On International Women’s Day in the year of the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike, we should remember the huge contribution of women to the miners’ struggle. One of those women is Florence Anderson, who said in 1984 that the children and grandchildren of the striking miners will have pride, “not only in what their dads did, but what their mams did as well.” Here’s the end of a sensational speech to the Durham Miners’ Gala in the year of the strike.
Tagged with Miners Strike
Forget the whitewash: was the miners’ strike modern politics in action?
Philosophy Football have produced a T-shirt to raise funds for the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. MARK PERRYMAN explains why the miners’ strike still matters 30 years on.
Do you remember 1984-85? Digging deep for the miners. Frankie Goes to Hollywood at number one. Everton win the league championship. And a medium-sized T-shirt was ample big enough. For those whose principles have endured the test of time it all seems just like yesterday, and Tony Blair only a bad dream. Continue reading
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Political Scandal and Indifference
Let’s look at what you would’ve won. No more privatisations. No market fundamentalism. An extension of trade union rights. A thriving mining industry using the most advanced technology in the world. A joined up approach to finance and industry. A strong labour movement. Communities proud of their history. All under three successive Labour governments, dating from 1987 to 2001. It was a time that saw the 1945 settlement strengthened and deepened. Social democracy renewed was the common sense of the age, so much so that they wrote it into the European Union’s constitution. Britain, by no means a perfect society, was nevertheless more at peace, more at ease. It had earned itself a respite from ugly industrial strife and the attempts to dismantle British industry by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. Continue reading
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Support the heroes of Orgreave
The pictures will be forever ingrained on our minds. They were so powerful that in 1984 the late Jo Richardson MP held up one of them in front of the Labour Party Conference, and the World’s media. It showed a mounted policeman, baton raised, charging a woman whose only defence was to raise her arm across her head. Looking back now at those black and white shots of nearly thirty years, it is still impossible not to be shocked at the organised violence meted out against young miners, dressed only in jeans and T shorts. The Battle of Orgreave came to represent the virtual civil war being played out across Britain’s coalfields, as all of the power and resources of the State were mobilised against pit communities fighting for their very right of existence. Continue reading
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Farmers for Action: hail the new NUM
My great-grandfather was a pig dealer. I revealed this fact to me oldest daughter recently and she instantly replied in what was – I hope – all innocence: ‘Is that like a drugs dealer?’
Generations of Oslers past relied on agriculture for their livings, perhaps for hundreds of years back, as far as I can make out from researching my family tree. Even my dad started working life as a farm labourer before switching to a railway job. Continue reading
