Photo courtesy of Luckas Galeano

On the Twenty-fifth anniversary of the miners strike, Pete Ramand speaks to former miner Ian Mitchell about the dispute that changed Britain.

It is 25 years since the miners’ strike, which is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in British history. Margaret Thatcher considered the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), especially its leader Arthur Scargill, an “enemy within”. Her allies in the right-wing media portrayed the union as a subversive force in British society and alleged that it operated in consort with international terrorism and the Soviet Union. A seven week strike by the NUM brought down Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1974, and Thatcher made defeating the union a key component of her economic strategy. I spoke to Ian Mitchell, a mental health worker in the Southside of Glasgow who lost his job as a miner, about life in the NUM and the legacy of a strike that divided Britain.

Ian grew up in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, a Labour Party stronghold dominated by steel, mining, and engineering. Both of his parents worked in the steel industry and were Labour supporters. He left school to work at Silverwood Pit in 1974, at the height of the NUM’s industrial militancy.

He was heavily influenced by a generation of radical young miners that included Arthur Scargill. In the 1960s, they led a campaign for a national pay rate: previously, miners were paid “piece rates” by the units of coal they produced. “Piece rates were seen as divisive and led to huge differences in pay depending on where you worked and what conditions you worked in,” Ian explains. “This led to a number of strikes led by the rank and file which included a young Arthur Scargill. These militants became the Barnsley Miners’ Forum and went on to play a key role in the national strikes of the early seventies.”

Most of these young militants were attracted to some kind of socialist politics. Ian was part of an angry minority who broke with the socialism of their fathers, a socialism which was largely based on electing the Labour Party to Parliament. Ian’s socialism embraced international politics and anti-racism. “In the late ‘70s I was active in the Anti Nazi League which was set up to combat the rise of the National Front,” he told me. “Reading socialist newspapers opened my mind up to a whole range of internationalist issues such as the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa and the fight for a united Ireland.”

As Ian embraced socialism, British politics was moving to the right. A series of botched deals between the Labour Party leadership and the trade union bureaucracy weakened both parties, culminating in the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978. Next year’s General Election produced a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher, whose evangelical support for free markets was equalled only by her vociferous opposition to collectivism and trade unionism.

Thatcher knew that she could not break Britain’s trade unions without assaulting the NUM. I asked Ian why Thatcher took five years to attack the miners’ union: “When it looked like a national miners’ strike would break out over closures in the early ‘80s she backed off and allowed money to be put in to the industry that staved off the closures,” he told me. “She knew that it was too risky to take on the NUM at that moment and she bided her time.”

Thatcher’s strategy to break the miners dated back to 1974, five years before she was even elected. It was the brainchild of Nicholas Ridley, founder of the Selsdon Group, a pressure group of radically pro-market Conservatives. The Ridley Plan advised building up coal stocks at power stations, “slashing benefits to strikers”, employing “good non union lorry drivers” to move coal from rail to roads, and “importing large amounts of coal from abroad”. In addition, it called for “training a large mobile squad of police equipped and prepared to uphold the law”. Thatcher made Ridley her Secretary for Transport after her post-Falklands War re-election in 1983, and pursued the Ridley Plan to the letter, at considerable public expense.

The man specifically employed to defeat the miners at the National Coal Board was Ian McGregor. McGregor proved his worth to Thatcher during his tenure at another “nationalised monolith”, British Steel, where he halved the workforce in two years. For Ian Mitchell, whose parents worked in steel, McGregor’s reign evokes particular fury: “His appointment was greeted with universal disapproval amongst miners and their families. Both my mum and dad worked in the steel industry at this time, and both lost their jobs thanks to McGregor.”

After stockpiling coal and recruiting anti-union road hauliers, the Coal Board under McGregor announced that they were closing 20 “unprofitable” (the accounting has been disputed) pits without consultation. Miners in Yorkshire, County Durham, Kent, Scotland and other areas walked out in protest. “Thousands of young miners signed up for action and there was massive enthusiasm for the fight,” Ian remembers.

“This was reflected in hundreds of huge branch meetings across the country that, like my pit, voted unanimously to support the strike.”

Even today, this mass walkout is controversial because there was no national ballot of all NUM members. The vast majority of miners backed the strike, but in Nottingham, many workers opposed the strike and later formed the Union of Democratic Mineworkers to oppose the NUM. Ian, like most miners, fully supported the NUM: “We were right not to hold a ballot. As far as we were concerned, the union had already got a mandate from its membership to oppose pit closures. This was taken in 1981 when over 80% voted to strike against pit closures.”

Given that the ballot was being pushed by the right-wing media and the NUM’s opponents, Ian believes that it would have sold out a strike that already had mass support. “For the majority of strikers the fight was on,” he argues. “It was a question of taking sides.”

Many attribute the failure of the strike to its leader, Arthur Scargill. Scargill was vilified in the media as a pro-communist and pro-terrorist traitor to Britain. However, Ian remembers Scargill fondly: “We did not have enough Arthur Scargills during the strike. His biggest mistake was relying on local NUM officials to conduct the strike. While Arthur supported mass militant activity, area leaders preferred more moderate tactics. Arthur should have appealed over the heads of these leaders to rank and file militants like myself.”

Despite the defeat, Ian has many fond memories of the strike. He points to the solidarity organised by working class communities around the country, who ran Miners’ Support Groups to keep the strike going. Support often came from unlikely sources. Lesbian and gay activists in London drove a pink mini bus filled with money, food, and toys to a mining community in South Wales. They challenged the homophobia of some miners and helped to break down barriers. “Gay activists and miners swapped stories of instances of police brutality and harassment,” he recalls. “In 1985 the Gay Pride demo was led by the Welsh NUM banner.”

Ian paid a heavy personal cost for his union activity. “I was sacked in 1988 and placed on a blacklist which obviously made it difficult to get a job.” Nevertheless, he remains a committed socialist. With his partner Gill, who formed a Miners’ Support Group at Leeds University and later led the campaign against the G8 Summit at Gleneagles, he is an active member of the Stop the War Coalition in the Southside of Glasgow.

I asked Ian if the strike could inspire workers facing unemployment today: “Despite the odds we showed daring and initiative when we started the strike, courage and endurance while we waged it, and pride and defiance when we ended it,” he said. “With the present recession we are seeing many workers being told they have to accept wage cuts and redundancy. Some of these workers are being encouraged by their unions to go along with it.

“Fortunately there are others who are fighting back, from Belfast to Dundee, with courage and determination. I hope their example will inspire others to resist and hopefully this time we’ll win.”

Photo - Stefan Sealey

Pete Ramand

Glasgow and Strathclyde students have joined a series of demonstrations condemning Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip.

The demonstrations, organised by the Stop the War Coalition, and supported by various other groups, have resulted in thousands of people turning out to protest all over the country.

Saturday January 3 saw an estimated 4000 people march through Glasgow’s city centre in support of the Palestinian people. The rally was addressed by speakers from all of the main political parties with the exception of the Conservatives.

Barrie Levine, a member of ‘Scottish Jews for a Just Peace’, described his reasons for protesting.

He said: “The collective punishment of the Palestinian population, first through the siege of Gaza and now through large-scale military attack in dense urban areas, is a brutal action that flies in the face of international humanitarian law — and of Jewish law.”

Glasgow students joined mass demonstrations in both London and Edinburgh on January 10, when 10,000 protesters marched through the streets of the Scottish capital and threw shoes at the US consulate building, chanting “George Bush we hate you. We will hit you with our shoes.”

In London rioting broke out after demonstrators marched from Hyde Park to the Israeli embassy building. Shops were vandalised and protesters threw projectiles at police lines.

According to Julie Sherry, a Glasgow University student who was at the demonstration, the police behaved violently towards some of the protestors.

She said: “The police were aggressive and very heavy-handed. They repeatedly charged at us with batons.”

Lindsay German, National Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, explained that, despite opposition, protests against the Israeli Government would continue.

She said: “As long as there is violence in Gaza, we will continue to protest outside the Israeli embassy.”

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Service said that the police had not received any formal allegations of police brutality and that their response was appropriate. Twenty-four arrests were made during the London demonstration, where five police officers and numerous protestors were injured.

On January 17, Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire and, the following day, Hamas agreed to a ceasefire on the condition that all Israeli soldiers leave Gaza over the next week.

James Foley

Labour Party elections played a formative political role for me. One of my earliest memories, aged seven, involves chasing a Conservative Party election wagon down the street screaming, “What about the miners!” My next door neighbour — a Neanderthal right-winger, aged eight — asked how I could support Kinnock, a man who openly kissed his wife in public.

He later joined the Officer Training Corps. Clearly Tories learn hypocrisy and sexual repression at the same age socialists learn class hatred.

No matter the circumstances, a Conservative government is never a positive thing for most people. The Tories recruit their membership from the traditional ruling class; their real prejudices are always with the very wealthy, no matter how “caring” they want to appear.

Just look at how shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley described the economic crisis: “On many counts, recession can be good for us. People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families.” Never mind that poverty is the biggest killer in Britain; never mind that if you live in the poorest areas of Glasgow you will die younger than the average resident of the Gaza Strip. From a Tory angle, all of our health problems could be solved if the great unwashed had less money to blow on fags, booze, and crisps and more time to be “strong fathers” to their lice-infested tearaway brats.

Nevertheless, electing a Labour Party to government is no real boon for your average worker. May 1st 1997 was a mass revolt against corruption, prejudice, and hypocrisy. But Labour made the rich even richer: the top one percent, about 600,000 people increased their share of national wealth from twenty, to twenty-four percent after seven years of Labour government. The poor got marginal reforms: a £3.50 minimum wage, for instance, although this made no real difference — in practice, real wages have been virtually stagnant.

Electing Labour heightened the expectations of ordinary people, but they were not rewarded. Blair and Brown sanctioned shady private corporations to pillage the remains of the public sector. Meanwhile, they embraced every opportunity to test our weapons industry’s finest produce on starving third world civilians.

Most pundits interpret the budget announcement as Labour’s ‘move to the left’. The top tax band, which covers the top 1 percent of earners, will increase from forty to forty-five percent.  However, remember that it is not long since Brown scrapped the 10p income tax band for the very poor, a decision that had enormous ramifications for people struggling to afford gas bills and rising food prices.

It has taken the greatest economic crisis since WWII for Labour to even consider taxing the rich. Before Thatcher was elected, the very rich paid eighty-three percent income tax; at best, we have edged past halfway to restoring the ‘progressive’ conditions of the 1970s.

Given that there is no viable political alternative, I hope Labour beats the Conservatives at the next election. Labour receives ninety percent of its funds from the trade union movement, and a more powerful movement from below — strikes, demonstrations, and so on — could force them into concessions that maintain living standards during the crisis. The Tories make most of their funding deals at yacht parties, and recruit their membership from Rotary Clubs, the Women’s Institute, and the Glasgow University Union.

Many reasonable people support Labour, for the same reason a scrawny seven year old touted at Tory wagons and supported Neil Kinnock’s public sex acts. But this loyalty is misplaced. Labour’s leadership are loyal to the same people who made millions at the expense of the miners, the dockers, the print workers, the single mothers, and — yes — even the students during 18 years of Tory rule.

If you still hate Thatcher, make sure you support the working class organisations she tried to destroy, and not the Labour Party she unwittingly created.

All Photos - Hossam el Hamalawy & Nasser Nouri

Influential Egyptian journalist and activist Hossam el Hamalawy speaks to Pete Ramand about the growing wave of strikes against the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarack

Egypt is witnessing an uprising of a proportion not seen for many years. Strikes and mass demonstrations are shaking the very roots of Egyptian society and have the highly repressive dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak in total disarray.

“We are in the midst of the biggest and the strongest strike wave that the country has witnessed since the end of the Second World War,” explains campaigning journalist Hossam el Hamalawy.

As I sit down with him on the Glasgow leg of his UK lecture tour, he tries to convey the depth of the situation in his home country. “I’ll start by reading you out a couple of quotes that I have overheard recently,” he says. “I think that will give you an insight into how far along things are: ‘The problem of this country is capitalism… We are being ruled by a bunch of thieves, they are the worst thieves since the time of the pharaohs… There is no middle ground; you either stand with the robbers or those who are robbed… The road of reform has been blocked, we are left with no alternative but revolt’.”

“These are not quotes from meetings of socialists or radical leftists,” Hossam explains, “These are things I heard in meetings of Egyptian property tax collectors, would you believe?”

Hossam explains that the tax collectors went on strike for a period of three months, in which time tax-collection in Egypt dropped by 90%. “The strike culminated in an eleven day occupation of downtown Cairo and they ended up winning a staggering 325% pay increase,” he says.

This level of unrest currently appears to be the norm in Egypt, although this has certainly not always been the case.

“This kind of movement is happening under a classic third world dictatorship,” says Hossam. “State repression is very high.” He describes the level of violence being met out to anyone who dares to stand up to the government: “In 1992 the Islamic insurgents had launched their campaign against Hosni Mubarak, and the response of the government was a severe crackdown. Not just against the Islamists, but against everyone else as well. I remember growing up in Cairo and there were police checkpoints all over the city. People were disappearing. Twenty-two new prisons were built. People were joking that Mubarak had come up with a very creative way of solving the housing crisis in Egypt, by housing the entire populations in prisons. Those being held without trial reached 5000 according to human rights sources.”

Hossam recalls his time as a student, explaining that university campuses are the only place activists are safe as the police are not allowed to enter: “If you opposed the government the moment you stepped outside your university, you would be kidnapped, you would be beaten up, you would be taken to the torture chambers.”

He describes the recent case of a bus driver found agitating against Mubarak. When the police caught him, he was taken to the police station and gang raped by security officers. “The police filmed the whole thing and then went back to his bus garage and circulated the video amongst his fellow workers, as a warning. This sort of thing happens all the time at the moment.”

Despite this brutal repression, the Egyptian people are fighting back. El Hamalawy describes the major turning point as coming in 2003, when Mubarak refused to oppose the ‘War on Terror’: “At the end of the day, Hosni Mubarak’s regime is the second largest recipient of US foreign military aid after Israel. And with the outbreak of the Iraq war, we saw the biggest rioting since 1977. Around 50,000 people clashed with the police. The government totally lost control. People were ripping down and burning posters of Mubarak.”

From 2004 onwards, activists started mobilising and taking on Mubarak directly, in the form of an umbrella organisation called ‘Kifaya’, meaning ‘enough’ in Arabic. This started with mass protests in support of judicial independence. “We had two reformist judges who were going to get prosecuted on bogus charges, in very similar events to those that happened in Pakistan recently,” says Hossam. “Thousands took to the streets chanting in support of the judges, burning images of Mubarak, and calling for his overthrow. For me, someone who saw the 1990s, this was like something from a different planet.”

“But things were to take a completely different turn,” explains Hossam. “On the 7th of December 2006, 3000 female garment workers went on strike in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla. This is home to the biggest textile factory in the Middle East, housing some 27,000 people working together. The women went on strike and started marching in the factory compound, demanding the two months’ bonuses that the government had promised them earlier.” These female workers then stormed the areas of the factory where their male colleagues were working, chanting and demanding the men came out on strike as well.

“The men laid down there tools and the entire textile mill went on strike,” reports Hamalawy. “They occupied their factory for three days despite security intimidation, and they won. But from that moment, they triggered what has been called the labour winter of discontent. Virtually all the textile mills in the Nile delta went on strike, demanding the same gains as those in Mahalla. But the industrial militancy did not stop there — it started spilling over into virtually all other sectors of the work force. So the following month, the train drivers went on strike and they slept on the rails, stopping the trains. Then cement workers went on strike and they won as well.”

Hossam explains that the mass media in Egypt, which is largely controlled by Mubarak, has dubbed the strike wave a “plague that is infecting the whole country.” And they, along with Mubaraks regime, became particularly worried when the strikes started spreading beyond industrial workers, into middle class professions. “Doctors were scheduled to go on their first national strike since 1951,” says Hossam. “The university professors went on their first mass strike since 1977, students on the campuses started mobilising. Social struggle went through an unprecedented upturn that we have not witnessed since the end of the Second World War.”

“Although this was initially a struggle over bread and butter issues, the workers soon started broadening their demands to encompass political issues,” explains el Hamalawy. “The most advanced sections in the factories started putting forward political demands like ‘we want to impeach the state backed unions and we want free unions’ — this is a political demand which is actually at the heart of the political transformation process.

“Also, if you look at the strikes, the workers are chanting against the IMF, saying that they will not be ruled by colonialism. You can see women workers wearing veils and carrying banners that say down with the government. So as you can see their political consciousness is very strong.”

In one of the most recent confrontations, Mahalla workers were set to go on strike but this was stopped by the government who occupied the factory with riot police and state security agents (the equivilent of MI5): “They detained the strike leaders in the factory, however everybody in town was going around saying ‘Is the strike going to happen?’ It came to 3:30pm, which is the time that the first shift should have left, but no strike happened. The heightened tensions caused the whole town to erupt, and that’s when there was a two-day intifada.” (Arabic for ‘uprising’).

“The government completely lost control. People were clashing with riot police in the streets. The government was very heavy handed — they shot using live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas and they killed three people, including a fifteen year old boy.”

The soaring prices of food and the shortage of bread have also led to great suffering and violence. “In Egypt the word for bread is the Arabic word for ‘living’ because that constitutes a major component of the food basket of every Egyptian family,” Hossam explains.

“But bread is disappearing as well as other basic commodities that Egyptian families live on. We’ve had huge bread queues all over Egypt since February, and sixteen people have been killed up to now in these bread lines. People are basically fighting each other to get the basics that they need to survive, these are like scenes from the French Revolution.”

At the same time el Hamalawy remains positive about the future: “There is hope; Mahalla has shown us that. After the Mahalla uprising communities of fishermen also erupted in protest. The people were chanting ‘revolution until victory’ and that slogan is being taken up by ordinary women and men across the country. They were confronting Mubarak’s police, his tanks and his soldiers using rocks. This is an uneven battle, but the people will prevail.”

Pete Ramand

Students and trade unionists demonstrated against bank-bailouts outside Halifax Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland in Glasgow on October 18th.

Danny McGregor, one of the organisers of the demonstration, outlined the demands of the protestors, highlighting the issues raised by rescuing big business with taxpayers’ money.

He said: “Working people should not be the victims of job losses and home repossessions while the bankers are being bailed out with billions of pounds of public money.

“Glasgow hosts some of the biggest financial corporations in the world. Despite the corporations being part of the cause of this crisis it is their profits that are being saved.

“We demand a bail-out of ordinary people, not the bankers; and to nationalise the profits, not the debts.”

RBS declined to comment, while both HBoS and Lloyds TSB were also unavailable to make a statement.

The demonstration was organised by the Socialist Workers Student Society as a prelude to a mobilisation planned for October 31st outside the corporate headquarters of HBoS in Edinburgh.

This event follows a series of demonstrations over the bank bailouts; the most notable of which was held in London on October 10th, where 700 students attempted to occupy the Bank of England.

In what was dubbed ‘Fight-back Friday’ students attempted to break into the London bank.

Steve Henshaw, one of the organisers of the protest, described the scene.

He said: “The police couldn’t really control things, and many started lashing out punches in frustration. The crowd were eventually trapped into a corner by police on horseback and officers with dogs.

“It’s becoming harder to pay bills, to find work and our student loans are linked to inflation, so the loan company will add about 10% extra onto our debts this year. We’ll fight with those trying to defend their homes from re-possession, stand alongside workers on picket lines and we’ll be on the streets again on the 31st.”

Rob Owen, of the NUS National Executive, was equally critical of the banks’ handling of the current crisis.

He said: “Students have had enough of one rule for the rich and another for the poor. The Bank of England gave billions of pounds of our money to the rich but we won’t be made to pay for their crisis.”

A spokesperson for the City of London police force reported: “This was a well-controlled demonstration.”