The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.
You can read the rest of Seumas Milne's brilliant piece on the long-term significance of the miners' strike, here.
1 comment:
The mines were uneconomic. The irony is that the alternative now subsidised by the government to an even greater extent is windmills.
It explains everything about the disappearamce of the traditional Labour movement that, with the enthusiastic support of the most extreme self styled "socialists", they were happy to give enormous subsidies to such a pointless Luddite middle class lobbyists scam as windmills but not lesser ones to miners.
To be fair lets note that neither Tories nor, even more enthusiastically, the Lud Dims had anything sensible to say.
We could have followed up the destruction of the mines by building lots of new reactors - that would have given us at least amongst the cheapest electricity in the world instead of the most expensive & we would still have most of our industries.
If politics is about class war both Labour & points left are not on the side of the working class but of the class of government beneficiaries, "servants" & quangocracy. The difference is that, even when they got subsidised, they did real productive work.
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