While the Tories will receive a drubbing in this week’s local elections, Jamie Driscoll’s North East mayoral candidacy has captured much attention — and highlighted Labour's future electoral headaches, should Starmerism disappoint.
The miners' strike was sustained by a broad coalition that coalesced entire communities. Forty years on, we must rebuild the bonds of solidarity, learn the lessons of defeat and reilluminate the possibilities that went dark as the pit entrances swung back open.
Faced with the wholesale destruction of pit communities, Britain’s miners and their supporters waged a struggle that has gone down as one of the most heroic moments in working-class history.
Despite being considered divorced from the coalfield communities in every imaginable way, the wave of enthusiasm shown for the miners’ struggle by London’s diverse workforces and communities proved to be a decisive form of support.
To advance the miners’ fight in Britain, some 6,000 Australian miners sacrificed their own jobs. Their heroic stance was one of many international actions in defence of British mining communities.
Against Thatcher’s plans to starve the miners back to work, the political and physical sustenance of the miners’ strike was wholly dependent on the skills and determination of thousands of working-class women.
Since the release of Pride a decade ago, the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners has become legendary. Now, in what’s likely to be its final year, members reflect on defeats and unexpected victories.
The County Durham pit village of Easington spent the strike year as a miniature police state as officers flocked in to enforce Thatcher’s assault. Four decades on, the scars run deep.
The period of defeat following the miners’ strike has been marked by an ideological retreat from class across the labour movement. Our task is to put the agency of working people at the centre of socialist politics.
Forty years on from the strike which sent their communities spiralling into poverty, former miners are still fighting for a rightful share of their pensions against a government that doesn’t want to give it up.
On the 30th anniversary of his seminal expose of the British state’s war on Arthur Scargill and mining communities, Seumas Milne explains how those same forces worked to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership.
The Tory project of deindustrialisation was a catastrophe for workers. It smashed the confidence of the socialist movement, which can’t become aloof to its historic demands for decent, dignified work.