Following the Devlin Report, a dispute about decasualisation in the Liverpool docks leads to a strike. Six weeks into the dispute, the Strike Committee reject the employers' demands for a return to work pending negotiations, and decide to escalate the industrial action into the political - the workers occupy the docks and commence to run the operation themselves. This occupation, though violently suppressed by the state and the owners, is nonetheless conceived as a gesture of possibility to the nation's workers; Jack Regan, the chief organiser of the occupation, envisages a "big flame" of political feeling igniting across the land.
