[Marxism] 1984-5 miners' strike: History On Our Side

[J Rothermel]

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/culture/books/non_fiction/history_on_our_side


  History On Our Side

by Hywel Francis (Iconau, £9.99)
Tuesday 24 March 2009
by Rob Griffiths
*

The son of communist miners' leader Dai Francis tells his story of the 
1984-5 miners' strike

*

Now the Labour MP for Aberafan, Hywel Francis is well-placed to write an 
authoritative account of the Great Miners' Strike in Wales. Son of 
communist miners' leader Dai Francis, official historian of the "Fed" - 
the South Wales Miners Federation and then the South Wales Area NUM - 
and long a champion of working class education, he tells a story with 
the appropriate fusion of commitment, fact and passion.

But reading this informed and informative book also brings to mind that 
old saying of Aneurin Bevan, revived by the Manic Street Preachers: "You 
tell me your truth and I'll tell you mine."

This is Hywel's truth. He confirms that many of the pits in south Wales 
had to be picketed out in the first weeks of March 1984, despite an area 
conference decision for an all-out indefinite strike.

Eighteen of the 28 pits had originally voted at local meetings against 
action. The thought of marching to the top of the hill once more - and 
that for a Yorkshire area which they felt had let them down just 12 
months earlier over the defence of Lewis Merthyr - initially kindled 
little enthusiasm among the Welsh miners.

Nor did NUM president Arthur Scargill enjoy any great personal 
popularity in coal valleys more attuned to the modesty, good humour and 
inclusive political and cultural outlook of Dai Francis and his ilk.

Shock troops from Tower colliery and Maerdy - one of the surviving 
"Little Moscows" - had to implore, even hector, the rest of the 
foot-soldiers into battle. To its credit, the south Wales leadership 
under area president Emlyn Williams, who was known as "Emlyn the 
Kremlin" despite his lifelong Labour Party membership, stood resolute 
from the beginning to lend the emerging militancy discipline and direction.

For the remainder of the strike, south Wales was a bastion of solidarity 
with and between the miners. Francis lucidly describes and explains how 
and why this was so. As chair of the extraordinary Wales Congress in 
Support of Mining Communities, he identifies the role that women, ethnic 
minority communities, gays and lesbians, Welsh language campaigners and 
even farmers played in building a unique solidarity movement.

Prominent in feeding an anti-Yorkshire, anti-Scargill mood from the 
beginning of the strike was South Wales NUM research officer Kim 
Howells. Like some other communists and ex-communists, he was relentless 
in his private and semi-public pronouncements on Scargill's sins and 
shortcomings. Indeed, so presumptuous and vituperative were the attacks 
of this unelected official on the union's elected president, it even 
caused a rift between Howells and Hywel Francis, which surfaces only 
obliquely in this book.

Hywel's truth is too kind to renegades like this. He even makes one 
fleeting attempt to rehabilitate then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who 
preferred condemning miners for "picket-line violence" to turning up on 
those picket lines and winning solidarity from the rest of the labour 
movement.

Many ex-miners have not forgotten or forgiven Kinnock for his treachery. 
And, although the initiative to end the strike came from south Wales - 
still the most solid coalfield as the strike crumbled - the majority of 
Welsh miners also voted to re-elect Scargill as NUM president against 
the recommednation of their area leadership a few months later.

Hywel's truth approves the assessment of south Wales area general 
secretary George Rees shortly after the strike's defeat that "beneficial 
alliances and long-term policies are easier to construct and formulate 
when the demands for industrial conflict are more absent than present." 
This relegated the necessity of taking industrial action and wrongly 
counterposed it to building broad alliances.

The alliance which the author worked so tirelessly to construct - 
although he thought it was aimed at Thatcherism rather than state 
monopoly capitalism - was founded upon and inspired by the miners who 
took action. While it's by no means certain that a strike would have 
saved the pits finished off by the Heseltine closure programme in 
1992-93, not a even an alliance so broad as to include rebel Tory MPs 
succeeded without it.

The full, unexpurgated story of the miners' strike, in Wales and 
elsewhere, remains to be told. It would have to include the rigging of 
financial figures against targeted pits by the installation of expensive 
and unnecessary machinery, the work of the "money mules" who carried 
cases of cash through customs and into Britain and the role of 
sympathetic journalists and other intermediaries who helped to protect 
pension funds against sequestration.

In the meantime, this book by Hywel Francis makes a valuable, if in 
places contentious, contribution to that story.

'South Wales leadership stood resolute from the beginning to lend the 
emerging militancy discipline and direction.'