When he was a young man, a friend of mine drove a carful of people down to Birmingham to join the miners’ picket lines. In winter 1972, the miners had gone on the offensive against the Tory government over their stagnant wages, in a display of militancy that sharply polarized British society. When one striking miner, Freddie Matthews, was killed on the pickets by a scab lorry driver, Labour MP Tom Swain told Parliament that the strike was “the start of another Ulster in the Yorkshire coalfield,” warning that if the government did not respond to the murder, he would “advocate violence” on the dead man’s behalf. A secret government report showed just how much the Tories feared the workers, portending that “If this sort of attitude is pressed too far, the social consequences are unpredictable.”

The situation was tense — and the authorities were on edge. As my friend drove toward the picket line with his comrades, a group of policemen pulled them over. But while they were being questioned, the car’s tires were mysteriously slashed, leaving them stranded. The police told them it “wasn’t in their powers” to help them continue their onward journey. As a cocky young radical, my comrade told the policeman: “Things are going to be very different between us when we get in charge.” The policeman retorted, just as confidently — “What makes you think we won’t get in charge first?”

Indeed, when Andrew Murray — today a senior figure in Unite the Union, advisor to Jeremy Corbyn, and folk-devil of the liberal media — became politically active in the 1970s, the British left was politically unrecognizable compared to what it is today. We get a sense of this in his rich new book, The Fall and Rise of the British Left, charting the astonishing changes that have marked the political left — and wider labor movement — over the last four decades.