Just after nine AM on 21 October 1966, teachers and children in the village of Aberfan settled in for the last day of school. Half-term break would start just hours later, at noon. As with every day, class teachers were working through the morning register.

But on this day, something was different. The call of the register was interrupted by a harsh rumble—something akin to thunder or a low-flying jet. Those who turned to the window saw a mound of slurry racing towards them.

Pantglas Junior School was demolished on impact, killing five teachers and 109 children.

The Aberfan disaster wasn’t bad luck. It was an incident of gross institutional neglect. Enquiries would show that the National Coal Board (NCB) had built the colliery tips that sat perilously above the village at five times the regulatory limits and, partly, on ground where springs emerged. Three weeks of heavy rain, not unusual for Wales, sent the spoil racing down the hill. As one father would later put it, the victims were ‘buried alive by the National Coal Board’.

In the years that followed the disaster, the people of Aberfan would face yet further insult. A grassroots relief fund was forcibly co-opted and used to pay the cost of clearing the NCB’s remaining dangerous collieries from above the village. It would take until 1997 for the funds to be repaid.

The co-option was supported by the national print media. Several national newspapers worked to create suspicion around just why the Aberfan community wanted control of their relief fund at all, forcing villagers to defend themselves from accusations of greed—a demonisation that pre-empted the horrors of coverage of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989.

The problem wasn’t the nationalised nature of the coal board—it was the logic on which the institution was run. The NCB was an early but archetypal example of a public-sector institution run on a neoliberal logic, centred towards a monetary motive; productivity was prized beyond all else and pursued by major cuts to safety, workforce numbers, and worker conditions.

It’s the same kind of transition we’ve seen since in our National Health Service. As I note in my book, the NHS is a national body currently run through a neoliberal governing logic—and as with the NBC, the consequences of running it at the top of its capacity can be catastrophic.

The enduring importance of Aberfan today comes not only from its horrors, then, but from its symbolism. It reminds us that we live in a country where to be poor is often to be made powerless. Similar neglect and unwillingness to regulate would underpin tragic events like Hillsborough and the Grenfell Tower fire, and elsewhere, even in lieu of some big disaster, the evidence is clear that poverty, deprivation, and disadvantage cluster to undermine health in the poor communities of our country today. Like in Aberfan, they cause needless and avoidable death.

The theme of injustice was central to the Aberfan story as it was told to me. My dad grew up in the South Wales valleys—Aberfan was very close to home, and he retold its events often. His version always combined the human cost with a clear sense of the structural and institutional failings that allowed it to happen.

For many others born after the event, though, their first real exposure to Aberfan may well have been its retelling in the hit Netflix TV show The Crown. The show portrays the Aberfan disaster from the perspective of the royals. It focuses on the Queen—on her long delay before visiting the village, and her struggle to feel emotion when she finally does. It’s said that her reaction to the disaster—namely, her decision to wait over a week before visiting the town—is now among her greatest regrets.

The difference between my dad’s story—one informed by the realities of growing up in the Welsh valleys—and that told by The Crown is one of perspective. By focusing on the Queen, the show makes the establishment the protagonist in the story—not the people. Worse, if the Queen represents the establishment—as she surely does—it is a story of redemption for the status quo.

As Welsh media noted when the episode aired, there is little real exploration in The Crown of the failures of the NCB. There is too little about the relief fund. There is little about the self-interested failures of those who were meant to act on behalf of working people. And there is little about how the media conspired to paint the people of Aberfan as greedy and quarrelsome rather than holding those in positions of power to account.

Discourses that challenge the establishment are often translated into more comfortable stories over time. There is perhaps one trope used more than any other to that end: the hero. Having visited Aberfan, the dramatised Prince Philip describes to his wife, ‘The rage, in all the faces, behind all the eyes. But they didn’t smash things up. They didn’t fight in the streets… They sang. The whole community.’ This is a key part of The Crown’s story, which makes the villagers’ restraint a key tenet of their heroism.

This hero trope intentionally obscures the senselessness of human loss at the hands of the establishment, instead helping build support for needless sacrifice, normally of working people. people. It’s not a new conclusion—it was the major truth of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, famously ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. Most recently, it has re-emerged around NHS workers during Covid-19.

As frontline health and care staff took in the pandemic without the right protective equipment, without enough testing, without liveable sick pay, and without decent transport, the most common refrain from politicians and the media was one labelling them ‘healthcare heroes’. Doctors have noted since that it’s a narrative they feel is often unhelpful—one that asks them to be super-human all hours of the day, without anger or complaint.

In each case, a virtue is made of the ability to quietly tolerate suffering. Rather than focusing on the failures that allow that suffering to happen, these stories shift our focus to how people respond in the face of what’s falsely dismissed as inevitable adversity.

Fifty-five years on, then, Aberfan shouldn’t just remind us of the heroism of those who did suffer, but of the injustice of the fact that they ever had to, and of the continued suffering of so many others today—not least in those former mining communities, where poor physical and mental health remain rife. Most importantly, it should be a clarion call to place a higher value on life.