"Our fight will go on"
We reprint below the March 8 editorial of Socialist Action, a revolutionary socialist paper, which spells out the aspects of the British miners' strike upon which the labour movement can begin to create a new leadership to carry on the fight.
miners was sabotaged by TUC general secretary Norman Willis and the majority of the General Council.
The TUC, no doubt, will use as an excuse the clause that support - particularly in the power stations - had to be "by agreement with the unions concerned." The truth is that from the beginning the General Council have been more afraid of a Scargill victory than a
Thatcher one.
To cap it all there can be few more dispicable incidents in the history of the British labour movement than the
TUC using last week's talks to "bring them closer to the government."
The TUC's treachery is all the greater when one realises just how little effort was necessary to bring power cuts and win the dispute. As few as eight of the major power stations had to be stopped to bring nationwide cuts. This was well within the TUC's grasp. Instead, along with Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and deputy leader Roy Hattersley, Willis concentrated on attacking the NUM for so-called violent picketing...
From Willis through to electrical workers union leader, Eric Hammond, and Kinnock through to Labour Party MP Denis Healey, the Labour leaders have clearly shown that they are unfit to lead the labour movement.
In the present crisis the working class needs a leadership that will stand and fight. The miners' strike has driven this understanding deep into the trade unions, the Labour Party, and all sections of the oppressed in struggle...
The centre and right of the TUC and Labour Party will undoubtedly use Thatcher's victory as an occasion to try and crush the left in the movement. They want the defeat of the miners to be, as the Observer put it last Sunday: the making of Neil Kinnock" . And now Kinnock has announced his opposition to an amnesty for sacked miners.
For the labour movement, such a strengthening of Kinnock could be a disaster. It would consolidate the leadership that betrayed the miners - one that couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag.
But Kinnock will not have an easy task. The miners' strike has brought into being a class-struggle layer and leadership in Britain which is thousands strong and organised throughout the movement. It has opened a period of radicalisation and political struggle of a kind not seen in Britain since the 1920s. It is a radicalisation that will deepen.
The task now is to organise that left to throw out the traitors. It requires a programme for a government as loyal to our class as Thatcher is to hers — and a fight for the Labour Party to adopt such a programme.
We need a leadership that will follow the example of the miners in resisting the attacks on the working class. For the working class there is no other road — no matter how long it takes. no Arthur Scargill put it very well: "It is on struggles such as ours that democracy Itsell depends Dr go will g . itself depends. Our fight will go on.
6
"The strike is over, but the dispute continues." Arthur Scargill's statement after Sunday's [March 3] special delegate conference expressed the spirit of struggle that continues to exist in the mining communities. The closeness of the return to work vote - 98 to 91, even after 12 months on strike - was adequate testimony to that ...
The NUM's [National Union of Mineworkers'] refusal to sign an agreement which would make it complicit in the Coal Board's closure programme was correct and necessary. Given the deterlorating situation faced by the strike, and the necessity to return in the short term, it was far better to refuse to make an agreement than to dress up a capitulation as "compromise"
As Arthur Scargill wrote in the Observer on March 3: "The NCB [National Coal Board] is demanding that the NUM accepts closures on 'economic' grounds prior to such cases going through the review procedure - which means that the fate of these pits nad units would effectively be predetermined even before they enter the procedures. That is the Board's ultimatum to us. We cannot accept it."
The crucial question for those who voted not to go back was rightfully the issue of amnesty for the 700 miners sacked in the course of the strike. This struggle is going to deepen. There are still over 2,000 court cases outstanding against NUM members — many on serious charges such as conspiracy and riot.
The NCB will continue to use these cases to victimise militants. Defence of those sacked is now a key task of the entire movement and not just the NUM...
The outcome of the strike is a defeat not just for the miners but for the entire labour movement. But the attitude taken by Scargill, and the NUM rank and file, has created the best conditions possible for an ongoing struggle.
This is despite the fact that the right has been sitting on its hands and waiting for an opportunity to isolate the Scargill wing of the union. And despite the fact that the South Wales executive decision to recommend a return — with the implied threat that the coalfield would go back whatever the national conference decided - effectively tried to pre-empt the discusInternational Viewpoint 8 April 1985 sion at Sunday's delegate conference.
The refusal of the NUM to sign an agreement, to become complicit in pit closures, means that the miners return to work in a much more favourable situation than, for example, the workers at British Leyland or British Steel -NCB chairman Ian MacGregor's previous two victims. There the leaderships accepted the agreements and effectively policed the rundown of the industries.
The NCB tried to force this same role on the NUM. It failed.
Of course, the NCB will try to move rapidly now to stamp its authority on the coalfields: to isolate militants, restructure the industry, and impose its spurious criteria of profitablility. MacGregor had already announced he will be continuing with the closure programme.
But the miners, under Scargill, are in a much better position to rebuild a fightback than the steel workers were under their former president Bill Sirs - or for that matter than the miners would be under another Joe Gormley [a former NUM president]. This is what makes the Scargill leadership different from anything that has existed in the British labour movement for 60 years. That is an intransigent determination to stand and fight on the basic issues...
The blame for the defeat does not lie with the NUM leadership. The mining communities have given the greatest example of struggle in the history of the British working class. Responsibility for the defeat lies with the leadership of the TUC [Trades Union Congress] and the Labour Party.
As Mick MeGahey, vice-president of the NUM, put it at the December TUC General Council, there were "three kinds of leader round the table": the honourable ones who had tried to deliver the support and had succeeded, the honourable ones who had tried to deliver support and had failed, and the dishonourable ones who have never tried.
The last are in a clear majority in the TUC. There is no room in the offices of the TUC for a leadership that stands and fights for its members interests.
The NUM's refusal to allow the TUC to take over the dispute was correct. The decisions of the September [TUC] congress to give "total support" to the