WeeklyWorker

19.03.2015

One year of the miners’ strike

Mark Fischer presents two articles originally printed in The Leninist at the end of the miners' strike

These two front-page articles from the March 1985 issue of The Leninist - forerunner of the Weekly Worker - contained some familiar political themes of our intervention in the miners’ strike. From the very start of the conflict, we emphasised the need for a generalised movement of solidarity with the miners; for other sections to join the miners on strike, fighting both for their particular sectional demands and against the Tories’ anti-trade union laws; and the transformation of miners support committees into council of action-type bodies.

What was new was the support for this programme by Kent miners’ leader Jack Collins - the general secretary of the most militant area in the country. To have a comrade of this stature identify with our platform was a real step forward for the small group of comrades organised around The Leninist.

But time had run out. The miners’ strike ended on March 3 1985, when the national executive of the National Union of Mineworkers voted by 98 to 91 to return to work. Jack Collins denounced the decision, since, in particular, there was no agreement providing for an amnesty for those sacked during the bitter 12 months of class war. Standing in the wind and rain outside the TUC’s Congress House after the decision had been announced, he was typically blunt: “The people who have decided to go back to work and leave men on the sidelines are traitors to the trade union movement.”

Kent NUM organised a continuation of picketing across the country, which delayed the return to work at many pits for another two weeks. It was the last act of the drama, however.

Mark Fischer

Fighting to win

The miners’ strike is the longest mass strike in British history. And it has been as heroic as it has been long.

The miners have suffered seven deaths, countless injuries and around 9,000 arrests. They have faced the newly organised national police force, which has launched cavalry charges and snatch squads against their picket lines. Their union has had its funds legally robbed by courts which have also banned mass picketing. Even worse, because of sectionalism most in the important Notts coalfield refused to join the strike and now the Notts area National Union of Mineworkers has taken fateful steps towards forming a neo-Spencer, Solidarność-type union.

But, while the miners have been blooded, they have not been cowed. They have fought back with hit squads, they have built barricades, they have defied the law and they have raised huge amounts of money to sustain the strike. In this they have received sterling help from the mining communities as a whole, especially the women. What is more, tens of thousands of militants in the miners support committees have rallied to their aid, as have workers across the world, especially those in France and the Soviet Union.

Tragically, this solidarity has not been matched by the leaders of the Labour Party and the trade union movement. Not only have we seen Ramsay MacKinnock and Judas Willis denounce miners’ fully justified violence, but, despite TUC and Labour Party resolutions calling for action in support of the miners, the best that has been delivered has been tokenism; at worst downright scabbing.

Seeing that the trade union leaderships have no stomach to fight, Thatcher has been determined to press the offensive in order to smash the NUM as an effective union. Un­fortunately, talk from the compromis­ing majority on the NUM national executive committee about an ‘honourable settlement’ - that is, an honourable surrender - has only encouraged the Tories in demanding a humiliating surrender as a prelude to their general offensive against the living standards, rights and organisa­tions of the rest of the working class.

True, many organisations and leaders of the working class have sought a victory for the miners. But against the full power of an aggressive and confident state the only way this can be achieved is the mobilisation of the workers in a strike wave of general strike proportions. This is something that many have refused to confront, preferring to keep talk about ‘industrial solidarity’ as vague as possible. Some, like Tony Benn, have even light-headedly said that the “miners cannot lose”.

Of course, the fact is that the miners can lose. To suggest that this can’t happen is to desert reality and no playing with figures can change that. This does not mean that the miners have already lost, as the ‘new realists’ of the Socialist Workers Party claim - far from it. While well over 100,000 miners are on strike, victory can still be won - snatched from the jaws of defeat. But the key question is how to win.

It’s no good just repeating the slogan for a general strike like News Line does every day: we all know this is what is needed; the real question is how we get it. Some have suggested halfway-house measures like a TUC-called 24-hour strike, or a recall TUC. But these calls are in reality utter diversions from the necessity of confronting the task of organising a general strike and offer not the slightest possibility of producing what is needed at the end of the day.

The key to victory lies amongst the militant rank and file, not the fat-cat trade union leaders and their petty bourgeois alter egos in the SWP, Militant, Socialist Action and Socialist Organiser, their Mineworkers Defence Committee and the Broad Left Organising Committee.* That is why we have from the very earliest stages of the miners’ strike called for an organisation of the militant rank and file modelled on the National Minority Movement of the 1920s.

Central to this perspective are the militants in the NUM itself. They have shed their hero-worship attitude towards Scargill. Yes, they respect his intransigence, but they know he has got no winning strategy. However brilliant a tactician Scargill is, he is a prisoner - indeed part - of the trade union bureaucracy. The fact that he is tied by a thousand strings of ideology, social position and tradition to the Kinnocks, the Willises and the Basnetts means that he cannot demand and really fight for a general strike because to do so would mean to break with the TUC, the Labour Party and reformism. This is something Scargill shows no signs of being prepared to do.

Because of this, if the miners are to achieve total victory - and what else is acceptable after one year on strike? - then they must organise independently of their leadership. They must have the courage to form a Miners’ Militant Minority.

No doubt many of the established full-time leaders of the NUM will oppose such a move; some will fight tooth and nail to prevent the rank and file organising themselves. They will have to be overcome like all tailists of the official structure. A Miners’ Militant Minority must be established wherever the opposition to it comes from.

A Miners’ Militant Minority should fight around the following immediate broad programme:

Militant miners must take this programme to other workers, especially those on the rails, in the docks and in the metropolitan counties. They must also fight to win direct support from miners support committees in order to provide vital financial and logistical help. Already militant miners finding their officials blocking moves to picket power stations around London have taken matters into their own hands and with the full backing of miners support committees, most notably the one in Camden (which provides £600 per week for the pickets), have organised picketing themselves.

This must now go much further. If a Miners’ Militant Minority was established it would receive the immediate support from a host of support committees. With a concerted propaganda offensive and patient explanation they could win the vast majority to back them. Part and parcel of this will be the political defeat of the gloom-and-doom-mongers who at present paralyse many support committees and the winning of new layers in the workplaces to them.

Militant miners must grasp this nettle. If they wait for others to lead, victory will never be won. Those who have taken tentative steps, those who have organised themselves in scab areas like Notts, those who refuse to accept their leadership’s compliance with court orders banning picketing, must organise themselves as a Miners’ Militant Minority. As soon as this is done they must turn outwards and rally the working class - above all, the millions who are yearning for a fighting lead and itching to teach the Iron Lady a lesson she and her Tories will never forget.

While the strength of The Leninist is small, we will place our paper at the disposal of those making any moves towards a Miners’ Militant Minority.

Jack Conrad

* The Broad Left Organising Committee was the trade union front of Militant - today Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party in England and Wales.

Prepare for a general strike

This was a personal appeal issued by Jack Collins, general secretary of Kent area NUM, to the Mineworkers’ Defence Committee conference on February 9 1985, and distributed in leaflet form by supporters of The Leninist

Comrades and friends

First let me wish you every success with your conference and in any future solidarity actions you may organise in support of the miners.

The miners’ strike is obviously the key battle facing the working class movement. On the outcome of this struggle depends not only the future of the National Union of Mineworkers, but possibly the very future of both legal and official trade unionism and other forms of democratic and progressive organisation in Britain.

The most recent underhanded manoeuvre is the attempt of the National Coal Board to string out the process of negotiations in the vain hope that the core of the striking miners will crack. They have clearly underestimated the resolve and fighting spirit of the striking miners and their families.

In contrast, the leadership of the TUChave clearly failed to respond in kind to the attacks of theTories on the miners and the wider working class movement. The miners’ strike has exposed the Willises, the Basnetts and the Chapples of the movement as spineless fat cats with no guts to fight. The miners have never had any reluctance to call over the heads of such official leaders of the movement if these people fail to live up to their responsibilities as class fighters.

Food and money remain an important - indeed vital - component part of solidarity with the NUM and on behalf of miners everywhere I express my heartfelt thanks for this sterling work, without which we could not have physically survived these past 11 months. However, the whole question of industrial solidarity is becoming more and more important. There is a crying need for a cross-industry movement of those committed to total physical support for the miners. This total physical support movement should be committed to a class-struggle programme and if necessary be organised indepen­dently of the official structures in much the same way as the National Minority Movement of the 1920s. Given this perspective the miners support committees could begin a process of transforming themselves along the lines of council of action-type bodies.

Although I have on frequent occasions called for preparations for a general strike to back the miners, we have to understand that the situation today is potentially very different to the 1926 debacle. Today we see the possibility for social change. The miners point the way forward - not only to the rest of the working class movement in the short term, but also to the struggle for a society where human need and not profit is the motive of our economy. But that relies above all on us seizing the opportunities that the struggle is presenting us with.