Letters
NUM and Labour
It should have been a classic: the 40th anniversary of the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85; the election of a Labour government, the virtual political extinction of the Tory Party and England on the cusp of a Euro 2024 football victory!
It was the kind of political mix which, during the long history of our industry and its embattled communities, has seen euphoric scenes, as virtually the whole population has used the Durham Miners Gala as an opportunity for a mass, collective, loud-music, pride-filled party. As it turned out, despite the presence of some of the essential ingredients, others were noticeably missing. The most enduring was the sun: despite it being mid-July, not an appearance, even in a cameo role. Instead the rain poured down in unremitting torrents all day.
There was no-one from the victorious Labour government - no Starmer, Rayner or Miliband. By tradition the leader of the Labour Party is always automatically invited - in the past there have been popular rising stars seeking the endorsement of the miners and a chance to set out their political stall (something of an ‘If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere’ opportunity). But this died a death ever since Neil Kinnock was given the cold shoulder after the Great Strike for his failure to stand foursquare with us.
The customary playing of a favourite piece before the County Hotel, where the big wigs such as the current Labour leader take the salute, turned sour, as the bands marched right on by. The throngs of a hundred thousand miners, with their families and other members of their community - trade unionists of the still largely industrial smokestack industries - quickly melted away. In the past, when Jeremy Corbyn, for example, took centre stage, things were different, but apart from that, Labour leaders have recently been far away from the politics and concerns of the mining and now ex-mining communities.
Another famous face missing from the throng was former National Union of Mineworkers president Arthur Scargill. There was a good deal of bad blood between the two stars of the Durham miners, Dave Guy and Dave Hopper - that bad blood remains, even though the ‘two Daves’ have sadly gone. While the leader of the Labour Party always gets an invite, the leader of the NUM during its most testing time never does. Some of us tried to get the hatchet buried at least for this year, but to no avail.
On the face of it Labour seemed to have been bearing gifts. Firstly, there has been the long-awaited public enquiry into the policing of Orgreave during the Great Strike, which I will deal with below, but potentially more individually rewarding was the promise to “put right the injustice” of mineworkers’ pensions. What exactly this means we can speculate about, but there is no doubt whatsoever that this promise persuaded thousands of former miners to vote Labour. As a mate of mine commented, “Look, Dave, I’d vote for the Taliban if I thought they’d give us back our money.”
Since 1992 the National Coal Board/British Coal Corporation - with the blessing of all governments, Labour and Tory - creamed off 50% of the income from pension investments, despite not having paid one penny into them, and this amounts to some £8 billion in stolen, ill-gotten gains, worthy of the worse, most extortionist money-lender you could imagine.
As with the rest of Labour’s manifesto, we have no details of what ‘putting it right’ actually means, but that did not stop lots of ex-miners excitedly speculating on their fortunes, now that Labour is in office. I think myself that we will now receive our ‘reserve fund’ and from now on all ‘surpluses’ (meaning the 50-50 arrangement, which we never agreed to) will end. As for the other investment profits, which have long gone into the government’s coffers, I think we can kiss them goodbye.
What has been kept quiet is the announcement that Labour has reversed the previous government’s support for a new coal mine in West Cumbria. This is as good a reason as any why Miliband did not appear at the gala - his manic hatred of all things carbon-composed, and especially coal, rivals that of Margaret Thatcher. We have been fighting the combined forces of the well funded ‘green’ movement for seven years, and cleared every hurdle they have thrown in the way. The simple fact is that Woodhouse Colliery, owned by the West Cumbria Mining company, would be a metallurgical mine for coal that produces blast-furnace steel, not power station fuel. We need new steel, which in turn requires blast furnaces to produce coke from coal.
It is proudly announced how many new wind turbines we shall have, like it or not. But every single wind turbine in the world uses blast-furnace coke from coal in their construction. Now that the last blast furnaces in the UK have closed, mainly because of the crippling carbon tax, we have to buy steel and steel products from abroad. In the case of giant wind turbines, it is China. Other primary steel is imported from the EU. They, by the same, equally stupid logic, allow steel production, but do not mine their own coking coal, which means they have to depend upon the international market to produce steel.
Woodhouse mine would be well placed to provide what was needed using the new mineral export terminal at Teesport - a regular supply on the doorstep. That supply would be consistent and lower-priced, but, more importantly in this environmentally critical world, it would be positively ‘green’, compared to the mountaintop-removal coal mining taking place in the Appalachians in the USA, for instance.
Woodhouse has had to undergo many environmental tasks proposed by the local council and government environment officials. It is going to be union-organised and that means, of course, the NUM - in contrast to the laissez-faire non-union outfits who are destroying the Appalachians. It is likely to be 8% less polluting and carbon-emitting, because the mine is itself more carbon-neutral in its operations than any rivals we know of (we are aware that coal itself is not carbon-neutral).
All of this brings me to Labour’s pledge to organise an enquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, where ‘militarised police’ launched a vicious attack against striking miners during the Great Strike. Dozens of workers were badly injured and then false charges of riot and unlawful assembly were brought against 95 pickets. The court case against them collapsed following accusations of falsified evidence against the police.
Yes, of course, a full and detailed investigation - but into what exactly? So much of the left and union movement wants to ‘forget about the ball’ and ‘get on with the game’. For example, the closures in British Steel cannot be taken on without dealing with the question of steel production: you cannot shout ‘Defend steel’ and in the same breath call for decarbonisation. You cannot defend the jobs of oil and gas workers and at the same time talk about stopping oil and gas production.
What were the miners doing in Orgreave in the first place? We were trying to prevent the wholesale massacre of the entire British coal industry - 200,000 mining jobs and up to two million related or ancillary jobs. But these were not jobs in the abstract: they were in very specific and historic parts of the country. These were skills and roles linked to ethnicity, regional identity, national identity and linked to firm values passed down for multiple generations of class, justice, a sense of worth and value in your communal contribution. Any enquiry will miss the essence of what this fight was about.
While it is possible to isolate police actions on that day, nothing can ever justify the sheer savagery and pent-up hatred let loose upon us. The cynical use of our enthusiastic stepping into a well-planned trap. But that is not enough, is it? What about the actions carried out at Hatfield Main, Armthorpe, Fitzwilliam and a dozen other places? What about their cavalry charge at Ravenscraig, or the unrestrained attack on the miners’ demonstration in London? Orgreave was simply a more sustained and public operation. An enquiry into policing the miners’ strike might be educational, but is even that exhaustive enough?
What is required to bring the ‘Justice and Truth’ that the Orgreave campaign has sought is nothing short of a full enquiry into the 10-year pit closure programme carried through by Thatcher and John Major, with the baton faithfully taken on by Ed Miliband. What was the logic of closing down the most efficient, cost-effective and safe coal mining industry in the world? What about the clean-coal technology developed since the late 70s - burning coal efficiency and with greatly reduced emissions? The Green Power plant developed at Hatfield Colliery, which generated electricity with no CO2?
Let’s have an enquiry into the reasons why the cops had the orders they got in that bloody field - why Thatcher turned heaven and hell to rid Britain, to deindustrialise and deproletarianise the whole UK. Without it you’ll never get to the rationale for Orgreave or pit closures, steel closures and the forthcoming purge of oil and gas.
David John Douglass
South Shields
Pre-revolutionary
I would like to reply to John Smithee on the question of the legalisation of drugs (Letters, July 11), and then comment on matters concerning the Labour Party.
The first question is whether communists should support the legalisation of drug taking. I have decided to change my position from immediately opposing the legalisation of drugs to one of temporary neutrality. Before communists can adopt a correct position about whether to support or oppose drug taking, what is necessary is to hear the arguments for and against, especially from the medical experts. A communist position on drug taking cannot simply be based on uninformed views, nor on the fact that people have taken mind-altering drugs for thousands of years.
Also, I don’t think that communists should support legalisation so as to simply take the drug trade away from the criminal drug cartels. It is not only the drug cartels who are criminals. Official capitalism itself can be viewed as a criminal organisation - even more dangerous than the drug cartels. The greatest threat to human survival today doesn’t come from the criminal drug cartels, but from official monopoly capitalism - the worst criminals on the planet.
One final point on the drug issue is that I am not opposed to scientific research on the nature and influence of drugs on the human mind. I once read a story about how placebo drugs were given to people in a scientific experiment. The test subjects thought they were taking the real thing and they experienced going on a trip, unaware that they had taken a placebo. This raises important questions about the nature of human consciousness and the power of subconscious beliefs, which mainstream science has hardly begun to explore.
As Smithee correctly pointed out in his letter, people have been taking mind-altering drugs for thousands of years. This was done for various reasons. Obviously the abilities of the human mind in an altered state of consciousness, whether produced by drugs or hypnosis, needs to be scientifically researched. One of these powers is the apparent ability to foretell the future. For instance, the biblical prophets were obviously in an altered state of awareness when they prophesied about future events, which later came to pass often in remarkable detail. While not confusing prophecy with religion, as the ancient peoples did and as religious people do today, we need to be aware of what these seers saw and warned us about, rather than simply ignoring these prophecies, because they were presented in a religious context.
So I am certainly not opposed to the scientific use of drugs by researchers who are exploring the nature and abilities of the mind in an altered state of consciousness, whether induced by a drug or hypnosis. Obviously, rushing to support the legalisation of drugs outside of scientific research, without hearing the arguments for and against, would be foolish.
On the question of the Labour Party I think that the Revolutionary Communist Group is the most vocal leader of sectarianism in Britain. They dismiss the Labour Party completely. This is to confuse rank-and-file Labour members with the rightwing, pro-capitalist group which leads the party. If the RCG is right, then Jeremy Corbyn should never have won the leadership in the first place.
What we need to remember is that Corbyn won the leadership of the party in a completely non-revolutionary situation. This is the most important lesson of the Corbyn episode. The RCG, the de facto leaders of sectarianism on the British left in relation to Labour, are not prepared for what will happen to that party, when capitalism begins to collapse - which I expect to start before 2030. Labour’s recent landslide election victory may be a sign that we are entering a pre-revolutionary situation.
We can agree with Lenin that the working class is spontaneously socialist. In Britain, this spontaneous socialism is mostly expressed as a vote for the Labour Party, which presently benefits the right wing. The RCG needs to understand that the ruling class will seek to take over any mass party of the working class, including a communist party.
This is why I oppose the formal banning of factions in the communist party, which serves the interest of capitalist roaders in the party more than anything else. Rather than preaching sectarianism and dogma, like the RCG, communists need to take a flexible attitude towards the Labour Party.
Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism
American bills
Paul Demarty’s ‘Denialism in the circles of hell’ was a great article (July 4). It’s good to know I’m not the only politics/history nerd who closely follows the interminably flawed machinations displayed by the US seats of power.
I’ll add one thing though; the other way laws are able to be passed is via the dreaded ‘Bipartisan Bill’, such as regarding the recent billions appropriated for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. In a display of shameless hypocrisy, the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, did a 180-degree turn and whipped support for funding Biden’s foreign wars, despite spending his career in Washington prior to this opposing this kind of warmongering and the money spent on it.
It’s a truism in Washington that, whenever the label ‘bipartisan’ precedes the name of any bill, it is guaranteed to be bad news for the ‘normal’ civilian people of America ... and also often the world.
Jason Patrick Quinn
email
Trump assassin
No doubt many thoughts will have been tumbling around the attempted assassination of Trump - that narrow escape of his. Not only questions or commentary in an empty-souled, flippant, utterly facile and anyway purely distractive social-media manner, but maybe the following from within our Leninism-modal ultra-seriousness.
1. Thank fuck the shooter wasn’t a disoriented Palestinian-American believing he was doing the right thing for Gazans. Equally so, neither a Muslim of any stripe nor an ‘undocumented’ Latinx; nor some Chinese-American loner upset at American attacks upon his ‘heritage’, etc.
2. Thank fuck that, seemingly, Thomas Matthew Crooks wasn’t a fall-guy stooge, acting as an unknowing ‘proxy’ for one element or another within the US deep state or Israel’s Mossad - where the bulk of blowback would exclusively suit the latter, and yet again only suit the dark forces of global capitalism.
3. It’s not only bizarre, but also almost surreally coincidental that the shooter was out to stop Trump becoming president, when it’s Trump’s ‘haywire’ politics, not those of Biden, that may well lead to an ‘easing up’ on Russia over Ukraine if again he’s elected president. A bizarre coincidence is that the two assassinated Kennedy brothers were similarly less rabid about Cuba than other main state players of the time.
4. Thank fuck we communists don’t opt for conspiracy theories in the absence of realistic doubts or evidence: giving ‘conspiracy’ a disproportionate status avoids either recognition or any understanding of far greater forces in play. Forces such as immeasurably more significant, class-based explanations within our overall Marxian truth.
In much that same vein, maybe it’s worth noting that the World Socialist Web Site considered our recent UK general election as a “war” election, whereas the Weekly Worker questioned whether it was over “Gaza”. At least to my mind, the former analysis/posture is far more useful - arguably one driven predominantly by objective ‘expansiveness’ rather than the Weekly Worker’s, based upon subjectivism within hugely inadequate ‘parochialism’?
Maybe also all this comes as part of strangely outdated stances - when and where things have moved in multiple ‘oblique’ ways and in often ‘obscured’ dimensions? So yet again it’s all about that ‘internally directed’ dialecticism thing so absent anywhere on our hard left, goddamnit!
Bruno Kretzschmar
email