Scottish Socialist Party Conference

So, politicians spent the day blabbering on about making slight reforms to the highest form of hereditary privilege. Meanwhile, the City are holding a gun to the Government's head, demanding that they are the only ones who are bailed out.

And the recession is much worse than feared. Much worse than anyone predicted, if the media are to be believed.

That's not actually true. Socialists predicted the timing and the severity of this economic catastrophe and most worryingly, expect it to get a lot worse, with tragic consequences for ordinary people. (Follow the "Left Banker" link at the side.)

We need to get organised and fight to defend our jobs, homes and standard of living. Until there is no more money for bombs, guns, bank bailouts or royalty, we should not even LISTEN, far less believe ruling class claims that there is not enough money to save the likes of us.

My friends in the Scottish Socialist Party are having their annual conference in Arran this weekend. They are a fantastic bunch, who have campaigned widely against all forms of injustice and exploitation. They are working on solutions to this current economic crisis. Solutions for ordinary people like us, not the greedy self-serving b@stards who got us into this mess.

I'm sorry I can't be there this year, but I hope everyone has a wonderful time and goes back to their communities, families and workplaces, re-invigorated and full of hope for what is possible if ordinary people seize control of their own destiny.

Read more about the SSP conference here:

http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org/new_stories/events/conference2009.html

ISRAEL USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS INDISCRIMINATELY IN DENSELY POPULATED AREAS IN GAZA!

You will probably have seen media reports of Israeli war crimes during their recent invasion of Gaza. These include callously murdering a young family and an old woman. In time-honoured fashion, there was also evidence of the widespread use of religion, to convince soldiers that the invasion of Gaza was a just, Holy war.

You may have been horrified by reports that Israeli recruits wore tasteless T-shirts that glorified and mocked the murder of civilians.

And from the little comment there has been from the fanatical, self-righteous right since these reports of war crimes began to emerge, you will no doubt already have heard versions of the following: "A few bad apples;" "Some individuals behaved appallingly and let the side down;" "Youthful high spirits. Just boys who don't know any better, not representative and they will learn."

Well here is the utterly sickening, immoral, murderous truth - Indisciminate slaughter of civilians was the main game-plan. Collective punishment of the Palestinian people was the objective of the mission. That'll teach them for daring to democratically elect a government that their imperialist neighbours disapproved off.

AN IMPARTIAL HUMAN RIGHTS' ORGANISATION HAS FOUND THAT ISRAEL USED WHITE PHOSPHOROUS INDISCRIMINATELY IN DENSELY POPULATED AREAS, INCLUDING A HOSPITAL, A SCHOOL AND A MARKET.

What could ever justify that?

Certainly not a few rockets that were launched in response to to the blockade of Gaza, which is also collective punishment of the Palestinian people for choosing the "wrong" government.

You probably already knew this, but the white phosphorous shells were made in the USA. (http://tinyurl.com/cpba7l).

See the report below from AP.

(PS I purposely didn't use an image of white phosphorous that makes it look like a harmless firework; or an image of someone's burned relative. You can google it yourself, if you need to.)

HRW: Israel's white phosphorous use indiscriminate
By KARIN LAUB – 1 hour ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel fired white phosphorous shells indiscriminately over densely populated areas of Gaza in what amounts to a war crime, Human Rights Watch said in a report Wednesday.
The New York-based group called on the United Nations to launch an investigation into alleged Israeli violations of the rules of war, including the use of white phosphorous, during its three-week Gaza offensive.
The Israeli military said Wednesday that the shells were used in line with international law.
"The claim that smoke shells were used indiscriminately, or to threaten the civilian population, is baseless," the military said in a statement.
International law permits the use of phosphorous weapons as flares or to create smoke screens masking the movement of troops.
However, Human Rights Watch said Israeli troops frequently fired the shells over densely populated areas. The firing "was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes," the report said.
The group documented only some of the cases, including white phosphorous shells fired at a Gaza City hospital, the U.N. headquarters, a school and a market. In six attacks, 12 civilians were killed and dozens wounded, said Human Rights Watch researcher Fred Abrahams.
Each shell bursts into 116 burning white phosphorous wedges, over a radius of more than 135 yards (125 meters). The wedges burn on contact with oxygen, creating intense heat, and can cause severe burns. The phosphorous kept burning for many days, and was still smoldering well after Israel's withdrawal on Jan. 18.
Abrahams said the Israeli military was aware of the destructive nature of white phosphorous. Army medical officers warned during the war that the weapon is "potentially extremely destructive to tissue," according to an internal army document attached to the report.
Israel's use of white phosphorous violated the laws of war, Abrahams said.
"They knew perfectly well what danger white phosphorous poses to civilians," Abrahams said. "Their own documents prove it. They know that these areas were densely populated. Yet they fired it not once, not twice, but repeatedly into densely populated areas."
Israel could have used less dangerous smoke screens produced by an Israeli company, Abrahams said.
He called for an investigation by the U.N. secretary-general or the U.N. Security Council into all of Israel's alleged violations of the rules of war, including the use of white phosphorous.
The United States supplied the white phosphorous to Israel and should launch its own investigation into whether the shells were used illegally, he said.
Hamas should also be investigated for war crimes, including indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli border towns, Human Rights Watch said.
Lt. Col. Shane Cohen, a reserve artillery officer, noted that white phosphorous shells are also used in the British and U.S. armies. He said shells would not be fired as smoke screens if civilians are present.
"The enemy might be behind the civilians, and you want to put the smoke screen in the middle, so you're going to think more than twice, and nearly for sure, you're not going to be firing it," he said.
Israel launched its Gaza offensive on Dec. 27 in an attempt to halt rocket fire and weaken the territory's Hamas rulers. More than 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians, were killed in the war, according to a Palestinian human rights group. Thirteen Israelis were also killed.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserve

Standing up and Speaking Out

If you've not seen this yet, please watch it. You will laugh. It's Jon Stewart on the Daily Show regarding Wall st opposing bailouts:

http://tinyurl.com/djkadn

(Sorry I couldn't upload the video. I don't know how to.)

There are a whole series of these clips where Stewart really takes to task the way the right wing media operate.

The French people have done a fantastic job of standing up to injustice this week, with three million people taking part in a General Strike about the effects of the recession on ordinary people:

http://tinyurl.com/c6hmwd

Go the NPA!

Men's Oppression

OK, this is actually going to be about oppression by men, but I got your attention.

I’m not going to focus on the gory details of Josef Fritzl’s crimes against his family. We have all read how many times he raped his daughter, what the cellar smelled like, how he burned their dead child's body and hundreds of other gruesome facts.

Instead, I am going to focus on answering three questions. Why did he do it? How did he get away with it for so long? And why are we all so keen to move swiftly on?

This article from the Guardian gives the best response to the first question, why did he do it? (http://tinyurl.com/ctnljz) He did it because he felt entitled to, because of patriarchy. Because of a belief system that makes ordinary men into Old Testament mini-Gods in their own homes, to a greater or lesser extent, obviously greater in his case. His daughter; his house; his rules.

He was perfectly sane. He managed to give a good impression of being a pillar of respectable society. Predators often do. He only behaved like a monster when it suited him to do so. It’s true he attacked other women and once he even got caught and was imprisoned for rape. But those were also calculated risks, where he reckoned that the potential benefits out-weighed the potential harm to himself. And no wonder he thought so. This woman (http://tinyurl.com/c67u5e) claims Fritzl attempted to rape her. Yet when she contacted police they advised HER to be more careful in future! It’s highly irresponsible behaviour for a woman worker to engage in after all, travelling home from work after a shift and putting her own key in the lock of her own front door when a rapist might be waiting to pounce!

Which brings us to how he got away with it for so long. Again, the answer is patriarchy. We live in a world that has unconditional positive regard for white, middle-class men, whereas women are always regarded with suspicion. He told people Elisabeth was a bit flighty and irresponsible, had ran away and joined a cult and was forever abandoning her children on his doorstep like the invisible stork. And with no genuine evidence whatsoever to back this up, and plenty of evidence to suggest that he WAS a monster and a danger to women, including his previous rape conviction, people believed him. Or at least decided it wasn’t their place to question a man’s right to be an Old Testament mini-God in his own home.

In the Telegraph we see yet more evidence of the belief system that allowed Fritzl to prey on his family. Instead of seeing the terror of the woman who was after all imprisoned upstairs, the Telegraph attempts to shift the blame for Fritzl’s undetected crimes onto his wife, Rosemarie (http://tinyurl.com/b4ssel). It doesn’t matter what a man does, it is always a woman’s fault that he got away with it. He does this himself - blames his own mother. (There is plenty of evidence that claims of a domineering mother by convicted predators are overwhelmingly false.) Predators do awful things because they can and because they feel entitled to control and use – not because a woman made them that way. Anyway, instead of using banner headlines to announce society’s failure to see the horrific domestic abuse and terror campaign that Rosemarie and the upstairs children were subjected to, the Telegraph chooses to blame her for society's collective failure to deal with a controlling man. The Telegraph ignores her Stockholm Syndrome, which brainwashed and imprisoned her in her own head, because the only way she could secure any measure of safety for herself and her children was by keeping her abuser happy. She was brainwashed into identifying with his needs first and foremost.

Anyway, with the blame laid securely at the feet of a woman, we can all move on, resume business as usual, the big business of entitled control of women, with lots of profit, mostly for men. No need to question the daily diet of objectification of their own bodies that women and girls are fed. No need to question soft porn music videos that depict girls stripping for the boys in their class and the middle-aged teacher. No need to worry about video games that dehumanise women, or hardcore porn downloaded to the laptop or mobile phone. No need to consider censorship of this dehumanising, anti-women propaganda, because that restricts men’s freedom and that is unacceptable. No need to question prostitution, in fact let’s legalise it completely. The girls involved choose to do it, after all, even if they were only 14 when they started and were groomed for it by a mini-Fritzl. And the fact that they had a worse start in life than a guy with cash in his pocket doesn’t make him any less entitled.

And we can resume our usual attitudes to morality, unfettered by Fritzl, because it was Rosemarie’s job to stop him. It was her responsibility and SHE failed.

Let’s start with eating. And don't get side-tracked into considering Fritzl's control of the food supply to the cellar. Yes, eating is a moral issue if you are a woman. Pity help the bitch who eats too much, or who gets fucked up in the head by it all and eats too little. Because society WILL call her to account for being the wrong size. And ageing. Ageing is also a moral issue for women. Yes, ideally she’s supposed to look like a pre-pubescent boy. Don’t even worry yourself about how fucked up that is, when considering incest. And if she gets beyond that pre-pubescent boy look, she’s beyond control. And we won’t worry that Fritzl’s entitlement was in essence, entitlement to control. Just pity help any bitch who lets herself go. But pity help her also, if she tries too hard and has plastic surgery that goes wrong.

Rosemarie should have stopped him. So we don’t need to let any thought of Fritzl the granddaddy-daddy deter us from controlling women’s fertility. We can continue to force our views on women, that they can’t be trusted to know whether it is a good idea for them to have a baby or not.

We can discount all the rape statistics because a few women lie. And we can discount the domestic abuse statistics because a man is entitled to have an “argument” with his partner. And you can’t be sure she is telling the truth unless she ends up in intensive care. And even then she probably drove him to it. And if the kids got hurt she’s an irresponsible, unfit mother who should have stopped him. In essence, every woman is Rosemarie. Or Rosemarie is every woman.

We don’t need to consider incest, because only one in three girls is sexually abused. And the British Fritzl wasn’t named (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/18/josef-fritzl-trial-press-reaction) so we don’t need to bother about him. And most of those girls made it up. Or if we are being charitable, some twisted professional who is part of the massive anti-good-fathers industry put a false memory in her head. And if it definitely did happen, it was her mother’s fault because she should have stopped him.

Entitlement. Control and Entitlement. Patriarchy allows men to control their partners and children and to believe it is entirely just for them to do so. Patriarchy allows them to get away with this, most of the time. Patriarchy enables society to turn a blind eye. And patriarchy ultimately blames women for men’s crimes.

And it’s got to stop. We have to deal with patriarchy. Men, we are not going to allow you to blame Rosemarie Fritzl for the crimes of the man who abused her for even longer than he abused his daughter. So all you Old-Testament mini-Gods can stick your patriarchal entitlement and control up your “oppressed” men’s Batman Capes!

The Tip of the Iceberg

See this shocking, but unsurprising (if you get what I mean) story from the Independent today:

PATIENTS DIE IN 'THIRD-WORLD HOSPITAL
Tuesday, 17 March 2009

Appalling standards of care at a hospital trust put patients at risk
and led to some dying, according to a damning report out today.

The "shocking" state of affairs at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust
meant patients admitted as emergencies suffered due to serious lapses in care.
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a
three-year period, the head of the investigation for the Healthcare Commission
said.
Families have described "Third World" conditions at the trust, with
some patients drinking water from vases because they were so thirsty and others
screaming in pain.
The Commission launched an inquiry after concerns were raised about higher than normal death rates in emergency care, in particular at Stafford Hospital.
The trust argued the anomalies were due to "problems with
its recording of data and not problems with the quality of care for patients",
the report said.
Not satisfied with this reponse, the Commission launched a
formal investigation last year, sifting through more than 1,000 documents and
interviewing some 300 people. It found deficiencies at "virtually every stage", including inadequately trained staff who were too few in number, junior doctors left alone in charge at night and dirty wards and bathrooms.
Some patients were left in pain or needing the toilet, sat in soiled bedding for
several hours at a time and were not given their regular medication, the
investigation found. Receptionists with no medical training were also left
to assess patients coming in to A&E. The investigation found heart
monitors were turned off on wards because nurses did not know how to use them
and some patients were left dehydrated because nurses did not know how to work
intravenous fluid systems properly.
The report also found that the Government's target for patients to be seen within four hours at A&E meant patients could be taken to "dumping grounds" to avoid breaching the target. Some patients had their operations cancelled for up to four days running and were "nil by mouth" for most of those days, leaving them hungry and thirsty. In one ward, 55% of patients were found to have pressure sores when only 10% had sores on arrival. The trust was also found to be 120 nurses short in
2007/08, of which about 17 were needed in A&E, 30 in surgery and 77 on
medical wards.
The Commission said the trust's board was more focused on finance, targets and achieving foundation trust status, as well as its desire to save £10 million.
Despite the fact concerns had been raised about the trust,
it was awarded foundation trust status - designed to mark out outstanding
hospitals - just weeks before the investigation was launched.
Earlier this month the trust's chief executive, Martin Yeates, stepped down and has now been formally suspended on full pay, while chairman, Toni Brisby, resigned.
Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, said today there had been a "gross and terrible breach of trust" of patients, adding the report showed there had been a
"complete failure of leadership". He added: "I'm proud of the NHS but actually I'm really saddened by this report."
Dr Heather Wood, who led the Commission's investigation, said the number of excess deaths between April 2005 and March 2008 was between 400 and 1,200, although it was expected the figure of 400 would be closer to the mark.
It is not clear how many of these deaths could have been avoided.
Chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said the report detailed "a shocking story".
"Our report tells a story of appalling standards of care and chaotic systems for looking after patients," he said. "These are words I have not previously used in any report. There were inadequacies in almost every stage of caring for patients. "There was no doubt that patients will have suffered and some of them will have died as a result."
Local MP, David Kidney, said: "The exhaustive Healthcare Commission report is both definitive and damning. "In A&E, emergency admissions and medical wards 10, 11 and 12, care standards were unacceptable during the three-year period ivestigated. As a result, some patients experienced intolerable conditions and lessons
were not learned by the hospital trust from those experiences. So more
patients suffered. It is galling for patients and patients' relatives and
carers that their complaints were not believed or were fobbed off with excuses
and promises that the report shows were worthless."
Julie Bailey, 47, has spent 14 months campaigning for an inquiry into Stafford Hospital following the death of her mother in November 2007.
Ms Bailey, from Stafford, was so concerned about the care being given to her 86-year-old mother Bella that she and her relatives slept in a chair at her hospital bedside for eight weeks.
"What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives,"
she said.
"We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty. There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief. Patients would fall out of bed and we would have to go hunting for staff. There was such a lack of staff. It was like a Third-World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace."
Eric Morton, chief executive of the trust, apologised to patients
but said "significant changes" had been made within a very short period of time,
including new management, more staff and new systems in A&E.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson also apologised to families and patients, and announced a review of current A&E services at the hospital as well as one to establish how long problems had been going on for.
He said: "There was a complete failure of management to address serious problems and monitor performance. This led to a totally unacceptable failure to treat emergency patients safely and with dignity."
Shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said: "The public will be rightly shocked by the poor standards of care exposed at this hospital. It is unacceptable that the pursuit of targets - not the safety of patients - was repeatedly prioritised, alongside endless managerial change and a 'closed' culture, which failed to admit and deal with things going wrong."

You have to hope - and I do believe it's so - that this hospital is an extreme case. That said, where else was this incessant drive towards targets and efficiency savings going to lead? It's a bit disingenuous for the Government to feign mock horror. Who was it that was driving the "modernisation" agenda in the first place? It was New Labour who introduced the concept of Foundation Hospitals, these flagship hospitals that would run on an enterprise ethos and would put the supposedly fuddy-duddy, crumbly old traditional NHS to shame.

It's high time we took stock of what really matters and gave all the gurus who lied to us the heave-ho.

In Scotland, healthcare is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, thankfully. We may have been spared the worst excesses of capitalist meddling, but there are no grounds for complacency.

I remember the early 90s, working as a newly qualified ward nurse when the Tories introduced their wave of health service modernisation. They introduced the purchaser/provider split and did a whole load of nonsense meddling and right-wing muscle flexing. It was all based on dogma, not evidence. My line manager took me to one meeting where I heard the senior management case for the purchaser/provider split, which was being implemented without meaningful discussion. I asked what happens if the purchaser has paid for 900 hip replacements and I am the 930th person who needs one? I was callously told: "you go somewhere else." So patients were to be carted around like tins of beans to be stocked on empty shelves, without a thought for the inconvenience to stressed-out visiting relatives.

I witnessed one nonsense decision which was taken on the basis that the high dependency unit was "under-utilised." [In practice it is actually essential that this sort of unit has spare capacity to accommodate emergency admisssions and thorough cleaning of bed areas between admissions.] Our right-wing, new breed of managers decided waiting list patients were to be housed in the spare capacity in the high dependency unit and left it to the "clinical director" - a busy clinician - to implement the decision. Of course it failed after one afternoon. Waiting list patients who were hospitalised for a hernia repair or treatment of their haemorrhoids were absolutely freaked out by close proximity to so many seriously unwell, highly dependant patients. They also had no access to proper washing facilities or a TV room or a dining area, as high dependency patients don't require these services. I did a little management study (not a popular one with the movers and shakers in either hospital management or higher education) on this particular decision. I counted that there were 19 paid managers involved in taking the decision, but only the clinical director - a clinician who was a busy expert surgeon - was actually responsible for implementing it. He had received half a day of management training.

You could almost laugh at those examples, but it got decidedly unfunny when I had to cancel patients' surgery on the day it was due, due to arbitrary decisions to close four or six or eight beds, with immediate effect. When it got to the third time that I told a man with cancer his surgery had been cancelled, I was handing him the complaint card and advising him on how to complete it. He wouldn't though, despite travelling a fair distance, so always actually being at the ward before finding out his surgery was cancelled. He had too much respect for the idea of the NHS and didn't want to cause the staff any trouble. His first wife had died of cancer. The first husband of his current wife had also died of cancer. But this couple quietly suffered their fears of cancer that spreads while waiting for surgery, rather than cause a fuss. And all this at the time of the much vaunted "Patients' Charter" which allegedly improved patients' rights. Sometimes I wanted to spit on that document.

So you can imagine my relief, in 1995, when I met my local Labour MP in the pub, and he asked me: "How are things in the NHS?"

But I barely got a chance to draw breath and tell him about cancer patients having their surgery cancelled, far less let him know how staff were using every aspect of themselves to paper over the cracks appearing in the NHS, by arriving early, working late, buying things for patients, never taking breaks..........

He launched into effusive mockery of how old fashioned I was, and informed me that New Labour weren't going to change health policy that much, that like the Tories they also believed the NHS needed a healthy dose of "modernisation." I fumed all night, but could barely get a word in, as, typical of New Labour, he is the sort of guy who is totally impressed by the sound of his own visionary voice. Eventually he noticed and remarked that I was a bit quiet. I told him I was deeply un-impressed by New Labour. He said: "Never mind, just keep the money rolling in." He actually rubbed his hands when he said that! It had obviously escaped his notice that I had already cancelled my Labour Party membership and subscription. Thankfully the money has finally stopped rolling in, as witnessed by the tricks New Labour have had to resort to in recent years, in order to fund their election campaigns.

New Labour's spell in charge of the NHS has been heart-breaking. I worked in intensive care at a PFI hospital. Support services were privatised, so detergent was rationed, the cleaner had to use a dirty mop-head to clean the floor, nutrient-lite microwave meals were transported from Wales and money was extorted from families who phoned ill relatives, or paid for access to TV for them. The thing that sickened me the most, though, was that we had to lay bets on the expected date of death of deteriorating critically ill patients. This was because the families were only entitled to one day's free car-parking - on every other day they had to pay £10. So if we guessed wrongly, they ended up being handed a £10 parking fee along with the death certificate and their loved one's belongings.

There was a lot more that scunnered me, like the patronising supposed "consultation" meetings on acute service cuts [strange how they never let me speak], or having to face elderly sick relatives who had braved four-hour journeys to distant hospitals where services had been rationalised to. I stomached a lot that made me heart sick.

I finally left the acute sector over a document entitled "Critical Care Without Walls." (http://www.sehd.scot.nhs.uk/publications/report.PDF) (http://tinyurl.com/dy8u4z). On the face of it, it sounded like a good idea. Patients should be able to get critical care when they need it, no matter where they are in the hospital. But how is it possible to do this without having the levels of staffing and equipment that are available in critical care? I attended a conference a few years before this document was released and was told by a Government health economist that they were "coming after our critical care staffing levels." And that's what "Critical Care Without Walls" is really about. It wasn't long before us ITU nurses were being farmed out all over the hospital as pairs of hands and we lost the polish of our specialist skills. Things that we could previously do automatically we now had to think hard about, losing vital minutes while a patient was deteriorating. When you think about it, if that document was ever truly about providing "critical care without walls," the Government would have ensured that ITU staffing levels were available in every ward, rather than diluting down ITU staffing levels to closer to ward levels and sprinkling a little technical know-how throughout the hospital.

The hospital in Stafford is an extreme case, but it is only the extreme case that proves the rule. All this right-wing dogma has got to be challenged, because everywhere we look it has caused nothing but harm. Up to 1200 unneccessary deaths, at one hospital, over three years! That is staggering, disgusting, criminal!

It's high-time we gave the right-wing yes men and women in the NHS their marching orders. Maybe we could even start rewarding the recalcitrant loony lefties who always spoke out against this sort of thing (joke + smile.)

1984 - 85 Miners’ Strike – A Personal Recollection

I have never put a word in print about this, always feeling others had more important things to say. But after 25 years I am going to be brave and share recollections of my life in an ordinary working class family during the year long strike. Working class people should write their own history, otherwise we are written out of it, or our views and experiences are minimised and altered. My ancestors were involved in mining in Midlothian for generations. I would love to know about their experiences in the 1926 General Strike, but there is no record, so that is why I am writing this. You only need to read the media accounts and editorials commemorating the 84-85 strike over the last few days to see examples of powerful people telling us we were misguided and the destruction of our way of life was in our own best interests.

When the strike started in March 1984 I was 15, at that awkward stage between childhood and adulthood, too old to think adults would take care of everything and we would all live happily ever after, but too immature to stand shoulder to shoulder and play a full part in the struggle.

Strikes were nothing new to us, as my relatives and ancestors have been miners as far back as you care to look. In 1984 most of my male relatives worked at Monktonhall Colliery in Midlothian – a pit with a reputation for militancy. In the 1974 strike, we had the three day week, power cuts and candles in the dark. I vividly remember during the 1974 strike, when my wee brother and I were still tiny. We were scared of the dark in a power cut and my mum reassured us, saying that this was good darkness, not darkness to be afraid of. She told us our dad and all the other miners had put out all the lights in the country to teach the rich people a lesson, that all the wealth in the country was created by ordinary working people, so the rich had to share it with us.

More recently, the strike at Monktonhall Colliery in 1983 and the events leading up to it were fresh in my mind. My dad was one of the face-workers who was sent a threatening letter about allegedly “restricting his efforts” on the L43 section of the pit. My dad believed this letter was delivered to our house by recorded delivery mail while he was at work as a deliberate attempt to intimidate miners’ families. There was clear provocation from the colliery manager William Kennedy, who did not follow agreed guidelines in his handling of the situation. He escalated the situation until miners were locked out of the pit for attending a union meeting and the rest of the Monktonhall miners went out on strike in solidarity, with some of them coming back up the pit to join the locked out miners. This was part of the general poisoning of relations between the NCB and the workforce that was being actively pursued by Scottish manager Albert Wheeler throughout Scotland. Ian MacGregor, Thatcher’s Scots-American hatchet-man added fuel to the poisoned industrial relations by comparing the Monktonhall miners unfavourably to those at Bilston Glen, despite the fact that Monktonhall had higher productivity per worker and was a much wetter more adverse environment to work in. The strike at Monktonhall lasted for seven weeks and ended in November. My family were just getting over the economic cost of that and of Christmas and now here was another strike.

I was very anxious about my parents because I knew they were very hard up already after the Monktonhall strike. I also knew that this was the big one. My parents didn’t burden us with their day to day worries about paying the bills, but my dad had made us all aware of the Ridley Plan (http://tinyurl.com/dyotdz), a document the Tories had produced which was about destroying the power of unionised workers. I had also heard a lot of talk at home and in the community about the confrontational tactics of the NCB management in Scotland, led by the hated Bert Wheeler. Also, the appointment of Ian MacGregor to the NCB chairmanship after he had decimated the steel industry was a clear signal from Thatcher that our time for being stomped underfoot was at hand.

When the strike started my Mum and Dad had a bit of an argument. He was angry that the strike was happening now, coming out of the winter and going into the summer, when the ruling class had years to prepare with stockpiles of coal and all their hatchet men in place. He felt that the timing of the strike had been chosen by the Tories. He had often said that in the dispute in 1981, although the Tories caved in, the miners should have stayed on an indefinite political strike to drive the Tories from office. He viewed this as democratic, because the Tory retreat was tactical and not genuinely conciliatory. He thought the Tories just weren’t ready to fight, so the miners should have taken the fight to them at that time. However, since the strike was happening now (1984), he was prepared to go along with it, despite his view that it was totally the wrong time for a strike tactically and his fear that the strike would fail.

My mum argued that the strike was just to protect the jobs of English miners, now that Cortonwood, a modern pit in Yorkshire was under threat. She pointed out the loss of Scottish and Welsh pits and asked where the powerful Yorkshire miners were when those jobs were under threat. She also thought that not having a strike ballot was a huge tactical error which the Tories and the media would use to beat the miners with. Dad disagreed with her, saying that Yorkshire had a good record for solidarity. His view was that this strike was a broadening out of the conflict that had engulfed Scotland’s mines, because MacGregor was now using the same tactics in England that Wheeler had utilised in Scotland, deliberately provoking the workers and causing trouble. He said that there had been loads of ballots and democratic decisions supporting the principle of strike action in defence of jobs and it wasn’t up to the Tories or the media to decide when another ballot should be held. He said that in Scotland at least, there had repeatedly been a mandate for strike action in defence of any jobs under threat, so anyone who was swayed by the media, the NCB or the Tories regarding the need for a ballot was just an eejit.

A lot of the time I experienced mounting anxiety and panic. I feared for my family who had all just come through the recent Monktonhall strike and who had been miners all their lives. I feared for the fate of my community which was built for the sole purpose of housing the workforce of Monktonhall and Bilston Glen. Although I intended to go to college, I feared for my school classmates who were depending on jobs in mining. At a time of three million unemployed, I had seen a tiny amount of glue-sniffing and heroin addiction amongst the most troubled inhabitants of the community and I feared that without the mines, this would be the future. So some of the time I retreated into residual childishness, or engaged myself in youth culture and my social life, to blot out my fears for the adult world. My beliefs were a mix of politics and childish notions - I believed that since the days of Marx and Engels humans were on a trajectory towards humanitarian socialism, that the working class were striving for a better world and slowly we were getting there and nothing could really stop us – that the Tories were just a temporary blip. I believed the miners would win this dispute because I was still young enough to have fairy tale notions in my head - that good always triumphs over evil in the end.

As the strike progressed I got bamboozled by the media reports about the lack of a ballot, or about the NUM acting illegally and being sequestered. I could see that most of the broadcast media at least were biased, but I found it difficult to read between the lines and work out what was really going on.

I am sure that other kids felt just as troubled, so it bothered me that in school classes we were barely allowed to discuss the strike. It was like the elephant in the room. Most teachers ignored it completely and just got on with our lessons. Some of the active trade unionist teachers allowed us to discuss it a little, although they probably had to be mindful of accusations that they were indoctrinating us. Personally I viewed the lack of opportunities to discuss the strike as a kind of indoctrination. If middle class communities were under anything like the same sort of organised onslaught I am sure we would have been hearing about it in our lessons. A handful of the worst of the teachers did discuss it, but just to impose their views on us, that they were superior, could always beat us in an argument, that we had better stick in at school now as our fathers were discovering there was no such thing as a job for life and rightly so, that the Tories were engaged in a just battle to re-assert elective democracy over trade union bullying.

The adults in my family tried not to burden us with their troubles. They only told us funny stories about what happened on picket lines. One relative said that in the beginning he was keen to picket and was up the front pushing and shoving against the scab buses and lorries and the police. But as the strike progressed he grew less keen and tried to stay at the back, because the police had lifted him up and threw him out of the picket line on three occasions, and each time they had ripped his trousers, so he was now on his last pair. He also spoke of a man who had lost several odd shoes on the picket line, so he now had no shoes to wear.

They told us comforting stories about the police. One day my dad was sent to picket at the nuclear power station at Torness. It was a scorching hot day and the miners had not been well organised, not knowing in advance where they were going. They ended up being at Torness all day without a bite to eat or a sip of water. The police on the other hand had brought their own packed lunches and had also been provided with a packed lunch, so they shared their food and drink with the pickets.

One of my uncles was a policeman who used to be a miner and he donated most of his wages to help his relatives who were on strike. Sometimes he looked ashen and I think he suffered a lot from internal conflict during the strike, but at least he still had a well paid job at the end of it.

One time Dad was so angry and so late getting home he told us the truth about an incident. Many busloads of pickets on their way to picket the Ravenscraig Steel Works were stopped by the police using the new Tory anti union laws and ordered to turn back. Negotiations failed, so the miners got out of the buses and sat on the M8 totally blocking the motorway for hours. The police were very angry and forced them back onto the buses. Dad said the police split him up from his comrades and put him on the wrong bus to Fife on purpose, knowing he had no way of getting back to the Lothians as he had no money. He said when he complained it was made clear to him he was being sent to Fife as punishment for blocking the motorway and if he had anything else to say he could discuss it with a police truncheon and lose his job for assaulting a police officer. He also said the bus driver was threatened by the police. Dad had to hitch-hike back from Fife, so he got home in the evening absolutely furious, having had no food all day, after leaving to go picketing in the early hours.

They didn’t tell us about their fears regarding victimised miners, who were singled out by the police and arrested and then summarily dismissed from their jobs. They couldn’t hide it though. We saw it in the papers, particularly when Davey Hamilton the Monktonhall NUM delegate was arrested and imprisoned at the crunch point of the strike.

One time when my parents couldn’t hide the serious nature of the conflict from us, was Orgreave. I was a few months older and past my childish denial stage and I have rarely in my life felt such rage. The site of mounted police charging down fleeing miners was sickening and the rustling of tenners like football casuals was vile. I was so angry I decided to do something about it. I was a prissy little pain in the arse I have to admit, but I decided to organise buses of school children to go to Orgreave. My cunning plan was that the miners were to put us, in our school uniforms in the front lines, so that when mounted police mowed us down people would get the true measure of them.

When I first suggested this, my parents laughed at me. Which made me so angry that I was even more of a prissy pain in the arse! I argued that schoolchildren could retaliate against police brutality, as we had no jobs to lose and laying into us would just make the police look even worse. When my parents realised I was serious they went nuts and barred me from using the house phone after they caught me trying to book buses. So I tried at school instead, but I didn’t get many kids agreeing to go. I ran out of money to use the school pay-phone to book buses and I couldn’t raise a deposit to pay for even one bus. All the buses in Scotland and Northern England were already all booked up indefinitely for pickets, scabs and polis. Eventually some bus company guy told me there was a law against taking a booking from anyone under 18. I have never found out if he was bullshitting me, but I gave up. Obviously there is a lesson there. Firstly, I should have ignored responsible adults like parents and teachers and joined the Young Socialists. Secondly, if you want to take action on something call a meeting and get a bit of consensus and assistance, instead of trying to save the world on your own.

The strike had a huge effect on school children. One afternoon there was a strike of pupils at my school. I wasn’t actually on strike - I was just talking to the kids who were going on strike and trying to get signatures for a petition about lack of access to school toilets. Some of the kids were going on strike to support the miners and some were going on strike to support a few of our teachers who were on strike. Others were going on strike to protest against the teachers going on strike and a handful were striking against the miners. Some were striking about the lack of access to toilets. Because of the confusion I wasn’t going on strike, but one of the Tory teachers who hated me decided I was and I got suspended from school as a result.

Mostly I enjoyed the summer holidays. I was growing up, had a summer job, was trying to contribute to the family costs. I found the tanned, sun-bathing young miners very sexy but I was too young for them to be interested in me and too shy to actually talk to them.

There was a bit of trouble at a private open-cast mine near where I lived. Some Durham miners were picketing the private open-cast mine and the police viewed it as illegal picketing, so there were some violent fights on the picket line. The police had chased the pickets and split them up and the ones they caught got beat up.

No-one could forget the scorching heat of that summer. The one summer in my life I prayed for cold weather to help the strike, was the warmest summer ever.

One scorching day my friend and I were sunbathing at the front of my house chatting about boys. A police car dropped two policemen off then sped up the farm road towards the open-cast mine. The two polis who were dropped off were standing at the edge of the field with binoculars. Obviously we knew it was something to do with the open-cast mine. My friend and I knew it was wrong but our heads were still full of girlish notions, so we noticed that they looked like the two motorcycle cops in “Chips” and we spent the hours discreetly ogling them.

My mum came out to keep an eye on them and us and it presented us with a bit of an ethical dilemma. They were there for hours and we had drunk lots of lemon barley and water, so we were aware they must be really thirsty. We spent a long time discussing it, whether we should demonstrate that socialism was a superior ideology to Thatcherism by giving them water, or whether that would be a betrayal of our men, who might prefer it if we left the cops weak and thirsty. Eventually when we had headaches from sitting in the sun despite being well hydrated, all three of us decided the right thing to do was to offer them water, to make it clear that mining communities were not the savages we were being portrayed as on telly, but not to engage in any treacherous chit-chat.

So my friend and I took them water, with my Mum in the garden watching us like a hawk. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t dreamily impressed by the handsome young cops who now had their jackets off and their sleeves rolled up. They were polite, thanked us for the water although they refused it. One of them had an English accent, so might not have been from the local force. Turns out they had little hip flasks. I got the impression they were scared we might have peed or put salt in the water, which we hadn’t. That was the tactics of police involved in interrogations in Northern Ireland, not socialists who believe in a better world.

As we turned to go they tried to engage us in conversation, asking if our families were on strike to which they got a one word answer, “yes”. Then they asked us where the miners in our families were picketing this week. We didn’t give a direct answer, I just said: “The same sort of places as you, but not the private open-cast if you are looking for names.” They asked us if there were any routes through the woods or the fields to the private pit that the pickets might use (Obviously there were and we knew them!) I was furious at that so I told them straight that we weren’t there to betray the miners, just to do the honourable thing which was to not let any human being suffer sunstroke and since they didn’t want the water we had nothing else to say. As we were leaving they continued to ask about routes to the pit so I said “Up the farm road, the way the car that dropped you off went but you obviously already know that”. They said we must know other routes but we ignored them and walked away. That kind of sums up policing in the strike. They never missed an opportunity to alienate the working class.

I told my dad later because I felt guilty about maybe betraying the miners, but he said we did the right thing, that the day socialists deprive other human beings of water is the day socialism is no better than capitalism. He did say to watch them though, that when they were bussed in from other places they had no respect for our communities.

Over the next couple of weeks the confrontation at the private pit got uglier, so some of the Durham miners had built up a supply of bricks and boulders in the back square at my house. It was a trap and the next time the police laid into them they lured the police to the back square and pelted them and obviously some windows and property got damaged. This led to the police tramping through some of the houses looking for miners. It happened at about 6.30am, so some of our neighbours who were not from mining families were angry. They described the Durham miners as thugs and said they could throw bricks where they lived, but shouldn’t be doing it where we lived. I disagreed. The Durham miners were in a battle to protect the rights and jobs of all working people and the police were allowing themselves to be used by the Tories, so they had it coming.

My dad was actually really angry with the Durham miners though. He was away picketing elsewhere when the ambush incident happened. He said that he would never have ambushed the police at the bit where the Durham miners’ wives and bairns lived and risked the police getting heavy handed with the families or the families getting caught in the crossfire. I disagreed with him and told him I’d rather be hit with a miner’s brick or a polis truncheon than Thatcher’s policies.

Dad did try to get us active with the Women Against Pit Closures, but it was awkward for us. My parents were divorced so my Mum didn’t feel she had the right to throw herself into all the women defending their men stuff, despite her entire family then and historically being engaged in mining. I was at an awkward age, not still a child, not quite an adult, just felt young and silly and like I had nothing to contribute whenever I went to the miners club. It did feel like a male environment and I wasn’t very comfortable there. At 15 it was wonderful ogling sun-bathing striking miners from a distance, but I blushed and got a bit tongue-tied if I actually had to talk to one I wasn’t related to.

The women in my family were never able to sing “Stand by Your Man” with a straight face, and devised our own spoof version that did not let men, not even heroic working class ones, escape responsibility for their part in the subjugation of women.

One time Arthur Scargill came to Dalkeith to speak. I went to the park, but I did not really hear him because I was chatting up boys. From what others told me, he gave a great speech.

Mick McGahey came to Dalkeith a few times and it lifted my Dad’s spirits when he met him.

When Thatcher described us as the “enemy within” I just stared at the telly in horror. There you had it straight from the vicious bastard’s mouth - Unadulterated class warfare and an admission that we were in fact the enemy and she is not even pretending to serve the interests of our class.

It wasn’t just me growing up, but also the duration and the bitterness of the conflict. After the summer things became a lot less fun.

The dispute over safety cover was tense. Media reports were clearly biased and I had great difficulty getting any adult to explain it to me as they did not want to “indoctrinate” me. I could tell the adults in my family were very frustrated about it though. Eventually the NACODS leadership reached an agreement with the NCB to provide safety cover. This was the height of naivety on their part.

I wondered if the Brighton Bomb would lead the Tories to develop any empathy for ordinary people in difficult situations, but they emerged from the rubble with their intense hatred of the militant working class still intact.

There was an NUM treat for the kids, a trip to the circus. I was at that awkward in-between age, and I didn’t really want to go. I would rather have been hanging out on street corners talking to boys, but I pretended I did want to go, for my Dad’s sake. As it happened he had got the wrong day, so we waited for the circus bus in vain. I was actually relieved but my poor dad really beat himself up about it. He was getting really low in mood by that stage and took his mistake as evidence that he was a useless dad who not only couldn’t provide for his kids, but couldn’t even access charity for them.

The support we received was great as far as it went, but most of it was too passive. The railwaymen and the seamen had the right idea, with regard to supportive strikes and blacking the transportation of coal. The TUC really let us down and Neil Kinnock’s role was despicable. It was unfair to expect one section of the working class to do all of the hard fighting against the Tories. It was also tactically stupid, letting them pick off one industry at a time.

Midlothian Council did some good stuff, giving us youngsters free access to leisure facilities and providing us with clothing vouchers. My family were in an awkward position because my parents were divorced. My mum was a student teacher and as well as supporting us, she used the benefits she received to support my dad and other single miners in our family who were not entitled to anything and were basically being starved back to work. But the whole time she was being harassed by the DSS who thought she was claiming benefits and taking money from my dad.

One day she took my brother and I to get winter coats and shoes with vouchers she got from the council. But the shop were at it. They decided that the vouchers could only be used to buy stuff that they couldn’t sell, so we were shown horrible unfashionable stuff. My brother and I decided just to choose anything, for Mum’s sake, even though we would rather wear old worn clothes we liked than new unattractive stuff. But my mum didn’t want us made fun of at school, so she tried to negotiate with the woman in the shop. She offered to pay extra in cash, if the woman would let my brother and I have one fashionable thing each. The shopkeeper was so horrible to my mum, really humiliating her about being a scrounger who was teaching her children to be scroungers and she was lucky to be getting anything at all and our dad should just get back to work and vote if he didn’t like the government. She said it was cash for the good stuff, only the sale stuff for the vouchers and we were lucky to be getting anything.

I said fine, I don’t want anything and walked out of the shop. My mum and brother got stuff for him while I waited outside thinking of all the things I would like to say to the bitch of a shopkeeper, which of course I couldn’t because at 15 if you dare to say what you think you are not a class-fighter you are just cheeky. My mum came out and pleaded with me to pick a coat and shoes. I could see how strained and upset she was, so I did, for her sake, and even pretended I liked them.

Once the vouchers had been handed over the woman needled my mum again, saying she hoped that scroungers like her were happy to be getting things for nothing while decent hard-working people like herself had to work for everything they got. I laid into her, a real political diatribe about how she was a working class Tory, a traitor, too stupid and petty-minded to understand that the miners were fighting for everyone’s jobs and trade union rights and unless people like her got behind them the Tories would win and we would all be up shit creek. She got really red-faced but was unable to mount a response to me. I continued that she wasn’t shit on the shoes of my mum [ who was begging me, “please hen, just leave it, it’s not worth it, I don’t want you getting involved in all this, let’s just go.”] But I continued and told the woman that the sad irony was that when her back was to the wall, as it surely would be because the ruling class Tories had no real love for stupid little working class Tories like her, that people like my mum and dad would be fighting for her rights. The poor woman looked shocked and didn’t say a word and eventually my mum dragged me out of the shop.

It was a very tense journey home on the bus, because I thought my mum was angry with me and for her own part, she was fighting back tears. Later that night she talked to me and told me she wasn’t angry with me, she just wanted to protect me from all this and that it was adults’ business. I said I was nearly an adult and was frustrated that I wasn’t being allowed to play a part. I said I wanted her to stop worrying about me not having stuff because I was happy to make do. I said I wanted her to start accepting some money from my part-time job. She compromised and let me pay for my own toiletries and clothes (as well as my usual stuff like school discos, haircuts etc.) With regard to the vouchers-bought shoes and coat, I wore them a few times for Mum’s sake, then I tried to wear them as little as possible. This was not because they were unfashionable, but a prissy, pain in the arse political statement from me, that I could do without, for my class. I actually wore a pair of cheap little plastic kitten-heel stiletto shoes that were held together with sellotape for most of the winter. 10/10 on the pain in the arse scale for me!

Some of my friends were from wealthier families and they had a lot of money for clothes and their social lives. They would get embarrassed if they inadvertently suggested something I couldn’t afford. But it didn’t bother me. I took a perverse pleasure in my poverty because I thought accepting it without putting pressure on my parents to get me stuff was the main contribution I could make to the struggle.

The NUM gave the miners food parcels and vouchers if they went on picket duty. The local butcher was really supportive and always gave us a bit extra and gave us the best of stuff.

We also got food parcels from Ukrainian mining families which were organised and distributed by Women Against Pit Closures. This was fantastic for our learning. It was the first time I tried black rye bread, or pickled gherkins and I can confidently proclaim that Communist raspberry jam is the best jam in the world!

The Women Against Pit Closures negotiated Christmas shopping for us which was an amazing feat, though again, British Home Stores had their best stuff off limits, so we had to use our vouchers for some old Summer stock.

It certainly brought home to me that charity is a very poor second to victorious class struggle, although I am obviously grateful to the people who donated money and goods for us.

Over the course of the strike everything of any value in our house began to disappear. All of my mum’s jewellery went. Anything hired, like the telly went. One of my school friends loaned me her portable TV, which was really kind of her, because having a telly in your bedroom was the equivalent of having an ipod, for my generation.

One night the TV licence man came to the door because obviously we didn’t have a licence. I answered and he asked if we had a telly. I was too prissy to tell lies, so I just told him my dad was on strike. He said he was going to walk round the square and come back, but he wouldn’t be looking in our cupboards. I went in and told my mum, who wanted to just own up and take the rap. I ignored her and put my friend’s portable telly in the hall cupboard. The TV licence man came back and he came into the living room and said “right, there’s no telly in this house. Obviously you know if you ever get a telly you have to buy a licence.” He also said he wasn’t trying to embarrass us by giving us money, but maybe we could do him a favour and put some money in the miners’ strike fund for him and he gave us 20 quid. It did go into the strike fund.

The house was really cold over the winter. Things also seemed to deteriorate really quickly, so we ended up with wallpaper hanging off walls and no lino or carpets in some rooms, including my bedroom. Our calor gas heater broke, so we only had a little paraffin stove, which got moved from room to room. Relatives lent us dimplex heaters but we could not afford to use them. The little paraffin heater did not let out much heat. We all had blisters on the palms of our hands from putting them too close to the little paraffin heater. There was often ice on the insides of the windows.

One day my mum had a massive heart attack that wiped out her left ventricle and made her a cardiac cripple. She was a diabetic, so she was at high risk of heart disease. She had pains in her arm over the winter. She used to sit with hot water bottles on her left arm, trying to ease the pain. But the GP just told her she was a neurotic divorcee, too young to have anything wrong with her heart (despite strong family history.) I always thought that the cold had something to do with my mum’s heart attack. The house was so cold when we came in from school that I often suspected she had not had the paraffin heater on all day, until we came home but she denied it. I cried for two days as an adult and as a nurse, when I discovered that it is not so much hypothermia, but more so heart disease that kills poor Scottish people in the winter. This is because in the cold the blood flow gets sluggish and the platelets get more sticky and prone to clotting causing heart attacks and strokes. My mum only lived a few years after the strike, but her health was ruined after that massive heart attack. So the vindictive, vengeful Tories and a middle-class arsehole GP basically killed my mum.

My dad wasn’t the same after mum’s heart attack. The fight was out of him. He started gathering and chopping firewood for pensioners instead of picketing, to get his food parcel.

He worried a lot about how we were being deprived, but for me, the worse things got the more my poverty became a badge of honour, as bearing it with courage was the one contribution I could make to the struggle. I had become really rebellious at school, started drinking, tried smoking. I had stand up fights with some of the teachers and one of them told me I was a communist, like that was a really bad thing, because I believed it was wrong to sell off council houses.

I remember the awful day that striking miners dropped concrete from a bridge onto a taxi carrying a scab. The taxi driver died. My dad was grief-stricken. He said they were stupid bastards and they had lost the strike for everyone, that everyone’s sacrifices and best efforts were worthless now, as we would all be portrayed as anti-democratic thugs. I reminded him of Davy Jones and a young miner who died after being run over by a scab lorry at the start of the strike.

There were a few children’s Christmas parties which I didn’t want to go to, because I would honestly rather have been in the park with a crowd of teenagers drinking cheap QC sherry and smoking. But Dad really wanted me to go because he didn’t want me to miss out, so I went. It was mostly OK. Although it was mainly younger kids, some of my friends were usually there. The most difficult one was organised by students at the Art School in Edinburgh. It was all teeny little kids and I felt so sorry for my dad because his mistake in taking me there was glaringly obvious and I could see he was crest-fallen. But I just threw myself into the role of being party helper, making sure all the little kids were having a great time playing games and opening their presents.

A couple of the female students took me away in private and they gave me a gift, which I was absolutely not expecting. It was a beautiful make-up set, something I could only dream of and it looked expensive. I knew for a fact that they didn’t buy it for me, that it was a hard-saved-for special gift for a cherished sister or something like that, so I tried to refuse, but they insisted that I took it. And wherever those students are today, I could never thank them enough for their sensitivity because I was so obviously delighted with it that it actually cheered my dad up too. That’s socialism in action. Every time right wing big-mouths pontificate about how we are all basically just in this life for ourselves and appealing to our selfish drives is the best way to proceed, I think of all the kind or brave things that people have done, which prove that people are capable of being so much more than just greedy selfish bastards. Oh, my Dad also bought me a double vodka and coke, so that party worked out quite well!

Sometimes when adults were drinking I got to hear more about what went on in the struggle, about pickets being badly beaten or victimised and losing their jobs, or about how some courageous men improvised and made road blocks to stop or delay picket buses, by chopping down lamp-posts. I also heard some horror stories about the families of scabs being victimised when the men were at work, with stones being thrown to smash their windows. My parents were horrified by this and I agree with them. There’s not much point in fighting oppression with oppression. I have no direct experience of this, but Davey Hamilton the Monktonhall delegate’s wife, Jean was subjected to dreadful treatment when her husband was jailed. She received threatening and predatory phone calls.

There was one Bilston Glen miner in our street who scabbed for most of the strike. I used to watch him leaving for his work thinking what a stupid traitor he was. I was well warned by my parents that I had better never dare say a word to him, far less his kids, as dealing with scabs was strictly adult business.

I never did say anything to him or his kids, but I did stop spending any time with them, not out of badness, just I didn’t want to have to talk to their dad and the strike was obviously a massive barrier to communication. How do you engage in chit chat while steering clear of absolutely anything to do with my dad being on strike or their dad working? “I like your new shoes – oh, you’ll have them because your dad is a scab.” It was better just not to see them, so the scab really isolated his kids.

He was quite pathetic to behold in later years, always profusely warm, trying to ingratiate himself with me and pass off his early embrace of Thatcherism as him just being a bluff, honest, nice guy who wanted to do the right thing for his family. I don’t hate him but I do think he is pitiful. As it happened the Tories thanked him by shutting his pit just like all the rest. So I avoid him and his family and he has never been on my Christmas card list.

I asked for nothing for Christmas from my parents and the other strikers in our family. Prissy as ever, I told them if they respected me they would abide by my wish. I intended to enjoy Christmas by being proud of my community and my family (and getting drunk and kissing boys). We really were starting to feel the pain, with my mum’s heart attack and the bitter cold and everything in the house and most of our clothes falling apart etc, but we had stood up to those bullying Thatcherite bastards and I was so proud to be with my family that Christmas.

Women Against Pit Closures and the NUM obtained and distributed a turkey and a Christmas food parcel for every single striker's family, which was an amazing feat.

Herringbone full-length coats were the height of fashion and I absolutely coveted one, but I thought I had managed not to reveal it, just looking at them in shops when my mum’s attention was diverted. On Christmas Day my Mum brought a top-of-the-range, exquisite herringbone coat out from behind the couch. It was the nicest one I had ever seen and it was a perfect fit. I was angry with her and dad, but eventually piped down and let them enjoy being parents. I don’t know how they did it. I honestly don’t think they had anything left to sell, or any access to credit by that stage.

January was hellish. My Mum had a lot of chest pain and we were all worried sick about her and tried to be good, but at the same time we were all sparking off each other. There were some days we couldn’t even put the little paraffin heater on as we couldn’t afford any paraffin. We were sick of cheap food, which mum interpreted as criticism of her cooking. We were fed up with the constant cold. Men were drifting back to work. Davey Hamilton was in jail. The media were really laying into Scargill. And god did they like to rub it in about the mountains of coal! (That has never made any sense to me. If they had so much why were they sneaking Polish coal in through every little remote port and inlet?) There were manipulative, twisted full-page adverts in all the media, even the local paper, promising miners the earth if they went back to work. I HATED school. I was sick to death of hearing about the UDM. I didn’t want to see another Yuill and Dodds lorry or Parks of Hamilton bus. The NCB were up to their old tricks. They sent my Dad letters offering him great options if he went back to work. They also sent him recorded delivery letters threatening that the pit had deteriorated so much that bits of it were flooded and it would be lost if men didn't go back to work. There was a stand-off about safety cover in the pits which I was at my wits end trying to follow because the media were biased, but adults in my community wouldn’t explain it to me. There was a strong feeling though, that the NCB were deliberately flooding pits. (Frances Colliery had already been lost earlier due to flooding which many believe was a deliberate act of sabotage by management.) Then my mum went into hospital again, with another heart attack. I was sick of sellotaping my shoes and having constantly wet feet and some of the teachers looking at me like I was feral.

I am ashamed to say it, but a couple of times I had fleeting thoughts about wishing my dad would go back to work. It was just a residual childish desire for adults to make the world all right again and it didn’t last. I recognised this January depression was just part of the struggle. It is at this point that struggles are won or lost. As men drifted back I got angry with Scargill. I started to think he was making scabs of good men by prolonging things.

My mum got out of hospital but she looked hellish and really wasn’t herself. I was so worried about her. We got sent to stay with posh distant relatives for a few days. I was really angry at being banished from my place in the struggle, looking out for my mum. But at the same time it was so soothing to be made a fuss of and spoiled by polite rich people and to feel it was OK to be young and carefree.

When we went home it was weird. My big brother had left home. My wee brother threw himself into having fun with his friends. My mum was silent, vacant, just going through the motions. She had been told her heart condition was so serious that she could drop dead at any moment. My dad looked haunted. We had lost the ability to communicate with each other, with no-one wanting to say what they were really thinking. I was full of anger. My hatred of school was pathological. I really wanted to batter some of my teachers – the Tory ones.

Then my mum was back in hospital again. One morning getting up for school I just had a bad feeling, I knew something wasn’t right. Dad phoned and asked to speak to me. I wondered what he wanted to talk to me at that time for. He told me he was going back to work that day, on the back shift. He said he didn’t know what I would think of that, he didn’t think I would be very pleased, but he was treating me like an adult by telling me before I left for school.

He said Scargill was a maniac with no compassion for the suffering of miners’ families after screwing up tactics on the best time for a strike. He said he had been a trade unionist and a socialist all his life but he wasn’t going to be a dutiful little donkey for Scargill. He said if it was democratic for the men to walk out, it was democratic for the men to walk back. He said he wanted his redundancy, he didn’t care what happened to the pit and as far as he was concerned he hoped no more generations would have to spend beautiful sunny days down pits.

I was so upset. I felt like I had been winded. I couldn’t speak for ages. He kept asking me what I had to say. Eventually I tried to talk him out of it, not very eloquently. Just stuff like “please don’t, we don’t need you to go back, we’ll get by. Earlier this century babies in Midlothian starved to death during a strike. This isn’t real hardship. We can hack it for a little bit longer, Dad”….But he told me the conversation was over, it was his decision and he was going back to his work, not because the Tories were right, but because we were beat and Scargill and his donkeys had better accept it.

I was in floods of tears, angry, upset, flailing around looking for something to hit. I was as vicious as I could be. I said “You’re selling your job. It’s not just yours to sell.”

He said he knew I wouldn’t take it well, that he would talk to me after his shift if I still had anything to say to him.

Our relationship was never the same again. I tried to accept it, even defended him publicly. But my feelings towards him were too confused for me to ever have an honest conversation with him again. I loved him. I recognised his courage as a trade unionist over the years. I recognised the difficult, dangerous job he did as a face-worker and he had the scars to show for it. I understood how guilty he felt for the adversity we faced. But I still don’t think he should have done it - that is the bottom line. Often I would act out my anger about the scabbing by picking fights with him over silly little things. He didn’t live long after the pits were shut.

Anyway, I went to school that day in a terrible state. I couldn’t be bothered with anyone and I wasn’t interested in being there. I wanted my mum, although she was so ill that it wouldn’t be fair to burden her with how I was feeling.

At about 11.30am we got sent home from school because the school was too cold, so it was illegal for us to be there. I was freezing and my feet were wet but I was well used to it. I hurried home alone, not wanting to talk to anyone. What do you say exactly? “Oh hi, my mum’s in hospital again and my dad’s a scab now.”

I got home and rattled around, unsure of what to do. Too early to go to the hospital and visit mum. I couldn’t think straight. I kept thinking of him going back, wondering if I could do anything to stop him, but it was too late, he would be on the pit bus. I was trying to work out the rights and wrongs of it all. It was bitterly cold and there was no paraffin for the heater. I put the kettle on, but it did not boil. I tried the lights and the cooker but they weren’t working either. Nothing was working. I collapsed in a sobbing ball. We finally have a fucking power cut on the day my dad scabs! I sobbed my heart out for hours, cuddling a cushion for comfort. Maybe if the power cut had been the day before he wouldn’t have gone back. Maybe they were lying about the coal mountains.

That was my experience of the strike.

After the strike MacGregor was ruthless, saying: “People are now discovering the price of insubordination and insurrection. And boy, are we going to make it stick.” Neil Kinnock helped him along, with his shameful treatment of the victimised miners.

Scargill’s warnings about the decimation and destruction of the coal industry, and the attacks on the jobs and trade union rights of other workers all came to pass. And even now, 15% of the energy used in the UK still comes from coal, half of it imported (http://archive.wn.com/2009/02/24/1400/ukenergy_old1/). 73% of our energy consumption was from other fossil fuels, in 2002.

I heard that William Kennedy, the manager at Monktonhall really humiliated the scabs after the strike, saying things like “Come on my wee scabbies” when he was putting them in the cage. And obviously relations in the pit were tense between strikers and scabs. I heard that men who went back after Christmas were not regarded as in the same league as the early scabs, but I don’t know if that was said partly to spare my feelings because of my dad. Anyway, it wasn’t long before the threatening recorded delivery letters started again and the pit was moth-balled. Most of Scotland’s coal industry was gone by 1989, including pits with a lot of people who scabbed for the right to work, like at Bilston Glen.

Anyone who harbours residual delusions about the inevitability and necessity of a ruling class, because of their superior qualities and abilities should read Ian MacGregor’s biography, with its sensitive title, “The Enemy Within”. I was disappointed to discover that our hated adversary was such a boorish buffoon. From his “boys own” adventure tales of strike-breaking by operating a crane on the Clyde during the 1926 General Strike, to profiteering as a wealthy industrialist during the Second World War after he emigrated to the USA, he comes across as a not particularly bright guy who just coupled monstrous arrogance, vanity and vicious, petty, nastiness with a tendency to do dirty things and step on others in his rise to the top. In one sentence he nonchalantly consigns jobs, lives and communities to the dustbin, with the mantra that free market economics is all that matters. In another he invites us to weep valleys of tears for an upper class wife, because the poor thing was frightened half to death when the lights on her Jaguar failed. He invites us to feel anger and horror at the shoddy efforts of the workforce who built such a car. It was his perspective, his arrogance and his sense of entitlement that led him to do what he did, not any superior intelligence or abilities.

I hear Albert Wheeler got moved down South. Probably just as well, for his own safety.

My community was ravaged with unemployment, hopelessness and drugs. Eventually people who weren’t utterly destroyed found work in the finance sector. And that takes us to today.

These rich buffoons told us we didn’t need to produce anything real - that services in general, including financial services and massive personal debt was a sound basis to build the economy on. Now we have been led up the garden path by these buffoons, to the point where the world economy is utterly destroyed and the world environment is swiftly following.

As we “nationalise” the banks we should beware of the 20th century model of nationalisation. We are already heading in that direction, paying bankers billions for their worthless assets. This is what happened when pits were purchased from colliery owners last century. They were paid fortunes for under-invested, worthless holes in the ground. Then they were employed as the managerial class, to rule over “our” coal industry. Let’s stop giving all our money to bankers and let’s nationalise their assets for what they are worth, which is virtually nothing. Then let’s have genuine democratic people’s control, with ordinary people and trade unions having the majority of voices in decision making on the banks.

Like most people who were involved in the year long Miners’ Strike, when I am asked how I feel about it now, I say I wouldn’t have missed it. It kept me grounded and stopped me from choosing to rise above my class, which is what a lot of teachers and some relatives intended for me. But when I say I wouldn’t have missed that struggle, there are tears in my eyes thinking of all the working class people who have died because of vicious, free-market dogma.

A lot of people have talked about partying when Thatcher dies and I am all for that. But I also think that at the exact same time as her funeral, we should have a public remembrance service for all the people who have died because of Thatcherite and Friedmanite ideology.

And my greatest hope is that some time soon we bury their cruel, failed, disastrous ideology.

Reading:

Seumas Milne: The Enemy Within. (This is the best thing I have ever read about the strike.)

Arthur Scargill on the Strike: http://tinyurl.com/dyotdz

Evidence of the behaviour of the Scottish management of the NCB: http://tinyurl.com/cevob6

On biased media coverage: http://www.workersliberty.org/node/2366

A fictional account of the role of David Hart, the shady, anti-democratic, ultra-right millionaire who managed the positive media portrayal of the scabs who were then discarded: GB 84, by David Peace.

On opportunistic cynicism almost beyond belief. This will be from the wing of the Labour Party that refused to back the miners, abandoned the victimised miners and told us we could not break the law and had to pay our poll tax: http://tinyurl.com/cyysz6

On policing, if anyone thinks a dispute today would be handled differently by the police, think again: http://tinyurl.com/coenoy

The Enemy Within?

So they are now running the money printing presses (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7927100.stm). I am not an economist, but I would bet that ordinary people derive no benefit from this measure. The banks will hoard the cash. The powerful are so cynical. They are still trying to sell us the theory of trickle down wealth. It never trickled down to ordinary people during the supposed economic good times. Instead it geysered upwards, while ordinary people’s incomes stagnated. I remember when my trade union (Unison) stopped negotiating meaningful pay rises and instead offered me a cheap introductory rate on a credit card and cheap car insurance. Anyway, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. The following figures were pointed out to me by a friend in the SSP.

Over the years 1950 to 1970, for each additional dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent of income earners, those in the top 0.01 percent received an additional $162. In contrast, from 1990 to 2002, for each added dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent, those in the uppermost 0.01 percent (today around 14,000 households) made an additional $18,000. (http://monthlyreview.org/081201foster-magdoff.php)

For more on the financial crisis and the desperate situation facing the European Union, check out the Left Banker blog (http://tinyurl.com/btambf).

The fact that the Bank of England have also reduced interest rates on the same day as rolling the printing presses, smacks of utter desperation.

I felt sad and vindicated at the same time watching Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King on Channel 4 News this evening. He admitted that it was a mistake to build an economy on services and credit and that in future our economy would have to be built on exports. (I took that to mean manufacturing real stuff.) This man who represents the interests of the powerful said these things on the 25th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike – a strike that was about defending jobs and producing real stuff. So 25 years to the day, we get an admission that the ruling class were wrong about the way forward; that their dogmatic worship of market forces was misplaced. And what a mess they have created! Ever widening inequality and no right to work, or to a roof over your head.

Most of the TV coverage today about the strike has been guff and it is really quite incredible that no TV channel is running a week of programmes focusing on this massive industrial dispute. What a breath of fresh air to see heroes of the strike - honourable men like John McCormack of Polmaise, or Bob Young of Comrie on the telly this evening, instead of the usual parade of slick, talking-head chancers of the banking and political worlds. It was particularly poignant to see James Hogg of Bilston Glen & his comrade wearing “Coal Not Dole” stickers when they appeared on BBC Reporting Scotland this evening. The current catastrophic financial crash, caused by the policies of first the Tories, then New Labour and all their neo-liberal partners in crime around the world, has starkly revealed who were the real “enemies within.”

At the weekend, I will try to post my personal recollections from the strike. It’s not big political ideas, just the memories of an ordinary person.

While we focus on our economic woes, an even bigger crisis is engulfing the world. Some truly terrifying news today, that the Amazon Rain Forrest is susceptible to drought caused by global warming, which causes trees to die and release massive amounts of carbon instead of storing it (http://tinyurl.com/akqyer).

Lastly, I feel compelled to express my disgust for Glasgow New Labour MSP, Tom Harris, who is always at his best when attacking the vulnerable (http://tinyurl.com/b2bbbk). On this occasion he has accused teenage mothers of raising an “underclass”. Is that Newspeak for “enemy within”? He further criticises young mums for “living off the state” and claims this is a “national catastrophe”. Well, Tom, from looking at reports by Unicef etc, it is clear that it is actually New Labour’s continuation of Thatcherite policies that has created an “underclass”. And it’s a bit rich for someone who earns in excess of fifty grand a year from the state, for sticking the boot into the vulnerable to accuse anyone else of “living off the state”. They don’t live half as well as you, Tom and they do a difficult job. As a community nurse, I can attest to the fantastic job that some teen mums make of parenting their children. The problem is not so much pregnancy in the young, but the fact that the youngest mums are plunged into the most adverse and challenging poverty because they get even lower benefits than older single mums. Also, if there was adequate child care provision and student grants etc, a lot of young mums wouldn’t be on benefits for long. The lack of adequate child care provision is the fault of New Labour and all the other mainstream political parties. Right at this moment, Tom's New Labour buddies in Glasgow City Council are butchering nursery places. And maybe if we lived in a society that affirmed women and the poor, young, poor women would truly believe they had other options.