Miners change the face of
British politics the end of the year. Within government circles, most believe that once the first power cut takes place that the miners will
This explains government support for court action fining the NUM £200,000 and the freezing of its entire funds be-
As 140,000 British miners enter the eighth month of their strike it is becoming increasingly clear that this is the most important workers' action in Britain since the general strike of 1926.
By its very duration, the strike has dealt a significant blow to the Conservative government. Its defeat or victory will determine whether Thatcher will be able to carry through measures which threaten the very organisational independence of the labour movement in Britain.
As such the miners' action has not only clarified the main trends in
British politics, but also has resolved in great part many of the disputes on the British left on the way forward for the workers movement.
For British revolutionary Marxists it has confirmed the necessity of allying themselves as closely as possible with the current in the trade unions which looks for leadership to Arthur Scargill, the president of the miners' union, and to Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, the most energetic supporters of the miners' dispute in the Labour Party.
At the time of writing the strike is at its most important point since it started on March 12 this year. The strike began at the most unfavourable part of the year for the miners from the point of view of coal consumption. It was provoked by the action of the National Coal Board
(the management of the nationalised industry), which closed the Cortonwood pit in South Yorkshire without consultation with the National Union of Mineworkers.
(1)
The shut-down was a foretaste of a closure programme put forward by the NCB that would close twenty pits and mean the loss of 20,000 jobs in the next year.
From the beginning of the dispute the miners' union has insisted that the pit
TUC has given official, but inactive, support (DR)
NUM closure programme be withdrawn that a settlement be drawn up on the basis of the 'Plan for Coal, a joint strategy agreed by the NCB and the NUM after the successful miners' strike of 1974.
That has remained the negotiating stance of the union in a series of talks sponsored by the government industrial conciliation service ACAS since September.
The miners' position has undoubtedly improved since the beginning of the strike. Starting from a position of relative iso lation within the labour movement, the NUM has gained successively support for their case from the Trades Union Congress, which represents 10 million British trade unionists, and from the Labour Party congress. The strike is now beginning to bite significantly into industrial cause of the union's refusal to accept that the strike was illegal as ruled by several high court judges.
The court action is the most determined bid by the government to end the strike on its terms. had hoped that the "back to work' movement sponsored by the press, paid for by the government and enforced by the police would lead to a majority of miners breaking the strike. The movement turned out to be a fiasco, however, with only a tiny number of miners responding.
The iron contradiction for Thatcher is that the longer the strike continues with the resultant material hardships and suffering endured by the miners' families - two miners killed on the picket lines, 250 miners seriously injured, 7,100 miners arrested by the police - the more determined miners became not to return to work with anything less than a victory.
This was confirmed by an opinion poll amongst miners taken by the right-wing Sunday Express newspaper on October 1 designed to embarrass the Labour Party conference. The result was the opposite. Of the miners questioned 68 per cent declared themselves in favour of the strike.
The government rightly fears that if the miners are even seen as being successful in the objectives of their strike, it will provoke and encourage a more general wave of militancy from the British working class.
This year strike days will exceed those of 1979, that of the 'winter crisis' strike movement which immediately preceded Thatcher's election to office. The even tual total will probably amount to the largest number of strike days since 1926 - the year of the 9 day general strike called in support of the miners.
Already this year there have been two national dockers' strikes, both called on
PICKET LINE issues related to the miners' strike, but
This also in defence of their own jobs.
has been accompanied by strikes among carworkers in Vauxhall and railworkers,
British Leyland, teachers and other sec-
DO NOT CROSS tors.
This is in stark contrast to the five years in which Thatcher has been in of fice. Strike days declined sharply in the years from 1980 to 1983. (2) However,
TUC Pr
IC Y the current phase of mass struggle does not mark an aberration.
See International Viewpc
: 50, April
1.
9, 1984.
See IV, No 47, February 27, 1984.
International Viewpoint 12 November 1984
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BRITAIN
Rather Thatcher has precisely seen the previous five years of office as preparafor a fundamental confrontation with the organised strength of the British trade-union movement. Her preparations for the strike were the result of ten years reflection by the Tory party since their defeat at the hands of the miners in 1974, a defeat which brought down the Conunder Edward Heath. The miners' strike represents this fundamental confrontation. It is a test of the underlying relation of class forces in British society.
It is for this reason that the British establishment is so disquieted by Thatcher's performance in confronting the miners and in its overall economic policy. It is not only figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Church who have condemned the of England, Thatcher government for breeding own party, senior figures like Heath and the ex-foreign minister Sir Francis Pym, Boy of 13 arrested by riot police in mining vilage (Di, have called for a reversal in poliey, and for the government to take radical meaunemployment (now standing at an all-time record of almost 13 per cent).
The bomb explosion on October 12 at their Brighton conference did not make a significant difference to this tide of there was further criticism of Thatcher's speech the next day when she implicitly included both the miners and the Provisional IRA (who claimed responsibility for the bomb) as
"irrational forces' threatened the fabric of British society.
In fact the Tories have anticipated ruling class unease at the socially explosive consequences of their policies. Brighton conference of the party was the occasion for a widely signalled alteration in policy changing the priority of beating inflation' to 'beating unemployment'
This change in the presentation of the government's policies marks both an attempt to steer the party towards a new electoral victory in the next elections in 1988, and the determination of the government to hold down wage increases (now running at 9.5 per cent in industry, far above the inflation rate of 5 per cent).
Finance minister Nigel Lawson came back from a trip to the USA praising the type of wage contracts now being concluded in American industry, in a signal that "beating unemployment' holding down wage costs.
But this 'change of direction' by the Tories is not the only measure advocated by ruling class circles to avoid any possibility of a Labour victory in a future general election. The Social Democratic Party, led by the ex-Labour foreign secretary, David Owen, was created precisely to take sufficient Labour votes to make sure that the Labour Party would not be able to take power again without first purging itself of its strong left wing.
The split of leading right wingers from the Labour Party in 1980 was at first dismissed by the left of the labour movement as a 'bubble that would burst' -International Viewpoint 12 November 1984 similar in type to many other splinters from the Labour Party in the past.
However, in alliance with the small Liberal Party, the SP succeeded in winning only 2 per cent less than the Labour Party in the 1983 general elections with 25 percent of the vote.
While this marked probably the irreducible minimum electoral base of the Labour Party, the results of the 1983 election not only seemed to confirm the correctness of ruling class strategy in promoting the new party, but also suggested to leading figures of the left that the only way forward for the Labour Party to take governmental office again was in coalition with the Alliance.
The leading exponent of this view was Eric Hobsbawm, a leading labour historian, and a member of the Euro-communist wing of the Communist Party of Great
This wing of the party, virtually abandoning the strife-ridden sect of which they are formally members, launched out with their journal Marxism Today to convince the left wing of the labour movement to abandon the 'adventurism' represented by the "infantile' Bennite left and to adopt the 'Eurosocialist' road represented by the electorally -successful France, Spain and Greece. They found their political vehicle in the Labour Party in the ex-Bennite Labour Coordinating Committee and a candidate to support for the Labour leadership in Neil Kinnock.
Hobsbawm warned against the idea of on industrial struggle to get rid Instead he projected Labour's task as winning over the 'middle ground' which he claimed had been abandoned by Labour in its swing to the left, and claimed by the SDP/Liberal
Labour had to rid itself of 'Bennite' influence and unite around a new leadership and swing to the right to supplant the Alliance. And, to the extent that this was not successful, it had to consider the possibility of an 'anti-Thatcher alliance' to regain governmental power. This strategy has guided nock's actions in power. However, the analysis was and is faulty.
Firstly, Hobsbawn and his cothinkers of the LCC precisely confused the downturn of the industrial struggle of the working class with the idea that the British labour movement had suffered a decisive reverse. Contrary to Hobsbawm's and Kinnock's view, a victory for the miners is the best chance for the labour movement to critically damage and eventually remove the Thatcher government. The SDP would also be casualties of a miners' victory since, from the beginning of the strike, Owen has called for the full force of the state to be used to smash the miners - criticising Thatcher from the right! The first test of the political impact of the miners' struggle and the struggle to defend local services through breaking the law came in the local and EEC elections in May and June of this
As against the prediction of the right that the miners' strike was damaging Labour's electoral prospects, the party made sweeping gains in the big cities.
Secondly, while it is true that Labour had lost much of its traditional support amongst skilled workers to Thatcher in the 1979 election and then to Thatcher and the Alliance in the 1983 election, Hobsbawm chose to ignore the conditions under which these workers had originally broken from the Labour Party. These were the years of the Wilson and Callaghan governments of 1974-79 where, as a result of the 'social contract' incomes real incomes sharply decreased, at a greater rate than the rest of the working class. It was incomes policy, the central policy of the right, not the policies of the left, that the Hobsbawm prescription rested on the idea that the Bennite left, after its heady years of success between 1979-82, was now irrelevant to the needs of the labour movement and was in irreversible decline.
This view was not limited to the right. Amongst the left, too, there was widespread pessimism as to the possibility of the Bennites reviving themselves after the debacle of Labour's vote in the 1983 general election. On the far left, organisations like the Socialist Workers Party wrote a plethora of articles on the 'fall of Tony Benn', thus retrospectively justifying their policy of sectarian abstention from the debates in the Labour Party in the preceding four years.
However, in 1984 the Labour left has witnessed a spectacular revival. The cause of this is not hard to discern. It lies with the miners' strike and the relation of the Labour left to the mass struggle of the
The emergence of the Bennite left has been from its very beginning marked by its connection with the mass struggle. The first development of this current in the Labour Party was made manifest by the support which Benn gave to the work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1972, in the face of the reluctance of the Wilson leadership of the Labour Party to associate itself fully with this struggle and with the miners' strikes of 1972 and
The result of the left's struggle in this was possibly the most radical manifesto produced by the party since the Second World War, approved by the party congress of 1973.
The second phase of the development of the Bennite current was based on a balance sheet of the collision between the Labour government and the public sector workers' strike of 1978-79. In their determination that there should be no return to the governments of Wilson and Callaghan, the left put forward a programme of institutional reform of the party, to make the parliamentary leadership accountable to the rank and file. NUM takes lead in left fight
In this, and in key policies like unilateral disarmament, renationalisation of industries denationalised, the 35-hour week and so on, the left was largely
However, despite the fact that the trade-union bureaucracy was involved in the discussion, the six million rank and file trade unionists affiliated to the Labour Party were not.
This began to change with the struggle of Benn for the leadership of the party at the 1982 Labour Party congress. Support for the Bennite programme was organised in union after union.
While Benn just failed to win the deputy leadership of the party, his support inside the unions revealed a powerful minority current inside the unions themselves, who likewise were beginning to organise themselves to change their
For 10 years the leadership of the British trade-union movement, and particularly the Trades Union Congress, has been moving to the right. This shift reached a culminating point at the 1983 TUC Congress where the policy of 'new realism' was proclaimed. (3) This policy essentially consisted of the trade unions breaking their policy of exclusive political representation by the Labour Party, entering into new types of contracts with the bosses (including 'one unionno strike' agreements in the hi-tech industries) and above all accepting the new framework that the Tory government was seeking to impose by its trade-union
This congress capped off a period where the TUC leadership had been instrumental in selling out struggle after struggle, most notably the train drivers and the health workers.
The only serious and consistent opposition at a national level to this policy was Arthur Scargill who demonstratively refused to take a seat on the TUC's leadership bodies.
It was as a direct result of the miners' strike that the right-wing union leaderships suffered their most serious reverse. For the first six months the TUC did not offer any support. Indeed the NUM did for it for fear that the TUC would use support given to exert leverage on the dispute to sell it out. They thus educated their own membership against such a betrayal and to rely on their own
However, the NUM organised a caucus of all those unions willing to give active support to their strike which included rail, transport and seafarers unions. Action by these unions resulted in a 100 per cent stoppage of the movement of coal by rail, two national docks' strikes and a halt of movement of coal by British ships. Nevertheless, in the power stations and the steelworks right-wing-led unions such as the electricians and the steelnot only refused support for their strike, but in the former case openly called for its defeat.
At the 1984 TUC Congress a major battle was expected between the left and right on the question of support for the strike. (4) The right wing had a majority in the conference as was shown by their decision to resume ongoing collaboration with the government and bosses Development Council from which the TUC had previously withdrawn. these conditions the NUM concluded a compromise® resolution with the TUC leadership which, nevertheless, promised concrete solidarity action at the power stations. Scargill left the TUC correctly claiming a victory over the right and the necessity to turn the resolution into
At the Labour Party conference, in one of the most significant decisions ever taken by the party, full support was given to the miners, and contrary to the evenhanded approach of Kinnock, delegates unequivocally condemned the massive police operation against the miners. (5)
However, the Labour Party conference also revealed that the NUM leadership, the most powerful industrial union and the recognised vanguard of the British working class, was not only leading the labour movement in its battle with the government, but had also moved to become the partisan of some of the most advanced causes within the labour move-
The NUM delegation present at the conference supported the successful resolutions on Ireland opposing the use of plastic bullets and other aspects of the government's repressive policy against the leadership of the Party. joined forces with public sector unions in voting to defy the government's laws on local government. It likewise supported resolutions encouraging the formation of black caucuses and the greater involvement of women in the decision-making bodies of the party. On gay and lesbian rights, too, where a debate was denied, the NUM executive sent its greetings to a fringe meeting organised by Nature and limits of Labour left
The evolution of the miners' towards these policies has evidently been greatly accelerated by the development of wives movement, the close alliances made with the Greenham Common women, the championing cause of the inner cities by the NUM. (6)
Margaret Thatcher could be forgiven her error when she talked of striking miners and their supporters in the Labour Party constituting a revolutionary minor-
However, it is an error. It is true that the forces constitute a minority within the labour movement today. TUC and the Labour Party, despite giving support to the miners represented certain gains for the right wing in the field of general policy.
But what is the political character of the leadership given by Benn, Scargill and Livingstone? How does one explain the tension between the Labour Party led by Kinnock, on the one hand, and what the Guardian newspaper calls the *newer, impatient Labour Party, the Scargillite Labour Party'?
For some forces on the far left there is no doubt as to the answer to this question. The Socialist Workers Party started its coverage of the miners' strike with warnings of its imminent collapse. was in part due to their analysis of the 'downturn' of the British class struggle which 'proved' that the miners' strike was an aberration from the general trend of the class struggle and would inevitably lead to speedy defeat. In addition, their belief that the bureaucracy would betray because of its social position as a mediating layer between the workers and bosses and the material privileges they accrue thereby, led them to predict weekly the 4. See IV, : No 50. Seem 1, 1931984.
55, June 18, 1984 and No 60, October 1, 1984.
International Viewpoint 12 November 1984
and those fighting for trade-union rights in their own countries.
Send donations to the NUM to: Miners' Solidarity Fund, Co-op Bank PLC, West
Street, Sheffield. Sorting code 08.90.75; Account No 30000009 betrayal of the NUM leadership. As the strike enters its eighth month it is clear that the original analysis was faulty.
Moreover, the argument that 'under pressure from the base' Scargill has resisted any sell-out does not hold up either. That there is pressure is true, but this pressure has been carefully nurtured, built and given leadership by
For decades the debate as to whether bureaucrats always betray has been a rather arcane one for the real life of the British workers. "The 'correct' position that opposed a reductionist view of the bureaucracy seemed to have little relewith monotonous regularity, strikes were sold out one after the other. However, the emergence of the Scargill/Benn/Livingstone leadership signals the emergence of a leadership which does not conform to the pattern of bureaucrats who consistently seek to betray.
This is not to say that this leadership has broken from reformism - on the contrary, all remain committed to the introduction of socialism through parliament by a Labour government.
Benn, Scargill and Livingstone remain on the left wing of the labour bureaucracy. On the extreme left wing it is true, but nevertheless a part of it. an abstract point. It is reflected in real weaknesses of the left in the face of the Tory offensive and the battle with the right wing of the bureaucracy.
In the first place the left lacks a political programme that can come to grips with the severity of the British capitalist crisis. There was a large measure of truth in the right wing's claim that the 'left' policies that the Labour Party fought the last election on lacked credibility in the eyes of even Labour supporters, with their lack of solutions to the problems of resolving Britain's massive social and economic crisis.
The solution of the right is a wholesale retreat from Labour's traditional, rather than class collaboration is starting to become more of a reality.
But the basic steps must be taken to organise the left at every level of the labour movement in order to take the battle home to the right. This is because the political divisions that exist in the labour movement cannot be tackled purely at the level of the bureaucracy. There are deep vertical divisions within the British labour movement today as the strike-breaking miners have shown. Only by this being recognised and the left organising from top to bottom, can the fight against the right be successful.
applies to the Labour Party, where forces such as Labour Briefing and related tendencies in the Labour Party Young Socialists) have launched a campaign based on this broad perspective entitled "Target Labour Goverment'.
It also applies to the trade unions where the left is beginning to be organised into tendencies that start to draw in rank-and-file activists rather than to confine themselves to the middle layers of the bureaucracy, as has previously been
The role of revolutionary Marxists in such developments is to be the best builders of such tendencies, pointing them towards a class struggle perspective, avoiding any organisational barriers that prevent their playing the fullest possible role in developing such organ-
During the strike supporters of Socialist Action, the revolutionary Marxist paper, have played a leading role in the development of strike support committees formed by Labour Party and trade-union members in collaboration with the National Union of Mineworkers. They have avoided the response of sectarian groups whose role has been to decry such committees as a diversion from building a revolutionary leadership'.
At the same time, Socialist Action sought to clarify the issues in the strike. It has done this both through the pages of its newspaper and through events like a national meeting of miners and British and European trade unionists, where the type of practical solidarity that has able to organised by Socialist Action and its cothinkers in Western Europe was discussed at the same time as perspectives for victory for the
This is now the No. 1 task for the development of any revolutionary perspective in Britain. miners can place the crippling and eventual defeat of the Tory government on the agenda, thereby confounding all those forces who preached Thatcher's invincibility the better to justify their own
Victory in the strike today means confronting the attempt of the government to smash the National Union of Mineworkers by seizing the assets of the union.
The key line of advance of the left is to fight to turn the support given to the miners at the Labour Party and the TUO Congress into action. That means that immediate all-out strike action should be against the seizure of the NUM's assets and that the TUC should call a general strike in defence of the
The desperation of the government is
They must finish the strike quickly or they will lose it as the first power cuts begin to bite. Already the miners' strike has changed the face of British politics. A victory for the miners would transform the prospects for socialist advance. defeat, however engineered, would mean an utterly remorseless government moving in to extend that defeat to the entire British
NUM under attack but little exercised, policy of ownership. A retreat which was endorsed
The British and international press have launched a furious attack against the visit by the same Labour Party conference by a British miners' union official to Libya to seek aid for the strike.
that gave such fulsome support to the
The visit was not only denounced by the Thatcher government which ended diplomatic relations with Libya a year ago, but also by Neil Kinnock, the leader of
Again on the field of defence and forthe Labour Party and Trades Union Congress officials.
Labour's commitment to
The campaign against the Libyan visit is the latest episode in a campaign against unilateral disarmament sits uneasily with the union which in recent weeks has included the seizure of the union's funds and a campaign by TUC leaders to force an agreement on the NUM leadership.
simultaneous support for Nato's allies of the union have hit back.
nuclear umbrella and their commitment from a mining area, asked Thatcher in the House of Commons why she was prespending on conventional pared to condemn the NUM visit to seek aid while companies which contribute to
This was another policy posi-
Tory Party funds made massive profits from exporting to Libya. (Exports to Libya tion passed by the October conference.
by British companies have reached a new high in the last year).
In other words the next years will see
Not content with seizing all the unions' funds, the government is still deducting a battle over what content will be given
£15 per week from striking miners' social security benefits on the spurious basis to the slogan 'a Labour government that the union is paying miners strike pay.
committed to socialist policies', with the against it by the government, the NUM has the right to both solicit and accept left in a rather poor position at its start.
Peter Heathfield, the NUM general secretary, stated that the NUM has receivec
For this reason, the policies and
Support for the miners' cause from these coun positions of the revolutionaries can have tries not only helps the miners to victory over Thatcher - a victory for the whole increased relevance and audience international working class - but also strengthens the position of trade unionists among those who support the left.
At the same time the left must overcome its resistance to across-the-board organisation to combat the right.
organisation of a left wing in the labour movement committed to class struggle
International Viewpoint 12 November 1984 support from over 50 countries.
Dennis Skinner, a Labour left MP
Given the financial sanctions taken
COAL
NOT
DOLE