Chapter 17: The Last Three Months - Collections, charity and the Band Aid spectacle...strikers' Christmas...Snow fun...

Submitted by Red Marriott on July 5, 2009

[center] Chapter 17:
The Last Three Months

Collections, charity and the Band Aid spectacle...strikers Christmas...
...Snow fun......Power cuts...the subtle sell-out...
...contradictions of low level NUM officials...increasing scabbing...
...Tony Benn...indifference towards the strike...Paul Foot...
...the bitter end...
[/center]

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Father Christmas, a collector for the striking miners, was arrested mid-November. Collections up down the country were subject to police harrassment, collectors often having the money confiscated – but then the working class have always been robbed.

At the same time as thousands of people were giving money and gifts to the strikers, Band Aid was launched by Slob Geldof (22). In Apocalypse Now the main character says - after an accidentally shot Vietnamese woman, bleeding profusely and half-dead, is given a plaster - “First we shoot them half to death then we give them a band aid.”; the kind of one-off insight one occasionally hears amongst the pile of dross coming from the movie industry. That more or less says it all about Band Aid and all the subsequent guilt-quenching spectacles brought to you courtesy of the same society that starves millions. The condition of aid is that the recipients produce cash crops, which makes them utterly dependent on the world market, and destroys the margin of self-sufficiency they had. In this way Aid – dependent also on compliant governments - kills as much as Third World debt (incidentally in 1985, for example, - the year that Band Aid supplied the money it collected to Ethiopia - Africa's debt was 3 times the amount given by all the nicey nicey charities to the starving).

Moreover, in presenting illusions that one can somehow save lives through the charity business it props up the system ideologically and reinforces resignation and illusions, making people believe that something less than global revolution can assure that the unnecessarily starving can survive. Is there any coincidence that Band Aid was launched at this time – when the possibility of challenging the system of mass slaughter, the world market, was a genuine concrete threat? Though for Geldof himself, the concern for the world's poor was merely a career move, for the rest of the dominant society it served a very useful function as a distraction from the essential. Some journalists even made direct comparisons between giving to the deserving poor - the starving Ethiopians - and giving to the undeserving poor – the striking miners (the obnoxious Julie Burchall, whose career was and is based on an ugly aestheticisation of petty, shallow, arbitrary 'shock' provocation without point, was one).

The collections for the miners, whilst also having some of the defects of charity insofar as they were often seen as substitutes for solidariity action and were extremely unevenly distributed, were also self-organised expressions of identification with a real movement of opoposition. Loads of people throughout the country used the collections as a point of contact, a place where they could talk about the news, about what was happening in the strike and about themselves. (It should be added that a lot of political sects would collect money for the miners from here and there and then present it to them as if it came from their organisation, thus hoping to boost the image of their particular group; this was also done by Housing Co-op bureaucrats collecting donations from tenants and then claiming it as a donation from themselves in a personal capacity).

Before this intensified spectaculisation of Giving epitomised by Band Aid, Comic Relief, etc.etc., the tendency was for people to give money – but not to make a song and dance about it. Few made much about giving to the miners, for instance – it was just something that had to be done . But since then, the tendency has been to make a big moral thing about how much or often you give, people more and more feeling the need to wear their pure hearts on their designer sleeves. For most, charity is simply an instant cleansing of the soul, a redemption for the 'sin' of being better off than someone lower down the international hierarchy, who are seen as merely victims to be pitied, not fellow proletarians in struggle with whom one can express practical solidarity. “There's always someone worse off than yourself” just keeps the international division of labour going: on the one hand it provides 'solace' for those who remain passive before their own misery, on the other hand, it substitutes mutual recognition and a sense of responsibility for changing the world with mere guilt.

***********************
“In anticipation of Christmas, at the end of September me and a couple of others decided to go round toy shops on a regular basis and accumulate loads of toys, using large coat pockets and bags, to be given to miners' kids at the end of the year. This has been recounted in 'Jenny's Tale' in a slightly embellished form: “He had asked smart London shops for donations to the miners’ strike and those that didn’t cough up he and his mates would rip-off blind. Mind you, even those shops that agreed also were shoplifted, but it didn’t really matter as they had more than enough in this society of raging inequality.'' We certainly never asked them, as most of them were in wealthy areas and wouldn't have given us any toys if we'd asked, and asking would have certainly made it very difficult for us to shoplift afterwards since they would have been suspicious. No – we just simply shoplited them, helped, on occasion, by others. It might have been that someone else elaborated on the story to Jenny, because, as it is, it's fairly banal, though we helped save the Christmases of 2 pits – Kiveton and Monkwearmouth. The latter seemed largely indifferent, even when we put two nicked battery-operated fluffy rabbits that moved onto a table and set them up moving in a fucking position - a somewhat dour lot dominated by the Communist Party''.

Despite the image perpetuated by the media of misery for striking miners' families at Christmas, and in particular by the well-known film Billy Elliott which presented the father and Billy as alone, cold, presentless and almost foodless, many if not most strikers had a good communal Christmas – and for many it was better than the usual nuclear family-round-the table watching telly, having a traditional Christmas row, with the kids complaining that they haven't got what they wanted or wanting more...Though undoubtedly there were far less presents for the kids, the excited collective atmosphere and sense of support from others made it, for some at least ''The best Christmas I had'', ''Everyone banded together'', ''Lots of cheap wine flying about – brilliant – really good atmosphere'' as various miners put it on the BBC's 20th anniversary programme. Sure, there were always hardships, but community in struggle, even with poverty, is infinitely more enriching than the impoverishment of conspicuous consumption. And many miners stole to make up for their poverty, to make sure their kids had enough – theft as part of struggle is always simply one method amongst many of stealing back the life that's been stolen from us. Another miner, who'd had a fight with the cops, been arrested and beaten up, said, ''I got more women that Christmas than I've had since. Unbelievable.'' At this time it wasn't hierarchical power and money that (supposedly) was an aphrodisiac but the passion of revolt: one became attractive by asserting oneself against everything that repressed oneself. Although at that time there was a common practice of middle-class lefty women trying ‘a bit of rough’ during the strike by getting off with a miner, as they came into closer than normal contact with them through miners support groups etc., it's hard to know whether this was the case with that guy, as it seemed the Christmas festivities at Hatfield mainly involved the locals. However we shouldn't ignore the fact that there was added prestige at this time on the lefty scene to be seen to be shagging a striker (or a miner's wife) – a kind of ‘donate your body to a miner’ attitude. Patronising but true.

Christmas also saw one of the few collective attacks on the NUM by striking miners. A few days before Christmas, hundreds of Durham miners (can't remember what pit), promised £40 Christmas money by the relatively cosy officials, when given just £10 each, ransacked the whole of the Union building, looting everything that hadn't been nailed down, including furniture.
* * * * * * * * * *
One of the lighter incidents of the strike happened about this time, though perhaps a bit later – in January: in the snow at Kiveton Park, a Chief Superintendant – Nesbit - drives up to the picket line and sees a snowman with a cop's helmet on it. This is clearly an affront to the dignity of policemen everywhere, so he orders the other cops to get rid of it, but they can't be persuaded – it's too silly. So he gets in his cop car and drives full speed at it. Little does he know that the snowcop is built round a concrete post – with the obvious result of a smashed up cop car, a very undignified Mr.Nesbitt and a very happy picket line, a story that spreads, despite the snow, like wildfire and keeps strikers warm for weeks to come, and picket lines reverberate with the following song, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body": "The pickets built a snowman Around a concrete post. The pickets built a snowman Around a concrete post. The pickets built a snowman Around a concrete post...But Mr.Nesbit mowed it down. Silly bugger Mr Nesbit. Silly bugger Mr Nesbit. Silly bugger Mr Nesbit...And he needs a new Range Rover Now!".

* * * * * * * * * *
The year ended with one of the most significantly stupid statements from Peter Heathfield (NUM general secretary) and from Arthur Scargill that there would be no power cuts this winter, and that they'd never said there would be power cuts. ''I accept that if this Govenment, regardless of cost, is prepared to use substitute fuels in power stations, then with the current level of economic activity, and with a mild winter, it is probable that there will be no cuts. The Central Electricity Generating Board will survive on a wing and a prayer.'' , said Heathfield, adding ''I never anticipated power cuts'' . This was a double lie:

1. They'd both repeatedly said there would be power cuts, as did the NUM paper The Miner .
2.More importantly, there had been power cuts and there continued to be power cuts in January. Not many and not nearly enough, but significant ones neverhteless. And if the strike had continued there certainly would have been more, particularly with the blacking of international coal distribution to the UK on the cards.

At a time when, as never before or since, the pound almost reached parity with the dollar – and this solely because of capital's fears about being defeated by the miners, one has to assume that these statements amounted to a sell-out. The point was not to be superficially upbeat about power cuts, but being so downbeat as this was deliberately demoralising. On January 15th, Edward Heath, former Tory PM, was more encouraging of the strike than Scargill and Heathfield had been two weeks previously. Referring to the collapse of sterling, he said, "People abroad are worried about a prolonged miners' strike which is very damaging indeed." Certainly the NUM leaders had a more demoralising effect. One wonders whether this was to give a nod to the NCB that they were worth negotiating with because they could help to deflate things or if this was just plain stupidity. But the national negotiations did start up again at this time (in 1981, the most exemplary action in Poland was the use of public loudspeakers to broadcast the negotiations going on between Solidarnosc and The State, a way of reducing the chance of a sellout, which has rarely been used as far as I know, and sadly was never used in the miners strike).

********************

Take a look at these unpublished notes - January – February 1985 (includes repetition because they were never organised):

POWER CUTS

Those radical striking miners who find Scargill vapid and hollow have also avoided making their disgust public. This is particularly self-defeating now that Scargill has made an idiot of himself by stating that there’ll probably be no blackouts this winter and that he’d never said that there would be. Given the fact that there have been blackouts, euphemistically defined by the CEGB as “maintenance problems”, in several areas (including 2-hour blackouts in Blackpool, Sheffield, Birmingham and Bradford) and which led to Peter Walker giving express instructions to the media not to mention them – given these facts, this demoralising claim of Scargill’s amounts to doing the Government’s dirty work for it, i.e. a subtle form of “sell-out” (the only form Scargill is capable of, since if he did what the NGA did in 1983 or what Ray Buckton did in 1982 he’d immediately be forced to ask for round-the-clock police protection to save him from being strung up by the militant radical section of the miners).

Scargillites have so consistently said “Arthur’s not put a foot wrong in this dispute” – and not been answered back – that even when Scargill says such a demoralising load of bullshit like there’ll probably be no power cuts, everyone keeps quiet . Up until the beginning of January, up until Scargill and Heathfield made these crass statements, the strike was virtually solid in those areas that had been on strike since the start: the drift back before Christmas was just a trickle back compared to since the New Year.[Phoenix note: this light seem like simplistic reasoning, but though undoubtedly there were other factors,the blatant contradictions of Scargill and Heathfield were definitely one of the more important ones.]

"The bigger the lie, the more it is believed” – Goebells.
It’s a banality that all news of the class struggle is heavily censored. Recently Peter Walker, Energy Minister, issued instructions to the press not to report any of the CEGB’s “maintenance problems”, as euphemism for power cuts. The only one-off report was in the Guardian of Jan.8th Outside London, places where there have been 1½ - 2½ hour power cuts include Sheffield, Bradford, Blackpool and Birmingham. Elsewhere there have been significant voltage reductions. Also reported in neither the national press nor The Miner has been a few days of rioting in Lincolnshire, including Lincoln, Boston and Grantham (the Maggot’s birthplace)…Wood Green (Class War’s 2nd front), Paddington White City…Newman’s 52 riots. All the time – silence, no news. In the information society: no information. Censorship – mass censorship. The ruling show has to present – to the miners as well as to other people who have no control over their own lives – the image of being in control, of the fatality and lack of effectiveness of all resistance to the inevitable 1000 year reign of Market Forces.

One of the most obvious, yet least talked about, of the reasons for the post-New Year mass scabbing is Scargill and Heathfields’ statements after Christmas that there would be no blackouts. In view of the fact that there had been 2-hour blackouts in Birmingham, Bradford, Sheffield, Blackpool and lots of other places before Christmas, and given that since then there have been 2-hour blackouts in several parts of North and East London (notably on January 7th), several blackouts between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. in other parts of the country, and vast voltage reductions everywhere, including fog-ridden motorways - given all this and more these statements by the bureaucrats seem, at first glance, utterly stupid. Particularly when one discovers that about 10 days before Christmas Peter Walker instructed the media not to mention any of the CEGB’s euphemistically labelled “maintenance problems”, a silence from the rulers’ media which seems to have also inflicted the NUM paper The Miner . In their January 17th issue, they attacked the media for being silent about the relation between the falling pound and the miner’s strike, but nowhere do they attack it for silence on the power cuts, nor for Peter Walker’s demand for this silence. This puts the NUM in the position of being more defeatist, if it’s possible, than even The Guardian (of ruling mediocrity), which at least prints the occasional letter mentioning power cuts (probably because of pressure from radical printers). Power cuts would clearly have been one of the most vital morale boosts to the strike: yet Scargill & Heathfield have done the opposite - done the government’s dirty work for it. Certainly a subtle sell-out: it passes the buck for the strike’s failure to the base, who have been starved and demoralised back to work, which, of course cannot be blamed on the bureaucrats, who, after all, just take their marching orders from the rank and file. But why this demoralisation? What are the ulterior motives?

Although these particular notes end there, the only satisfactory answer is that the NUM leadership, despite needing the continuation of a large coal industry to maintain their own organisation and their roles and, amongst those higher up, their careers, had had enough of the strike which was becoming increasingly difficult to control. Sure, they didn't want to overtly sell it out. But they probably felt it would be a Pyrrhic victory for Thatcher (given the plunging pound & the government’s forced re-organisation of it’s vastly over-spent budget) and that the Labour Party was bound to come back to power and slow the coal industry's decline. At the same time we shouldn't forget that incompetence and personal fears are oft-ignored reasons for the acts of those in power and were probably a factor in Heathfield's and Scargill's attitudes. Towards the end of November '84 I was at some miners' benefit where a guy from South Wales, a Communist Party member, got up and said something like “If we don't get some good power cuts soon, if we don't win this strike over the next couple of months, then we're going to have to give up...” As we shall see, this is basically what happened, and with the manipulations of the C.P. at the centre of the bitter end.

On 'When Britain Went To War,' Peter Walker claimed that enough coal stocks had been horded to last two years. But according to the Guardian at the time of the strike (18/1/85) “some power stations are nearly out of fuel, although imports of coal during 1984 were double what they were in previous years.” Now one might think that this could have been just disinformation by some Lefty journalist, but if that's the case, why did Walker see the need to instruct the press not to mention 'maintenance problems'? In today's atmosphere, the most outright lies about the present go pretty much uncontested: one about the past wasn't even noticed. The aim is to present the State and the Economy as immutable, an all-powerful system that has never been threatened and therefore never can be in the future and that such ideas as a social movement to undermine this power are purely pathetic utopian dreaming.

At the beginning of '85 I wrote to an NUM branch secretary in Derbyshire (Peter Elliott of Warsop Main) I was in touch with, about what seemed to me the beginnings of a 'subtle sell-out'. I have no copy of this letter, but I do have the reply:

“I agree with your analysis of the subtle sell-out: other events (full executive on the negotiations) seem to confirm that fact.

I am at this moment organising in N.Derbyshire, and hoping to broaden the base, a challenge to the Stalinist bureaucratic approach now more openly being pursued by the NUM not only at national but at regional level. Our objectives are simple.

1. Which is fundamental - give the running of the dispute where it should be, with the rank and file.
2. Intensify our activities in seeking support by more physical approaches to other rank & file trade unionists, by-passing the leadership.
3. Incorporate into our struggle unemployed workers, who until now we have largely ignored.
I am having tremendous pressure put on me by our local leaders and there is the beginning of a character assasination programme being levelled against me, so I don’t know how far we will get - however, the fight goes on....”
- letter from a Derby branch official, Jan 1985.

One can see here a bit of one of the contradictions of low level NUM officials: he wanted to give “ the running of the dispute where it should be, with the rank and file”. If this meant giving the access to files of contacts, the use of money, use of phones, vans and all the union equipment to all those who wanted it to advance the struggle – fine. But the idea of “giving” still implies a certain paternalism - it was really up to the 'rank and file' to take it, maybe by means of mass assemblies...Someone who is in an authority role, however minor such a role is, can only refuse such a role if he is to help develop a social movement. But this didn't happen. The guy was an ok decent guy – he had none of the pretensions of some of the more heavily 'political' branch secretaries – the CP fellow travellers, or those in lefty organisations, and was rather contemptuous of those who sought media attention or those who'd developed their “rhetoric at Ruskin College” . But, after the strike, when I mentioned I'd liked the attack on Mick McGahey, he came to the old Stalinist's defence, saying he'd always admired him. Branch delegates and secretaries like this guy have played a dual role of leader-representative and initiator equal to the rest of the strikers - but because the strikers looked up to them and looked to them, as specialists, to provide the means for the struggle, the inevitable consequences were confusion and demoralisation, regardless of their radical intentions, regardless of their integrity. So in the end, this branch secretary was, as a representatative, reduced to justifying the scabs (the February ones) – whilst his wife, out of a fury that came from not being trapped in having to represent (though also she knew she wouldn't have to work with these scabs), had refused to share the same bed as him, and he had to sleep on the couch. It was a measure of his honesty that, despite having only seen him twice before, he told me that. Whilst nowadays, people are often so closed that they hardly ever reveal anything personal, in those days, this was fairly common.

On the other hand, in a struggle against this world, the central question is not that this or that person is nice or not, is endearingly 'honest' about their lives or not, but whether they are able to honestly confront their petrified ideas and the hierarchical roles that maintain them so as to advance the struggle, so as to break through the contradictions that stop the advancement of this struggle. But that would also require some confrontation coming from those lower in the hierarchy, those who looked up to these officials.

****

On 17th January there was a one-day national rail strike against the intimidatory policies of Brutish Rail against train drivers blacking coal trains. Ray Buckton, ASLEF leaders said, “If it hadn’t been official, there would have been chaos because there’s a tremendous amount of feeling about this.” Which says everything that needs to be said about official strikes: for the unions, chaos is when workers are not controlled by them.

Thatcher was well known for saying, “We are not going to intervene in the coal dispute.” (Thatcher, Scottish Tory Conference, 11/5/84.) But "documents leaked to the Daily Mirror show that the Government had intervened – by persuading British Rail to settle with its workers, then in dispute, in order to prevent the two unions joining forces.” (Thatcher’s Reign – A Bad Case of the Blues, McFadyean & Renn).
***
On the same day as the national train strike Paul Foot of the SWP carried a short article about the miners strike in the Daily Mirror, recounting an interesting story where a miner had been beaten up, his kids intimidated and his car attacked, and that the media had decended on him, assuming he was a 'working miner' (euphemism for 'scab'), but , as soon as they heard he was a striker, a victim of the scabs' violence, they retreated and ignored the whole event. But the main part of his column was a long article about how cleaners in the House of Commons were giving fake names to avoid tax and national insurance, whilst he complained that the DHSS and Inland Revenue knew all about it but did nothing about it, moaning that nobody was prosecuted. Normally these middle class investigative journalists who claim to be the vanguard of the working class at least feign sympathy for the poor but clearly here Paul Foot, the epitome of this tendency, let his guard slip: he always led such a respectable life that for him cheating the State, even one run by the Tories he claimed to oppose, was considered an outrage. But this was typical of most of the two-faced utterly out-of-touch Left (and even a few on the ultra-Left), and this disconnectedness from basic class instincts made them express all their moralistic qualms about attacks on scabs. Foot always maintained good relations with his ex-public school chums at Private Eye till the end of his days.

In the Daily Mirror article, Foot showed in a crude form the aim of all investigative left-wing journalistic revelations: to get the State to rationalise the anomalies and incongruities in the organisation of the market economy which the State manages, and in so doing, putting even greater constraints on the dispossessed (often as the pay-off for a few reforms). Recently (March 2005) Foot was uncritically praised in a memorial service in Sheffield by Arthur Scargill and Bridget Bell of Women Against Pit Closures. During his lifetime, workers in struggle were a little less enthusiastic about this professional wordsmith. In the early 70s, after a big confrontation with the cops at the Fine Tubes factory in Plymouth, where workers had been on strike for sometime, Foot, introduced as the NUJ journalist-of-the-year, got up at a meeting and descibed how “we fought and beat the police this morning” . He was greeted with jeers and catcalls because everyone knew that this 'we' was a lie – the lame Foot had remained on the other side of the road observing the fight from a safe distance.

Foot, of course, was part of the popular front of the miners strike which included the Bishop of Durham, Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner, Beatrix Campbell, etc.etc. – who always banalised and ideologised the struggle. Using their hierarchical roles (through which they tried to repress class violence against the rape of our lives) they publicly denounced the Police State; yet they only showed what a good liberal country we live in. Britain’s so tolerant: anything can be said about anything – and just as long as this “freedom” of speech without consequences practically submits to all the logic of hierarchical power, of the market economy, it can flourish as an example of how ‘democratic” our misery is, how unlike a Police State it is.
* *
In the last two months of the strike, in the face of increasing scabbing, initially exaggerated by the NCB, there were constant schizophrenic swings amongst the most active section of the strikers and those who supported them, between a terrible desperate demoralisation (encouraged even by some of those who apparently supported the miners [25]) and loads of plans to kick-start the strike up again. Everywhere the most active strikers were saying "I hope it never ends". These desires, however, were overwhelmed by the forces of the old world, and our hesitations won out in the end. For example, Peter Elliott's plans never came to anything - and nor did mine. Read once again, my notes written at the time:

It is true that the miners strike has not collapsed into the apathy, impotent depression and demoralising despair (at least not with any consistency), which has been so persistently predicted over the last year or so. But unless this vital battle attempts some further qualitative leaps, it will. It’s not enough for the hit squads to continue doing what they’re doing, however audacious and exciting such activity is.

For the past year, the miners strike has been manic-depressive: sometimes it has almost collapsed into clichéd predictability, apathy, impotent depression, humiliating demoralisation and unarmed despair; at other times, it has violently exploded into unpredictable qualitative leaps on all fronts of daily life! Of course, from the start, the pundits – and many who thought of themselves as revolutionaries – were predicting the strike’s imminent collapse. But the fact that it’s lasted so long – and has revealed so much about class society in Britain and the world – isn’t enough to keep it going. There is a steady return to scabbing, however much the NUM has to maintain a front that everything’s ok. And the next few weeks could see over 50% of the strike scabbing. Certainly, whilst those who are wholeheartedly involved in the strike and support it practically only see things in terms of what they’re going to do “when the strike’s over” (e.g. complete our text on the strike; get into permanent sabotage of the pits; produce the best video on the strike) there will be no way to stop a massive uncontested humiliation which the end of the strike would imply. Indeed, the most practical of the post-strike hypotheses (e.g. consistent sabotage of the pits) the State has also anticipated and will already be working out ways of getting information in order to fill the massive extra prison space which by 1986 they will have generously provided for.

As for those hoping to produce their particular view of the strike – in text or video form – after the strike, even if their aim is to push the class struggle further by drawing out some of the less banal aspects of their experience of the strike, this reflective task is as necessary now to deepen the movement as it will be when and if the strike ends. If the strike ends? Well, it’s still a bit of far-fetched optimism to hope that a significant minority of class conscious proletarians here and throughout the world could provoke a revolution within 2 years, which would see the “end” of the strike: realistically, even if the strike officially ends, there will still be vast numbers who will be signing themselves off sick, which miners can do themselves, without a doctors’ certificate, for up to 8 weeks (in Shirebrook, 50% of the scabs are doing this, and the figures must be pretty high elsewhere also).

[b]Scabs [/b]

"A scab is still a scab” – Kiveton miner, late Jan. ‘85

Another vital change in the battleground has been the change in attitude from the early “super-scabs” to the present plain “scabs”. Even after dozens of pits throughout the country exploded against the rats who grabbed at the NCB bribe last November, and against their guard-dogs in the police force and the media, Scargill was condemning violence “away from the picket lines” and saying that these scabs would be forgiven if they came out again after Christmas (some have been stop-go on strike and scabbing from November to today).

Leftists like the SWP were already excusing those who returned to work at the start of December, and even came out saying that maybe the attacks on the scabs had been a bad tactic and really shouldn’t have happened.

Whilst some Leftists complained that attacks on scabs were contrary to trade unionist tradition, the sub-Leninist pseudo-revolutionary ideologues of the ICC went one better than the Left – this clique displayed its uniquely delirious sectarianism by condemning the attacks on scabs for being within the ideological traditions of trade unionism (by which abstract criteria, one could condemn all strikes !). What all these groups have in common is the verbiage of struggle (and of a definition of struggle that supports their own notion of themselves) but when some real concrete violent necessities and realities about this struggle are expressed and exposed they run away shitting in their pants. It’s always been a violent minority that initiates struggle, that has gone through the pain/fear barrier and acted concretely to extend their struggle. No innocent bystanders! The attacks on scabs, on or away from the picket lines, might have horrified the spectators whom these self-proclaimed vanguards hoped to win over – but they also certainly did put off many miners who had remained spectators of the strike from returning to work. That the majority of striking miners had remained largely spectators of the strike was/is both their fault, the active strikers' fault and the NUM’s.

In the 1983 NGA Warrington battle, or with Ray Buckton and the 1982 ASLEF strike, or NUPE in the ’82 health strike, the bureaucrats consistently passed the buck to the TUC - a convenient scapegoat for the sell-out. This time, however, the miners haven’t let Scargill pass the buck to the bureaucrats – for too large a minority this con would be shown to be too obviously convenient for him and clearly unnecessary – so Scargill has had to subtly undermine the resistance of the strikers from within, to scapegoat the drift-back to work he in the first place had helped to encourage. Why did he say nothing to condemn GMBATU’s withdrawal of its daily £1000 donation to the miners, which, significantly, was also made right after Christmas?

Before Christmas, giving to the miners strike was Today’s Good Deed. Since Christmas it’s more like “Let’s get the nuisances back to work as quick as possible: the longer this thing continues, the more my position is in the balance”.

Nevertheless, the State and its servile guard-dogs in the media, with the help of the pseudo-opposition in the NUM hierarchy & the Labour Party etc., will do their best to make sure that this ‘defeat’ goes out with a whimper, not with a bang, that this ‘defeat’ is made to seem like not just a partial defeat of one battle, but a permanent defeat. The mass depression and demoralisation the State will do their best to inflict on you and me here - & even in other countries - can only be avenged by the sort of explosion of anger that spread through the mining villages from July onwards - and this time not just against scabs & cops, but also the Union scabs, the NUM cops. Of course, this rage won’t come from thin air, but, above all, from an understanding of the subtle compromises & lies perpetuated by Scargill, Heathfield, Jack Taylor & co; it’ll come from all those striking miners & sympathisers who, up till now, have been relatively private about their critiques of the NUM hierarchy.

* * * * * * *
However, instead of producing these notes in publishable form (I've transcribed them above into a more coherent form from almost illegible – even to myself - scrawls on different scraps of paper), which would have been more useful, I produced the following, still interesting, leaflet for a miners' demo, January '85, in Islington, North London, where Tony Benn was the main speaker:
[b]
TONY BENN - ANOTHER LEFT-WING CAPITALIST PIG
[/b]

"It is the Government’s policy to phase out subsidies to the nationalised industries. In line with this the Government hope that the coal industry will be able to operate without the need for assistance, apart from the social grants”
(27/11/75, Hansard, Vol.901, Col.1062) (Tony Benn)

"What is needed is a viable industry to get the coal out of the ground. And to get it out at competitive prices.”
(Colliery Guardian, May 1976) (Tony Benn)

"I am reluctant to engage in the House in discussion of individual pits, for the reason that I have given, namely, that there is a proper procedure and that where necessary, the NUM can come to me and I can raise the matter with the NCB… I have never found the NUM in any way unreasonable where closures are necessary because of exhaustion or because pits are out of line in economic terms.” (Hansard, Vol 959, Col. 1015.) (Tony Benn)

Like most social movements that concretely contest symptoms of the misery of capitalist development the miners’ strike is an amalgamation of contradictory aspirations, a popular front which contains within it both counter-revolutionary and revolutionary perspectives. One of the more evident aspects of this contradiction is the way in which miners, and their supporters, have remained silent about what they know of some of the hypocrisies of the bureaucrats who claim to support them. Under the illusion that they have to present an image of unity in order to win, striking miners have swallowed their pride and allowed 2-faced leaders to speak “on their behalf’ with hardly a hint of opposition. Tony Benn is merely one of the most well-known of these scum whose aim is to get back into positions of power over the backs of the miners.

In 1977, that benignly patronising grey-faced ponce, Tony Benn, as Minister of Energy, collaborated with Joe Gormley, former NUM boss, in manipulating the notoriously divisive bonus scheme for the Notts, South Derbyshire and other areas, a scheme that had been decisively rejected by a majority of the miners in a ballot.

Also in 1977, Benn did his best to crush the unofficial power workers’ strike, which had courageously risked one of the few attacks on the Labour Government’s Social Contract (otherwise known as the Social Con-trick), and which was even organised, by some of the workers at the end of the strike, against the divide and rule tactics of the ‘militant’ shop stewards. Benn had even made contingency plans to call the army in to do the work of the power workers, but he’d found this unnecessary when the so-called ‘militant’ stewards accepted a deal worked out with Benn and the CEGB bosses which created a skill hierarchy (status, ‘responsibility’ and small differentials) as the ‘reward’ for weakened solidarity.

Another one of Benn’s achievements as Energy Minister was the closure of more pits than Thatcher has managed, and all justified with the same monetarist logic that he now denounces the Tories for. Moreover, despite the Left’s attack on the development of nuclear power, the brutality of the cops and the threatened use of the army to put down strikes, when Benn was part of the Cabinet, he armed the Atomic Energy Authority, participated in the government’s brutal use of cops to put down the Notting Hill carnival riots of 1976 and 1977 and never raised a squeak in protest against the use of troops in the firemen’s strike of ’77 – ’78.

Leftists say “Aaaah – but Tony’s criticised a lot of his past …he is capable of change, you know.” Though it might well be that he’s conveniently changed his image now that he’s not part of a government (i.e. not directly helping to organise the commodity economy and the crushing of resistance to it), a minimal (very minimal) basis for accepting a person has changed is that they criticize precise past behaviour and resolve not to put themselves in a position where they could repeat this behaviour (even then, it would be stupid to judge them on their intentions, rather than their concrete acts). But even by these insufficient criteria Benn has not changed: he still aspires to a position of hierarchical power, still seeks the limelight of the TV studios, and hasn’t even criticized any of these precise previous acts. Far from it: in his present criticism of monetarism, he has stated, “The BBC, the police and the army are uneconomic. But we all need these. The same goes for coal.” Who is this “we” that needs the BBC (Bourgeois Brainwashing Creeps) and the rabid guard-dogs of wage slavery and the market economy (the filth and the army)? Certainly not the masses of dispossessed individuals! The “we” he is referring to, of course, are politicians and other organizers of our misery, whether in right-wing or left-wing guises. It’s about time we gave them despair and paranoia! The anti-hierarchical violence of some of the miners, and the rioters of 1981 before them, have shown us the way. Bosses left, right and centre must disappear forever.

P.S. Scargill constantly claims that the agreed ‘Plan for Coal’ makes no mention of closing uneconomic pits. This is bollocks. In fact, in ’74 the NUM and its Labour allies committed themselves to the “inevitable” closure of pits “as their useful economic reserves of coal are depleted”.

January 19 1985
Produced by: B.M.Combustion, London WC1N 3XX
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For some reason, this leaflet was not particularly liked by Benn's admirers. I was profoundly upset when one nice middle class lady politely handed the leaflet back. Some said it must be a fascist leaflet – the B.M. obviously stood for British Movement (for those who don't know, it stands for British Monomarks, a company that works like an anonymous post box, receiving mail that you then pick up from them for a small fee). Stalin and his supporters likewise characterised any opposition from the left of Stalinism as "fascist".
* * * * * *
One can see in the intitially absurd exaggerations of the amount of miners scabbing and the eventual result this encouraged of a genuine flood of scabbing the way lies and ideology function in the ruling world. What starts off as an aim is presented as a fact and thus creates the conditions for its own realisation – that is, unless more forcefully contested. The crude manipulation of lies by the Hungarian Stalinist ruling class in the early 50s, for example, didn't prevent these lies being contested by an explosion of social contestion in '56. But modern capitalism is far more subtle in its demoralisation, functioning more on the basis of utter isolation, making you think you're the only one who sees through the lies, when usually there are a considerable minority who do but who haven't yet found the means to make their doubts count.

The following were amongst my notes for this period:

When bully-girl Thatcher challenged Scargill to condemn the violent “bully-boys” amongst the striking miners she knew perfectly well that, despite the fact that Scargill would have to remain silent, in the past Scargill has condemned the necessary violence of miners against the hierarchical violence of the State. With this ploy she could present the Union bureaucracy as responsible for the most autonomous aspects of this strike, the violent initiatives outside Union control. The rulers’ show – the ruling spectacle – needs to determine the image of what constitutes an opposition to it in order to confuse the more radical opposition to the system. At the same time it’s a way of getting the bureaucrats, ever-anxious about their image, to police the violence of their members (after all, in the past, such violence has been turned against the Leftist manipulators as well as the ruling ones).

This confusion of the Union with class violence mirrors the confusion of the mass of the miners – and other proletarians also – a confusion maintained by the fear of the more rebellious miners to explicitly go against the hypocrisy of the unions, and the misery of union ideology. That Dave Douglass, an NUM official, can distribute ‘Class War’ (journal of that gang of anarcho-social democrats who seek, by violent means, a society based on equality of bullshit: self-styled opportunists who aim to “win people over” to their gang and use writing as a way of presenting a public image – much like a record is for a rock star – conveniently forgetting that analysis is as vital a weapon as a Molotov, that the class war won’t be won without it) is illustrative of how schizophrenic the proletariat is at the moment - on the one hand desperately angry, on the other hand, having no perspective outside of reforming what is, even if such reforms require violence. Going beyond such a limit requires not only going beyond the limitations imposed by the Unions, which also means recognising that solidarity from other sectors of the working class will best be developed from an attack on the bureaucrats, but also going beyond the humiliating defence of jobs which is how the Union officials can dominate the argument.

The following unpublished notes were written by the author of this text during the period January and February:

Notes written in the last two months of the strike
(there’s no precise chronological order to these notes – all of them were undated - but I’ve put them roughly in the order they were probably written, written often in a scrawl which was almost incomprehensible to even me)

"There've been so many ways that the NUM hasn't helped during the strike – like when they took the minibus away and had nothing to do with our communal kitchens – that it's made me see that we shouldn't ever look to the unions for help. We should organise ourselves outside them, without them, against them..." - Fitzwilliam miner's wife.

What can be done during the strike: blackouts/2nd front/ picketing of police stations. Different meetings: form and content. Demos over collections. Graffiti and damage. Involvement of striker-spectators (what objective and subjective/inter-subjective obstacles to involvement?). Limitations on transport to London for collections.

Lack of permanently revocable strike committees.

The striker as spectator – what they miss out on.

Getting their picket-line money.

Few texts have helped theoretically prepare the rebellious minority of miners and sympathiser for “making the best of a bad situation - the compromise necessitated by circumstances out of our control” – i.e. the sell-out (as far as I know, the following English language pamphlets are the only lucid undogmatic support over the last 9 months for the most radical aspects of the strike which have also tried to prepare, with any consistency and honesty, the rebellious miners for the cop-out to come: Workers Playtime, June 1984; Miner Conflicts July 1984; The Positive and the Negative Sept. ’84; A Communist Effort December ’84; and, to a certain extent, Wildcat Jan/Feb 1985).

"Don’t follow leaders” - son of Scottish striking miner.

"They’re all just in it for themselves” - Yorkshire miner.

"Scargill would make a better boss than MacGregor” - another Yorkshire miner.

"If he sells us out - we’ll kill him” - miners everywhere.

Dear Hack Arselickers,

Thanks for everything!

Even the most ‘oppositional’ of you are essential for the perpetuation of our rule. Once again we thank you! If it wasn’t for your excellent job of presenting the ordinary-slave-in-the-street with the false choices necessary to maintain his passivity our skins wouldn’t even be worth the paper their printed on. Once again we thank you! Though we shit on you like all the rest, even the most ‘crusading’ of you only complain about the exhorbitant price of the turds. Most of you - resigned cynics, alcoholics, moralists - are happily content to churn out yet another tear-jerking photo of the sewer we protect. Once again - we thank you!

Like us, you have learnt the only lesson the World Market teaches: contempt and the apparent ‘success’ of contempt. Once again we thank you!
All your ‘scandals’, ‘exposes’ and ‘insights’ into ‘bad’ authorities and ‘bad’ commodities reveal nothing more than your need to perpetuate a self-image of your benevolence and indispensability - defended with implicit ideologies of the ‘good’ authority and the ‘good’ commodity. That’s just what we need. Once again let us thank you for all your services rendered in the maintenance of submissive conditions. With a sincerity that us full-time liars can only muster for their fellow professionals, once again we thank you.

You remain, sirs, our obedient servants ~
The Capitalist Class.

“After the strike’s over most of us’ll probably just collapse exhausted – until one day we’ll just have to start up and get organizing again…We’ve had support from everyone – people from right across the world – and if there’s any people in the world, anywhere, who need our help in the future, we’ll try, through our action groups, to do our best to help them.” – Striking miner’s wife, S.Yorks.

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