I Remember Old King Coal

Will Hutton, writing in the Observer today, gave me pause. Read it, it's worth it. His article gave me a moment for memories and scratchy eyes and a lump in the throat. It is twenty years ago this week that the last great strike in British history, the Miner's Strike of 84-85, ended in ignominious defeat for the miners and for the idea that the unions could force an end to the depredations of Thatcherism.

I remember it, because I was there. I was a nineteen year old student at University when it started, fired up with newfound knowledge and utterly aware of my family's mining background amongst all the middle and upper class kids in academia's ivory towers. I joined the picket lines at the local pit, backing up the miners, standing with other students who mostly came from far more priveliged backgrounds to whom the miner's struggle was a matter of rhetoric and philosophy rather than the gritty battle for survival for jobs and communities. I saw the police brutality and the nastiness of miner against miner when the "scabs" tried to pass through the picket lines to work.

It made a lasting impression. No matter that I went on to drive a Mercedes and wear a suit to work, those days and later days watching my uncles be crippled by back pain or clogged lungs have always been my political conscience. In all honesty, much as I still hate the remembered feelings of defeat, I realise it was mostly for the better. However, society does need better than the callous cruelty of naked market forces. Let the market have it's forces, but let it also have compassion too - and compassion comes from people, not from shares, or printed bills, or profit margins. I have to agree with Hutton when he writes:

Looking back after 20 years, it is clearer that the defeat of Scargill was vital for the economy, the labour market, the environment, the public interest and progressive politics. But that didn't and shouldn't mean that capitalism should remain unchallenged, that working-class institutions should wither on the vine and that social democracy should be neutered.