Chapter 19: The period up to the Present

Submitted by Red Marriott on July 5, 2009

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Chapter 19:
The period up to the Present
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29/4/85: Strike begins at South Kirby:

Counter-Information wrote:

South Kirby miners walked out immediately when management victimised and sacked yet another miner on 29th April. The strike soon spread to other pits in the Barnsley area.

But the Yorkshire NUM leaders went all out to sabotage the struggle, and the miners returned to work on May 9th with the men still sacked.

A local miner sent us the following information:
At the time of writing South Kirby pit walked out on strike after yet another man was sacked for alleged intimidation of a scab. This now brings the total number of men sacked to 5 all for alleged offences of this nature. The word SCAB is now good enough to get any man sacked. Combine this with a manager who thinks he’s God Almighty and we have now reached the stage of true “Capitalist democracy". To use the manager’s own words when one of the sacked men said he could produce 20 people to say he had not done anything, “Bring them and I’ll sack them as well.
This action is due directly to the hard line attitude of the management, under strict guidelines from “
Mack the knife”. Well, they are in for a fucking shock if they think we are going to tolerate the bastard much longer and it is abgout time other people started to take the same stand. All conscious elements should now stand up and say fuck off you bastards, we want every sacked man back in this pit or you won’t get another cobble of coal cut”.

Another local miner described how the strike started with a spontaneous walkout. At the beginning the action came completely from the ‘rank and file’. There were no union officials involved.

But then the NUM moved in, saying the didn’t want too much disruption. Holding back the struggle as usual, the union officials issued orders restricting picketing. They said that miners could only picket pits that had already pledged support, that pickets should be limited to 6, that the sacked mem shouldn’t picket. Nevertheless, the SKirby and Ferrymoor Ridding’s pickets met with success – solidarity action was taken at Royston, Dodsworth and Haughton Main collieries and at the Shafton workshops miners were ringing up all round Yorkshire asking for pickets to come to their pits.

A S.Kirby miner told us that he and many other strikers believed that the strike shouldn’t only be for reinstatement for the sacked men but that the aims of the year-long struggle should be taken up again.

However, on 7th May the Yorkshire area executive of the NUM refused to make the strike official and urged that everyone return to work, and ordered the withdrawal of flying pickets. Though South Kirby and Ferrymoor Ridding’s strikers stayed out for another day, there wasn’t the confidence to defy the union and continue the strike until victory.

It’s no good relying on support from the Trades Union structure. They’re now part of the whole system of exploitation. We must expect that they will try and stop struggles, or contain them. From the start, struggles much be controlled directly by those involved. Union official should be treated with the same contempt as management or any other boss.

DD reacted furiously against Counter-Information for this article, attacking especially the idea that the NUM was somehow separate from the miners themselves, a theme he has constantly reiterated for the past 20 years or more. One assumes his ability to intimidate many anarchists into inarticulate silence is not just due to the hangover of an anarcho-syndicalist ideology amongst anarchos but also due to his ability to mouth an aggressive rhetorical working class style which, like dust in the eyes, stops people looking the facts in the face. The following extracts from a letter written by a South Kirby miner published in Wildcat, June/July '85 shows, as if it needed to be illustrated yet again, that indeed the NUM was not simply a reflection of the miners:
“The strike started at South Kirkby colliery where the night shift walked out in support of 2 lads that were sacked that morning. What was inspiring...was that it was totally spontaneous...We stood up for the first time since we crawled back...We organised the picket of the day shift against the wishes of the branch officials, with great success; the scabs didn't cross our picket line. We have 26 at S.Kirkby and only 1 of them scabbed this time. Even the scab who was allegedly intimidated by the 2 lads who were sacked didn't cross. This amazing achievement can only be put down to the spontaneity in which it began. Ignoring bad advice from the officials and going for the throat while anger is rife and seizing support. An emergency branch meeting was called by the officials which only reaffirmed strike action making it official. From here on in it was doomed. The officials had no zest for the insurrection that had taken place. We were told after voting unanimously to strike -
a) There would be no pickets sent out until the next executive meeting took place. This was to make our official strike “OFFICIAL”.
b) Any pickets that were dispatched would need an officially stamped letter signed by the secretary.
c) Any picketting that may take place will be by “INVITATION ONLY” meaning that any pit would have had to have a meeting stating that they wanted pickets and would respect our line. ...

We argued our right to seek support immediately and deploy pickets but were beaten by the bureaucrats. We stayed gounded for the rest of the week . You may be asking why we did not continue in the manner that we had been so successful at before. And the answer is simply this -
a) our official strike was not officially “OFFICIAL”.
b) That without our officially stamped lettter stating that we were official we were not official pickets.
c) We had to be officially invited (HA!).

Without the letter from the secretary we were rendered harmless, and wide open for the “troops in blue” to seize our liberty. We were not able to go out picketting until after our next branch meeting. Where after a very lukewarm speech by our president we were made to vote again on whether to strike...This was Sunday (5 May) following Monday's magnificent walkout. We reaffirmed strike action - 290 to strike, 150 against. We were then told our officials had been to 6 branches and got official invitations for pickets. They stressed only these 6 branches would be picketted and only 6 letters would be endorsed. There was a sizeable rush to sign up for picketting and get off the subs bench. Letters would be given out on Bank Holiday Monday at our HQ after teams of 6 had been targetted for each shift. When we arrived for our letters we were told we didn't need them and that we should go only where we were sent. We did, and we had success in picketting out our targets. Whilst we were out picketting we tuned to the car radio for news of disruption at the other pits.

To our utter amazement three branches that had pledged support had not been mentioned. After picketting out our target we returned to HQ to see what had gone wrong. I asked our secretary why the pits had not been affected. He told me that they had not been picketted. I asked why and he said, “I do not apologise for the lack of organisation. We have achieved what was necessary - the NCB knows we are here.”

I told him it was a fucking utter crime to slap support in the face in this manner. That was deliberate sabotage right from the word “official”!...

That night Tuesday, as we made ready to go and picket out our target's night shift , a news flash (5.45) informed us that the strike had been called off. The executive had put paid to our hopes of fighting for our sacked miners all over this country. All our mates in jail. And all our futures.”

But the defeat of these miners was not as definitive as this guy felt at the time, although in terms of resistance at work, it may well have been a virtually definitive defeat for that period at least. However, few months later, on the 24th October '85, over 60 youths attacked cops in Mill Lane, South Kirkby. Mr.Clarke, S.Kirby NUM secretary played the usual role of soft cop, as to be expected from any official. “I succeeded in getting the lads off the street and asked the police to keep a low profile…For some reason, police are out in large numbers and if we are going to get back to normal, this is not the method. I do not condone violence at any time…there could be a riot and some innocent people could get hurt…I want trouble on the streets to stop. I don’t want to see an ‘us and them’ situation…” he said revealingly. In the next couple of months, S. Kirby became a no-go area for the cops, with any cop vehicles travelling around getting stoned and being forced to retreat.

This was part of the post-strike atmosphere at the time – for example, 13th July '85 cops were attacked by a large crowd at a fairground in the mining village of Knottingley, Yorkshire. And on 27th July '85 over 200 people battled with cops in Wombwell, S.Yorks, after an attempted arrest following the bricking of a police car. And on 4th Novemeber '85 crowds of teenagers rampaged though the streets of the Yorkshire pit village of Askern, near Doncaster, laying siege to the police station and hurling stones, milk bottles and fireworks, breaking many cop shop windows.

The autumn of 1985 saw the renewal of a whole range of riots throughout Britain, most notably in Handsworth (Birmingham), Brixton (S.London) and Tottenham. These were not as friendly as the riots of '81 in part because of the sense of despair following the defeated miners – they included a couple of rapes and other anti-social acts, but they expressed also a sense of rising community far more so than in recent riots, which have often had racist, and even psychotic, aspects.

The class struggle in the 80s continued with a degree of autonomy in the form of riots, strikes, prison riots etc. - such that the defeat of the miners was not seen as especially important, as a defining moment which, up till now at least, was the moment that the balance of class forces tipped significantly towards the ruling class. It was more during the Major years, when the pits were decimated, and the advent of Blair that retrospectively the miners strike could be seen this way. The apparent enormity of the Poll Tax movement, for example, made it seem that it was possible for people to get together and seriously subvert the State on as profound a scale as any previous social movement- after all, it had played a significant part in getting rid of Thatcher.

But what was ignored was how incredibly easy it was to refuse to pay your poll tax. It didn't really involve much of a struggle at all (the riots, outside the town halls and in the West End of London, were something else) – it just involved you giving a false name or fiddling in some way. What was not noticed was that, despite this apparent ease of not paying, amongst miners who had been very militant and subversive up to and beyond the Great Strike, the fight had often gone out of them: many of the best paid their poll tax, fearful of the consequences of not paying.

When the pit closure programme was announced by Heseltine in autumn 1992 there were spontaneous walk-outs in virtually all the coalfields, and a few sympathy strikes by other workers (e.g. a wildcat by some nuclear power workers) and a big mid-week demonstration, brought together at very short notice, which sadly had none of the rage of the Poll Tax demos of two years previously (there had been three Major events in the intervening years: Thatcher, sacked partly over Poll Tax, had been replaced by Major; there'd been the brutal manipulation of the masses by the mass murder of the Gulf War; and the Tories had won - against all expectations - their fourth electoral victory in a row) .

The decimation of the pits was 'opposed' by a majority of the media (this time playing the friend all the better to hammer them with silence later) and even many Tories - including Winston Churchill, the grandson of the bastard who shot down Welsh miners before the First World War. But the pits were closed not with a bang but a whimper: each individual pit was subject to a review procedure, there was a media blackout and each pit was closed one by one in isolation. The film Brass Tacks illustrates this defeat: oh how the culture industry love tragedies - a real victory of proletarians in struggle would be beyond them, partly because it would have to take on the culture industry. And of course, the content of the film reveals the circular tautological nature of culture: in the form of a musically exquisite brass band, culture is seen as the consolation for, the one redeeming result of, tragic defeat (with a very different - partly feminist, partly gay liberationist - content, there's a similar underlying thread in the film Billy Elliott, most of which takes place during the miners strike; and also one could mention The Full Monty, with its backdrop of the decimation of the steel industry, in this vein - the culture in this instance involving humiliating yourself as a male stripper).

The atmosphere over last fifteen years since Poll Tax has been one of progressive defeat. For example, the Liverpool dockers, despite, for example, the innovation of their connecting with Reclaim the Streets, were predictably defeated under Major and Blair - the chickens of the limitations of their insufficiently independent actions during the miners strike having come home to roost. And since then we've had the fuel protests and the kids movement during the Iraqi war, none of which got out of their marginality, despite the excellence of much of their spirit and initiative. There has been no geographical proliferation or extension over time of any of the struggles that have taken place since Poll Tax, and there's a suffocating stench of utter submission involving, amongst other things, taking it out on those closest to you rather than the development of a struggle to confront our real enemies.

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