It is not often that we get speakers from outside the city
to come to Coventry TUC, but on Thursday evening, November 15th,
delegates were enthused and enthralled by John Dunn, former Clay Cross
Councillor and Derbyshire NUM officer, and now of the SMSC.
It is not often that we get speakers from outside the city
to come to Coventry TUC, but on Thursday evening, November 15th,
delegates were enthused and enthralled by John Dunn, former Clay Cross
Councillor and Derbyshire NUM officer, and now of the SMSC.
John covered three main areas: the recent struggles of
Spanish miners, the role of miners worldwide in the fight against exploitation
and the recent revelations about state collusion in the famous Battle of
Orgreave during the miners’ strike of 1984/85.
While 8,000 Spanish miners were on strike for 67 days over
the summer period, the SMSC raised more than €30,000 to support them, even
sending two supporters to the Asturias to give solidarity . The links that were formed resulted in two Spanish
miners coming to the UK to speak at the Durham Miners Gala, thanks to work done by the Durham Miners Association. They did so on the
same platform as Ed Miliband who champions “responsible capitalism”. As John said,
capitalism is responsible – for war, hunger, death and disease!
After outlining the revolutionary traditions of Spanish
miners, as exemplified by the Asturian Commune of 1934 and the recent battles
in mining areas with the riot police, where miners faced high velocity rubber
bullets and police terror tactics in mining villages and miners responded by
using home-made rockets, John explained why miners were always at the forefront
of working class struggles.
Today, across the world, from Sardinia to the USA, from
Spain to Marikana in South Africa, miners are fighting back and this fighting
spirit is born of comrades working on a day-to-day basis in conditions which
are constantly life threatening and where the safety of each is the
responsibility of all. This breeds a feeling of mutual solidarity and
understanding that cannot be broken. In the UK this is exemplified by the
Durham Gala where, in an area without pits, 150,000 gather each year to
celebrate this solidarity.
John also explained that the UK rests on a sea of coal and
leads the way on a world scale in clean coal technology, yet we import 50
million tonnes each year from Russia and China and in China 3,000 miners die
each year due to unsafe working conditions. So here so-called uneconomic pits are
closed where the subsidy was £1.64 per tonne and the pension fund of
mineworkers, in order to sweeten privatisation bids, was taken over by the
government which has looted £4bn from the funds since 1993.
John also dealt with state collusion during the strike of
1884/85. This included the BBC airing footage from Orgreave which had been
spliced back to front in an attempt to show that police brutality against
picketing miners was provoked by violence from the miners. The reverse was the
case. The whole episode was revealed in a programme called Inside Out, which
John says should have been called Back to Front. In addition, more than 100
police from Yorkshire colluded to write up exactly the same reports, word for
word, and these police were from the same force that colluded at Hillsborough.
During that famous strike there were 11,000 arrests; five
striking miners were killed, two on picket lines (Joe Green at Ferrybridge was
crushed by a scab lorry and Dave Jones, aged 24, was killed by the police on a
picket line in Nottinghamshire); 7,000 were injured by the police; 966 sacked
and the whole operation cost £105m at 1984 prices, such was the determination
of the state and Thatcher to crush the miners and the NUM. As John said, miners
are not Luddites. They were fighting against pit closures and the Thatcher
government which claimed we did not need manufacturing as the UK could be a
service-based economy. What has been the result? Bankers sell derivatives that
they and few others understand and trigger an economic crisis. Yet blame for
the crisis is laid at the feet of public sector “gold-plated” pensions, “uneconomic
pits” and “benefit scroungers” and now working class people will have to work
into their 70s to pay for a crisis they did not cause.
Since the 1984/85 strike whole communities have been
destroyed and now working class youth are being denied the chance to study due
to rising tuition fees and the abolition of maintenance allowances. What is
worse is that in this crisis of capitalism education itself is a commodity
where courses that do not directly serve the interests of capitalism are axed.
Why can’t we have education for education’s sake which can develop each and
every individual’s talents and not waste them? Why can’t we as a movement play
a part in education youth to get involved in the fight to transform society?
John came to speak on Spain but what he said covered the
struggles of working class people internationally and the role of miners across
the world. Given that Spanish miners have gone back to work for the present,
the SMSC has been wound up but there is every chance that an international
campaign to support miners will be launched next year.
At
the end of his talk and an excellent discussion, we had a collection amongst
the delegates present for the Justice for Mineworkers campaign and Coventry TUC
also voted to donate an additional £100. This is solidarity in action.
Addendum:
On November 20th
the home website of Socialist Appeal – www.socialist.net
– published a report (see above) that I had written of the visit to Coventry TUC of John
Dunn, ex-Clay Cross Labour Councillor and ex-officer of Derbyshire NUM, who
spoke on behalf of the SMSC.
In writing the report I tried to
achieve a number of objectives: to show the good work that had been done by the
SMSC in terms of raising money, organising acts of solidarity and paying visits
to miners in Spain; to report on the enthusiasm amongst delegates that John
Dunn awoke with his stirring report; to show that Coventry TUC maintains its
traditions of internationalism and does not just deal with domestic trade union
issues; and finally, to show how Coventry TUC is generous in its support of
labour movement causes.
After the report had appeared Socialist
Appeal was contacted by an activist in the SMSC, Graeme Atkinson, who pointed
out that there were some inaccuracies in the report. I have had some very
comradely and friendly exchanges of information with Graeme and we as
supporters of Socialist Appeal are pleased to correct any inaccuracies that had
appeared. (The original text has now been amended)
Firstly, the SMSC raised
more than €30,000 not £30,000. There is a difference of around
£6,000/€7,000. The comrade is correct to say that if we do not distinguish
between £s and Euros, some sceptics may claim that all the money collected has
not been accounted for.
Given that the small number of comrades
active in the SMSC managed to raise that sum of money, they can only be
commended for the efforts they made and the results they obtained.
Secondly, I implied that one of the
organisers of the SMSC, John Cunningham, a Spanish speaker, had gone to Spain
alone. That was not correct. He had been accompanied by Comrade Graeme who had
suggested the idea.
Thirdly, the visit to Spain by the comrades
was not with the support of the NUM. The comrades had gone as individuals and
at that stage neither the NUM nor the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) were
officially involved
Finally, the links that were formed by the
visit did result in “in two Spanish miners coming to the UK to speak at
the Durham Miners Gala” but, without the decisive official invitation from the DMA, that would not
have happened.
As Comrade Graeme
points out, “ALL the work of mediating with the CCOO and FITAG-UGT (Miners’
Unions in Spain – DC) was done by me and Dave Temple of the DMA with DMA
General Secretary Davey Hopper’s full support”.
I as the writer of the original report accept that there were inaccuracies and
that therefore due recognition had not been given to all of the comrades
involved in the SMSC
.
However, I also wish
to say that the whole campaign in support of the Spanish miners raises a number
of issues for all of us active in the labour and trade union movement.
Firstly, what is
happening in Spain today is the music of the future for Britain too if we do
not put an end to capitalism and change the nature of the society that we exist
in. We have seen in Britain that at the height of the crisis a private debt of
the banking system was turned into a public debt, as the National Audit Office
reported in December 2011 that the bank bailout had amounted to £950bn. Workers
in Britain are now paying the price of a bank bailout through cuts in jobs,
public services and a drastic fall in living standards.
In Spain, too, the
removal of most of the subsidy to the mining industry has had a devastating
effect on the livelihoods of miners and their families yet the sum represented
only 0.006% of the sum that had been given to Spanish banks to bail them
out. So we know that money is
there to bail out the capitalists when they get into trouble, but not for jobs,
services, pensions and better living standards.
We in the movement in
Britain will support, with all means at our disposal, workers in struggle in
any part of the world and especially Spain given the close historical ties
between the Spanish and UK labour movement, ties that were forged in the heat
of the battle during the Spanish Civil War and that were retied during the
Great Strike of British miners in 1984/85. But the best service we can give to
workers in struggle everywhere is to fight to rid ourselves in Britain of a
decrepit capitalism whose continued existence will only mean increasing misery
for the working class during the next decade or so.
Secondly, the comrades
active in the SMSC achieved some marvellous results with small forces but as
Graeme says the visit of Spanish miners to the Big Meeting in Durham, the
Durham Miners’ Gala, would not have taken place without the official invitation
from the DMA. What that tells me is that we as comrades and activists in the
labour movement can often achieve far more than the collective effort we put
in, but when we turn to the official labour and trade union movement, we can
achieve far more.
In the battles that
lie before us the organisations created by the collective effort of the working
class will be transformed and retransformed as they are put to the test in the
search for ideas and leadership that will create the conditions for the
emancipation of the working class from capitalism. I therefore see the task of
always turning into the movement to get it to use its potential muscle in the
battles that lie before us and all attempts, therefore, to try and bypass this
movement will end in failure.
I, for one, as a
supporter of Socialist Appeal, have enjoyed the comradely exchange of ideas and
views with Comrade Graeme and look forward to future work with the comrade. And
given that for the moment the comrades in Spain have returned to work in the
mining industry to recuperate and prepare for future battles, but that in other
parts of the world miners in places such as South Africa and China they are
engaged in struggle, perhaps now is the time to turn the SMSC into an
international solidarity organisation to support miners everywhere. That is
food for thought!
Darrall Cozens, UCU,
Coventry TUC and Coventry NWCLP.
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