, all the other branches were all in favour of settling the dispute for a pittance. I refused and hung out, hung out because I believed Stefan Cross, when he said we were entitled to massively more compensation. Within, with a matter of, well, at the same time as the settlement was announced for the school meals workers, I was suspended and sacked, and I was also suspended by the union. My employer would, and the Labour leader would not have moved against me, unless he did it, he'd come to an understanding with UNISON. UNISON wanted rid of me as well. And the reason for that, it's very, very interesting in terms of politics, who was against equal pay?
Hill: All three unions, Labour councils, the Labour government and white-collar workers led by NALGO, they were all against and, and even the manual workers, because they were, the white collar workers was because they were afraid of the differentials, as privileged position that some had, the three unions for manual workers, they were against it because would threaten the bonuses that the male workers enjoyed, which is a fact that a lot [unintelligible]. I mean, the current battle in Birmingham, it's precisely over the bonuses, really, that were negotiated from 1971 onwards. I mean, at the time when the, the Equal Pay Act came into force in 1975, between ’71 and ’75, the three trade unions had negotiated huge numbers of bonus schemes exclusively for men. The legislation’s going one way, the negotiations are going another, and then when you saw the vested interests, the Labour government did not want to pay the women the money they were entitled to. The manual unions wanted to protect the bonuses of the men that they’d negotiated. NALGO was shit scared that there were going to, basically, if you, if you went through the pay of some of the local government officers, they could not be justified by any kind of sensible thing. So, there, there were so many vested interests, and in any way, for standing up against them, I got crushed.
Sankey: Do you think if the Communist Party was still around, sort of at full strength at that point, you would have, your side of the dispute would have stood more of a chance?
Hill: Oh, good question. I would say that the Communist Party, the Industrial Department, did not make a thing of equal pay. I mean, on paper, in terms of resolutions, same as the trade unions, you can go back and the TUC carried a policy before, I think, 1900, you know what I mean, in favour of equal pay, but claiming you support it and actually doing something about it is absolutely, totally different. I think that the reality, the reality is that, although there were odd exceptional cases of equal pay disputes been successful, they were cauterized and settled so that they weren't seen as being opening up the bigger picture. I, I actually said at a meeting in Middlesbrough Town Hall, the meeting where it was announced about the women, the school meals women, were getting, and like, I'd, I give the report, and I’m expecting like, I mean the school meal shop stewards were like, “yeah, yeah!” And as soon as I'd finished the report, a hand went up: “It’s all very well talking about school meals workers, what about the home carers? It's disgraceful what we are paid.” Another hand went up, before I even had a chance to say anything, you got the convener for the cleaners: “Nobody even mentions the cleaners, we are the back of everything, ever and we'd never get anything. When are we gonna get our equal pay?”
Hill: And I said it, and I wish I’d been, I had the bloody recording, and I actually said, “Look. Soon as the school meals workers, the settlements have progressed, we'll deal with home carers next, we can’t deal with everybody all at once, it's just logistically impossible. We’ll then move on to cleaners, and then we'll move on to other workers.” And one person stood up and said, because NALGO was at the meeting, “What about the white-collar workers? We’re entitled to something as well.” They weren’t actually but never mind. The person who stood up and spoke was a senior officer in the personnel department. I went straight back to the leader of the council, that’s when the decision was taken that I'd be sacked.
Hill: And so I was sacked in 1997, February I think it was: February '97. I fought my Equal Pay claim, won it. UNISON took a vote at a regional council meeting, that they would not support my re-instatement, because they wanted to shut Equal Pay down. And I was, well, I had, I was blacklisted, and I had pretty grotty jobs. I stood for executive of UNISON, on an anti-corruption platform. And the person I was up against was Dave Anderson, who became MP for one of the Durham seats, and he was vice president of the union. And I, I was successful. It was one of the, one of the most exciting things in my life. You need to do something with that? [referring to the recording equipment]
Sankey: No, it should be fine, should be fine.
Hill: Just to say about the disciplinary action that the union had taken to get rid of me. It lasted, because I fought it, it lasted just short of five years. The people who presented the case, the people who did the first investigation was a extremely well-paid barrister from Matrix Chambers. Subsequently, there were other barristers employed to present the case against me. Over those five years, I would estimate the union spent, at least, a quarter of a million pounds on barristers’ fees, and on top of that, there were all the hotel bills and the expenses of the panel that was listed in my case. They took, the hearings took place in Middlesborough, Stockton, Yarm, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, London, and other places. You know, it was unbelievable, but anyway.
Hill: And then, I was eventually, eventually expelled just over the 2000 year barrier. And my activity continued. What happened was Stefan Tross left the trade union law firm that he worked for and set up shop on his own behalf. And he want, saw the possibilities to going back to equal pay claims, he asked me to work for him, which I did. I started working for him and, for a pittance, it must be said at first, when we developed equal pay claims. All of, all what's happening now in local government, I mean, the claims that we had in Scotland cost Glasgow City Corporation one and a half billion pounds. I would of think Birmingham is probably around that figure, maybe a bit more. It was, and what I did is, I had the opportunity of employing my considerable skills of…
Sankey: Sorry do you mind moving your microphone?
Hill: Sorry, my considerable skills in going round parts of the northeast, Yorkshire, Wales, having meetings with women, and encouraging them to lodge legal claims. At one time I had approximately ten thousand clients, all of whom had my phone number, my landline and my mobile, and used to ring me constantly, because of course some of the workers would only have access to a telephone when they're on night shift. And so, I can't... But, it's one of the things to, probably the greatest thing, that I’ve been involved with was the battle for equal pay. The impact it’s had on so many thousands, tens of thousands of particularly women, though some men benefitted as well. It has been terrific.
Hill: And I'm still politically engaged. I left the Labour Party, it was only, only about, about two years ago whilst I was a Labour councillor, I was only a councillor for three months and I got suspended by asking questions basically. Now, since I, since I left the Labour Party, I'm now in an outfit, fairly small outfit called the North Tyneside Community Independents. They're almost all ex-Labour Party people, and who knows where we might gravitate to. We’re fairly open and work very closely with the Greens.
Sankey: Do you see much continuity between that group now and the Communist Party in the 80s and 90s in terms of membership, ideology?
Hill: Not really. I mean, I think there's a, there’s a commitment towards more democratic, I would say there's a general commitment towards more democracy, which is, I think, probably the biggest thing that unites this group together. And certainly, my commitment to democracy developed whilst I was in the Communist Party.
Sankey: Brilliant, so we’re just coming up on the hour now, or in a few minutes. Is there anything, final thoughts you have about the Party itself, or your membership within it?
Hill: Have a glance at this. [referring to his papers]
Sankey: Yeah, no worries.
Hill: People say about the conflict between those people who argued for what they call class-based politics and those people who were more bothered about feminism and Eurocommunism type of thing. My activity always was across the, was across both . I mean, what people call class politics, lots and lots of it, what it really meant was trade union politics, you know, and pay demands and things like that, which are extremely important, but they're not the be-all and end-all. So, I remember, you know, national abortion campaign, we were heavily involved in that. The Cleveland child abuse, child sex abuse, I was involved as the NUPE branch secretary, but also as the chair of the Communist Party, with Andy as secretary.
Hill: We all, you may have mentioned it, we organised a meeting in Middlesbrough that was absolutely, there must have been at least two hundred people there and it included bloody paedophiles, even the, the paediatricians and the paedophiles, they both, they all came to the meeting. It was only the Communist Party in Middlesbrough that was prepared to even meet and discuss what was involved. And it may have been that the Communist Party in Middlesbrough was exceptional, but it was exceptional for a long, long time, you know, decades you're talking about, and, you know, there was a kind of, the relationships we had with the Labour Party, the various events we organised, loads of people from the Labour Party used to come to our meetings because they didn't get any politics at the meetings they went to. In a sense, that's what's the Labour Party will find out now as they've got rid of activists and thinking people, they’ll have a terrible time trying to defeat Reform. Think that’s about it. I was an election agent, I think it was, let me see, for ten candidates, in the 80s, and I'm an election agent for the Community Independents. And whilst, whilst I was in the Labour Party branch in Darlington, I made a very growing, lively branch, that councillors, right-wing councillors, moved into and shut down.
Hill: They didn't do anything with it. They just shut it down and killed it. And in Benton as soon as Linda and I left, almost the entire branch committee left as well because they'd had enough, and without trying to build this Community Independents, this tiny, tiny thing, and I, you know, we’ll just have to look, see developments.
Sankey: Well, thank you very much Stuart, I will just end the recording here.