Socialist Worker, the miners and the “downturn”
By Jack Cleary, from Socialist Organiser 6 February 1985
Socialists need realism, honesty and candour in assessing the world around us. On the other hand we should have no business with unnecessary or premature defeatism. Anyone reading what Socialist Worker says could not avoid the conclusion that the strike is lost.
Socialist Worker’s 2 February issue, for example, has good headline advice for striking miners: “No Surrender”. But the underlying train of thought behind this, is made clear in articles in that issue.
For example, under the headline “Who is to blame?” they talk about the “very powerful criticisms to be made of how the NUM leadership have handled the strike.” Arthur Scargill is seen as being in some ways an exception, but “he failed to deliver the leadership which could have taken the strike in a different direction.”
They are entitled to their opinion, and these are things that will have to be discussed after the strike. But the SWP are not entitled —while continuing to present themselves as militants — to give up before the hard core of the miners give up.
Over the last few years the SWP has been in a deep political depression, talking as if no major working class action could even be considered. They correctly registered the downturn in the working class movement but magnified and exaggerated it into a deep depressive pessimism which led them to outright defeatism towards everything alive in either the industrial or the political wing of the labour movement.
Preaching defeatism, they became a force for demobilisation and passivity in the labour movement.
An extreme expression of the terrible confusion of the SWP is their attitude to the call for a general strike. They said “Revolutionary socialists should argue that the slogan does not fit at the moment because of the way the Labour Party leadership and the TUC general council have sabotaged the movement in solidarity with the miners.”
When was it otherwise? Mass strike and solidarity action is possible without the leaders and can pressure the leaders into calling for effective action. There are objective difficulties but it does not follow that we do not call for a general strike.
A general strike is objectively necessary for the self-defence of the working class now, and without it serious further blows will be struck at the labour movement. We call on militants to work for it, we make propaganda for it. We break it down into warm up demands like the call for a one-day general strike.
The SWP’s rejection of the call for a general strike is just part of its crippling defeatism.
The events
In the new year (1985) the steady dribble back to work now could be measured in hundreds per day. Neil Kinnock, now the strike looked to be failing, managed to visit a picket line (by a chauffeur-driven car). Nonetheless, something like 130,000 miners remained on strike.
12 January 1985: Henry Richardson, pro-strike leader of Notts NUM, is suspended.
22 January: A challenge to the government’s deduction of £16 from benefits to striking miners fails in the High Court.
23 January: Peter Walker, the Secretary of State for Energy, refuses to hold an independent inquiry into the future of the coal industry. NUM General Secretary, Peter Heathfield, meets with NCB Director for informal discussions, but MacGregor intervenes to prevent negotiations.
