British workers’ movement

Twenty five years ago on March 5th 1984, miners at Cortonwood pit walked out. That was the beginning of the great 1984-85 miners’ strike. Nigel Pearce of the Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers and a participant was interviewed by Socialist Appeal in 2004 about the strike. "

The
strike is full of lessons. One of the main ones is the need for unity among the
working class, that stands out above all else – unity is strength, and united
the working class can achieve anything. Divided we are weak, and even small
divisions can have a destructive effect."

Today, almost 25 years since the miners’ strike
began, the industry has been decimated, with only a few thousand jobs left. The
proud traditions remain as the Durham Miner’s Gala demonstrates each year, and
many miners have taken their fighting traditions into the wider labour
movement. But many of the pit villages are crumbling and the social effects may
never be completely overcome, on the basis of capitalism.

But this destruction wasn’t an ‘act of god’ or some huge work of nature
like the tsunami. This was a deliberately worked out plan. It was an attempt to
take on and smash the most militant determined and class conscious section of
the organised labour movement. And this was seen as a critically important task
by the ruling class ad their chosen instrument, the Tory Party. It even had a
name, the Ridley Report.

The Labour
Movement must learn from the lessons provided by its own history. The trade
unions were created out of class struggle. To establish themselves they had to
fight the hostility of Parliament, the courts, the employers and the media.  Here we trace how the TUC arose from the need
to secure a legal basis for the developing union movement in the 1860s.

In September 1931,
the sailors of the Atlantic Fleet of the British Royal Navy organised an
insurrection against the government in response to pay cuts and conditions of
employment. Known as the Invergordon Mutiny, it is one of the historical
examples of the power of class-based action in response to attacks on living
standards.

Jack London
is best known as the writer of what he called his ‘dog books,’ such as ‘Call of
the Wild’ and White Fang’. As this biographical sketch shows, he was a
convinced socialist till his death in 1916. Reader will find that he learned
his socialism from a very convincing school – the school of hard knocks. Here
he sums up the lessons of his life.

Before the
establishment of the NHS in 1948, the provision of health care was inextricably
bound up with religion and controlling the poor. What is clear is that
capitalism has never been able to provide health care for working people and
they have been forced to rely on charity and philanthropy.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the
National Health Service, once described by Tony Benn as the “the most socialist
and most popular” of all institutions in the UK. Supported even by a majority
of Tory voters over the years, ardent supporters of privatisation such as
Margaret Thatcher, was obliged to assure voters that “The NHS is safe in our
hands!”

A name etched into the collective consciousness of the labour and trade
union movement is that of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, a case which clearly demonstrated that the State is
not a neutral instrument, but the means by which the ruling class will
use peaceful means by preference and violence if necessary in order to
maintain its power. So who were the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
what did they do and what lessons do they have for socialists in the
twenty-first century?

Pentrich in Derbyshire is a quiet place these days. But in 1817 it was the centre of a plot to
overthrow the Government of the day. Britain had been at war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic
France almost continuously until 1815. When war ended, the
economy slumped. It was the poor who had borne the brunt
of the fighting. Now they were required to bear the economic and
social fallout from the subsequent peace.

In April and May of 1797 the British ruling
class was horrified when two naval mutinies broke out; the first was at
Spithead, close to Portsmouth; the second at the Nore which marks the seaward
approach to the Thames Estuary.

The State
can ultimately be reduced to bodies of armed men. These bodies of armed men are
used by the ruling class either to maintain its power against what it sees as
internal enemies, to defend itself against foreign aggression, or in support of
its own aggressive action against foreign nations. Since its power lies in its
ability to threaten or actually to use force, the ruling class regards anything
that jeopardises the effectiveness of the State apparatus with the utmost
seriousness. This explains why mutinies in the armed forces are of such concern
to them.

In the period of intense and bitter struggles described in Part 1, the
massacre at Peterloo in August 1819 was just the most extreme example.
Arthur Thistlewood was able to gather around him a mixed collection of
other individuals equally impatient to bring matters to a head and have
it out with the country’s political leaders. They believed that violent
direct action was the answer.