The Miners' Strike 1984/85

Tubeworker online meeting, 21 March, 3pm: 40 Years Since the Miners' Strike

📢 A Tubeworker and Off The Rails public (Zoom) meeting

Thursday 21 March
15:00-17:00

In 1984-5, a strike by mine workers rocked the foundations of the British capitalist state. The strike was a counter-offensive against the Thatcher government’s class-war policy which aimed to smash the labour movement.

A half-story of the miners’ strike

Some aspects of the Channel 4 documentary on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, The Battle for Britain , are worth paying attention to. It includes interviews with former striking miners, who give straightforward, honest and hard-hitting accounts of what happened to them and, in particular, their appalling treatment at the hands of the police. The contrast is stark with the accounts from miners who worked through the strike: they seem blissfully unaware of the broader issues of the strike. They offer a fixation with the idea of “intimidation” as driving the strike, but little in the way of evidence...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

Christmas appeal for miners’ families

During and after the 1984-5 miners’ strike a large number of strikers were arrested and served prison sentences solely for the crime of defending their communities, their jobs and their union. The National Justice for Mineworkers campaign (NJM) has, for many years, been collecting money to help these men, some of whom have never been able to find regular work. Most of this money has been collected at public meetings and labour movement events, but the Covid pandemic has meant that many of these events, such as the Durham Miners’ Gala, have been cancelled. As a result there is a special...

Rick Sumner, 1933-2021

Sadly, Rick Sumner of the National Justice for Mineworkers Campaign has died. Once a miner at Shuttle Eye Colliery in West Yorkshire, in the aftermath of the 1984-5 strike he, along with his wife, Christine, organised the Justice campaign to help the many miners who were victimised and unable to find work. I met him a few times at various functions such as the Chesterfield May Day Rally and the Durham Miners’ Gala, where he was a regular presence with his stall of miners’ memorabilia and publications. A few years ago he stood down and the work of the campaign is being continued by others...

Letter: Not so much vipers

Emma Rickman’s column, Diary of an Engineer, gives us a window into the male dominated workplace. And in her latest entry, 'A Nest of Vipers' ( Solidarity 585 ), she gives us a window into the minds of the men who work there. Such a workplace as depicted here, and there are many of them, is a safe space for those men who are threatened by world events to air their prejudices. It is a place to exaggerate, moan, entertain their mates and laugh in the face of their own weakness. You know, reading Emma’s column, that S did not tell his wife to “fuck off” in bed. He’s an idiot for bragging to his...

Save BBC from the Tories? But what BBC?

The recent resignation of BBC director Tony Hall has once again thrust the question of the role and the future of the BBC into the spotlight. Hall’s resignation comes at a time when redundancies, cuts and reorganisations are being announced, along with calls for a rethinking about what the BBC does and how it does it. On 29 January it was announced that 250 jobs were to go among journalists and production staff. The scrapping of the popular Victoria Derbyshire Show, announced a few days previous, is indicative of what this will mean for the programme schedule. Although the reasoning behind...

The tragedy of Arthur Scargill

Arthur Scargill emerged from semi-retirement from politics to speak at a meeting of the Communist Party of Britain’s wretched little pro-Brexit front organisation Leave Fight Transform (LeFT) in Brighton on 11 September, alongside Eddie Dempsey (the man who said Tommy Robinson supporters were right to hate the “liberal left”) and other assorted xenophobes, nationalists and social conservatives. According to the Morning Star Scargill said that “every single MP who wants us to go back into Europe should be opposed.” That would be the majority of Labour MPs, then, Arthur? It’s easy to mock Arthur...

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