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
Tagged with NUM
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
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Labour leaders and strikes: the lesson of Wilson and the Miners
Ed Miliband’s lack of backing for trade unions on strike on 30th June disappointed some, but in fact no Labour leader has ever backed strikes. It is worth looking at how Harold Wilson handled the miners’ strike of 1974, where Labour won a general election against all expectations.
Wilson was a politician with extraordinary talent, who won four general elections, and twice held the party together through crises when factionalism looked set to tear it apart. Wilson’s record in managing the party was more successful than Tony Blair’s as Blair, like Gaitskell, behaved as if those within the party who did not share his own vision, should be silenced, excluded and manouvered against. Continue reading
