ALL TOGETHER NOW?

Sub-titled 'One Man's Walk In Search of his Father and A Lost England' this powerful and moving book is about the need to write new stories for our communities and ourselves. In 1981, Mike Carter's dad Pete organised the People's March for Jobs which saw 300 people walk from Liverpool to London to protest as the Thatcher government's policies devastated industrial Britain and sent unemployment skyrocketing. Just before the 2016 EU referendum, Mike set off to walk the same route in a quest to better understand his dad and his country. As he walked, Mike found many echoes of the early 80s - a working class overlooked and ignored by Westminster politicians, communities hollowed out, anger and despair co-existing with hope and determination for change. He also found that he and his father shared more in common than he might have thought. The book begins with the story of Pete who left school in West Bromwich at the age of 15 in 1953, illiterate, one of six children of alcoholic parents. He trained as a bricklayer where he was radicalised on the building sites and joined the Young Communist League, and by the early 70s, led the Birmingham Building Workers in their successful strike action against the use of casual labour. He went on to become the industrial organiser of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Working on the Guardian, his son Mike asked himself "what had happened to the Britain that my father had promised me?" Clearing his father's belongings, Pete discovered papers, photographs and scrapbooks and newspaper cuttings about the industrial disputes of the 70s, love letters and letters to himself and his sister and his father?s old flat cap. He put it on and decided to follow the route of the March which had set off on 2nd May 1981 35 years to the day later. 391pp, paperback.