08.07.2009

One year of the miners' strike

This article by Jack Conrad was first published in The Leninist March 1985

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 Solidarnosc-type union.¹

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 Minersï¿½ 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 Willis² denounce minersï¿½ 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 ï¿½honourable settlementï¿½ - 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 ï¿½industrial solidarityï¿½ as vague as possible. Some, like Tony Benn, have even light-headedly said that the ï¿½miners cannot loseï¿½.

Of course, the fact is that the miners can lose. To suggest this canï¿½t 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 ï¿½new realistsï¿½ 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.

Itï¿½s no good just repeating the slogan for a general strike like News Line³ does every day: we all know this is what is needed: the real question is, how are we to 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,⁴ their Mineworkers Defence Committee and BLOC.⁵ That is why we have from the very earliest stages of the minersï¿½ 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, a 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 Basnetts⁶ 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 Minersï¿½ 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 Minersï¿½ Militant Minority must be established, wherever the opposition to it comes from.

A Minersï¿½ Militant Minority should fight around the following immediate broad programme:

For a strike wave of general strike proportions in support of the miners, around particular sectional demands, and against the anti-trade union laws.
For the transformation of the Minersï¿½ Support Committees into council of action-type bodies so that the struggle at a local level can be coordinated. This means they should consist of elected and recallable delegates.
For the linking of Militant Minorities across industries and for the linking of local Support Committees into a National Council of Action.
For the formation of Workersï¿½ Defence Corps.
For a democratisation of the NUM in particular and all trade unions in general. All officials to be elected and recallable and to receive no more than the average pay of the rank and file membership.

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 Minersï¿½ 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 ï¿½600 per week for the pickets), have organised picketing themselves.

This must now go much further. If a Minersï¿½ 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 leadershipï¿½s compliance with court orders banning picketing must organise themselves as a Minersï¿½ 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 Lady⁷ 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 Minersï¿½ Militant Minority.

Notes

The scab-led Notts area of the NUM broke away to form the Union of Democratic Mineworkers in December 1984. This was a repeat of the action taken by the Nottinghamshire Minersï¿½ Association, whose president was George Spencer, at the time of the General Strike in 1926. Spencerï¿½s breakaway union was supported by the coalowners. Solidarnosc was the anti-communist Polish trade union formed in 1980. Its first president, Lech Walesa, was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher.
Former Labour left Neil Kinnock was leader of the party from 1983 to 1992; long-serving union bureaucrat Norman Willis was elected TUC general secretary in September 1984.
News Line was the daily colour newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, probably the largest Trotskyist group in Britain until the early 1980s. Various nationalist and reactionary regimes and organisations in the Middle East backed the WRP - in return for services rendered - to the tune of well over ï¿½1 million. Despite the splintering of the WRP in 1985, News Line is still published.
Socialist Organiser was published until the 1990s as a Labour left newspaper by what is now the Alliance for Workersï¿½ Liberty.
The Broad Lefts Organising Committee (BLOC) was set up by the Militant Tendency (forerunner to todayï¿½s Socialist Party in England and Wales) in 1981. The Mineworkers Defence Committee was formed by Socialist Organiser and others on the Labour left, including London Labour Briefing.
David Basnett was general secretary of the GMB union from 1973 to 1985.
Margaret Thatcher was first called the ï¿½Iron Ladyï¿½ by a Soviet newspaper in 1976.

Prepare for a general strike

A personal appeal issued by Jack Collins, secretary Kent Area NUM, to the Mineworkersï¿½ Defence Committee conference on February 9 1985, and distributed in leaflet form by supporters of The Leninist