Mike Davis on fighting back in the 1980s
Reasons to Rebel by Sheila Rowbotham published by Merlin
These are the author’s recollections of life, love and politics in the 1980s. They are written in Sheila’s inimitable style, a tapestry of events, places, people and insights, woven together in a technicolour record that brings back some of the most significant events of that stormy decade. We have the ascent of the “Iron Lady” and the unremitting attacks on the miners, trade unions, local government, living standards and a plethora of reactionary measures designed to push back on the limited advances of the 1970s under Labour.
Sheila was at the heart of one of the most important struggles: the battle to save the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone’s leadership. She worked in the Greater London Enterprise Board in various roles and with an enormous range of pioneering activists, particularly editing Jobs for a Change.
She still found time to tour Britain, Europe and the US delivering talks on history and socialist feminism, write books, most notably Daring to Hope, Friends of Alice Wheeldon, and drafts for booklets on homeworking. She had opened the decade with Beyond the Fragments, co-authored with Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, who are referenced in virtually every year of the decade as comrades, friends and touchstones for support.
Like Sheila I was a parent of children living and being schooled in Hackney. So the book has particular resonance for me. I wish I’d kept a diary. I can’t think how such detailed vivid memories and commentaries are possible without one.