Miners in a once bustling South Yorkshire coal region marched with their champion, Arthur Scargill, at the weekend to mark 40 years since their war with Margaret Thatcher.
Camera: Joe Lauria. Editor: Cathy Vogan (1hr, 23 min)
In 1984 British coal miners went on strike to save their jobs as Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution targeted the most politically powerful labor union in Great Britain. After more than a year the union was crushed.
Last weekend hundreds of former miners in Hatfield, South Yorkshire marched to their closed pits to mark the 40th anniversary of the strike, and heard an address by the former head of their union, 86-year old Arthur Scargill. Joining him on the march was newly elected MP George Galloway of the Workers’ Party of Britain.
Nice work. Respect for being there back in the day.
NUM Miners fought like lions in that strike, but were let down by lame leadership of other unions, the Labor Party under Kinnock and, to a degree, apathy among the working class.
Given the ramifications for the British working class, there had to be a general strike to stop it being settled on the Tories’ terms. Still paying for it.
Blair is widely reviled, rightly, but more should be made of Kinnock’s poisonous role in this era, and its consequences.
The miners were the heart and soul of the British labour movement. No one involved in the Grunwick strike will ever forget
the morning that they and Scargill arrived in London from Wales and Yorkshire to help keep scabs from crossing the picket line. The
line held despite multiple violent charges by police goons and advances by mounted police with clubs. But in the end the
strike was sabotaged and broken by the Labour government, with the help of cowardly union bureaucrats.
Grunwick marked the first time that a strike by immigrant South Asian women received massive support from the rest of the
working class. Its defeat signified the final betrayal of the labour movement by “their” party, a betrayal which as you
write was on full display in the miners’ strike a few years later.
“Its defeat signified the final betrayal of the labour movement by “their” party, a betrayal which as you
write was on full display in the miners’ strike a few years later.”
“the British labour movement.”
The “British” labour movement always moved within a linear paradigm of limited tolerances facilitating the sustainability of “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, where “heroes” like Mr. Scargill were deluded that they were “strategists” and some former miners tend to agree with Mr. Scargill thereby continuing to practice supplication.